Cooked Goose

maybe,” she said, “but dumb? How would you know? Stupid Head.”
    “Get Coulter!”
    “Pee-Pee Brain.”
    “Now! God damn it, Reid, you’d better...”
    “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
    She walked over to the couch and nudged Dirk in the ribs. “Hey, Sleeping Beauty. Bloss is on the phone,” she told him, loud enough that the captain would be sure to hear, “and he’s got his panties in a wad about something.”
    Sure enough. A few more obscenities drifted from the receiver in her hand.
    Dirk looked suspicious. “Did you say something to piss him off?”
    She batted her eyelashes. “Me? Why, of course not. You know how I just adore that man.”
    “Right.” He sat up, ran his fingers through his hair and took the phone. “Coulter here.” He listened. Savannah pretended not to as she rearranged the books and magazines on her coffee table. “Really? When? Where?”
    Whatever it was, he was wide awake now. He made a scribbling gesture in the air and Savannah quickly supplied him with a tablet and pen. He began to write. She looked over his shoulder and read something about rocks and the beach. She had never been able to decipher his chicken scratches.
    “Did they say who they were? What else?” He threw down the pen and reached for his sneakers, which he had kicked off and thrown beneath the sofa. “Okay,” he said, pulling them on. “I’m on my way out there right now.” He gave Savannah a funny look. “No, of course not, Captain. I wouldn’t think of taking Reid with me.”
    When he hung up the phone and reached for his coat, Savannah grabbed hers, too.
    As they rushed out the door, she said, “So, where are we going?”
    “To that big, stone jetty, just north of the pier.”
    She locked the door behind them, then ran to catch up with him as he hustled to his car. “Why?”
    “Because some anonymous caller just phoned the station.“
    “And?”
    He paused for a moment, his hand on the Buick’s door handle. He looked a tad green. “And they said that’s where we can find Titus Dunn’s body.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

    December 14 —8:16 a.m.

    D irk sat on the end of the pier, his sneakers dangling over the edge, looking about as miserable as Savannah had ever seen him. She walked out to him and sat next to him, ignoring the fact that she would probably get seagull poop or fish bait remnants on her good linen slacks. Friends didn’t concern themselves with such things at times like this.
    “Don’t jump,” she said, nudging him with her elbow. “It isn’t worth it. The water’s damned cold this time of year.“
    “Oh, I don’t know,” he mumbled. “I hear that drowning ain’t all that bad.”
    She gazed thoughtfully out at the horizon where the morning sky was clear, cloudless, blue... the typical California sky. “I don’t trust information about dying,” she said. “Like, how do they know for sure? The people who have really gone through with it aren’t around to talk about it. The rest of them are guessing.”
    “I suppose Titus knows what it’s like to die.”
    She glanced over her shoulder at the jetty and the stretch of beach between the rock formation and the wooden pier. The area was swarming with cops. Dr. Liu and her team were hovering over the classic Charger they had found, parked in the beachside lot. It had been empty. Thank God.
    Except for a generous amount of blood splatterings, smudges and smears.
    Hordes of spectators lined the yellow tape that marked the perimeter. Some were equipped with cameras, microphones, and pushy attitudes that identified them as media. Everybody wanted a piece of the action.
    “We can’t be sure Titus is dead,” she said, trying to believe her own words, “until we find the body.”
    “Where the hell is it? We looked all night.” He waved a hand at the assortment of uniformed cops, plain-clothes cops, off-duty cops. Everyone and their brother was looking for any sign of their fallen comrade. “Dammit, Van,” he said, “half of the force... hell, more than half... was out here looking all night. And we got zip, zilch.”
    “We’ve got a little more than zip or zilch. There’s the Charger.”
    He cast a depressed look at the car and winced. “So, the blood is probably his, the same as the house. We already knew he was hurt. So, that’s nothin’ new.”
    Savannah marveled at how Dirk could put a negative spin on anything. But this time, he wasn’t without justification.
    “And somebody wiped the car down pretty good