Corpse Suzette

human.”
    “Personally,” Savannah
said, “I think it was the solid night’s sleep that snatched you from the jaws
of the Grim Reaper.”
    “Jaws? Grim Reaper?” Tammy
made a face. “I think the Grim Reaper uses a scythe to—”
    “Oh, don’t go waxing
literary on me this early in the morning,” Savannah told her. “I can’t stand
two perky people when I first get up. One of you has to go, or at least turn
down the sunshine of your smile.”
    “Well, it isn’t going to be
me,” Tammy replied. “I think I’m on to something here.”
    “I’m happy for you,”
Savannah told her. “An hour from now I might even be happy for us all, if what
you’ve got is really good. But for now, I’m still waking up and have no
measurable brainwave activity. Besides, you’re gonna wake up Abby, so keep it
down.”
    “Well, I’m wide
awake,” Dirk said, strutting across the room to stand behind Tammy’s chair.
“Ignore the grumpy woman in the corner and show me what you’ve got, kiddo.”
    “Oh, Lord, I can’t stand
it,” Savannah groaned, biting into the Danish. “Sugar, caffeine, do your
stuff.”
    “I’ve been playing with
this software that Ryan and John gave me, and I’ve found all sorts of
skullduggery.”
    Skullduggery? Savannah
shook her head. That girl was going to have to go off Nancy Drew books, cold
turkey.
    “Like what?” Dirk asked.
    “Like major embezzlement...
from the Mystic Twilight spa for starters.”
    “Really?” Dirk leaned over
her shoulder. “How much and when?”
    “Beginning about a year
ago.”
    Savannah couldn’t help
responding. “A year ago is when Suzette threw him out of her house.”
    “Well, he got her back,
big-time,” Tammy said. “He started siphoning off Mystic Twilight’s assets. And
he was really good at it, too. He got a lot and he did it in ways that would
have made it hard to tell he was doing it.”
    “How much is a lot?” Dirk
asked.
    “A mil and a half,”
Savannah offered.
    “More,” Tammy said.
    “More?” Savannah raised one
eyebrow. “How much more?”
    “From what I can see here,
about three million more.” Savannah and Dirk both gasped.
    Even Abigail stirred
briefly, readjusting the pillow over her head.
    “Do you mean he pulled four
and a half million dollars out of that business in only a year?” Savannah said.
“Wow, he was good!”
    “But he got caught.” Tammy
typed away and produced another file on the screen. “The person who installed
the keystroke spyware pulled up his files... recently.”
    “Recently?” Dirk asked.
“How recently?”
    Tammy grinned up at him.
“Would you believe a week before he died?”
    Dirk grunted. “I would have
killed the guy if I found out he stole four and a half million from me.”
    “You,” Savannah added,
“would have gladly sent Billy Bob Mason to the gas chamber for stealing your eight
track, so we can’t go by you. But just for the record, I would have killed him
for that, too.”
    “I’ll bet you that Suzette
is still alive and kicking somewhere,” Tammy said. “And she installed this
spyware to see if he was chasing other women, and lo and behold, she found out
he was ripping off the business.”
    “I’ll bet you’re right,”
Dirk said. “She found out what he’d done, took the money back somehow and
transferred it to an anonymous bank account in Switzerland or the Caribbean,
then she grabbed her dog and hid out... waited a couple of days and knocked him
off, and then left to go join her money in Europe or the Cayman Islands.”
    “But if she did do that,”
Savannah said, “how are we ever going to find her? You haven’t had much luck
finding an anonymous bank online with that sort of an account number, right,
Tam?”
    “No, not yet. But there are
so many. I haven’t even worked through all the ones in the Caribbean.”
    Suddenly, Savannah stood
up, nearly spilling her coffee on one of the cats. “Wait a minute,” she said,
flashing back to her conversation with Clare. “Do you know that they have
casinos on Santa Tesla Island?”
    Dirk and Tammy both stared
at her blankly.
    “So?” Dirk said. “We’re
talking banking here, not gambling.”
    “I know. But where do they
have casinos?” she said.
    “Las Vegas, Native American
reservations?” Tammy said.
    “And cruise ships!”
Savannah was practically dancing in her fuzzy penguin house slippers. “Because
the ships go out into international waters where it isn’t subject to the laws
of the