Death by Chocolate

14.”
    “Yes!” Savannah started
pulling the desk drawers open. “Whatcha wanna bet I find that tan parchment
stationery here, too?”
    “What’s a default font?”
Dirk asked.
    Savannah smiled to herself,
knowing what it must have cost him to ask. Dirk didn’t relish looking
uninformed under any circumstances, but especially in front of Tammy, whom he
regarded as a bothersome kid sister.
    “The default font, Arial
14,” Tammy explained without any note of haughtiness, “is just the style and
size of print that she has the computer set to type.”
    “It’s not like a
typewriter?” Dirk asked. “It can type different ways?”
    “Many, many ways and
sizes,” she told him. “It’s all adjustable by the settings, and she’s got hers
set to the same as the threatening letters were.”
    “Can you tell if she typed
those exact letters on this?” Dirk asked. “I know some guys at the lab can go
into a computer and see what the user’s been doing on it.”
    “That’s what I’m checking
right now.” Tammy continued to click and move around the screen with a level of
skill that easily impressed both Savannah and Dirk.
    “There’s hardly anything in
her documents file, except some stuff that might have been school homework for
Gilly. Nothing here that’s like those letters,” she said.
    “Shoot,” Savannah said as
she opened the bottom drawer of the desk and looked inside. “I was hoping—
well, you know what I was hoping.”
    “Yeah, we all were,” Tammy
replied, continuing to type and click away. “But I didn’t really expect to find
the letters among her documents. If she’s smart, she would have deleted them.”
    “Deleted?” Dirk sounded
crushed.
    “Yeah, but...” Tammy
suddenly brightened. “Now that’s what I was hoping for!”
    Savannah stopped her search
and stood straight. Dirk leaned over until his head was obscuring both of their
views of the monitor screen. “What?” he asked. “What? What?”
    “She didn’t empty her
recycle bin.”
    “Empty the garbage?”
Savannah asked. “What are you talking about?”
    Tammy tapped a tiny symbol
on the computer screen that looked like a miniature garbage can with white
papers sticking out the top. “When you delete something in the computer, it
goes into the ‘trash.’ But it’s not really, truly gone until you also empty
what they call the ‘recycle bin.’ ”
    “Can you see what she put
in there?” Dirk asked.
    “I sure can. Hold on....”
    Nobody breathed as Tammy
clicked on the little garbage pail and a list of documents popped up. They had
been labeled: “Mom 1, Mom 2, and Mom 3.”
    One by one, Tammy opened
the letters on the screen, and they read the threats that they had practically
memorized from the letters that Eleanor had given Savannah.
    “We’ve got her!” Dirk said.
“I’m going to cart this whole computer thing down to the lab, and have them
print this stuff out. Wait’ll the D.A. gets a load of this.” Savannah had
resumed her search for the paper, and it was in the bottom of the lower drawer
that she found it: a box of parchment stationery of assorted colors, including
tan. She pulled out the box and handed it to Dirk with a smile. “And let your
D.A. stick that in his pipe and smoke it, along with what they get from the
computer there.”
    Tammy closed down the PC,
then stood. “When are you going to arrest her?” she asked Dirk.
    He grinned... and it
occurred to Savannah that when he smiled, Dirk really was quite a good-looking
guy. Not gorgeous, like Ryan. But he had a certain street-worn appeal.
    Unfortunately, he only smiled
like that when he was about to bust somebody.
    “How’s about right now?” he
said. “You girls wanna come along for the fun?”
    He didn’t have to ask
twice.

Chapter

23
     
     
     
    W hen Savannah, Dirk, and
Tammy found Louise on the beach, she was so totally
enthralled with Ryan and her conversation with him that she didn’t even notice
the threesome approaching from behind.
    Ryan glanced their way for
only a second, but it was long enough for Savannah to give him a thumbs-up and
for him to smile and nod imperceptibly.
    As they made their way
along the beach, Savannah could feel the loose sand slipping into her loafers,
but she didn’t mind at all. She wouldn’t have minded if there had been sharks
nipping at her ankles. Taking in Louise’s hot-pink bikini trimmed in lime green
and the provocative way she had posed herself, lying on one side,