Death by Chocolate

so
sure it was on the bottom of the Dumpster. What if it wasn’t?”
    “Then I’m wrong. But I’ll
bet it is. I told you: The last time this trash was picked up was last
Thursday, a week ago today. Eleanor died a week ago Wednesday. I’m telling you,
Sydney dropped the empty bottles—and probably the empty capsules, too—in here
on Thursday night, when he came by for his nightly beer.”
    Dirk grumbled under his
breath.
    “What did you say?”
Savannah asked, straightening up and stretching the kinks out of her back for a
moment.
    “I said—we’re going through
all of this crap just because you saw a guy walk over to the Dumpster and look
inside. Big deal.”
    “Not only that. There’s
also the phone call from Angela. She—”
    “Hey! I think I’ve got
something here!” Tammy shouted. She lifted up a white plastic bag that had a
familiar logo printed on the side.
    “Rx Shop!” Savannah tromped
through the refuse to Tammy’s side and took the sack from her. Eagerly she
opened it and found two brown plastic bottles inside. They were empty.
    Even Dirk’s scowl melted
into a grin as he glanced into the bag and read the labels on the bottles:
phenylprophedrine.
    “All right!” he said.
“Let’s get these suckers over to the lab pronto.”
    Savannah glanced at her
watch. “There won’t be anybody there yet. Not for a couple of hours.”
    “So we’ll be there when
they open,” Dirk said, holding up the garbage-smeared bag with two fingers and
looking at it like it contained a winning lottery ticket.
    “You’ll be there when they open,”
Savannah said. “I’m going home to take a bath and drink a pot of coffee. And
you’re going to call me as soon as you know whether they lifted any prints. The
very instant—you hear me, boy?”
    Dirk gave her an almost
sad, sympathetic look. “I thought you didn’t want it to be him.”
    “I don’t,” she said. “But
at this point.... I just want it to be over.”
     
    * * *
     
    Savannah lay soaking in her
clawfoot bathtub, her favorite mountains of jasmine-scented bubbles up to her chin,
the blinds pulled against the midday sun, and candles lit.
    But it wasn’t working.
    The smell of garbage was
long gone, but her nerves were still twisted into knots. She kept glancing over
at her cell phone on top of the hamper, willing it to ring— and somehow hoping
it wouldn’t.
    Until she heard the
words... she wouldn’t know for sure.
    The phone rang, and she
jumped, her heart suddenly pounding so hard she could hear her pulse thudding
in her ears.
    She grabbed it and punched
the talk button. ‘Yeah,” she
said.
    “Three clear prints,” Dirk
said on the other end. ‘Two on one of the bottles. One on the sack.”
    “His?”
    “Yeah. One of them on the
bottle is a match to his DMV thumbprint.”
    She swallowed hard. “Let me
go out there first and talk to him.”
    “Alone?”
    “Yeah. He’s not going to
hurt me, Dirk. He only had the one murder in him, believe me.”
    The long silence on the
other end told her that Dirk wasn’t convinced. But finally, he said, “Will you
wear a wire?”
    She didn’t need anybody to
tell her that a wire was a good idea and not just for her own security. There
was nothing like a taped confession to assure a conviction— if you could get
one.
    “Yeah,” she said. “I’ll go
in wired. But I’m going to try to talk him into coming in on his own. And
you’ve gotta let me. Hear?”
     
     
    With a microphone taped to
her chest and her Beretta in its holster beneath her blazer, Savannah got out
of her Mustang and walked across the parking area to the Maxwells’ garage.
    “The Jag’s here,” she said
softly to the microphone in the vicinity of her left breast. “I’m going up to
the apartment.”
    But having climbed the
steps and knocked several times on the door, she neither saw nor heard anyone.
    “Gonna walk around the
grounds,” she told Dirk, Tammy, Ryan, and John, who were waiting just outside
the gates on the highway. They were inside John’s van, which was packed with
the latest high-tech surveillance equipment.
    Dirk could have used
departmental issue microphones and receivers, but heck....John’s toys were more
advanced and therefore more fun to play with.
    Not in a million years
would Dirk have admitted that he felt better having the two of them along with
him and Tammy, serving backup for Savannah.
    “I think I hear somebody around
the side of the house,” she said as she walked between