Conflict of Interest

  Conflict of Interest

  Savannah Martin Mystery #17

  Jenna Bennett

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  About the Author

  Savannah is delighted to be back in her hometown of Sweetwater, surrounded by family and friends, even if it’s only temporarily. The house in Nashville is in the process of being repaired after the fire. Baby Caroline is alive and well and getting bigger every day. And Rafe is all recovered, and is working for Tamara Grimaldi and the Columbia PD, at least for the time being. That probably won’t last, but for now, Savannah’s content.

  * * *

  There are flies in the ointment, however. Savannah’s best friend from high school is back in town, and seems to be setting her cap for Savannah’s brother Dix. Savannah has been rooting for Dix and Tamara Grimaldi to get together, and this new development doesn’t make her happy. Sure, she loves Charlotte… but Charlotte already has a husband, and shouldn’t need another one. She especially shouldn’t need Dix, not when Savannah wants Grimaldi to have him.

  * * *

  And then there’s the case Rafe is working on. Katie Graves was a teenager when she disappeared fifteen years ago. Now she’s back—or at least her remains are. And the evidence in what looks like a case of homicide points squarely to one of Savannah’s nearest and dearest. With another Martin on the hot-seat, and Rafe and Grimaldi duty-bound to serve the law, it’s up to Savannah to keep her family safe and out of prison.

  One

  “Do you remember Katie Graves?” my husband asked.

  It took a second, maybe more than one, before I placed the name in my memory. Then I nodded. “Of course.”

  We were sitting side by side at the island in Mother’s kitchen in the Martin Mansion in Sweetwater, having dinner.

  And I’m calling it my mother’s kitchen, even though technically, it was my kitchen now. At least for the time being. Mother had vacated the premises over the weekend, to live in sin with Sheriff Satterfield, and had left Rafe and me, and baby Carrie, in sole possession.

  We were eating at the island because the dining room table can seat sixteen and I hadn’t felt like dealing with the antique splendor of it for just the two of us, and besides, the kitchen island was much closer to the stove and the food, and that made everything easier.

  Rafe quirked a brow in my direction. “A bit of thinking for an ‘of course,’ wasn’t it?”

  I couldn’t very well deny that. “I haven’t thought about her in years. And I didn’t really know her. I don’t think I ever met her. But I remember what happened.”

  Rafe nodded and took another bite of chicken.

  He’s three years older than me, and must have been in high school at the time Katie Graves disappeared. I’d still been in middle school. But he had probably known Katie. Or at least known her better than I did.

  “She was a year ahead of me,” he said when I asked, “and didn’t pay me no mind, but I knew who she was. Saw her in the hallways and the cafeteria.”

  “Pretty girl?”

  “Pretty enough,” Rafe said, “though that don’t always matter.”

  No, it doesn’t. Sixteen-year-old girls disappear sometimes even when they aren’t pretty.

  That’s what had happened to Katie. She’d set out for school one morning, and never made it there. Her parents sounded the alarm when she didn’t come home in the evening, but by then she’d been gone close to twelve hours, and she either had enough of a head start to be halfway to Canada, or whoever took her did.

  Nobody knew what had happened, or if they did, they didn’t talk about it. There was speculation that she’d run away from home, and speculation that she’d been abducted. For a few weeks, every parent in Maury County kept a tight rein on their children. As time passed, and no body appeared, people started leaning more toward Katie taking off on her own, and everyone relaxed again. Life went back to normal.

  For everyone but Katie’s friends and family, I guess.

  “What about her?” I asked.

  Rafe took another deliberate bite, and chewed and swallowed, before he answered. “The sheriff called. They found bones up in the hills near the Devil’s Backbone.”

  The Devil’s Backbone is a ridge of hills in the western part of Maury County. As for the rest of the statement… “They?”

  He glanced at me. “You know they’ve been going over the Skinners’ property since the murders.”

  The Skinner family—Art and Linda, their son AJ and their daughter Cilla, Cilla’s boyfriend, along with Darrell and Robbie, Art’s brothers—had all been murdered in their beds one night last fall. Rafe had been sent from Nashville to Maury County on Sheriff Satterfield’s request, on loan from the TBI, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigations, to help out. Like Katie Graves, the Skinner boys had also gone to Columbia High, and Rafe had known them, or at least known of them. Like Katie, they’d all been older than me, so I hadn’t.

  At any rate, the Skinners had been involved in a fair few unsavory endeavors at the time of their deaths. Pearl, the gray pitbull terrier mix who had lifted her head from her pillow over in the corner of Mother’s kitchen, and who was thumping her tail now at the mention of bones, was a casualty of the dog fighting operation they’d been running. We’d rescued her from being chained underneath Robbie Skinner’s trailer back in October.

  In wandering around the Skinners’ adjoining properties, which took up a lot of space in the foothills leading up to the Devil’s Backbone, we’d also run across a large scale marijuana operation, with several greenhouses. As a result, there had been agents from all sorts of alphabet agencies crawling all over the hills of Middle Tennessee over the past few months.

  “Someone found bones on the Skinners’ property?”

  “One of the ATF guys ran across’em back in November,” Rafe said. “Not a complete skeleton. Just the skull and most of the bigger bones.”

  I put down my fork. “What happened to the rest?”

  He shrugged. “Animals, maybe. It’s wild up there.”

  It was. Most of the land that belonged to the Skinners was just woods and a few dirt tracks. And yes, there are animals. No bears or anything like that, but raccoons and coyotes and various birds of prey, who might pick at a corpse and carry some of one away.

  I steered my mind firmly away from the Skinners’ dogs, and from Pearl. Much better not to go there. Not that she can help being what she is. But I’d be happier if I didn’t think about it. “If this happened in November, why are we only hearing about it now?”

  “The sheriff heard about it then,” Rafe said. “He went up and gathered what they could find of the remains and sent them to the lab. It’s the lab that’s been dragging their feet getting back with the results.”

  Labs are notorious for that. It isn’t the tests themselves that take a long time; it’s waiting for the lab to find the time to do the testing.

  And we were more than halfway through January now. If the bones had been discovered in November, there’d been Thanksgiving and then the whole Christmas season to get through, with holiday closings, annual Christmas parties, and the like. Not to mention the increased cri
me that usually happens around the holidays, that would have taken precedence over a few old bones. No, it was no wonder the sheriff hadn’t heard anything before now.

  I picked up my fork again. “Which of the Skinners’ land was she found on? Has she been up there all this time? Ever since she disappeared?”

  “I dunno yet,” Rafe said. “The sheriff just called Tammy this afternoon.”

  Tammy is Tamara Grimaldi, formerly of the Metropolitan Nashville police department, homicide division, and since the first of the year, chief of the Columbia PD. Since two days ago, she was also Rafe’s boss, at least for the time being.

  It’s a long story. And one that probably doesn’t matter right now.

  He continued, “The remains were found outside the city limits, but Katie disappeared from Columbia, so the sheriff wants somebody from the PD involved.”

  “And that’s you?”

  “I was part of the Skinner investigation,” Rafe said, “and I went to school with Katie.”

  And the sheriff respected him. For a long time, a very long time, that hadn’t been the case. For years upon years, my mother’s boyfriend suspected Rafe of involvement in anything that happened in and around Maury County. And admittedly, he’d had some cause, since Rafe hadn’t been the best behaved teenager. But it was nice that the sheriff finally saw him as a colleague, and not a suspect.

  “Just out of curiosity,” I said, “did they talk to you back when Katie disappeared?”

  He arched a brow. Just one. And didn’t say a word.

  “Sorry,” I added, since an apology seemed to be expected. “But the sheriff used to think you had a hand in everything that went wrong around here. I was just curious whether he’d talked to you about Katie back then.”

  “No,” Rafe said. “It was Columbia’s case. Not the sheriff’s. I can’t remember who was in charge of the Columbia PD sixteen years ago. But nobody talked to me about nothing.”

  After a second’s pause he added, “The school did an assembly. The principal talked about it, and said if anybody knew something, to go tell the cops.”

  “But of course you didn’t.”

  He shook his head. “Wouldn’t have, even if I did know something. Not like I was gonna go volunteer information. Then they’d think I had something to do with it for sure.”

  Sadly, they probably would have.

  “But like I said,” Rafe added, and turned back to his dinner, “I didn’t know Katie.”

  “No problem. I was just curious.” I rearranged some of the broccoli on my plate with the tines of my fork. “Is it certain it’s her?”

  “The sheriff seems to think so. He called Tammy and told her he was gonna reopen a cold case from her jurisdiction because the body had turned up on the Devil’s Backbone. And could she spare someone to help out, since there’d be overlap between her jurisdiction and his.”

  “And he asked for you.”

  “I figure there’s a reason for that,” Rafe said calmly, “and it ain’t because I went to school with Katie.”

  No, it wasn’t likely to be. Part of the reason Rafe was here—part of the reason Grimaldi was here—was that Sheriff Satterfield had wanted someone in charge of the Columbia Police Department who could figure out whatever the hell—pardon my French—had been going on there.

  The reason there was a vacancy at all, was that the previous chief had been corrupt. He’d been removed back in October, in conjunction with the Skinner investigation. But when the head is rotten, there’s quite likely to be some rot elsewhere too, and the sheriff wanted to root it out. He’d offered the chief’s job to Rafe first. My husband had turned it down flat, without realizing what the sheriff was really after. Then the sheriff had approached Grimaldi, and she’d accepted. He’d probably been more open with her. And she had prevailed on Rafe to help. So now they were both here—and I was, too—and in addition to keeping the peace, and solving any crimes that came their way, they had to figure out whether anyone else in Chief Carter’s old command, and Grimaldi’s new one, was corrupt and had to go.

  And that was most likely the reason the sheriff had asked to work with Rafe. Under cover of the Katie Graves investigation, they could discuss and confer and sniff out other things, as well.

  “I start tomorrow morning,” Rafe added. “Jarvis is pissed.”

  Detective Paul Jarvis was one of Rafe’s new colleagues in the Columbia PD. And while we had no particular reason to think he was corrupt, or at least no more reason to suspect him than anyone else, I don’t care for him. “Why?”

  “High profile case,” Rafe said, “lots of interest. He likes the attention.”

  “Is that your opinion of him after working together for two days?”

  “It’s my opinion after seeing him throw a tantrum ’cause Tammy didn’t loan him to the sheriff’s department instead of me today. He slammed outta there at the end of the day like a five-year-old taking his toys and going home. Damn near ran me down in the parking lot.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  He shook his head. “If he coulda gotten away with it, I think he’d’a done it. I’m guessing he was Chief Carter’s pet investigator, and he figured it’d be the same with Tammy.”

  “And instead, you’re the pet investigator.” I smiled.

  He gave me a look. “There ain’t no pet investigator. The sheriff asked for me. You know why.”

  I did know why. “Why do you think Jarvis was Carter’s pet investigator? Is Jarvis corrupt, too? Or is he stupid, so Carter assigned him cases he didn’t want solved, because he knew Jarvis couldn’t solve them?”

  “He solved cases,” Rafe said. “Tammy’s going over’em, to make sure they got solved the right way, but he don’t seem stupid.”

  Corrupt, then.

  Or maybe he was neither corrupt nor stupid. “Maybe Carter kept him busy with as many investigations as he could, because he knew Jarvis was both smart and driven, and if he kept him busy with other things, maybe Jarvis wouldn’t notice what Carter was up to.”

  Rafe nodded. “Could be. Either way, I’m on this one, and Jarvis ain’t.”

  “Too bad for Jarvis,” I said. Without a smidgeon of sympathy, I might add. “So the bones have been identified, and they definitely belong to Katie Graves?”

  “You know as much as I do, darlin’,” Rafe said and put his fork down. “The sheriff called and explained what he needed. Tammy said he could borrow me. The sheriff said to have me report for duty tomorrow morning. I guess I’ll find out more then.”

  I guessed he would. However—

  “It’s not that late.” Just going on seven, by the clock on the stove. “We could load the baby in the car and drive over to the sheriff’s house. Just to say hello and see how they’re doing.”

  “They’re doing fine,” Rafe said. “Prob’ly taking advantage of the peace and quiet to do what people do when they move in together.”

  I winced. “I wish you wouldn’t put pictures like that in my head.”

  He chuckled. “If they’re in mine, they might as well be in yours, darlin’.”

  I supposed. “I don’t think they’re having sex. Not at this time of night. They’re not young anymore. And I bet Mother would like to see Carrie.”

  Rafe arched a brow. “Your mama saw the baby at lunch, didn’t she?”

  She had, but she probably wouldn’t mind seeing her again. “Besides, I’m sure Pearl would like to see Mother.”

  Over on the pillow, Pearl’s jaws split in a doggy grin and her tail thumped.

  “See?”

  “Shameless,” Rafe told me, with a shake of his head. “You just wanna know what the sheriff knows, and you don’t wanna wait until tomorrow to hear it. So you’re using your baby and your dog as an excuse.”

  And I wasn’t ashamed of it. “Aren’t you curious?”

  “’Course I’m curious. I’ll find out tomorrow morning, though. I can live with being curious till then.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “You might find o
ut in the morning. But I’ll have to wait until tomorrow evening, when you come home, to learn anything. And besides, it’ll be secondhand. I love you, but I’d rather hear it from the sheriff.”

  “’Course you would.” He got off the stool and carried his plate over to the sink. “Fine. We’ll take the baby and dog and go see your mama. But if the sheriff won’t tell you nothing, don’t blame me.”

  “He’ll tell me something,” I said, dumping my plate next to his. “Just leave the dishes. I’ll deal with them when we get back. We don’t want to get there too late.”

  “’Course not.” But he didn’t say anything more to try to dissuade me. Maybe he was curious, too. “You get the dog. I’ll get the baby.”

  “Works for me.” Pearl likes me better anyway. And while I think Carrie’s too young to have developed a preference for one of us, she definitely likes her daddy very much.

  * * *

  So we loaded up both the baby and the dog—Carrie in the back seat with me, Pearl in the front with Rafe; better not to take any chances while the dog was getting used to the baby—and set out for town and Bob Satterfield’s house.

  The Martin Mansion sits north of town, on the Columbia Highway. The sheriff lives in a big turn-of-the-twentieth-century foursquare in the historic district. When I’d been growing up, it had been Bob, Pauline, and their son Todd, my brother Dix’s best friend, in the house. Then Todd went away to college, and Pauline died. And Todd got divorced and came back. Most recently, he’d gotten himself engaged and had moved in with his fiancée, Marley, and her little boy, in the same subdivision where Dix lives. All through this, Bob had been living in the house. And now my mother had joined him there.