Collateral Damage: A Savannah Martin Novel (Savannah Martin Mysteries Book 19) Read online

  Collateral Damage

  Savannah Martin Mystery #19

  Jenna Bennett

  Contents

  About This Book

  Prologue

  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

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  About the Author

  A white supremacy group is spreading its tendrils of hate through the bucolic hills of Middle Tennessee, holding target practice in Laurel Hill wildlife area and stockpiling explosives in preparation for a race war.

  It's up to Savannah's husband Rafe to find and eliminate them... with a little help from Columbia chief of police Tamara Grimaldi, the joint sheriffs of Lawrence, Lewis, Giles, and Maury counties, and an undercover agent from the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation - an undercover agent Rafe trained, and one he wants to keep alive.

  But it isn't Clayton in the cross-hairs when the members of the group discover they're under investigation. It's Rafe who goes down from a bullet to the chest, and Savannah who must sideline her worry to lend a hand in taking down the people responsible, before they can put their evil plans into action and affect damage that far supersedes the shooting of one man.

  Prologue

  The bullet that hit Rafe came out of nowhere. One second everything was calm and copacetic—he turned to me and said, “I’ll get the baby,” before pushing his car door open—and the next, the world exploded, and he hit the side of the car and slid down, leaving a smear of blood on the window.

  I screamed. Carrie started crying, and from inside the house, I could hear Pearl the pitbull go crazy.

  I would like to make you believe that my subsequent actions were calm and rational. I’d like to, but the truth is, they weren’t. I was a gibbering mess, and it’s a minor miracle that I was able to function at all, let alone do anything useful.

  Nonetheless, the tiny part of my brain that was operating on a level more advanced than, “Ohmigod, my husband’s been shot!” did manage to string some elemental cautions together.

  If you get out of the car, you might get shot too.

  If you get shot too, the baby will be alone, and no one might show up here until tomorrow.

  Call for help before you do anything else. That way, if something happens to you, at least someone will come and find Carrie.

  My nose was running and my eyes were leaking, but I knew the voice was right. And although every other cell in my body was screaming to go see how badly Rafe was hurt, somehow I managed to stay where I was and get the phone out of my purse. My fingers were shaking too much to hit the buttons for 911, so I had to ask Siri to dial the number for me.

  It rang once, twice, and then— “911,” the voice on the other end of the line said calmly, “what’s your emergency?”

  “I need an ambulance.” My breath was hitching enough that it was hard to get the words out. “Someone shot my husband.”

  I rattled off the address to the Martin mansion in Sweetwater, Tennessee. I’d grown up here, so thankfully the digits were hardwired into my brain, otherwise I’m not sure I’d have been able to call them up. “He works for the Columbia PD. Notify Chief Grimaldi. And Sheriff Satterfield. And hurry.”

  I dropped the phone in the console, in the middle of the operator’s exhortation that I stay on the line with her. I wished I could, I wished I didn’t have to leave the safety of the car, but Rafe was hurt, and not getting up, and if he died out there, alone, while I sat inside the car waiting for the ambulance to show up, I’d never forgive myself.

  So I slid my door open—and I had the sense to reach up and turn off the dome light before I did it, so I wouldn’t be outlined like a silhouette in a shooting gallery. And then I slipped out on the gravel and dropped to my knees, and, ignoring the pain as the small stones dug into my skin, started crawling around the car to see what—if anything—I could do for Rafe.

  One

  ”Dear me,” Mother said. She stuck her hand through the crook of my elbow and turned me a hundred and eighty degrees, so I was facing in the opposite direction. “Let’s go this way instead.”

  It was a Saturday morning in early March, and spring had finally sprung in Middle Tennessee. There were leaves sprouting on the trees in Laurel Hill Wildlife Area, and the dry winter-grass was starting to turn green. Here and there, a brave dandelion opened its yellow face to the sun. It was hot enough that I had a trickle of sweat running down my back underneath the slightly too-warm jacket I couldn’t take off because I had the baby strapped to my chest, and I could feel myself developing freckles from the UV rays.

  None of that was what had prompted Mother’s outburst. As I twitched my arm out of her grip, I tried to imagine what might have. A group of men with automatic weapons? A group of men with skull-masks covering the lower halves of their faces? A group of men doing the Nazi salute while goose-stepping?

  That’s what we were here looking for. Or rather, that was what my husband, and Mother’s boyfriend, Bob Satterfield, the sheriff of Maury County, were here looking for. Mother and I were looking for them. In a very circumspect and roundabout way.

  Rafe and his boss, police chief Tamara Grimaldi, along with Sheriff Satterfield and his colleagues in Lawrence, Lewis, and Giles counties, plus any spare personnel they could rustle up from their respective departments, had been staking out Laurel Hill on the weekends for the past month. They were looking for a group of neo-Nazis who were rumored to be holding target practice, or maybe pep rallies, in the park. So far, they’d been down here three or four weekends running, without seeing anything out of the ordinary, so this weekend, Mother and I had invited ourselves along.

  We didn’t tell them that, naturally, since they’re both of the alpha-male, clap-the-women-and-children-behind-the-barricades, type of man. Neither of them would have been happy about us walking into a potentially dangerous situation. So it was possible that Mother had simply seen Rafe or Bob, or someone else we knew who was part of the same taskforce, and she wanted to hustle us out of sight before they could recognize us.

  And I was all about doing that. Rafe would not be happy about the fact that I’d put myself in what he’d consider danger by coming here, and he’d be even less happy about the fact that our almost four-month-old daughter was strapped to my chest while I was doing it. But even so, I couldn’t keep myself from throwing a glance over my shoulder as Mother tried to hustle us away. I’m crazy about my husband, and any opportunity to look at him is a good one.

  Although when I saw him, I stopped in my tracks. “What the hell… um… heck?”

  “Shhh!” Mother hissed, still tugging on my arm. “Come on, darling. This isn’t the time to cause a scene.”

  No, it wasn’t. Now was the very last time I should draw any kind of attention to either of us.

  Besides, if my husband had his arm around some other women’s shoulders, and was smiling down at her while she beamed up at him, it was just part of his cover while he was here. Just a local guy and his girlfriend enjoying a nice hike in the park on the
ir day off. Not keeping an eye out for neo-Nazis at all.

  I might have wished the woman he was smiling down at—the woman gazing adoringly up at him—was his boss, or maybe cute, little Lupe Vasquez. Someone who had no romantic interest whatsoever in my husband. But I suppose that’d be too much to ask.

  “That’s Officer Robinson,” I told my mother, and I’m pleased to say that my voice was perfectly even and calm. No jealousy here; no, ma’am. “She works for the Columbia PD.”

  And she probably had a first name in addition to the title, but I didn’t know what it was. Officer Robinson didn’t like me, and the feeling was mutual, so first names hadn’t come up.

  “Grimaldi must have put them together so they’d look like they have a reason for being here. Instead of having Rafe just wandering around on his own.”

  And Officer Robinson, too. She was young and pretty—and black—and might present a tempting target for a group of local skinheads.

  Rafe isn’t all that young anymore—almost thirty-two now—and doesn’t look like an easy target for anyone. If there were enough of them, they might take him on in spite of that, but we had no idea whether the group was big or small, and he’s tall enough and muscular enough that you can tell it wouldn’t be easy, even if you had a crowd behind you. And after ten years deep undercover, working his way into one of the biggest South American Theft Gangs in the southeastern United States, he gives off a vibe that’s as effective as a warning sign.

  Not that it seemed to be having any effect on Officer Robinson. And I’ll admit that seeing him with his arm around another woman was annoying.

  Not because I have any reason to suspect my husband of infidelity, or even of harboring so much as a secret fondness for Officer Robinson.

  No, he loves me, and he adores our baby. He even likes my mother, and has no desire to get on the wrong side of her by making eyes at anyone else. The fact that he was grinning down at Officer Robinson with every sign of enjoying her company, was just part of the job. And besides, he probably did enjoy her company. Why wouldn’t he, when she so visibly enjoyed his?

  “Let’s just get out of here before they see us.”

  Mother nodded, and as we hustled off down a path to the left, I congratulated myself on getting away without being seen.

  I should have known better, of course.

  When Rafe came home, it was late afternoon, and I was sitting at the island in the kitchen, in view of the back door—the one closest to the carriage-house-turned-garage—doing some work on my laptop.

  We were living in Mother’s house, while she was shacked up with the sheriff. The Martin mansion is a big antebellum plantation home that sits on a little knoll on the road between Sweetwater and Columbia, and in spite of the almost five thousand square feet and plethora of rooms to choose from, I often found myself hanging out in the kitchen. I’d grown up here, in what Rafe used to call the mausoleum on the hill, and in spite of having run and played in these rooms all my life, with just the two of us here—plus the baby and the dog—the size of the place was just a little daunting.

  Pearl the pitbull lifted her head when she heard Rafe approach the door. I knew he was coming, of course, since I’d heard the car come up the driveway and around the back. Pearl may not have, not until he came closer. She gave a short, sharp yip when he inserted the key in the lock. By the time he’d pushed the door open and she could see him, her little stub of a tail was slapping against the pillow, and her jaws were split in a doggy grin.

  “Yes,” he told her, “that’s a good girl. Good girl, Pearl.” He bent to give her a scratch between her small, furled ears before shutting the door behind him and straightening to fix me with a look.

  “What?” I said. And I might have sounded a little defensive. Maybe.

  “Got something you wanna tell me?”

  “No,” I said.

  He arched a brow.

  “Fine.” I huffed out an exasperated breath. It wasn’t like I didn’t know what he was doing, after all. He’d seen us earlier, and wanted to hear me admit it. And in case you’re thinking that I gave in too quickly, there was no sense in dragging it out, since he already knew, anyway. “We were curious, OK? It’s been a month, and you’ve gone down to Laurel Hill every weekend, and so far you haven’t seen anything worthwhile. We figured it would be safe for us to take a walk in the woods ourselves.”

  He folded his arms across his chest. They’re nice arms, and it’s a nice chest, and under other circumstances my eyes may have lingered. At the moment, I just went on.

  “The place was crawling with law enforcement, so it wasn’t like we were in danger. And anyway, nothing was going on. All we saw were people fishing and riding horses and hiking. Did you see anything more than that?”

  “I saw you,” Rafe said.

  “Other than me.”

  He shook his head.

  I leaned back. “So that’s four weekends in a row now with nothing going on. Do you think the reports were wrong?”

  “They weren’t wrong.” He stepped away from the door and came over to lean on the island across from me. The head of the viper tattooed around one upper arm peeked out from under the short sleeve of the black T-shirt. “When we did the first search, we found spent bullet casings and masks. They’d been there.”

  But they hadn’t been back since, or not as far as we knew.

  “Maybe they don’t meet at the same place every time they want to practice goose-stepping,” I said. “That would be smart, wouldn’t it? Even just a few young men with semi-automatic weapons and swastikas tattooed on their scalps aren’t easy to overlook.”

  Which was how Rafe and the rest of law enforcement knew that they met—or had met—in the wildlife area for target practice before. Someone had seen them, and reported it. “Maybe they switch things up and go to different places every time. To make it harder to track them down.”

  “It’s starting to look that way,” Rafe agreed.

  “What about Rodney and Kyle? You’ve got somebody sitting on them, right?”

  Rodney Clark and Kyle Scoggins were two young men in the Columbia area, who had come to my attention—and thus Rafe’s attention—during a murder investigation earlier in the year. Neither of them had been guilty, or for that matter much of a suspect, but one of them had a swastika tattooed on his head, and I’d heard them use racial slurs against Cletus Johnson’s five-year-old daughter, which argued a high degree of probability that if there was a neo-Nazi group meeting in the area, they’d be part of it. Most people, decent people, don’t call cute little African-American girls ugly names.

  Rafe shook his head. “There ain’t enough money in the budget to keep’em both under surveillance twenty-four/seven. The one week I did watch, they never did nothing to justify keeping’em covered like that.”

  “What about this weekend?”

  I mean, if the Columbia PD couldn’t justify paying six officers to keep an eye on Rodney and Kyle around the clock—and I quite understood why they couldn’t—shouldn’t there at least be enough money in the budget to watch them on the weekends to see if they traveled somewhere to meet their goose-stepping brethren?

  “We did have somebody on’em this weekend,” Rafe said. “They didn’t go nowhere. Rodney worked this morning.”

  So clearly this hadn’t been a weekend when the neo-Nazis met for target practice.

  Either that, or we were wrong about Rodney and Kyle, and they weren’t part of the group, swastikas and racial slurs to the contrary.

  “Do you think they noticed that someone noticed them?” I asked. “The group, I mean. Back in February, when the park rangers let law enforcement know what was going on, do you think they noticed that they’d been noticed, and now they’ve stopped getting together?”

  He shrugged. It set off a nice chain reaction of muscles under the tight T-shirt. “Might be. Or maybe they’re just hanging out somewhere else.”

  “Or they don’t meet every week, Or even every month.”
/>   Rafe nodded. “We’ll try again next weekend, I guess. Although at the rate we’re going, I don’t see us being able to keep this up indefinitely. Maybe we’ll just have to wait for the park rangers to give us another heads up next time it happens.”

  He dismissed the conversation to look around the kitchen. “Where’s the baby?”

  “Having her last nap of the day.” Upstairs in her crib. “You can go check on her if you want.”

  He glanced at the doorway to the hall, and then looked back at me. “Maybe I’ll just stay down here.”

  My lips curved up when he started to move around the island toward me. “That’s fine with me.”

  “You don’t mind?”

  He plucked me off the stool and boosted me up on top of the island, where he nudged my thighs apart so he could step between them.

  “Why would I mind?” I wanted to know, my voice breathless.

  “No reason I can imagine.” He bent his head to nuzzle below my ear. I arched my neck to give him better access while I wrapped my arms around his shoulders. Down on the pillow, Pearl closed her eyes with an almost human-sounding sigh.

  Rafe’s lips curved against my skin. “Prob’ly thinking, ‘not this again!’”

  Probably. “I’m not thinking, ‘not this again,’” I pointed out.

  “No.” He chuckled. “Good thing, too.”

  It was. A very good thing. I put the dog out of my mind and concentrated on the moment.

  With one thing and another, it was at least an hour before we got back to the conversation. By then the baby was awake, and we had moved from the kitchen to the parlor. Pearl had curled up on another pillow—we kept them in several of the rooms where we spent a lot of time—and Rafe and I were sitting on the peach velvet loveseat while I was feeding Carrie.