Right of Redemption Read online

  “I know Patrick,” Jarvis said, with a nod at Darcy. “Pleasure.”

  He didn’t sound like he meant it, but I guess he found himself in a tough position, and didn’t really appreciate it. Here I was: Rafe’s wife and Chief Grimaldi’s good friend. And there Darcy was: my sister, Rafe’s sister-in-law, and Patrick Nolan’s girlfriend. Jarvis couldn’t really treat either of us like the suspects he probably felt like we were, since our friends and significant others would have something to say about it.

  “And this is our friend Charlotte,” I said, as Charlotte belatedly—and reluctantly—opened the passenger door and swung her legs out. “Darcy bought the house, and Charlotte and I have been working on renovating it.”

  Jarvis glanced at Charlotte, nodded, and turned his attention back to me. “Tell me about this morning.”

  “There’s not much to tell,” I said. “I got here about forty-five minutes ago. Darcy was waiting outside. She doesn’t have a key.”

  Jarvis nodded. His face didn’t change, but I could tell he was thinking. Maybe about the fact that the back door had been open, or at least accessible. Or maybe just about the fact that Morris hadn’t had a key, either.

  “We changed the locks on Tuesday. I should have made sure Darcy got one of the new keys, but I didn’t. So she was waiting on the sidewalk when I pulled up.”

  Jarvis nodded.

  “We went inside. And felt a draft—from that broken pane of glass in the den—so we walked through until we found… him.”

  “Did you know him?” Jarvis wanted to know.

  I shook my head. “No.”

  Charlotte twitched and gave me a surprised look over her shoulder, which totally made me look like I was lying.

  “He showed up here yesterday afternoon,” I told Jarvis, “just before we were done for the day. Around four. Knocked on the door and waited for me to open it. Said his name was Steve Morris and that this used to be his house.”

  Jarvis nodded.

  “I have no idea whether he was telling the truth. No reason to think he wasn’t, I guess—” Except for that half-formed theory that he might have been working for the other bidder at the auction, “but it was the first time in my life I’d seen him, so he could have been anybody.”

  I glanced at the house, where Enoch was still waiting on the stoop. “Did he have ID on him?”

  “Yes,” Jarvis said.

  “And is he actually Steven Morris?”

  Enoch nodded, but Jarvis—who couldn’t see him—said, “I’m the one asking the questions here, Mrs. Collier.”

  I refrained from rolling my eyes. “What else do you want to know, Detective?”

  “Did either of you see Mr. Morris again?” He looked from one to the other of us, and seemed unaware that he had now confirmed the victim’s identification.

  “Between yesterday at four and this morning?” I shook my head. “No. I left and went home. Stopped off at the Martin and McCall office on my way, to talk to Darcy, and then picked up my daughter from Sheriff Satterfield’s house—you know that my mother’s living with the sheriff, don’t you?—and took her home. Rafe got there a little after seven, and we spent the rest of the night together.”

  The name dropping was almost indecently heavy, and Jarvis must have noticed, because he grimaced.

  “I stayed at work until five,” Darcy said, without being asked. “I went to my mother’s house and had dinner with her and her aunt. Then I went home, and Patrick met me there after the SWAT practice.”

  “I guess you didn’t go to Laurel Hill with the others this morning,” I said, and Jarvis gave me a flat look.

  “Someone has to stay and deal with the things that happen here, Mrs. Collier.”

  Like this. He didn’t say it, but it was implied. It was also implied, somewhat, that my husband and Tamara Grimaldi had no business gallivanting off to Lawrence County when there were crimes happening here in Columbia.

  “Of course,” I said. “And we’re happy to have you.”

  He didn’t snort, but I got the feeling he wanted to. “What about you?” He turned to Charlotte. “Did you see Mr. Morris after you left the house yesterday afternoon?”

  Charlotte shook her head. Her voice was almost inaudible, and she had guilt written all over her face and posture. “I went home. I’m staying with my parents in Sweetwater. My husband…”

  She swallowed.

  Jarvis waited, and eventually Charlotte pulled it together. “The kids and I left my husband over Christmas. I have two. A boy and a girl. We’ve been staying with my parents since. My mother was watching the kids while I was here, working. We had dinner together, and then I put the kids to bed…”

  She trailed off. Jarvis nodded. “And then?”

  It was obvious that there was more. Instead of ending the statement with a solid period—she’d put the kids to bed; the end—Charlotte had left the sentence sort of hanging. It was not surprising at all that Jarvis probed further.

  “I went for a drive,” Charlotte said reluctantly.

  “A drive.” Jarvis’s tone was flat, and said nothing at all. And that in and of itself said a lot. “Did you talk to anyone during this drive? Stop for gas or a drink somewhere?”

  Charlotte shook her head, her eyes wide.

  “Do you know when he was killed?” I asked, just as much to take Jarvis’s attention off Charlotte as because I’d like to hear the answer.

  Jarvis shook his head. “That’ll be up to the medical examiner. Best I can determine, between four o’clock yesterday and nine this morning.”

  Between the time I’d seen him drive away yesterday, and when we’d found him on the floor this morning, in other words.

  Or maybe it was between when he showed up here, and when Enoch had seen the dead body. Maybe Jarvis wasn’t ruling out the possibility that Morris never left yesterday, and we were all lying.

  “He really did leave last night,” I said. “If you check with the neighbors, someone might have seen him drive away. But if we’d decided to kill him—and we had no reason to—we wouldn’t have left him on the floor in the den until this morning.”

  Jarvis didn’t sound surprised. “What would you have done? Come back in the middle of the night to get rid of him?”

  “Of course.”

  “You don’t think it might have been smarter to leave him here and make it look like he’d broken in overnight and been murdered by someone else?”

  I suppose it might have been smarter. But to be honest, if we’d killed him, I’m not sure we’d have thought of it.

  “We didn’t do anything to him, Detective,” I said firmly. “He was here. I watched him drive away. We locked the door, we left, and we didn’t see him again until this morning.”

  “And he was dead,” Darcy added, since I hadn’t made that clear.

  Jarvis nodded, but not in a way like he believed us. “I know how to get in touch with the two of you.” He looked from me to Darcy. “You—” He turned his attention to Charlotte, “—I’ll need contact information for, in case I need to talk to you again.”

  Charlotte gulped, but managed to rattle off the Albertsons’ address and her cell phone number. Jarvis took them down in his little notebook.

  “You’re free to go,” he told us. “I’ll be in touch if there are any more questions.”

  And there surely would be, because I didn’t think he was finished with us. We were the obvious suspects, and Charlotte, at least, didn’t have an alibi. No, this wouldn’t be the first time we spoke to Jarvis, singly or together.

  “There are a couple of spare keys on the kitchen counter,” I said, “if you’d like to lock up when you’re done. And if you wouldn’t mind taping something in front of that broken windowpane, too, when you’re finished processing the scene. We probably shouldn’t leave it open for anyone else to walk in.”

  Jarvis sighed. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “We appreciate it. We’ll get out of your way now.” And make room for the crime
scene van and the vehicle from the morgue.

  Jarvis nodded. “I’ll be in touch.”

  He headed back to the house. Enoch fell in behind him, respectfully.

  We waited until they’d both disappeared inside and shut the door behind them before I glanced at Darcy. “Your house?”

  She lives in Columbia, much closer than Charlotte or I, and I wasn’t quite ready to go our separate ways yet.

  She nodded, and we separated into our respective cars. Charlotte and I tailed Darcy over to her small rental on the other side of town.

  “I think that went fairly well,” I said fifteen minutes later, when we were sitting in Darcy’s breakfast nook with cups of coffee in front of us and Carrie cooing in the car seat on the bench next to me. “Or as good as we can expect, anyway. He didn’t arrest anyone.”

  “He wanted to,” Charlotte said darkly.

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so. Not yet. He’ll need more evidence before he can arrest anyone. Right now he doesn’t know enough.”

  “He knows that Morris is dead,” Charlotte said. “On our floor with our screwdriver, that has my fingerprints all over it. What more does he need to know?”

  “Motive?” Darcy suggested.

  “We had motive. He was taking the house.”

  “Jarvis doesn’t know that,” I said.

  “Are you sure?” Darcy asked. “He didn’t ask us what Morris wanted when he showed up yesterday afternoon. Why do you think he didn’t?”

  Good question. It would have been logical for Jarvis to wonder about that. But—

  “It can’t be because he already knows. How would he?” We hadn’t told him, and Morris wasn’t talking.

  “Maybe he found out some other way,” Charlotte said.

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe Enoch knew? If Morris used to live in our house, maybe he and Enoch knew each other. Maybe Morris stopped by Enoch’s house last night after he left ours, and he told Enoch what he was doing there. And this morning Enoch told Jarvis.”

  Huh. “But if Jarvis knew that Morris wanted to take his house back, don’t you think he would have mentioned it?”

  “Maybe he was waiting to see if we mentioned it,” Darcy said. “And since we didn’t, he knows we’re trying to hide something.”

  Maybe.

  “This whole thing doesn’t make any sense to me,” I said. “I know what Morris said, but the house sat empty for three years before the city foreclosed on it. If he wanted to keep it, he could have come back to it at any time during those three years. Why wait until it sold?”

  “Maybe there was something in the house that he wanted,” Charlotte suggested. “Maybe he’d hidden something there, and for as long as he owned the house, it was safe, even if he didn’t live here. But once the city foreclosed and we got the house, he was afraid that whatever it was would be discovered. So he needed to get the house back.”

  It’s probably telling that my first thought was dead bodies buried in the basement. Not that there was a basement. Just a small crawlspace.

  “We’ve been tearing things out all week. Don’t you think we would have found whatever it was by now?”

  “Depends on what it was,” Charlotte said.

  “What do you think it might be?”

  She shrugged. “Could be anything. Maybe he was a bank robber. Or a jewel thief. Maybe there’s a fortune in gems hidden in the house.”

  “I don’t think he’d leave anything like that sitting around if he wasn’t here,” Darcy said. “Why wouldn’t he take it with him?”

  No idea. “Maybe we should look into bank robberies and jewel thefts in this area three to four years ago.”

  “I can ask Patrick,” Darcy said. “He was on the police force back then.”

  “Did you tell him about Morris last night?”

  She shook her head, her cheeks turning pink. “I was going to, but then he got here and we got busy with other things.”

  I nodded, even as I hid a smile. “I was going to tell Rafe, too. But then he walked in wearing that SWAT outfit, and the thought blew right out of my head.” Until later, but by then I’d decided to keep my mouth shut, since his case involving the neo-Nazis was more important than my little problem.

  Of course, now my little problem had turned into a much bigger problem, and I would have to tell him—if Jarvis hadn’t already done it for me—but if he did, at least Rafe could tell him, in all honesty, that I hadn’t made a big deal out of Steve Morris showing up.

  Charlotte looked from one to the other of us. “SWAT?”

  “The Special Weapons and Tactics team at the Columbia PD. Rafe and Darcy’s boyfriend are both on it.”

  “I know what a SWAT team is,” Charlotte said irritably. “”This is Maury County. What do we need a SWAT team for?”

  “At the moment, I’m thinking the neo-Nazis. Although you never know when a SWAT team might come in handy.”

  Charlotte rolled her eyes.

  “They’re nice to look at,” Darcy said mildly, “if nothing else.”

  Yes, they were.

  “Is there anything we can do,” Darcy wanted to know, “other than wait and see what conclusions Detective Jarvis draws?”

  “We could do a little investigating of our own. Or at least we could try to shore up Charlotte’s alibi, in case she needs it.” I turned to her. “Are you sure you didn’t stop anywhere last night? Did anyone see you who could prove that you weren’t on Fulton Street when the murder went down?”

  Charlotte shook her head. “But I wasn’t on Fulton Street when the murder went down.”

  “How do you know?” My eyes narrowed. “You didn’t go inside, did you?”

  “Of course not,” Charlotte said, with a guilty little wriggle.

  I stared at her. “Oh, my God. You went inside the house and you didn’t tell us?”

  “It was just for a minute,” Charlotte said.

  I threw my hands up and turned to Darcy, who said calmly, “Anything else you haven’t shared?”

  Charlotte shook her head.

  I took a deep breath—in through the nose, out through the mouth—and forced myself to calm down. “Why did you go inside?”

  “I’d lost an earring,” Charlotte said. “I wanted to see if it was there.”

  An earring? Had she even been wearing earrings yesterday?

  I thought back, but couldn’t rightly remember. I’d been leaving mine off this past week, along with every other piece of jewelry I customarily wear. All except my—plain, unadorned—wedding band. There’s no point in trying to look fancy when you’re scraping popcorn off the ceiling and tearing out drywall. It wasn’t like we had cameras following us around, after all.

  “What did it look like?” I asked, at the same time as Darcy said, “Did you find it?”

  Charlotte shook her head to Darcy and told me, “Diamond studs. Richard bought them for me last year.”

  And she was still wearing them? I would have pawned those the first chance I got. Especially given how hard up for cash she was, and how Richard wasn’t giving her any.

  “I’m sorry,” Darcy said.

  “Did you look everywhere?” I added. Partly because I hated the idea that she’d lost a valuable earring—valuable because it had the potential to put food on the table for a while, not valuable because it came from Doctor Dick—and partly because I wanted to hear whether she’d truly been through the whole house. “Even the den?”

  We hadn’t done any work in the den on Friday, but Charlotte nodded.

  “I assume Steve Morris wasn’t lying dead on the floor when you were there?”

  “No,” Charlotte said.

  I gave her a narrow look. “You aren’t lying to us, right?”

  She shook her head.

  “Because you sound like you’re lying.”

  “I’m not lying,” Charlotte said. “He wasn’t dead on the floor when I was there.”

  “Was he dead somewhere else?”

  �
��Of course not!” Charlotte said.

  “And he didn’t show up while you were there?”

  “No,” Charlotte said.

  I leaned back, just as my phone rang, and I reached for my bag instead. “Well, at least we know that the murder happened after… when did you say you were there? Ten?”

  I fished the phone out of my bag and put up a finger to stall the conversation. I already knew who was calling, so there was no need to look at the display. “Hi,” I said brightly. “I didn’t expect to hear from you so soon.”

  “Jarvis?” Darcy mouthed. Charlotte sat up a little straighter.

  I shook my head, as my husband’s voice said, with no further introduction, “What the hell, Savannah?”

  Ten

  “It wasn’t my fault,” I said.

  “Glad to hear it.”

  I made a face, but there wasn’t much I could say to that, so I didn’t try.

  “As it happens,” Rafe continued, “I ain’t upset that you found a dead body. I ain’t even surprised. Not like it’s the first.”

  No, it wasn’t. I’ve found more than my fair share. Although it was perhaps a little disconcerting that he’d gotten so used to it that it wasn’t even a surprise anymore.

  “I didn’t particularly appreciate hearing about it from Paul Jarvis, though,” he added. “Some reason you didn’t call me?”

  “You’re in Lawrence County,” I said. “Dealing with more important things.”

  “Not sure I’d call’em more important, darlin’.” So at least I’d gone from Savannah—something he usually only calls me on serious occasions—to the more casual darlin’.

  He continued, “Somebody was stabbed to death in a house you work in every day. A house where you take our baby to work with you. That’s a pretty big deal.”

  When he put it like that, I guess it was.

  “I don’t think it had anything to do with us,” I said.

  “How’d you figure that?”

  “We didn’t know the guy. He just knocked on the door and…”

  “Yeah?” Rafe said when I didn’t continue. “Go on. He just knocked on the door and… what?”