Survival Clause Read online

  “No, sir!” Curtis shook his head. “No, I ain’t.”

  “—or your friends planned this without telling you, and then they left you holding the ball while they ran away. Either way, I don’t wanna come back here and find you again. You understand me?”

  “Yes, sir.” Curtis nodded vigorously.

  “And maybe think about getting some new friends, since the ones you’ve got don’t seem like the ones anyone oughta have.”

  Curtis looked glum.

  “You need a ride somewhere?” Rafe wanted to know.

  Curtis blinked, and it took him a second to respond. “No, sir. My granddad’d kill me if I came home in a police car.”

  Rafe nodded. He’s had some experience with grandfathers who beat their grandchildren, so he knows what that’s like. “Go on home, then. And stay outta trouble.”

  “Yes, sir.” Curtis took off running. The buzzing from the crowd got louder, and then softer again.

  “Show’s over,” Rafe told them, and reached for the door handle.

  Only to stop when a voice asked, “What about my merchandise?”

  The speaker was an older man, middle-eastern in coloring. When Rafe turned to him, he looked like he might have wanted to quail, but he squared his shoulders. “They stole from my market!”

  “He didn’t,” Rafe pointed out, indicating Curtis, who was now a block away and fading fast. The kid should be on the track team at school, if he wasn’t already. “You the one who called the cops?”

  The man nodded.

  “I can’t arrest him when he didn’t do nothing. It’s not his fault that his friends shoplifted and ran.”

  The market owner looked obstinate, and Rafe sighed. “Here.” He pulled out his wallet, extricated a twenty, and passed it over. “That oughta cover it.”

  The older man tucked it away. The crowd buzzed again, the anger turning toward the shop owner now.

  “Go on back to your market,” Rafe told him. “You got enough money to pay for what was stolen. And you shouldn’t leave the place unattended.”

  The shop owner turned and trotted away, and I think it was spurred just as much by a desire to get away from the crowd as the need to see if his place was all right.

  “Anybody else got something they wanna say?” Rafe inquired. When nobody spoke up, he grabbed for the car door again. “Go on home. We’re done.”

  He folded himself into the car and snapped his seatbelt in place. And drove away, careful not to get too close to anybody. The cell phone cameras stayed on the car until we were out of sight, and it took that long for Rafe to let out the breath he’d been holding.

  “Shit.”

  “Tense situation,” I said.

  He rolled his head back and forth, loosening the no doubt tight muscles in his neck, and then he glanced at me, his lips curving. “Coulda been worse. In the past, I’d be the one on the ground.”

  With Tucker’s knee in his back. “Did you ever…?”

  “End up on my face on the pavement with some cop’s boot on my neck? More than once, darlin’. Lucky for me, none of’em had an itchy trigger finger.”

  Lucky, indeed.

  “You handled it well,” I said.

  “Easier when you’ve been the one on the ground,” Rafe answered. And shook his head. “Stupid kid.”

  “Do you think he was telling the truth? About his friends taking off and leaving him?”

  “I don’t imagine he’d be stupid enough to let himself get caught if he’d known what was gonna happen,” Rafe said, maneuvering the car back in the direction of home, for the second time that night. “He’d have been outta there with the others if he’d known. And I don’t imagine what’s-his-name…”

  “The store owner?”

  He nodded. “—woulda let him get away if he’d had anything in his pockets that oughtn’t have been there.”

  Probably true.

  “So justice was served. More or less.”

  “If you wanna call it that,” Rafe said. “Curtis went home. The guy got his money back. I’m twenty bucks poorer, and my name and face’ll be all over social media tomorrow. But it coulda been worse.”

  Very easily. “What’s going to happen to Tucker?”

  “Not much,” Rafe said. “He was only doing his job. The kid wasn’t damaged. Tucker wasn’t killing him, or even hurting him much. I don’t see him doing that even if I hadn’t shown up.”

  “So Grimaldi—?”

  “Didn’t want the bad press,” Rafe said, leaving the lights of Columbia behind as we headed south on the Pulaski Highway toward home. “The optics—” his tone made quote marks around the word, “are bad any time a white cop has a black man on the ground. And with what happened last month…”

  I nodded. What had happened last month, was the discovery of a small, local, white supremacist cell that held target practice in Laurel Hill Wildlife Area in the next county over, and that had staged a mass shooting right near the square in Columbia. The leader was in prison now, and so was his right-hand man, but the discovery of a neo-Nazi group operating out of Columbia hadn’t made the optics, as Rafe called them, any prettier. Especially not since said neo-Nazi group’s big gesture had been to shoot up a gathering of black people that were celebrating the raising of a monument at the site of the 1946 Columbia Race Riots. Including Civil Rights era icon Mordecai Lawson, who had marched on Selma and Washington with Doctor King.

  The Reverend Lawson was fine, by the way. Healthy and hale and back in Memphis, where he lived.

  “So Grimaldi wanted you to make the situation look better for the cameras,” I said.

  Rafe smirked. “I’m sure she figured I’d get some personal satisfaction out of being the one to deal with Tucker, too.”

  No doubt. “Did you?”

  “It didn’t suck,” Rafe said.

  I settled more comfortably into the seat now that we were outside the city limits and it looked like we’d make it home this time. “Any idea what murder scene Grimaldi’s at? Have you heard anything about it?”

  “Not a word,” Rafe said, “but I’m sure I’ll find out tomorrow.”

  I was sure he would, too.

  * * *

  As it happened, though, we didn’t have to wait until tomorrow. About thirty minutes after we’d made it home, while I was upstairs feeding Carrie and singing lullabies, I heard the crunch of gravel and the sound of a car engine outside the house. Then the sound of a car door shutting, steps on the floor of the porch downstairs, and the doorbell ringing through the house. Rafe, who had made it out of the shower by then, stuck his head through the doorway to Carrie’s nursery. “I’ll get it.”

  I nodded. “I’ll be down in a few minutes. She’s almost asleep already.”

  He disappeared from the doorway, and I called after him, “Put your shirt on before you answer the door.”

  He didn’t respond, but I heard a chuckle float back on the air.

  He padded down the stairs on bare feet, and across to the front door. And I recognized Grimaldi’s voice, the timbre and inflection, even if I couldn’t hear what she was saying.

  By the time Carrie was tucked up in her crib, and I had rearranged my clothing, they had migrated to the kitchen, where Rafe had put on a pot of coffee—coffee?—and lined two mugs up on the island.

  “Where’s mine?” I wanted to know.

  He gave me a look. “You need your sleep, darlin’.”

  “I guess you two aren’t going to get any?”

  I headed for the fridge, where I pulled a carton of milk out. If I wasn’t going to get coffee, I might as well make myself a cup of hot chocolate. Dairy’s good for the baby.

  “We’ll get some,” Grimaldi said, “just not in the next couple hours.”

  “Did Rafe tell you what happened with Tucker?” I poured the milk into a mug and stuck it in the microwave to heat.

  Grimaldi nodded. “And I saw the live stream.”

  Live stream? “Really?”

  They both n
odded. Neither of them said anything else. I looked from one to the other of them as my milk rotated in the microwave. “So what’s going on? Are you going to talk to Tucker now?”

  “Tucker can wait till tomorrow,” Rafe said, pulling the coffee pot off the coffee maker and tilting it over the two cups.

  “What, then?”

  “That murder scene I came from,” Grimaldi said, and my heart sank to the bottom of my stomach.

  “Oh, God. Who do we know who’s dead?” My mother? One of my sisters? My brother? A friend?

  “Nobody,” Grimaldi said. “It’s not who, it’s what.”

  “What do you mean, what?”

  “Dead woman,” Rafe told me. “Found a couple hours ago at the truck stop down by the interstate. No identification on the body. No idea who she is. Or was. But not anybody we know.”

  Good to know. Although how would he know that, unless— “Have you seen a picture?”

  He nodded.

  “Can I see, too?” Just to make sure it wasn’t someone I knew, that he didn’t.

  He glanced at Grimaldi, who shrugged. “She’s been dead just a few hours,” she told me, while she opened the camera program on her phone. “Best as we can figure.”

  “OK.” Nothing to worry about, then. No maggots or anything. I took the phone she handed me and looked at the picture. Dark-haired woman in her thirties, and no, no one I’d ever seen before. Or if I had, I didn’t remember.

  I handed the phone back to Grimaldi. “What does she have to do with us?”

  And I didn’t mean to sound cold, but Grimaldi was a homicide detective with the Nashville PD before she took over the Columbia police department. And Rafe has certainly seen his share of dead bodies. So have I, tagging along behind him. It’s always sad, but if she was no one we knew, it didn’t seem to warrant this kind of reaction.

  “Murdered woman,” Grimaldi repeated, as if this should mean something to me, “left at the truck stop off Interstate 65.”

  She waited. It took me a second. I admit it. And then, finally, I got what she was—or rather, wasn’t—saying. “You mean…”

  “Yes. The I-65 serial killer is back.”

  The I-65 serial killer who had murdered Grimaldi’s mother when Grimaldi was just a kid. The serial killer Grimaldi had been wanting to pit wits with for going on two decades now.

  “And this time,” she added, her voice grimly satisfied, “he left the body in a place where I get to investigate it.”

  Two

  “If it’s over by the interstate,” I said, “won’t it be Bob Satterfield’s body to investigate?”

  Grimaldi looked at me, and I clarified. “You’re police chief of Columbia. The interstate is outside the city limits. Therefore, it isn’t your investigation. Or your body.”

  “The sheriff called me,” Grimaldi said.

  “He’s giving you his murder investigation?”

  “Not exactly.”

  Rafe had put the coffee pot back and was watching her with both hands wrapped around his mug, one brow elevated. “Lemme guess. He called you because he wanted me, and you decided to invite yourself along.”

  “Something like that,” Grimaldi admitted.

  Rafe’s lips curved. “How’d he like that?”

  “He seemed fine with it. But I had to promise I’d bring you back with me.”

  Of course. “He wants Rafe as a representative for the TBI,” I said, and they both nodded.

  “The woman ain’t gonna be local,” Rafe said. “The killer picked her up somewhere along the way. Mighta been Nashville, mighta been farther north.”

  “Or south,” Grimaldi added, “if he was trying to throw us off.”

  And had dumped her on the opposite side of the interstate than the direction he was traveling. He’d been going south, obviously. Or at least he had dumped the body on the west side of the highway.

  Rafe nodded. “Mighta been inside the state, or in Kentucky. Or Indiana or Alabama. Either way, it’s outside county jurisdiction.”

  And into the TBI’s. “So you’ll be taking over?”

  “It depends,” Rafe said. “First McLaughlin has to agree to it.”

  “But he will. Won’t he? I mean, you’re here. Surely it makes more sense to let you deal with it than send someone else down when you’re here already.”

  “I imagine he will,” Rafe said. “And if it turns out that the victim was picked up inside the state, then I’m all we need. If she came from outside Tennessee, I’ll have to coordinate with folks from there. Or the FBI, if some bright soul has the idea to call’em in.”

  Grimaldi grimaced.

  “I guess you’re hoping she’ll turn out to be local,” I said, looking from one to the other of them. “From inside Tennessee.”

  “It’d make it easier,” Rafe agreed. “The feds sometimes try to take over. And they can be…”

  He hesitated.

  “Pushy?”

  His lips curved. “I was thinking ‘condescending bastards,’ but pushy works, too.”

  I nodded. “So first you have to figure out who she was and where she came from, and then you can go there and start looking around?”

  “Something like that. And on that note—” he turned to Grimaldi, “I’ll go get ready.”

  She nodded. I busied myself with the hot chocolate while he walked through the kitchen and down the hall. Over by the door, Pearl the pitbull looked up and slapped her tail against the fabric of her pillow a couple of times before she settled back down. The bullet wound on her flank was still pink and puffy against the silvery gray fur that was just starting to grow back around it.

  “Good girl,” I told her, and turned back to Grimaldi. “How do you feel?”

  She opened her mouth, probably to claim she had no feelings whatsoever, but she closed it again without speaking. And took a few seconds to settle her thoughts before responding. “I’m not sure. I’ve been tracking this guy—or his victims, more accurately—since I came on the job almost a decade ago. They were always left somewhere else. Now that he’s put one where I can actually investigate it, I’m almost afraid to believe it.”

  I nodded. I could well believe that. “Worried you won’t be able to solve the case?”

  “No.” She sounded surprised I’d even ask.

  “He probably isn’t local, you know. You might be able to investigate the crime—” If Bob Satterfield allowed it, since it was his jurisdiction, “but if the murderer isn’t local, you won’t be able to catch him.”

  “I’ll find a way,” Grimaldi said.

  “As you said, he might not even be in Tennessee.” No reason to think he was. He could be based anywhere along I-65, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes.

  That included here, of course. So he might be from here, huge coincidence or not.

  Grimaldi nodded when I said so. “That would be nice. But not very likely, I’m afraid. Whoever dumped the body was at the trailer stop. If he lived nearby, he had no reason to stop at the truck stop. He could just go home.”

  “Unless he wanted to get rid of the body,” I said. “He wouldn’t want to take it home. It’d be hard to explain away, if he doesn’t live alone.”

  “Eighty percent of serial killers are unmarried,” Grimaldi said.

  “That means twenty percent are married. He could have a wife.”

  Grimaldi shrugged.

  “And he has to be from somewhere. I don’t think the truck stop is enough of a clue, though. He could have stopped there simply to get rid of the body. Or to do whatever it is he does to them…”

  “Rape,” Grimaldi said distantly, “mutilate, and strangle.”

  I blinked. And it took me a second or two to get my voice to cooperate. “What do you mean, mutilate? What does he do?”

  “Carves a number on the body,” Grimaldi said. “Or a numeral, I should say.”

  That wasn’t as bad as I’d feared, honestly, although it was bad enough. And quite chilling. I could almost feel the ice cubes drop
into my stomach as I asked, “You mean, he numbers the victims?”

  She nodded.

  “In Roman numerals?”

  “Yes,” Grimaldi said.

  Well, that made a certain kind of sense, anyway. Roman numerals are all straight lines. Much easier to carve than curved Arabic numbers. Which, I’m sure, was why the Romans did it that way in the first place. Made it easier with all those marble monuments.

  “Which number is he up to?” I wanted to know, and I’ll admit that it took effort to keep my voice steady.

  “Eighteen,” Grimaldi said.

  “XVIII.”

  She nodded.

  “He’s killed eighteen people?”

  “He or they. There might be more than one murderer.”

  Maybe. That’s a lot of murders for just one person. On the bright side— “At least you know that those are all the victims.”

  “Not necessarily,” Grimaldi said. “We know that those are the victims he’s claimed. But there might have been earlier murders. While he was practicing, finding his style. Before he decided to start counting.”

  Ugh.

  “And there could be others he just didn’t claim, for one reason or another. But we can say with certainty that these eighteen are his. There might be more, but there can’t be less. Not if they were all marked in the same way. No one else would have known to do that.”

  We stood in silence a moment. I took another sip of chocolate, but instead of tasting rich and creamy, it filled my mouth with bitterness. I put the cup down. “Your mother…”

  “Number three,” Grimaldi said.

  I saw the three straight lines in my head, and swallowed hard. “At least you know for sure that she’s one of them. Once you find him, there won’t be any doubt that he did it.”

  Grimaldi nodded, just as Rafe’s footsteps came down the stairs and then along the hallway toward us. He stopped in the doorway and looked from Grimaldi to me and back. “Everything all right?”

  “As right as it can be,” Grimaldi told him, as she put her mug on the counter. “Ready?”

  He nodded. “Sorry, darlin’. I’ll be home as soon as I can.”

  “Take your time,” I told him. “Pearl and I, and Carrie, will be fine here.”