Wrongful Termination: A Savannah Martin Novel (Savannah Martin Mystery Book 16) Read online

  Or he could have been skimming money from the undercover operations of his subordinates at the TBI, and used the proceeds to buy his expensive house and his expensive car, and when Doug Brennan came along and began to suspect something, Foster had done the only thing he could think of, and had killed Brennan. And once word got out that Goins was on the case and wasn’t buying the fact that it had been an accident—even if his focus was on my husband and not Foster—Foster had realized it was only a matter of time before the whole house of cards would come fluttering down, and he’d taken the only way out that he thought he had.

  * * *

  The meeting started, and I sat back in my chair and listened. As usual, I had nothing to contribute. I had no new listings and no new clients, and hadn’t sold anything lately. This was the first meeting of the new year, so Tim was all about pumping up the employees to get off to a great start and do amazing things in the coming twelve months.

  I waited until things had quieted down a little before I posed my question. “Does anyone know what’s going on with real estate in Ridgetop?”

  Everyone turned to me. “Is something going on in Ridgetop?” someone asked. And someone else added, “Do you have property for sale in Ridgetop? Because I’ve got someone looking for something with a view.”

  Doug Brennan’s house had a lovely view, and was likely to come on the market at some point. But it wasn’t likely to be my listing. I shook my head. “Just curious. No rumors about some big corporation putting a fulfillment center up there, or anything?”

  There was shaking of heads all around the table.

  “Do you know something we don’t, Savannah?” Tim wanted to know.

  I shook my head. “Not at all. Sorry. What about Hermitage?” Might as well ask, right? Just in case Wendell decided to go through with his plan to sell the townhouse and buy that shack on a river somewhere, and enlisted me to help. “Townhouse just off Lebanon Road. Not new but well maintained.”

  We spent a couple of minutes talking about it—or they spent a couple of minutes talking while I listened—and then the conversation went on to other things.

  At the end of the meeting, I told Tim I’d let him know whether we decided to move to Sweetwater or not. “I guess if we do, I should find a brokerage down there to work with.”

  Tim nodded. “That would be easier for you. Although if you can’t find one, or it takes some time to find one and you want to keep your license here for a while, you can commute up when you want to, and do the rest remotely.”

  I suppose I could.

  “And no offense, Savannah,” Tim added, “but you may want to consider a different line of work. This one doesn’t seem that well suited to you.”

  “I’ll take it under advisement,” I said. “I guess I’d better get back to my husband and baby now.”

  Tim smacked his lips. “Give your husband my love.”

  Oh, sure. “How about you leave that for Kenny,” I suggested, “and I’ll just tell Rafe you said hello?”

  Tim grinned. He has a lot of teeth, all white and pretty. “You can do that. But Kenny would understand. Believe me.”

  He probably would. Especially since the chances of Tim getting to do anything with Rafe, other than admire him from a safe distance, are very remote indeed.

  So I put my coat back on and walked out to the Volvo for the trip home.

  Only to come face to face with Detective Goins in the parking lot.

  I stopped like I’d walked into a wall and looked around, suspiciously. “Detective.”

  He showed teeth. Maybe he thought it was a friendly smile, but it missed by a mile. “Mrs. Collier. Your husband told me I’d find you here.”

  My eyes narrowed. “You’ve spoken to Rafe? What about?” Had Goins pulled a gun on him again? And put our baby in danger?

  “On the phone,” Goins said. “I’d like you to come downtown with me for an interview, Mrs. Collier.”

  Oh, he would, would he?

  “And you spoke to Rafe about this?”

  He nodded.

  “Then I’m sure you won’t mind if I call him and verify that?”

  He shook his head. “I understand you’ve been at police headquarters before.” This insinuating statement, which was in no way a question, was accompanied by a smirk. “You can probably find your own way there.”

  I told him I could. I have, in fact been at police headquarters more than once. Both for interviews and other things.

  Goins nodded. “I’ll see you there. Shortly.”

  He got back into his Toyota and peeled out of the lot. I waited until he was gone, around the corner toward downtown, before I got into the Volvo. Before I turned the key in the ignition, I pulled out my phone. And dialed Rafe. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine. Why?”

  “Goins just showed up here. He wants me to drive into downtown for an interview.”

  “He called,” Rafe said. “I told him where to find you.”

  “So you’re OK with this?”

  I imagined the shrug I could hear in his voice. “Not like I can be otherwise. He’s got the right to ask. And it’s better to cooperate.”

  I guess it was. “Are you going to be all right with Carrie for however long this takes?”

  His voice turned amused. “I don’t imagine it’ll take all that long. The baby and I’ll be fine. We’re on the sofa watching the Shopping Network.”

  Of course they were. “You have enough milk?”

  “Plenty of milk,” Rafe confirmed. “If you’re planning to stay gone a couple days, we could be in trouble, but otherwise, we’ll be fine.”

  And they had enough diapers. He knew how to put them on. If Carrie sprung a leak, it wasn’t a big deal. She had plenty of clothes he could change her into. “I probably don’t have to worry that he’s thinking of arresting me, right?”

  “Not less’n you’ve done something I don’t know about,” Rafe said. “Go find out what he wants, darlin’. We’ll be here when you get back.”

  No doubt about that. I had the car with the car seat, and Rafe wouldn’t put Carrie on the back of the Harley for any reason. “I’ll get there as soon as I can.”

  “Take your time,” Rafe said and hung up. I turned the key in the ignition and set off.

  * * *

  The first time I visited police headquarters in downtown was the morning Rafe and I discovered Brenda Puckett’s body. Spicer and Truman drove me there in the back of their squad car, and I was shaking like a leaf, both from the discovery and from the upcoming interview. I hadn’t done anything to Brenda, but I was still nervous.

  I’ve been back plenty since. Enough that I totally lost the fear of being interviewed. Once Tamara Grimaldi and I became friends, the police station became a much less uncomfortable place.

  Until now. When I parked in the lot behind the building and made my way through security, I was quaking. While I trusted Grimaldi, and knew she liked Rafe and wouldn’t do anything to trip him up, I had no such convictions about Rick Goins. As soon as Grimaldi figured out that Rafe worked for the TBI, she backed off him, and treated him like a fellow law enforcement officer. Rafe’s eleven years of service to the TBI seemed to make no difference to Goins.

  And I guess maybe that wasn’t so surprising. I mean, weren’t we contemplating the very same thing? That some trusted servant of the TBI wasn’t what he appeared to be, and had in fact killed Doug Brennan to cover up something else he was doing?

  If we were considering it, why wouldn’t Goins?

  Of course, we weren’t thinking that Rafe had anything to do with it. We were looking for someone else. But Goins didn’t know Rafe, so maybe it made sense that he’d suspect my husband. Even if, to me and everyone else who knew Rafe, that made no sense whatsoever.

  I was deposited in an interview room, the kind with a two-way mirror where someone could see in but you can’t see out, and left to cool my heels. It might even have been the same interview room I’d been in once before. Unless
they all looked the same, and they probably did.

  Time passed. It was extremely annoying, especially taken into account that Goins had been so pushy about me coming into downtown right away. He’d said he’d see me ‘shortly,’ yet here I was, and where was he?

  “You understand that I have a six-week-old baby at home?” I asked him when he finally wandered in after at least thirty minutes. “I don’t have time to sit here and twiddle my thumbs.”

  He dropped a stack of folders on the table. “I thought your husband was babysitting.”

  There was a slight sneer in his voice on the word ‘husband,’ and another on ‘babysitting.’ As if real men didn’t spend any time with their children.

  “He is,” I said, “but unlike me, my husband doesn’t produce milk. So when the baby gets hungry, he can’t lift up his shirt and feed her. Only I can do that. And I was only supposed to be gone an hour and a half at the most. Now it’s way past that.”

  And it was supposed to snow this afternoon. Like most Southerners, just the thought of snow puts me into a panic. Traffic gets snarled and impossible to navigate, and it could take hours to get across the bridge and home.

  “Then let’s get to it,” Goins said and opened the top folder. He glanced at what was inside and then at me. “Tell me about your husband.”

  “Seriously?” Did he have all day? “He’s from Sweetwater. Small town a little over an hour south of here. We went to high school together. After he graduated, he went to prison. I was still—”

  “Prison,” Goins interrupted. “For what?”

  “Don’t you have that in the folder? It’s common knowledge.”

  He didn’t answer, and I added, “Assault and battery. Or something like that. I don’t remember the exact wording. He had a fight with someone and put the guy in the hospital.”

  Goins smirked and made a note.

  I continued, since this was all stuff he probably knew anyway. “He was sentenced to five years and served two. While he was in prison, the TBI recruited him and got him released early, and then they put him into undercover work. He spent ten years working his way into Hector Gonzales’s South American theft gang, and finally broke it up last year. In February, the TBI offered him a job training new recruits. He did that for the rest of last year, until they eliminated the program on the first of this year and let him go.”

  Goins nodded. “Let’s go back to the assault and battery for a moment.”

  Lord. “If you’re trying to make the point that he’s capable of hurting someone, let’s just take that as said. He is. But he doesn’t have a habit of hurting people who don’t deserve it.”

  “Maybe he thought Douglas Brennan deserved it,” Goins said mildly.

  I ground my molars together for a second before I opened my mouth again. “When I said they deserved it, I meant that they actually deserved it. The man my husband fought with when he was eighteen, was forty-five and had hurt Rafe’s mother. In any county but the one where we grew up, he would have gotten off with time served.”

  “That’s not in the file,” Goins said.

  “I’m aware of that.”

  He tilted his head. “So how do you know?”

  “How do you think I know? He told me!”

  “And how do you know he told the truth?”

  “How do I…?” I bit it back. Goins obviously wasn’t going to take Rafe’s word for anything, and in his position I guess maybe I shouldn’t expect him to. But it was frustrating, since it all seemed to add to the picture he had of Rafe. The very misshapen picture. “Does your file happen to include the fact that that same man—whose name was Billy Scruggs—ended up killing LaDonna Collier a year and a half ago?”

  “No,” Goins said.

  “Well, the sheriff said he’d make sure the file reflected that.”

  Goins smirked. “I guess he must have forgotten.” The implication was that the sheriff had never said that, and if he had said it, he’d never intended to do it.

  I fought back the desire to scream, and channeled my mother’s upbringing and a year at finishing school in Charleston to calm down. It took all of that. “What exactly am I doing here, Detective? Because this is a waste of my time. My husband had nothing to do with Doug Brennan’s murder. Brennan didn’t even give him the news that his position was eliminated. Ben McLaughlin did. Brennan’s the one who tried to get him reinstated.”

  “And when he couldn’t,” Goins said, “maybe your husband killed him.”

  “He’d have to know that Brennan couldn’t, for that to make sense. And he didn’t. By the time he got to the TBI on Friday, Brennan was already dead.”

  “Maybe Brennan told him on Thursday,” Goins said.

  I shook my head. “He didn’t. I heard the conversation.”

  Goins smirked. “So you say.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I was there. I know what Brennan said. And all it was, was that he wanted Rafe to stop by and talk to him when we came back to town on Friday. By then, someone else had killed Brennan. While Rafe was in Sweetwater.”

  Goins didn’t say anything to that, and I picked up the thread from where I’d been earlier. “He had nothing to do with James Foster’s death, either. It might have been a suicide, anyway. It sounded like a suicide. Maybe Foster killed Brennan and then himself. Did you know that Foster was living well above his means? New car. New house. The most expensive house in the neighborhood. One he paid for with cash!”

  Goins didn’t write it down, of course. He didn’t even acknowledge it. “Let’s get back to your husband.”

  “Let’s not,” I said, “OK? We can say we did, if it makes you happy. But my husband was in Sweetwater when Doug Brennan died. I can attest to it. So can my mother. So can Detective Grimaldi. He didn’t get Malcolm to help him compromise Brennan’s brake cables. If you look into it, I’m sure Malcolm has an alibi. He was at work on Thursday, after all. But Rafe had no reason to want Brennan dead. Killing Brennan wasn’t going to get him his job back. He has another job offer, anyway. And he’s been working for the TBI for eleven years. He’s a law-abiding citizen.” Mostly. “Whatever he did at eighteen doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “It all matters,” Goins said.

  “You know, it really doesn’t. He’s spent the past eleven years sweating and bleeding and risking his life for the TBI. That’s what matters.” That’s what made him who he was today. Not some crazy, chivalrous, misguided defense of his mother almost fourteen years ago.

  Goins looked pleased. “Exactly.”

  He agreed with me? “Exactly, what?”

  “That’s it,” Goins said. “He’s sweated and bled and risked his life for the TBI for eleven years. And when the TBI fired him, he couldn’t handle it. So he snapped and killed Brennan.”

  I threw my hands up. “He didn’t snap, for God’s sake. He came home on Tuesday night and told me it had happened. Then he went to the TBI on Wednesday and handed in his badge and gun. Then we went to Sweetwater on Thursday morning. Brennan didn’t die until Thursday night. Almost three days after McLaughlin told Rafe he was no longer employed by the TBI. Nobody snapped.”

  Not even whoever had killed Brennan. Snapping means you pick up a blunt object and whale away, spur of the moment. Cutting someone’s brake cables and waiting for them to drive away at the end of the day isn’t snapping. It’s cold and calculated.

  But I could see that nothing I was saying had any effect on Goins. He had made up his mind, and was in the phase where he was trying to prove his hypothesis, no matter how misguided.

  “Is there anything else?” I asked. “Because if there isn’t, I’d like to get back to my daughter and my husband. Before the snow starts, and before the baby starves to death.”

  There was no chance of that, of course. Rafe had told me they had plenty of milk. But I was annoyed.

  “One more thing,” Goins said. “Your husband admitted to being at James Foster’s house yesterday.”

  “I doubt that very much,” I said. “We w
ere outside Foster’s house—the operative word there being ‘outside’—for a span of maybe ten seconds. Neither of us left the car. Neither of us went into the house, or even up to the door. We didn’t step foot on the property. And you have no proof we did.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  I told him what we’d been doing there. “Someone killed Brennan and stabbed Malcolm. And it wasn’t Rafe. So we came up with a list of suspects and drove around to take a look at them.”

  “Leave the investigating to the professionals,” Goins said.

  I snarled at him. Actually snarled. Mother would have been aghast.

  Or maybe not. Under the circumstances, maybe even my mother would have snarled. “My husband is a professional, Detective.”

  Goins looked like he’d bitten into something sour. “You may leave, Mrs. Collier. I can see I won’t get anything helpful from you.”

  “You wouldn’t know anything helpful if it bit you,” I said and got up from the table. “Don’t bother to see me out.” Not that he’d made a move in that direction. “I’ve been here before. I know the way.”

  I sailed toward the door. And through it. And down the hall and across the lobby and out the door to the parking lot. Where I located Goins’s Toyota and relieved my feelings by kicking the back tire violently several times. The only thing that resulted was that I bruised my toes, but it felt good in the moment. Then I limped over to where I’d parked the Volvo, got in, drove out of the parking lot, across the bridge, and home.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Wendell stopped by on his way home from work. We live in the opposite direction of the one he’d take home, so it wasn’t quite as casual as it sounds.