Survival Clause: A Savannah Martin Novel (Savannah Martin Mysteries Book 20) Page 22

  “You went to her apartment?”

  “Figured I might as well get the full picture of what we’re dealing with,” Rafe said coolly.

  “And did you?”

  He shifted his weight, looking—as he rarely does—uncomfortable. “She had a lot of pictures. A lot more than she posted online. Not of you or Carrie, but of me. She had the intake form for the vet clinic for Pearl, when we brought her there, with my signature on it...”

  “Your signature? Why?” What could she have done with that? It wasn’t like she could pretend to be him.

  “I think she just wanted it,” Rafe said. “She had a used napkin from Beulah’s—mine, I guess—in a plastic baggie, and a T-shirt—I have no idea where she got that—folded on top of her bureau. Tammy said it was mine. I couldn’t tell.” He shrugged.

  “That’s really creepy.” I glanced around, at the bureau with his clean clothes and the hamper with the dirty ones. “You don’t think she got into the house, do you?”

  “I can’t imagine how,” Rafe said. “And I think Pearl woulda torn her limb from limb if she’d tried.”

  True. “I guess it doesn’t matter, now that she’s been arrested. Grimaldi told me she’s going to make sure she won’t get out on bail.”

  “Believe me,” Rafe answered, “there ain’t no chance of that.”

  Good to know. I shifted Carrie away from me and held her out. “Here. She’s full of milk and all yours. Make sure she burps.”

  He grabbed her while I buttoned myself back up, put her against his shoulder, and patted her back. Cheek against her small head of curly hair, he closed his eyes. And didn’t open them again, even when our small daughter let loose with a belch that wouldn’t have sounded out of place coming from him. Although his lips did curve.

  Eighteen

  By the time Grimaldi came and picked me up the next morning, he was long gone. I had no idea what he and Bob were planning to do about Agent Yung—whether they were bringing her to Daffodil Hill Farm with them, or letting her cool her heels at the sheriff’s office without telling her what they were up to—and I had refrained from asking. I did not expect Leslie Yung to be sitting in the passenger seat of Grimaldi’s official SUV when it pulled up in front of the mansion.

  I blinked at her. She ignored me in favor of my—Mother’s—house. “Wow.”

  I pulled open the back door of the SUV and went to work attaching the base for Carrie car seat. “Yep.”

  “This is where you live?”

  “This is it.” I made sure the base was secure before I snapped the rest of the seat, with Carrie inside, to it.

  “You’re not planning to carry that through the woods,” Grimaldi said. It was more statement than question, but I answered anyway.

  “No. I have a sling. I’ll strap her to my chest or my back when I get out of the car.”

  She nodded. Agent Yung, meanwhile, was still gaping at the house. “It looks like a museum.”

  I crawled into the back seat next to Carrie and answered, “It is, pretty much. Built by one of my ancestors between 1839 and 1841. We have stuff inside from almost as long ago.”

  She had the visor down on her side of the car, and I wasn’t sure whether it was to block the sun or so she could look at me in the makeup mirror. Maybe she’d been touching up her face. “Your husband lives here?”

  “Of course.” Where else would he live?

  “That must be interesting,” Leslie Yung said blandly.

  I decided to pretend I didn’t understand what she was getting at, since I found the implication insulting. “He grew up in a trailer on the other side of town, so I don’t imagine he ever thought he’d be living here. But a lot of things have happened since then. To both of us.”

  Grimaldi smirked, but didn’t say anything.

  “Speaking of that,” Agent Yung said. “I heard what happened yesterday. That must have been scary.”

  “Not as scary as certain other events we’ve been involved in. I’m sure, by now, you’ve familiarized yourself with my husband’s file.” I met her eyes in the mirror. “You probably know it better than I do.”

  A few of the events that had been among the scariest weren’t part of any file, of course. But she didn’t need to know about those.

  “I didn’t expect to see you this morning,” I added, when she didn’t answer immediately. “This little excursion falls outside your purview, doesn’t it?”

  “Outside the Classicist case, you mean? Your husband and Sheriff Satterfield informed me that Mr. Mullinax was likely to respond better to the two of them than to me.” She sniffed.

  “I feel your pain,” I said politely. “I wanted to come, too. They said no. Was my brother there, by any chance?”

  “The lawyer?” She nodded.

  “Typical. They took him and not me.”

  “If you’ll pardon me for saying so,” Agent Yung said, in a tone like she didn’t give a damn—darn—if I pardoned her or not, “he looked more professional than you do.”

  “He probably wasn’t planning to be hiking through the woods. And besides, there’s something to be said for showing up in jeans and sneakers and with a baby in tow, you know. Everybody relaxes and nobody suspects you of being a spy. You should try it sometime.”

  She sniffed. I did, too. Grimaldi grinned. “Children,” she intoned, “no arguing.”

  Yung gave her a fulminating glare. I smirked. “Yes, ma’am.”

  When we got to the rear of Daffodil Hill Farm, though, and Grimaldi pulled off to the side of the road into a little graveled patch, the sensibility of my attire became apparent quickly. I strapped the baby to my chest and set off in my jeans and sneakers. Yung, meanwhile, had to keep her wool from snagging on branches and her heels from sinking into the ground. It must have been annoying enough that after a few minutes, I took pity on her and decided to be nice. “You probably didn’t expect to be doing this today.”

  She gave me a glare. “You think?”

  “You don’t have to be here, you know. Or so I assume.” She didn’t say anything, and I added, “You could go back to the car and wait. It isn’t so hot yet that you’ll perish without the air conditioning running.”

  It was hot enough, though. Or must have been quite uncomfortable for her, anyway, even without the crazy heels. I was fairly content in my jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt—which I had had the foresight to wear because I thought there might be brambles, and because I knew I’d be responsible for keeping whatever it was off Carrie.

  She fell asleep in her sling covered with pictures of zoo animals, legs dangling and her cheek against my chest. As time passed, I felt a wet spot spread across the front of my shirt from her drool.

  By then, we had been walking—or cutting our way through the woods—for about forty minutes. We had yet to see any sight of civilization—of the buildings at Daffodil Hill—but we were far enough from the road that the sound of passing cars had faded.

  “Remind you of anything?” I asked Grimaldi.

  She gave me a sardonic look over her shoulder. Like me, she’d dressed for the occasion, in a pair of heavy-duty khakis and what looked like hiking boots. “I assume you mean that trek through the woods in South Nashville when we were looking for Hernandez’s victims.”

  I nodded. That was exactly what I meant. There had been more of us then: Wendell Craig and the three young men from the TBI had been with us, along with Rafe. And we’d been near the airport, so every minute or two we’d had to deal with the sound of a jumbo jet coming in for landing practically on top of our heads. But otherwise it had been a similar experience. Hotter, though. It had been June, and the heat and humidity hadn’t made the task any easier.

  And this time, as far as we knew, we were looking for a single set of remains. Back then we’d been looking for several. I’m not sure whether that made it easier or the opposite.

  “Hernandez?” Yung glanced between us. I left it to Grimaldi to explain.

  “Eugenio Hernandez. One of Hector
Gonzales’s associates. He was in prison when Agent Collier took down Gonzales’s SATG. By the time Hernandez heard what had happened, and got out, it was June. He grabbed Collier off the street, spent the best part of a day torturing him, and then left. Agent Collier freed himself and made it home.”

  Yung nodded. “I read about that.”

  Neither of their voices gave any indication that they understood what that had been like, and the strength of will it had taken. Rafe still had scars all over his chest and stomach from Hernandez amusing himself, not to mention the one on his arm, where Hernandez had pinned him to the table with a knife through the forearm. But since that wasn’t what this conversation was about, I swallowed both the nausea that the memory produced, and the need to point out how heroic my husband had been, and let Grimaldi carry on.

  “Collier suspected that Hernandez was responsible for the disappearance of several young women. We went looking for them.”

  “And did you find them?” Yung wanted to know. She swatted irritably at a strand of something sticky that tried to attach itself to her pants.

  Grimaldi nodded. “In the woods behind the house he lived in at the time. It was a situation much like this one. But they’d been gone less time. Five years, instead of twenty-five.”

  “Bones don’t disappear,” Yung said.

  Grimaldi ignored this sage comment. “Have you ever done this before?”

  “Looked for remains?” Yung didn’t look up. “Yes. It’s easier when it’s bones.”

  No question. “Harder to see, though.” I kicked at a dry, brittle stick that could have been a bone or just something that had fallen off a tree. (It was a twig, or I wouldn’t have kicked it.) “Jurgensson’s remains could be five feet away from us, and we’d walk right by them.”

  “Maybe we should spread out,” Yung said, with no enthusiasm whatsoever.

  Grimaldi shook her head. “No point. I’m not expecting to find anything. This is just something to do because I can’t sit still.”

  Yung slanted her a look. “You’re not expecting to find anything because there’s nothing to find? Because you don’t think the remains are here? Or—”

  “I don’t expect to find anything because the remains could be five feet away from us and we’d walk right by them,” Grimaldi said. “This isn’t the way to do a proper search. We’d need more people, and dogs. And permission. As it is, we’re just three women taking a walk in the woods.”

  “On private property.”

  Grimaldi shrugged. “I’m not too worried about that. If he comes and warns us off, it’s just confirmation that he has something to hide.”

  “And he won’t be coming anyway,” I added, swatting at a clump of leaves. “Rafe and Bob are keeping him busy.”

  “And your brother.”

  Right. And my brother. Because you never know when you might need a lawyer.

  “How far from here to the house?” Agent Yung wanted to know.

  Grimaldi glanced at me. I shrugged. “I’ve never been here before. I have no idea.”

  Yung looked from one to the other of us. “Did neither one of you think to consult a map?”

  “It’s not like we’re walking the Appalachian Trail,” Grimaldi said. “We’re never more than twenty minutes from civilization.”

  “We’ve walked a lot longer than that and seen nothing!”

  “That’s because we’re walking parallel to the road,” Grimaldi said. “If he’s going to dump a body on his property, and he didn’t want to bury it in the pigsty or under the rose garden, chances are he’d put it as far from the house, and as far from the road, as he could. At the same time.”

  I nodded. That made sense to me. “Less chance someone would stumble over it accidentally.”

  “Less chance anyone would find it at all if he’d buried it in the rose garden,” Leslie Yung grumbled.

  “And he might have done that. That’s what Sheriff Satterfield and Agent Collier are trying to ascertain. Meanwhile, we’re here looking at the terrain to see where someone might have left a body.”

  We walked another few feet in silence.

  “Is he a big man?” Yung wanted to know. “Mullinax?”

  I glanced at Grimaldi. “He isn’t small. Not as big as Rafe, but no shrimp. And would have been in better shape at fifty-some than he is now, in his mid-seventies.”

  “What about the victim? Jurgensson?”

  It had never occurred to me to wonder, so I waited to see whether Grimaldi knew. As I might have expected, she did. “Per his most recent driver’s license, thirty years ago, he was five feet, ten inches tall, and weighed a hundred and ninety pounds.”

  So not super-sized, but as I’d said about Mullinax, no shrimp, either. Hefty enough that it might have taken two people to get him out here. It’s one thing to carry a woman twenty yards, from a truck to a dumpster, and quite another to haul almost two hundred pounds on a twenty minute hike into the woods, over downed tree trunks and rough terrain. The weather might have been bad too, for all we knew. It was too long ago for anyone to remember, most likely, especially since we didn’t know exactly when he’d disappeared.

  “Maybe he had help,” I said, pushing aside a branch and holding it until Yung, behind me, could get a grip. “Maybe Noah Trent helped.”

  “The victim?”

  “The kid Jurgensson supposedly molested,” Grimaldi confirmed. “Mullinax’s nephew. His sister’s son. No way to ask him. He’s dead, too.”

  We walked forward in silence. Until my phone rang and the Hallelujah Chorus rang through the trees. Grimaldi snorted, as she usually does when she hears my phone go off with this particular ring tone. Yung, who wasn’t in on the joke, just looked politely inquisitive.

  “Hi,” I told Rafe.

  “Darlin’. Where are you?”

  “Walking through the woods, somewhere between Mullinax’s place and the road.”

  “Nothing yet?” His tone told me clearly what he expected the answer to be.

  “If we’d found remains,” I told him, “I would have called you.”

  “Right. Well, I’m calling to let you know we’ve been and gone. We’re in the car on our way back to Sweetwater.”

  “Already? Wasn’t he there?”

  “Sure he was. We talked to him for fifteen minutes and left. You didn’t think it was gonna take all day, did you?”

  Well, no. I guess we’d been out here longer than I thought. On the one hand, it felt like we’d been stomping through the trees forever. On the other, it didn’t seem as if he’d had enough time to properly interrogate Mullinax.

  “Did he say anything you didn’t already know?”

  “No,” Rafe said. “But then I didn’t expect him to come out and confess.”

  “Do you think he might have done it?”

  “Killed Jurgensson? I wouldn’t rule it out.”

  So that was something, anyway. Grimaldi met my eyes across the phone—we were standing in a huddle around it, with the speaker on—and I knew she felt vindicated. If Rafe also thought Mullinax might have killed Jurgensson, at least Grimaldi wasn’t imagining things.

  “What about the women?” Yung asked.

  Rafe hesitated a second, as if he hadn’t expected to hear her voice. “That you, Yung?”

  He went on without waiting for an answer. “Ain’t nothing to suggest he’s any kind of a serial killer. Don’t drive a truck, has what looks like a normal life with a wife, a couple kids, and grandkids.”

  “But?”

  He chuckled. “Can’t put nothing past you, can I, darlin’? He does own an RV. Somebody’s out here working on the engine right now.”

  An RV? “Like a Winnebago? A motor home? Did anyone see a Winnebago at the truck stop the other day?”

  “Nobody mentioned one,” Rafe said, “but they do stop at truck stops. Some stops even have designated overnight parking for RVs. Somebody in an RV’d look less outta place than someone in a regular car.”

  Interesting. “So we mig
ht not be looking for a trucker at all. We could be looking for a family man with an RV.”

  “As long as the family wasn’t with him,” Rafe said. “Most wives ain’t gonna be OK with their husband bringing prostitutes home and strangling them.”

  “Maybe the husband brings the prostitute home and the wife strangles her.”

  He chuckled. “You wouldn’t say that if you’d seen Mrs. Mullinax. She looks like your mama, only about ten years older.”

  Yes, I had a hard time imagining Mother strangling anybody, too. And if Mrs. Mullinax was seventy, give or take, the chances that she could actually squeeze the life out of a woman half her age were probably slim to begin with.

  “But it could be Mullinax,” I said. “On his own.”

  “Might could,” Rafe agreed.

  “Are you going to get a search warrant for the RV? To see if there are any traces of anything inside?”

  “Bob’s gonna work on that. Anything on your end?”

  “We’re standing in the middle of the woods,” I said, “with nothing around us but trees. I’m surprised we have cell service. And it’s really hard to tell the difference between a dry twig and an old bone.”

  “Tell me about it.” I’m sure he, too, remembered that outing through the brush, looking for Hernandez’s victims. “We’ve headed out, so from now on, there’s nothing to keep him here. He was talking to the mechanic when we left, but if he gets the idea you’re back there, he might decide to come root you out.”

  I looked around, at the wilderness we were standing in. It was hard to believe we were only a quarter mile or so from the road and the houses. “Does he have anything that’ll drive cross-country? Because there are no trails back here.”

  “He has an ATV,” Rafe said.

  “One of those little four-wheelers?” I met Grimaldi’s eyes over the phone. She grimaced.

  “That’s it,” Rafe said. “Man likes his toys.”

  He paused for a second before he added, “My advice? Get on outta there. The chances you were gonna find anything were slim anyway. It’s a big area, and what you’re looking for is tiny.”