Adverse Possession Read online

  It took at least a minute before I had calmed myself down enough that I was able to make it down the stairs, clinging to the banister the whole way.

  At the bottom of the stairs, I clicked the light switch. Bright light seared my eyeballs for a moment. My pupils protested, but then adjusted. The body didn’t twitch. She was either out cold, or dead.

  I had to force myself to creep over to her, to check whether she was still alive. And before I did it, I looked around for the gun, to make sure she wasn’t going to suddenly rise, like a phoenix from the ashes, and shoot me.

  The gun had fallen from her hand and landed several feet away. She would have to scramble to get to it, and to be honest, she didn’t look like she was in any condition to scramble. Just to be sure, though, I moved in the direction of the gun and nudged it a little farther away with my foot before I turned back to the body.

  She was lying on her back, with her neck at a very uncomfortable angle.

  Broken, my mind supplied, and I swallowed.

  It was just a month since I’d killed someone. He would have killed me—and my mother, and David—if I hadn’t, and he’d also killed a few other people and been well on his way to killing Rafe, so I couldn’t regret it too much, but it still bothered me, deep inside. I had taken someone’s life. I—Margaret Anne Martin’s perfect little girl, who had been brought up to be a gracious hostess, devoted wife, and elegant Southern Belle—had killed a man.

  And now I might have done it again.

  She wasn’t moving. Not so much as a finger twitched. And I couldn’t see her chest moving. It had been long enough that it wasn’t likely she was holding her breath to fake me out, either. Not without turning blue.

  I crept closer and knelt next to the body.

  She was dressed in black. Black sneakers, black jeans, black hooded sweatshirt. And under the hood...

  “Shit,” I said. “I mean... shoot. I mean...”

  It was Terry Dixon. She looked different now—more dead—but there was no mistaking her.

  She didn’t stir when I spoke. I reached out and gingerly put two fingers against her throat. And moved them around when I didn’t feel anything. I don’t know anything about where to find someone’s pulse, after all. This isn’t something I do every day.

  I had found Kylie’s pulse without a problem Saturday morning. So why couldn’t I do it now?

  I fumbled up the black sleeve of the sweatshirt instead, and stuffed my fingertips under the top of the rubber glove she was wearing.

  Still nothing.

  Downstairs, the front door slammed against the wall, and I froze. But only for a second. “Savannah!”

  “Rafe!”

  I scrambled to my feet, away from the corpse, and headed for the stairs. He was faster, taking the steps two or three at a time. I’d only reached the top of the stairs when he burst into the second floor hallway.

  I’m not sure he even took the time to look around, although I imagine he must have. It wouldn’t be like him not to make sure we were safe. But he took in the scene in a fraction of a second, and then he wrapped his arms around me and pulled me in. I could feel his body shake, and his voice, when he spoke into my hair, was rough. “Can’t leave you alone for a minute, can I?”

  “I couldn’t help it,” I protested, my voice muffled against the front of his shirt. “I was just minding my own business, being asleep. It wasn’t my fault that someone tried to break in.”

  He didn’t answer. He didn’t have time, because now there were more footsteps downstairs. His body stiffened for a second, and then relaxed again when he heard a voice call out. “Savannah!”

  This time it was Grimaldi’s voice.

  I lifted my head from Rafe’s chest. “Up here.”

  She took the stairs almost as fast as he had, but rather than grabbing me—not that I’d expected her to—she stopped at the top of the stairs and took in the scene a lot more slowly.

  She only gave the two of us a glance in passing. Just to make sure I wasn’t bleeding or anything, I guess. I’m sure she figured that if Rafe was just standing there, holding me, I was all right. If something had been wrong with me, he would have been hustling me down the stairs.

  So she brushed past and headed for the end of the hallway, where the body lay. We both watched as she crouched and put her fingers against its throat.

  “Dead?” Rafe asked softly.

  “I think so. I couldn’t find a pulse.”

  “What happened? Did he fall down the stairs?”

  “I pushed him,” I said, with a shudder. “I was going to hide upstairs, but then I decided I didn’t want to cower like a scared rabbit, so when the door opened, I pushed him. And he’s a she.”

  His brow arched. I nodded. “Terry Dixon. She works with Aislynn as Sara Beth’s. Mendoza thinks she killed Virgil.”

  “Why?”

  “She knows Stacy,” I said. “He was here, too. Or at least she wasn’t alone. There were two of them. But when she fell... when I pushed her, he ran. Or whoever was downstairs, ran.”

  “Damn.” He raised his voice. “D’you hear that?”

  Grimaldi shook her head. “She’s gone.”

  “So’s her buddy,” Rafe said. “Savannah says he ran when she fell.”

  Grimaldi straightened and came toward us. “Did you see him?”

  Rafe dropped his arms from around me, but kept a hand on the small of my back to steady me.

  I shook my head. “He—or she, whoever the other person was—stayed downstairs. I heard them come in, and heard them whisper. Then one of them came up the stairs, so I headed to the third floor. And when the door opened, I pushed her.”

  I shuddered, at the thought of the body tumbling backwards down the steep stairs, and Rafe’s hand moved in a soothing circle.

  “She had a gun,” Grimaldi remarked.

  I nodded. “It discharged when she fell. There’s a bullet buried in the wall up there. She screamed, but then she stopped when she hit the hallway floor.”

  “Her neck’s broken,” Grimaldi said. “I’m sure she was dead on impact. It could have gone a lot worse. If she had survived the fall, she might have become a paraplegic.”

  Rafe muttered something. I didn’t ask him what it was, since I could guess.

  “I didn’t mean to kill her,” I said. “Maybe I should have waited until she came into the room. Maybe I could have done something different. Hit her with a box, or something. I just didn’t want to hide, and wait for her to find me.”

  Rafe shook his head. “You didn’t do nothing wrong. You were defending yourself.”

  “I killed her.”

  “The fall killed her,” Grimaldi said. “And she had a gun. She probably planned to kill you.”

  She put a hand on my arm. For Grimaldi, that’s pretty much the equivalent of a warm hug. “Don’t worry. There isn’t a judge in the world who’d find you guilty of anything other than self-defense.”

  Maybe not. But that wasn’t my concern. “This is the second time I’ve killed someone. I’m not sure what that says about me.”

  “That you’re strong enough to do what’s necessary,” Rafe said. “She threatened you.”

  “She didn’t have time to threaten me. I pushed her as soon as she opened the door.”

  “She came into your house with a gun,” Grimaldi said. “In the middle of the night, when you could be expected to be sleeping. That’s a threat, whether she told you she was going to shoot you or not. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  She fumbled for her phone. “I better call for transport.” She went past us and down the stairs. A few seconds later, we could hear her in the downstairs hallway, identifying herself and explaining that she needed a van from the medical examiner’s office to come by and load up a body.

  I glanced down the hallway and shivered.

  “C’mon.” Rafe pulled me in the direction of the stairs. “Let’s go downstairs. We can’t do nothing for her, and I don’t wanna have to keep looking at
her.”

  I didn’t, either. So I let him lead me to the top of the stairs and steady me down.

  Grimaldi was standing in the foyer, nudging the pieces of broken glass on the floor with her toe and examining the jagged hole in the front door window. When we reached the bottom, she looked at us over her shoulder. “Somebody knew what he was doing. Or she.”

  Rafe nodded. “Have Mendoza run some background on the two of’em. And check for juvie records. This whole letter writing thing sounds like a high school prank to me.”

  “It wasn’t a prank,” I said, and he nodded.

  “I know, darlin’. Somebody coming into my house with a loaded gun had better not try to tell me he was just trying to be funny. But it’s the kind of thing high school kids do to get attention.”

  It was. At least up until the point when people started dying and bullets started flying.

  Rafe turned to Grimaldi. “Did you send somebody after Stacy?”

  “Not yet. It isn’t my case, for one thing, and for another, I don’t have anyone to send. I don’t know why someone didn’t get here before the two of us. There should be cars in the area. Spicer and Truman are working tonight.”

  And Spicer and Truman always jump when Grimaldi calls.

  “I’ll go get Stacy,” Rafe said, and Grimaldi shook her head.

  “No, you won’t. It isn’t your case, either, and if I send you after him, I’d be afraid he wouldn’t make it to interrogation.”

  “I wasn’t gonna kill him. Just rough him up a little.”

  “No. The last thing we need is for him to cry police brutality and then get all the gay rights organizations involved.”

  “I ain’t stupid,” Rafe told her. “I wasn’t gonna hit him for no reason. I woulda made sure he resisted arrest first.”

  “And how were you going to make sure of that?” She rolled her eyes. “Don’t answer that. No. You may not go and pick up Mr. Kelleher. What you may do, is stay here with your wife until we’ve got him into a box in downtown. And then you may come and observe the interview.”

  “That won’t be as much fun.”

  “No,” Grimaldi agreed. “But we’ve already killed one suspect tonight. I don’t want us to kill another. At least one of them should survive to answer questions, don’t you think? And go to prison.”

  “I told you I wasn’t gonna kill him,” Rafe said. “Maybe put him in the hospital for a few days. He can go to prison later.”

  “No. I’m not going to tell you again. And if you don’t start listening, I’ll recant my invitation.”

  “Fine.” But he sounded like a petulant five-year-old who’s been told he can’t stay up to watch another episode of Scooby-Doo. “Just go get him. Before he goes in the wind and you lose him.”

  “He won’t,” Grimaldi said. “He thinks he’s got us all snowed. Besides, he’s got an alibi for Virgil Wright’s murder. There’s no way we can pin it on him.”

  “You can’t?”

  This was from me, of course. I’m sure Rafe knew better than to ask.

  Grimaldi shook her head. “He didn’t kill Mr. Wright. He was pouring drinks in front of multiple witnesses when the murder took place. And as far as we can tell, he didn’t pay Ms. Dixon to do it, either. That makes it not a murder for hire.”

  “Conspiracy to commit?” Rafe ventured.

  “Sure. But how do you prove it? She’s dead.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Rafe’s arm tightened around my shoulder, but it was Grimaldi who spoke. “Don’t be. You did what you had to do. And we’ll get him for something. Somehow.”

  There was a moment while no one said anything. Then Rafe told her, “Let me know when you get him in the box. I’ll come down and watch. And if you can’t get what you need from him, I’ll get it for you. I ain’t leaving the bastard free to come back here one more time.”

  “I don’t think he will,” Grimaldi said, “but we’ll get him and make sure of it.”

  She turned toward the door and the yard beyond as the van from the medical examiner’s office—right down the road from the TBI—pulled into the driveway.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  It ended up being the next morning before the police managed to corral Stacy Kelleher and drag him downtown for an interview. Rafe didn’t sleep for the rest of the night, of course. First we had to wait for the medical examiner to determine cause of death—not a difficult task in this situation—and then the morgue attendants had to take the body away. While all of that was going on, Rafe found a piece of cardboard and tape, and boarded up the broken window until we could get it fixed.

  Grimaldi had stuck around for all of this, and in the middle of it, a black-and-white squad car pulled into the driveway and to a stop behind the van from the morgue.

  As an aside, we had quite the array of vehicles in our driveway at that point. My Volvo, Rafe’s Harley, and Grimaldi’s sedan, followed by the M.E.’s SUV, the morgue van, and now Spicer and Truman’s patrol car.

  It was a good thing it was the middle of the night, or we’d have had all the neighbors hanging over the wall to see what was going on.

  Spicer parked the car and they both got out. Grimaldi and I were standing on the porch, while Rafe was doing his thing with the cardboard and tape, and the M.E. and morgue attendants were upstairs dealing with the body.

  “What the hell happened to you two?” Grimaldi wanted to know. “We had a situation here, and I counted on you for support. Where the hell were you?”

  Truman hung his head and looked ashamed. He’s in his early twenties, with a tendency to blush if you look at him too hard, and he was clearly bothered by being chastised. Spicer, meanwhile—in his forties, and with twenty additional years on the job—was made of sterner stuff. “Sorry, Detective. We had our own situation.”

  Grimaldi wrinkled her nose. “You reek.”

  They did. And while it wasn’t a very nice thing to say, in this case it was true.

  Truman brushed futilely at his uniform—as if he could brush away the smell of smoke—while Spicer shrugged. “You told us to keep an eye on the house where Mrs. Collier’s friends live. So when we saw the flames, we didn’t wanna leave until we knew everyone was OK.”

  My breath caught. “Aislynn and Kylie’s house caught fire?”

  Spicer nodded, while Truman continued to brush at himself. “It wasn’t bad. The fire department’s just a couple blocks away. They were there in a minute. And it turned out to be a bucket of rags someone had left on the back porch. There’s a bit of water damage at the back of the house, but nothing too bad. And the house was empty, so nobody was hurt.”

  “Wow.”

  And then what he’d said registered, and I added, “A bucket of rags?”

  He nodded. “Someone musta left it on the porch.”

  “Aislynn and Kylie drove to Bowling Green this afternoon,” I said. “I checked that the back door was locked before they left. There was no bucket of rags anywhere in sight then.”

  Spicer shook his head. “The fire chief said it looked like a prank. Some kids put a bucket of oily rags on the porch and lit it on fire.”

  Sure. A prank. Like the anonymous letters saying, I’M WATCHING YOU.

  “Three guesses who the prankster was,” I told Grimaldi.

  She shook her head. “No deal. They must have meant it as a distraction. They probably figured we had the house under some sort of surveillance, and they wanted to keep us busy while they came over here.”

  “Everything all right here?” Spicer wanted to know.

  I nodded. “One of the burglars is inside with the M.E. The other got away.”

  I remembered the car I had seen drive slowly up the street just before I’d noticed the shadows, and added, “If you want something to do, you can check up the street a block or two for a car with a lot of bumper stickers about food and farms and bicycles.”

  Spicer and Truman exchanged glance, and then glanced at Grimaldi.

  “What makes yo
u think the car is still here?” she asked me. “Wouldn’t Stacy have left in it?

  “Not if he wanted us to think that Terry was acting alone. He probably doesn’t realize that I was awake when they arrived, and that I know there were two of them. If it were me, I would have taken off down the street and left the car. It would be hard to explain how she got here otherwise.”

  Grimaldi nodded.

  “Of course, they might have come in Stacy’s car. A black Jeep Wrangler. But if they did, he probably left in it, too.” And if he had any sense at all, he’d have talked Terry into using her car. He wouldn’t have wanted his Jeep anywhere near the scene of the crime, in case anyone noticed it.

  “Take a look,” Grimaldi told Spicer and Truman. “Let me know what you find.”

  They returned to their squad car, and reversed out of the driveway since they couldn’t make it past all the vehicles parked there. They kept their windows down even as the air conditioning was blasting icy air. Guess they didn’t enjoy the smell of themselves, either.

  “You all right?” Grimaldi asked me.

  I glanced at her. “Sure. You asked me that earlier, didn’t you?”

  “I meant about the fire.”

  “Oh.” I hadn’t really thought about it, other than to feel a bit wobbly when I first heard. “Of course. Aislynn and Kylie weren’t there. They don’t have any pets. And it’s just a house. I’m sorry it got damaged, but they’re both all right. I guess I’ll have to call and tell them.”

  “Wait until morning,” Grimaldi advised. “There’s no need to wake them up in the middle of the night to tell them that they’ll have to get a disaster cleanup company in to make their house livable again.”

  She had a point.

  “Stacy loves that house,” I said. “I’m surprised he was willing to risk damaging it.”

  “At this point, he’s probably more worried about saving his skin,” Grimaldi opined. “And you’ll notice the house wasn’t damaged. Not other than some water.”

  But water could make the wood wet, which would then attract termites and carpenter ants, which could do a lot of damage.