Survival Clause: A Savannah Martin Novel (Savannah Martin Mysteries Book 20) Read online

  I scrambled out of the car as he slid, snakelike, over the back of the seat and oozed through the door and onto the grass. He took off after the others.

  I hesitated for a second before I ran around the car and started wrestling Carrie, protesting at the rough handling, out of the seat.

  Then a gunshot rang through the air, blasting my eardrums, and my fingers fumbled.

  Rafe and Grimaldi both had guns. Jacob Drimmel had a gun. Hell—heck—Agent Yung had a gun. That bullet could have come from any of them, and could have hit any of them, but my first thought was that Rafe had been shot. Again. He wasn’t wearing body armor today, and a bullet now—unlike last month—could have killed him.

  There were sounds from the woods, as if a body—or more than one—was crashing through the trees.

  I ducked down behind the car, still trying to unfasten Carrie, but the straps and buckle were fighting me, probably because my fingers were shaking.

  Then Jacob Drimmel burst out of the trees and I saw him for the first time.

  There was absolutely nothing of Curtis in him, although Laura Lee might have had his height, if nothing else. He was a big guy, and looked something like an overgrown, aging Howdy Doody. The hair must have been flaming red at some point, and there were still streaks of faded ginger among the silver. His face was ruddy and broad, fair-skinned, and I imagined as a young man, he’d probably had freckles. At the moment, the color was florid, and he was baring his teeth in a snarl. He was wearing a pair of jeans and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and his forearms were still muscled in spite of his age.

  He ran for the truck, but when Rafe burst out of the trees on the left, Jacob changed direction and made for cover behind the truck instead. At the same time, Curtis came out of the woods a few strides behind Rafe. “Granddad!”

  I didn’t see Grimaldi, so I figured—if I were thinking clearly at all at that point, and I’m not sure I was—that she was taking care of Leslie Yung. Hopefully that meant that Yung was alive, and that Jacob hadn’t had time to kill her.

  He hesitated for a second at the sound of his grandson’s voice, just long enough to look in Curtis’s direction. That in turn caused him to notice me standing there on the far side of the SUV. When he moved toward me, I shoved the lock down and slammed the door, shutting Carrie inside. It took a couple of crucial seconds, but it put a locked door between him and her. Then I did the same with Grimaldi’s door, that she had left open.

  All this locking and shutting only took a couple of breaths, but it was long enough that Jacob was on me before I could get away. He reached out and twisted a hand in my hair, and yanked me backward.

  I shrieked—being pulled by the hair like that hurts—and then my back slammed into his chest and drove the rest of the breath out of my lungs. He wrapped a meaty arm around my torso, pinning my arms to my sides. With the other, he pressed the muzzle of the gun in his hand to my temple.

  “One more step and she gets it!”

  It was such a horrible movie-cliché, but I didn’t doubt for a second that he meant it. I froze, and everyone else did the same.

  “That’s my wife,” Rafe told him, and his voice had that same soft rumble a big cat’s growl has just before it jumps.

  Jacob chuckled, and I could hear the edge of excitement in it. It made all the little hairs on my body stand up. “Then you’d best be careful what you do with that weapon.”

  He met my eyes, and I knew what he was thinking. He was a good enough shot to put a bullet in the middle of Jacob’s forehead from where he stood—or anywhere else in Jacob’s body, too; at least the parts of it he could see above the car—but if he did, Jacob might squeeze the trigger of his own gun by reflex, and where he had it aimed, I’d be dead before I hit the ground.

  “Granddad,” Curtis tried, “you don’t have to do this.”

  Jacob looked at him. I could feel the slight movement when he turned his head. “What do you know about it, kid?”

  “I know you killed Mom,” Curtis said, and swallowed. I could see the movement of his throat. “I figured it out in the car on the way over here. You killed Mom, and you killed the woman last week, the dead one, at the truck stop.”

  “I’ve killed a lot more than that.” Jacob’s voice hit somewhere between irritated and proud. I guessed he wanted acknowledgement. “Eighteen of them.”

  He gave me a little shake. “Guess you’ll be number nineteen, since I didn’t get a chance to finish up the other one.”

  So Yung was alive. That was good, although at the moment I couldn’t find it in myself to care a whole lot. “Too bad you couldn’t make it an even twenty,” I managed, although my teeth were chattering.

  He chuckled. “Isn’t it?”

  “So you didn’t have anything to do with Kent Jurgensson,” Rafe said. His voice was conversational, but he still had the gun up and I knew that at the least sign of distraction on Jacob’s part he’d fire.

  “We found the bones in Mullinax’s woods this morning,” I added, to do what I could for the cause. I assumed the goal was to distract Jacob enough that Rafe could get a bead on him. “We thought maybe you’d helped Mullinax get him out there.”

  “Art did that on his own. Him and that nephew of his, I guess. Or maybe the kid’s father. The kid might not have had it in him.”

  He said it like it was a bad thing, and to him I guess maybe it was.

  By now there were sounds from the woods opposite the car, and after a few seconds Grimaldi appeared between the trees.

  “I called for an ambulance,” she told Rafe, calmly, as if she couldn’t see me standing here in Jacob’s embrace with the muzzle of a pistol pointed at my head. “She’s not walking out of here. And since you both ran off…”

  She turned to Jacob. “Mr. Drimmel. I’m Tamara Grimaldi. Police chief of Columbia. You killed my mother.”

  As I waited for what sounded like the obvious end to that sentence, “Prepare to die,” I wondered, slightly hysterically, whether I was losing my mind.

  Jacob didn’t seem to have heard anything funny in the statement. Maybe he wasn’t familiar with The Princess Bride. “Which one was she?” he asked, with every indication of interest.

  “Her name was Maria Grimaldi. Number three.”

  Jacob thought about it. “I think I remember her,” he said finally, as if pleased with himself. “Pretty woman, but she looked tired. Not a hooker.”

  “No, she wasn’t. She worked the night shift at a motel near the interstate. That’s why she was tired. She’d just come off a work shift when you picked her up.”

  Jacob nodded. I waited—we all waited—for him to say something else, but he didn’t. And to be honest, I’m not sure what he could have said. He wasn’t sorry, and nobody would believe him if he said he was. And I certainly didn’t want to hear any of the details of the crime. I’m sure Grimaldi didn’t, either.

  “I’ve been looking for you for a long time,” she told him. Still calm, as if they’d met in much more pleasant circumstances than across the roof of an SUV in the middle of the woods. “It’s thanks to you that I became a cop. I wanted to figure out what happened to my mother.”

  Jacob didn’t say anything to that, either, and Grimaldi continued, “I’d like to know about the numbers. The Roman numerals. That’s why we started looking at Kent Jurgensson and found the remains, you know. We thought it might have had something to do with the Latin classes at the school.”

  Jacob giggled, and all the little hairs on my body rose again. “I got those off those old books of my wife’s. In the living room at the house.”

  “The Encyclopaedia Brittanica.” I’d noticed them—a lot of volumes in leather bindings—but hadn’t gotten close enough to see the Roman numerals stamped on the spines. I knew them, though. We have a similar set at the mansion. There’s stuff at the mansion from generations back.

  “Always thought she was better than me, with her la-dee-dah ways. Lunching with Debbie Mullinax and volunteering at the hom
eless shelter, like there isn’t plenty of work to do at home.”

  He turned his head and spat, an eloquent opinion of his wife’s airs. I braced myself for Rafe to shoot him while his head was turned and his attention wasn’t on me, but it didn’t happen.

  “You killed Laura first,” Grimaldi said. “Your daughter. You want to tell me about that?”

  Jacob stared at her. “Why’d I wanna tell you anything?”

  “It might be the last chance you get to tell your story.”

  Jacob chuckled. “You gonna shoot me dead right here? I don’t think so. Not while I’ve got this.”

  He wiggled the gun at my temple. I gulped.

  “Then maybe you owe it to your grandson to let him know the truth,” Grimaldi said. “He’s been without his mother a long time. Don’t you think you ought to tell him how it happened?”

  Jacob glanced at Curtis, standing still and pale on the other side of the car. “You wanna know what happened to your whore of a mother, son?”

  He didn’t give Curtis a chance to answer, and it was just as well. “Your good-for-nothing father had gotten himself arrested, finally. I told her from the start that he was no good, but no, she had something to prove, so she married him. And look where it got her. Alone with two kids, one barely out of diapers and the other one just a baby. I figured she’d come crawling back then, but no. She took a job serving food at the truck stop. I had to run out that night—had a broken-down truck an hour and a half north, in Kentucky—and I stopped in to see her on my way past. Got there just in time to see her crawl into the cab of some trucker looking for a lot lizard while his wife was at home…”

  The injustice of that was rather breathtaking, considering what he’d been doing while his wife was at home, but it didn’t seem like a good idea to mention it.

  “Too proud to take money from her parents,” Jacob said bitterly, “but not too proud to sell her body for twenty bucks at a truck stop.”

  Curtis had, if anything, turned even paler, but he didn’t say a word, just stared at his grandfather, his eyes like black holes.

  “So you waited for her to come out,” Grimaldi prompted.

  Jacob gave a little shudder. I could feel it in the arm that held mine pinned, and felt the pistol shiver against my skin. “She didn’t expect to see me. Gave me lip, the little bitch. Stood there smelling of this man, telling me it was none of my business what she did. That I gave up the right to tell her what to do when she married Frankie. So I slapped her.”

  He said it like it was something that happened every day, like it wasn’t momentous. And maybe it wasn’t. From some of what Curtis had said, it might have happened all the time.

  “She fell and knocked herself out,” Jacob said. “Hit her head against the side of the truck and fell. I couldn’t leave her there, so I picked her up and tossed her in the truck and took her with me. She woke up halfway to Nashville, and tried to get out. I was afraid she was gonna hurt herself, so I tied her hands. And before I got to the broken-down rig, I gagged her and put her in the back. Couldn’t have the trucker see her.”

  No, he definitely couldn’t. The unknown trucker might have thought it was a little strange that Jacob had his daughter bound and gagged in the car.

  “She was in there kicking her feet, trying to get attention. So when I had the rig moving again, I opened the truck and I tried to get her to stop. But she wouldn’t, not even when I hit her again. So I put my hands around her throat and squeezed…”

  His voice trailed off, and it had an almost dreamy quality to it. I fought back a shiver. Nobody else said anything, for a moment. Curtis looked ready to drop. Rafe still had his gun up, pointed at Jacob’s head, his eyes black and hard. If the story had affected him, it didn’t show. I wasn’t sure he’d even been listening. The only thing he was focused on, was the right moment to pull the trigger.

  “So you lifted her out of the car and left her there,” Grimaldi said, and Jacob came back to himself.

  “I didn’t wanna take her back with me. You never know when someone might pull you over. And I knew we’d get her back eventually…”

  He trailed off again. No one else said anything, either. Like me, I guess they didn’t know what to say.

  I wasn’t aware of movement behind me until the very last second. I heard the sound of rushing footsteps, what sounded like a war cry, and the next moment Jacob smacked face first into the side of the SUV. I heard a crunch. The gun fell from his hand and bounced off my shoulder on its way to the ground. Jacob slid to the grass in a boneless jumble, and was handcuffed by Yung—Yung?—almost before he’d come to a stop.

  It was over.

  Epilogue

  The elegant FBI agent from this morning was a thing of the past. Her perfect sheet of black hair was a straggling mess past her shoulders, decorated with leaves and twigs. The sleeve of the elegant suit was ripped half off, her makeup was smeared, and she had the beginnings of a black eye and a streak of blood at the corner of her mouth, and her bottom lip looked like she’d either bit it or been punched in the face. I figured it could be either.

  But her eyes were flinty and she didn’t hesitate or wince when she flipped Jacob over on his back and shoved him up against the tire of the SUV. But where I would have expected her to go right into the Miranda warning, she glanced over at Grimaldi. “You want to do the honors?”

  I expected Grimaldi to say yes, she did. She’d told me as much: that Leslie Yung was welcome to join the team, but Grimaldi wanted the prerogative of slapping the handcuffs on her mother’s killer herself. I guess maybe Yung’s experiences made Grimaldi feel differently. She shook her head. “We got him. That’s good enough.”

  Yung nodded. “You’re under the arrest for the murders of Laura Lee Matlock and Ramona Mitchell,” she informed Jacob, “with more charges to follow. You have the right to remain silent…”

  By that point, Rafe had holstered his weapon and was holding me in an embrace so tight it was hard to breathe. I didn’t mind, though. That had been a little too close for comfort. “I need to stop doing this,” I murmured into his chest.

  He buried his face in my hair and breathed in. “That’d be good. Keep me from losing my mind so often.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t mention it. Nothing I haven’t done to you before.”

  True, that.

  He let me go with a pat, and went to let Carrie out of the SUV. I took the opportunity to survey the scene.

  On the other side of the car, Grimaldi was dealing with Curtis. The kid was obviously distraught—who wouldn’t be?—and he kept repeating, “I gotta see my gramma. I need to go see my gramma.”

  “We’ll go see her together,” Grimaldi told him. “Just as soon as we’re done here. I’ll go with you, and we’ll explain it all to her.”

  Curtis glanced at her. “He killed your mom?”

  “A long time ago,” Grimaldi said. “Couple years after he killed your mom.”

  Curtis shot a look across the car. He couldn’t see his grandfather, who was still sitting down and still mostly out of it, but his voice rang with defiance. “I’m glad you caught him. I’m glad he’s going to prison. I hope he dies there.”

  I hoped he did, too. And at Jacob’s age, that was more likely than not. There was no need to spell that out, though.

  Yung left Jacob where he was, head and shoulders against the metal of Grimaldi’s SUV, and went to talk to them. She was limping, so she’d either hurt a leg or lost a heel at some point today. I still wanted to know what he’d done to get her into the truck with him, but since all’s well that ends well, I figured it could wait.

  “Here comes the cavalry,” Rafe said, as he dropped Carrie into my arms. His ears, sharper than mine, had picked up the sirens. It took another second before I heard them, and a minute or two after that before the ambulance roared into the clearing and came to a stop.

  Behind it, like an afterthought, came a blue SUV. I blinked at it. “Is that Dix?”
r />   It was Dix. My brother got out of the SUV, still in the fancy suit he wears to work—probably the same suit he’d worn to go with Rafe and Bob to Daffodil Hill Farm this morning.

  While the two paramedics scrambled down from their vehicle, and converged on Yung and Jacob Drimmel, checking pulses and doing triage, my brother stood there beside the SUV taking in the scene. After a few moments, he focused on Grimaldi, and I could hear the crackling from where I was standing. She could see it, too, because she fell back a step when he started toward her.

  “Uh-oh,” I said. The corner of Rafe’s mouth turned up. And then we both fell silent as my brother grabbed Grimaldi, shook her once, and kissed her. And kissed her. And kept kissing her.

  “About time,” Rafe said after a few seconds had passed.

  I nodded. Yes. It was.

  And then things got even better. Dix let Grimaldi go, and dropped down to one knee, right there in the middle of the crime scene. And while I couldn’t hear what he said, it was obvious to everyone what he was doing.

  I held my breath while I waited to see Grimaldi’s response. And while I couldn’t hear that, either, I saw her nod. And saw Dix surge to his feet and grab her, and plant another kiss on her.

  Rafe slung an arm around my shoulders. “Congratulations,” he told me, dropping a kiss on the top of my head. “You lost a friend and gained a sister.”

  “You, too.” After a second, I added, “I can’t wait to see how Mother responds to this one.”

  He smirked. “It’ll be nice to have someone else take some of the heat off me at the Thanksgiving table.”

  “Grimaldi might be used to lasagna for Thanksgiving. I wonder how Mother will handle that?”

  “With her usual finesse,” Rafe said, and gave me a nudge. “C’mon. Let’s be the first to welcome your brother’s fiancée to the family.”

  “Don’t mind if I do,” I answered, and stepped forward.

  About the Author

  New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Jenna Bennett (Jennie Bentley) is the author of more than 40 books, most of them in the mystery and suspense genres.