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

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

  He nodded, and dropped a quick kiss on my lips before turning to the door. “Let’s go.”

  They went. I followed them out to the foyer, where I watched Grimaldi’s official SUV roll down the driveway to the road before I locked and bolted the front door and headed back to the kitchen to clean up the mugs.

  It was late when he came back. I was up again with Carrie, for her middle-of-the-night feeding, when I saw the headlights move across the wall as the car turned into the driveway, and heard the crunch of tires on the gravel. A car door opened and—with a low-voiced comment—closed again, and then I heard footsteps on the porch and the key in the door.

  He gave me a quick wave from the doorway, and mimed that he was going into the bathroom to rinse off. I nodded, and watched him shut the door behind him. A few seconds later, the shower kicked on.

  He was in bed when I tiptoed across the hallway and into our room. (Mother might have been living in sin with the sheriff, but I hadn’t felt comfortable enough to move my husband and myself into the master bedroom yet. In my mind, that was still my parents’ room. So it was sitting empty at the end of the hall while Rafe and I slept in what had been my room as a girl, across the hall from Carrie’s nursery in Catherine’s old room.)

  He was lying on his back with his arms under his head when I appeared in the open door. He turned to look at me, and the corners of his mouth turned up, but he didn’t say anything. I floated across the floor and slipped under the comforter next to him. “You OK?”

  He turned and pulled me in. “Fine. You?”

  “Everything’s good here.” I tucked my cold toes between his feet. The air conditioning can be freezing in the middle of the night when you’re not wearing slippers. “Carrie’s back to sleep. And nothing else happened after you left.”

  He didn’t respond, just kept his nose buried in my hair, breathing deeply. Trying to get the scent of death out of his nostrils, maybe. I’ve smelled it, and it’s hard to get rid of. I was under no illusions as to why he’d needed another shower when he came home, just a couple of hours after the previous shower.

  His hair was still a little wet, and I ran a hand over it. It was like the slightly rough, slightly silky nap of a Persian rug against my palm. “Was the crime scene bad?”

  “I’ve seen worse,” Rafe said. And added, “So have you.”

  Perhaps. I’ve seen some things that keep me up at night if I think too hard about them. And I know for a fact Rafe has seen a lot worse than I have.

  “This wasn’t too bad,” he told me. “She was killed somewhere else and dumped there, so there was nothing to the crime scene other than the body. Not much blood, all of it dry. Death was from strangulation. She was naked, so whatever she’d been wearing when he picked her up, he took with him.”

  “Or dumped it somewhere else,” I suggested, while I marveled, with half of my mind, at what constituted pillow talk in our family.

  He nodded. “Or he dumped it elsewhere. But not there. Tammy’s crime scene crew checked inside the dumpster—glad I wasn’t assigned that job—and everywhere else we could think of, and there was nothing that looked like it was related. They have to take it all back to the lab, to check it for fingerprints and DNA, just in case the killer happened to toss out a Styrofoam cup or empty his ashtray at the same time he dumped the body—”

  Another job I wouldn’t want to take on. Not, in this case, because it would be unpleasant—although sorting through so much icky, smelly trash probably wouldn’t be fun, either—but because it would be tedious and would take forever and at the end, probably wouldn’t result in anything useful. But it had to be done, and I guess it was good that there were people out there willing to do it.

  “I’m glad it wasn’t too unpleasant,” I told my husband, who was starting to act drowsy. His eyes were at half mast and his breathing was getting deeper. “Go on and get some sleep. You’ll have to be up again in a few hours.”

  “Team briefing at nine.” He snuggled a little closer. “You sure you don’t wanna…?”

  “Positive,” I said. “I’d rather wait until you’re more awake.”

  “Tomorrow morning.”

  “No problem,” I said, and held him as he drifted off to sleep.

  He was up bright and early the next morning, and when I use the word up, I use it advisedly. I woke to him nuzzling the back of my neck and the area behind my left ear, while his hand was busy under my nightgown.

  “Careful,” I murmured as I turned to meet him. “It’s been a few hours since Carrie’s last meal—”

  He silenced me as soon as I’d turned around enough that he could reach my mouth with his own, and that, as the saying goes, was all she wrote. He sauntered off to the shower with a distinct jaunt to his step, and I burrowed back into the mattress and tried to get comfortable again. But then Carrie woke up, and by the time Rafe came out of the shower, I was wrapped in a robe and sitting in the rocking chair in the nursery feeding my daughter.

  He dropped a kiss on the top of her downy head, and a longer, more leisurely one on my mouth—he tasted minty fresh; I did not—before he told me, “I’m gonna go get the coffee started.”

  I glanced at the clock ticking away on the wall. “Didn’t you tell me you have a briefing at nine?”

  It was barely six-thirty now.

  “Team briefing,” Rafe corrected. “I gotta be there sooner.”

  “For the super secret, inner circle briefing that only you and Grimaldi and Bob Satterfield get to attend?”

  His lips curved. “Something like that. Mostly I need to find out if Ben McLaughlin has authorized me working on this, or whether somebody else is gonna come down and take over.”

  “He wouldn’t be that stupid.” I shifted Carrie from one arm to the other. “I only met him once, but he seemed like a reasonable guy. And it doesn’t make sense to send someone else when you’re already here.”

  Rafe gave a shrug. “Guess we’ll find out.”

  “Leave me some coffee,” I told him.

  He nodded. “What’ve you got going on today?”

  I made a face. “Another trip to the house on Fulton, to make sure everything’s done and ready so we can get the place back on the market.”

  A couple of months ago, my sister Darcy, my best friend Charlotte, and I had bought a fixer-upper together. Or rather, Darcy had put up the money while Charlotte and I had put in the sweat equity, and what expertise we had in home renovation.

  It wasn’t much, but after a rocky start—a dead body in what was intended to become the new master suite—we’d persevered until the house was finished. And at that point, not only had someone gone inside it and vandalized the place, but someone else had set off a bomb outside and done damage to the structure.

  Rafe and Grimaldi insisted it hadn’t been a bomb, and technically speaking they were right. It had been a cardboard box full of something called Tannerite, that blows up when you shoot at it. People use it for target practice, I’m told. Apparently it’s more exciting when the target explodes in a cloud of orange or blue smoke when you hit it.

  In this case, someone had put a box of Tannerite outside our front door and shot it, and if it hadn’t been a bomb, it had acted like one, blowing out part of the front wall and floor and roof. Our poor house had come away from the experience with a gaping hole in the middle of it.

  Those particular repairs were beyond Charlotte’s and my capabilities, so we had hired a construction company—at more cost to Darcy—to fix the damage for us. Meanwhile, Charlotte and I had spent our time on the interior of the house, fixing the cosmetic vandalism by replacing broken glass and smashed tile and repairing drywall and applying new paint.

  At this point, we were almost back to where we’d been before Rafe—and by extension I—got tangled up with the white supremacy group that had been responsible for some of the damage. We’d only been on the market a couple of da
ys the first time. Long enough to garner a little interest, but not long enough to get a purchase offer. At this point, we were in danger of missing out on the hot spring market. I wanted the house listed for sale ASAP.

  I wanted it off my hands, to be honest, before something else could happen to it. By now, I was almost ready to believe the house was cursed. We’d had nothing but trouble with it since we bought it, and even before that, the previous owner was besieged by bad luck. Up until and including the moment he wound up dead in our master bedroom conversion.

  “Good luck,” Rafe told me. I gave him a suspicious look, but he seemed to mean it sincerely, without any hint of sarcasm.

  “Thank you.” I think.

  “No problem.” He turned toward the door again. “I’ll make sure there’s plenty of coffee.”

  “Thank you.” I was going to need it.

  A few minutes later he called up the stairs that he was leaving, and then I heard the back door close, and a minute later, the sound of the police-issue Chevy making its way past the front steps and down the driveway. I got Carrie ready for the day and wandered downstairs, where the coffee was fresh and hot. And strong.

  By the time I made it to Columbia and Fulton Street, it was after nine, and Charlotte was already there. She had finally got rid of the minivan her ex-husband had used to abduct her and their two kids—another long story—and was driving a new-to-her Jeep Grand Cherokee with plenty of room in the back for the car seats.

  They were empty, though, because Mrs. Albertson was taking care of the children while Charlotte was busy renovating. It was for her sake, more than for my own, that I wanted to get the house on the market and sold as fast as I could. We had Rafe’s income, and we were living for free in Mother’s house. But I wanted to get Darcy her money back, and give Charlotte the opportunity to buy or rent a place of her own if she wanted one, or at least to pay her parents rent, so she’d feel more independent, and not like she was a failure living back in her childhood room.

  She opened the door to the Jeep with her phone in her hand; glossy brown hair bouncing around her excited face. “Your husband’s all over Facebook!”

  I winced. I know it was what I’d wanted last night. Another nail in the coffin of Rafe’s undercover career. But that still didn’t make me feel good. “No kidding.”

  “No,” Charlotte said, almost dancing toward me. “Look at all the hearts and heart-eye emojis!”

  She thrust the phone under my nose. I grabbed her wrist and pushed it a little farther away, so I could see the screen without going cross-eyed. The video was dark—it had been dark on Green Street last night—but… “Yep. That’s my husband.”

  And those were definitely little hearts and heart-eye emojis accompanying comments like, He can arrest me anytime! and I need to be stopped and frisked immediately!

  I rolled my eyes. “He stood there and pointed to the car and said, ‘That’s my wife and baby in there.’ I’m sure it’s part of the video.”

  Charlotte looked like she wanted to laugh, but she contented herself with a grin. “It is. I watched the whole thing, and it’s definitely in there.”

  “Then why are they talking like that?”

  “Because he’s hot?” Charlotte suggested.

  Of course he was. But since it had taken her as long as it had to admit it—because at first she could hardly believe I’d get involved with our hometown black sheep—I just sighed. “I hope they don’t drive down here and try to get themselves arrested. Rafe has more important things to do than dodge women.”

  “I’m sure he’s used to it,” Charlotte said and dropped the phone in her pocket. And of course that was true. He was used to it. This was just blowing up on a larger scale than either of us had seen before.

  But as long as they stayed where they were, and didn’t come to Columbia to get in his way, it’d probably be all right.

  I turned to the car and hauled Carrie and the baby seat out of the back. And turned toward the house. “So far, so good.”

  Charlotte nodded. “I just got here, so I haven’t gone inside. But the new roof and front door look all right.”

  They did. You could hardly tell that the roof had been patched at all. If you didn’t know that a chunk of house had been missing until recently, you might not notice anything wrong.

  “Wonder if there’s anyone in Columbia who doesn’t know what happened here?” I mused.

  “What?” Charlotte had started walking toward the house, and now she turned around to look at me.

  I shook my head. I already knew the answer: nobody. Everyone in town probably knew that our house had been blown up. “Nothing. Don’t worry about it.”

  She gave me a look, but didn’t pursue the subject. “Paul told me about the murder victim,” she said instead, as she headed across the grass toward the front door.

  Paul? “When did you talk to Detective Jarvis between last night and this morning?”

  Or had he spent the night?

  I didn’t think they’d taken the relationship to that level—I hadn’t been sure there was a relationship there at all—but maybe I was wrong.

  “He called,” Charlotte said, with a betraying blush in her cheeks. “He’s the one who told me about the video.”

  “And the body?”

  She nodded. “What’s going on?”

  “Well…” Until Grimaldi’s personal connection to case was public knowledge, I should probably stick to the basics. “I don’t know that I know a whole lot more than Paul Jarvis. Someone found the body of a woman at the truck stop up by the interstate, and the sheriff’s office got called in. Because there’s some indication that she’s the victim of a serial killer who’s been operating up and down I-65 for fifteen or twenty years, Rafe got called in. Now they’re talking about maybe having to call in the FBI.”

  Charlotte nodded, and looked sorry she’d asked. I put the baby carrier down on the concrete stoop (that not even a box full of Tannerite had been able to budge) and nudged her out of the way so I could insert the key in the lock of the brand new front door we’d had to install after the previous door had been blown to pieces.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I told her over my shoulder. “It has nothing to do with you. Or with us.”

  She nodded, but didn’t look convinced. I twisted the knob and pushed the door open. And stuck my head through the opening. “Well, hell.”

  Three

  “What?” Charlotte wanted to know, pushing against my shoulder. Her voice hit somewhere between frantic and resigned.

  She’s a few inches shorter than me, so I stepped aside to give her access to the doorway. She peered past me. “Oh, no.”

  “It’s no big deal,” I said, even though my heart had dropped when I’d first seen it. “Just a broken window.” And some glass on the floor. “We can replace it.”

  Charlotte gave me a look. I avoided her eyes. “Looks like a baseball.”

  It was in a corner of the living room, up against the wall. I continued brightly, “It’s not a brick or a rock. Breaking the window was probably not deliberate. And whoever did it doesn’t seem to have entered the house.”

  The broken window was still in place. No one seemed to have reached in, undone the lock, and pushed the sash up so they could crawl across the sill and inside.

  “Probably just kids,” I said.

  Charlotte looked unconvinced, and when she crossed the threshold, her shoulders hunched, like she was waiting for that proverbial other shoe to literally fall out of the ceiling onto her head.

  It didn’t. We took Carrie inside and locked the door behind us, and then we made a reconnaissance of the rest of house to see whether anything else had gone wrong since we’d been here yesterday.

  Nothing had. Everything else was in place, and looked the way it should. “See?” I told Charlotte. “Nothing to worry about. Just an accident.”

  She looked reluctantly convinced. “So we’re ready to go on the market again?”

  “Once we fix
the window,” I said. “Shouldn’t take too long. I’ll start breaking out what’s left of the pane if you’ll go buy a new piece of glass.”

  Charlotte nodded. We both remembered the dimensions, since this wasn’t the first broken window pane we’d had to replace.

  By the time she came back, thirty or forty minutes later, I had the rest of the glass swept up and removed, and it was a matter of a few minutes to pop the new window into the old frame, push in the little points that held it in place, and then run a new bead of putty along the edges.

  We both stepped back and contemplated it.

  “Looks good,” Charlotte said.

  I nodded. “I’ll call the photographer and have her come back out.”

  Charlotte glanced at me. “Do we need new pictures?”

  “I guess we could put up the old ones. The finishes are all the same.” Paint color and tile and all the rest. “But the place was staged the first time we put it on the market.” And Michelle the stager absolutely refused to rent us furniture a second time, since several of her pieces had been damaged in the vandalism. “It would probably be best if we got some pictures of the house the way it looks now.”

  Charlotte sighed. “More money.”

  “Yes. But we don’t want to market a house full of lovely furniture and then have people show up and be disappointed when they see empty rooms.”

  We were headed out when Charlotte’s phone emitted a little chirp, different from the usual ringtone or message sound. She dug it out of her pocket and peered at it, brows arching. “There’s another video of Rafe.”

  I leaned in. “How do you know?”

  “I set an alert,” Charlotte said.

  “On videos of my husband?”

  She shrugged. “I figured you’d want to know. And you might not think to set one yourself.”

  She was right. I hadn’t.

  “I have an alert on Richard’s name, too. Just in case something happens and he gets out. Someone loses their mind and gives him the chance to post bail, or he arranges a prison break, or something.”