Survival Clause Page 4

  I glanced at her. “You aren’t really afraid of that, are you?”

  “Not really,” Charlotte said. “Not when I’m sane. I know he’s probably safe where he is. And I hope if he does get out, he won’t come for me. Or the kids. But if something changes and nobody tells me, I want to know about it.”

  Hard to blame her for that, when this was the guy who had put her and their children into a car at gunpoint, and tried to drive them back to North Carolina. “How do you know to do this, anyway?”

  “Paul showed me,” Charlotte said.

  I gave her a closer look. “Something going on with you and Jarvis I should know about?”

  “No,” Charlotte said, but she flushed again. “Worry about your own husband. Look at the video.”

  “It’s just twenty seconds of Rafe walking from his car into the police station.” And while he looked just as good as he always does, he wasn’t doing anything that could get him, or anyone else, in trouble.

  “Somebody stood outside the police station and waited for him to show up so she could film him getting out of the car and walking up the stairs and through the door,” Charlotte said. “She called out to him so he’d turn and smile at her, too. And then she posted it online. And several hundred other women piled on with hearts and comments. You don’t find that a little creepy?”

  The first part, maybe. The second I was used to. Women always make googly-eyes at Rafe. In person, most commonly, but I wasn’t surprised that he was a hit on social media, too. “How do you know she stood there and waited?”

  “Either that or she was following him,” Charlotte said tartly. “Which do you prefer?”

  Now that I thought about it, I decided I preferred neither. “Couldn’t it just be a coincidence? She happened to be there, and…”

  I trailed off, because it didn’t make much sense. People don’t tend to loiter outside the Columbia PD unless they have business there. And anyone who had legitimate business there wasn’t likely to be filming my husband get out of his car and walk into the building.

  Plus, she’d known his name. She’d used it when she called out to him.

  If she’d had a gun, she could have shot him.

  I dropped Charlotte’s phone and dug for my own. It rang once, twice, then—

  “Darlin’,” my husband’s voice said in my ear. “This ain’t a great time for chit-chat.”

  “Are you OK?”

  His voice changed, went crisp and lost the Southern drawl. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “It can wait.”

  “Hang on a sec.” I heard him excuse himself to whoever he was with, and the sounds of him, probably, exiting whatever room he was in. I pictured him leaning a shoulder against the wall in the hallway, phone to his ear. “What’s going on, darlin’?”

  “I panicked,” I admitted, now that I’d had a few seconds to think about it. “There’s another video of you on social media. Some woman stood outside the police station and waited for you to show up this morning, so she could film you.”

  He sounded more amused than bothered. “More hearts and kisses?”

  “Yes. Lots of them. But that’s not the point. Some woman is stalking you. She stood there and waited for you to show up, and when you did, she called out so you’d turn around. Do you remember?”

  There was a pause. “Yeah. Maybe.”

  “So you know what she looks like.”

  “No,” Rafe said. “Some woman called my name when I was walking up to the door. I turned around, but I didn’t see nobody, so I kept walking.”

  Another pause. “I don’t like it,” I said. “I mean, we don’t want a repeat of Elspeth, do we?”

  Elspeth, who had done her best to kill me, so she could have him to herself…

  “No, darlin’. But that was a different situation. I knew Elspeth. I slept with Elspeth. Hell, I knocked her up…” Even if he hadn’t known about it at the time. And that was Elspeth’s fault, for not telling him.

  “I know it’s not the same,” I said. “This is someone you don’t know—”

  Or so I assumed. I gestured to Charlotte, who had picked her phone up when I dropped it, and was examining it, maybe for damage. Now she dutifully handed it over. I peered at the screen. “Do you know someone named Jessica Rabbit?”

  “No,” Rafe said, his voice amused.

  Yeah, I hadn’t thought so. “It doesn’t sound like a real name.”

  “No,” Rafe agreed, while next to me, Charlotte wiggled her fingers. I handed the phone back while I kept talking to Rafe.

  “The point is, this woman took the time to stand outside the police station this morning until you got there, just so she could film you walking from your car through the door. She might have been the one filming last night, too. Or one of the ones…”

  Charlotte was shaking her head.

  “No?” I said.

  “Not as far as I can tell. Those videos were posted by other people. She might have been there, but without filming, or she might be someone who saw the video last night and decided to show up today and get a video of her own.”

  “What’s that?” Rafe wanted to know in my ear. I repeated what Charlotte had said. “Could be,” he agreed. “I’ll keep an eye out.”

  “Thank you.” I resisted the temptation to suggest that he should put on a flak vest and keep it on. “What’s going on where you are?”

  “The victim’s been identified,” Rafe said. “Her name was Ramona Mitchell. She had a record for solicitation in Nashville.”

  “So he picked up a prostitute.” Probably at a truck stop not unlike the one he’d dropped her off at.

  Had he picked up another one here in Columbia and taken her south with him?

  But no, probably not. Most of these guys—serial killers—don’t kill several people a day. So far, the eighteen victims we knew about had been spread out over almost as many years. It might be months before he took someone else. Maybe years.

  “Will you have to go to Nashville to investigate?”

  “No,” Rafe said. “Tammy’s called in a favor from a friend.”

  “Not Goins, I hope?”

  Detective Goins with the MNPD was a former colleague of Grimaldi’s, and a particular thorn in my side. A few months ago, he had pulled a gun on Rafe while my husband was holding my daughter. I didn’t think I’d get over that anytime soon.

  “No,” Rafe said, sounding amused. “And not Jaime Mendoza, either, before you can ask. You don’t waste a homicide detective on this.”

  “Why not?” It was a homicide, wasn’t it?

  “They have cases of their own to investigate,” Rafe said. “Tammy asked Spicer and Truman to ask questions. They’re driving around the neighborhood all day anyway.”

  Our Nashville neighborhood, I assumed. Spicer and Truman were the two patrol officers who had responded to my 911 call the day we—Rafe and I—discovered Brenda Puckett dead in Mrs. Jenkins’s house on Potsdam Street.

  “I guess we’re talking about the truck stop on Trinity Lane?”

  “No idea,” Rafe said. “There are several of’em along the interstate in that part of town. When Miz Mitchell was picked up last time, she was walking up and down Dickerson Road.”

  Of course she was. “So Spicer and Truman are going there?”

  “They’re going everywhere,” Rafe said. “To Dickerson Road, to the truck stop on Trinity Lane and the one next to the bridge on James Robertson. It’s a long shot, but if we—if they—can figure out where she worked these days, maybe they can find someone who saw her leave with this guy.”

  “And you’re sure you don’t need to be there?”

  “Spicer and Truman can handle it,” Rafe said. “I’m better off trying to find someone who saw what happened here.”

  “Didn’t Bob do that last night?”

  “Yes,” Rafe said, “but it gotta be done again this morning. Different people at different times of day.”

  That made sense. “So you’ll be
careful? In case this nutcase follows you around?”

  “If all she’s gonna do is shoot pictures,” Rafe said, “I ain’t that worried.”

  Well, no. Seeing as he’d been shot by something other than a camera last month, I could understand that a cell phone didn’t worry him much. But— “Elspeth ended up with a gun.”

  “She didn’t try to shoot me,” Rafe pointed out.

  No. “She did try to shoot me, though. And came pretty close to taking you out at the same time.”

  “I’ll be careful.” Something rustled on his end of the line and he added, “I gotta go.”

  “I love you,” I said quickly.

  “Love you too, darlin’. Take care of my baby.”

  He hung up before I could respond. Charlotte was still watching her own phone, and I asked her, “Any way to figure out who this person is?”

  “From the Facebook profile?” Charlotte shook her head. “I’ve been looking at it. It’s brand new. Created yesterday. The name is obviously fake. Nobody’s really named Jessica Rabbit.”

  No. Or at least it seemed unlikely.

  “Does she have a profile photo? Can we try some kind of facial recognition software?”

  “A picture of Jessica Rabbit for the profile,” Charlotte said. “No headline picture. Nothing on the timeline except the video from this morning.”

  “Not even the video from last night?”

  She shook her head.

  “I don’t like it,” I said.

  Charlotte nodded. “I get that. I don’t like it, either.”

  “Maybe we should check the other video. The one from last night. If she saw that, and that’s how she focused in on Rafe, maybe she dropped a heart emoji or a comment.”

  Charlotte didn’t answer, and I added, “As herself, I mean. Maybe we could track her down that way.”

  “There are at least a thousand comments on that thread,” Charlotte said. “And probably five thousand heart emojis. It would take months to track them all down.”

  “Probably not months. Maybe days. But chances are only a few are local. If we can isolate them…”

  Charlotte thought about it, and shrugged. “We’re not doing anything else.”

  “Come on back to the mansion,” I said, “and I’ll fix you lunch. Then, when Carrie’s napping, we can make a list.”

  “And start snooping?”

  “I’m game if you are,” I told her. “And if that doesn’t work, we can always follow Rafe around, and see if we can find her that way.”

  Charlotte tagged along behind as I headed for the front door. “What was that you were saying about Elspeth Caulfield?”

  “That she tried to kill me? “ I glanced at her over my shoulder as I bent to scoop up the baby. “Did I never tell you about that?”

  “I don’t think so,” Charlotte said, sounding doubtful.

  “Then remind me to do that over lunch. It’s quite the story.”

  “I can’t wait,” Charlotte said, and followed me across the threshold and onto the porch.

  Four

  Back in Sweetwater, I let Carrie nurse herself to sleep while I told Charlotte about Elspeth Caulfield, and how she had ended up trying to kill me. “You know that Elspeth talked her way into Rafe’s bed in high school, right? Or invited him into hers, or just pulled him off into a field somewhere?”

  Charlotte nodded.

  “He graduated and was arrested for fighting with Billy Scruggs. She got pregnant and didn’t tell him about it, because he was in prison. She had the baby and her father made her give it up for adoption.”

  “And that’s David,” Charlotte said.

  “That’s David.” Who was living in Nashville with his adoptive parents, very happily. “Twelve years went by. Rafe got out of prison and started working for the TBI. LaDonna died, and he figured out who his father was, and that his grandmother was still alive. He showed up in Nashville, and ended up calling me to show him the house on Potsdam Street.”

  Charlotte nodded.

  “Rafe and I danced around each other for a few months, and during that time, I ended up talking to Elspeth about him. She decided she wanted him back. I think she had a plan for getting David away from the Flannerys, too, and she had some sort of idea that the three of them were going to be a family…”

  “But you were in the way,” Charlotte said, “because he was getting involved with you.”

  I nodded. “First she killed Marquita Johnson—you know, Cletus’s wife—because Rafe hired Marquita to take care of Mrs. Jenkins. Marquita was living in the house with Mrs. Jenkins, and with Rafe when he was in town, and Elspeth thought Marquita might be poaching, so she killed her. And then she came after me.”

  “And Rafe killed her.”

  “Jorge Pena killed her,” I corrected. “Rafe killed him. And I owe her for that. She planted herself in front of Rafe and refused to move even though Jorge said he’d shoot her. If she hadn’t, Rafe might be dead.”

  Or not. He might still have gotten the drop on Jorge. But the chances of him surviving that encounter would have been much fewer.

  “Anyway,” I said, as I lifted Carrie to my shoulder and patted her back. She was already asleep, her head lolling. “The last thing I want, is another experience like that.”

  “No kidding,” Charlotte said.

  I got to my feet. “I’m going to put her to bed. I’ll be right back.”

  Charlotte nodded and reached for her phone. I carried the baby up the stairs to her crib and headed back down. “Let’s go in the kitchen. I’ll make some lunch. Anything new?”

  Charlotte shook her head. “More hearts and comments on the video she put up two hours ago, but nothing else.”

  “Do you think I’m overreacting?” I glanced at her over my shoulder as we traversed the hallway down to the kitchen in the back of the house. Pearl had already greeted Charlotte when we first came home, and had spent the time while I was feeding Carrie curled up on a pillow in the corner of the parlor. Now she lead the procession, her stub of a tail jauntily raised.

  “Go outside?” I asked her, and her tail gave a wag. I headed for the back door and pulled it open while Charlotte answered my question.

  “Hard to say. You said it yourself, most women are attracted to Rafe.”

  And then some. It’s a curse.

  “She might just be some lonely woman who thinks he’s hot, and after spending a couple of days following him around, she’ll stop.”

  Yes, she might be. “He pointed me out last night, though. Both me and Carrie. ‘That’s my wife and my baby in the car.’ Isn’t it weird that anyone would go that gaga over a married man?”

  “Most women lust over married celebrities,” Charlotte said with a shrug. “It might be something like that.”

  It might. I peered out the window to where Pearl was squatting in the grass. “So you think I shouldn’t worry?”

  She hesitated. “I think it’s probably going to be fine. But I understand why you’re concerned.”

  “Maybe I should just give it a day or two before I start freaking out?”

  Pearl was up again, and on her way back toward the house. I opened the door for her.

  “It can’t hurt to do a little investigating,” Charlotte said, and got comfortable on one of the stools in front of the island. “We may not be able to discover who she is. But it can’t hurt to look.”

  Pearl bounded up the couple of steps into the kitchen and stopped to look at me, tongue hanging out of her mouth.

  “Good girl,” I told her. “Sit, and I’ll give you a cookie.”

  She thumped her haunches down on the floor and brushed the little bit of her tail that was left back and forth. I fished a dog treat out of the jar on the counter and held it out to her. She took it daintily from my fingers and proceeded to chomp it into bits.

  “Good girl,” I said again, as she trotted over to her water bowl for a couple slurps of water. “Go on and lie down on your pillow. We’re going to be in here for a whi
le.”

  Pearl headed for the pillow, and Charlotte arched her brows. “She understood that?”

  “I’m not sure she understood anything more than ‘good girl’ and ‘pillow.’ But it got the point across.”

  Pearl circled twice and settled down with a sigh, and I turned back to Charlotte. “Let me throw some sandwiches together, and then we can get to work.”

  “I’ll just get started while you cook.” She hunched over the phone. I started dragging containers of cheese and lunchmeat out of the fridge.

  * * *

  Two hours later, by the time Carrie woke up, we had eliminated several hundred of the commenters on the original video. Some because they were male—Jessica Rabbit didn’t sound like a guy—but most because they listed their location as somewhere other than Middle Tennessee.

  “I’ll keep going at home,” Charlotte told me, as we both got up from the loveseat in the parlor (it was a lot more comfortable than the stools in the kitchen, so we had moved in there after the sandwiches were devoured). “After I relieve my mother of babysitting duty and spend some time with my kids.”

  I nodded, as I headed for the stairs to rescue my squalling daughter. “Let me know if you find anything. I’m going to arrange to get the house photographed and back on the market in the meantime.” Since we’d forgotten all about that in the excitement of a possible stalker.

  “Deal,” Charlotte said. She let herself out the front door, and I twisted the lock behind her. We live in the country, outside a small town, and random crime is pretty non-existent, but it never hurts to be careful. Especially since we both, Rafe and I, seem to attract trouble.

  That done, I headed up the stairs to take care of Carrie and give her tummy time on the floor while I focused on real estate for a while.

  * * *

  When Rafe came through the back door and into the kitchen, it was after seven, and dinner had been pushed back to accommodate a late arrival. He hadn’t let me know why he’d be late, just that I shouldn’t expect him until after his usual time, but the black cargo pants tucked into black boots, and the black T-shirt that molded his chest and shoulders, told me all I needed to know. “I didn’t realize you guys were still doing SWAT practice,” I told him, as I turned up the heat under the pot of water on the stove to bring it to a quick boil for the angel hair spaghetti.