Survival Clause Read online

  “Or he’s like Samuel Little,” Rafe said, “just driving around for his own pleasure, getting rid of people he comes across.”

  Maybe so. “You think he’s a trucker, though. Don’t you?”

  “It makes the most sense. Anybody who ain’t a trucker stands out at a truck stop. Several of the women were picked up from, or dumped at, truck stops. It’s most likely he’s someone who fits in there.”

  Carrie indicated that she’d had enough to eat for the time being, and I lifted her up to my shoulder and patted her back. She emitted an unladylike belch, and Rafe grinned.

  “So that’s what we’re doing,” he added. “Starting with companies that run trucks up and down the interstate.”

  “How many of them are there?” I handed him Carrie so I could get my clothing in order before going out.

  He put her up against his own shoulder, with one hand on her tiny, ruffled butt. “Too many to count. Bob’s got a wet-behind-the-ears deputy sitting over at the sheriff’s office making cold calls. I’m not sure anything’s gonna come of it, but I guess it’s gotta be done.”

  “Unless you can find something else to narrow it down. Someone who saw him, or something.”

  “That’s my job,” Rafe said, swaying gently back and forth with the baby. “And now I guess I oughta get to it. You ready?”

  I was ready. Or as ready as I ever am, without makeup. I got to my feet, still adjusting my blouse. “Let’s go.”

  “After you,” Rafe said, and nodded toward the door.

  * * *

  The trip into Columbia was short and uneventful. I went first, and found myself a parking spot near the police station, where I could see the door and the parking spaces up front. Rafe doesn’t park in the lot behind the building, since he’s in and out all day, and gone more than he’s inside. When he pulled up, I started scanning the surrounding area.

  Last night’s video had been taken from the vantage point of where I was sitting, more or less. This side of the building, anyway. I’d seen the outline of City Hall in the background when Rafe got into his car. So I’d parked myself down here, in the same vicinity, thinking Jessica Rabbit might choose to do her filming from the same spot this morning.

  The engine of the Chevy shut off, and the door opened. I kept my eyes peeled as Rafe got out.

  And I’ll admit I held my breath, too. I wasn’t really worried that anyone was going to take a potshot at him—there was no reason to think Jessica Rabbit was out for blood—but it’s a habit that’s hard to break, especially when I know someone’s watching.

  Rafe stood for a second, looking around, before he shut the car door. I knew he’d seen me—he doesn’t miss much, and besides, he knew I’d be nearby—but he didn’t acknowledge the car in any way. Nor would I expect him to. He knows better than that.

  When nobody called out, and nothing else happened, he headed up the steps to the front door. Two seconds later he was inside. If anyone had been filming, they’d been doing it from somewhere they weren’t immediately visible.

  I stayed where I was, scanning the surrounding area. Wondering whether Rafe was doing the same, inside the building, behind the tinted windows.

  Nothing happened. The seconds ticked by in silence, and turned into minutes. I started thinking about leaving.

  A car engine started up nearby. I looked around, and saw a light-colored compact roll out of a parking spot farther up the street.

  It had been parked rear in and was coming toward me, so I couldn’t see the license plate. And speaking of tinted windows, I couldn’t get a good look at the driver through the windshield, either. I got the impression of a pale oval surrounded by darkness, but that was all. I couldn’t even, honestly, swear to whether it was a male or a female.

  And then it—or he or she—was past me, and on its way down the street. I wrestled the Volvo out of the parking space I was in—not a compact, my Volvo—and got it turned around, in time to see the tail end of the car I was chasing zip around a corner a couple of blocks down the road.

  I leaned over the steering wheel and lowered my foot on the gas pedal. The last few blocks of Columbia went by in a blur. But even so, by the time I got to the corner and around it, there was no sign of the compact. The street was open and empty, with not a car in sight.

  I looked, of course. Left and right as I navigated slowly down the street. Up and down the cross streets. Into the driveways along the road. There was no sign of the tan car. After a couple of minutes I gave up, and went around the block and back to the police station.

  This time I parked legitimately out front, because I wasn’t trying to hide. And I grabbed Carrie from the backseat, and hung my bag over my shoulder, and headed up the stairs and through the doors into the lobby.

  Up until a few weeks ago, the front desk at the police station had been manned by a young officer named Felicia Robinson. She’d had something of a crush on Rafe, and as a result, she hadn’t always been polite to me. It had been an annoyance every time I’d walked through the doors into the police station, looking for him.

  Then, a few weeks back, Felicia had gotten shot by the neo-Nazis. Now, still, it always came as a shock every time I walked through the door and she wasn’t there.

  This morning, that feeling was mitigated by the scene that took place in front of me.

  The front desk was occupied by an officer in a spotless uniform, so young he probably didn’t have to shave yet. He sat behind the desk, his eyes focused on whatever was in front of him—a screen, a TV monitor, maybe a lurid novel—but they didn’t move as if anything was actually going on behind the eyes. Instead, his ears practically vibrated as he tried not to miss anything of the low-voiced conversation going on in the middle of the lobby.

  It involved three people, and Rafe was one of them. Grimaldi was another. She stood, dressed in one of her usual no-nonsense pantsuits, confronting a third woman, someone I hadn’t seen before.

  Like Grimaldi, she had black hair and dark eyes. Like Grimaldi, she was dressed in a dark suit. They were around the same age. And there the similarities ended. Where Grimaldi’s short heels and cropped curls spoke to her preference for low maintenance and easy movement, the other woman had paired her black pants and jacket with three inch heels, and her hair hung like a straight curtain most of the way to her waist. The pants clung to a nice posterior and flared out at the bottom, while the jacket was cut to nip in around a tiny waist. The crisp white blouse set off a perfectly made-up face with almond-shaped eyes and flawless skin.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, and it might have come out a little sharper and louder than I’d intended. But I’d just come smack up against my prejudices for the kind of woman I’ve always imagined being Rafe’s type.

  I know he married me, a not-skinny blue-eyed blonde, but I’ve never quite gotten over the idea that he’s supposed to be with some exotic beauty as dark and gorgeous as he is.

  Here I was looking at her. And she was looking at me, with calculation in those black eyes.

  “Darlin’,” Rafe said. And said no more.

  Grimaldi didn’t, either. “Savannah.” She nodded a greeting before turning back to her adversary. Her nostrils flared.

  No one seemed inclined to do the polite thing, so I took matters into my own hands, and stuck one out. “Savannah Martin. Collier.”

  The woman took it. Her palm was surprisingly rough for such a delicate-looking creature. “Really?”

  “Yes,” I said, and squeezed. She had a firm handshake, too.

  She turned back to Rafe. “Your wife?”

  He gave a curt nod. Uh-oh, I thought, looking from one to the other of them. An old girlfriend, or maybe more accurately, someone he’d shared his bed with at some point between high school and when he met me again? Sometime during the undercover years?

  That had the potential to get ugly, if so.

  She turned back to me, her smile blandly polite and her eyes flat black. “I’m Agent Leslie Yung with the Federal Bureau of I
nvestigations.”

  The FBI? Rafe had slept with an FBI agent?

  “Nice to meet you,” I said pleasantly. “How do you know Rafe?”

  She glanced at him. “We met in Memphis.”

  During the undercover years. Check.

  “Agent Yung hauled me in for questioning a couple times,” Rafe added. The flash of white that accompanied the statement was more a baring of teeth than an actual smile. “Always bothered her when she couldn’t hang nothing on me.”

  Yung gave him a scathing look. “And now I see why. You might have let me know that you were working undercover for another agency. I wouldn’t have wasted my time on you.”

  Ouch, I thought, while Rafe said, blandly, “That’d defeat the purpose, don’t you think? Not much point in being undercover if everybody knows you’re undercover.”

  “The FBI—!” Yung began, and then seemed to think better of it. We stood in silence for a moment while she breathed heavily through her nose.

  “Welcome to Columbia,” I told her when I figured she’d gotten herself under control again and wasn’t going to blow up. “What’s the FBI doing in our neck of the woods?”

  As if I couldn’t guess.

  “We were just discussing that,” Grimaldi said tightly. And added, with a switch of subject that made it clear that the discussion wouldn’t be continuing while I was present, “What are you doing here, Savannah?”

  “Oh.” I switched gears. “I just came to let Rafe know that I saw a car pull away and leave just after he went inside. It was coming toward me, though, so I didn’t see the license plate, and the windows were tinted, so I couldn’t see the driver. And by the time I’d gotten the Volvo turned around so I could follow it, it was gone.”

  There was a second’s silence. “What kind of car?” Rafe wanted to know.

  “Tan compact. Nothing unusual about it in any way. Not that I could see.”

  He nodded. “I’ll keep an eye out.”

  It was painfully obvious that they all wanted to get rid of me, so I figured I’d oblige. “I’ll head home. Walk me out?”

  Rafe nodded. “Back in a minute,” he told Grimaldi, who turned to Agent Yung with rather heavy courtesy.

  “Why don’t you come on back to my office, Agent Yung. We’ll continue the discussion when Agent Collier comes back.”

  The two of them headed for the door at the far end of the lobby while Rafe took Carrie’s car seat off my hands and put one of his own at the small of my back to guide me outside.

  I managed to keep my mouth shut until we were beyond the doors, where the young cop behind the desk couldn’t hear us. And then I couldn’t hold it in any longer. “Old girlfriend?”

  He gave me a surprised look. “Yung? Hell, no. She’s much too straight-laced to get involved with the likes of me.”

  “Then what was all that tension about?” We continued down the shallow steps toward street level.

  “What tension?” Rafe wanted to know, and chuckled when I slid him a look. “She had some preconceived notions I had to disabuse her of.”

  “She thought you were a criminal,” I translated.

  He nodded. “We went to some lengths to make it look that way back then, yeah.”

  ‘We’ being him and his handler, and the rest of the TBI.

  “I guess she didn’t like being fooled,” I said.

  “Seems that way.” He waited for me to unlock the car and then he opened the back door and put Carrie’s seat on the base for the ride home. “Nothing ever happened aside from her wanting to arrest me. Nothing you need to worry about.”

  “She’s gorgeous,” I said. “And I’m standing here with no makeup on and my hair undone. And at least ten pounds of excess baby-weight I haven’t managed to lose in the past four months…”

  While Leslie Yung was a perfect size four in her clingy pants. I haven’t been a size four since middle school, and I don’t expect I’ll ever be one again.

  “You’ll get there, darlin’.” He put an arm around my waist, while the other hand crept up into my hair. His fingers started undoing the messy bun. “And if you don’t, it was well worth it.”

  I suppose Carrie was worth an extra ten pounds of weight, if he wanted to look at it that way. “I love you,” I said.

  He grinned. “I love you too, darlin’. Now go on home and let me deal with Yung.”

  “She’s here for the murder investigation?”

  He nodded.

  “Is she going to try to take it away from you?”

  “I imagine she’s gonna try,” Rafe said. “I better get in there, darlin’.”

  I nodded. “Let me know what happens.”

  He said he would. And then he leaned down and gave me the kind of kiss that’s more suited for the bedroom than the sidewalk outside the police station. It ended with me hanging from his arm, as limp as a noodle, and it resulted in catcalls and whooping from a couple of cops who were walking by, and wolf whistles from up the street.

  Rafe chuckled and set me upright. “You OK to drive?”

  “I’ll sit a minute and catch my breath before I attempt to navigate,” I promised him. “Go on inside and make sure Grimaldi doesn’t murder Agent Yung. I’ll see you later.”

  “I’ll be in touch.” He jogged back up the stairs and let himself into the police station while I folded myself behind the wheel of the Volvo and, as promised, sat there until my legs stopped shaking before I turned the key in the ignition and headed home.

  Six

  I was halfway there when the phone rang. The display showed Charlotte’s name, so I picked up with a cheery, “Good morning.”

  “That was quite the kiss your husband laid on you,” my old friend informed me, with a ripe chuckle.

  “How did you—? Oh, my God.” I fought an instinctive inclination to turn the car around. “Someone filmed that?”

  “And uploaded it to Facebook,” Charlotte confirmed. “It just came on two minutes ago. I have an alert set.”

  So she’d told me. I was starting to think I might have to set my own alert.

  “I followed Rafe to work this morning,” I told her, “to see if I could spot whoever’s doing this. And I thought I had.”

  I told her about the tan compact that had gotten away from me. “It didn’t even occur to me that someone might still be there. I was so sure whoever it was had escaped me…”

  “So you went back?” Charlotte prompted when I fell silent.

  I nodded. “Yes. To tell him I’d lost whoever it was, but to keep an eye out for the car. And when I walked into the lobby, I found him and Grimaldi in a face-off with Agent Leslie Yung from the FBI.”

  “What’s an FBI agent doing here in Maury County?”

  I hadn’t gotten around to asking, but I could guess. “Probably because of the murder. Rafe said he might have to contact the FBI and see if they have a task force put together for this guy. He’s killed a lot of women in a lot of states, so it makes sense that they would.”

  I just hadn’t realized he’d done it yet. Rafe, I mean. Called the FBI. Judging from his expression inside the lobby earlier, he hadn’t expected to see Agent Yung. He certainly hadn’t prepared Grimaldi for her. The scene I’d witnessed bore every evidence of being adversarial, the way it would be if Yung had shown up and tried to take over.

  “Tell me about it when you get here,” Charlotte instructed.

  “Here?” Did we have an appointment I’d forgotten?

  “You want to see the video, don’t you?”

  I did. But I could look it up myself. Or she could send it to me.

  I deduced, cleverly, that she wanted to show it to me in person, though. So—

  “Sure, I’ll come over. Are you at your mom’s house?”

  She said she was, and I dropped the phone in the console and navigated my way past the mansion, into Sweetwater proper, and down Green Street.

  Charlotte was in the front parlor when I pulled up, and opened the door before I’d even latched the picket-
fence gate behind me. “It must be quite the video,” I told her as I trudged up the walk to the front porch.

  She smirked. “Wait until you see the comments. X-rated, some of them.”

  “Jesus. I mean… sheesh. Don’t people have better things to do?”

  “Apparently not,” Charlotte said, and closed the door behind me. “Put the baby down. Here.”

  She handed me her phone, already cued up, and bent over Carrie. My daughter gurgled and cooed as she was lifted out of the carrier and snuggled in Charlotte’s arms. Her youngest, Richard Junior, or JR, was going on three now, so maybe she missed holding babies.

  I turned my attention to the video.

  It was taken from the same angle as the others, from the area down the street where I’d been parked and waiting this morning. And it started with Rafe and me coming out of the police station. He kept his hand on the small of my back on the way down the steps, and then we stopped next to the car. I watched as he pulled open the back door and put Carrie inside before turning to me. We exchanged a few words, and then he put his arm around my waist. I watched myself lean back to look up at him, and reflected that I didn’t recall doing that when I’d been standing there. It was very evident on the video, though.

  A few more words were exchanged—I remembered them, but whoever had been holding the camera; probably a phone—hadn’t been close enough to catch what we said. Then I smiled up at him, and he nodded, and then he—as Charlotte had put it—laid a kiss on me that had certainly curled my toes at the time, and did it again now.

  “Sheesh,” I said, my cheeks burning.

  Charlotte chuckled. She was bouncing Carrie up and down, and my daughter was giggling. “Pretty hot, isn’t it?”

  “It was. I just never realized what it might look like from the outside.”

  “Now you know,” Charlotte said as, on the screen, I came up for air. My expression was part dazed, part aroused, and wholly embarrassing.