Collateral Damage: A Savannah Martin Novel (Savannah Martin Mysteries Book 19)

by Jenna Bennett

  Mendoza headed out, letting the door close behind him, and Rafe grabbed a chair and pulled it up to the window. “Have a seat.”

  I sat, and gave the toys attached to the handle of Carrie’s car seat a jingle-jangle so she’d have something to look and swat at. “Been a while since I was in one of those.”

  “I was in one of’em back in January. It mighta been that one.” He looked through the window into the interrogation room. “Goins pulled me in for questioning about Doug Brendan’s accident.”

  I remembered. Detective Goins had interviewed me, too, although he’d done it in his office. I hadn’t been suspected of killing Rafe’s superior at the TBI. I’d just been suspected of covering up for Rafe, or perhaps of being fooled by him, so Goins had treated me with more care than he did Rafe.

  “Do you suppose he’s here?”

  “Goins?” Rafe said. “I imagine he is. That’s why I called Mendoza directly yesterday. Didn’t wanna risk ending up with Goins on the case, and having him accuse me of killing Jennifer Vonderaa, too.”

  “That was probably a good move.” Since Goins was stupid enough, and racist enough, to believe it. “It’s too bad he doesn’t live in Maury County, or I’d suspect him of being involved with the white supremacy group.”

  “He don’t need to live in Maury County for that,” Rafe said.

  True. “Any reason to think he is?”

  He shook his head. “Just your garden variety bastard. If he was involved, he’s be breathing down Mendoza’s neck by now.”

  I guess maybe he would. “That’s a shame. I’d like to have him be guilty of something, so he could lose his job and not be a detective anymore. People like him don’t belong on the police force.”

  “People like him are everywhere,” Rafe said, and turned to the door when it opened. “Clay.”

  He nodded to Clayton as the younger man stepped through. Mendoza came in after him, and shut the door.

  Clayton nodded back, and spared me a glance before he focused on Rafe again. “You OK, man? I thought you were wearing a vest, but then you went down and didn’t get up.”

  “A couple broken ribs, a couple of Band-Aids,” Rafe said, as if neither was important enough to worry about. “Although you coulda given me a heads-up.”

  I nodded. Advance warning would have been nice.

  “No time,” Clayton said, rubbing a hand over his barely-there hair. He subscribes to the Rafe Collier style of haircut. On Clayton, scrawny and pale, it makes him look like a skinhead. On Rafe, it just looks dangerous. “We lit outta the parking lot outside the restaurant, and Rodney and Kyle, they were bitching about how you’d been pushing me around and how you needed to be taught a lesson. And before I knew it, there we were, in the fields opposite the house, and one of’em handed me a rifle and told me that since I was the one you’d been pushing around, I was gonna have the honor of taking the first shot. And I tried to tell’em I’ve already been inside—”

  In prison.

  “—and I don’t wanna go back, especially not for shooting a cop, but I couldn’t argue too much, or they were gonna question whether it had been a good idea, hooking me up with the group…”

  Rafe nodded.

  “And so I took the shot. And because there was no blood, I figured I might as well take another one. Because if there wasn’t any blood, I figured Rodney and Kyle were just gonna take the gun, and then they’d start shooting…”

  “You did good,” Rafe told him, like the fact that Clayton had shot at him, and hit him, twice didn’t matter at all. “If it hadn’t been for the vest, you woulda killed me with the first shot. And the second was just close enough to take a slice outta my arm. It all looked real good.”

  Yes, it had. Good enough that I had to fight back a shiver.

  I shook off the memory and smiled at Clayton. “It scared the daylights out of me.”

  He ducked his head and looked embarrassed. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” I told him. “You did your job. And you obviously did it well enough that Rodney and Kyle decided that they didn’t need to take their own shots.”

  “I said,” Clayton told us, with a vicious undertone, “that Rafe was down and that the place was gonna be crawling with cops in a few minutes. They couldn’t wait to get outta there.”

  The corner of Rafe’s mouth turned up. Mendoza, leaning against the wall a few feet away, shifted from one foot to the other.

  “Tell me about last night,” Rafe said.

  Clayton made a face. “Rodney gotta text. He called Kyle and told him to be ready to roll in twenty, and that we needed the truck. Then he told me to get my coat on. I asked him what was happening, and he said that we’d been given a mission.”

  He made air quotes around the last word.

  “What was the mission?” Mendoza wanted to know, and Clayton glanced at him.

  “You gotta understand, they don’t tell me everything. Not yet.” He looked at me. “I didn’t even know it was your house they were planning to blow up until I saw you drive up, and I recognized the car. And by then it was too late to let anybody know anything.”

  “Not your fault,” I told him, since it wasn’t, and since there wasn’t anything he could have done about it anyway. Not without blowing his cover. “Just out of curiosity, do you have any idea why they did that?”

  “’Cause they could?” Clayton said, irritated, and then added. “Sorry. Yeah. It was because of Jamal. You came and got him and Alexandra from the shop, and Rodney didn’t like the way you talked to me. He’d seen you working on the house, and he’d been inside it that Sunday, so he knew it looked nice, and he figured, if he could damage it enough, it would take you time and more money to fix it.”

  I nodded. “Did he happen to mention whether he was the one who broke in and vandalized the place Sunday night, too?”

  “If he did, he didn’t say anything about it,” Clayton said. “When he picked me up, he said he wanted to see if I could shoot. I figured we were going to a shooting range or something, or a field with a bunch of cans on a fence. Instead, he dropped down in a neighborhood full of people. When I recognized the car, I was afraid he was gonna tell me to shoot you. But then all he wanted—he said—was to see if I could hit the box.”

  “Congratulations,” I told him. “You hit the box.”

  “Yeah, no kidding.” He made a face. “For the record, I didn’t know it was gonna blow. I just figured it was a stupid initiation thing and all I had to do was make it jump or something. I didn’t expect it to blow half the roof off.”

  We stood in silence a second while we all remembered the roof blowing.

  “Then what happened?” Rafe said, and Clayton turned back to him.

  “Rodney said I’d proven myself to be worthy. He’s kind of a jackass. And then we drove to the restaurant south of town and met Kyle. And the other guy showed up. And then you showed up—” He nodded to Rafe, “and the rest of it you know.”

  “Tell me about the guy.”

  “Rodney calls him Lance,” Clayton said, “but I don’t think it’s his real name. Kyle asked about it, and Rodney told him that the guy who led The Base called himself Spear.”

  Both Rafe and Mendoza nodded. I had no idea what The Base was, but I nodded, too, so it would look like I did.

  “Does he have a connection to The Base?” Mendoza wanted to know, with a glance at Rafe. I deduced The Base was a big deal.

  But Clayton shook his head. “If he does, nobody mentioned it. He sure didn’t. He didn’t say much of anything. Just showed up, and sat down. He and Rodney did some kind of handshake. Rodney introduced me. Lance asked why I wanted to join them. I gave him the cover story. Arrested just over a year ago. Got out after a year. Wanted somewhere to start over. Came here.”

  “And he bought it?” Mendoza asked.

  Rafe’s lips twitched.

  “Nothing not to buy,” Clayton said. “It’s all true. Except that I didn’t spend the last year in prison. But the arrest’s on
record. It was in the paper and everything. With my picture. Unless he’s stupid, he already verified it.”

  “Did you get the impression that he was stupid?”

  “No,” Clayton said. “I got the impression that he’s as cold-blooded as a snake, and not stupid at all. And that was before I knew he’d killed somebody.”

  There was a moment’s silence.

  “What about last night?” Rafe wanted to know.

  “I told you Rodney gotta text. We drove over to Kyle’s place and parked my car, and then we drove Kyle’s truck to Nashville.”

  “Did either of them talk about what was going to happen once you got there?” Mendoza wanted to know.

  “I asked,” Clayton said. “Rodney said we had to pick up the rest of the explosive for Friday.”

  I could see Rafe’s lips tighten, and knew what he was thinking. It was already Thursday morning. If Lance was blowing something up tomorrow, there wasn’t much time left to figure out what it was and stop it.

  “What are they setting up to blow?” he asked Clayton.

  Clayton shook his head. “Dunno. Rodney said I’d find out tomorrow.”

  “So doesn’t Rodney know,” Mendoza asked, “or did he just not want to share it with you because you’re new?”

  “No idea. Him and Kyle could just be minions, running around doing errands for this guy, and he’s keeping it all to himself until it’s time. Or Rodney might know, but he likes yanking my chain.” He shrugged.

  “Did Rodney mention anything about Jennifer Vonderaa’s body?”

  Clayton shook his head. “Not a word. Just that we were there for the Tannerite. That’s all. When we left the truck, he said to grab all the ammonal and load it up so we could get outta there as quick as possible, before anyone saw us.”

  Rafe nodded. Mendoza did, too. “If that’s all, we should probably get you back to the cell.”

  “First,” Clayton said, “tell me what’s gonna happen next.”

  “We’ll talk to Rodney and Kyle,” Mendoza said. “Separately. It’s up to you what you want to do. If we get this guy’s whereabouts out of one of them, your job might be done. We can let them know that you were in violation of your parole and you were taken back to prison.”

  Clayton folded skinny arms over his skinny chest. “How was I in violation of my parole? Tannerite is legal. You can’t arrest any of us for having that. The garage door was open, so we didn’t break in. We didn’t know about the body, and you can’t prove we did.”

  Rafe smirked. I hid a smile, too. Mendoza gave Clayton a look. “Careful there, sport. If you don’t want us to tell your new friends you went back to prison, we won’t.”

  “I wanna see it through,” Clayton said. “If they’re blowing something up tomorrow, I wanna be there to help. I wanna stop it if I can. Don’t take me off the job now.”

  “That’s up to you,” Rafe told him. “You wanna go back in the cell, you go back in the cell.”

  “And make it good,” Mendoza told him, as he opened the door and gestured for Clayton to precede him.

  “Rafe trained me,” Clayton informed Mendoza as he walked past him and into the hallway. “I know how to do my job.”

  The door closed behind them, and Rafe chuckled. And then winced and put a hand to his ribs.

  “Sounds like he’s doing all right,” I said.

  Rafe nodded. “He’s good. And he’s right. We need him to stay in. Rodney and Kyle are more likely to hear what the target is before we figure it out. If Clay’s there, maybe they’ll tell him. They sure as hell ain’t gonna tell us.”

  No, they wouldn’t. At this point, Clayton was our best shot of getting a handle on this before the worst happened.

  “Do you believe that Rodney doesn’t know? Or is he just stringing Clayton along and making himself out to sound special?”

  “Could be either,” Rafe said, leaning against the wall. “If I’m reading this situation right, Lance has an agenda. He’s the one driving the action. But instead of having built himself an army he can use, he’s dealing with a couple of kids who are playing war games, who are doing this because it makes them feel like hot shit. They pick fights with five-year-old girls in restaurants, and get excited about their ‘missions.’” His tone made air quotes around the last word. “They put a box of explosive in front of a house and shot at it to see it blow, for God’s sake. They’re kids. And unless Lance is an idiot, he can see that. He should be able to see it. So it’s very possible he’s keeping those plans close to his vest until the last minute. Because if it came to a real interrogation, I could have the information out of either of’em in two minutes flat.”

  I didn’t doubt it. “Is that what you would do?”

  He nodded. “I’d string’em along, and make’em feel like they mattered, and I’d use’em to do things I didn’t wanna do myself—like go back to the house where I’d killed my girlfriend and dumped her in the freezer to pick up the explosive I was gonna use for whatever my master plan was tomorrow. But I wouldn’t tell’em anything important, and I’d be prepared to do the real work myself.”

  “So this is a lesson in futility.”

  “Pretty much,” Rafe said, and turned to the window as the door into the interrogation room opened. “But it has to be done.”

  I nodded. And turned, too, as Kyle Scoggins walked into the room next door ahead of Mendoza, wrists cuffed in front of him.

  Nineteen

  “Looks about ready to piss his pants,” Rafe said.

  I nodded. Kyle did. Or at least he looked quite nervous, and not at all like the cocky bastard who had whispered racial slurs to Cletus Johnson’s five-year-old and then swaggered out of Beulah’s like he was untouchable.

  He was trying, I’d give him that. He walked in with his head high, and he nudged the chair out from the table with his foot like he couldn’t be bothered to use his—cuffed—hands. And when he sat, he slouched back, trying to look at ease. But I could see his Adam’s apple move when Mendoza took the seat across from him and laid a manila folder on the table, aligning it precisely with the edge.

  Deliberately, he placed a ballpoint pen at a perfect forty-five degree angle to the corner on top of the folder, and then placed a small recorder next to that. Finally, he folded his hands on top of the folder, and eyed Kyle. “I’m Detective Jaime Mendoza. Homicide.”

  Kyle didn’t say anything, but his Adam’s apple moved again.

  “State your name and address for the record,” Mendoza told him.

  Kyle gave his full name—his middle name was Maynard—and an address in Columbia, in a voice that shook a little.

  “First time in an interrogation room?” Mendoza asked him, in a tone like he found it a little bit amusing.

  Kyle shrugged, but it came across more nervous than insolent.

  There was another moment while Mendoza eyed him, and while Kyle fidgeted. Then—

  “Tell me about last night,” Mendoza said.

  “What do you wanna know?” Kyle had to clear his throat before he got the words out.

  “You were found breaking into a house in Bellevue—”

  “We didn’t break in!” Kyle said. “The door was open!”

  “Did you have the homeowner’s permission to come inside?”

  Kyle hesitated.

  “I’m guessing not,” Mendoza said, “since at the time you got there, the homeowner was dead. Who told you the door would be open and you could go in?”

  “Lance told Rodney,” Kyle said, his voice almost inaudible.

  “Speak up for the record, please. Someone told your friend Rodney?”

  Kyle glanced at the recorder. It was the same sort of glance someone might give a snake, or a neo-Nazi. “Lance did.”

  “Is it Lance’s house?”

  “I think it’s his girlfriend’s house,” Kyle said.

  “Lance’s girlfriend is the dead woman in the freezer?”

  Kyle turned pale. “I don’t know.”

  “Have you
ever met Lance’s girlfriend?”

  Kyle shook his head.

  “Out loud, please,” Mendoza reminded him, “for the recorder. Have you ever met Lance’s girlfriend?”

  Kyle swallowed. “I don’t think so.”

  “Did you look in the freezer last night?”

  I wouldn’t have thought Kyle could look much paler than he did, but somehow he managed. “No,” he whispered.

  Mendoza opened his folder and fished out a piece of paper. When he slid it in front of Kyle, I recognized Jennifer Vonderaa’s face, upside down. The angle was wrong for me to be able to tell whether the picture had been taken before death, or after, but judging from Kyle’s expression, she was dead, and her head was resting on a bag of frozen peas. “You ever see her before?”

  “No,” Kyle whispered.

  “You didn’t go there to pick up the body?”

  “No!” Kyle looked like he was about to vomit.

  Rafe made a little sound, halfway between amusement and disgust, and inside the interview room, Mendoza nudged the small trash can under the table in Kyle’s direction, using the tip of his Italian leather shoe. “Use that, if you feel the need.”

  “I’m OK,” Kyle said, although he reached down and pulled the can a little closer. There was no sign left of the cockiness from last month, or even a few minutes ago.

  “If you weren’t there for the body, what did you go there for?”

  “Favor for a friend,” Kyle said.

  “This friend being Lance?”

  Kyle nodded. Mendoza must have eyed the recorder, because Kyle added, “Yes.”

  “Does Lance have a last name?”

  “Doesn’t everyone?”

  I waited. After a second Kyle shriveled under what was undoubtedly a glare from Mendoza. “Sorry,” he muttered.

  “A woman’s dead,” Mendoza informed him. “Your friend Lance might have killed her. It’s not a laughing matter.”

  “No, sir.”

  “And let’s not forget that if I can’t find Lance, you and your friends make pretty good suspects, too. You were found in the house with the body.”