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

by Jenna Bennett

  “Here’s something.” Rehman stopped the video that was scrolling and rewound it. “This is the two of you… um…”

  Kissing. I nodded.

  “This is the camera above the front door.”

  He switched screens. “This is the one on the left corner of the building. Right hand from where we’re sitting now.”

  I nodded. The angle of the picture was different. Rafe and I were much farther away, off on the edge of the screen, and the rest of the shot was taken up by the street in front of the police station, the sidewalk across the street, the bottom halves of the buildings over there, and some parked cars.

  “This car—” Rehman pointed to one of them, “pulled up during the minute or two you were inside. Here you are—”

  He scrolled farther back, and showed me myself chugging up the hill and parking in front of the police station, then grabbing Carrie from the backseat and hauling her and her carrier up the steps to the front door and through. No sooner had I disappeared inside—the door hadn’t completely closed behind me yet—before a small, light-colored compact came into view on the other side of the screen. It zipped into a parking space on the other side of the street, and stopped. I kept watching, but nothing happened. Nobody opened the door and got out. Whoever was inside stayed in their seat—or perhaps moved around the interior of the car—but didn’t leave the vehicle.

  My eyes narrowed. “That’s suspicious.”

  Rehman didn’t answer, just kept watching.

  The next thing that happened, other than that a car or two passed by, slowly, was that the front door of the police station opened again. I came through, followed by Rafe. He walked me to the Volvo and put the car seat with Carrie into the rear of the car. Then he kissed me.

  “Keep your eye on the other car,” Rehman said softly. This time he didn’t blush. I guess repeated exposure to the clip had boosted his immunity, or maybe he was just too focused on what he was doing. He rewound again, to where Rafe was coming out the door. “Look.” He pointed to the other car. “The window’s going down.”

  It was. Lowering smoothly. I could see the outline of a phone appearing in the gap.

  “Can you zoom in on that?”

  “I can try,” Rehman said, “but it’s going to pixelate badly.”

  He tried, and it pixelated badly, the image going more and more grainy the closer he got to it. “I can play with it,” he said, dark eyes fastened on the screen. “See if I can clean it up a little. But it’s dark in there.”

  It was dark inside the car. The windows were tinted—I was pretty sure this was the same car I had followed out of downtown earlier; the driver must have circled around, back to the police station. Very cunning behavior. Quick thinking, too.

  And it had certainly resulted in a memorable video.

  At any rate, even if Rehman could sharpen the image enough, there were no guarantees that we’d be able to see whoever was inside the car. Not with the dark windows, and the way they kept the light from penetrating the interior.

  “Keep the video running, please. The car has to pull out eventually. When that happens, maybe we can see the license plate.”

  Rehman hit the button and let the video scroll. On the tiny screen, Rafe finished kissing me, and bounded up the steps to the police station again. The Volvo stayed still while I gathered myself. So did the little compact. The Volvo pulled out, presenting a nice, clear view of the rear license plate to the camera, and rolled off down the hill, past the compact. The car window was closed again now, I saw.

  The Volvo disappeared out of the frame. The compact stayed for another minute—the seconds ticked by as Rehman and I both stared at it, unblinking—before it also moved. But instead of following me, it came toward the camera.

  “I’m pretty sure that’s the same car I followed this morning,” I said, as it rolled past the police station. “If you switch to the camera on the other side, we might get lucky and see the license plate.”

  Rehman manipulated the buttons. As the compact disappeared out of sight on one side of the screen, it jumped back, disconcertingly, on the other. The license plate was visible, but hard to read. It was some sort of specialty plate, with a landscape of colored sky and dark hills, and the black silhouette of some kind of animal on one side. The black numbers of the plate were difficult to make out against the darkness of the bottom half of the plate.

  “That’s a three,” I said, “or an eight, or a nine…”

  “Maybe an O.”

  Could be an O. Or a Q. Or anything else with a round top. Like an S or even a C or G.

  “I’ll play with it,” Rehman said again, as the compact zoomed out of sight around the corner.

  I sat back. “I’d appreciate that. This woman—this person—makes me nervous.”

  Rehman nodded. “We don’t want another situation like the one last month.”

  No, we didn’t. “Thank you,” I told him, and gathered up my bag and my baby. “I should go find Grimaldi.”

  “Straight back to the end of the hall.” He gestured to the door.

  I told him thanks, and headed out, leaving him to pore over the video footage.

  At the end of the hallway, Grimaldi was sitting behind her desk peering at the computer. I put Carrie’s seat on the floor and made myself comfortable in one of the visitor’s chairs. “Anything?”

  “A few details.” She dragged her eyes from the monitor and leaned back. “You?”

  “We found footage of someone filming,” I said. “But the license plate was hard to make out. Officer Rehman said he’d play with it and see if he could make it any sharper.”

  Grimaldi nodded. “What kind of car?”

  “Some sort of light-colored small one.” I hadn’t been paying enough attention, to be honest. Too intent on making out the plate to focus on the insignia. “Pretty sure it was the same one I followed down the hill this morning. She must have doubled back and come in the other way.”

  Grimaldi nodded.

  “I think it was a Japanese import. But whether it was a Toyota or Honda or Nissan or Mazda, I couldn’t tell you. They all look very much the same to me.”

  “Rehman’ll figure it out,” Grimaldi said.

  I hoped so. “What about you? What did you discover?”

  “Not much,” Grimaldi said. “I’m still waiting for Frankie Matlock’s incarceration record. I need it to be pretty detailed—if he had twenty-four hours furlough at any point in the past sixteen years to go to his grandmother’s funeral, I need to know about it—so it won’t be immediate.”

  Understood. “Anything else?”

  “Still tracking down Jurgensson,” Grimaldi said, “but I have narrowed it down to the single year he spent here.”

  “Did that coincide with any of Laura Lee’s years at Columbia High?”

  “As a matter of fact,” Grimaldi said, “he was there her junior year.”

  “When she was sixteen.”

  Grimaldi nodded. “No reason to think she was the student he misbehaved with any more than anyone else, though. Whoever it was didn’t file a police report, so there’s no official record one way or the other.”

  “But it could have been Laura Lee.”

  “Could have,” Grimaldi said. “She was a student there, so that would have given him opportunity. That doesn’t mean it was her. There were a lot of other kids at Columbia High that year, too. I’ll have to find someone who remembers, who’s willing to talk.”

  It made a nice, little syllogism, though. If syllogism was the word I was looking for. If Mr. Jurgensson had had an affair with a student and lost his job over it, it had probably destroyed his career. No other school was likely to hire him after that. And if he’d lost not only that particular job, but his ability to find another, he might have held a grudge. And over the next decade and a half, that grudge could have turned to obsession. Lacking the means to make a living in his chosen profession, he might have taken a job driving trucks. And sixteen years later, if he came acros
s Laura Lee again, slinging hash and selling her body at the truck stop in Columbia, things might have boiled over. And then, after he killed her in a fit of lunacy, he went on to recreate that murder again and again, marking each victim with a Latin numeral.

  It sounded like something that belonged on Dateline or 48 Hours, all right.

  I shook myself, since the thought was creepy. “Do you know where he is now?”

  “I’m still looking,” Grimaldi said. “There’s no sign of him. His social security number hasn’t paid taxes since he taught at Columbia High, but there’s also no death certificate on file anywhere. Or not one I’ve found so far.”

  “So he’s either in a shallow grave somewhere, and hasn’t been found—or identified—or he’s living and working under someone else’s name.”

  “Or under the table,” Grimaldi said. “Or he’s made it across the border to Mexico, and is living the high life, drinking tequila on the beach and teaching people to surf.”

  I suppose. “Any idea which scenario is more likely?”

  “No,” Grimaldi said. “But once I figure out who the girl was—or boy—I’ll hopefully be able to eliminate at least the possibility that he’s rotting in a shallow grave somewhere.”

  Because if he was dead, it was likely related to the statutory rape he’d committed here in Columbia, and if so, the girl’s—or boy’s—family hit the top of the suspect list.

  I tilted my head to look at her. “Do you feel like we’re getting anywhere? Or just turning over rocks, looking for slimy things to crawl out?”

  “A lot of police work is turning over rocks and looking for slimy things,” Grimaldi said. “But these are two reasonably strong strings to pull. All in all, I think we’re making progress.”

  Good to know. “Any idea when Rafe is expected back?”

  “I imagine it won’t be long,” Grimaldi said, with a glance at the clock. “He’s been gone all afternoon.”

  She glanced at the door. “In fact…”

  Yes, I heard him, too. And so did Carrie, it seemed. She started gurgling louder and kicking her feet harder. When the half-open door opened further, with a knock that was perfunctory at best, my daughter squealed at the sight of her daddy.

  “Hi there, pretty girl.” He bent and tickled her feet before turning to me. “Didn’t expect to see you here.”

  “Grimaldi and I have been hanging out,” I said, and tilted my head back for the quick kiss he dropped on my upturned mouth.

  Not until all that was done, did Rafe greet his boss. And not in a very subservient manner, either. “What are you getting up to with my wife?”

  “We’ve been to Damascus and Columbia High.” Grimaldi nodded him into the second chair in front of the desk. “This guy’s first victim was local. A Damascus woman who was picked up at the same truck stop where the latest victim was dumped. We—” She glanced at me, “thought we’d do some digging into the cold case.”

  Rafe leaned back on the uncomfortable chair. I guess Grimaldi had picked them so people wouldn’t linger long. “Any luck?”

  Grimaldi updated him on Frankie Matlock and Mr. Jurgensson. “Laura Lee didn’t take Latin, and there’s nothing to indicate she was the student he misbehaved with. But there’s no reason she couldn’t be, either. They were there the same year.”

  Rafe nodded. “Even if she was, that don’t mean nothing. She could have, like you said, misbehaved with a teacher when she was sixteen, and gotten killed when she was thirty-three, and there’s no connection.”

  “Of course,” Grimaldi said. “What’s new on your end?”

  “Yung’s a pain in the—” He glanced at me and changed what he’d been about to say to, “butt.”

  “It was probably disappointing to her when you turned out to be a hero and not a criminal,” I said.

  He grinned in my direction. “Not so much a hero. But I’m sure she was looking forward to catching me red-handed. Too bad.”

  “Did she give you a hard time?” Grimaldi wanted to know, not that there was much she could do about it if Agent Yung was. Yung didn’t work for Grimaldi and wouldn’t be open to taking orders or suggestions from that quarter.

  “Nothing I couldn’t handle. She tried to get something going with Bob—him being a good old Southern boy and all—but he wasn’t having it.”

  I hid a smile. No, acting the hotshot FBI agent with the sheriff wouldn’t have won her many points. He isn’t a Southern bumpkin and wouldn’t have agreed to play one for her. He is a gentleman, though, so I imagined he’d probably been more pleasant than perhaps she deserved.

  “Once we got that straightened out,” Rafe added, “she consented to give us all a presentation of the case as a whole, from Victim One down through the line. She presented the FBI profile—”

  Grimaldi arched her brows, and he shook his head. “Nothing we didn’t expect. Most likely male, most likely white, most likely between fifty and fifty-five, but could be younger or older by a decade or more. Most likely a long haul trucker, but don’t disregard other folks who move up and down the interstate—”

  “Who else moves up and down the interstate?” I injected, and they both glanced at me. Down in the car seat, Carrie kept gurgling and trying to chew on her toes. I deduced she’d probably start asking for food soon. She was getting pretty close to the age when we could start feeding her solids—or semi-solids—and that would help her stay full longer, and would keep me from having to nurse every couple hours around the clock.

  “Bus drivers,” Rafe said, and Grimaldi added, “But it’s hard to find the time to murder women when you’ve got a schedule and a bus full of passengers to get somewhere on time.”

  Rafe nodded. “Could just be somebody who lives in Mobile but has family in Ann Arbor, and a couple times a year he makes the trek to see his grandma.”

  Could be. The murders were infrequent enough that that wasn’t a bad idea. “How do we find him if that’s the case?”

  Grimaldi made a face. “It’s harder. But if that’s the case, he’s someone who’d stand out at a truck stop, so someone might have noticed him.”

  Maybe.

  She turned to Rafe. “Any luck on the surveillance videos?”

  “Nothing out of the ordinary,” Rafe told her. “One of Bob’s guys has been over every second of the video, for several hours before the body was discovered, and there’s nothing to see. Just the usual trucks coming and going. No passenger cars going past the camera. But if this guy routinely drives this route, he’d most likely know where the cameras are located, and be able to avoid them.”

  Grimaldi sighed.

  “We’re trying to trace as many of the trucks as we can,” Rafe added. “Most are marked with a company name on the cab or the cargo. Bob’s got a couple deputies on it, and Yung offered some FBI grunts if we need more help.”

  Grimaldi nodded. “But if this guy is a truck driver, and he’s familiar with the truck stop, he’d make sure he wasn’t caught on camera.”

  “The camera’s hard to avoid if you’re driving an eighteen-wheeler,” Rafe answered. “A small passenger car, you can maybe skim underneath. But not a full size truck. If he was there—and he was—we most likely have footage of him.”

  “So now all we—” Grimaldi caught herself, “all you have to do, is identify all the trucks and all the drivers, and then determine which of them had the opportunity—over the past sixteen years—to commit eighteen murders.”

  “If it was easy,” Rafe said, “everybody’d be doing it.”

  That got a smile, at any rate. But I got the impression that Grimaldi was feeling overwhelmed with the task she had set herself.

  “Where do we start tomorrow morning?” I asked, to take her mind off the enormity of the job and put it back on the individual steps we, and Rafe, and Agent Yung and Sheriff Satterfield, would have to take, to figure out who the killer was, and catch him.

  She shook herself, more of a mental shake than a physical one. “You want to come with me?”
/>
  “I thought we were a team,” I said. “You, me, and Carrie.”

  She smiled. It was faint, but there. “I’ll come pick you up. Nine?”

  Nine would be fine. It was a Saturday, but with the current case, and Agent Yung in town snapping the whip, I was sure Rafe would have to work. Without Grimaldi, I’d just be sitting there by myself all day.

  “Anything you need me to do overnight? Anyone I need to talk to?”

  She hesitated. “I can do it myself…”

  “But?”

  “If Laura Lee was thirty-three sixteen years ago, and left high school fifteen years before that, she’d be around fifty now. A little too young for your mother—”

  “My mother grew up in Georgia, anyway,” I said. “She’s one of the Georgia Calverts.”

  Grimaldi gave me a sardonic look, and Rafe chuckled. I blushed. “Yes, that’s too young for my mother. She’s almost sixty. Audrey’s sixty-one. So was my dad. And my aunt Regina is a few years older. But she works for the local paper. She might have taken an interest in the case back when it happened. I can check with her whether she remembers anything.”

  “I’d appreciate it,” Grimaldi said formally.

  “Don’t mention it.” I grabbed the diaper bag, Rafe grabbed the baby, and we headed out.

  Ten

  My aunt and uncle live in a small, pink Victorian cottage in the center of Sweetwater, just a block or two from the Albertsons, and about the same from the love nest Mother shares with the sheriff.

  Aunt Regina is my father’s sister, a couple of years older, and she’s the gossip columnist for the local paper, the Sweetwater Reporter. It’s more make-work than anything else, I guess, or at least it doesn’t pay her a living wage, but Uncle Sid had a good job until he retired at sixty-two, so they don’t need, and never did need, Aunt Regina’s salary. Now, Uncle Sid spends his time golfing, while Aunt Regina does what she’s always done, and sticks her nose into other people’s business, for pay.