“But if he was standing between you and a bullet,” I said, repeating the same words he’d used earlier, “he might step out of the way.”
He didn’t answer, just shrugged. Although it was answer enough. “Have you talked to Grimaldi about it?” I asked.
“What am I, twelve years old?” He shook his head. “No. I’ll deal with it. I’m prob’ly wrong, anyway. He’s been a cop a long time. It’s in his bones by now. He wouldn’t let a fellow officer down just because he didn’t like him personally.”
Hopefully not. But since there was no point in talking about it, I changed the subject. “Yvonne’s been gone a long time.”
“Just showing off the baby,” Rafe said, and nodded behind me. “Here she is now. Safe and sound.”
She was, cooing in her car seat and looking just as beautiful as always. Yvonne slid the carrier onto the seat next to me, and the two plates with our food in front of us.
“You make beautiful babies,” she told Rafe. “Your daughter was a hit with everyone who saw her. You’re going to have to beat the boys off with a stick when she gets older.”
“If anyone can do it,” I said, “he can.”
Rafe grinned. “She ain’t going on a date till she’s twenty-five. And she’s only dating boys with pickup trucks.”
Pickup trucks? Because…?
It hit me. “No back seat?”
Yvonne was already chortling appreciatively.
“Yes, darlin’,” Rafe said, with a wink at her. “I married a lady.”
“So you did.” Yvonne grinned at me. “Enjoy your food, princess.”
“Thank you,” I said demurely, as I picked up my fork. “I will.”
We were on our way home, replete with food and the cobbler Rafe had insisted on having to finish off the meal, when my phone made a noise. I fished it out of my purse and peered at it while Rafe kept the Chevy going in the direction of home.
“It’s Charlotte. She says there’s another video up.”
He glanced at me. “Of us?”
“Maybe. Probably.” I had clicked the link and was waiting for the video to start playing. “Yes. You and me. Inside… that’s you and me inside Beulah’s.”
Where he was kissing my fingertips and the inside of my wrist, before I had taken my hand away. The heart-eyed emoji were already mounting up.
“She was there,” I said. “Inside the restaurant.”
Rafe nodded, looking faintly amused as the camera zeroed in on his face and stayed there as the video ended. “Looks that way.”
“You don’t suppose Yvonne…?”
“She’s too busy to spend her time following me around to take pictures of me,” Rafe said. “She’s got a business to run.”
After a second, he added, “And she wouldn’t do that to you.”
Good to know. “I’m sure it isn’t Mo. And she—this woman, Jessica Rabbit—was behind me, where she could zoom in your face. You don’t think Tucker…?”
Rafe started laughing. “No, darlin’. I don’t think Sergeant Tucker is stalking me and posting videos of me on social media.”
“It could be some kind of underhanded way of getting you in trouble. You know, make you enough of a public spectacle that Grimaldi won’t want you around because you’re a liability. Because you make the Columbia police department look like a bunch of TV cops, or something.”
“I’m a real cop,” Rafe said. And added, “Or at least I work like a real cop.”
But he looked good enough to play one on TV. I didn’t bother saying it. I had already offended him, it seemed.
The phone dinged again, with another message from Charlotte. I opened it, expecting a comment on the video or a question about what I was planning to get up to with my oh-so-hot husband tonight.
It wasn’t either of those things.
“She says there’s another picture that was just uploaded. Did we do anything else?” I clicked the link. “God, I hope whoever it is, wasn’t close enough to record our conversation.”
We’d been discussing serial murder and confidential information, and Grimaldi would kill me—and probably Rafe—if that conversation was made public. I could see that the idea worried Rafe, too.
And then that concern, and all the others, vanished as I got a look at the still picture that had been uploaded after the video.
A close-up of my daughter, with her glossy curls and big blue eyes and pink rosebud lips, and Yvonne’s hand wrapped around the handle of the baby carrier.
#beautifulbaby, the caption read. Looks just like her daddy!
Twelve
I was flung against the seatbelt and then side to side as Rafe whipped the car around from one direction to the other and floored the gas pedal on his way back to Beulah’s.
“Take it easy,” I told him breathlessly. “I don’t want to die on the way back there.”
He gave me a dark look, but didn’t respond.
I pushed myself upright. “She probably isn’t even there anymore. She would make sure she was long gone before the video posted.”
“She can’t be that long gone,” my husband growled. “It’s only been a couple minutes since we left.”
“Yes. But she probably left before we did.”
“Don’t care,” Rafe said. “I wanna see if anybody knows who she is. I wanna get there before anybody else leaves, so I can talk to them.”
That wasn’t a bad idea, actually. Beulah’s is a small place, and a lot of the customers are regulars. There was a good chance that somebody would know who we were looking for. Yvonne, if no one else. She’d been holding the baby carrier when that picture had been taken.
“I’m glad you’re taking this seriously, anyway,” I told Rafe. And I thought I sounded pretty placid, and not at all accusatory, but he shot me a look.
“If somebody’s acting foolish over me, that’s their business, darlin’. Nothing you or I need to worry about.”
His voice was deathly calm, the tone so chill that it sent a shiver down my spine.
Some of the heat came out, though, when he added, “But when it comes to Carrie, that’s a different story. Nobody threatens my family and walks away.”
“Are you sure it’s a threat?” It felt like one, but I was trying—hard—not to freak out, and to keep an open mind, just in case I was overreacting. It didn’t feel like I was overreacting, but I was doing my best to stay calm. “I mean, there isn’t anything particularly threatening about it. Carrie does look like you.”
“Someone I don’t know gets close enough to our baby to take a picture of her, that’s threat enough.”
He took the turn into the parking lot outside Beulah’s on two wheels and slammed to a stop just at the bottom of the stairs. The car quivered. I did, too.
He pushed his door open. “Stay here.”
Normally, I would have told him that I’m not a dog and he can’t order me to sit and stay, but under the circumstances, I figured he’d get more done on his own, and besides, I didn’t want to remove Carrie from the car. I wanted her safe, cocooned, where I knew no one could get at her. I waited for him to slam the door and then I locked the car from the inside, and watched him take the steps up to Beulah’s front door two at a time. When he wrenched the door open and strode in, like the wrath of God in human form, the look on his face and the tension in his body ought to have been enough to have any evildoers scurrying for cover.
No one did. Or at least nobody came out of the restaurant after he went in, so if our unknown photographer was still in there, she was sticking it out.
I was pretty sure she was gone, though. I wouldn’t have been. And not only that: from where I was sitting, I had a view of the entire parking lot, to the left in front of the building, to the right, beside the building, and the area next to the entrance. There was no small, light-colored compact anywhere.
Unless our unknown stalker had access to more than one car, and if so, all bets were off.
The phone rang, and I took my eyes off the parkin
g lot, and the front door, to see who it was. It came as no surprise that it was Charlotte. “Are you OK?” she wanted to know.
I told her where I was and what I was doing. “Rafe’s inside, putting the fear of God into whoever is left in there. I don’t think the person who took the picture is still inside, but if anyone knows who she is, he’ll get it out of them.”
Charlotte made an agreeing sort of noise. She knows how scary Rafe can be when he puts his mind to it, and besides, Yvonne probably wouldn’t be OK with this either, and would put her own weight behind his to get whoever knew something to spill.
“Are you OK, though?” Charlotte asked again.
“I’m…” I hesitated. “I’m not sure what I am. It was frustrating and a little funny when it was Rafe getting the attention. I only got worried because of Elspeth, and I didn’t worry much, because I know he can take care of himself. I figured, if this person went around the bend and came after me, I’d deal with it. But Carrie…”
“She’s a baby,” Charlotte said, stating the obvious.
Yes. She was. And she was my baby. I wasn’t any more inclined than Rafe to sit back and let anyone threaten her. My first instinct hadn’t been to go on the warpath and flex my muscles and yell at anyone, though. What I did first, was to lock all the doors and hunker down, where I could keep my eye on her.
Some sort of ancestral memory thing, probably. The man goes out and beats his chest, killing the mammoth and dragging it home, and the woman tends the home fires and the babies, and beats off any predators that happen by with a stick.
The door to Beulah’s opened, and Rafe came out, with Yvonne right behind. For a second it looked like she was escorting him out, sort of forcibly. But as he stepped down to the ground and turned to talk to her, I could see that she looked distraught, not angry. And while Rafe was still tense, his body had lost that ‘touch me and I’ll flick you into next year’ brittleness it had had when he bounded up the steps.
“He’s coming,” I told Charlotte. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“I’ll pick you up at seven-thirty,” Charlotte corrected. “We’ll get to the police station early and keep watch. And we won’t use your car, since she’s seen it.”
Good idea. “Are you sure you have time?”
“I have nothing but time,” Charlotte said expansively. “When are we putting the house back on the market?”
Oh. That had totally slipped my mind in everything else that had gone on this afternoon and evening. “As soon as I get the photographs. Maybe tomorrow.”
“Open house again on Sunday?”
Why not? “Sure,” I said. “It’ll give me something to do other than worry about serial killers and stalkers. And now I really have to go. He’s coming toward the car.”
“See you in the morning,” Charlotte said and hung up. I dropped the phone back into the console in time to unlock the doors before Rafe started yanking on the handle.
He slid behind the wheel with an irritated grunt, and a look into the back seat at the baby. She was still there, of course, and no reason he’d have supposed otherwise, since I’d been out here with her since he left the car, but I guess he wanted to reassure himself she was still present and accounted for.
“Anybody hurts her,” he informed me, “I’m tearing them limb from limb.”
No question. “I’ll help you.” I don’t really have limb-tearing in me the rest of the time, but I’d realized that when it came to my daughter, there wasn’t much I wouldn’t do.
Rafe smiled faintly, and some of the tension left his face. He leaned his head against the seat and closed his eyes. “Christ. I went in there looking to kill somebody.”
I was well aware of that. I’d seen his face. “She wasn’t there, right?”
He shook his head. “And nobody could identify her, either. Not a regular, they said. Nothing special. She came in a little after we did, so I guess she musta followed us there.”
Guess so. All the way from the police station to Aunt Regina’s house and back to Beulah’s. “How come you didn’t notice her?”
“No idea,” Rafe said. “I usually keep track of stuff like that. Maybe I’m losing my edge.”
Maybe. “Is there any reason I would need to call Aunt Regina and make sure she’s all right?”
“I don’t think so.” He finally turned the key in the ignition and brought the car to life. “She’s got no reason to be interested in your aunt.”
No. Whereas Carrie… “That might not have been a threat, you know. It probably wasn’t. She just had a chance to take a picture of your baby and post it online. And she does look like you. Carrie does. That might be all it is.”
“Prob’ly is all it is,” Rafe nodded, as he took the turn onto the Columbia Highway with a lot less panache than he’d taken the turn into the parking lot ten minutes earlier. “No reason to assume the worst. Just because she thinks our baby’s beautiful and looks like me, don’t mean she’s gonna want her. Or gonna wanna hurt you to get at her.”
That second idea hadn’t occurred to me yet, in the panic over Carrie. Now it did. And Rafe let me sit with it for a few seconds longer than strictly necessary before he added, “But no reason to assume good intent, either. Better safe than sorry and all that.”
“I’ll be careful,” I said.
He nodded. “I want you to promise me you won’t go nowhere alone for the next few days. Take Charlotte with you, or your mama, or Dix or Darcy. And keep Pearl by you when you’re home alone. Make sure all the doors are locked and don’t open’em to strangers.”
I promised I wouldn’t, even as I hated the idea of becoming a prisoner in my own home. “Just a few days?”
“I don’t imagine it’s gonna take much more time than that to figure out who this is and what her intentions are,” Rafe said. “You said Vasim was gonna work on the video?”
“Officer Rehman? Yes. He thought he might be able to make out at least part of the license plate. And if we have that, we can probably track her down.”
“Unless she’s using someone else’s plate.”
Yes. But— “Surely that isn’t something that occurs to normal people? If she’s truly just someone with a crush on you who’s following you around because she thinks you’re hot, she wouldn’t really think about trying to hide her identity, would she?”
“Depends,” Rafe said, slowing the car down as we approached the driveway for the mansion, “on what her end goal is. If she just wants to look at me, she’ll probl’ly get tired of it sooner or later.”
I hadn’t. And I couldn’t really imagine anyone else getting tired of looking at him, either. But it was a nice idea. “She knows you’re married. And that we have a baby. That doesn’t seem to have cooled her interest any.”
“It’s too soon to say that,” Rafe said and pulled the car to a stop at the bottom of the steps. “You OK with me parking here for the night?”
“It’s your car,” I said, “you can do what you want. Just be careful getting out.”
He cut the engine and glanced at me. “She ain’t gonna shoot me. She prob’ly don’t even own a gun.”
Probably not. It was the ‘probably’ part that worried me. This was the sticks, and all sorts of people have guns here.
“You wait for me to get there before getting out, though.” He opened his door and slid down before I could answer. I held my breath—it wasn’t that long ago that he’d done this very thing one night: stopped in front of the steps and been taken down by a rifle shot from across the fields—but tonight, nothing happened. He slammed the door and jogged around the car and pulled my door open. “C’mon.”
He handed me out, and then reached in for Carrie and the seat. A few seconds later, we were on our way up the stairs to the front door. He stayed between me and danger every step of the way. I let him unlock the door while I turned around and surveyed what I could of the area in front of the mansion over his shoulder.
Nothing stirred, and if anyone was looking at us—you
know that prickly feeling you get sometimes?—I couldn’t tell.
“Go on,” Rafe told me, and gave me a nudge across the threshold. I scrambled inside, and turned to shut the door behind him after he had moved Carrie to safety inside the foyer. Down the darkened hallway, the scrabbling coming toward us was Pearl’s nail clicking on the hardwood floors.
“This is crazy,” I said. “Hello, Pearl. Yes, I know you have to go outside, sweetheart. Just let me—”
“I’ll do it,” Rafe said and turned back to the door.
“Go out the back,” I told him. “Less chance anyone’s going to take a potshot at you.”
“This woman don’t want me dead,” Rafe said, but he snapped his fingers at Pearl and headed down the hallway toward the kitchen. She followed, prancing excitedly and getting in his way. His voice faded as he moved away. “Take the baby upstairs. I’ll be there in a minute.”
A bit longer than that, if I were any judge. But I gathered the carrier, the diaper bag, and the baby, and hauled them all up the central staircase to the second floor. I was in the process of changing Carrie’s diaper and wrestling her into her pink pajamas when he stuck his head through the door. “I’m gonna rinse off.”
Pearl was with him, tongue lolling in a canine grin. She’d spent her formative years chained under a camper up on the Devil’s Backbone, and while she’s gotten used to, and pretty happy about, living inside, she isn’t all that keen on those things called stairs. In this case, Rafe must have cajoled her upstairs with a doggie biscuit, because it was still in his hand.
“Here you go.”
He handed it over. Pearl took it daintily and then crunched into it. I had my mouth open to protest—“Not in the nursery!”—but it was already too late. Crumbs scattered on the floor, and Pearl proceeded to demolish her bone, stubby tail wagging. Rafe headed for the bathroom.
By the time he came out, I had put Carrie on the floor for some tummy time. She’s spent a large part of the evening cooped up in her seat, and it’s good for her to move around. Since she’d figured out how to roll over once, she was trying to do it again, her small, pink body rocking back and forth with the effort. Pearl had licked up the remaining crumbs from the floor and was prone across the threshold with her big head on her paws, watching Carrie intently. I was always a little bit worried that Pearl would see Carrie as prey, but so far she seemed clear on the fact that Carrie was human, and part of the family, and not a chew toy to be demolished. I hovered pretty close, though, I’ll admit that.
Survival Clause: A Savannah Martin Novel (Savannah Martin Mysteries Book 20) Page 14