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

by Jenna Bennett

  Rafe leaned a shoulder in the doorway and watched. “She’s gonna do it again.”

  I nodded. She probably was. “You look better.” And not just physically, although he did look quite nice, in faded jeans and a comfortably soft T-shirt that molded his upper body, with his feet bare and moisture still clinging to the roots of his hair. But the shower had beaten some of the tension from his face and body, too. He looked more relaxed, not so braced for battle.

  He shrugged. “We’re home and safe. I guess that helps.”

  Yes, it did. “How long do you expect it’ll take to find this person and stop her?”

  “Not long,” Rafe said. “I just called Vasim—”

  “At home?”

  “He’s still at the police station,” Rafe said. “He’s on second shift this week. Gets off at eleven.”

  Ah. “And did he have anything to report?”

  “No,” Rafe said, “but I lit a fire under his ass so he can get me something soon.”

  Lovely. “He’s doing us a favor, you know. He doesn’t have to spend his time doing this. It isn’t his job.”

  “It is now,” Rafe said. “Tammy’s making it Vasim’s mission in life to get that license plate. And he’s getting paid, remember.”

  I remembered. But still. “You were nice to him, weren’t you?”

  “I’m always nice,” Rafe said, with blatant disregard for the truth. He had absolutely no reason not to be nice to Officer Rehman, though, so if he said he had been, he probably had. “You ready for bed?”

  I wasn’t, particularly. It was a little earlier than usual. But I recognized the gleam in his eyes, so I told him, “Just let me feed the baby. I’ll be in in a few minutes.”

  “I’ll be waiting,” he told me, and pushed off from the door jamb. “Don’t linger.”

  No. I plucked Carrie from the floor and headed for the rocking chair in the corner so I could get her taken care of and get to my husband’s needs as quickly as possible.

  Charlotte picked me up bright and early the next morning, and by the time Rafe pulled up to the front of the police station, we were parked nearby, keeping watch.

  There was no sign of the compact from yesterday. “Maybe she knows you spotted her and she’s using another car,” Charlotte suggested.

  I nodded. “Maybe. Although she came back after I followed her out of town yesterday morning. That’s when the video of Rafe kissing me was taken. After I had already followed her car down the street and around the corner. If she’d come back then, why wouldn’t she do it now?”

  “Maybe she figured you wouldn’t think she’d be back yesterday?” Charlotte said. “Maybe she thought it would be safe to double back because you wouldn’t be on the lookout because you’d already run her off?”

  Maybe. “There he is.” I gestured to the Chevy that pulled past us and to a stop outside the police station. A second passed and Rafe got out. Like last time, he stood for a few seconds and looked around, and like yesterday, I knew that he spotted us. Like yesterday, he didn’t give any indication of it. After a moment, he headed up the stairs and into the building. Unlike the first morning, no one called out to him today.

  “Yesterday,” I told Charlotte, “she was parked up there and left this way. But when Vasim ran the video footage for later, after she came back, she was parked down on this side of the hill, and drove up onto the square and away in the other direction.”

  “Maybe she knew you were here,” Charlotte suggested, “and decided to draw you away the wrong way.”

  Possible. “In that case, she lives up on the north side of Columbia.”

  “Or farther north.”

  I nodded. “But probably not too far. She’s around this area too much to be driving in. If she’s outside the police station before eight in the morning, and at Beulah’s, on the south side of Columbia, at eight at night, she probably doesn’t live in Franklin or Nashville.”

  “No,” Charlotte admitted. “Although she could work here and live somewhere else. Did you get a good enough look at the license plate to tell whether it was local?”

  I hadn’t. Or rather, I hadn’t looked. I’d been focused on making out the numbers. So had Vasim, I assumed. Neither one of us had commented on whether the plate was from Maury County or elsewhere. I’m not sure we would have been able to tell. “Maybe Vasim noticed.”

  “Do you want to go ask him?”

  “He worked second shift yesterday,” I said. “Three to eleven. I’m sure he isn’t back yet.”

  Charlotte shrugged. “Well, I don’t see anything moving around.”

  I didn’t, either. The small, pale car was nowhere in sight. “I guess we go home.”

  Charlotte put the hybrid in gear and we rolled backwards out of the parking space. “Maybe she has something else to do on Saturday mornings.”

  Maybe so. Or maybe she just wasn’t out of bed yet. But I had better things to do than to stalk my own husband in the event that she’d show up. “Just take me home. Maybe the photographs have arrived, and I can get the listing up and promote the open house for tomorrow.”

  “Works for me,” Charlotte said happily and headed up the hill toward the courthouse to circle around and go back home.

  We were halfway around when I looked out the window and squealed. “Stop! There! You see that?”

  It was a small, tan car with a Smoky Mountains license plate—the purple mountains, orange sky, and black bear I had seen in black and white in the video yesterday—and it was parked on the opposite side of the courthouse from the police station. “That’s it. I’m sure it is. Yes… I can see the Mardi Gras beads around the mirror!”

  The hybrid kept going, though, and Charlotte said tensely, “I can’t stop. There’s a car behind us. And he’s in a hurry.”

  I glanced in the mirror. There was a car behind us, or more accurately a truck. And it was so close to the hybrid’s bumper that all I could see of it was the grill and the top of the hood. If the guy behind the wheel was impatient—and it had to be a guy; the truck had testosterone written all over it—I had to take Charlotte’s word for it.

  “We’ll go around,” she said, without slowing down. “It’ll only take a minute to circle the courthouse. Just keep your hair on.”

  My hair was in no danger of going anywhere. My butt was, though, or would have been, if she’d slowed down long enough to allow me to jump out. She didn’t, so I kept an eye on the quarry in the side mirror until we’d circled too far for me to be able to see the tan car anymore. And then I turned to Charlotte. “Hurry up. By the time we get around to the other side, she might be gone.”

  “The square isn’t that big,” Charlotte said, her hands tight on the wheel. “And this guy behind me is making me nervous. I keep expecting him to beep at me so I’ll go faster. Look, there’s an empty parking spot. Want me to pull in?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Charlotte turned the wheel, and the truck behind us hit the back corner of the hybrid and knocked us a good ten feet sideways. It would have been farther if Mrs. Albertson’s car hadn’t hit the car parked next to the empty spot and been forced to a stop. Charlotte and I both squealed, with the first impact and the second, and once we came to a quivering stop, Carrie let out the scream that had been building in her little lungs.

  “Oh, God.” I fumbled for my seatbelt, only faintly aware that my hands were shaking and my neck hurt.

  The truck stopped behind us, and a large and angry man jumped down from the cab. “What the bleep bleep bleep…!”

  I left Charlotte to deal with him, and tuned out as I pushed my own door open, and then took the couple of wobbly steps to the back door—it was crunched in; Mrs. Albertson wasn’t going to be happy about that—and wrenched at the handle.

  At first it wouldn’t open, and I felt panic rising in my chest. I knew nothing was likely to be wrong with Carrie. Nobody who could scream like that could have anything seriously wrong with them. But we’d been in a (minor) accident, and she was back ther
e, and the door wouldn’t open, and I couldn’t get to her… and then I realized that the reason the door hadn’t opened under all my frantic yanking was because the mechanism for the lock must have been impacted by the… well, the impact of the truck, and when I snaked my arm through the front opening and pulled the button up manually, the door opened, and I was able to grab to Carrie and lift her out of the seat and cradle her against my chest and see for myself that she was all right.

  My pulse quieted after that, and so did her screams. My heart slowed to a rate that wasn’t likely to throw me into cardiac arrest, and I was able to look across the roof of the hybrid and figure out what was going on with Charlotte.

  The driver of the truck had stopped berating her while I’d worked on getting Carrie out of the back seat, and now he was standing, hands on hips, scowling down at her. At Charlotte. “Now listen here, young lady—!”

  “I am not,” Charlotte informed him, through gritted teeth, “a young lady, and if you don’t stop talking to me like that, I will prove it.”

  I smirked, and then did my best to hide it. She wouldn’t appreciate me laughing at her attempt to sound fierce.

  By now, people—the few who were abroad at this time of the morning—had started coming out of the various shops and offices around Main Street. Several of them had paper cups of coffee in their hands from the coffee shop on the corner. And I recognized a woman I’d spoken to briefly last spring, a friendly lady named Becky who worked at the tourist office on the other side of the square. She didn’t seem to recognize me, though, just hurried over to where Charlotte was sitting, still in the front seat of the hybrid. “Are you all right, honey? Do you need an ambulance?”

  And someone must have called the police. Since they were so close, several of them were on their way up the hill almost before the hybrid had come to a standstill. One of them must have recognized me and notified Rafe, because when I turned, there he was.

  “You all right, darlin’?” His eyes were intent on my face.

  “Fine,” I said. My teeth were still chattering, so I made an effort to breathe deeply. “We’re both fine.”

  Carrie had gone from shrill shrieks to sobs during the minute I’d been holding her, and now the sobbing turned to delight at the sight of her father.

  “Hey, pretty girl.” He stroked her cheek. Tears were still stuck in her eyelashes, but that was long forgotten in her excitement to see her daddy. He chuckled. “C’mere, sugar. Daddy’ll hold you.”

  He plucked her out of my arms and cradled her in the crook of one arm while he tickled her tummy with the other. She giggled.

  “There goes every ovary on the town square,” I muttered, working the kinks out of my neck.

  He gave me a jaundiced look, and then a more concerned one. “Neck all right?”

  “Fine. We were barely moving when he hit us. I’m just stiff.”

  He nodded. “The car looks all right. Gonna need a little body work, but it don’t look too bad.”

  No. Some of the metal had crumpled, but it wasn’t anything to worry about. The car on the other side of the hybrid, the one that had stopped our passage, had gotten off with a few minor scratches. And the truck, of course, was unharmed. On the other side of the car, Charlotte and the other two drivers were exchanging insurance information under the watchful eye of a couple of uniformed officers. It was amazing how quickly the guy from the truck had calmed down once the police showed up on the scene.

  “Go on home,” Rafe told me when that was taken care of. Most of the bystanders had disbursed by then, and so had most of the cops. The driver of the truck climbed back into the cab, and as we stood there, the engine came on with a roar. We watched as he crept around the rear of the hybrid and from there, around the courthouse. “Go home and relax. Take care of yourself and Carrie.”

  I nodded. “That’s the plan. Although I forgot to tell you… I think Jessica Rabbit’s car is sitting on the other side of the square.” Or was, before all this happened. “We were just about to park and get out and take a look when this happened.”

  “Over there?” He glanced past the courthouse.

  I nodded. “Small, tan compact with a Smoky Mountains license plate.”

  “D’you happen to write down the license plate?”

  I hadn’t, of course.

  “Here.” He handed me the baby. She protested at being dumped by her daddy, but by then he was already gone, jogging across the square toward the other side of the courthouse.

  I spent the time while he was gone getting Carrie back into the hybrid and strapped in. Charlotte arranged herself behind the wheel, not without a grimace. “I’m not looking forward to explaining this to my mother.”

  No, I wouldn’t be either, if it had been Mother’s Cadillac getting creamed. “It wasn’t your fault. The guy in the truck acknowledged that he’d been following too closely, didn’t he? I mean, he was.”

  Charlotte nodded. “Get in. What are you waiting for?”

  “Rafe,” I said. “He went across the square to look at the car.” There was no need to specify which car. “Here he comes now.”

  And he wasn’t looking particularly happy. I knew, before he stopped beside me, what he was going to say. “It ain’t there anymore.”

  No, of course it wasn’t. “Maybe my subconscious noticed the license plate. Maybe hypnosis would work.” A hot bath, lots of bubbles, candles and soft music…

  “Sounds like a plan.” He dropped a kiss on my mouth before helping me into the car. “Drive carefully.”

  Charlotte assured him that she planned to, and we rolled off down the hill under the Martin & Vaughan mural toward home.

  We were halfway there when Charlotte’s phone signaled an incoming message. She glanced at it. “There’s a new video up.”

  Of course there was. “I’ll look.”

  I pulled the phone toward me and pushed the appropriate buttons. In the backseat, Carrie cooed, the trauma of being in a (very minor) car accident already forgotten.

  The video started playing, and I sighed.

  “What?” Charlotte asked.

  “She was there. Couldn’t have been more than ten or fifteen feet away from us.” I showed her the screen, where Rafe had just plucked Carrie out of my arms and was cradling her. “I was too shook up to realize it, I guess. It didn’t even cross my mind to scan the crowd for anyone filming.”

  “Mine, either,” Charlotte said. “What are you going to do?”

  “Go home, send it to Rafe, and let him and Vasim Rehman worry about it.” I shut the phone off with an irritated click and handed it back to her. “I’ve got a job of my own to do. I’m going to upload the new listing with the new photographs and schedule an open house for tomorrow. And let the police deal with the stalkers and serial killers.”

  “Works for me,” Charlotte said, and turned the hybrid in the direction of Sweetwater.

  Thirteen

  She dropped me at home, and I spent the next hour or two doing what I’d said I’d do: track down the new photographs, create a new home listing, and scheduling the open house. While I did all that, Pearl snored on her pillow and Carrie moved around on the floor. She’d gotten the rolling over thing down well enough that she could now move from one side of the room to the other like a sausage. Eventually she got tired, though, and banged her nose against the floor. The resulting cry made Pearl wake with a startled bark, and that made Carrie cry harder.

  I rocked the baby and let the dog out and gave her a treat, and was just about to feed Carrie and put her down for a nap when the phone rang. “It’s me,” Grimaldi said. Unnecessarily, since I have her number plugged into my phone, and it comes up when she calls.

  “What can I do for you?” I whisked off the wet diaper with one hand and reached for a wipe with the other.

  “I want to go talk to the Drimmels.”

  It took me a second to place the reference. “Laura Lee’s parents?”

  Grimaldi nodded. Or at least she made a nodding sort
of sound. “M-hm. They live in Sunnyside.”

  A neighborhood on the southwest side of Columbia, full of winding roads and trees and large lots with mid-century ranches and split-levels.

  “Let me guess,” I said, wrapping a diaper around my daughters hips and fastening the sticky straps, “you got Frankie Matlock’s prison record, and he could have committed the murders.”

  “Your friend Ms. Durbin exaggerated a smidgeon when she said he was in and out of trouble all the time,” Grimaldi said. “But he’s done a few stints behind bars. None of them long enough to stop him from killing eighteen women and dumping their bodies.”

  “I guess he’s still in the area?”

  “I don’t know where he is,” Grimaldi said, “he’s someone else who doesn’t pay taxes, but I figure the Drimmels can tell us that.”

  Maybe so. Or maybe not. If they’d lost contact with their deceased daughter’s husband, he could be anywhere.

  “They had custody of the kids,” Grimaldi said. “Still do of the youngest, since he isn’t eighteen yet. I’m hoping Frankie stayed in touch with them, and they can tell us where he is. Do you want to come?”

  “Of course I want to come. Just let me get Carrie fed, and then she can take her afternoon nap in the car today.”

  “I’ll be there in fifteen,” Grimaldi said, and hung up. The implication was that I’d better be ready at that point, whether Carrie had finished eating or not.

  She refused to let me drive again, of course, so we had to move the car seat back into the SUV. That done, I crawled into the passenger seat and Grimaldi arranged herself behind the wheel, while in the back seat, Carrie sucked on her pacifier as her lids got heavy. By the time we were halfway to Sunnyside, she was sleeping.