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

by Jenna Bennett

  “To make it look like the work of a a serial killer,” I said.

  “Darlin’…” Rafe looked at me patiently, “it is the work of a serial killer.”

  “You know what I mean. He could have done it compulsively, the way serial killers do, or he could have done it deliberately, to cover up Laura Lee’s murder.”

  “He’d be a serial killer either way,” my husband informed me. “What about Noah? You got an explanation for that death, too?”

  Dix opened his mouth, and I got in first. “Noah figured out what Uncle Art had been up to, and was horrified by it, not to mention afraid he’d be implicated, so he killed himself.”

  “Or Uncle Art killed him,” Dix added, “and made it look like suicide.”

  I nodded. “Mullinax sounds sort of Roman, doesn’t it? Like… I don’t know, Claudius or Tiberius.”

  Rafe’s mouth curved. “Can’t say they sound all that similar to me, but you may be right.”

  Bob’s head had swiveled back and forth as he looked from one to the other of us. “That’s a nice theory,” he said now, “but you understand there’s no proof?”

  Of course. “A theory is a good thing, though. Right? Then you can go about trying to prove or disprove it.”

  “One thing comes to mind,” Rafe said, “and I didn’t see Mullinax—don’t think I ever met the man—how’d he look, driving into a truck stop to dump a victim? Like he’d belong?”

  Not precisely. “He’s at the upper end of the profile age wise,” I admitted. “Probably more like seventy-five. But he looked like he was pretty healthy. He golfs.”

  “Healthy enough to strangle a full-grown woman and carry the body?”

  Hard to say, really. But he hadn’t looked unhealthy, so that was something. Maybe.

  When I didn’t answer, Rafe went on. “Any reason to think Mullinax would look at home at a truck stop? Did you see a truck? Anything with a diesel engine?”

  I shook my head. “It’s a farm, though. I wouldn’t be surprised if such a thing existed.”

  “I don’t see him traveling up and down I-65 on a tractor, darlin’.”

  Well, of course not. “I didn’t mean that,” I said. “All I meant is that there might have been a pickup truck or something in the garage. It was a big garage.”

  “You didn’t look inside?”

  I hadn’t. “I don’t think it had any windows, and the doors were all closed. But practically anything could have fit in there.”

  Except maybe an eighteen-wheeler. But the cab of one might.

  “I guess it couldn’t hurt to go out and take a look,” Rafe said, with a glance at Bob.

  The latter nodded. “We can run out there this afternoon, see what we see.”

  He shifted sideways as Lynn leaned in to put Rafe’s drink on the table.

  “Not this afternoon,” Rafe told him, leaning the other way as Lynn’s hip brushed his arm. “Thanks, Lynn.” To Bob, he added, “I have something else I gotta do later.”

  “I have an open house,” I told Bob, leaning too, as Lynn came closer with my iced tea, “at the house on Fulton, and Rafe’s taking David back to Nashville. Thank you, Lynn.”

  She nodded. “You folks ready to order?”

  I guess we were. I mean, I hadn’t opened the menu, but I’ve been at the Wayside Inn often enough to know what they serve. “I’ll have the savory crepes with a side of field greens, please.”

  Lynn took the other orders—Rafe was having steak with shoestring potatoes at noon—and then moved on to Mother and David. Catherine had scooted closer to them, still with Carrie on her lap, so both my children, or Rafe’s children, were getting quality time with their aunt and grandmother. It was nice to see.

  Bob and Rafe decided that they were going to pay a visit on Art Mullinax in the morning, and Dix was angling to be allowed to come. I have no idea why he’d want to, but maybe he’d gotten bitten by the detective bug, too, and wanted to play.

  “Can I come?” I wanted to know. “Grimaldi let me.”

  They looked at one another.

  “That’d be quite the delegation,” Bob said. “You, me, Yung, Tamara, Dix, Savannah…”

  Rafe nodded. “Better not, darlin’. We’re just gonna go have a talk with him. If we show up with that kinda group, he’s gonna be suspicious. You and Tammy go find something else to do. You, too.” He glanced at Dix.

  My brother looked mutinous. “I don’t see why I can’t come. You might need a lawyer.”

  “I’ll make sure he doesn’t,” the sheriff said dryly. “You do your job, Dixon, and let us do ours.”

  Dix stuck his lower lip out, but didn’t protest. I turned to Rafe, who shook his head. “Sorry, darlin’. If there’s anything there, I don’t wanna get his back up with a big group. Bad enough that the sheriff and local PD shows up.”

  “And the TBI.” Not to mention the FBI.

  “We’ll try to keep Leslie out of it,” Rafe said. “Nothing to do with her case, after all. And no need to mention that I’m doing double duty with the TBI, either. Better to keep it as low key as possible.”

  “What are you going to use as an excuse for going out there? Because if he’s guilty of anything, he’s going to be suspicious no matter what you say.”

  We discussed it until the food arrived, and then we ate. Once the food was gone, Rafe caught David’s eye down the length of the table. “Time we were getting on, if we’re gonna have time to stop by Audrey’s before we drive back to Nashville.”

  David looked reluctant to be parted from Mother, but he nodded. “Sorry I can’t stay longer.”

  “From what I understand,” Mother told him sternly, “you shouldn’t be here at all. Next time, you’re to stay home, where you’re safe.”

  “I’m safe here.” He grinned at her, before he leaned in and kissed her cheek. “Bye.”

  Mother looked momentarily stunned, and then pleased.

  I took Carrie back from Catherine and we headed out. “We’ll take you home and pick up the Harley,” Rafe told me when we got to the parking lot, “that way you can keep the Volvo to go to the open house.”

  “There’s no room on the Harley for Carrie,” I pointed out, while David’s eyes got big. After a second, he started to vibrate with excitement. He’d been on the back of the Harley before, but never for an hour or more on the interstate. “Besides, are you sure Ginny would approve of that?”

  “By the time she finds out, it’ll be too late,” Rafe said. And added, “You suggesting I can’t be trusted to get David home safe?”

  “Of course not. I know you know how to handle the beast. I just don’t know whether David’s parents are going to want him riding on it.”

  “He’ll be fine,” Rafe said dismissively and opened the Volvo’s back door so I could put Carrie’s seat inside. David crawled into the back next to the carrier, and Rafe behind the wheel. “Coming?” he asked me when I didn’t climb in next to him.

  “Just looking around.”

  “She ain’t here,” he told me.

  No. There was no sign of the tan compact. “I thought maybe Lynn…”

  “She drives a blue Volkswagon,” Rafe told me. “You saw it back when we were at her house that time.”

  Of course I had. “She might have switched it out.”

  “Switched out a nice VW for that old import? Why would she wanna do that?”

  “So she could stalk you in peace and we wouldn’t recognize the car?” I folded myself into the front seat.

  He shook his head as he put the car in gear. “It ain’t Lynn. We’d have recognized her at Beulah’s the other night. Besides, Yvonne knows Lynn. If she’d been there, Yvonne woulda told me.”

  “Fine.” His arguments made sense. “It’s not Lynn.”

  “No,” Rafe said, and left the parking lot for home.

  Back at the mansion, I said goodbye to David, since they were planning to head for Nashville straight from Audrey’s house, and kissed Rafe. “Drive carefully.”

&n
bsp; “You too, darlin’. I’ll see you later.” He swung a leg over the big, black Harley-Davidson and nodded to David. “Get on. Hang on to me. Lean into the curves. You’ll be fine.”

  David didn’t look like he needed the reassurance. He was wearing a big grin behind the helmet, and when the bike took off down the driveway with a spurt of gravel, he let out a “Whoop!” I could hear all the way back to where I was standing.

  They took a right turn out of the driveway, toward downtown Sweetwater and Audrey’s house, and I carried the baby inside to change her diaper and feed her before it was time to head to Fulton Street and the open house.

  I was a few minutes late, but nobody cared except Charlotte. She was there before me, but because she didn’t have a key, she had to sit in her Jeep and wait. When I pulled up behind her and opened my door, she flung her own open and stalked toward me. “You’re late!”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I had to see Rafe and David off. He showed up late last night, in a rented Uber, after having crawled out his bedroom window.”

  It was enough to stop her in mid rant, although it took her a second to switch gears. “Oh, my God. Is he OK?”

  “He’s fine.” I reached into the back of the Volvo and pulled out the baby seat. Carrie had fallen asleep on the way here, and looked like a little angel, with long lashes shadowing her cheeks and her little pink pout. “It’s not the first time he’s pulled something like this. Last time, he was at camp up on the Cumberland Plateau, and he used a bike, and it took him hours to get here. We were all worried sick.”

  Especially since we didn’t know whether he’d actually run away or whether Hernandez had grabbed him.

  “He spent the night with us and came to brunch this morning,” I added, as I headed up the steps to the front door. “He and Rafe were going to see Mrs. Jenkins at Audrey’s before Rafe took him home. On the bike.”

  I stuck the key in the lock and twisted it.

  “How will his mother feel about that?” Charlotte wanted to know.

  “I imagine she might have some things to say about it.” I pushed the door open and went in. “But as Rafe pointed out, by then it’ll be too late. Oh, shit. I mean… shoot.”

  “What?” Charlotte peered around me, and came up with a more subdued, “Oh, not again!”

  “It’s starting to feel personal, isn’t it?” I looked around for the baseball, and saw it lying over by the wall, in practically the same spot as it had been the last time.

  Charlotte nodded. “Either someone has really bad aim…”

  “Or really good aim.” I headed for the kitchen and the broom. “I’ll get the glass up. You can find something to tape over the hole. And one of us is going to have to go to the hardware store and get another piece of glass before we leave here tonight.”

  Charlotte nodded, and went to look for a piece of cardboard.

  She ended up going to the hardware store while I stayed. It wasn’t necessary for both of us to be at the open house, and I was the one with the real estate license. She was more expendable—in this case—because she couldn’t discuss price or any of the other official details with anyone who asked.

  By then, the first rush of visitors—the one that shows up in the first hour—was gone, and I was waiting for the second rush, the one that shows up in the last fifteen minutes and often stays after the official end of the open house at four. Charlotte had left, and there was a young couple meandering around in the master bedroom. I had told them to give me a holler if they had any questions, but otherwise I was going to stay in the living room, between Carrie and the front door. I had tucked her into a corner of the dining room, below the broken and taped window, as far from the front door as she could get, so nobody would reach in and snatch her.

  That was when a young woman with two kids walked through the door. She looked vaguely familiar, and it took me a second to place her. Then it came to me: she lived a couple of houses down the street, and when the roof had blown off last month, she and her husband and the kids had been out in the street, worrying that their little house would be next.

  For the life of me I couldn’t remember her name, or that of the kids, but I greeted her like I recognized her. “Hi there! How are you?”

  “Fine.” She didn’t look fine, though. She wouldn’t meet my eyes, but kept looking down instead. “Jerry has something he needs to tell you.”

  Jerry. Right. The little boy.

  He was about four, and like the last time I’d seen him, he was clinging to his mother’s pant leg. This time, there was no explosion to account for the nerves, so something else must be wrong.

  I squatted down to his level. “Hi, Jerry. What’s up?”

  I hope you won’t accuse me of arrogance if I say that I thought I might have guessed the problem. It didn’t come as a surprise when the kid took his thumb out of his mouth, blinked big, blue eyes, and told me, “I broke your window.”

  I nodded, since I’d already suspected it. “How did it happen?”

  “I was playing with my ball,” Jerry said, “and it slipped out of my hand and went through the window.”

  The window that was five feet off the ground, when the kid was only about three feet tall.

  “Twice?” I asked.

  “What?” his mother said.

  I looked up at her. “It’s the second time it’s happened this week.”

  She turned to the kid. “Jerry?”

  He clearly wouldn’t be growing up to have David’s fortitude, because all it took was a frown on his mother’s face to make him break down. His little face twisted, and tears filled his eyes. “The man told me to do it,” he said.

  “The man? What man?”

  But Jerry didn’t know what man. Just that he’d driven by in his car, and had told Jerry he’d pay him five dollars if Jerry could get the ball through the window in our house.

  “Jerry!” his mother said, appalled. “What have we told you about talking to strangers?”

  Not enough, apparently, to outweigh the chance to make five dollars. “Did the man come back again yesterday?” I asked.

  Jerry nodded. He was knuckling tears off his face with both fists.

  “Jerry!” his mother said. “Don’t you know that you’re not supposed to break other people’s things? Mrs. Collier’s husband is a policeman! He can take you to jail for this!”

  He probably couldn’t, actually. Not for this. But who was I to tell this woman how to parent her child? And clearly Jerry needed incentive, both to keep him from talking to strangers in cars, and from breaking windows.

  “Can you tell me what the man looked like?” I asked Jerry when the storm was over and he’d stopped hiccupping. “Or the car?”

  But that Jerry couldn’t. The car had been big and blue, he said, and the man had been “just a man.” He had no real concept of old and young; the one thing he was sure of was that the man didn’t have a beard or glasses.

  “Was he brown?” I asked. “Or white?”

  “Like us,” Jerry said.

  White, then. So that eliminated Curtis, and Frankie Matlock, who wasn’t supposed to be around Columbia anyway, and who wouldn’t know that my sister owned the house, and even if he did, would have no reason to vandalize it.

  What it didn’t do, was eliminate any of the more likely suspects, like the guy who had vandalized the house the first time, or his father, who might be upset that his son and his wife had to pay for damages. Or the family members of the guys who had set the explosion, or even the one young neo-Nazi we knew about who hadn’t been swept up in the sting, since he’d testified against his friends, and since he hadn’t actually been guilty of anything more than destruction of property. He was only twenty-one or –two, but I wasn’t sure Jerry would be able to tell the difference between that and, say, Sergeant Tucker, and there was no point in trying to get him to be more specific.

  His mother took him home with the promise that Jerry would come back with the ten dollars he’d gotten for the ‘work’ so I
could spend it on fixing my window. Jerry looked a little mutinous over that, and his lower lip was firmly stuck on truculent when he stomped away. But he did come back ten minutes later with two crumpled five dollar bills that he gave me, with every sign of reluctance. I took them, not because I needed help paying for the window, but because his mother clearly wanted to teach him what happens to ill-gotten gains, and it would do the boy no harm to learn that crime doesn’t pay.

  By then, the second wave of visitors had started to show up. Charlotte came back with the piece of glass, so we decided we might as well show everyone how capable and responsive we were, in case anyone might want to make an offer. Replacing a broken window isn’t a difficult or drawn-out process, and we’d just replaced this window anyway, so we didn’t even have to deal with chipping out old, dry caulk. I had to move Carrie into the kitchen, since she’d been parked under the window in question. She was still asleep, and didn’t wake, not even when we started messing with the window.

  People came and went, a few of them lingering to give us advice about what to do, while the rest just wandered in and out. I don’t think more than thirty seconds had passed before I glanced over my shoulder, as I’d done every thirty seconds, and saw that the spot on the floor where I’d put Carrie’s car seat, was empty.

  Seventeen

  I almost dropped the piece of glass. It would have shattered on the floor—for the second time that day—if Charlotte hadn’t had a good grip on it. “What?” she wanted to know, irritably, as she juggled the pane.

  “Carrie.”

  I didn’t have time to say anything more, since I was already on the move. I just registered Charlotte’s eyes opening wide before I was through the door into the kitchen.

  There was just a chance that someone else had picked her up and moved her. Or at least that’s what I tried to tell myself, to quell the instant panic that someone had left with her.

  Surely I would have noticed if someone had walked my baby out of the house?