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

by Jenna Bennett

  Surely I would have—

  And that’s as far as I got—the panic didn’t even have time to lodge deeply, and I can only be grateful for that—before I heard loud voices and the sound of activity behind the house.

  I’m pretty sure I pushed a couple of prospective buyers out of my way as I careened down the hallway and through the master bedroom to the French doors onto the deck.

  And stopped like I’d run into a wall.

  Rafe, gun drawn, and Grimaldi—ditto—were advancing from the left and right on a person who stood in the middle of the grass clutching Carrie’s seat.

  At first, I thought I was looking at a young girl. She was considerably shorter than David—he was there, too, at the corner of the house—and she couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds soaking wet.

  When I got a better look, I realized she wasn’t as young as I’d thought. Younger than me by a few years, sure. Twenty-three, maybe. Or twenty-four. Dishwater blond hair to her shoulders, slight build in a pair of jeans and a pink T-shirt. Nothing even remotely like the busty Jessica Rabbit cartoon. But not a kid.

  Although there was something familiar about her…

  I squinted, trying to bring it into focus, when Charlotte barreled through the door behind me and knocked me forward a step. Behind her, several of the open house visitors started to crowd into the doorway, while a couple others came around the corner from the driveway and gathered behind David.

  The girl was starting to look rattled. Blue eyes in a narrow face flickered from side to side, probably assessing her chances of escape.

  They were pretty close to nil, as far as I could see. Both Rafe and Grimaldi had guns trained on her, and I’m sure either of them would fire before they’d let her get away with Carrie.

  But she did have Carrie, and while the baby was somewhat protected, at least on the underside, by being in the heavy plastic car seat, I’m sure neither of them particularly wanted to fire, either.

  And then the likeness finally registered, and I opened my mouth without really thinking about it. “I know you. You work at the pet emergency clinic.”

  She spared me a glance, but kept her attention on the guns. I would have, too.

  “I remember you.” It was all coming back to me now. “You were there that morning I came to pick up Pearl. I made you carry the baby, because you looked too small to handle the dog.”

  And she must have been there the night before, too, when Rafe dropped off Pearl, because she’d asked me about him. Whether he was my husband.

  I’d told her yes, he was, and had refrained from adding that he was ‘mine, all mine.’

  Not that I’d been worried. It was hardly the first time some woman had taken a fancy to Rafe because he was handsome, and sexy, and liked to flirt.

  “What happened?” I asked. “You haven’t been following him around since then, have you? The videos just started a few days ago.”

  She glanced my way again. “I was there the other night. In downtown. When that horrible policeman had that poor boy down on the ground and was trying to kill him.”

  Grimaldi opened her mouth, and Rafe did, too. In the end, both of them thought better of speaking.

  “Curtis is fine,” I said. “Nothing happened to him.”

  “Because he came.” She shot a glance at Rafe, and if I hadn’t already been chilled to the bone from this woman stealing my baby, that look would have done it. It wasn’t just attraction, or even some sort of twisted love. It was obsession, pure and simple. I recognized it, because I’d seen it before.

  On Elspeth Caulfield’s face.

  “But it wasn’t you who took the video that night,” I said, trying to get her attention back on me. Watching him point that gun at her probably wasn’t doing her psyche any good, when she was halfway around the bend already. And while I had no problem with nudging her the rest of the way if the opportunity arose, I didn’t want to do it while she was holding Carrie.

  She shot me another look. “No. I saw it the next morning, and I thought if she could do it, so could I. And because I knew where he worked, I went there and waited for him.”

  “And the other night you followed us to Beulah’s Meat’n Three.”

  She nodded. “You didn’t even notice me. I sat at the counter, and I filmed you, and when the owner carried the baby past, I took a picture of her, too.”

  “‘She looks just like her daddy,’” I quoted, while my stomach did a sort of unpleasant, soggy flip.

  She didn’t recognize the quote from her post, or if she did, she didn’t comment on it. Instead she looked down at Carrie, and a sliver of that obsessive light came back into her eyes. “Yes.”

  “You can’t have her,” I said. It wasn’t conscious, and might not have been the psychologically best thing to say. To be honest, I didn’t think about that. I didn’t think about anything at all. “She’s mine.”

  I’m not sure she even heard me. She did hear Rafe. He shifted his hands just slightly on the gun, which he held in both hands, up at chest level and pointed at her, very businesslike. Her eyes focused on the movement, which was probably what he expected her to do. “Put the baby down,” he told her. “Step away from her.”

  The girl—I didn’t even know her name; if she’d had a name badge pinned to those scrubs she’d worn to bring Pearl out of the vet clinic last month, I hadn’t noticed—hesitated.

  “I’d prefer not to hurt you,” Rafe added, “but you’ve got my daughter. And I’m not letting you walk away with her.”

  There wasn’t much chance of that. Between the crowd in the French doors, and the people thronging behind David at the corner of the house, and Rafe and Grimaldi with their guns drawn, and me, there wasn’t anywhere for her to go.

  I’m not sure she realized that, though. She glanced from side to side, and then back at Rafe. “I love you,” she told him.

  I have no idea whether she meant them as her last words or not. She might have, because a second later she threw the carrier with the baby to the left—toward me—and stood alone.

  To be honest, it wasn’t much of a throw. Carrie was more than four months old, and weighed around fourteen pounds. Add five pounds or so for the seat, and she was shifting twenty. And as I’ve mentioned before, she wasn’t a big girl. She’d also been standing there holding the seat for a while, so she was probably tired. The combined weight of seat and baby wears on the arm after a while, and it doesn’t take long, either.

  So it was really more of a tumble than a throw. She let go of the seat, with just a little push behind it.

  The seat rolled, and I shrieked and threw myself at it. The girl, meanwhile, went in the other direction. A bullet—I’m not sure whether Rafe or Grimaldi pulled the trigger—must have just skimmed past her, because it hit the bathroom window and shattered it into a million pieces. A lot of voices shrieked at the same time, and I imagine a lot of people ducked, even though the bullet got nowhere close to them. Hopefully nobody was left inside the house who could have been hit.

  I just had time to think, “Not another window!” before I had the baby carrier in my hands and put it upright. Carrie was screaming bloody murder, of course—the rough handling had woken her from sound sleep—but she was unharmed, strapped in tight, and just upset. Her little face was bright red with her screaming, but there wasn’t anything else wrong with her.

  I unhooked her and lifted her up, and turned to look at the scene behind me.

  The girl had made it maybe two feet before David had tackled her. Now she was flat on the ground with her arms up over her face. I wasn’t entirely sure whether she was protecting herself from blows or crying, or maybe both. Rafe was plucking his infuriated son off her, much the same way he’d plucked Sergeant Tucker off Curtis Matlock a few nights ago, and Grimaldi was moving in with a pair of handcuffs.

  “She took her!” David bellowed. “She took my baby sister!”

  Rafe set him upright and dusted him off and slapped him on the back a couple of time
s. “Good job. You got her. Good job.” He met my eyes over David’s head.

  “She’s OK,” I said, patting Carrie’s warm little back. The screams were down to hiccupping sobs now, and she was starting to snuffle like she was hungry. “Take care of David. I’ve got Carrie.”

  Rafe nodded, and put a hand on David’s shoulder. “C’mon, son. Let’s finish this up.”

  David nodded, still vibrating with fury. I made my way over to him and bussed him on the cheek. “Thank you.”

  He nodded, and his eyes fastened on Carrie. “She all right?”

  “She’s fine. Just shook up and hungry. She’ll never even remember this.”

  “Not sure I’ll ever forget it,” David said, and followed Rafe toward the corner of the house. The bystanders gave way for the two of them like the Red Sea before Moses.

  Grimaldi, meanwhile, had dragged the stalker to her feet. “You have the right to remain silent…” she began, as she marched the girl toward the street in the wake of the other two. The woman’s hands were cuffed behind her, and she had tears streaking down her face.

  Charlotte crept out of the crowd inside the French doors and made her way to me. “What the hell, Savannah?”

  Blame the reaction of coming off an adrenaline high, but it sounded like such an unlikely thing to come out of her mouth that I snorted, and then started to laugh. After a second, the laughter turned to sobs—blame that on the reaction, too—and Charlotte put her arms around me, and around Carrie, as well. Some of the bystanders shuffled their feet awkwardly, and some started to drift away.

  “Show’s over,” I managed. “If you’re interested in making an offer on the house, my number’s on the sign out front.”

  “We’ll fix the bathroom window,” Charlotte added. “We’re getting good at that.”

  We were. And we would. But probably not tonight. All I wanted was to take my baby home, and batten down the hatches, and celebrate the fact that she was safe, and I still had her. The window could wait.

  So we boarded it up, and shooed the remaining people out, and locked the doors, and went home. Charlotte to her kids and her parents, and I to my empty house and my dog.

  Word spread about what had happened, of course, so I spent a lot of my time fielding phone calls. Mother called to make sure Carrie and David were all right. Dix and Catherine did, too. Grimaldi called to tell me that the girl, whose name was Jessica Lloyd, had been booked on kidnapping and stalking charges.

  “It was a good thing she tried to take the baby,” she told me, “because without that, we might have had to let her go. There’s nothing illegal about taking pictures of people and posting them on social media. It happens to celebrities all the time.”

  Of course it did. And can’t be much fun for them, either. “Rafe isn’t a celebrity. He’s a cop. And his safety depends on people not knowing too much about where he is and what he’s doing.”

  “You and I know that,” Grimaldi said, “but the law doesn’t.”

  She let that sink in for a second before she added, “But because she took the baby out of the house and, we assume, tried to walk away with her, she not only demonstrated that she was a threat, but she committed a felony. So we can charge her with some things that are going to keep her locked up for a long time.”

  Good.

  “There’s just one thing.”

  “Uh-oh,” I said. I had a feeling that I knew where this was going.

  “She won’t make bail. I’ll make sure the DA sets it high enough that she can’t meet it, and that’s if they agree to bail at all. I’m going to push that they won’t, and I’m sure between me and your brother and Bob, we can prevail on Todd Satterfield to prevail on his boss to deny bail.”

  Excellent. “So what’s the problem?” I asked.

  “Her public defender will most likely insist on a psychiatric evaluation. I would.”

  I would, too. “You mean, they’ll discover that she’s nuts.”

  “My guess is they will,” Grimaldi said. “Sane people don’t act that way.”

  No, they don’t. “So what does that mean? They won’t let her out, will they? She’ll still be locked up, right?”

  Grimaldi assured me that she would be. “It just won’t be in prison. It’ll be some psychiatric hospital instead. For inmates.”

  “I don’t have a problem with that,” I said. “I don’t need her to suffer. I just want to make sure she can’t come near my husband or my baby again.”

  Or David, but he was probably safe in Nashville by now.

  “She won’t,” Grimaldi said. “I’ll make sure of that.”

  “Thank you.”

  She sounded embarrassed. “No problem. Are you still willing to go investigating with me tomorrow?”

  “Sure,” I said. “What are we doing?”

  And did she know that Rafe and Bob—and perhaps Dix—had plans to visit Art Mullinax to test out her theory that he’d killed Kent Jurgensson?

  “I thought we’d take a walk around Mullinax’s back forty,” Grimaldi said.

  Oh. “Um…”

  I could hear her eyebrows going up. “Problem?”

  “Not exactly. I mean…”

  She waited, and since I’m just about the world’s worst liar, and not much of a prevaricator, I broke within the first few seconds. “I told Rafe what you said. About Mullinax and Jurgensson’s remains. And then we told Bob. And the two of them decided to go pay a visit on Mullinax tomorrow. Dix may be going with them.”

  Grimaldi sighed. I waited for her to start chastising me, but instead she said, “Good time to explore the back forty, then, while they’re keeping him busy at the house.”

  That was one way of looking at it. “Jurgensson’s been dead for almost thirty years. Do you really think we’ll find any evidence lying around Daffodil Hill Farm?”

  Even assuming she had a point about Mullinax and Jurgensson, Mullinax wouldn’t have left the body just lying in the woods. He’d have buried it, surely.

  “Unless he wanted to make sure it look like an accidental death if anyone found him,” Grimaldi said promptly when I mentioned this. “Like Jurgensson had just stumbled onto Mullinax’s property and accidentally broken his leg, far enough from the house that no one heard him crying for help. And then he, sadly, just died from exposure.”

  I suppose that might fly. It had flown for Katie Graves, who had been missing for fifteen or sixteen years when an ATF agent just happened to stumble across her remains up on the Devil’s Backbone about six months ago. Rafe had ended up investigating that crime, and the question of exposure had definitely come up.

  “I guess it can’t hurt to look.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Grimaldi said sarcastically. “I’ll pick you up at eight-thirty.”

  I grimaced. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Wear comfortable shoes.” She hung up before I could respond. I made another face at the phone before I put it down.

  Rafe made it home around nine. After leaving the house on Fulton Street, he’d taken David to see Audrey and Mrs. Jenkins before driving him home. Once there, Ginny and Sam had asked him to stay for dinner, and then it sounded like there’d been some discussion afterward. Ginny had a tendency to blame Rafe for making David run off, even when Rafe has had nothing to do with it.

  Suddenly discovering, after twelve years of parenthood, that her son had another father, couldn’t have been easy. I tried to imagine bringing Carrie up for twelve years, having her be mine, and then suddenly finding out that she had another mother, and because that mother hadn’t known she existed, she had the right to sue for custody.

  Rafe never had, of course. David was settled with Sam and Ginny, he was happy and healthy and loved. It wouldn’t have been in David’s best interest to change that. But I could well imagine Ginny’s fear that it could happen, and her feeling that Rafe (and I and Carrie and Mother and everyone else) were taking something away from them. David would never be fully hers and Sam’s again. From that moment when Dix and I
knocked on their door a year and a half ago, to tell them about Elspeth’s death and Rafe’s existence, she’d always have to share him with us.

  “Everything OK?” I wanted to know when Rafe ambled into the bedroom after putting the Harley in the garage.

  He nodded, and his lips relaxed as he took in the tableau of me feeding Carrie and Pearl curled up on the rug (because I felt safer having her nearby than downstairs, where she usually sleeps). “David’s grounded for a week. No electronics. He can’t believe he’s being punished for saving his sister’s life.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “He isn’t being punished for saving his sister’s life—”

  “He’s being punished for running away from home and making me spend several hundred dollars on cab fare. If he hadn’t saved his sister’s life, it woulda been two weeks.”

  He sat down on the edge of the bed next to me and looked at Carrie.

  “I’ll give her to you when she’s finished,” I told him. “If I do it now, she’s just going to be upset.”

  He nodded. “She wasn’t in any danger, you know. We had the house surrounded before you even pulled up.”

  “I figured that out,” I said, “when I came out and saw you. I had no idea you were there until then. I had no idea she was there, either. I didn’t notice her. Or recognize her. Not until we were outside.”

  “It was David’s idea,” Rafe said. “He thought you mighta mentioned the open house over dinner on Friday night, at Beulah’s, and that she mighta heard you. So he talked me into providing backup, just in case she showed up.”

  “It was a good thing he did,” I said, “or she might have made it out of there with Carrie.”

  He didn’t say anything, and I added, “I only took my eyes off her for a few seconds. I swear.”

  “Nobody’s blaming you, darlin’.” After a second he added, “But that was too damn close.”

  Much too close. “I guess Grimaldi updated you on what’s going to happen next.”

  He nodded. “Not somebody we have to worry about again. There were enough pictures and other things in her apartment to shut the cage door tight for a long time.”