Wrongful Termination: A Savannah Martin Novel (Savannah Martin Mystery Book 16)

by Jenna Bennett

  “I don’t imagine it was the main goal,” Rafe said when I asked. “I ain’t important enough for that. If this woulda happened to Brennan without me getting fired first—”

  “Laid off,” I interjected.

  He nodded, “—it ain’t like I woulda gotten the job of figuring out what’d happened. The MNPD woulda prob’ly gotten it then too, since there’d be a conflict of interest with us investigating our own.”

  That made sense. “So someone wanted Brennan dead, and saw your leaving as a way to pin it on you. Or at least throw some suspicion on you and off himself.”

  Rafe nodded.

  “Or this all came to a head after you lost your job. Brennan went to talk to whoever he planned to talk to after he spoke to you on Wednesday, and something happened during the course of that conversation to make him suspicious that someone was doing something they shouldn’t be. Then that same someone caught on that Brennan was suspicious and decided to terminate him and make use of the fact that he’d just let you go to try to hide his own actions. But it was all decided on the spur of the moment on Thursday.”

  “Something like that,” Rafe agreed.

  “So who would Brennan talk to about you, if he wanted to try to get you your job back?”

  “McLaughlin,” Rafe said, smiling at Carrie. “Brennan’s boss. But it don’t have to be McLaughlin. He coulda decided to talk to one of the other supervisors to see if there was a spot for me on their crews. Like Foster.”

  Who was in charge of undercover narcotics, if I recalled what Wendell had said correctly.

  “If your cover is blown in undercover organized crime, and in gangs—and we know that Jamal’s friends figured out who you were last fall, since a couple of them showed up here at Mrs. Jenkins’s house—your cover’s probably blown for undercover narcotics, too. All undercover work. Don’t you think?”

  “Maybe,” Rafe said.

  “So Foster might be less likely than the other three. How well do you know Pavlova?”

  “Enough to recognize her on the street,” Rafe said.

  “Not a former conquest?”

  He chuckled. “No, darlin’. Christina Pavlova is twenty years older than me and not the kinda woman you flirt with. She don’t appreciate my type.”

  His type? “What do you mean? She doesn’t like men?” Or was he suggesting that Pavlova was racist?

  “Gay,” Rafe said, “and with no sense of humor. Lives and breathes the honor of the TBI. Works strictly by the book. Totally against riffraff like me—and Clayton and Jamal; José was OK—being on the payroll.”

  So maybe not a racist then, since if that had been a problem, she’d likely have approved of Clayton—criminal record notwithstanding—and disapproved of José.

  “She probably isn’t likely to be involved in anything illegal, then. Not something that would reflect badly on the TBI.”

  “Less’n she just puts on a good show,” Rafe said. “At home she could be wearing satin and drinking champagne.”

  Possible. We probably shouldn’t take her off the list.

  “This is frustrating. I don’t know any of these people or what they’d do.”

  “We’re just gonna have to wait for Spicer and Truman to come through,” Rafe said, “with whoever Goins talked to.”

  “But even then we don’t know that that person is who we’d have to investigate. Say he spoke to McLaughlin. That would make sense, right? McLaughlin was Brennan’s boss. And say McLaughlin told him that you’d just lost your job and were upset about it. That doesn’t mean McLaughlin is guilty. He could have heard that from someone else, who wanted him to think you were upset, and he was just telling Goins what he thought was the truth.”

  Rafe nodded. He’d probably thought about it himself. “How about some breakfast?”

  “I could eat,” I said.

  “Me, too.” He stood up and handed over the baby. “Eggs and bacon?”

  “Are you cooking?”

  “I thought I might,” Rafe said.

  “Then whatever you want to make is fine.” I should probably have something healthy like oatmeal instead of something fattening like eggs and bacon, but who was I to complain about whatever was put in front of me?

  Besides, eggs and bacon sounded better than oatmeal.

  “Eggs and bacon,” Rafe said, and headed down the hallway toward the kitchen.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The eggs and bacon were tasty, and the domestic interlude lovely. Being married was wonderful. I hadn’t thought so when I was married to Bradley, but then Rafe was a totally different person than Bradley had been. And while he might scare me into fits sometimes, with the risks he took and the possibility that he might not come back to me, I’d sooner deal with that than a cheater and big, giant jerk.

  After breakfast—I loaded the dishes in the dishwasher since he’d done the cooking—we put Carrie and her stroller in the car, and drove to the park, where we took an actual, honest-to-goodness Sunday walk in the cold.

  Carrie fell asleep, of course, and once we were back inside the Volvo, with the heat going, Rafe suggested we take a drive.

  I gave him a sideways look. “Is this going to be a drive like yesterday, where we end up breaking into someone’s house?”

  He chuckled. “Not on a Sunday morning.”

  “Then sure. I’ll take a drive.”

  “We’ll get some lunch at the end of it,” Rafe said and put the car in gear.

  The first leg of the drive went from Shelby Park in East Nashville out east to Hermitage on the interstate. Rafe took off down toward the lake, which lay like a sheet of ice under the weak January sun. A few minutes later, he drove through the gates of a subdivision full of brick houses. Cookie-cutter houses, in three different styles and three different types of brick, but ultimately just the three similar floor plans and facades on every house.

  “Does someone we know live here?” I asked, looking around.

  “Hammond. Head of narcotics.” He pointed to a red brick McMansion with Christmas lights still in the windows and a wreath on the door. As well as a couple of kid-sized bikes in a heap on the grass.

  “Family man,” I said, looking around. From the cozy look of the place, Hammond wasn’t someone I would have expected to be working with narcotics. “Nice place. Family friendly.”

  “He’s got a wife and a couple small kids,” Rafe confirmed. He glanced at me. “That don’t mean he ain’t breaking the law. Sometimes, a wife and kids can be incentive to commit a crime, just as much as they can be incentive not to.”

  He had a point. “I guess he stays on the list.”

  “For now,” Rafe said. “I don’t see nothing here that would take him off. Do you?”

  I didn’t. Not unless having a nice house with a family inside meant anything, and Rafe clearly thought it didn’t. He lowered his foot on the gas, and the Volvo rolled forward. In the mirror, I saw the door to the Hammonds’ house open, and a pretty, blond woman usher two small children out.

  No, we couldn’t take him off the list. A man with a family might do anything he had to, to keep them safe and happy. Even break the law he’d sworn to uphold.

  “Here’s where Wendell lives,” Rafe said fifteen minutes later. We’d crossed back over the interstate, away from the lake, and gone into Hermitage proper. Now we were idling outside a row of townhouses in a small community just off Lebanon Pike.

  “He lives alone?” The place didn’t look big. “No family for Wendell?”

  “He has a daughter,” Rafe said. “I think he’s been married once. But she doesn’t live around here.”

  So just Wendell in residence. “This is the townhouse he wants to sell, so he can buy the shack on the river?”

  Rafe nodded. “He’s serious about that. Or mostly serious. I don’t think he wants a shack. But he does wanna sell and buy something more private for when he’s retired.”

  I looked around. “This probably wouldn’t be too hard to sell. It’s not new, but it’s
well maintained. It looks like nice people live here. All the cars are in good shape. None of them are especially pricey, but they all look relatively new and well taken care of.”

  “Run some numbers,” Rafe said, and moved his foot off the brake. The car rolled forward, past Wendell’s townhouse and toward the exit turn that would take us back on Lebanon Road.

  I glanced at him. “You didn’t take me here because you think Wendell has anything to do with what’s going on, did you?”

  I mean, surely not. Rafe loved Wendell. They’d worked together for more than a dozen years.

  Although… Brennan could have contacted Wendell with what he’d found out, especially when Rafe wasn’t available until the next day. And he hadn’t.

  Although maybe Wendell hadn’t been there, either. And Rafe had worked with Wendell for so long. They’d worked so closely together over the past year, training the boys. Rafe would have noticed if Wendell was up to something.

  And what could he be up to anyway? It wasn’t as if Clayton, Jamal, or José provided any kind of opportunity to make money. Not at the moment, at any rate.

  Rafe shook his head. “It was on the way. I figured we’d drive by.”

  The car left the subdivision and merged with traffic on Lebanon Road again. “Where to now?” I asked, since we were headed east, out of town, instead of west toward downtown and home.

  “Mount Juliet,” Rafe said, picking up speed. “Pavlova has a spread out there.”

  A spread? “That sounds like it might take some money.”

  “Might,” Rafe agreed and lowered his foot on the gas.

  It took another fifteen minutes until we were out of Metro Nashville and into Wilson County, and another five before we were cruising down the winding country road where Christina Pavlova’s spread was located. “I think it’s gotta be this,” Rafe said.

  I peered out the windshield, at a quantity of fence surrounding a big field. “A farm?” Two horses with blankets across their backs were nibbling straw from a bale, while, behind the fence on the other side of the driveway, what looked like a herd of dogs were running along the fence, barking at the car.

  When I tried counting, there turned out to be only six or seven, but that’s enough when they’re all making noise at the same time, running and jumping over each other, frothing at the mouth. Even the small terrier looked rabid, and it wasn’t much bigger than Carrie.

  “I think she rescues animals,” Rafe said. “At least that’s what I’ve heard. Old horses from the glue factory, stray dogs from the street or the kill shelter.”

  “That makes her sound like a nice person.” Anyone who rescues homeless animals can’t be bad.

  “Nice people kill people, too,” Rafe said. “And I imagine it costs money.”

  It probably did. Animals have to eat, and need veterinary care. When you have a lot of animals—and these eight or nine that we’d seen probably weren’t all of them—it can add up. So Christina Pavlova might have excellent reasons for skimming money here and there. She might also be one of those people who thinks that animals are better than people, which would make her decision to kill Doug Brennan seem eminently reasonable. In her eyes.

  “McLaughlin lives down in Brentwood,” Rafe said, moving the car forward. “Big, fancy house in a subdivision. Similar setup to Hammond, but twice the space, and at least twice the price tag.”

  “So he lives high.”

  “He’s higher up the food chain, so it could be within his means, but yeah. He’s got an expensive house in an expensive part of town. Wife and a couple of kids. Teenagers, or maybe in college by now. College tuition can wear on a budget.”

  It could. “Are we going down there?”

  Rafe shook his head. “I’ve seen it before. Don’t seem worth the drive. And we wouldn’t be able to get inside the subdivision, anyway.”

  “One of the fancy, gated ones?”

  He nodded.

  If he’d seen it before, then no, it wasn’t worth driving all the way down there. Not if we wouldn’t even be able to get inside the subdivision to see it. And I’ve seen my own share of fancy McMansions, so I could imagine what this one would be like without actually seeing it.

  “So we’ve visited Hammond and Pavlova, and we won’t be stopping by McLaughlin. Who’s left?”

  “Foster and Grant,” Rafe said. “Foster lives in The Nations.”

  So clear on the other side of downtown. It would take us at least thirty, maybe forty minutes to get there from here. But he lived closer to the TBI than either Pavlova or Hammond.

  “What’s his reason for wanting Brennan dead?”

  “Don’t know that he has one,” Rafe said. “He’s single. Might have a girlfriend, but ain’t married that I know of. Could be divorced. But he likes women. That always takes cash.”

  Especially if you wanted to impress the women you like.

  “He drives a Mercedes,” Rafe added. “And he just moved into a new house. So he’s been throwing money around. And he’s got Brennan’s job, but in narcotics. With several handlers and undercover agents under him.”

  “So he’d have plenty of opportunity to run some sort of scam on the side. Lots of money to be made in narcotics.”

  “Like I said,” Rafe nodded.

  That took care of Foster, then. He sounded like a real possibility. Not only did he have means and opportunity, but he lived alone, so there was no one to ask questions if he disappeared in the middle of the night—to leave an incriminating knife in our recycling bin, say. Some of the guys with wives and/or children might not find that as easy to accomplish.

  Then again, they worked for the TBI. Their significant others might not find it strange that they came and went at odd hours sometimes. I’d certainly had to get used to that with Rafe. “And Grant?”

  “Lives over by us,” Rafe said. We’d reached the interstate, and now he merged with traffic headed west toward town. “In the nicer parts of East Nashville, over by the park. We shoulda driven by when we were over there.”

  “That isn’t a cheap area, either.” And had become less so as time had passed.

  “Convenient drive to the TBI, though.”

  It was.

  “I don’t know much about him other than that. We’ve never had any dealings. He runs the support department. Does a lot of research and logistics and stuff like that.”

  Research and logistics? “So he has access to everything everyone’s doing?”

  “Prob’ly,” Rafe said with a shrug. “I never paid him much mind. I don’t write the reports. Or didn’t till a year ago. I’d tell Wendell what was going on or what I needed, and he’d write it up and file it. Or make sure I got whatever it was. I couldn’t spend my time doing that.”

  No, it wouldn’t have been good if any of the people he was planning to put in prison came across him compiling official-looking reports on what he was doing.

  “I think he’s gay,” Rafe added, still on the subject of Grant. “But not real open about it. He’s never hit on me or nothing. But I catch him looking sometimes.”

  “That might not be because he’s gay,” I pointed out. “It might just be because you’re good-looking. Maybe he wishes he looked like you.”

  A corner of his mouth curled up. “I’ve seen that look before, darlin’. And that ain’t it.”

  Fine. He should know, after all. He’d been the recipient of plenty of those looks. Every time Tim, my broker, sees him, he practically drools. “If he thinks you’re hot, do you think he’d set you up for murder?”

  “No reason why not,” Rafe said.

  “Before you and I got involved, I thought you were hot. And I didn’t want Grimaldi to arrest you.”

  “She wasn’t gonna do that anyway.”

  She wasn’t, no. She’d known about his undercover work several months before I did.

  “Anyway,” I said, “it sounds like we should take a look at Grant. And it’ll be easy, since he lives close to home.”

  Rafe nodded. “
Foster first, though. We’ll hit Grant on our way back.”

  Fine by me. I settled into the seat for the drive.

  * * *

  The Nations is a semi-industrial area on the west side of town, not too far from the Women’s Prison and for that matter Riverbend Penitentiary, where Rafe had spent some time. It’s situated between Interstate 40 and Centennial Boulevard, and the neighborhood name makes no sense. All the streets are either numbered from 45th up to about 60th or so, or they’re named after states. California, Louisiana, New York.

  No countries, and no Indian nations.

  The street address Rafe had for Foster turned out to belong to a brand new three-story super-modern house with a garage on the bottom floor and a rooftop deck from which you could probably see all the way to downtown. It looked familiar, and I squinted at it. “I know that house.”

  Rafe arched a brow at me.

  “I’m serious,” I said. “It was one of Tim’s listings. I remember he talked about it at one of the sales meetings. It was right around the time when the whole debacle with Jolynn and Todd went down, though, so I didn’t pay a lot of attention. And since he fired me right around then, I didn’t end up sitting an open house here. I think I was supposed to. But I didn’t happen.”

  Rafe turned his attention back to the house.

  “It wasn’t cheap,” I added. “I do know that much. I think Tim said it would be the highest sale in The Nations, if he could get close to list price.”

  “Did he?”

  “I’m sure he did. I can check when I go into the office tomorrow. That, and whether there’s anything going on with real estate in Ridgetop that we need to know.”

  Rafe nodded. “It’s a nice place, anyway.”

  It did look like a nice place, if you liked flashy new construction in mostly industrial areas. I don’t. I grew up in the Martin Mansion, which was built between 1839 and 1841, and now I’m in Mrs. Jenkins’s house, from the 1880s. I like old woodwork and drafty fireplaces and not-quite-straight floors. Old houses have personalities that brand new houses don’t have, and will probably never have, because there was no way James Foster’s house would still be standing a hundred and fifty, or a hundred and eighty, years from now. They don’t build houses like they used to.