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

by Jenna Bennett

  I was in the middle of cooking dinner, and Rafe must have surmised that I didn’t want to miss any of the conversation, because he invited Wendell to have a seat at the kitchen table instead of in one of the more formal rooms where we’d normally be entertaining guests—at least if we stood on ceremony—but where I wouldn’t be able to hear what they were talking about.

  “You’re welcome to stay for dinner,” I told him, as I stirred diced tomatoes into ground beef at the stove. “There’s plenty.” Or would be, once I was finished with it.

  He shook his head. “Thanks, but I have plans.”

  OK, then. “Rafe drove me by your townhouse yesterday. He told me you might be thinking about selling it.”

  “Maybe,” Wendell allowed.

  “Let me know if you need any help. I asked during the sales meeting today, and somebody who’s familiar with the area told me that those condos are popular. They sell quickly, and for good money.”

  “Good to know,” Wendell said.

  “I’ll let you talk.” I turned back to the stove, but kept my ears peeled.

  At first there wasn’t much to hear, just the companionable popping of beer caps and the sound of swallowing. Then Rafe said, “Goins dragged Savannah downtown for questioning this morning.”

  “No kidding?” Wendell looked at me.

  I shook my head. “None. He wanted to talk about that old business with Billy Scruggs. Like that isn’t a decade old and forgotten already.”

  “Depends on who you ask,” Rafe said dryly, and I guess that was true. Sergeant Tucker in Columbia certainly hadn’t forgotten. Good thing Goins didn’t know Tucker existed, or vice versa, or Goins would never get over his suspicions of Rafe.

  “He brought up how we’d been outside Foster’s house in The Nations yesterday,” I added. “I pointed out that since we’d stayed in the car and hadn’t so much as stepped foot onto Foster’s property, it was hard to make anything of that.”

  “Any information on Foster?” Rafe asked Wendell.

  Wendell shrugged. “Lotta speculation about what’s going on. No real information. I don’t think it’s conclusive that it wasn’t suicide, but everyone assumes it had something to do with Doug Brennan.”

  Rafe nodded. So did I. It was a logical assumption.

  “I had a meeting with Ben McLaughlin,” Wendell added. “He wanted to know what I thought of this rumor that you had something to do with it.”

  “I hope you told him that Rafe had nothing to do with it,” I began, at the same time as Rafe asked, a lot more calmly, “That going around the TBI, too?”

  Wendell nodded. “Hard to say where it came from. I tried to track it back to the beginning, but everybody I asked said they’d heard it from somebody else. I got it from Jamal, Jamal got it from Kirk, and Kirk said he got it from Foster. Could be that Foster started it, but since I can’t ask him, there’s no way to know. But people are talking.”

  “Course they are.”

  I looked from Rafe to Wendell and back. “You’re taking it very calmly.”

  He slanted me a look. “Not like I ain’t used to taking the blame for everything that goes wrong, darlin’.”

  When he put it like that... “That doesn’t make it OK.” And Sheriff Satterfield had mostly stopped putting the blame for everything that went wrong on Rafe.

  “I don’t care,” Rafe said. “I don’t work there no more. They can think whatever they want.”

  He turned back to Wendell. “McLaughlin say anything else?”

  “Not about you. And I didn’t wanna ask straight out if there was something going on in his command that mighta caused someone to wanna murder Doug Brennan.”

  No, that was probably best. Especially since Ben McLaughlin himself was one of the suspects.

  “What about the others?” I asked. “Pavlova, Hammond, and Grant? Did you talk to any of them?”

  “All of’em,” Wendell said. “McLaughlin called a meeting. Two of his people have died in the past couple days. He’s upset. Understandably. And so is the upper brass.”

  “Does he suspect that something’s going on in his command that might account for it?”

  “If he does, he didn’t say,” Wendell said. “Just went over the facts and told us all the MNPD and Goins are in charge, and to answer any questions they ask. If anyone has information, to tell Goins.”

  “How did that go over?”

  “Fine,” Wendell said. “Larry Grant grumbled about Metro investigating one of our cases, and shouldn’t it be us investigating our own, but everybody else seemed to understand why we can’t.”

  “And nobody said or did anything suspicious?”

  Wendell shook his head.

  “They wouldn’t, darlin’,” Rafe told me. “They’re professionals. Or at least too professional to let slip something like that, that easy.”

  Wendell nodded. “McLaughlin and Pavlova both did some undercover work before they moved into command. They’re used to keeping a straight face.”

  “Hammond and Grant didn’t?”

  They both shook their heads. “Grant’s support,” Rafe said. “He never moves outside the office. His background’s in tech. I guess he thought the TBI would be more exciting than working for some IT outfit.”

  “Hammond came to the TBI from the PD,” Wendell added. “When his wife got pregnant, he wanted a job where he could work regular hours.”

  Or he wanted a supervisory job where he could skim money, because with a kid on the way and one more in the works—he had at least the two we’d seen—he needed more than he was making.

  I didn’t say it. I didn’t have to. Rafe and Wendell knew as well as I, maybe better, that all these people were still under suspicion, no matter their background or ability to keep a straight face.

  Rafe glanced at the kitchen window. “The snow’s starting.”

  Wendell did, too. “Guess I should think about getting home. Before it gets any worse.” He pushed his chair back from the table.

  “Before you do,” Rafe said, “let me run something by you.”

  Wendell sank back down on the chair.

  “I was thinking,” Rafe said, “that maybe I oughta call these people.”

  These people… as in McLaughlin, Hammond, Pavlova, and Grant? The suspects? “Why would you want to do that?”

  “To see what’ll happen,” Rafe said. “Three of’em may wonder if I had something to do with what happened. The fourth’ll know better. If I call’em all, and give each of’em the idea that I know what they’re up to, the three that didn’t do nothing are prob’ly gonna contact Goins and complain, and then at least we’ll know which three that is.”

  “If Goins shares the information with you, and he probably won’t. And they may not call him, either. Maybe they’ll think you’ve lost your mind because they aren’t doing anything they shouldn’t be, and they give you the benefit of the doubt because they feel bad for you. And anyway, why would you do something to make Goins even more suspicious of you?”

  “Not sure it’s possible to make him more suspicious,” Rafe said.

  “Fine. It would certainly not make him any less suspicious. Which is sort of the point. We want Goins to realize you had nothing to do with this. Not give him the idea that you know something you don’t.”

  “If we can prove who did it—” Rafe began.

  “Goins still won’t believe you. If he caught one of them in the process of chopping at Brennan’s brake cables with their nail scissors, he still wouldn’t believe that you didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “Then it can’t get any worse than it is,” Rafe said. “I think it’s worth a shot. If we can rattle one of’em sufficiently, he might do something stupid. And if everyone but that one goes screaming to McLaughlin or Goins, at least we know who didn’t do it. Whoever’s guilty ain’t gonna say nothing. He ain’t gonna wanna draw any attention to himself.”

  It made sense. I had to admit that. At least to myself. But… “I don’t like you
putting yourself in danger.”

  “I ain’t in any danger,” Rafe said. “These people live in Nashville. They ain’t gonna go out in the snow.”

  I glanced at Wendell, who said, “Just in case, maybe I oughta spend the night after all.”

  Rafe rolled his eyes. “You’re as bad as she is. When did you start worrying about the chances I take?”

  “I always worried about the chances you took,” Wendell told him evenly. “Many a time, I told you not to do it. Whatever it was. You usually did it anyway. I figure it’s gonna be the same thing now.”

  “Are you telling me not to do this?”

  There was a pause. Wendell didn’t say anything.

  “It’s worth a shot,” Rafe insisted.

  “I’m not saying you don’t have a point, boy. But this ain’t your job to do. Let Goins do it.”

  “If I leave it to Goins,” Rafe said, “I’ll be behind bars tomorrow.”

  And it was hard to dispute that. But that didn’t make it any easier to see him take stupid risks.

  He shook his head when I said so. “It ain’t stupid. And not much of a risk. All I’m gonna do is call each of’em and put a little bug in their ear. Make’em wonder whether maybe I know something they don’t want me to know. Something that maybe I haven’t realized, or done anything about, until now. When it’s in my own best self-interest to mention it.”

  “So you’ll make yourself look like you’re willing to look the other way in exchange for some money. Since you’ve lost your job and all.”

  He nodded. “Makes sense, don’t it? And whoever’s doing this would believe it. If he’s doing it for the money, he’d believe that I’d care about the money, too.”

  He probably would. I sighed. “I should have married Todd. He wouldn’t have kept me up at night with crazy, hare-brained schemes like this.”

  “I keep you up at night with other stuff,” Rafe said, and there was no denying that. I turned toward the stove to stir the ground beef—and to hide the warmth in my cheeks from Wendell—while Rafe chuckled.

  So I stirred the green chiles and the seasoning into the ground beef and turned down the heat to let the chili simmer while I pulled shredded cheese and sour cream and little tortilla crumbles out of the fridge and cabinets. Meanwhile, Rafe dug his phone out of his pocket and dialed.

  I listened while I shook the shredded cheese into a bowl and the tortilla crumbles into another, and scooped the sour cream into a third. I guess I could have just left it all in the containers it came in—and had it been just Rafe and me here, I might have—but we had company, and that meant making sure the food didn’t just taste good, but was presented properly, as well.

  “Agent Pavlova?” He must have started with her. Very chivalrous of him. Unless he suspected her more than he did the others. “This is Rafe Collier.”

  There was a faint quacking from the other end of the line, and I wondered why he didn’t put it on speaker so Wendell and I could hear, as well.

  On the other hand, if it was on speaker Pavlova might wonder why, since it’s usually possible to tell, and then she might wonder whether someone else was listening in, as well. Maybe he was trying to avoid that.

  “This won’t take long,” Rafe said, from which I deduced that Christina Pavlova must have told him how busy she was. “I was thinking maybe we oughta get together sometime. To talk.”

  There was more quacking. Pavlova must be asking what he wanted to talk about, because he said, “Better if we leave that till we got some privacy, don’t you think?”

  As far as sinister implications that said nothing specific, it wasn’t bad at all.

  Pavlova quacked. I thought I could hear a sort of frantic note in the tone of her quacking, but it could have been my imagination.

  “Tell you what,” Rafe said. His voice was nice and even, but he’d coated it with an edge of steel. “How about you just sleep on it? And let me know in the morning? Not something you wanna wait too long to deal with, I imagine, but we can take a few hours for you to think about how you wanna handle it. And what might happen if you decide not to call. Let me know. I’ll be here.”

  Pavlova said something, but I have no idea what it was. I don’t know that Rafe did, either. He hung up in the middle of it. And arched his brows at Wendell.

  Who nodded. “Sounded good.”

  It had. Certainly like he knew something he didn’t. Something the person he spoke to might not want him to know.

  He was already dialing the second name on his mental list. I waited. Until— “Grant? This is Rafe Collier.”

  His lips curved. “Exactly. That Rafe Collier.”

  Wendell smirked. I did, too.

  Rafe started going through much the same spiel with Grant that he had with Christina Pavlova. He’d only gotten halfway through it when Wendell’s phone rang. He pulled it out, glanced at it, and muttered an apology before he took himself and his phone into the hallway.

  Rafe finished his conversation with Grant with the same vaguely threatening air—like Pavlova, Grant wasn’t ready to admit anything, and wanted to sleep on it—and arched his brows at me.

  “Good job,” I said. “I have no idea who called Wendell. I guess he’ll tell you when he comes back in.”

  Rafe nodded and polished off the call to Hammond while he waited. There was no answer, so maybe Hammond was having dinner with his wife and small children and turned the phone off while he did. Rafe ended up leaving a brief message laced with vague not-quite-threats and innuendo, before he hung up. By the time he had, Wendell was back in the kitchen. “Pavlova called McLaughlin.”

  Rafe nodded. “No need to call him myself, then. If it’s him, he knows I don’t know nothing. If it ain’t him, it don’t matter.”

  “He said if you have something on Pavlova, you need to tell him,” Wendell said, “and not go behind his back to try to work an angle of your own.”

  “Which is exactly what he’d say if it’s him and he doesn’t want you to know it,” I said.

  They both nodded. “Grant’s sleeping on it,” Rafe told Wendell, “same as Pavlova, and Hammond didn’t pick up. I left a message. Anybody else on the list?”

  Wendell rattled off another dozen names. The list started with Johnson and ended with Kirkegaard. I didn’t think I’d heard any of them before. “Who are they?”

  “Undercover handlers and agents,” Rafe said. “Some of Brennan’s, some of Foster’s.” He glanced at Wendell. “You got numbers?”

  “I can get’em.” Wendell started punching buttons on his phone.

  “Why—?” I began, and Rafe explained it to me.

  “If Foster was dirty, somebody helped him skim merchandise and money. If Foster was murdered, somebody killed him. The most likely suspect is somebody who worked under him.”

  Obviously. “So now you’re going to call all of them, too?”

  “Might as well,” Rafe said, and dialed the first number Wendell gave him.

  Ten minutes later, with the phone calls out of the way and the chili done, we settled down to eat. Wendell, too. He must have decided to stick around. I’m not sure whether it was the weather, or the fact that Rafe was sticking his neck out, but Wendell made no more noises about wanting to leave. After dinner, I headed upstairs to put clean sheets on the bed in the lavender room that used to be Mrs. Jenkins’s, while Rafe and Wendell took Carrie to the parlor to watch basketball while they waited for someone to call back with a confession, or at least with a desire to meet and talk.

  No one did, though. Grant and Pavlova must still be thinking about what to do—or maybe Pavlova wasn’t, since she’d dumped the metaphorical mess in McLaughlin’s lap—and Hammond didn’t call to ask what the hell Rafe meant by making such an insulting, slanderous suggestion on his voicemail. I figured he either hadn’t gotten the message, or he knew it was neither insulting nor slanderous, and he was planning what to do about it. Of the handful of undercover handlers Rafe had called—not like he could call the agents themselves; h
e knew better than to put them in danger—two had cursed him out, one had threatened to have him up on charges, and one had snarled at him to do his worst. All four had hung up in his ear. The other two hadn’t picked up.

  After the basketball game we went to bed. Rafe rustled up a pair of pajamas for Wendell—a bit too big for the older man, who is neither as tall nor as muscular as Rafe, at least not anymore—and he even pulled on a pair of pajama bottoms of his own, too. There was no hanky-panky in the bedroom before we fell asleep.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I guess I should be grateful we had a baby. Without Carrie, who knows what would have happened?

  As it was, I was already up and awake in the middle of the night, sitting in the rocking chair in the nursery with the baby on my lap, when something crashed through one of the windows downstairs. A second passed, during which I was frozen in shock. Then came a whoosh, at the same time as I screamed. “Rafe!”

  “On it.” He was already moving, coming through the doorway on the other side of the hall toward the top of the stairs. A moment passed, then— “Shit!”

  It isn’t often I hear panic in my husband’s voice—he’s faced things the rest of us will never face without batting an eyelash—but I heard it then. “What?!”

  “Get the baby.” His voice was tight, and by now I could hear crackling behind it. Meanwhile, he pushed Wendell’s door open fast enough that it knocked back against the wall. “Move!”

  Wendell must already be moving, because his voice was almost as close to me as Rafe’s. “What the hell was that?”

  Rafe said something I didn’t catch, both because the crackling was getting louder and because the baby was crying. I’d had to unlatch her from what she was doing, and she wasn’t ready. I rocked her—“Shhh! Shhh!”—as I ran for the door. Since she was full of milk, and I hadn’t burped her properly, and I was bouncing her as I ran, she threw up on me. Of course.

  At the moment, it was the least of my concerns. I stopped at the top of the stairs with an echo of Rafe’s exclamation from earlier. “Shit!”

  It was no wonder he’d sounded panicked. At the bottom of the stairs, the foyer was already engulfed in flames. They licked at the walls and the old wood of the newel post. Our winter jackets, on the coat rack beside the door, were burning like bonfires.