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

by Jenna Bennett

  Not that she was acting hurt. She’d wailed lustily the whole way down into the basement, and had dissolved into sniffles and hiccups while Rafe carried her. Now she was blinking up at us with big eyes. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong with her. But I didn’t draw a deep breath again until both of the paramedics had taken a look at her and declared her good to go.

  There was certainly nothing wrong with her lungs. She starting using them as soon as they began poking at her.

  I took her back after they were finished, and she calmed down. “Any chance we could get our hands on some clothes?” I asked Rafe, since now that the adrenaline had left me and I had been out here a while, I was starting to feel the chill. He was wearing even less than I was, and had a burn on one arm; he was probably feeling the chill even more than I was.

  “Our winter coats are history.”

  I nodded. I’d seen the coat rack go up in flames. “It doesn’t look like the flames reached the second floor, though. We have more clothes there. Do you think someone might go up there if we asked, and would bring us something?”

  “I’ll do it,” Rafe said and rolled to his feet. He used the uninjured arm to push himself up, but otherwise there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with him.

  “Make sure you’re allowed to go inside first,” I called after him as he set off across the grass. The little bit of snow that had fallen earlier had been churned into slush and mud by the water and all the feet tramping across our yard, but I’m sure it was still burning cold on the naked soles of his feet.

  He lifted a hand—the uninjured side—to let me know he’d heard me, but he didn’t turn around. I lifted my camisole—Carrie was trying to find milk through it—and let her find her way to food while I watched him cross the yard to where Wendell and the station chief were still in conversation. A minute passed, and then all three of them headed toward the back of the house. I guess they’d decided that it would be easier to get in that way.

  I watched them boost themselves up and through the kitchen door—the wooden porch and stairs were gone—and I’m sure the movement hurt Rafe’s arm, but he sidelined the pain and did it anyway. Wendell followed, a little less gracefully, still wearing Rafe’s blue pajamas, and then the fire chief clambered through. They all disappeared inside.

  I stayed where I was. Once the paramedics had cleared me and left, no one else bothered me. The firemen were busy doing their own thing. And Spicer and Truman must not be on duty on the graveyard shift, because after a few minutes a black and white squad car came up the driveway, but the two officers that stepped out were people I’d never seen before. And they didn’t seem to notice me, just exchanged some words with the paramedics and firemen—to make sure that everything was under control, I guess—and then they reversed out of the driveway the way they came and drove off again.

  I wondered whether they’d file a report, or whether our address would come up as being of interest in the case Rick Goins was working.

  He must not be working the graveyard shift, either, or he probably would have been on hand, trying to prove that Rafe had set fire to his own house, with his own wife and infant inside, just to prove someone else was out to get him.

  I closed my eyes and sent a prayer heavenwards with a heartfelt plea that the two cops who had just left wouldn’t knock Goins up and send him over here, because this night was already traumatic enough, and we didn’t need that on top of everything else.

  Chapter Nineteen

  It might have been ten minutes or so before Wendell and Rafe and the fire chief came back out of the house. Wendell and Rafe had both changed into street clothes. Wendell was wearing what he’d been wearing yesterday, minus the overcoat that was now nothing but ashes on the floor of the foyer. But he’d worn his shoes upstairs last night, so his feet were covered. So were Rafe’s. They weren’t the boots he’d left in the hallway downstairs, along with his jacket, before retiring to bed last night, but a pair of sneakers he wore to the gym sometimes. The jeans were faded and snug and fit him very nicely, and he’d thrown on a cable knit sweater over what was probably a T-shirt. The black leather jacket he usually wears was history, of course.

  They were all carrying bags. I guess they’d taken the time to throw whatever they could fit into the suitcases they could find so we’d have something to wear for the next week. Rafe was carrying Carrie’s diaper bag across his chest, and one of my coats—not the puffy one I’d had on yesterday, but a demure (and warm) wool I’d had since I was Bradley Ferguson’s wife—over his arm. A pair of my boots dangled from his hand.

  “Here, darlin’.” They dumped it all on the floor of the gazebo, and Rafe put the coat around my shoulders. I smiled up at him. “Thank you. How bad is it?”

  He dug in the diaper bag and pulled out a small blanket he draped over Carrie. “Could be worse.”

  “The front of the house is a total loss,” the fire chief said after nodding a greeting to me. He kept his eyes very carefully away from the nursing baby. “You’ll have to do some work in the dining room, but not much. The rear of the house is all right.” So the library and kitchen and powder room, I assumed. “The staircase is destroyed. The heartwood survived, but the sapwood all burned. And there’s a lot of damage from the water and smoke. I’m afraid that can’t be helped.”

  No problem. We were here and alive and hadn’t lost most of the house or most of our belongings, so it was all good. “The upstairs is OK?”

  They all nodded. “Other than some smoke,” Rafe qualified.

  So we could fix it. If we wanted to. The insurance would cover it, surely. Although we probably couldn’t live here for a while.

  The thought was still making its way through my mind when Rafe said, “You should take the baby and the car and go stay with your mama for a few days.”

  It would take more than a few days to fix this. But what he meant was probably that I should take the baby and car and go stay with my mother for a few days while he didn’t. While he stuck around here until the case was solved.

  I shook my head. “If you’re staying here, I’m staying here.”

  “I’m gonna spend a couple days with Wendell,” Rafe said, after the fire chief had excused himself and wandered off. I guessed he didn’t want any part of the argument he heard brewing.

  “If there’s room for you at Wendell’s house, I’m sure there’s room for me, too. We sleep in the same bed.”

  “It’s a twin,” Rafe said.

  OK, so that might be a little tight. And then there was Carrie. But I wasn’t about to give up that easily. “Then why don’t you come to Sweetwater, too? You can take a couple of days to recover and then go to work for Grimaldi.”

  “I wanna finish this,” Rafe said, with a glance over his shoulder.

  He wasn’t talking about the house, of course. He was talking about whoever had thrown the Molotov Cocktail—or whatever the current term was—through our window. Whoever had tried to kill us in our sleep.

  I lowered my voice. I’m not sure why, since no one else was close enough to us to hear what we were saying. The fire chief was back by the fire truck by now. “You think this is because of those phone calls you made last night.”

  It wasn’t a question, and I didn’t make it sound like one.

  He nodded. “It was stupid. I just didn’t think anybody’d do something like this.”

  Who would? Doug Brennan’s death had probably been designed to look like an accident, and Foster’s like a suicide. When Brennan’s accident was questioned, Foster’s suicide was supposed to explain it. The person who had set it all up had been hoping to get away with it.

  But this was murder. There was no way anyone could look at this and think it was accidental.

  Unless we weren’t supposed to know what had happened. If we’d slept through the missile through the window, and the house had gone up—or down—in flames, with all of us inside it, maybe it would be chalked up to old wiring in a very old house.

  With the way t
hings had worked out, that wasn’t a possibility. I’d been awake, and had heard the glass break. There was no coming back from this. Whoever had done it was on the hook now, with no way to wiggle his way—or hers—off.

  “Do you know who it is?” I asked Rafe.

  He hesitated. Glanced at the house. Glanced at Wendell. Looked back at me. “Not for sure. I have an idea. But it’s too soon to tell.”

  “Do you know who it isn’t?”

  He looked like he wanted to roll his eyes at my persistence, but he didn’t. Or maybe it was just frustration. His answer made it sound like it could be. “It ain’t Foster, and he was at the top of my list until yesterday.”

  “Unless he was involved,” Wendell said, “and whoever he was involved with took care of him.”

  Rafe nodded. “Then it’s either Hammond or McLaughlin, or one of the handlers Foster had under him. One of’em coulda struck a deal with Foster, prob’ly with the help of the undercover agent, and between the three of’em—the agent, the handler, and Foster—they got busy playing the players in whatever field they were working.”

  “Until Brennan talked to Foster about you,” Wendell nodded, “and Brennan figured out what Foster was up to, and Foster killed Brennan. And when he told his partners what he’d done, they decided they might as well take Foster out, too.”

  I looked from one to the other of them. “Why would they do that?”

  “The game was up anyway,” Rafe said, “if Brennan had figured it out. They couldn’t keep going. This way they take the suspicion off themselves and put it on Foster. Who prob’ly did kill Brennan.”

  “What about McLaughlin or Hammond?”

  “Foster coulda been working with one of them, too,” Rafe said. “Hammond’s Foster’s opposite in narcotics the way Pavlova’s Brennan’s.”

  All the possessives and contractions—and job descriptions—confused me, and he dumbed it down. “Foster was to undercover narcotics like Brennan was to undercover organized crime. Both of’em dealt with undercover agents and handlers. Hammond’s narcotics and Pavlova’s organized crime, but none of’em deal with undercover agents.”

  Got it. “There’s plenty of money to be made in organized crime, though.” As he very well knew. He’d been winding his way through every aspect of it for ten years.

  He grinned, but didn’t take the bait. “No reason for Pavlova, if she’s dirty, to involve Foster. And Foster’s involved. Or was.”

  Or why kill him? I nodded. “That makes sense. Besides, when you called her, Pavlova called McLaughlin. If she was planning to do something to you—if she was planning to do this,” I glanced at the house, “chances are she wouldn’t have drawn attention to herself by calling him.”

  Always assuming McLaughlin wasn’t dirty, too, and the two of them weren’t working together.

  I put that thought aside for now. This was complicated enough without that. “So it’s more likely that whatever’s going on was going on on the narcotics side of McLaughlin’s department. Brennan wasn’t dirty—at least we don’t think so—and chances are, if something had been going on in organized crime, even under just Pavlova, the two of you, as well as Brennan, would have noticed it.”

  They both nodded. “Too much activity in organized crime,” Rafe said, “with me and the boys and the gang unit and all that. Hard to slip anything past anyone.”

  “Brennan did notice,” Wendell added, “and that’s how come he’s dead.”

  “So for now, we’re putting Pavlova on the bottom of the list, because she’s in organized crime, and we don’t think this was happening there. We think it was happening in narcotics.”

  The both nodded, and Wendell averted his eyes politely while I moved Carrie, pulled my camisole down, and put the baby against my shoulder so I could burp her.

  “Any reason we can’t take this conversation to Wendell’s place for the rest of the night? We can’t stay here.”

  “You go on,” Rafe said. “I wanna make sure the place is boarded up before we leave. Don’t want nobody thinking it’s a good idea to walk in and help themselves to whatever’s in there.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sure your TV is history.”

  He shrugged. “There’s a TV in your mama’s house.”

  There was. It wasn’t the size his had been, but if he didn’t care, I certainly didn’t. And we could replace it with something bigger, if he wanted.

  I got to my feet, a bit stiffly, because it had been cold sitting there on the hard wood floor of the gazebo, without much in the way of clothes on.

  Wendell peeled a key off his keychain and handed it to me. “The guest room’s at the top of the stairs on the right. Make yourself at home.”

  “We’ll be there as soon as I get this squared away,” Rafe added, and picked up a suitcase and some of Carrie’s paraphernalia for the walk over to the Volvo. “An hour. Maybe a while longer. Then we’ll finish talking.”

  I would absolutely hold him to that. “Take care of yourselves. Both of you.”

  “He ain’t here,” Rafe said with a disdainful look around. “Prob’ly waited long enough to see the flames take hold, but there’s too much activity now for him to risk being seen. He’s home, in bed, congratulating himself on how clever he’s been.”

  No doubt. I got Carrie situated in the car—the seat had survived mostly intact inside the house, and Rafe had brought it out—while the men dumped the bags and suitcases into the trunk. “Don’t worry about hauling’em inside when you get there,” Rafe told me, and I figured he’d tell me he’d help me later, but instead he said, “You’ll just have to put’em back when you take off for Sweetwater.”

  Which I wasn’t planning to do until he was coming with me, but I didn’t argue, just nodded. “Be careful.”

  “You, too.” He kissed me, and stepped back to wave me off. I got into the car and cranked the key in the ignition. The Volvo didn’t seem to have been damaged at all by anything that had happened, and purred just as sweetly as always down the driveway. I headed down Potsdam to Dresden, and from there over to Dickerson and the entrance to the interstate.

  The streets were all quiet this time of night. There’d been so much activity outside our house that I hadn’t really thought about how early it was, but the lighted numbers on the dashboard told me it was just going on 4AM, and the streets were mostly deserted. The little bit of snow that had fallen had already blown off the interstate, and it was an easy drive out to Hermitage. It was just past a quarter after when I pulled up outside Wendell’s townhouse and found a spot marked Guest Parking, where I pulled the car in. And then I turned off the engine and dropped my hands to my lap and just sat there for a few minutes, shivering.

  It wasn’t because I was cold. I’d had the heat going in the car, and it was nice and toasty. I was wearing the wool coat on top of my pajamas, and boots on my feet, so I was in no danger of freezing.

  No, it was reaction, pure and simple. I had held it together during the trip down the stairs and into the basement. I’d had a few moments of quiet panic in the tunnel, but I hadn’t said anything about it, because Rafe had Carrie to deal with, and he needed me to be strong, because he couldn’t take care of me too. And once we got up the shaft and outside, there were people there, and I couldn’t break down into a gibbering mess in front of them. Not only would it be unbecoming, but I was sitting there in my pajamas, with no makeup and no bra, and it wasn’t the time to draw attention to myself.

  And I’d focused on keeping the car on the road during the drive. But now I was here, safely parked outside Wendell’s townhouse with the engine and lights turned off. The baby had gone back to sleep in the back seat, and I didn’t want to disturb her, because the sooner we got her onto a working day/night schedule, the better for everyone involved. And yes, six weeks was probably a little soon to be worrying about that. But she was asleep. I didn’t want to do anything to change that. So I sat there in the dark, and had my little meltdown very quietly, in the front seat of my car
, while around me, everyone was sleeping. Caroline was making soft little snuffling, sucking noises as she slept, and the thought that, if things had gone differently I might never have heard those small snuffling, sucking noises again, was heart breaking.

  Who’d throw a firebomb—or whatever it was—into a house where there was a six-week-old baby, for God’s sake? Who had that little respect for human life as to be willing to kill a baby in order to get her father off their tail?

  Probably not Christina Pavlova. If she rescued animals, she probably had a somewhat soft spot for babies, too. Maybe not as soft—animal people tend to value animals above humans, even tiny humans—but I’m sure she liked babies better than she liked adults. And anyone who rescued animals surely wouldn’t deliberately kill a baby, even as collateral damage.

  McLaughlin and Hammond both had children. McLaughlin’s were grown, or close to grown. Hammond’s were still small. We’d postulated that either one of them might do something illegal to get money to provide for their children’s needs. Did that extend to not wanting to harm anyone else’s child, too?

  I would tend to think it did. But of course I could be wrong.

  That left Grant, the bachelor, and the unknown undercover operative or handler we thought might have been in business with Foster, and who had killed Foster after Foster killed Brennan.

  Wendell had a daughter, Rafe said. An adult daughter now. But he certainly wasn’t a family man, not the kind with a wife and a kid at home. And I was willing to bet his opposite number, the hypothetical narcotics handler, didn’t, either. It was even less likely that the undercover narcotics agent did. People with a lot of hostages to fortune, women and children at home, didn’t tend to go into that kind of work. Too much risk. Too much time away from the people they loved.

  That’s as far as I’d traveled down the convoluted byways of my mind when something happened. The door to Wendell’s townhouse opened, and someone came out.

  My first instinct was to question whether I’d made a mistake in identifying Wendell’s townhouse. Maybe what I thought was Wendell’s townhouse wasn’t really Wendell’s townhouse at all. Maybe it was Wendell’s neighbor’s townhouse, and now the neighbor was off to an early start at work.