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

by Jenna Bennett

  Once we exited the highway at Hart Lane, in sight of the TBI building and its antennae, Wendell shut the light off and pulled it back inside the car. We drove up Gass Boulevard toward the TBI quietly, past the fancy old shell of the building that used to house some sort of orphanage back in the old days, and past the Medical Examiner’s office to the top of the hill and the big, brown building housing the Tennessee Bureau of Investigations.

  There are people at the ME’s office around the clock, just as there are at the TBI. Someone’s always on duty. There were a handful of cars in front of the Office of Forensic Medicine, and when we drove into the lot at the TBI, there were a few there, too. Including a dark SUV parked under a tree.

  I pointed to it, and Rafe nodded. He pulled the Volvo over to it, got out, and put his hand on the hood. “It ain’t warm anymore. But with the temperature being what it is, maybe it wouldn’t be.”

  Maybe.

  “And there’s no ice on the windshield, so it ain’t been here all night.”

  No, it hadn’t. Not that that thought would have occurred to me, but now that he’d mentioned it, it made sense. Someone had driven that car here recently, albeit not so recently that the engine was still warm.

  We parked the Volvo next to Wendell’s Town Car, and I pulled the carrier with the baby out of the back seat. “Now what?”

  “Now we go in,” Wendell said, “and the first thing we do is go see McLaughlin. He’s gonna need to know what’s going on, if we’re gonna take down one of his employees inside the TBI.”

  “Are you sure it isn’t McLaughlin himself we’re looking for?”

  “I don’t think it’s McLaughlin,” Wendell said, “but that’s why you’re coming. You’ll recognize the guy you saw?”

  I had to hope I would. “As soon as he starts talking, I’ll recognize his voice, if nothing else.”

  “Good enough,” Wendell said, and led the way into the TBI.

  We had to stop at the security desk, of course, where Rafe and I, and even Carrie, were issued visitor passes. The guy on duty didn’t seem quite sure that it was OK for him to give Rafe one, but when Wendell got in his face and told him to, he didn’t dare disobey. I felt pretty certain that the guy was on the line to somebody the second we hit the elevator, though, and that supposition was borne out when we got off the elevator on the second floor and were hailed by a stocky guy in his early fifties, with brown hair going gray at the temples. “Craig! What the hell d’you think you’re doing?!”

  Wendell glanced at me. I shook my head. Not only was this guy an inch or two shorter than the man I’d seen, and a bit stockier, but the voice was wrong. He was also about ten years older, unless I missed my guess, and was dressed in a suit and tie.

  “Ben.” Wendell’s voice was calm. “You know Rafe. This is his wife, Savannah.”

  Ben McLaughlin’s eyes snagged on the pajamas he could see through the opening in my coat, and on the baby, still in her sleeper, before they returned to Wendell. “Craig…”

  “It’s a long story,” Wendell said. “Let’s take it into your office.”

  And McLaughlin must have been curious enough to hear what was going on, because rather than argue, he just did an about-face and led the way down to a door on the right.

  “Have a seat.” He gestured to two chairs in front of the desk, while he himself took a seat behind it. Rafe deposited me in one chair and left the other to Wendell, while he walked over to the wall and leaned on it, arms folded across his chest. He’d shrugged out of the sweater while we were still in the car, so in spite of the January weather and sprinkling of snow on the ground, he was in a T-shirt with the bandage around his arm and over his shoulder on display.

  McLaughlin nodded to it. “What happened?”

  I let Wendell explain. He had been there for everything that had gone on at the house overnight, and he had more official standing than either of us.

  When he was finished, McLaughlin turned to Rafe. “This true?”

  Rafe nodded.

  “I received Christina Pavlova’s call last night. No one else has contacted me.”

  Rafe shrugged.

  “You didn’t contact me,” McLaughlin added.

  “You were on the list,” Rafe said coolly, “but after you heard from Pavlova, I figured there wasn’t any need to call you myself. You already knew what I was doing. And you weren’t gonna fall for it.”

  McLaughlin’s lips twitched. “You’re not afraid of saying what you think, anyway.”

  “For what it’s worth,” Wendell said, maybe because he was afraid McLaughlin was angry with Rafe, in spite of the almost-smile, “you were at the bottom of the list. Foster was at the top, until he died.”

  McLaughlin nodded.

  “Now we’re down to Hammond and Grant for the short list. It was a man who attacked Savannah, so Pavlova’s off the hook. She pretty much was anyway, after she contacted you yesterday. Whoever killed Brennan and Foster wouldn’t have done that.”

  McLaughlin nodded again. “Someone attacked you?” he asked me. “Tell me about that.”

  I told him about it. And ended with, “It wasn’t you. He’s younger than you, and the voice was different.”

  He looked surprised for a moment, and then I guess he accepted it. “That’s what you were doing in the hallway,” he said to Wendell. “Checking if it was me.”

  Wendell nodded. “And it wasn’t. So now we check Hammond and Grant.”

  McLaughlin didn’t move from the desk. “Why them?”

  Wendell laid out our reasoning. McLaughlin nodded. “I don’t see Josh Hammond trying to burn anyone alive. Especially not a family with a baby. I don’t see him trying to push a woman with a baby into a river, either. He’s a family man.”

  “What about Grant?” Rafe wanted to know. “You see him doing it?”

  McLaughlin hesitated. “I wouldn’t have thought so. But at least he doesn’t have children of his own. I don’t see anyone who has children being able to do this.”

  Since this was something we had thought of ourselves, it didn’t come as a surprise. On the other hand, it wasn’t conclusive evidence, either. Some people do horrible things to their own children, while some treat their own like gold, but couldn’t care less about anyone else’s. Either way, being a parent wasn’t proof one way or the other.

  “Let’s just let Savannah talk to’em both,” Rafe said, “and see what she says.”

  McLaughlin nodded. “Grant’s already at work. I saw his car in the lot when I came in.”

  So had I, if he happened to drive a dark SUV. But before I could ask, McLaughlin reached for the phone on his desk. “I’ll just call him up here.”

  We all waited while he punched a button or two on an old-fashioned phone. A voice answered. “Yeah?”

  Rafe and Wendell both looked at me. I shrugged. I couldn’t say for certain that this wasn’t the voice I’d heard, but I couldn’t say for certain that it was, either. It’s hard to tell from just one word, especially on a speaker phone.

  McLaughlin issued the request that Grant come to his office, and Grant said, “On my way.”

  Rafe and Wendell looked at me again. I shrugged again. I still wasn’t sure.

  We waited in silence for Grant to arrive. McLaughlin turned a pen over and over in his hands. I crossed my legs in the other direction. Wendell sat so quietly he’d practically stopped breathing. And Rafe pushed off from the wall next to the window and moved across the room to the wall next to the door, I guess in case Grant was the person we were looking for and he tried to make a break for it once he realized we knew.

  McLaughlin watched, his brows arched, but he didn’t saw anything. When Rafe leaned his other shoulder against the opposite wall and folded his arms again, he gave a sort of approving nod.

  There was a knock on the door, and McLaughlin called, “Come.”

  “Boss?” A head with mousy brown hair and glasses appeared around the door. “You wanted to see me?”

  McLaughlin n
odded. “Come on in.”

  I already knew this wasn’t the guy we were looking for, though. Too skinny—the guy in the SUV, the guy who had pretended to be a cop—was more muscular than this. Not as built as Rafe, not as stocky as McLaughlin, but not as lanky as Grant, either. And the voice was wrong. So was the attitude. When he came into the room and saw us all, especially Rafe leaning against the wall looking menacing, he looked a little confused, but not guilty. Certainly not afraid, and anyone who had hurt Rafe’s wife and child, and who was facing a Rafe looking at him like that, would have been terrified. It’s sexy as hell if you’re not on the receiving end of it, but if you are, it’s enough to make a hardened criminal pee his pants.

  And this was no hardened criminal, nor anyone with anything to hide. Grant just blinked at us behind the glasses. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” McLaughlin said. My lack of reaction must have told him everything he needed to know, unless it was Grant’s own lack of reaction that did it. “Have you seen Josh Hammond this morning?”

  Grant looked surprised. “He’s in. He was at his desk when I walked by.”

  “Would you tell him to come see me? Don’t mention that anyone else is here.”

  “Sure,” Grant said. He made to withdraw, and then he hesitated. And stopped in front of Rafe. “I was sorry to hear you were let go. For what it’s worth, I never thought you did anything to Brennan.”

  Rafe nodded. Grant blushed and disappeared through the door. McLaughlin arched his brows, and Rafe shook his head.

  No, much better not to ask. But I could see what Rafe had been talking about when he mentioned the way Grant looked at him. Clearly, somebody had a crush, even if he was a lot more polite about it than Tim.

  Less than a minute passed, and then there was another knock on the door. Hammond didn’t wait to be asked to enter. He just knocked and pushed the door open and his head inside. “Boss? Something the matter?”

  McLaughlin glanced at me. Rafe shifted his weight like he was getting ready to pounce. And Hammond stuck his head around the door jamb and looked from Wendell to me to Rafe. His brows went up. “Hell.”

  It wasn’t a guilty hell. Just a surprised one. And although he was the right height and weight—slimmer than McLaughlin, more muscular than Grant—he didn’t have the right voice, either. “It’s not him,” I said.

  McLaughlin dismissed him the same way he had Grant, and Hammond made to leave.

  “One second,” Rafe said, and McLaughlin’s brows went up. So did Hammond’s. He glanced at McLaughlin, but when the latter didn’t interfere, he halted his retreat. He wasn’t happy about it, though.

  “Yeah?” His eyes were narrowed, and it was clear he didn’t like Rafe as much as Grant did. Or maybe he just didn’t like him the way Grant did. Either way, he didn’t like being questioned by him.

  “You used to work for Metro PD.”

  Hammond nodded. “So?”

  “You know Goins?”

  “Sure,” Hammond said.

  “Seen anything of him lately?”

  “Not since I left,” Hammond said.

  “You ain’t spoken to him this week? Maybe about Doug Brennan?”

  Hammond shook his head. “I have nothing to do with what happened to Brennan. We weren’t close. He worked undercover organized crime, I work narcotics. We have our own undercover department. And besides, it’s a waste of time to talk to Rick Goins. When he makes up his mind, it’s hard to change it. Easier just to let him work things through on his own till he figures out where he went wrong. It takes time, but it beats trying to reason with him.”

  No question. I’d beat my own head against that particular wall a time or two, so I could attest to the absolute verity of this.

  Rafe nodded. “Thanks.”

  Hammond glanced at McLaughlin. “Everything OK?”

  McLaughlin nodded. “Fine. You can go back to work.”

  Hammond withdrew.

  “Now what?” McLaughlin said. He glanced at me. “You’re sure it wasn’t either of them?”

  I nodded. “Positive. Hammond had the shape but not the voice. Grant didn’t have either. And either one of them would have wet his pants when he came face to face with Rafe, anyway, if he were guilty.”

  McLaughlin’s lips twitched. Rafe’s eyebrow arched. He pushed off from the wall by the door, sauntered over to put a hand on my shoulder for a second and drop a kiss on the top of my head, before he continued over to the wall by the window again.

  The conversation stopped until he was in place. Then McLaughlin picked it back up. “Any other ideas? Could Foster have killed Brennan and then himself?”

  “Of course he could have,” Wendell said. “But someone set the fire last night and pushed Savannah off the road this morning. And it wasn’t Foster.”

  No, it wasn’t. “The person we’re looking for might not have killed either Foster or Brennan. But he tried to kill all of us in the house fire, and then he tried to push me and the baby into the Stones River. So even if he isn’t a murderer right now, it isn’t for lack of trying.”

  McLaughlin nodded. “What more can we do?”

  There was a moment’s silence. “We thought it made sense for it to be Hammond or Grant,” Wendell said. “Hammond’s also in narcotics, and Grant knows a little about everything. But if it isn’t either of’em, maybe it’s someone that’s under Foster. Maybe Foster was the top of the chain and the rest of the operation was in the tiers below.”

  McLaughlin allowed as how that made sense. He pushed off from his desk. “Better we go down to Foster’s department than call them up here one by one. There might not even be anyone there yet.”

  I guessed there might not. The undercover guys wouldn’t be coming in to the office at all, and the handlers might not keep regular hours, either. Rafe and Wendell certainly hadn’t been keeping a nine-to-five schedule back when they were doing undercover work.

  So I picked up the baby carrier, in deference to Rafe’s arm and to the fact that it’s hard for a man to look menacing when he’s carrying a baby, and we trooped out in the hallway behind McLaughlin.

  Foster’s department was situated one floor up, but when we got there, it was deserted. It consisted of a room full of cubicles, and there wasn’t a single person at any desk. McLaughlin looked around with a frustrated expression on his face.

  “Someone’s been up here,” Wendell said, pointing to a takeaway container of coffee on a desk. It had leaked a little, and was sitting in a ring of coffee that was slowly spreading across the desktop. If nobody had been here this morning, and the cup was from yesterday, the coffee would have been dry by now.

  A jacket hung over the back of the chair in front of the desk, and I pointed to it. “That’s the kind of jacket the guy in the SUV was wearing.”

  Your basic dark windbreaker, with extra padding for the winter. No identifying marks anywhere, but the kind of thing that identified the wearer, very obviously, as being in law enforcement.

  “Gym?” Rafe suggested. And it was a good suggestion. Whenever he’d gone in to work extra early, it was so he could work out.

  Granted, this guy might have other things on his mind this morning, but he might also have thought that a nice workout, after pushing a car with a woman and her infant into the river, would be just the thing to relieve tension and make him relax.

  We headed back to the elevator.

  The workout facilites at the TBI are in the basement. I’d been there once. Rafe was trying to teach me self defense—I can’t even remember off-hand who I needed to defend myself from—and I’d ended up on my back on the mat with him on top of me, and a very enjoyable interlude had ensued.

  But I digress. Rafe either didn’t remember, or he also had other things on his mind, because he didn’t look at me as we approached the gym doors. His expression was grim.

  The elevator had made a noise as the doors opened, and I’d been a little worried that the man we were after, if he was down here, had heard it and
realized we were coming. But it must have been lost in the sounds inside the gym. Feet moving and grunts and the occasional breathless curse. Our man, if he was here and this wasn’t someone else, wasn’t alone.

  We stopped outside the doors. They had windows in the top, but the glass was covered with brown paper, so it wasn’t possible to see in. McLaughlin tried the handle. It moved in his hand.

  He looked back over his shoulder. “Ready?”

  Rafe and Wendell nodded. Wendell pulled his gun. Rafe’s eyes glinted with annoyance when he remembered that he didn’t have one.

  Then McLaughlin pushed the door open and we all slipped inside.

  It wasn’t as quiet and orderly as all that, but we also weren’t trying to be stealthy. There were four of us—five if you counted Carrie, although you probably shouldn’t, and you shouldn’t count me, either. That left three of us—and McLaughlin and Wendell were armed—against one.

  Except the one wasn’t alone. He was inside the sparring ring on the opposite side of the room, mock fighting with someone. Tall, lanky, with brown skin and black hair…

  “Rafe!” Jamal stopped in the middle of his attempt to drive his opponent back against the ropes, and grinned widely from ear to ear.

  I squinted, as the light caught on something in Jamal’s hand. And in that second, Jamal’s opponent made his move.

  He had an arm around Jamal’s throat and his knife against the underside of Jamal’s jaw in the time I went from realizing that they weren’t just mock fighting, they were mock fighting with knives.

  Knives with real blades.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  For a second, everything stood still. Nobody moved. We all just stood frozen. Until Jamal let out a shuddering breath and dropped the knife he was holding. It hit the plastic with a sort of dull thump and the man holding him gave it a kick. It went flying off the mat, out of the ring, and onto the floor.

  “Kirk,” McLaughlin said, his voice rough. I recognized the name from when Alexandra had told me who Jamal’s new handler would be. “What the hell are you doing?”