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

by Jenna Bennett

  And between you and me, Alexandra had been right. Kirk wasn’t near as hot as Rafe. He had some decent muscles, and blond hair in a crew cut, but there was just the hint of a potbelly, now that I saw him without the windbreaker.

  Yes, he was absolutely the guy who had tried to run me into the river earlier. I didn’t even need to hear him speak to know it.

  He didn’t acknowledge McLaughlin’s question, just kept his knife at Jamal’s throat and his eyes on Rafe and Wendell. “Don’t come any closer, or I’ll gut him like a fish.”

  There was no doubt in my mind that he would. Or at least that he’d try. This was probably the same guy who’d stabbed Malcolm. Given that Malcolm was still holding his own and would survive what happened to him, Kirk might not manage to kill Jamal if he tried, either.

  But it wasn’t a risk I wanted to take. Nor did Jamal, I’m sure.

  “Let him go,” McLaughlin said. “Put the knife down and let him go. We can figure this out.”

  Kirk laughed. It wasn’t a pleasant laugh. “It’s too late for that.”

  “You haven’t killed anyone yet. Foster killed Brennan and then himself…”

  But Kirk either didn’t realize that McLaughlin was giving him an out, or he didn’t care. He snorted, as if this was an insult to his own abilities instead of a way to claim himself innocent of murder. “I killed Brennan and Foster. Me. Nobody else.”

  No one spoke, and he added, disdain in his voice, “Foster called me in a panic after Brennan had spoken to him. Foster said Brennan figured out that Foster was being paid to look the other way while my boys and I creamed off some of the take on our deals. He even went down to the parking lot and tried to get at Brennan’s brakes. Hacked away on the underside of Brennan’s car with his knife. It’s a miracle Brennan was able to get it to drive at the end of the day!”

  It was clear from his tone that he could have done a much better job of cutting someone’s brake cables than Foster had.

  “So if Foster didn’t cut Brennan’s brake cables,” McLaughlin asked, “what happened?”

  “I followed him,” Kirk said, “and pushed him off the road. It went a lot smoother than when I tried to do the same thing to the Collier bitch this morning. Brennan went right over the edge and down.”

  He gave me a scowl. I’d clearly disappointed him by not doing the same.

  I opened my mouth to apologize—sarcastically, I swear; my good upbringing doesn’t extend so far that I’ll actually apologize, sincerely, to my would-be murderer for surviving—and then I thought better of it. No need to upset him unnecessarily. Not while the point of that knife was at Jamal’s throat.

  “Why d’you put the knife in my trash can?”

  Kirk turned his attention to Rafe. “I wiped the handle first. Figured there might be some traces of Brennan’s car on the blade. Thought Rick Goins would find it and test it and match it. But I guess he was too much of an idiot for that.”

  Or there was nothing on the blade to test. Which was also a possibility.

  “How do you know Rick Goins?” McLaughlin wanted to know. I did, too. Kirk hadn’t come to the TBI from Metro PD. Or if he had, no one had mentioned it.

  He smirked. “High school buddies. He called me for the inside intel when he got the case. It was no problem to whisper in his ear how Brennan had fired Collier. I didn’t even have to suggest that with Collier’s background, he was a likely suspect. Rick’s the same racist asshole he was in school; he figured that out right quick on his own.”

  “And Malcolm?” Rafe said.

  “That the black kid? He saw me put the knife there. When I saw him again the next day, I decided to teach him a lesson.”

  Kirk’s voice was chillingly unemotional, like he was talking about taking away Malcolm’s video privileges instead of stabbing him repeatedly with a knife and leaving him to die.

  “One less young, black male on the street,” he added, with a smirk that no doubt included both Rafe and Wendell. “No loss to anyone.”

  Sounded like there might be a bit of a racist asshole in Kirk, too, if you’ll excuse my French.

  “For your information,” I said, “Malcolm’s going to be all right. He survived, too. Just like I did. Just like we all did.”

  With the way he was talking, I figured we might as well get the fire out on the table, too. He’d been willing to admit to—even brag about—how clever he’d been about everything else, so it was likely he’d cop to that, as well.

  “You threw an accelerant through the window of my house,” Rafe said, his voice conversational, but with an undertone of icy fury that was clear as day to me, at least. “Where my wife and my baby were sleeping.”

  Kirk smirked. “You got out.”

  “No thanks to you.” He took a step forward, and Kirk did something with the knife that made Jamal squeak. Rafe stopped, frustration on his face and in the way his hands clenched at his sides. If it hadn’t been for Jamal, he would have thrown himself at Kirk by now, knife be damned.

  “We’re gonna leave now,” Kirk said. His eyes flicked from side to side, assessing the room. “Through this door back here.” There were two, apparently. One on one side of the room, where we’d come in, and one on the other.

  There must be a staircase up and out of the building over there, or he wouldn’t get far, seeing as our door was between him and the elevator.

  He pulled Jamal backwards a couple of steps. It must have been awkward, because Jamal was several inches taller than Kirk. Kirk probably weighed more, or at least they weighed about the same, but Jamal is practically as tall as Rafe, but with the build of your average distance runner. Tall but lanky. “And you’re gonna stay here and let us.”

  Nobody spoke. Kirk took another step back, still dragging Jamal. But Jamal’s heel must have gotten caught on something, and suddenly he was falling.

  Except not really falling. He was executing some complicated sort of twist in Kirk’s grip, rotating away from the knife, at the same time as he somehow managed to hook a foot around one of Kirk’s legs, and dump him on his butt. Kirk let go of Jamal, probably because he didn’t have any other choice, and although he tried to hold on to the knife, Jamal swung a size fifteen shoe and kicked it out of his hand.

  All in one beautifully choreographed move.

  The knife went flying, and ended up hitting the wall with a clang.

  By then, while Jamal was still finding his balance, Rafe was halfway across the floor. A second later, he was on top of Kirk. I turned away so I wouldn’t have to watch what happened next. Not because Kirk didn’t deserve it, but because it wouldn’t be pretty. Someone would haul Rafe off fairly soon, I was sure, if he didn’t rein himself in and remember who and where he was, but the first couple of seconds while he gave vent to his temper were bound to be pretty ugly.

  It didn’t take long. Maybe twenty seconds, maybe less. Enough time for me to hear a fist connect with flesh and bone a couple of times, before it turned silent.

  I swung back around.

  Nobody had had to pull Rafe off. They were all still standing where they’d been, not interfering, and Rafe was pulling himself off Kirk, who was flat on his back on the mat. There was a little blood at the side of his mouth, but nothing else. Rafe got to his feet and shook out his fist.

  “We’ll call that justified,” McLaughlin said calmly, “under the circumstances.” He glanced around the room. “Anybody got a pair of handcuffs?”

  “He ain’t going nowhere,” Rafe said, and wiped at his own mouth with the back of his hand. Maybe Kirk had gotten in a shot. “Not for a while. You OK?”

  He glanced at Jamal.

  “Gotta scratch on my face from the knife,” Jamal said. “Nothing to worry about. Chicks dig scars.” He grinned.

  And while he was right—he did have blood on his cheek from the knife—it didn’t seem to be a big deal. It probably wouldn’t even need stitches. Just a shallow scrape he’d sustained in trying to get away. While Alexandra would probably make a big dea
l out of it if he showed her—and told her what had happened—he wasn’t likely to have to deal with lasting ramifications.

  “Nice kick,” I told him, and I have to admit my voice was a little shaky. These episodes are always a little scary, and anyway, I enjoy seeing my husband in action.

  McLaughlin nodded. “Nice moves altogether.”

  “Rafe trained me,” Jamal said.

  McLaughlin glanced at him. At Rafe. And at Wendell, who had unearthed a pair of handcuffs from somewhere—maybe he’d had the foresight to bring them in from the car earlier, in the hopes that he’d get to put them around someone’s wrists this morning—and was in the process of putting them around Kirk’s. “Maybe we should discuss this termination in more detail.”

  Yes, if I’d been watching Rafe and Jamal in action, and had the power to hire or fire them, I’d keep them on the payroll, too. Especially as McLaughlin’s department was now three men short, with Brennan and Foster in the morgue and Kirk on his way to prison. And they were likely to lose more, too, when they interrogated Kirk, as he’d probably be induced to share the names of those of his ‘boys’ who had been in this with him.

  McLaughlin’s department wasn’t going to look good after this. But if he could talk Wendell into withdrawing his resignation, and talk Rafe back into the fold, that would go a little way toward mitigating some of the damage.

  He must have been thinking the same thing, because he waited until Wendell had finished handcuffing Kirk and had straightened before he said, “It looks like I’m gonna be short two supervisors and a handler, not to mention several undercover operatives, from this week’s mess. How would you like to take over Doug Brennan’s position? Or Foster’s?”

  Wendell looked at him. And looked at Rafe. And looked at McLaughlin again.

  McLaughlin sighed. “Yeah, yeah. If you take Brennan’s job, or Foster’s, Collier gets your job, or Kirk’s.”

  There was a moment of silence.

  “I already have a job offer,” Rafe said.

  McLaughlin nodded. “From the Columbia PD. I know.”

  “My wife wants to spend more time with her family, now that the baby’s here. And Chief Grimaldi needs my help.”

  And while all of that was true, I had a feeling Rafe, if he could choose, would prefer to stay with the TBI, and with Wendell and Jamal.

  “Why don’t we take some time to think about it?” I said. Everyone turned to look at me, and Rafe’s eyebrow rose. “We can’t live in our house right now, anyway. The fire damage has to get fixed, and that could take a while. First the insurance company has to investigate and then decide whether to pay the claim, and then the work has to be done. We could be into spring by the time the house is livable again.”

  Rafe nodded, the corner of his mouth curling up. I guess he knew where I was going with this.

  I turned to McLaughlin. “Maybe the TBI could loan Rafe to the Columbia PD for the time we have to spend in Sweetwater? You’ve done it before. He went down there to help Sheriff Satterfield with a case just a few months ago, and last May, the MNPD sent him down to interview the ADA about his ex-wife’s death.” Todd Satterfield, as it happened. A very uncomfortable experience for everyone involved. “There’s precedence.”

  “I can live with that,” Wendell said, while Jamal looked like an overgrown choir boy with his hands folded in front of him and a pleading expression on his face.

  Rafe looked from them to me.

  “I’m fine with it if you are,” I said. “I told you, I don’t care where we live. Carrie and I just want to be with you.”

  “But you were looking forward to spending time with your family.”

  “And I will. For the next couple of months, at least. At the end of it, you can decide whether you want to stay in Sweetwater and work with Grimaldi, or if you want to come back here and work with Wendell and Jamal. But at least you have choices.”

  Rafe nodded. Down on the mat, Kirk groaned.

  “I better start the paperwork,” McLaughlin said with a sigh. “I’ll copy the MNPD and Goins. He won’t be happy, I imagine.”

  I imagined he was right. “Make sure you tell him you heard Kirk confess to both murders.” I glanced around the room, at Rafe, Rafe’s handler, Rafe’s protégée, Rafe’s baby—who was being very quiet in her car seat—and me, Rafe’s wife… “He won’t believe that any of us are telling the truth, and without some independent proof, I’m not sure he’ll ever believe Rafe didn’t have something to do with it. Even if we all heard Kirk confess.”

  “The recording’ll take care of that,” McLaughlin said, and fished a small voice recorder out of his breast pocket. When he saw my expression, and mine might not have been the only one, he added, “I engaged it when the security desk told me you were on your way up. Just in case. It’s been running for a while.”

  If he’d engaged it before we’d even laid eyes on him this morning, it had been. “Is that legal?” fell out of my mouth.

  “One-party consent state,” Rafe told me. “As long as one party to a conversation agrees to record it, the other party don’t have to.”

  “And doesn’t even have to know it’s being done?”

  He shook his head.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “All legal,” McLaughlin assured me. As Kirk emitted another moan down on the mat, he added, “I’ll go find someone to drive him downtown.”

  “Until you know who you can trust and who you can’t,” Wendell suggested, “might be just as well to have us do that.”

  McLaughlin thought for a moment, and then nodded. “Take him outside and load him up. Make sure you read him his rights first. I’ll call Goins and tell him to expect you.”

  “You’d better stay here,” Wendell told Rafe as McLaughlin headed for the door. “It won’t help for Goins to see you.”

  Rafe shook his head. “Savannah can drop me at the house. I’ll board up the doors like we talked about, and then I’ll head down to Sweetwater for a while. See what I can do to help Tammy clean house.”

  “You had a good practice run up here,” Wendell said and slapped him on the back before he turned to Jamal. “C’mon, boy. Let’s take out the trash.”

  The two of them hauled Kirk to his feet. He was awake enough by now to walk on his own, even if he wasn’t entirely steady on his feet. They marched him to the door—the one he’d planned to use for his escape—and out. “Matthew Kirkegaard,” I heard Wendell intone as they passed out of hearing, “you’re under arrest for the murders of Douglas Brennan and James Foster…”

  I turned to Rafe. He turned to me. And looked at me for a moment before he said, “You sure you’re OK with this?”

  “I told you. I’m OK with anything that makes you happy.” After a second I added, “Almost anything. I draw the line at sharing you with Yvonne McCoy.”

  He chuckled. “No need to worry about that. The only person you have to worry about sharing me with is Caroline.”

  Not quite. There was David. And Wendell. And Jamal. And in the immediate future, Grimaldi. But for right now he was mine, and that was good enough.

  “Let’s go home,” I said.

  He nodded. “I’ll take the baby.” He picked her up, and we walked out of the TBI gym hand in hand.

  Keep reading for an excerpt of Conflict of Interest, Savannah Martin Mystery #17:

  Excerpt

  * * *

  ”Do you remember Katie Graves?” my husband asked.

  It took a second, maybe more than one, before I placed the name in my memory. Then I nodded. “Of course.”

  We were sitting side by side at the island in Mother’s kitchen in the Martin Mansion in Sweetwater, having dinner.

  And I’m calling it my mother’s kitchen, even though technically, it was my kitchen now. At least for the time being. Mother had vacated the premises over the weekend, to live in sin with Sheriff Satterfield, and had left Rafe and me—and baby Carrie—in sole possession.

  We were eating at the island because the di
ning room table can seat sixteen and I hadn’t felt like dealing with the antique splendor of it for just the two of us, and besides, the kitchen island was much closer to the stove and the food, and that made everything easier.

  Rafe quirked a brow in my direction. “A bit of thinking for an ‘of course,’ wasn’t it?”

  I couldn’t very well deny that. “I haven’t thought about her in years. And I didn’t really know her. I don’t think I ever met her. But I remember what happened.”

  Rafe nodded and took another bite of chicken.

  He’s three years older than me, and must have been in high school in Columbia at the time Katie Graves disappeared. I’d still been in middle school in Sweetwater. But he had probably known Katie. Or at least known her better than I did.

  He nodded when I asked. “She was a year ahead of me, and didn’t pay me no mind, but I knew who she was. Saw her in the hallways and the cafeteria.”

  “Pretty girl?”

  “Pretty enough,” Rafe said, “though that don’t always matter.”

  No, it doesn’t. Sixteen-year-old girls disappear sometimes even when they aren’t pretty.

  That’s what had happened to Katie. She’d set out for school one morning, and never made it there. Her parents sounded the alarm when she didn’t come home in the evening, but by then she’d been gone close to twelve hours, and she either had enough of a head start to be halfway to Canada, or whoever took her did.

  Nobody knew what had happened, or if they did, they didn’t tell. There was speculation about her running away from home, and speculation about her being abducted. For a few weeks, every parent in Maury County kept a tight rein on their children. As time passed, and no body appeared, people started leaning more toward Katie taking off on her own, and everyone relaxed again. Life went back to normal. For everyone but Katie’s family, I guess.

  “What about her?” I asked.

  Rafe took another deliberate bite, and chewed and swallowed, before he answered. “The sheriff called. They found bones up in the hills near Devil’s Backbone.”