Scared Money (Savannah Martin Mysteries Book 13)

by Jenna Bennett

  Tim nodded.

  “Brittany is spending money hand over fist. She took a four hour lunch yesterday, and came back with hundreds of dollars worth of packages. Maybe more. She says she and Devon are getting married this weekend, and going to Curacao for their honeymoon.”

  Tim winced. “Right. About that...”

  I continued quickly, before he could ask me to take over Brittany’s job all of next week. “And speaking of Devon, when Rafe and I were here last night—”

  “Rafael was here last night?”

  “Just about where you’re standing now,” I said, and watched Tim’s nostrils quiver.

  “About Devon...”

  “Right. When Rafe and I were here last night—”

  “No,” Tim said. “He’s the reason Brittany isn’t here this morning. He was shot and killed last night.”

  “What?”

  The question was sort of automatic. I’d heard what he said. I didn’t think I’d misunderstood him. ‘Shot and killed’ isn’t the kind of thing you mishear. They’re short, simple words, not really open to interpretation. But it didn’t seem possible. We’d seen Devon last night. Right here in the office. How could he be dead?

  “Your Detective Grimaldi went to Brittany’s apartment at seven this morning. Brittany recognized her from when she was here last year, after Brenda was killed.”

  “She isn’t my Detective Grimaldi,” I said. “What happened?”

  “Brittany didn’t say. Just that he was shot and killed. In the parking garage under their condo.”

  “Mugging gone wrong?”

  Tim said he had no idea. “But she won’t be in today. Can you sit the front desk? At least until Heidi gets here?”

  “How about I take the first half of the day,” I suggested, feeling a bit guilty now that I knew the reason why Brittany wasn’t here this morning, “and Heidi can take the second. That way I’ll have some time this afternoon to work on your problem. If I’m stuck at the desk all day, I can’t.”

  Tim allowed as how that sounded fair. “Do you want me to contact DeWitts?”

  He sounded like he’d rather have a root canal, and it was tempting to tell him yes, but I refrained. “Not yet. I have to coordinate with José first. See what he wants to do and when he might have time to do it. I’ll let you know.”

  Tim nodded and took himself off. I did the same, over to the front desk.

  The first thing I did, of course, was call Tamara Grimaldi. “Detective.”

  “Ms....” She’s been calling me Ms. Martin for a year, and can’t quite wrap her brain around me being Mrs. Collier. So she has, reluctantly, come around to calling me by my first name. “Savannah. Make it quick. I’m in the middle of something.”

  “I know,” I said. “I just got to the office. Tim told me that Brittany won’t be in today. Our receptionist. Her boyfriend was killed last night. Devon... um...”

  “Knight,” Grimaldi told me. “And it was very early this morning. TOD is estimated at around two-thirty.”

  “Any idea who did it?”

  “Not so far,” Grimaldi said.

  “Tim said he was shot in his parking garage. Mugging?”

  “That’s what it looks like. Phone and wallet are both gone.”

  “What about the car?”

  “The car’s still here,” Grimaldi said.

  “What kind of car?”

  “Jeep Wrangler. A few years old.”

  Maybe the age explained why the car had been left behind. Then again, it was strange. The car had to be more valuable than both Devon’s phone and his wallet. And if he was coming home, he must have had his car key with him. No need to hotwire it, or anything like that. Just grab the key, turn the car on, and go.

  Why take the phone and wallet and leave the car?

  “How long before he was found?”

  “A couple of hours,” Grimaldi said. “Nobody heard the shot. Your friend was asleep.”

  Brittany wasn’t really what I’d call a friend, but I let it go.

  “911 got the call just after five this morning. An early riser had gone into the garage to take his car out for the day, and found the victim.”

  I winced. I didn’t envy him, whoever he was. I’ve seen my share—some people would say more than my share—of dead bodies, and there’s nothing fun or exciting about it. “Do you have any suspects?”

  “If I did, I couldn’t tell you. But so far I don’t. It looks like a crime of opportunity. Someone saw him drive into the garage and decided to make a quick buck.”

  Or not. “We should talk,” I told Grimaldi.

  “We are talking.”

  “Not on the phone.” And not in the office, where God knew who was listening. Tim had told me he didn’t want the police involved in the wire fraud issue, but what if Devon had been involved, and that’s why he was dead? “Can you take thirty minutes for lunch?”

  She hesitated. “Is this general nosiness, or something more?”

  “Just meet me,” I said, “and I’ll tell you. Surely you have to eat?”

  “If you see what I see every day, you may not wanna eat, either.”

  Maybe not, but I didn’t have a choice. “If I don’t eat, the baby starts gnawing on my stomach lining. It hurts. Noon?”

  “Twelve-thirty,” Grimaldi said. “And you’ll have to come and meet me somewhere down here. I’ll still be working.”

  Assuming ‘down here’ meant Melrose, I suggested a diner on Granny White Pike in the 12 South neighborhood, four or five blocks from the crime scene. Grimaldi said she’s see me there at twelve-thirty, and hung up.

  I took a quick look around Brittany’s desk, just to see if anything had changed since the last time I looked. I was still trying to figure out what Devon had been doing here last night, and what it was Brittany had asked him to pick up.

  But everything looked the same as it had when I left for lunch yesterday. The small changes were likely made by Brittany herself after I’d gone.

  I’d have to find out from Detective Grimaldi what Devon had had in his pockets when he was found. Maybe he’d still had whatever it was. And if he hadn’t, maybe someone else had been after it, too.

  If there’d been something here worth killing for, I sure hadn’t noticed it.

  We’d seen him at eight-thirty, or maybe closer to nine. It would take me maybe twenty minutes to drive to Melrose later. That was for lunch, when there were more cars on the road. At nine o’clock last night, he might have gotten there in fifteen. If time of death had been estimated around two-thirty in the morning, he hadn’t gone straight home from here.

  So where had he gone? And to do what?

  EIGHT

  At noon, I packed up and let Heidi know I was going to lunch and that she had to come take over the front desk.

  She had walked in around twenty minutes after me, and had seemed suitably shocked to hear about Devon. And no reason why she wouldn’t be. He hadn’t been in her office last night, so whatever was going on, if Devon was involved in it, Heidi didn’t seem to be.

  She also didn’t seem to notice that her office had been searched last night. Or if she did, she didn’t say anything about it.

  Of course, it had been searched by a pro. I wasn’t worried about my part: there’s nothing much involved in pulling out and pushing in filing drawers. The only thing that would reveal my presence, was someone looking for fingerprints, and there was no reason why anyone would bother. No, where she’d notice the search, would most likely be the desk. But it was Rafe who had searched Heidi’s desk, and he knows what he’s doing. There was no reason at all that she’d notice he’d been there. She treated me the way she always did, with a mixture of hostility and malice. Nothing new there.

  “You’re on the desk for the rest of the afternoon,” I told her as I headed for the door, bag over my shoulder. “I have some things I have to do.”

  She glanced down the hallway. “Tim...”

  “Knows about it. And said it would be all ri
ght. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “I haven’t had lunch yet!” Heidi shouted after me.

  I didn’t slow my steps. “I think I left a Lean Cuisine in the freezer last week. You can have that if you want. It’s chicken pot pie.”

  “Grrr!” Heidi said. And if she said anything else, I didn’t hear it. I was already gone.

  Twenty minutes later, I was sitting across from Detective Tamara Grimaldi in a booth in an old-fashioned 1950s style shiny diner on 12th Avenue South, just up the street from Sevier Park. The tables were speckled Formica with chrome edges, and the seats were red Naugahyde, as were the chairs grouped around the tables. The walls sported black-and-white photographs of Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Marlon Brando, and of course Elvis, all in their heyday.

  The detective looked the way she always did: businesslike in a dark suit—pants, not skirt—and low heels. She has short, black, curly hair and an olive complexion, and she’s a few years older than me, at a guess. I’ve never actually asked.

  She doesn’t always look like someone has died. I’ve seen her casually dressed, drinking beer on my brother’s deck in Sweetwater. I even got her into a dress for my wedding two months ago. But when she’s working, this is pretty much her default mode of dress and demeanor. Dark and strong and grim.

  Probably because, when she’s working, it is because someone died.

  She was already there when I arrived, sitting on one side of the booth looking at something on her phone. I squeezed in on the other side. It was a tight fit, and since the table was bolted to the floor, there wasn’t much I could do to help accommodate the baby.

  Grimaldi watched my efforts. “Would you prefer a table instead of a booth?”

  I shook my head. “This is good. I’ll be OK once I get situated.”

  The detective already had a glass of sweet tea in front of her. I ordered a milkshake. Dairy is good for the baby. And also because I was getting to that dangerous time when the baby was eyeing my stomach lining and salivating. I needed something semi-solid in my stomach, stat.

  Grimaldi asked for a patty melt, and I ordered a club sandwich. After two burgers yesterday, I was all burgered out. The waitress—dressed in a striped uniform with a little white apron and her hair in a ponytail—withdrew on squeaky, white Keds and left us alone.

  There was a moment of silence.

  “So,” I said. “Devon’s dead.”

  Grimaldi nodded.

  “Are those pictures of the crime scene?” I eyed the phone.

  “Yes.” Grimaldi dropped it in her pocket. “And I’m not showing them to you.”

  “That’s OK. I didn’t want to see them anyway.”

  “Sure,” Grimaldi took a sip of tea.

  I grimaced. “Fine. I’m curious.”

  “I know you are. But I’m still not going to show you my crime scene photos. They’re none of your business.”

  “They might be.”

  She arched her brows. “How do you figure that?”

  “I’ll tell you. It started yesterday morning, when I got to work. Or actually, it started a couple of months before that, I guess. Technically. Do you know who Magnolia Houston is?”

  “Yes,” Grimaldi said with a sneer.

  “Well, after making all that money, she decided she wanted to buy herself a mansion.”

  “Of course she did.”

  “And she hired Tim to help her. My broker, Timothy Briggs. You remember Tim, don’t you?”

  “Who could forget?” Grimaldi said.

  “Right. Well, anyway...” I went through the whole story: how Tim had found Miss Harper and convinced her to sell Magnolia the house, how Tim had waylaid me yesterday morning and told me about the missing money, and what I had done since then to try to figure out what was going on. And eventually, I got to Rafe’s and my visit to the office late last night. “We were snooping in Heidi’s office when we heard a car outside.”

  Grimaldi nodded.

  “We didn’t know who it was, and we thought us being there might look bad, so we turned the light out.”

  “Naturally,” Grimaldi said drily.

  “We waited a bit, and then someone came in. And went past us to the lobby. When Rafe went after him, he turned out to be Devon.”

  “Let me guess. Your husband scared him into confessing to some horrible crime?”

  “Nothing all that horrible. He said he was there to pick up something Brittany had forgotten. It might even be true.”

  “Did he tell you what it was?”

  I shook my head. “He said it was none of my business. And it wasn’t. But when I asked him if he’d found it, he said yes and patted his pocket.”

  Grimaldi looked interested. “Which pocket?”

  “Front left,” I said, and watched as Grimaldi pulled out her phone again and punched buttons.

  She shook her head. “Nothing in his front left pocket when he was found.”

  “What about the other pockets?”

  “Car keys in his hand,” Grimaldi said. “It happened pretty much as soon as he got out of the car. He only had time to close the door, but not lock it. And judging from the way he fell, between his own car and the one next to it, he was still facing the front of the car when he was shot.”

  “So someone came up behind him. He probably never even saw them.” It wasn’t a crime scene photo, but it painted a picture nonetheless.

  Grimaldi nodded. “It didn’t look personal at all. Whoever shot him probably didn’t even say anything. No evidence he turned around to face his assailant. The guy—or woman—just came up behind him, gave him two quick pops—one to the back, one to the head—and left again.”

  “Yikes.” I made a face. The picture was becoming clearer than I wanted it to. I could imagine the scene a bit too well.

  “Have something to drink,” Grimaldi instructed, as the milkshake made its way across the floor toward me. “Try to settle your stomach. You’re turning green. We don’t have to talk about this anymore.”

  “I want to talk about it.” I nodded thanks to the waitress for the shake and stuck the straw in my mouth. After a swallow or two, I started to feel better. “I’m just constantly hungry. And if I don’t eat regularly, I get nauseous. And like I said, it feels like the baby starts gnawing on my insides. I’m sure that’s not actually true, but it feels that way.”

  “Too much information,” Grimaldi said. “To continue, he had his keys in his hand. They were found next to him. He dropped them when he fell. The car was still where he parked it, with the driver’s side door closed but unlocked. There was nothing in his front pockets, although we surmise he regularly kept his keys there, because the front right pocket had a small hole in the lining, as if he kept something pointy there. Keys are a logical guess.”

  I nodded, and focused on my milkshake.

  “His phone was missing, and so was his wallet, assuming he carried one. The wear on his back pockets indicated he did. Phone on the left, wallet on the right. When he fell forward, the shooter must have helped himself.”

  “But he wasn’t rolled.”

  Grimaldi shook her head.

  “So chances are nobody checked his front pockets. If it was a robbery, the thief had already gotten what he came for.”

  “Presumably,” Grimaldi said.

  “So if Devon had picked something up at the office and put it in his front pocket, it should still be there. And since it wasn’t, he must have given it to someone.”

  Grimaldi nodded. “Unless he lied, and he didn’t pick up anything at all.”

  Unless that. “What was he wearing?”

  “Black jeans and boots,” Grimaldi said. “Black T-shirt with the name of a rock band on the front.”

  “The same thing he was wearing when I saw him. He hadn’t been home to change.”

  Not that that meant anything. He could have gone home, but without changing. Why would he change, after all?

  Although it did imply that he might have been somewhere else between the
time we’d seen him at the office and the time he was shot, and was only getting home at two-thirty in the morning.

  “Have you asked Brittany?” I asked.

  Grimaldi’s face darkened. “I had to do the notification.”

  “She’s not his next of kin, is she? They aren’t married. She told me they were going to tie the knot this Friday.”

  Grimaldi winced. “She didn’t mention that. But no, she isn’t. I also had to call his parents in Virginia.”

  “I don’t envy you your job,” I said.

  “Times like that, I don’t either.”

  “I don’t envy you your job at any time. I wouldn’t want it. I’m just nosy.”

  It would have been nice if she’d told me I wasn’t nosy, just endearingly curious. She didn’t. “If you’re wondering how she took it, she got hysterical. Worse than you used to get, whenever you thought something had happened to Mr. Collier.”

  “I had good reason to worry about Rafe,” I told her, even as I remembered, vividly, falling into a dead faint once when the detective showed up at my door with what she called ‘bad news.’ The news hadn’t turned out to be about Rafe, as it happened, but about my sister-in-law Sheila. But by the time she told me that, it was too late: I had already fainted. “And I didn’t say anything. Or suggest anything. I have no reason to think she wouldn’t be genuinely upset if her boyfriend died.”

  Grimaldi grunted.

  I squinted at her. “Do you?”

  “The significant other is always the first person we look at,” Grimaldi said.

  It was my turn to arch my brows. “That wasn’t a very straight answer.”

  “But you know it’s true. We always look at the spouse first. Or in this case, girlfriend.” She waited for me to say something, and when I didn’t, she added, “She was there. Upstairs. She had access to the garage. She knew where he parked. And she was alone. That gives her opportunity, if nothing else.”

  I suppose.

  “What can you tell me about their relationship?”