Scared Money (Savannah Martin Mysteries Book 13)

by Jenna Bennett

Rafe thought it over. “Dunno if it’s a good idea to drag you into this. Denise Seaver has good reason to wanna hurt you.”

  “I’m not worried,” I said robustly, even though, to be honest, I was. But I was more worried about being left behind. “You’ll protect me.”

  “The best way I can do that is keep you outta harm’s way.”

  Hard to argue with that. So I didn’t try. I begged instead. “Please take me with you. I’d rather be with you than by myself. I’ll go crazy if I have to sit around and wait to hear something.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Goodlettsville,” I said.

  “I’ll meet you at home in ten minutes.”

  Ten minutes?

  I wanted to tell him that unlike him, I’m a defensive driver who tends to go the speed limit. There was no way I could get home in ten minutes. But he’d already hung up. And anyway, I couldn’t spare the time to argue. If I wasn’t there in ten minutes, he’d probably leave without me. So I gathered up the paint scraper inside the curtain and clattered down the stairs and out to the car, where I peeled off with a spatter of dirt. The green Jeep had nothing on me.

  * * *

  I DIDN’T MAKE it home in ten minutes, but it was close. Not close enough for Rafe, though. He was pacing the front porch when I pulled into the driveway, looking like a caged puma. By the time I pulled up to the bottom of the stairs, he was waiting, and he had the door open and himself inside before I’d even come to a full stop. “Drive.”

  I drove. “Where?”

  “What the hell is this I’m sitting on?” He drove a hand underneath his excellent posterior and dug around.

  I glanced over. “Be careful with that. It’s a paint scraper the guy from yesterday was using on Miss Harper’s house. I was going to take it to Grimaldi for fingerprints, to see if the guy on the ladder was Devon or someone else.”

  “Devon?” Rafe said, digging the scraper out from under himself and tossing it and the curtains into the back seat. “The kid from the office last night?”

  “He’s dead. Someone shot him this morning around two-thirty. In the parking garage underneath his condo.”

  Rafe was silent for a moment. “Sounds like you’ve had a busy day.”

  “You have no idea. After you left, I went to the office. Tim told me that Brittany wouldn’t be in, because Devon had been shot. Tim said Brittany had recognized Detective Grimaldi, so I called Grimaldi and asked her to lunch.”

  “Trying to solve her case again?”

  “It might have something to do with the missing money,” I said. “Turns out Devon’s day job was troubleshooting computers. He’d know how to spoof an email address.”

  Rafe arched his brows, but said nothing.

  “I saw his car. He was driving a green Jeep. And the guy I saw yesterday, who was scraping paint from Miss Harper’s house, drove off in one of those. So I went back up to Goodlettsville to see if he was back today, or whether it might have been Devon.”

  “Don’t you think you woulda recognized Devon?”

  “Not necessarily. I don’t—didn’t—know him well. And anyway, the place was empty today. No guy, no Jeep. But the paint scraper was upstairs, so I took it. I figured Grimaldi could test it for fingerprints. That way we’ll know one way or the other if the guy on the ladder was Devon or someone else.”

  Rafe nodded. “Makes sense.”

  “But it can wait. The paint scraper’s not going anywhere. Neither is Devon.” People don’t check out of the morgue. “Right now, finding Doctor Seaver and Carmen is more important.”

  We drove in silence a minute. Since he hadn’t answered my question about where to go, I’d taken a right out of the driveway, and another right from Potsdam onto Dresden. At the moment, we were on our way toward Dickerson Pike and the interstate.

  “Where do you want me to go?” I asked.

  “The abandoned van is between mile markers 22 and 23 on Briley Parkway eastbound. Why don’t we start there.”

  Sure thing. It meant I’d gone in the wrong direction—I should have taken a left out of the driveway onto Potsdam—but it was easy to fix. I navigated the light at Dickerson and headed for the entrance to the interstate. We’d go north and pick up Briley Parkway up there.

  “So tell me about your day,” I said, as we wended our way onto the entrance ramp to I-24.

  He gave me a quick look. “I went in and gave blood in the morning. Worked with the boys after. José says anytime you can get access to that email, he’ll take a look at it for you.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “The lab called when the sample from the prison got there. About ten-thirty or eleven. After that, I worked with the boys some more. Until I got the phone call from the doc out there at TPFW that the transport never made it to the hospital. And then the call thirty minutes later that they’d found it and the guard.”

  He shook his head. “I gotta do something, Savannah. It don’t much matter whether it’s my baby or not—”

  It seemed to me it mattered rather a lot, but I didn’t say so.

  “—it’s somebody’s. And the two of’em are out there somewhere, walking around, or holed up in some shack in the woods, and you’re right. What if something goes wrong?”

  “Women spent a lot of centuries giving birth before we had modern hospitals,” I told him, as we headed north on the interstate. “Most of them were fine.”

  “But some weren’t. A lot of’em died. So did the babies.”

  True. Let me put it this way: I wouldn’t choose to have my baby in a shack in the middle of the woods. Not if there was a well-equipped hospital available.

  But I wasn’t incarcerated. No one would take my baby away from me and give it to someone else after I carried it for nine months and gave birth to it. And that’s what Carmen was looking forward to. Whether it was Rafe or her sister, she wouldn’t be able to bring up her own child.

  I wondered whether she had chosen this, or whether the whole thing was Denise Seaver’s doing. And if it was, was she just using Carmen as a way to get herself out of prison, or did she think she was helping?

  “Exit’s coming up,” Rafe said.

  I nodded. “I see the sign. What do you want to do once we get there?”

  He shrugged. “Have a look around, I guess. Figure out where they were, and then see if we can figure out where they went from there.”

  That might be easier said than done. But I didn’t say so, just flipped on my turn signal and took the exit for Briley Parkway.

  * * *

  WE HIT mile marker 22 first, going toward the prison rather than away from it. I slowed down, and we started looking around. Less than twenty seconds later, we saw the DOC van—white, with Tennessee Department of Corrections spelled out in black letters along the side—down in the grass beside the road on the other side of the median. A vehicle from the morgue was parked next to it—I’ve seen them before, so I recognized it—and several white-clad crime techs were moving around.

  There was no way to get across to the other side. We had to drive past, down to the next exit, and then turn around and come back in the same direction the DOC van had been driving: away from the prison toward town. Just as we approached, the morgue vehicle pulled off the grass and away into traffic. I drove off the road and into the space it had vacated, behind the Metro PD crime scene unit van that had been parked in front of it.

  No sooner had I come to a stop, than a uniformed officer jogged in our direction, hands up and out. “This is a crime scene! You can’t stop here!”

  Rafe brandished TBI credentials at him, and he scowled. “Nobody told me the feds would be coming.”

  “They’re not,” Rafe said. “I was part of the team that took Hector Gonzales’s theft gang down. I did too much work to have Carmen Arroyo walking away like this.”

  The cop bent down to peer into the car. I twiddled my fingers at him. I’d personally taken Denise Seaver down, with a shot of pepper spray, but it was probably best not to men
tion that. I had no official standing here. And besides, it was Sheriff Satterfield who had arrested her. I’d just incapacitated her first. And managed to get myself shot in the process, I might add.

  “Any word on where they’ve gone?” Rafe asked.

  The cop shook his head. “Might have walked off into the hills.”

  Briley Parkway on the north side of town runs through a pretty rural area. Where we were standing right now, there were hills in all directions. In the distance, I could see the rooftops of the subdivision at Eaton’s Creek, but right here, there was nothing. Just a dirt road below the interstate, running up the holler between two small knolls, and a big sign advertising a dressing service.

  Dressing as in cutting up deer and other animals that people had hunted, not dressing as in putting on clothes.

  “Is anyone following the trail?” I asked. When they both turned to me, I added, “If they walked away. Up the road, say. Or into the woods.” The hillside was thickly crusted with trees and bushes. “Is anyone looking for them?”

  The cop glanced at Rafe, maybe to ascertain whether he should answer or not. When Rafe didn’t tell him not to, he said, “A couple of guys with tracking experience went up that way. I don’t know if they’ve found anything.”

  If they had, they would have called, I assumed.

  “Mind if I take a look?” Rafe gestured to the van.

  The young cop looked mutinous, but also looked like he didn’t quite dare refuse. I guess he wasn’t quite sure how Rafe fit into this case, and erred on the side of not offending him. My husband has that effect on some people. “Go ahead. Just don’t touch anything.”

  Rafe promised he wouldn’t. And turned to me. “Stay here.”

  I nodded, and watched him walk away; long legs in faded jeans eating up the distance between the Volvo and the van.

  As soon as he was out of earshot, the young cop turned to me. “Was he really part of the team that took down Hector Gonzales?”

  “Ten years undercover,” I said grimly, as I watched him approach the van and peer inside. “He wasn’t just part of it. He was the guy on the inside. Without him, they wouldn’t have had the evidence to take anyone down.”

  The cop stared at me.

  “But yes. He took Hector down personally.” With a blow to the throat that made it questionable whether Hector would ever be able to talk again.

  In justice to him—and I was there, tied to a chair at the time—Hector had had a knife and been hell bent on killing him, so it was hard to blame him for the use of force.

  Also, Hector did eventually talk. It took a couple of days, but he got there. And now he’s in a Georgia prison serving a nice, long sentence.

  The young cop gazed at Rafe with something like awe. “That was him?”

  “In the flesh.” And very nice flesh it was, too.

  I watched as Rafe leaned into the back of the van, hands carefully behind him. One of the crime scene techs was working inside, and said something to him. I could see her teeth flash when she smiled.

  He has that effect on women. And on some men, too. Even here, in this setting.

  “Wow.”

  “I know.”

  We stood there—or sat, in my case—and watched him walk back. This time he came to my side of the car and opened my door. “C’mon.”

  “What are we doing?” I accepted the hand he extended, and let him pull me out of the car. “I don’t have to look at the body, do I?”

  He shook his head. “The body’s gone. I wanna drive. You couldn’t outrun a funeral procession.”

  “Could so,” I said, but I walked around the car anyway. “And I wasn’t aware we had to outrun anyone.”

  The young cop gallantly held the door for me, and closed it once I was inside.

  “You never know,” Rafe said, and started the engine. He gave the cop a nod. “Appreciate it.”

  The young man nodded back. “It’s no problem.” He looked a bit star struck still, and when we peeled away from the gravel and took off down the road like a bat out of hell—Rafe’s usual mode of locomotion—he gazed after us until we were gone.

  “Need you to do something for me,” Rafe said, as we made our way back toward town.

  “What’s that?”

  He glanced at me. “You knew Denise Seaver.”

  “I don’t know about knew,” I said. “I mean, we weren’t friends or anything. She was my gynecologist. But I dealt with her. So I suppose I knew her. A little.”

  “I need you to think about where she mighta gone. The cops have trackers up in the hills. They got a head start, but two women—one of’em pushing sixty and outta shape, and the other ready to give birth—they ain’t gonna be able to walk far before they need to shelter. If they’re out there, the cops’ll find them.”

  I nodded. That made sense. If Doctor Seaver and Carmen had walked away from the DOC van, and Carmen was in labor, they couldn’t have made it more than a mile or so. Even if Denise Seaver had given Carmen something to stop the contractions—and we didn’t know that she had—labor might have been too far advanced for the medication to work. And if it did work, it would take time for it to kick in. If they were on foot, they’d be rounded up pretty quickly.

  “Do you think they hitched a ride? Would anyone pick up two women in prison uniforms standing next to a Department of Corrections van?”

  “A pregnant woman giving birth on the side of the road?” Rafe said. “Some good Samaritan’s bound to stop.”

  He had a point.

  “Or they mighta arranged for a ride.”

  “Planned it?”

  He shrugged.

  I thought about it. “It’s possible, I guess. Depends on when either of them figured out what was going on.”

  “Couldn’ta been before yesterday,” Rafe said. “That was the first time I was out at the prison.”

  Yes, but... “I was there on Sunday. And I know that Denise Seaver saw me notice Carmen. She told me Carmen’s due date is in a couple of weeks. I didn’t think Carmen saw me, but Denise Seaver might have asked Carmen about me later. Or about you, since she knows we’re married now. She could have asked Carmen about you and found out that there’s a chance you’re the father of Carmen’s baby. She isn’t stupid. And she knows about David. She’s the one who took him away from Elspeth. So she knows you’ve already lost one child. She might have figured that you’d do whatever you had to, to keep this one. And if she told Carmen...”

  “Shit,” Rafe said.

  I nodded. “The other alternative is that she didn’t realize it until you showed up yesterday. She might have told Carmen about it this morning, and gotten the OK to induce labor so both of them could try to escape. Or she did it without telling Carmen.”

  “Not sure which would be worse.”

  I was pretty sure. If this was all about Denise Seaver getting out of prison, and Carmen and her baby were just the means to achieve that, that would be worse. That meant Denise Seaver didn’t care whether they lived or died.

  “I hope Carmen knew,” I said. “At least that she knew what to expect. I hope she isn’t out here with no idea what’s going on.”

  Rafe nodded, his hands tight on the wheel, the knuckles showing white under the skin. The car took the curves on two wheels on our way back toward town.

  “You knew Carmen,” I added. “Probably better than I knew Denise Seaver.” Or at least more intimately. “If she’s part of this, do you have any idea where she’d go?”

  “Her sister’s house? Or the mother’s?”

  Good thinking. “They were both there on Sunday, visiting her. I saw them. I realize none of this had been cooked up then, either way you look at it, but we should definitely check that out. They both seemed to really care about her.”

  “And why not?” Rafe said grimly, as the car sailed over a bump in the road and went airborne for a second or two. “Her being so loveable and all.”

  Better not to touch that one, I thought, and kept my mouth firmly cl
osed.

  ELEVEN

  Carmen’s mother lived in a small house on the south side of Nashville, near Nolensville Road. The drive took us past the Havana, the nightclub where Carmen had worked for Hector Gonzales last year. It was his club, and it did a little illegal gambling—not allowed in the state of Tennessee—as well as a lot of money laundering and other things. Rafe had spent a few weeks there playing bouncer, while he pretended to be a South American hitman by the name of Jorge Pena. This was after those eight interminable hours I mentioned earlier, during which word went out that Rafe was dead, so he could come back as Jorge. Everyone in Hector’s organization knew that Jorge had been sent after him. Nobody thought for a moment that Jorge would miss. And when he did—almost—Rafe, Grimaldi, and Wendell Craig cooked up a plan in which Rafe would become Jorge and weasel his way into Hector’s organization that way. Since ten years of trying to do it the other way hadn’t worked.

  But I digress.

  As we zoomed down Nolensville Road, I glanced over at the cinderblock building that had housed the Havana; dark and closed now, with a For Rent sign out front. “Where did Carmen live? With her mother?”

  Rafe gave me a sideways look. “Townhouse out by the lake.”

  “Fancy.”

  He shrugged.

  “Didn’t you like it?”

  “It was fine. Not my taste.”

  OK, then. “Any chance she’d go there?”

  “I figure she prob’ly lost it,” Rafe said. “But we can check. After we’re done down here.”

  “Does the sister live in this area, too?”

  “Couple miles east.”

  So between here and the lake.

  “Can you think of anywhere else she might have gone?”

  “To her baby daddy,” Rafe said grimly, “less’n that’s me.”

  “Any idea who it might be? If it isn’t you?”

  He shook his head. “Far as I saw, she wasn’t doing nobody else at the same time she was doing me. But who knows?”

  Right. A bit of anger there. And probably time to change the subject.

  “Denise Seaver still owns her house in Sweetwater. Darcy, Dix and I broke in there a couple of nights ago, looking for medical records.”