She looked up, in the process of manipulating her phone. “Yes. Devon Knight’s prints were all over it. The footprint you found matches a pair of tennis shoes found in his car. Along with a pair of jeans and a white T-shirt.”
I nodded, and headed up the stairs to get dressed.
* * *
BEFORE I MOVED into Mrs. Jenkins’s house with Rafe, I lived in a small one-bedroom apartment on the corner of Fifth and East Main. It was on the way to the office, and the last few times I’d driven by, I’d seen a potted plant and a bike on the balcony. When Grimaldi pulled up to the curb, the plant was still there, but the bike was gone.
“Looks like whoever lives there might be out,” I said. “There’s usually a bicycle on the balcony. Now there isn’t.”
“We’ll go knock anyway.” She opened her door. “If no one answers, we’ll see who else we can find.”
“You’re the boss,” I said, and followed her across the street.
The building is set around a central courtyard, which was empty when we walked in. Most of the people who live at Fifth and East Main are young professionals, with a few older people mixed in for good measure. Almost everyone is single, and gainfully employed. The building tends to be pretty empty during the day. Whoever lived in my apartment now, might have taken his or her bike to work. It’d be a quick, easy ride into downtown, just a mile or so down the road, on the other side of the Cumberland River. We could see Grimaldi’s office from where we were standing; or could have, if we’d been on the street instead of in the courtyard. The western part of the building blocked our view at the moment.
My old apartment was on the second floor. We went inside, past the mailboxes, and headed up the stairs. The hallway was still carpeted in the same utilitarian gray as six months ago.
Grimaldi knew just where my door was. She’d been here plenty, after all. She knocked, and we waited. No one answered. She knocked again, and we waited some more.
“Probably gone to work,” I said.
Grimaldi nodded, and looked around. “What do you think the chances are that Denise Seaver is inside with the baby?”
I didn’t have to think long. “I’d say slim to none. I lived here back in November, when Sheila was murdered, but Denise Seaver had no reason to know that.”
“She was your gynecologist, right?”
“My obstetrician, more accurately. I was pregnant last winter, remember? But she was my gynecologist while I lived in Sweetwater, too. While I was a teenager.”
“When you went back to see her for the pregnancy, did you have to fill out new paperwork? Did you give her this address, or your mother’s house in Sweetwater?”
Good question. “I’m not sure,” I said. “After I divorced Bradley and lost his health insurance, there were a couple of years I didn’t go to the gynecologist at all. I wasn’t sleeping with anyone, and I didn’t have any female problems, so I didn’t want to spend the money. But then Rafe came along and I got pregnant. I can’t remember whether I put this address on my medical forms or not. I might have.”
“So she could have gotten it that way.”
She could have. I wouldn’t say it was impossible.
“Do you hear anything?” Grimaldi asked.
“From inside?” I put my ear to the door. “No. Do you?”
She knocked again, and raised her voice. “This is the police. If you’re inside, please open the door.”
No one did. Grimaldi fumbled for her keys.
My eyes widened. “You can’t just open the door. Can you?”
“I can if I suspect someone inside is in danger,” Grimaldi said.
“But there’s no sound from inside!”
“The baby could be sleeping. And Denise Seaver wouldn’t respond. We’re here. We might as well look.”
She started fitting what I guessed was a universal key into the lock.
“I’m pretty sure this is illegal,” I said, moving from foot to foot.
She glanced at me. “I’m the police. And if that baby’s in there, you’ll thank me.”
I would. Although I didn’t think the baby was inside. Not without making a sound.
“Maybe not,” Grimaldi said, twisting the key in the lock, “but you know what they say. Better safe than sorry. I’d rather step over the line now, and have them not be there, than not go the extra mile—or step—and miss them.”
When she put it like that...
“I’ll stand guard,” I said.
Grimaldi arched both brows at me. “I’m the police, Ms.... Savannah. Not your disreputable husband. You don’t have to make sure no one sees me.”
“Good.” Because someone had just opened the door downstairs and was moving across the floor.
“Stay here,” Grimaldi said and pushed the door open with one hand, while the other went to the butt of her gun. She raised her voice. “Anyone home?”
She disappeared inside. Part of me wanted to know what the place looked like now, when someone else was living in it, but I recognized my own curiosity as being out of place and stayed where I was. Bad enough that Grimaldi was invading this person’s privacy; I had no right to do so.
The footsteps started up the stairs. I stayed where I was, wondering whether there was any chance at all that it was Denise Seaver who was on her way up the stairs.
But no, as he kept climbing, I recognized Mr. Sullivan from down the hall. Back from his morning constitutional, it seemed. A trip to the gym—as evidenced by the shorts and sweaty T-shirt, and the gray hair sticking straight up—followed by one to Brew-ha-ha, the coffee house up the street, for the cardboard cup that was currently in his hand. I inhaled the life-giving scent of coffee—which I couldn’t drink because of the baby—and smiled. “Hi, Mr. Sullivan.”
Mr. Sullivan squinted at me. “Oh,” he said after a moment. “Back, are you?”
“Not really. My friend and I are just looking for someone.”
“This the same friend who came looking for you yesterday?”
My spider-senses tingled. “Someone came looking for me yesterday?”
“A nurse with a baby,” Mr. Sullivan said.
“Nurse?”
“Looked like she was dressed in scrubs.”
Shit! I mean... shoot. I had already noticed how much the prison uniform looked like medical scrubs, and had told Rafe that that fact probably made Denise Seaver happy.
“When was this?” I asked Mr. Sullivan, as Detective Grimaldi came back out of my old apartment and closed the door behind her. “Yesterday, you said?”
Mr. Sullivan nodded. “Late. After seven. Late enough that I thought it was strange she was carrying a baby around.”
After seven. We’d been eating dinner less than a mile up the road. If we’d driven past, we might even have seen her.
Rafe and I hadn’t, though. We’d gone a different way toward home, and had turned off before we got there.
“How did the baby seem?” Grimaldi wanted to know.
Mr. Sullivan tilted his head to look at her, and she showed him her badge.
He waved it away. “I know who you are, young lady. I’ve seen you around here before.”
It might have been the first time in her life someone had called Grimaldi ‘young lady.’ Her mouth dropped open, before she closed it again with a snap.
“You want to tell me what’s going on?” Mr. Sullivan asked, sharing a look between us.
I glanced at Grimaldi. She shrugged. I guess maybe she was still speechless. I turned back to Mr. Sullivan.
“Those weren’t nurse’s scrubs. They were a prison uniform. She escaped from the Tennessee Women’s Prison yesterday, along with another inmate. The other woman was pregnant and in labor, and they were on their way to the hospital. Now the guard who was driving them is dead, and the pregnant woman is dead, and the woman you saw took the baby and she’s on the run.”
A masterpiece of succinctness, if I do say so myself.
“Why was she looking for you?” Mr. Sullivan asked.
“I’m not entirely sure. But I don’t think it’s because she wants to give me the baby.”
Grimaldi snorted, and covered it with a polite, “Can you tell us anything else about the woman? Or baby? Did it seem healthy?”
“Seemed asleep,” Mr. Sullivan said. “Wrapped in a small blanket or towel or something like that. I just saw the top of the head. Lots of black hair.”
No surprise there. Carmen was—had been—Hispanic, with long, black hair.
And of course Rafe was half black, also with dark skin and hair that was almost black.
“Do you have any idea where they went from here?”
Mr. Sullivan shook his head. “Wasn’t watching. Saw them right here in the hallway. She asked for Savannah.” He glanced at me. “I told her Savannah didn’t live here no more. She asked where you live now. And I told her I don’t know.”
I nodded. He knew I was still in the neighborhood, because we’d seen each other since I moved, but I’d never had a reason to give him my exact address. Now I was very happy about that. “Then what happened?”
“She left,” Mr. Sullivan said. “Walked down the stairs and out. I don’t know where they ended up.” He shook his head. “I would have called you, but I don’t have your number. If I hadn’t seen you now, I would have called your office and asked them to put me through.”
“I appreciate that,” I said, and dug a business card out of my wallet. “Here. If she comes back, or you see her again somewhere, you can call me.”
Mr. Sullivan pocketed it, along with the card Grimaldi gave him. “Anything else you can think of?”
Mr. Sullivan shook his head. Grimaldi thanked him on behalf of the police department, and we took our leave. Back down the stairs and across the street to the car. Where Grimaldi stopped with her hand on the door handle. “What’s that?”
“What?” I looked in the same direction she was.
“The yellow building with all the people outside.”
“A Catholic church,” I said. “They do good works. Feed the homeless and give them somewhere to sleep on cold nights. Those guys are probably waiting for lunch. Or a morning biscuit and coffee.”
Grimaldi locked the car again. “Let’s go.”
“Over there? Why?” But I scurried after her down the sidewalk. She—in pants and low heels—ate up the distance a lot faster than I did. By the time I skidded to a stop next to her, she already had her badge out and was showing it to the older woman in charge. Several of the homeless—mostly men, quite pungent in the warm August sunshine—sidled away, trying to look nonchalant.
“Yes, Detective.” The woman behind the biscuit tray kept working. She didn’t look at us, her hands kept moving, kept gathering up biscuits and cups of coffee and passing them across the tray into waiting hands, but she spoke to Grimaldi. “What can I do for you?”
“We’re looking for this woman.” Grimaldi held up her phone. I leaned forward and peered at it.
It was Denise Seaver’s mugshot, and believe me, the most awful passport photo in the world couldn’t have been worse.
Granted, it had probably been taken just a few hours after I dosed her with pepper spray, so her eyes were swollen and she looked blotchy and horrible, not to mention angry. But still, it’s one of the worst pictures I have ever seen.
Normally, she’s a plump, friendly-looking woman of the earth-motherly type. All long gray hair and a benevolent—if totally fake—smile. In this picture, the hair was scraped back from her face, and her lips were pinched into a tight line. A much more accurate representation of what she was really like, on the inside.
It made me wonder what Rafe’s mugshot looked like, from when he was first arrested at eighteen. Maybe I could ask him to dig it up for me? Or Grimaldi?
The biscuit-and-coffee woman nodded, and dragged me back to the present. “Saw her yesterday. Came in carrying a baby around dinnertime last night. Said her daughter had run off and left it with her, and she needed money. We don’t hand out money, but I gave her a blanket and a package of diapers and some formula. We do keep those on hand.”
While she spoke, her hands kept moving among the biscuits and coffee cups.
“It didn’t occur to you to wonder why she was wearing prison blues?”
The biscuit lady gave Grimaldi a look. “They looked like scrubs. She said she worked there. As a nurse, in the clinic.”
And she hadn’t even been lying, really.
“What happened after that?” Grimaldi asked.
“She took the stuff and the baby and left. Said she was going to go across the street and look for her daughter.”
So now I was her daughter. Great.
“And you didn’t see her again?”
The woman shook her head. “We have some regulars here—” she nodded to a toothless old man as she handed him his breakfast, “take care of yourself out there, Curtis—but she didn’t come back.”
“If you see her again, can you call me?” Grimaldi withdrew another card.
The woman stopped handing out biscuits long enough to take it, glance at it, and drop it in her pocket. “Homicide?”
“She killed a couple of people last year,” Grimaldi said, “and a prison guard yesterday.”
“The church should have gotten a bulletin from the police yesterday,” I added. Grimaldi looked at me. “Detective Mendoza said he’d put all the churches and shelters on alert, in case she decided to get rid of the baby.”
The woman shook her head. “Haven’t seen anything like that. It might have come in after she was here.”
Maybe. Or maybe someone had dropped the ball. At any rate, there was nothing we could do about it now. Denise Seaver had been here, had moved on to my old apartment, where Mr. Sullivan had seen her, and had gone on from there. Where she was now was anyone’s guess.
“Thank you for your time,” Grimaldi said politely as the woman continued to hand out biscuits and coffee. The tray was half empty by now. “If you see her again, give me a call.”
“Do you think she will?” I asked when we were half a block away, out of hearing range of anyone who’s been even remotely close to the biscuit-and-coffee handout.
Grimaldi glanced over her shoulder. “Hard to say. Some of these religious types like to think they can rehabilitate the world with good deeds. She might be one of them.”
“Denise Seaver probably won’t go back there again anyway.” She wasn’t stupid, and once someone had seen her, chances were she’d stay away from that person again, just in case someone had gotten to them in the meantime.
“Probably not.” We reached the car and Grimaldi unlocked the doors. “Let’s go to your office and get those fingerprints.”
I nodded. While Denise Seaver and Carmen’s baby might be topmost of mind, Grimaldi had a murder case to solve, and I had promised Tim to find out where Magnolia Houston’s money went. And who knew, maybe it would do me good to think about something else for a while.
SIXTEEN
“Thank God you’re here!” Tim said when we walked through the door. For once, he wasn’t looking at me, but at Grimaldi.
She arched her brows. “Why?”
Tim was standing over Heidi, who was sitting at the front desk. “We had a break-in!”
A break-in?
I looked around. Nothing seemed out of place. I was looking right at the back of Brittany’s computer monitor, and there was the usual low hum of electronics in the air. The company checkbook was open on the desk, with plenty of checks left in it. “How do you know?”
“The petty cash is gone,” Tim said.
The petty cash box was sitting on the desk beside the checkbook, lid closed.
There hadn’t been much in it when Rafe and I had checked it two nights ago. “Are you sure someone didn’t just borrow the money yesterday? For manila envelopes or whatever?”
“Positive,” Tim said. “The window in the powder room is broken.”
Grimaldi had her notebook out. “Is anything missing
?”
“Nothing beside the petty cash,” Tim said. And changed it to, “Or nothing we’ve found so far.”
“How much was in the petty cash?”
Tim looked at Heidi. Heidi shrugged. “Sixty-four dollars and change,” I said.
All of them turned to me.
“I counted it on Tuesday night. After we caught Devon in here.”
Grimaldi scribbled in her notebook. “What are the chances that this has something to do with the missing money?”
Tim winced. I did, too. Heidi blinked. “What missing money?”
Tim opened his mouth. And closed it again.
“There was a problem with the funding for Magnolia Houston’s closing on Friday,” I said. “The money didn’t get to the seller.”
“Where did it go?” Heidi asked, and I will say for her that she sounded completely sincere, and sincerely baffled.
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out. Something happened with the wire transfer.” And that reminded me. I turned to Tim. “Rafe has a friend who knows a lot about computers. He said, if he can see the original email, he might be able to tell us where it originated. Would you like to call Lane DeWitt, or should I?”
Tim grimaced, but rose to the occasion. “I’ll do it.”
“Just ask when someone can come by to take a look at that email if they still have it. Hopefully they do.”
Tim nodded.
Grimaldi was still waiting, pencil poised, for an answer to her question, and I turned back to her. “I can’t think of any reason why someone who made off with half a million dollars would break in here to raid our petty cash.”
Tim shook his head.
“Unless they came back for something else,” Grimaldi said, “and took the petty cash to make it look like that’s why they broke in.”
I looked at Tim. Tim looked at Heidi. “What could they be coming back for?” Heidi asked, right on cue.
“That’s what I need to figure out,” Grimaldi said. “Have any other emails gone out for other transactions, changing the wiring instructions? Overnight, perhaps?”
Tim turned pale. “I don’t know.”
Scared Money (Savannah Martin Mysteries Book 13) Page 17