“Can you find out?”
“I’d have to call every closing attorney involved in every transaction the company’s doing.” He flapped his hand in front of his face, as if having the vapors. “Heidi!”
Heidi reached for the petty cash box, I assume to put it away.
“Leave that,” Grimaldi ordered. “I want to print it.”
Heidi blinked.
“Fingerprints,” I said. “If nothing else, we know the intruder touched the box. If we’re lucky, maybe he left fingerprints.”
Heidi nodded, worrying her bottom lip.
“Come on,” Tim said, setting off down the hallway. “If I have to call everyone, I need help.” He snapped his fingers at her. She lumbered after him down the hall.
Grimaldi pulled out her fingerprint kit. “I might as well start here. While I’m doing this, why don’t you call your husband and tell him that Denise Seaver stopped by your old apartment last night. She has probably left the area now, but if he’s trying to put together a timeline of where she’s been, you can give him the church and the apartment.”
I nodded. I could do that. It would keep me out of my own office, that still had to be fingerprinted—although if nothing else, we knew it wasn’t Devon who had broken in last night. And it probably wasn’t Brittany either, since she had a key. The same, of course, could be said for anyone else in the office. So if the break-in was related to Magnolia’s money in any way—or to Devon’s murder—everyone who worked for LB&A were exempt from suspicion.
“Unless they tried to make it look like a break-in when it really wasn’t,” Grimaldi said, setting up her supplies on the sofa by the wall, where the fabric was too rough to take fingerprints. “It’s never a good idea to jump to conclusions. Go make your phone call, Ms.... Savannah.”
“Any objection to me taking a look at the bathroom?”
“Not as long as you don’t touch the windowsill,” Grimaldi said. “I’ll have to print that, too.”
Naturally. I took my phone and headed down the hall while I dialed.
Rafe hadn’t called me today. I figured that meant A) he had dropped off due to exhaustion and was asleep somewhere, and B) there was nothing to report. If they had found Denise Seaver and/or the baby, I’m sure he would have called. If he’d been awake, I’m sure he would have called, too. I hated to wake him, but Grimaldi had told me to call, and besides, I needed him to know that Denise Seaver seemed to be looking for us.
The phone rang a couple of times on the other end, and then I heard his voice. “Morning, darlin’.” It was husky and a bit rough. Gravelly. And quite sexy. That was the first thing I had noticed a year ago, when he’d called the office to report that Brenda Puckett had stood him up for their appointment. His voice, and how it sounded like he had just rolled out of bed. Or was still in it, like now.
“Good morning,” I said appreciatively. “I’m sorry to wake you.”
“How d’you know I was asleep?” I heard rustling, like he was sitting up.
“I figured you would have called me if you weren’t.”
“Maybe I was just being considerate, seeing as my wife’s pregnant and needs her rest.”
Maybe so. “Were you?”
“No.” There was amusement in his voice. “I was asleep.”
“Good,” I said. “You probably needed it.”
He didn’t say anything, and I added, “Long night?”
“Long enough.”
“I guess you didn’t find anything?”
“Not the baby, if that’s what you’re asking. I guess she’s still carrying it around.”
“She was carrying it around last night.” I explained how Grimaldi had come to pick me up when I’d overslept this morning, and we had stopped by my old apartment and the Catholic church up the street on our way to the office. “We have no idea where she went from there. Mr. Sullivan doesn’t know where I live now, so he wasn’t able to tell her, so I don’t think we have to worry about her knowing where to find us.”
“Would be nice if she did,” Rafe said. I arched my brows, and although he couldn’t see me, he added, “At least we’d know where they were at. If I’ve got her in front of me, I can get that baby away from her. It’s a lot harder just having her walking around God knows where.”
Indeed. “I’ll keep an eye out. If she was in the neighborhood last night, maybe she’s still in East Nashville this morning.” And if I got lucky, maybe I’d see her walking down the street.
It was quite annoying to reflect that if we’d driven down Main Street last night, on our way home from dinner with Grimaldi at the FinBar, we might have seen her walking down the street then.
“Can I borrow José for thirty minutes later?” I added. “Tim has agreed to contact DeWitts about the original email changing the wiring instructions for Magnolia Houston’s money. If they still have it, maybe José can look at it and tell us where it came from.”
“I’ll let him know,” Rafe said. “We’re all crashing on his floor. He lives down here.”
I assumed ‘down here’ was the Tusculum/Antioch area, where the Short Stop was located. I also assumed, but didn’t mention it, that they’d all been a little bit impaired last night, and hadn’t wanted to go far after they left the sports bar. Hopefully José’s fiancée had been OK with having three extra TBI-agents—two in training—crashing on her living room floor. There was a whole lot of testosterone in the air when the four of them were together.
“I appreciate it,” I said. “I know finding Denise Seaver and the baby has to take precedence, but I could really use him. Five hundred thousand is a lot of money. And if Devon was involved and now he’s dead...”
“You don’t have to justify it,” Rafe said. “If you want him, he’s yours.”
“Thank you.”
“Just don’t go thinking about keeping him.”
“Why would I want to keep him? I’ve got you.”
“Damn straight,” Rafe said, and hung up.
I continued on into the bathroom to inspect the damage.
The powder room is pretty small. Just a commode and a sink, with a window overlooking a small, overgrown gap between our building and the one next door. We’ve never bothered to cover the window with anything. A small, ruffled, green valance—to match the flower printed wall paper—hung at the top of the window, but there’s no way to actually cover the window for privacy. Then again, for as long as I’ve worked at LB&A, I’ve never seen a soul in the gap between the buildings.
If you were going to break into the realty office, it was a good place to do it. There are plenty of trees and bushes in the gap, no through-traffic, and the other building doesn’t even have any windows on that side. The LB&A building sits on a corner, fronting the street on two sides, with a parking lot at the back, and of course those three sides are all visible from the street. But the gap between buildings is very private.
It’s also pretty narrow. Three feet wide, maybe; no more. These days, you wouldn’t be able to build two buildings that close together. There’s at least a five foot setback on each side, so the buildings would be ten feet apart, minimum. But the LB&A building is a hundred years old, and they didn’t have such concerns back then. Also, both buildings are brick, and I guess they weren’t worried about fire.
At any rate, someone had slipped sideways into the gap between our building and the next, and had slithered through the trees and bushes over to this window, where he or she had slammed a rock through the glass. The rock was on the floor, a big, gray chunk. Grimaldi would have to have a go at it, although I suspected it was too rough to take prints.
Along with the rock, there was glass all over the floor. No question about this being an outside job. The rock and glass were both on the inside, so whoever had broken the window had done it from outside. That didn’t mean it couldn’t have been someone from LB&A trying to make it look like a random break-in, of course, but at least whoever had done it, had gone through the trouble of pushing through the overgrown trees and brus
h outside to get here.
I wandered back to the foyer and gave Grimaldi my take on the situation. She was busy picking up fingerprints on little pieces of tape—a bit broader than Scotch tape, but otherwise it looked like the same thing—and transferring them onto small index cards. On every card, she noted down where the print came from. After the cash box was done, she went on to the edge of the desk, and the knobs and drawer pulls. With that done, she moved the whole operation into my office, and started again. The front office prints were put away in a folder, and a new folder was started for my desk.
About halfway through this process, Tim wandered back in. “Nothing’s missing from my office. I don’t think anyone’s been in there.”
Grimaldi nodded. “Good.”
“Heidi’s been calling the closing companies to double check the wiring instructions for all our closings. So far, everything’s A-OK. Nothing’s wrong with any other transaction.”
“Good.”
Tim turned to me. “I talked to Lane DeWitt. He says they still have the email. It was deleted from the inbox after they printed it out, but it was still in the trash. He moved it back.”
“Good.” That way, there was something for José to look at. I didn’t think the printout would have helped him at all.
“He says you can stop by anytime you want.”
“I’ll send Rafe a text and tell him we’re ready whenever José is.” I dug for the phone I had dropped into the pocket of my maternity dress.
“Be sure to tell him I send my love,” Tim said with a lascivious wink, and sashayed off again.
“That doesn’t bother you?”
Grimaldi didn’t look up from her gathering of fingerprints. There seemed to be a lot of them on the edge of my desk.
“Not much anymore.” I sent off the text to Rafe, and dropped the phone back in my pocket. “It used to. A year ago, when I first met Rafe again. Tim was always drooling over him, and remarking on how hot he is. It was embarrassing, especially when he did it in front of Rafe. But then I realized that Rafe didn’t mind, so I guess I got used to it.”
Grimaldi nodded. “I have your fingerprints on file. And I took Brittany’s yesterday. But I’ll need them from everyone here. This could take a while.”
“I don’t have a car,” I said. “We took yours, remember? I’ll just stick around until you’re ready to go.”
“Let me guess. You’re planning to tag along with me for the rest of the day?”
“Not if you don’t want me to. Although it would be nice if you’d keep me in the loop. We’re sort of working on the same case, after all.”
Grimaldi refrained from telling me I wasn’t working on a case at all. She was working on a case; I was doing a favor for a friend.
“I thought you’d probably want to come along when I take José to DeWitts,” I added. “Unless you don’t care about the email.”
She moved on to my drawer pulls. “I care about the email. The missing money probably has something to do with Devon Knight’s murder. And since it’s my job to find Devon Knight’s murderer, I definitely care about the email.”
“Then I’ll just stick around until we figure out what to do.” My phone whistled, and I pulled it back out of my pocket. “Rafe says José can be here in forty-five minutes.”
“Tell him to meet us outside DeWitts,” Grimaldi said, still intent on her fingerprint-gathering. “I’ll be finished here by then.”
I walked away, down toward Tim’s office to ask for the exact address for DeWitts Title and Escrow, so I could text it to Rafe and he could pass it on to José.
By the time I got out of Tim’s office, Grimaldi had moved on to the powder room. As I had suspected, the rock was too rough to take fingerprints, but Grimaldi stuffed it into an evidence bag anyway, and busied herself gathering fingerprints from the windowsill.
She spent the next thirty minutes in the bathroom, and when that was done, she went on to get fingerprints from Tim and Heidi and the handful of other agents who were unlucky enough to be present in the office on a Thursday morning. Once it was all done, and properly annotated and filed, we carried it all out to the car and went to meet José at DeWitts.
Tim had declined to accompany us—still upset with Lane DeWitt’s accusation about the missing money, I guess—so it was just the two of us headed the few blocks south to DeWitts.
They’re located in one of the big turn-of-the-(last)-century four-squares that dot the landscape in East Nashville. When the house was built a hundred plus years ago, the area was a summer playground for the wealthy who lived on the other side of the river. This was when a ten mile trip by horse and carriage from Belmont and Belle Meade would take all day, instead of twenty minutes by car, like now. Although a good many of the old buildings burned to the ground in the great fire of 1916, there are still a lot of lovely, old houses left, many of them on the National Register of Historic Places.
This one was built of pale gray stone with a cedar shingled second story that had been painted a pale aqua. It might not sound like much, but it looked gorgeous. A short, wrought-iron fence encircled the front yard, matching the wrought-iron sign that proclaimed this as the home of DeWitts Title and Escrow (Est. 2006).
José’s truck with the Virgin Mary on the window was parked at the curb. José was inside it, and so was Rafe. I guess, since I’d dropped him off last night and he’d had to get a ride with someone, he’d chosen to come with José to see us. And perhaps also to see if he could find any other sightings of Denise Seaver in the last twenty-four hours.
As always, it was lovely to see him. We do the sideways greeting now, since the stomach gets in the way front to front. I leaned in and he slipped his arm around my back and gave me a kiss. It lingered. Or maybe I did. As usual, I got flutterings in my stomach. Not the baby this time.
Grimaldi and José exchanged more proper greetings. They’d met before, during that period between my scheduled wedding and my actual wedding in June, when Rafe was missing. Grimaldi, Wendell, and all the rookies had worked tirelessly to find him.
When all the formalities were concluded, Grimaldi turned to the building. “Ready?”
We followed in her wake through the wrought-iron gate, up the steps, and through the door.
Inside, a plump young woman in a black dress sat behind the front desk. She looked up. “Can I help...?”
The question ended in a gulp when she got a load of the four of us. I’m nothing particularly unusual, other than being pregnant. Grimaldi is all cop, in her usual dark suit and no-nonsense demeanor. Rafe is... well, he’s Rafe. Gorgeous, with the kind of sex appeal that can hit a woman between the eyes and knock her backward. Even in yesterday’s clothes and with stress and sleeplessness carved in the lines of his face, he was equal parts compelling and terrifying.
And then there was José. He’s short for a guy, no bigger than me, with the usual Hispanic glossy black hair, warm skin, and liquid dark eyes. And he works out a lot, so the sleeves of the polo-shirts he favors—this one a dark turquoise—are rolled up almost to his shoulders. Not to show off his biceps, but because the sleeves probably cut off his circulation when he pulls them down.
Rafe is rather nicely muscled, too, but I think José’s biceps might have his beat. Or if not, José looks more impressive, simply because he’s almost a head shorter.
Anyway, there we were. The three of them and me. The young receptionist stared from one to the other of us, mouth open, blue eyes wide, and I wasn’t surprised to see a flicker of fear cross her face. Rafe and Grimaldi separately look scary. Together, they’re damn near terrifying.
Grimaldi badged her. “We’re here to see Lane DeWitt. He’s expecting us.”
The receptionist hiked her jaw up. “Yes, ma’am. Detective. Right away.”
She lunged for the phone. The corner of Rafe’s mouth quirked and Grimaldi wrinkled her brows at him. Only José remained imperturbable.
“Mr. DeWitt?” The receptionist’s voice practically quivered. “A p
olice detective is here to see you. Along with two agents from the TBI. And... um...” She glanced at me, obviously unsure where I fit in.
“The representative from Lamont, Briggs, and Associates,” Grimaldi said.
The receptionist repeated it, then hung up the phone. “Mr. DeWitt will be right out.”
Grimaldi nodded and turned to José. “Savannah tells me you think you can figure out where this email originated.”
“If I can get a look at the original and trace it back,” José said. “It isn’t hard to spoof an email address. All it takes is a server and a little bit of know-how. The trail should go right back to the IP address it originated from.”
“A location?”
“That’ll take a little longer. But once I have the IP address, you can find out who it belongs to and where the unit is located.”
“Excellent,” Grimaldi said.
The receptionist was still looking from one of us to the next, her expression halfway between fascinated and wary. She probably knew about the missing money, and she might not have been sure whether we were going to be a blessing or a curse. We certainly had showed up in force, anyway.
Steps on the stairs brought all our heads around in that direction. A pair of elegant, gray slacks were making their way down, followed by an eggplant-purple shirt. The ensemble was topped by a handsome face surrounded by dark hair, artfully sterling at the temples.
He floated off the staircase and toward us. And since his quick assessment dismissed me and Grimaldi, in that order, and lingered on Rafe and José, it was easy to see why Tim and Lane DeWitt had always gotten on well. Birds of a feather, and all that.
“Gentlemen.” He smiled winningly before adding, a smidge too late, “And ladies. What can I do for you?”
Grimaldi pulled out her badge again. So did Rafe and José. Lane blinked at finding himself faced with so much hardware.
“We’ve come to take a look at that email,” Grimaldi told him when the formalities were over. “Timothy Briggs called you earlier and let you know we were coming?”
The inflection made it sound like a question, but her tone said clearly that he’d better not pretend not to know anything about it.
Scared Money (Savannah Martin Mysteries Book 13) Page 18