Kickout Clause (Savannah Martin Mystery)

by Bennett, Jenna

  He sounded halfway between shocked, intrigued, and amused.

  “Oh.” I blushed, both at the realization that I’d spoken out loud, and at the confession I was about to make. “I... um... You, I guess. I mean, I guess I was fantasizing about one of Barbara Botticelli’s romance heroes, you know, and since Barbara—I mean, Elspeth—probably thought about you when she wrote those books...”

  Elspeth Caulfield, AKA historical romance author Barbara Botticelli, had grown up in a little town called Damascus not far from Sweetwater. She’d gone to Columbia High at the same time as Rafe and me, and she’d had a thing for him. He’d kept his distance from her, until one night when he didn’t. The result was a twelve-year-old boy named David Flannery, who lived with his adopted parents in the West Meade section of Nashville.

  None of us had known he existed until Elspeth died in September, and left everything she owned to the son no one knew she had. My brother Dix was her attorney, so it fell to him to track David down, and since he turned out to be Rafe’s son as well, let’s just say I took an interest.

  I had always adored Barbara Botticelli’s romance heroes, and after I met Rafe again, I saw him in every tall, dark and dangerous highwayman, sheikh, Indian brave and pirate I read about. It wasn’t until after Elspeth’s death that I realized I hadn’t been the only one to imagine Rafe during the love scenes, which sort of killed it for me. I haven’t picked up a Botticelli book since.

  His smile widened. “No kidding?”

  I shook my head. “I wasn’t thinking about you specifically, since I didn’t really know you when I was married to Bradley, but I thought about Barbara’s—I mean, Elspeth’s—romance heroes, and since Elspeth probably thought about you too...”

  He tilted his head. “You ain’t just saying this to make me feel better?”

  “No.” Why would I have to make him feel better? He had nothing to worry about. “Bradley was bad in bed. You know that. And we’re divorced. You know that, too.”

  “And yet you’re worried about him.”

  “He looked ill. And now that I have you...”

  I trailed off.

  Rafe arched a brow. “Now that you have me?”

  I flushed. “I guess I don’t care so much about Bradley and Shelby anymore. If he hadn’t slept with her and divorced me, I wouldn’t have become a realtor, and we wouldn’t have met, and you wouldn’t be here now. I wouldn’t, either. I’d still be married to Bradley. So I can afford to be worried, you know?”

  He didn’t say anything for a moment, just looked at me. Then— “You want I should help you?”

  “With what?” I got to my feet as well, to take my plate to the kitchen. He trailed behind me as I passed out of the dining room and into the hallway.

  “With Bradley. Figuring out what’s going on.”

  I glanced at him over my shoulder as I stopped in front of the sink. “How are you planning to do that?” I turned on the water and rinsed the plate before putting it in the dishwasher.

  He leaned in the doorway, folding his arms across his chest. “I’ll use it as an exercise. Me and Manny are supposed to train tomorrow anyway. Instead of following me, we’ll both follow Bradley.”

  “You’d do that for me?”

  “Ain’t much I wouldn’t do for you, darlin’. And since it looks like I ain’t gonna get any until this is taken care of...”

  “I told you,” I said, “you can have some any time you want.”

  He quirked a brow. “Now?”

  “It’s after dinner. That means it’s time for dessert, right?”

  “Works for me,” Rafe said and grabbed me.

  He went to work as usual the next morning, and so did I.

  I work at LB&A, a real estate firm half a mile from my apartment and a few blocks from where I’d met Shelby for coffee yesterday afternoon.

  It was early, earlier than usual. Not as early as when I’d caught my broker, Tim Briggs—the B in LB&A—rinsing blood off his hands in the bathroom sink a few weeks ago, but early enough that mine was the only car in the lot when I pulled in behind the building. Rafe has to be at work at eight, and the bed had been lonely without him, so I was up and out early, too.

  I parked and made my way over to the reinforced steel door, only to stop in my tracks a few feet away, keys dangling from my hand, when I realized that it was open a crack.

  My first thought was that someone had forgotten to shut the door all the way last night. Brittany the receptionist had still been in the office when I left, and people sometimes come and go late at night. You never know when you might have need of a purchase and sale agreement.

  However, the scratch marks on the door itself gave the lie to that explanation. Someone had forced the door open, and busted the lock, so it didn’t latch anymore.

  I stepped away, carefully. Chances were that whoever had been here was long gone, but I wasn’t about to take any chances. I’d found a dead body once before, and wasn’t keen to repeat the experience.

  Instead, I pulled out my phone and dialed a number I knew by heart, hoping and praying it wasn’t too early for the detective to be up and about.

  I should have known better. The phone didn’t have time to ring more than once before it was answered. “Metropolitan Nashville Police Department. Homicide. Detective Grimaldi speaking.”

  “It’s me,” I said.

  “Ms.... Savannah.”

  I couldn’t help it, I grinned. “You’re getting better.”

  “You should talk,” Grimaldi said. And she had a point. I had just as hard a time calling her Tamara as she did calling me Savannah.

  I had known her since August, after walking in on that dead body I mentioned. In Mrs. Jenkins’s house, as it happened. It was a body that belonged to my former colleague Brenda Puckett, queen bee of LB&A, or Walker Lamont Realty as it was called back then, and Tamara Grimaldi was the detective who ended up catching the case. We didn’t get off on the best foot, she and I. I found her hardnosed and intimidating, while she found me girly and annoying.

  But we kept running into each other as people kept dying, and in November, she ended up investigating the death of my sister-in-law, Sheila; my brother Dix’s wife. By then, Grimaldi had decided that I wasn’t as annoying as she’d first thought, and she had stopped intimidating me. And somehow, she and Dix took to one another. Not in a romantic way, since Dix’s wife had just died and he wasn’t in a position to be looking for another, but they clicked somehow.

  Yet Grimaldi and I kept calling each other by our last names and titles. We’d slowly been working our way around to first names, but it was a lot harder than you might think.

  “What’s going on?” she asked now.

  “I just got to the office and the back door is open. It looks like it was forced.”

  “Have you been inside?”

  I said I hadn’t. “I can go in if you want.”

  “No!” She took a breath and said it again, more calmly. “No. I want you to stay where you are. Don’t go anywhere near that door. Someone will be there in a few minutes.”

  “You?”

  “I work homicide, remember? Unless there’s a dead body inside, it’s not my jurisdiction.”

  I gulped. “You don’t think there’s a dead body inside, do you?”

  Her voice remained calm. “I hope not. But if there is, I don’t want you to find it.”

  If there was, I didn’t want to find it, either. Once was enough.

  “Just wait,” Grimaldi said. “There’s a patrol car a few minutes from you. I’m rerouting them in your direction. They should be there shortly. In the meantime, just stay on the line with me. And stay where you are.”

  “You don’t have to babysit me,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  “I’m sure you are. But it’s standard procedure. If you called 911, they’d do the same thing.”

  Fine. I stepped away from the building and leaned my back against the side of my car. “So what’s going on with you? Anything exciting
?”

  “Just the usual,” Grimaldi said. “A gang-related shooting in Bordeaux overnight. An overdose the night before. Nothing new.”

  Just the usual crop of dead bodies. I changed the subject. “Have you seen Dix lately?”

  “No,” Grimaldi said, in a tone that didn’t invite to further questions.

  I asked anyway. “Did you have an argument?”

  “No,” Grimaldi said.

  “So things are going well?”

  She didn’t answer. I guess she couldn’t very well say no again, since then I’d ask why, but at the same time she didn’t want to admit that things were going well.

  “Any sign of the cruiser?” she asked instead.

  I took my eyes off the back door and looked around. “Not yet.” There was a steady stream of cars headed down the street toward downtown, the beginnings of rush hour, but none of them were police issue.

  “Any movement from inside the building?”

  “None I can see.” But I wandered over to the wall, where there was a window, and peered in. With the lights off inside, it was hard to tell whether anything was wrong. All I could see were shadows: a chair, a desk, and filing cabinets. There was no sign of movement. “Do you want me to go around to the front and look through the windows there?”

  Grimaldi hesitated. “No,” she said eventually. “Stay where you are until the car comes. Just in case.”

  I didn’t ask her to elaborate on the ‘just in case,’ since I could imagine several scenarios, none of which appealed. Another dead body, a man with a gun, or a man with a knife, or a man with a baseball bat...

  “The cruiser’s here.” I watched as it pulled off the street into the lot and came to a stop.

  “Good,” Grimaldi said. “I’ll get a copy of the report, but I’d appreciate an update.”

  “Of course.” I hung up as the doors to the cruiser opened, in synchronicity, and two officers got out.

  They turned out to be my old friends Lyle Spicer and George Truman, whom I’d also met that fateful day in August. When I’d called 911 to report a murder, Spicer and Truman had been first on the scene, and they had transported Rafe and me to downtown for the interview with Grimaldi.

  Yes, Rafe had been there, too. For a few days I’d been worried that maybe he had killed Brenda.

  Spicer, Truman and I have met many times since then. They often catch me doing things I shouldn’t be doing, like breaking and entering and kissing Rafe outside the privacy of our own bedroom. They’re by way of being Tamara Grimaldi’s favorite minions, or maybe it just seems that way to me, since they patrol East Nashville, where I spend most of my time.

  Spicer nodded. “Miz Martin.”

  I nodded back. “Officer.”

  “What’s going on?”

  I pointed to the door. He sidled closer, while Truman gave me a nod of his own on his way past. Spicer is the senior partner, while Truman is a rookie, twenty-two or twenty-three years old. He blushes if I smile at him.

  They exchanged a look over the condition of the door, and then, without a word, they both pulled their weapons. Spicer nudged the door open, and they pushed inside, Spicer going high and Truman low.

  I stood where I was and waited, nervously gnawing my bottom lip.

  There were no indications of what was going on inside; no shots and no sounds of struggle. No furniture breaking, no yells or raised voices. After a few minutes, Spicer came back, holstering his gun. “The place is clear. C’mon in, Miz Martin.”

  Chapter Four

  I stepped gingerly through the door and inside, looking around as I did.

  Everything looked normal. I had been afraid the office would be a mess, but it wasn’t. The toilet paper hung sedately from the roll, and the refrigerator was closed and the counter clean. Nobody had vandalized anything that I could see.

  On the other side of the hall, Tim’s office looked the way it always did. His computer was still on the desk, with his printer, scanner, and shredder where they always were. The electronics hummed softly, comfortingly.

  The conference room looked untouched. So did the other offices along the hall.

  I stepped into the reception area at the front of the building, and looked around.

  It looked the way it always does, too, with the exception of Brittany, who wasn’t here yet. Usually she sits at the desk chewing gum and reading the most recent issue of Cosmopolitan or Marie Claire. Today it was too early. But—I checked my watch—in an hour she’d be here.

  Unless, of course, the office turned into a crime scene, and then I’d have to call and tell her.

  But so far that didn’t seem likely.

  “I don’t see anything missing,” I told Spicer and Truman.

  Spicer looked around. “Nothing?”

  I shook my head. All the computer equipment was here, and if someone had broken in to rip us off, surely that’d be the first thing they’d take. The paperwork wasn’t worth anything, aside from the fact that it had signatures all over it, and it wasn’t as if we kept money sitting around, other than some petty cash in Brittany’s desk drawer.

  I walked over and pulled it out. “The petty cash is gone.”

  “How much?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “You’d have to ask Brittany. Or Tim. There might be a regulation for how much was supposed to be here.”

  It didn’t make sense, though. Petty cash was under a hundred dollars, surely. Probably under fifty. The office equipment was worth many times that. So why would someone take the petty cash but leave the equipment, after going to the trouble of forcing the door?

  Spicer looked around. “Is this all of it?”

  “Other than my office.” I gestured to the door on the other side of the reception area. “It used to be the coat closet.” And still looked like one.

  “You wanna go look,” Spicer asked, “or you want me to?”

  “I’m sure everything is fine.” But I walked across the reception area anyway, and reached for the door knob. Only to stop when Spicer tutted at me. “What?”

  “Fingerprints.”

  I rolled my eyes, but wrapped a fold of my coat over my hand before I twisted the knob. “See? Everything’s...”

  I stopped when I saw the state of my desk. Because no, everything was not fine.

  While the rest of the building looked untouched, someone had been inside my office. And hadn’t left it the way they found it.

  The papers that had been neatly stacked on my desk were now strewn everywhere, across the desktop, chair and floor. It was a couple of folders worth, and it would take me a bit of time to sort and organize everything again.

  My pencil cup had been emptied and hurled at the wall, or maybe it had been full when it was thrown. At any rate, there were pens and pencils everywhere, and the cup itself lay in a couple of pieces on the floor, while the wall had a dent in it. It also had black and blue speckles, from where a couple of pens had broken open and the ink had spattered. Everything had been ripped from the little cork board above the desk, thumbtacks scattered, and worst of all—to me, anyway—was that the framed photograph on the desk—of Rafe and me on New Year’s Eve; the only picture I had of us—was broken. The glass was shattered, the frame cracked, and someone had taken the photograph itself and torn it into about a million teeny-tiny pieces, and tossed them like confetti.

  I could organize the paperwork and glue the pencil cup together, but there was no way to save that photograph.

  I reached out without thinking, and Truman put out a hand to stop me. He blushed when I turned to him. “Don’t touch anything.”

  By then I’d realized my mistake, so I just nodded and stepped back, out of the doorway. Spicer, meanwhile, had already gotten on the phone to request a crime scene tech. “Fingerprints,” he was telling the phone, “and fibers.”

  “You OK?” Truman was looking at me. Maybe he was afraid he’d have to catch me if I fainted.

  I nodded. “I’m fine, thank you.”

  Or m
aybe not fine, exactly, but I wasn’t in danger of fainting. I did feel violated. Someone had come into my space, uninvited, and destroyed it. I was angry. A little afraid. Nauseous. My hands shook. And I felt unsafe.

  “Burglary,” Spicer said into the phone.

  I turned to Truman. “Why would someone go to all this trouble just for what was in the petty cash?”

  He blushed, of course, as always when I gave him my undivided attention. “Not sure.”

  Spicer hung up the phone and offered a theory. “Maybe they thought there’d be more money here. They went through the whole place looking, and when all they found was the petty cash, they took out their frustration on your office.”

  Maybe. If they—whoever they were—had come in through the back door, as it appeared they had, my office would have been the last thing they encountered. It made sense that, after a buildup of frustration at finding nothing, someone might be led to have a temper tantrum. However— “Why my office? If they wanted to make a statement, wouldn’t it make more sense to wreck the reception area? They could have thrown the computer at the wall and broken the glass on everyone’s real estate licenses, and so forth.”

  There were a lot of things in the reception area it might be tempting to break, including the two plate glass windows out to the street.

  Then again, breaking those would have set off— “The alarm isn’t on,” I said.

  Spicer looked around. “There’s an alarm?”

  “Just inside the back door. Last person out at night is supposed to set it.”

  “You come and go out the back?”

  “It’s where the parking lot is.” And most of us drive to work. “Brittany makes sure the front door is locked before she leaves at five, and the last person out the back door sets the alarm.” Sometimes that’s Brittany, sometimes it’s someone else. It depends on who’s in the office at closing time. Real estate isn’t a nine to five business—for anyone but Brittany—so most of us work late at least some of the time.

  “Who was the last one out yesterday?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I left early. I was meeting a... friend for coffee.”