“I hope they won’t have to break down the door. It’s original to the house. Almost a hundred and fifty years old. Maybe I should have offered them a key.”
I reached for the door handle.
Darcy grabbed me. “Don’t you dare! The door can be fixed. You can’t.”
She sounded like Rafe.
“I was just going over to the SWAT car,” I said. “There’s probably a driver left in it. I was going to offer him the key. They’re all wearing earbuds, I’m sure.”
Darcy shook her head. “Just stay here.”
Fine. I settled in to wait, and then jumped high enough in my seat that the top of my head connected with the ceiling when a figure suddenly materialized next to the car.
Ten
A few seconds passed before I managed to swallow my heart and make sure I hadn’t lost control of my bladder. By then, Rafe was scowling and making imperial gestures about opening the window.
I rolled it down. “You scared me.”
“Good,” my husband said ruthlessly. “You’re not supposed to be here. I told you to stay at the Milton House.”
“We wanted to see what was going on.”
I glanced at Darcy, tacitly trying to communicate to him that this was really her fault; she was the one who had wanted to come back.
She shook her head. “Don’t blame me for this. I wanted to go home.”
Rafe arched a brow.
“Fine,” I said. “I wanted to see what was going on. Not Darcy. Me.”
Rafe didn’t answer. He knows the value of silence. Makes the suspect—or in this case his wife—babble.
“We figured he’d have left by now anyway,” I said. “He knew we’d seen him. He knew we’d seen the gun. He had to figure we’d call the police as soon as we were away from the house. He’d have to be an idiot to stick around.”
Rafe nodded sagely. “And you parked in this driveway because...?”
“Nobody lives here,” I said. “The house is empty. I knew nobody would bother us.”
“Uh-huh. Did it cross your mind that this big, empty house might be a good place for a couple gang bangers on the run to hide, while they watched SWAT search the house they’d been in until five minutes ago?”
Oh... snap.
“No,” I admitted, with a wary glance over my shoulder at the empty house behind us. “I didn’t think of that.”
Darcy turned to look, too, her expression fearful.
“Uh-huh,” Rafe said again, dryly.
“Are they there?”
He shrugged. “I don’t imagine so. Like you said, they’d be stupid to hang around.”
“Then why did you say they might be? Just to scare us?”
“You could do with a good scare, darlin’.”
“I’ve already had one today,” I told him.
His face darkened. “You all right?”
“Fine.” I glanced at Darcy. “He didn’t actually shoot at us. Just looked like he thought about it. And maybe thought better of it.”
I looked back at the house. The SWAT ants were gone from the porch and the door stood open. Hopefully no one had destroyed it. “They’re inside.”
Rafe nodded. “If anybody’s left inside, we should start hearing shooting soon.”
Great. “I hope they don’t destroy our stuff.”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Rafe told me, and straightened. “’Scuse me, darlin’. I better go introduce myself to the SWAT commander.”
He sauntered off across the street, pants hanging low on his butt. Darcy breathed out. I hadn’t realized she was holding her breath.
“Does he scare you?” I asked curiously.
She glanced at me. “Doesn’t he scare you?”
“Not anymore. Now that I know him, I know he’s mostly all bark.”
Not true at all, actually. He was plenty dangerous when he wanted to be. He just wasn’t dangerous to me. And never had been, although I hadn’t realized it at first.
We watched as he stopped and talked to the man inside the SWAT vehicle. He was still standing there, leaning on the window, when one of the SWAT team came out onto the porch and gestured.
I knew he wasn’t gesturing to me, but I got out of the car anyway.
Rafe shot me a look over his shoulder and raised his voice. “Don’t even think about it, darlin’.”
“It’s my house! I live here!”
“And now you’re gonna stay in your car till I tell you it’s safe.”
“But it must be empty. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be standing there waving.”
“No,” Rafe said, patience obviously wearing thin. “Sit.” He pointed to the Volvo.
“I’m not a dog,” I told him, but I opened the car door again anyway. “Can I at least move across the street and up the driveway?”
Rafe rolled his eyes. “Fine. Just don’t run over anybody.”
I managed to avoid doing that as I maneuvered the Volvo up the same gravel driveway we’d careened down just thirty minutes ago. And then I parked where we’d stood earlier, and waited for approval to go inside the house.
Rafe and the SWAT commander hoofed it up the driveway. “Just stay here until I come and tell you it’s safe,” Rafe told me on his way past. “Keep the windows up.”
And the air conditioning going. “No problem,” I told him.
They disappeared up the stairs and inside.
We sat in silence a few seconds.
“What do you think happened?” Darcy wanted to know.
I made a face. “They probably destroyed something. Shot out the TV screen, punched holes in the walls, plugged up the tub and let the water run. Rafe probably wants to look at the damage before he lets me in.”
Darcy nodded.
We sat in silence another minute, as the SWAT team started filing out and back to their vehicle to get rid of the heavy armor.
“Does this happen a lot?” Darcy wanted to know.
I thought about it. “Not a lot. We had people break into the house last month. And the month before that, there was the crazy serial killer who was after Rafe. He left a dead prostitute on the bed. But before that, there were several months when nobody but us was inside.”
Darcy stared at me. Her mouth was open, but no words came out.
“No,” I said. “It doesn’t happen much at all.”
Darcy snapped her mouth shut. “That’s good.”
It was. I hated that it had happened now, but hopefully the gang bangers hadn’t done too much damage.
The SWAT team went in and out for five or ten minutes, and then Rafe came back outside and down the stairs. He stopped next to the car. I rolled down my window. “How bad is it?”
He shook his head. “Not good.”
“Can I go inside and see?”
He nodded, his face set to grim as he reached for the handle. “You, too,” he told Darcy, “if you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind at all.” She opened her door and swung her legs out, as I turned off the car and the lovely, cool air conditioning. “I don’t want to sit out here by myself.”
Hard to blame her for that, even with half a dozen SWAT cops in the yard.
So we walked up the steps and across the boards of the porch together. No sooner had we crossed the threshold into the house, than my nose wrinkled involuntarily. My steps hitched.
“Oh, no.”
Rafe’s hand was under my elbow, steadying me. “Afraid so.”
“What?” Darcy asked, looked from him to me and back.
“Can’t you smell it?”
She scented the air, and her nose wrinkled, too. “It smells like sewage. They didn’t ruin your pipes, did they?”
Not quite. The smell wasn’t that strong. Thank God. And what there was of it, was mixed with the metallic tang of blood.
The body was slumped over the kitchen table, where two bottles of beer, both empty, were standing next to a bowl of chips and a smaller one of salsa. He had been shot through the back of the head. It w
as a mess, and his face—what was left of it—was worse.
I felt my knees turn to water. Rafe held me up. Until Darcy took one look at the corpse and crumpled into a dead faint.
“I’m OK,” I said weakly, grabbing hold of the back of another kitchen chair for support. “Get her out of here.”
“You sure?” He gave me a measuring look. And I must have passed muster, because he bent and scooped Darcy up. I could hear his steps retreat with her. A minute later he came back. “I put her on the sofa in the parlor.”
“That’ll work.”
“I’ll take you there in a minute. But first I gotta know... is this the guy you saw?”
I forced myself to look at the body. He wasn’t pretty. The bullet had gone into the back of his head, and taken a chunk of his face with it when it exited. Lots of blood and other stuff on the table—and I’m not talking about the beer bottles. It was hard to concentrate, and honestly, hard to get a good idea of what his face had looked like. But—
“I don’t think so. I only got a glimpse of him, you know. I mean, he was out on the porch for maybe twenty seconds, between the time when we first saw him and when we turned onto the road. But I wasn’t looking at him other than the first second, and the last. I was busy driving. I think, though, that his shirt’s a different color. And maybe his skin’s a little lighter.”
Rafe nodded. “Good enough. So this is someone else.”
“As far as I can tell,” I said, and looked around. “You’ve checked the house, right?” This guy’s comrade wasn’t lying in wait anywhere, ready to jump out?
“It’s empty. The SWAT team cleared it. And I went through, as well.”
Good to know. “So the last guy made it out of here.”
Rafe turned to look at me. “Whaddaya mean, the last guy?”
“Didn’t Grimaldi call you?”
He shook his head.
“She caught a case. Dead gang banger. Same color bandanna as this one. She surmised it might be one of your missing guys.”
“Shit,” Rafe said.
“I don’t know for sure. You’ll have to talk to her. But it seems like maybe one of them was killed last night. Disagreement over what to do next, maybe. And then this one was killed sometime today.”
“Sometime in the last thirty minutes,” Rafe said. “The body ain’t cold yet.”
He might have been alive when Darcy and I pulled up outside. I don’t know why that should make a difference to me, since we’d had no idea he was here and there was nothing we could have done to stop him being shot anyway—and besides, he was a gang member and most likely a killer himself, too—but somehow it hit home. He’d been alive, and now he wasn’t.
I wobbled.
“C’mere.” Rafe scooped me up. “I’ll take you in to Darcy.”
“Thank you.” I looped my arms around his neck and held on. “I’m sorry. It’s just... a lot. You know?”
“Sure.” He brushed his lips over my cheek. It wasn’t quite a kiss, but close enough for jazz. And then we were in the parlor, and he put me down, carefully, on a chair opposite the sofa where Darcy lay.
She was still out cold. I lowered my voice. “Are you going to make her look at him again?”
Rafe squatted next to my chair, and managed to shrug at the same time. “Second opinion. She mighta seen him better than you. She wasn’t driving.”
And had been closer to the porch than I’d been. I nodded. “She isn’t likely to pass out twice, I guess.”
“Prob’ly not,” Rafe agreed.
“We found a birth record in the St. Jerome files that might be her mother.”
He looked skeptical, and I added, “I know. We don’t even know that she was born there. She could have been born in any number of other hospitals, or for that matter at home in bed.”
He squinted at me. “You ain’t gonna wanna give birth at home in bed, are you?”
“Have you lost your mind?” I said. “I know some people want to have natural childbirths in the sanctity of their own homes, etc, etc, but no thank you. Give me drugs, and give me a nice, sanitary hospital with doctors and nurses, and equipment if anything goes wrong. A baby isn’t something I want to take chances with.”
“Good to know. So you found a record that might could be Darcy?”
I kept an eye on her face as I told him about it. Her eyes weren’t open yet, but some of her color was coming back. “The timing works. Just a few days, give or take, from the birth date on Darcy’s amended birth certificate. And when Officer Vasquez in Columbia went to Water Street to look for Ora Sweet, the neighbors said there’d never been a Sweet family living there. The house number didn’t even exist.”
He nodded.
“So I thought about what you told me, about picking information that’s close to your own, to make it easy to remember. And I wondered...”
“If she was from Sweetwater,” Rafe said.
“Exactly.” I beamed. “If you thought of it, too, that means it makes sense, right?”
“Sure. That don’t mean it’s true, but it’s worth looking into.”
I nodded. “That’s what I thought. So we were planning to stop by Columbia on our way back to Sweetwater. See if there was anything Vasquez thought of, that she didn’t put in the report. Just to cover all the bases. You remember her, don’t you?”
“From back in May? Sure.”
“She seemed competent, didn’t she?”
“For a girl cop,” Rafe said with a grin.
I was going to chastise him—as he clearly deserved—but then I realized I didn’t have to. Grimaldi stood in the doorway, hands on her hips. “I heard that.”
“I thought you would.” He got smoothly to his feet before gesturing to Darcy. “We got one out cold. Passed out when she saw the body.”
“Ugly?”
He shrugged. “I’ve seen worse. He was shot in the back of the head. Exit wound’s messy.”
Grimaldi nodded. “You look like hell.”
I had my mouth open to tell her thank you very much, that I was six months pregnant, it was a hundred degrees outside, and I’d just seen a dead body, when I realized she wasn’t talking to me.
“Thank you very much,” Rafe said dryly. “Savannah ain’t a fan, either.”
“I can see why.” She nodded to me. “You all right?”
“I will be. It’s hot and I’m uncomfortable. And Rafe’s right. The exit wound’s messy.”
“I’ll go take a look.” She headed off down the hallway.
“Better go with her,” I told Rafe. Just in case she fainted, too. Not that I thought there was any chance she would.
“You gonna be OK here by yourself?”
I wasn’t by myself. I had Darcy across from me, and him and Grimaldi twenty feet away. The SWAT team was still combing the yard. I could see them through the window. They had stripped down to short-sleeved black T-shirts, and there were a lot of very nice muscles on display. Not as nice as when Rafe mows the lawn, of course, but enough to keep me occupied.
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “I’ll scream if anything happens.”
He nodded and followed Grimaldi down the hall. I sat back, divided my attention between Darcy and the SWAT team outside, and listened to Rafe and Grimaldi talking in the kitchen.
At first it was just a technical discussion about the body. The caliber of weapon used—a 9 millimeter semi-automatic versus maybe a .38 or .45—and also where the shooter must have been standing when he made the shot. (Right behind the guy with the barrel almost touching the back of his head; notice the abrasion collar and tattooing.)
He must have come in from seeing Darcy and me drive off, they surmised, and his buddy was still sitting at the table eating chips and drinking beer. The shooter walked behind him, aimed, and pulled the trigger before beer-and-chips dude even knew what was happening.
They didn’t call him beer-and-chips dude, though.
“Robert Lewis,” Rafe said, giving the young man’s name the French pr
onunciation.
“How d’you spell that?”
“His mama spelled it Ro’bear,” Rafe said. “Like the animal.”
There was a beat. “OK,” Grimaldi said, and I’m sure she had her little notebook out and was writing it down. “Ro’bear Lewis. Was he one of the gang members you lost yesterday?”
“We didn’t lose’em,” Rafe told her, and sounded a bit irritated that he had to. “Just misplaced’em for a while.”
“Sure. Well, you’ve found this one again.”
“No offense,” Rafe told her, “but I’d rather not have found him like this, here.”
I would rather not have, either.
Over on the sofa, Darcy started to stir. First her eyelashes shivered, and her lips pursed. Then her eyes opened. They were unfocused at first, but after a few seconds she started looking around.
Meanwhile, the conversation in the kitchen went on to the other case Grimaldi had caught this morning, and how the victim in that one also looked like a gang banger.
“You shoulda called me,” Rafe told her.
“I’ve been a little busy. And I’m telling you now.”
He acknowledged that with something like a grunt. “You gotta picture?”
Grimaldi said she did. And must have pulled out her phone to show him. I took the opportunity to greet Darcy. “How are you feeling?”
“Weird.” She pushed herself up on one elbow and swung her feet over the edge, pushing the ends of her short bangs away from her face. “I can’t believe I fainted.”
“Take it slow,” I said. “Put your head between your knees if you feel faint again.”
She was still pale. Not as sickly white as she’d been at first, but there was a long way from a rosy glow in her cheeks.
“Have you ever done this?”
“A year ago,” I said, “right in this house. In the room across the hall. My colleague Brenda Puckett had been murdered—Alexandra’s mother—and was lying in front of the fireplace with her throat cut. There was blood everywhere. Everything went really bright and light. Rafe had to pick me up and carry me outside.” And then I really had fainted.
While I talked, Darcy pushed herself upright, and was leaning her head back against the sofa. In the kitchen, Rafe was identifying the body. The one in the picture. “Germaine Wilson.”
Uncertain Terms (Savannah Martin Mysteries Book 12) Page 12