“Another of the boys you lost last night?”
“I told you,” Rafe said tightly, “we didn’t lose’em. And they ain’t lost now, are they?”
“Two of them aren’t. What about the third?”
“We didn’t lose him, neither. He ran. He’s prob’ly still running.”
Probably. Especially after shooting two of his comrades.
“At least we know who he is,” Grimaldi said soothingly.
“We always knew who he was. Now he’s alone. I dunno whether that’ll make him easier to find, or harder.”
“You caught a lot of his gang yesterday,” Grimaldi pointed out. “With the way he keeps losing his remaining friends, he may not have many places to go.”
“I sure didn’t expect him to come here.”
I hadn’t either.
“We can put a guard here tonight,” Grimaldi offered. “Make sure he doesn’t come back.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’m staying the night.”
“You could use some backup...”
“I’ll get some,” Rafe said. “I’ll call Wendell and the boys. We’ll sleep in shifts. Just in case he’s stupid enough to come back.”
“What about the duplex?”
“I’ll let the guy from narcotics know it’s all his. And to keep an eye out for our missing boy.”
We heard their footsteps coming down the hall toward us. Darcy started breathing faster.
“Don’t worry,” I told her, and added, when Grimaldi and then Rafe appeared in the doorway, “now that you’ve identified him, Darcy won’t need to look at him again, will she?”
They both shook their heads. “We know who’s still standing,” Rafe said. “That’s all we need.”
“That and knowing where he is,” Grimaldi added.
I shook my head. “We can’t help you there. So we can go? I think Darcy would probably like to get home.”
She nodded.
“If you’re staying here tonight,” I asked Rafe, “can I drop Darcy off and come back?”
He shook his head. “Hell, no. Not until we’ve caught him. Wasn’t being shot at once today enough?”
Since that’s what I had expected him to say, I wasn’t even upset. A little disappointed, maybe. And a touch worried. “You’ll make sure you’re not alone, right? You’ll get Wendell and the boys to stay with you?”
“I promise,” Rafe said and held out a hand. “C’mon, darlin’. I’ll walk you to the car.”
On the other side of the table, Grimaldi gave Darcy an unobtrusive hand up, just to make sure she was steady on her feet, I guess.
Rafe stepped through the door first. I don’t know if he was holding his breath, but I knew I was. It wasn’t likely the missing gang banger would shoot at him in broad daylight when the yard was still crawling with SWAT cops, but stranger things have happened. It was pretty bizarre in and of itself that he was going around assassinating his former friends.
No shots were fired, though, but Rafe still kept me behind him when he walked down to the car, and he made sure to stand in front of me when he put me into the driver’s seat, too.
“Don’t think I don’t see what you’re doing,” I told him.
“What?” He tried to look innocent. It’s way beyond him. He didn’t look innocent when he was David’s age.
“If you do something stupid like stay here alone to try to flush this guy out, I’ll kill you myself.”
He grinned. “Don’t worry. I may be dumb, but I ain’t stupid. If it’s just me and him, I’ll prob’ly end up killing him, and I’d rather take him alive. I’ll call Wendell and get some backup.”
“Thank you.” I shut the door and then rolled down the window to finish talking to him while Grimaldi got Darcy situated on the other side of the car. “I really don’t want to wake up tomorrow and hear that something’s happened to you.”
“You won’t.” He leaned down.
I leaned out and gave him a kiss. Grimaldi closed the passenger side door.
“Drive carefully,” Rafe told me, straightening.
“I will. You be careful, too.”
He stepped back, and so did Grimaldi. I steered the car down the driveway, at a much slower pace than last time, swerving to avoid the SWAT team members still milling about. And then we were on the road, for the second time today, and on our way south on Potsdam Street.
“Do me a favor,” I told Darcy. “Just keep an eye on the mirrors. If you see a car staying behind us for any length of time, let me know.”
She turned a shade paler. “You think he might follow us?”
“I think he’s probably on the other side of town by now. It doesn’t make any sense for him to stick around here, especially with all the cops crawling all over everything. And I can’t think of any reason he’d be interested in us. But it never hurts to be careful.”
Darcy looked apprehensive, but game. She kept staring in the mirror until we were out of the East Nashville area and onto the interstate headed south. For the first several minutes, I’m not sure she blinked.
By the time we got to Columbia, almost an hour later, she was a little more relaxed, and she swore no one had followed us. I’d been keeping an eye out myself, and hadn’t noticed anyone either, so I figured she was right. Not that I’d know what to look for, necessarily—or that Darcy would—but since we were both aware that we might be followed, and we had both been looking for any sign of it, the guy was either very far behind us, very clever, or not there.
We exited east of Columbia and, instead of heading south toward Sweetwater, took the road into Columbia itself. Five minutes later, we were parked outside the police station.
“I can go in by myself...” I told Darcy, who hadn’t said much on the way here. I got the very distinct feeling she wanted to get home as soon as possible, and get away from me. She had probably gotten a little more than she’d been expecting today.
She shook her head. “Oh, no. I’m not sitting out here by myself. If you’re going in, so am I.”
Fine with me. “We may be coming right back out again,” I warned her. “Officer Vasquez probably won’t be here. Unless it’s the beginning or end of a shift, she’s likely either home or on patrol.”
“I don’t care,” Darcy said. “I’m coming.”
OK, then. We locked the car—just in case—and went inside. If someone had managed to follow us all the way from Nashville, in spite of us both keeping an eye out, he probably wouldn’t be stupid enough to do something to the car when it was parked outside a police station, but better safe than sorry, right?
Eleven
There was a desk in the lobby, with a uniformed officer sitting behind it. It wasn’t Lupe Vasquez. I asked whether she happened to be in the police station, and was told no, she was on patrol.
“Any chance you can find out where she is? I have a couple of questions about a report she made, a favor to the Nashville PD.”
The cop on duty looked skeptical.
“Here.” I dug the report out and showed it to him. “See? It’s her signature. We just had a question about it.”
He scanned the piece of paper.
“I know her,” I added. “I was involved in that high school serial killer case this spring. She’ll remember my name if you want to call and tell her I’d like to talk to her about something.”
He looked reluctant, but he did reach for the phone. “You can take a seat over there,” he told me, before he started dialing. I guess he didn’t want to give me a chance to see—or guess—the phone number.
‘Over there’ was a couple of uncomfortable chairs ranged against the wall. Darcy and I sat down on them and waited. I pricked my ears up, but couldn’t hear anything of the mumbled conversation. After about a minute he hung up, and turned to us.
“She’ll be at the Mexican place on State Street in ten minutes. It’s their dinner break. She says you can talk to her there.”
I told him I appreciated it, and we headed back out.
&nb
sp; “Do you know the Mexican place on State Street?” I asked Darcy on our way across the parking lot.
She shook her head.
“Do you want Mexican food?”
“Isn’t it a little early for dinner?”
Maybe it was. By the time we got there, it would be barely four. Nonetheless, I could eat.
“It’s up to you,” I said, as visions of chips and guacamole danced in my head.
State Street wasn’t hard to find—it ran straight through town—nor was the Mexican place. There was only one: called Fiestas de Mexico, all decked out in orange and green, with little flags and lighted signs for Corona and Dos Equis in the windows.
There was a police car parked in the lot.
“That must be them,” I told Darcy, a bit unnecessarily.
She nodded.
“You ready?”
“I don’t know what you think she’ll be able to tell us, but I guess it can’t hurt to talk to her.”
Her enthusiasm floored me. Then again, she had a point. If Lupe Vasquez had learned anything of interest, chances are it would be in the report.
And anyway, Darcy was probably over the whole thing by now. I’m sure she’d had more excitement today than in the past two years put together. And on top of that, it wouldn’t be surprising if she were a little worried about what we might find out. It’s one thing to want to find your biological parents, in a theoretical sort of way. It’s quite another to come face to face with who they are, or some aspects of them you maybe hadn’t anticipated. She might be thinking that it would have been better to just let sleeping dogs lie.
But she followed me through the door and into the restaurant. “We’re meeting someone,” I told the hostess, who advanced on us with two menus, and looked around. “There they are.”
The cops were easy to find, prominently seated in the middle of the room, in their navy blue uniforms. Lupe Vasquez had her hair tied back in a bouncing ponytail again. Across from her sat her partner, Officer Nolan: tall and hawk-like, with a beaky nose and a long neck.
They saw us standing there and beckoned.
“Sorry to interrupt your dinner,” I said as we approached the table. “This won’t take long.”
“Have a seat.” Lupe Vasquez nodded to the chair next to her, while Nolan took one look at Darcy and shot to his feet, his cheeks flushed, to pull out the chair next to himself for her.
She simpered at him and sat. I plunked myself onto the seat next to Vasquez without assistance. “We were going through a bunch of hospital records the Nashville police got from St. Jerome’s Hospital in Brentwood last fall. They asked you for help trying to find a woman who gave her address as being on Water Street in Columbia thirty-some years ago.”
I put the report on the table. She scanned it and nodded. “I remember. And for the record, they didn’t ask me specifically. They contacted support services, and the captain gave it to us, since it’s part of our beat.” She glanced up at Nolan. He was busy getting acquainted with Darcy and didn’t even notice.
“You couldn’t find her?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Couldn’t even find the address. It wasn’t there. Never had been. No such number.”
“So you talked to the neighbors.”
She nodded. “It seemed like the only thing we could do.”
“And they didn’t know her.”
She shook her head. “Some of them have lived there a lot longer than thirty years. There’s never been a Sweet family on Water Street. It’s just a little stretch of road. Two or three blocks long. They all know one another.”
“No indication they were lying to you?”
“None that I noticed,” Lupe Vasquez said. “They’re not real fond of the police—racial profiling and police brutality and all that. So they were more willing to talk to me than Patrick. Me being female and younger and brown.”
Patrick was Nolan, I assumed. I also made the assumption that the population on Water Street was mostly black. And while Lupe Vasquez wasn’t, her skin was several shades darker than mine and Nolan’s.
“Look at this.” I pulled out the birth certificate we’d taken a copy of. And pointed to the checkmark next to ‘Caucasian.’
Vasquez shook her head. “She wouldn’t have lived on Water Street. You know how it is. There’s a white side of town and a black side of town. Or at least there was thirty years ago.”
Yes, indeed. Sweetwater had the same dynamic. Black churches and white churches, black neighborhoods and white neighborhoods. Things had started to change, slowly, over the past decade, but back when Darcy was born, Water Street would have been firmly African-American. And the Caucasian Ora Sweet wasn’t likely to have lived here.
“Her mother could have been black,” I told Vasquez softly, with a glance at Darcy. She and Nolan—Patrick—were talking and weren’t paying any attention to what was going on on this side of the table. Darcy looked a lot perkier than she had when we walked in. “Look at her. Black hair, black eyes, skin like yours.”
Vasquez nodded. “Hard to imagine the nurses at the hospital wouldn’t have noticed a black girl claiming she was white, though.”
True. “So maybe it was her father who was black. And Ora lived on Water Street with him.”
“Even more likely the neighbors would have remembered her, I’d say.”
Probably so.
At that point the officers’ dinner arrived. It was probably time for us to go. I started making leaving noises, and Nolan immediately did everything short of holding on to her to get Darcy to stay. “Aren’t you hungry?”
“I guess I could eat something...” Darcy said, with a glance at me.
I arched my brows—now she wanted to eat?—but if she’d found a guy she liked, who certainly seemed to like her back, who was I to cut things short?
I turned to the waiter. “I’d like a bowl of guacamole, please. A big one. And a bowl of chips. And an iced tea.”
He nodded. “Senorita?”
Darcy ordered a drink and a Speedy Gonzales, maybe because she thought it would be quick and easy to make.
It was kind of awkward sitting here while Vasquez was tucking into her food and while Nolan was trying to decide whether to focus on Darcy or his burrito.
Darcy won out, and I guess that was a good sign. My guacamole arrived shortly, and I got busy scooping it up and shoving it in my mouth. Then Darcy’s dinner arrived, and Nolan allowed her and himself to eat, hopefully before his own food had gotten too cold.
“I don’t suppose you know anything about Beulah Odom?” I asked Vasquez, mostly just for something to say.
She swallowed. “The woman who ran the meat’n three outside Sweetwater? She died a few weeks ago.”
“I know. That’s why I asked.”
She put down her fork. “I don’t know a lot. I mean, I was there, but there wasn’t much to see.”
“No sign of foul play?”
I’m not sure why I kept harping on that, when the death had been ruled natural by the M.E. and the sheriff had been at the crime scene and told me it all looked as it should.
Lupe Vasquez shook her head. “Not that I could see. Just an older woman who died of heart failure in her own bed. Or out of it.”
She waited a second and then added, “Why do you ask?”
I shrugged. “No reason, really. One of her employees told me it happened. And that there’s a problem with the will. The employee was supposed to get the restaurant. Beulah had been grooming her to take over, but the Odoms are contesting it.”
“That doesn’t mean they killed her,” Vasquez said.
Of course not.
“If anyone did, I’m sure you realize that it’s your friend who had the best motive.”
I blinked. No, I hadn’t realized that, actually. Or hadn’t thought about it, at any rate. “Yvonne would never kill Beulah!”
Nolan stopped mid-sentence to look at me. Darcy did, too.
“Sorry,” I said. “But she wouldn’t. I know h
er. She wouldn’t kill anyone.”
Nobody answered, and I picked up a chip and dipped it into the guacamole just to avoid the silence and the eyes. Then Nolan began speaking again, and Darcy turned to him.
“Listen,” Lupe Vasquez said, her voice low. “Nobody killed her. The M.E. said it was heart failure. And he should know.”
I nodded. He should.
“The case is closed. The body is buried. She’d lived a good life, good enough that she brought both heart disease and diabetes on herself.”
“I suppose.”
“And I’m sure your friend will figure out the will. If it’s valid, and Miz Odom wasn’t under duress when she wrote it, your friend will probably get the restaurant.”
I hoped so. But before I could say anything, Nolan’s radio squawked. “Dispatch to One-Adam-Four. One-Adam-Four, come in, please.”
“That’s us,” Vasquez said, while Nolan excused himself (to Darcy) and got to his feet. He disappeared outside, already talking into the radio, while Vasquez looked around for the waiter. He must be used to this, because he was on his way to the table with the check. She took it and pushed her chair back. “’Scuse us.”
“No problem.”
“Sorry I couldn’t be more help with the adoption thing.”
“Not your fault,” I said. “If she didn’t live there, she didn’t live there. And we have some other strings we can tug. I figured if there’d been anything else, you’d have put it in the report, but it was worth checking.”
Especially since I’d gotten a very nice bowl of guacamole out of it. A bowl of guacamole I had to pay for, of course—I wasn’t about to stick the officers with it—but still. A very nice bowl of guacamole.
She nodded. “I’ll see you around. Nice to meet you.” She smiled at Darcy and then walked off, hardware jangling from the belt around her waist, to settle the bill.
Darcy was looking at the front door and pouting. I hid a smile. “He’ll find you if he wants to. And you know where to find him, if you get tired of waiting.”
She glanced at me, and then blushed. I guess maybe she hadn’t realized how obvious they’d been. “Did she know anything more than what was in the report?”
Uncertain Terms (Savannah Martin Mysteries Book 12) Page 13