Home Stretch

by Jenna Bennett

  I was tempted not to tell him when it happened again. I mean, they were just practice contractions.

  OK, so maybe they came a little stronger and a little closer together now than they had yesterday, or this morning, but that was just because of all the activity today. Anybody would have contractions after everything that had happened. Even people who weren’t pregnant.

  So when the dessert course arrived, and with it another contraction, I thought about not saying anything. He’d never know the difference, after all.

  Except he did. The contraction started, and Rafe glanced over at me. And frowned. “Another one?”

  I gritted my teeth and nodded.

  He glanced across the table at Nolan’s wrist. “Eleven minutes.”

  Nothing to worry about, then.

  Not that they were real contractions. But even if they had been, they needed to be under five minutes apart before we could go to the hospital.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said, when I could talk again. “I’m not in labor. Nothing’s going on. We have weeks to wait.”

  “Sure, darlin’.” But he kept watching me. Surreptitiously.

  “Knock it off,” I told him.

  “Just trying to decide whether it’s safe to leave you.”

  Leave me? “Where are you going?”

  “I thought I’d go with Tammy and the sheriff to talk to Hammond after dinner. I told him I’d see him again.”

  “Sure,” I said. “If you’re willing to miss the football game with the other guys.”

  He smiled. “I doubt it’ll take that long to get a confession outta him. I’ll be back by the third inning. Unless you need me to stay with you?”

  “Why would I need you to stay with me?”

  He arched a brow, and I added, “I always want you to stay with me. But I realize you have things to do. It’s fine. I’m not in labor. You can go.”

  “How about you just keep an eye on that clock and time your contractions while I’m gone? I don’t really wanna have to deliver the baby on the side of the road as we’re driving home tomorrow.”

  I would prefer to avoid that, too. “I’ll do my best to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

  “You do that,” Rafe said.

  Twenty-Two

  After dinner, he and Grimaldi prepared to leave in Grimaldi’s sedan. The sheriff was going to go with them, in his own truck, to unlock the jail and add his own charges to the litany coming out of Nashville.

  “Can I come with you?” I asked.

  Rafe arched a brow. Grimaldi arched both.

  “I thought you were gonna stay home and time your contractions?” my husband asked me.

  “I can time my contractions at the sheriff’s office.”

  He didn’t say anything, and I added, “I told you, I’m not in labor. It’s too soon. And this guy tried to kill me. And Mrs. J. I’d like to hear what he has to say.”

  They both turned to the sheriff, obviously waiting for him to lay down the law.

  I smiled. “You have one of those interrogation rooms with a two-way mirror, don’t you, Sheriff? I can stay outside and see what’s going on inside?”

  The sheriff reluctantly admitted that he did.

  “With a chair, I bet? So I don’t have to stand?”

  The sheriff nodded.

  “So can I come? I won’t interfere.” Not that I thought either of them would give me the chance to. But I’d had plenty of theories about this case. I’d like to know how close I’d come to some of them.

  Grimaldi looked at Rafe. He shrugged. “It don’t bother me.”

  She looked at the sheriff. He shook his head. “Whatever the lady wants.”

  Grimaldi threw her hands up. “Fine. Get in the car.”

  “But if you go into labor in my sheriff’s office,” Bob Satterfield told me, “I’ll have your head.”

  I shook my head. “Don’t worry. I’m several weeks away from my due date.”

  Rafe looked extremely cynical, but he didn’t speak up. Just picked up my coat and held it.

  “Thank you,” I said and let him put it around me.

  He didn’t speak, just gave me a jaundiced sort of look.

  “If you really don’t want me to come...” I began. And trailed off before I actually offered to stay home, since I had no intention of doing that.

  “That ain’t it. I don’t care if you wanna look through the window and see what happens. It’s the sheriff’s jail. If he don’t mind, I don’t mind.”

  “But?”

  “You’re in labor, darlin’. I wish you’d just get off your feet and take it easy.”

  “If I’m in labor,” I told him, “and I’m not, because they’re Braxton-Hicks contractions and I have more than two weeks to go until my due date, and first babies are never early. But if I’m in labor, I might as well be in labor doing something I want to do. With something to think about other than the contractions. And I’d like to hear what this guy admits to when you interview him.”

  “Then that’s what you’ll do,” Rafe said and nudged me toward the door. “But I’m making sure you have a chair to sit on.”

  That would be very nice. I had no problems whatsoever with that.

  “We’ll take our own car,” Rafe told Grimaldi.

  She nodded. “I’ll see you there.”

  My car was the only one that was in the garage, of course, since it hadn’t been out yet today. It took a minute to get it, and then Rafe helped me, solicitously, into the passenger seat. “Buckle up.”

  I did, even if the belt pushed on the sore part of the underside of my stomach.

  It wasn’t a long drive. Nothing in Sweetwater is far from anything else in Sweetwater. In less than ten minutes, we were parked in the lot behind the county jail, and on our way through the door.

  It isn’t a big place. Just three little cells, mostly used for people pulled over for DWI or disorderly conduct on a Saturday night. Sweetwater’s a pretty low crime area, or I guess I should say that traditionally, it always has been. Since Rafe started showing up again, Sheriff Satterfield has had rather more to do than usual.

  Although that’s a bit unfair of me. The biggest case in recent history, the Skinner murders earlier this fall, had had nothing to do with Rafe, other than that the sheriff called him in to help solve the case. And the other big crime spree, in connection with my high school reunion in the spring, had had nothing whatsoever to do with Rafe. Or with me, for that matter. I’d just happened to be here, since it was my reunion, and Rafe had shown up after the bodies started piling up, to provide me emotional support. He’d had no connection to either victims or killers in that case.

  He had been responsible for bringing Lester Hammond here, though. As Lester made clear once they got him into the interview room.

  “Sure.” He smirked. “I followed you. You didn’t even look around.”

  I found that hard to believe. Rafe is usually very good at looking for tails. He had to spend years doing it, so it became second nature. Although in this case, with everything pointing to Fesmire and Fesmire being dead, he might have relaxed his vigilance a little.

  At any rate, I was happy it wasn’t me who had neglected to notice the tail. I’d been worried about that. But if Hammond had followed Rafe instead, I was off the hook.

  “So you waited outside the house for Mrs. Jenkins to come out,” Grimaldi said, and Hammond turned his smirk on her.

  “Yeah. I figured she was gonna wander off sooner or later. She usually did.”

  I wondered whether Julia had told him that. Or maybe his Aunt Beverly. Someone must have, because I didn’t think he’d been around Mrs. J enough to figure it out on his own.

  “And then she came out with the dog.”

  Hammond nodded. “I wasn’t gonna do nothing while she had the dog. Vicious-looking beast woulda probably bit me.”

  Pearl was the sweetest dog on the face of the earth, but I had no doubt that if Lester Hammond had tried to grab Mrs. Jenkins away fr
om her, Pearl would have ripped him limb from limb.

  “So I waited some more. Until she came out on her own. But she didn’t walk on the road. She was going across the fields and into people’s yards. So I followed along, and when she got to the cemetery, she went across the road and inside. I didn’t wanna park where anybody could see me, so I went around the back and parked on the service road there. And I watched her.”

  “And when she came close enough you put a plastic bag over her head and picked her up and ran.”

  Hammond nodded. “I didn’t know the fat bitch was there until she screamed. If I’d known, I’d have figured out a way to get her, too.”

  “She’s pregnant,” Rafe growled, “not fat. You moron.”

  Hammond smirked. “That your ball and chain, is it? She probably looks pretty good when she’s not knocked up.”

  Grimaldi sent Rafe a warning glance. “You’re single, aren’t you, Les? I guess that meant when somebody needed to seduce Julia Poole, you got that job?”

  Lester Hammond’s face closed up. “I dunno what you’re talking about.”

  “Julia Poole.” Grimaldi enunciated clearly. I didn’t think the problem was that Lester hadn’t understood what she said. More that he didn’t want to talk about it, because he hadn’t been caught red-handed doing that. “The woman whose throat you slit last Saturday.”

  “You can’t prove I did that,” Lester said. Which was not exactly a denial. Although it wasn’t an admission, either.

  “I can make a good case for it. When you and your brother decided that your Aunt Beverly’s money would look so much better in your bank accounts than in hers, you discussed how to get rid of her. And of course it made more sense to do it at night, when everyone else was asleep.”

  “Except for Julia Poole,” Rafe said.

  Grimaldi glanced at him. “But if someone could distract Julia, someone else could go in and take care of Aunt Beverly. And since your brother’s married, distracting Julia fell to you.”

  “I’m better looking,” Hammond said with a smirk.

  “You’re identical twins,” Rafe told him.

  Hammond gave him a look. “I’m still better-looking. My brother’s let himself go. Gotten fat. Like your wife.”

  He seemed to have a real obsession with fat people. Whether they were fat or not. Or just pregnant.

  “So you met Julia in the pavilion,” Grimaldi yanked the conversation back on track, “while your brother snapped Aunt Beverly’s neck and pushed her down the stairs. And when it came time to kill Julia, it was your turn.”

  Hammond shook his head. “You can’t prove I did that.”

  “I can prove one of you did it. Your DNA was found inside Julia’s car.”

  This was the first I’d heard of any DNA, but maybe she was just bluffing. I think cops are allowed to do that.

  “That don’t mean you can hang it on me,” Hammond said.

  Grimaldi smiled sweetly. It’s a very scary look for her. “I don’t really care whether I can prove which one of you did it. I’m charging you both with conspiracy, which means you’ll both go down for all of it, whichever one of you did what. But since you don’t seem inclined to want to share with me, I’ll just tell you what I think.”

  She waited. And when Hammond didn’t tell her not to—I’m sure he was curious just how close she’d come to the truth, just as I was, when it came to my own theories—she continued. “You wanted Aunt Beverly out of the way so you could get your hands on her money. It wasn’t doing her any good. Most of the time she didn’t even remember she had it. So you used Julia to get your brother into the nursing home. He killed Aunt Beverly, and you both went home. But Julia either suspected something, or just felt guilty for neglecting her job when she should have been available for Aunt Beverly, and she threatened to talk to Doctor Fesmire. So you made another appointment with Julia, and you slit her throat. And then you went to get her car. But while you were gone, Mrs. Jenkins showed up and found Julia. You told her Julia was hurt, and you needed to get help for Julia, and she crawled right into the car. You drove to Shelby Park, put the car in neutral, and pushed it down the ramp to the river. And then you got into your brother’s boat, and the two of you headed up the river to Madison. He tied up the boat, you drove home, and neither of you thought of it again. Until the news started talking about Julia Poole’s body being found. And nobody mentioned Mrs. Jenkins.”

  Hammond was doing his best to look nonchalant, but he couldn’t quite pull it off.

  “You realized she must have made it out of the car. You could hope that maybe she’d gotten washed away, and her body would surface in a couple of days, but you were probably worried. She’d seen you. She could identify you. And you had no idea where she was.”

  “Until she showed up at the funeral,” Rafe said. “And walked right into your confrontation with Doctor Fesmire.”

  Grimaldi nodded. “And suddenly you had two threats to deal with. Mrs. Jenkins, who had seen you with Julia’s body, and Doctor Fesmire, who was saying things that made you suspect he knew something about what had happened. About what you’d done.”

  “No time to waste,” Rafe said. “You went after Fesmire while your brother and his wife went looking for my grandmother.”

  “We have a witness,” Grimaldi said, “who saw your sister-in-law make the call from the payphone on Ulm and Dresden, that brought Mrs. Collier out of the house.”

  I had no idea whether that was true, either, but it sounded good. And it might be true. If Grimaldi had continued canvassing the neighborhood after Mrs. J and I left Nashville, she—or the uniformed officers she’d sent out to do the job—might have discovered someone who’d seen something.

  “But Mrs. Jenkins evaded your brother, and Mrs. Collier came back early. Your brother ran, and was picked up by his wife. Meanwhile, you dispatched Fesmire and threw the body in the river. And decided to hang onto his car.”

  “Nice car,” Rafe remarked. “A damn sight better than that piece of crap Ford Explorer that’s parked outside your brother’s house right now.”

  Hammond flushed.

  “You parked there,” Grimaldi said, “so it’d look like you were at your brother’s place for Thanksgiving. And then you took Fesmire’s car and followed Agent Collier down here. Where you got lucky and caught Mrs. Jenkins alone in the cemetery.”

  “Kidnapping,” the sheriff said, rolling his tongue around the word. Up until now, he’d been standing quietly in the corner with his arms folded, just listening to the conversation, and I’d pretty much forgotten that he was there. “Attempted murder. And four different people who watched you do it, and can testify to same in court. Plus another attempted kidnapping and murder.”

  Hammond looked annoyed. “I wasn’t trying to kidnap the heifer, for God’s sake. I didn’t know she was in the car. I just figured I’d use it, since it was sitting there.”

  “And attempted grand theft auto,” the sheriff added.

  “And when you realized she was there,” Rafe said, in a very soft voice, “and she told you she was pregnant and wouldn’t be able to fit through the window of the car, you decided to try to drown her. And her baby. My baby.”

  “Another attempted murder,” the sheriff said. “It’s adding up.”

  Grimaldi nodded. “If I were you, Mr. Hammond, I’d start pinning whatever I could on your brother. You’re looking at a lot of charges of your own. But you don’t have to go down for the things he did.”

  “I’m not ratting on my brother,” Lester Hammond said, seemingly offended that she’d even consider such a thing.

  “That’s fine. But the police in Nashville is picking up your brother and his wife as we speak. And you’d better believe Brigitte will do what she can to keep what sticks to the two of them to a minimum. And you know as well as I do that the DNA points to both of you. If Brigitte says you did it all, and Chester was with her when it happened, there’s nothing we can do to prove it wasn’t so.”

  “Effing bit
ch,” Lester Hammond said.

  Grimaldi nodded pleasantly. “If you want to take the fall for your brother, you go right ahead. But if you want some company in prison, it would help us all out if you’d just let us know what you’re responsible for, and what your brother did. We’ve already got you for everything that happened here in Maury County, with eye witnesses. You’re not getting out of any of it. But I don’t see why you’d have to take on anymore than what you actually did up in Nashville.”

  Hammond hesitated. And seemed to come to the conclusion that this made sense. “Yeah.”

  Grimaldi spread her hands as if to give him the floor. And Hammond performed.

  In the end, it turned out that we’d had it pretty well figured out already. He admitted to developing a relationship with Julia Poole after he and his brother decided to kill their aunt. “All her money was just sitting there. She didn’t need it. And we were getting it anyway, once she died. All it was, was getting it a little sooner.”

  And murder. Let’s not forget that.

  “So while you were with Julia, your brother killed your aunt and threw her body down the stairs to make it look like an accident.”

  Hammond nodded.

  “Did Julia guess what had happened, and threatened to turn you in? Or did she just feel bad about one of her patients dying because she’d walked off the job in the middle of her shift to meet you?”

  “Stupid cow,” Hammond said. “She didn’t suspect a thing. Just kept talking about how horrible of a person she was for leaving her post and letting something happen to Aunt Beverly. And how she needed to talk to Doctor Fesmire and confess. And Fesmire wasn’t stupid. If she talked to him, he’d figure it out.”

  “He’d already figured it out,” Grimaldi said. “He was there the night you killed Julia.”

  “He didn’t see nothing. But I saw his car when I went to the parking lot to get Julia’s car. Stupid bastard hadn’t even locked it. So I put the knife in his glove box. I figured it’d give him something else to think about.” He smirked.

  Neither Grimaldi nor Rafe looked surprised by this. I was. It was the first I’d heard of it. And since Rafe and Grimaldi hadn’t told me, I had to assume it was the first they’d heard of it, too.