Collateral Damage: A Savannah Martin Novel (Savannah Martin Mysteries Book 19)

by Jenna Bennett

  “There’s enough Tannerite in the garage to blow up the whole neighborhood.”

  The guy behind the voice was definitely arching his eyebrows now. “Any suggestions for what I should do about that? Maybe call in an explosives team?”

  “It’s a binary explosive, Detective,” Rafe said. “You’d have to shoot at it to make it blow. As long as it’s just sitting there, it’s safe.”

  “Good to know,” Mendoza answered. I had recognized his voice by now—and yes, it was partly because Rafe had identified him by title. Although I had heard his voice before, more than once, so the name would have come to me eventually. “Anything else I need to know?”

  “Not right now. Call in your TBI contact so it’s on the record. We can talk when you get here.”

  Mendoza didn’t answer, just hung up. Two seconds later, the phone rang again, and Rafe picked it up. “How long’s it gonna take you to get out here?”

  They exchanged a few more words, and then Rafe dropped the phone in his pocket and turned to me. “Sorry. I just had to get that called in as soon as possible.”

  “No problem.” I was still feeling a little light-headed, and I appreciated his hand under my elbow. “Jennifer’s dead?”

  He nodded. “There’s a big freezer in the garage. When I opened it, there she was.”

  I got a little wobbly again, and his hand tightened on my arm. “What happened to her?”

  “Hard to say,” Rafe said. “I didn’t try to lift her. There was no blood that I could see. Not on the front of the body, anyway. And she wasn’t strangled.”

  I didn’t ask him how he knew. “What do you think happened?”

  “I think he probably broke her neck,” Rafe said. “It’s quick and easy to do if you know how, and anybody who’s been through special forces training would be used to unarmed combat.”

  I nodded. He was used to unarmed combat, too, and had trained Clayton, Jamal, and José, so he—and they—probably knew how, as well. Although I could live very comfortably without having that hypothesis confirmed. “That’s cold, no pun intended. Most people would just kill her and leave her there. He put her in the freezer?”

  “Might be coming back,” Rafe said.

  And wouldn’t want to walk into a house with a stinky, bloated corpse lying on the floor. I nodded, even as I asked, “Why would he come back?”

  “For the explosive.” He glanced at the garage door. “I wasn’t kidding. There’s enough ammonal in there to blow up a building. One that’s a lot bigger than your house. You saw the box that sat on your doorstep. There’s enough ammonal in that garage to take down something five times bigger. If they went to the trouble of buying all that, they must be planning to use it for something.”

  “So he might also have been thinking that he wouldn’t want anyone to notice the smell before he could come back and get his ammonal.”

  Rafe nodded. “We’ll have to stake the place out and wait for him. That’ll be a fun job for somebody.”

  “It won’t be you, right?”

  He shook his head. “No, darlin’. This is grunt work. Mendoza’ll put a couple patrolmen on it. Or maybe I can talk Jamal into moving in.”

  “Just as long as you don’t have to,” I said. And added. “The… um… body will be gone, right?”

  He nodded. “The body’ll be going to the morgue in an hour or two. Just as soon as Mendoza gets here and calls it in.”

  “Is there a reason you can’t call it in?”

  “Mainly it’s ’cause I don’t wanna have to investigate,” Rafe said. “It happened in Mendoza’s jurisdiction; let him deal with it. I got my hands full with Maury County.”

  Made sense. “So he’s on his way?”

  Rafe nodded again. “You wanna stick around, or take the baby and go before he gets here?”

  “Is there a reason you don’t want me to be here when he shows up?”

  A corner of his mouth turned up. “No, darlin’.”

  I sniffed. “I married you, you know. And Mother loves you. I’m sure she regrets asking Mendoza if he’d marry me when you weren’t there on our wedding day.”

  “Not a problem,” Rafe said. “This is gonna take some time, and prob’ly be boring. If you wanted to do something else, you could. I can get a ride back to town.”

  It sounded like he wanted to get rid of me, so I decided I’d let him. “Fine. I’ll go somewhere and do something else. The lady in the house over there is named Dot Mangrum. She says she saw Jennifer yesterday morning and the guy last night, leaving. She thought Jennifer might have been with him, but if she’s in the freezer, he probably left alone.”

  “I imagine he did,” Rafe said, glancing over my shoulder at Mrs.—or Miz—Mangrum. “You think I oughta go talk to her?”

  “I don’t know if she knows anything she didn’t tell me, but she seems to appreciate good-looking men, so it couldn’t hurt. Or you could send Mendoza over when he shows up,”

  Rafe looked at me. “You’re doing that on purpose.”

  I grinned. “I’m not blind. I can tell that he’s good-looking. Although not as good-looking as you.”

  Or good-looking in a very different, more civilized, Armani-clad way. Quite nice if you like the type, but it couldn’t compare to the rock’em, sock’em sex appeal of the man I married.

  He seemed like he was actually a little perturbed by my mentioning Mendoza’s good looks, though, so I took a step closer and went up on my toes. “I love you.”

  It was supposed to be a sweet kiss, just a quick brush of lips before I put Carrie in the Cadillac and left. It turned into something else when he looped an arm around my waist and yanked me up against him.

  And promptly grunted when I slammed against his probably-still-painful ribs.

  I eased back a fraction of an inch. “Serves you right for trying to be macho.”

  “I don’t have to try to be macho,” Rafe said, which was certainly true.

  “Why don’t we give this another shot?” I went back up on my toes. This time he didn’t yank, just leaned down to kiss me. And the quick brush of lips turned into something slower and deeper, something that didn’t hurt him, even though I did have to grab hold of his jacket with my free hand so I wouldn’t dribble into a puddle at his feet.

  When I opened my eyes again, he grinned. “That’s better.”

  I nodded. “I hope you’re not actually worried about Mendoza. Because I wouldn’t be interested in him even if I hadn’t already met you by the time I met him. He isn’t my type. He might be Mother’s type, but he isn’t mine.”

  “Judging from Bob,” Rafe said, “he ain’t so much your mama’s type, either.”

  Maybe not. I hadn’t thought about it, but Mother had picked a different kind of guy the second time around, just like me. Daddy had been the perfect Southern gentleman, a suit-clad lawyer with a degree from Vanderbilt and an antebellum mansion. Bob, while certainly no slouch in the gentlemanly arena, was a cop, and a lot less polished.

  “Huh,” I said.

  Rafe nodded. “Go on home, darlin’. I’ll talk to Miz Mangrum and wait for Mendoza and the medical examiner. I’ll let you know what happens.”

  He opened the door to the Caddy and waited until I had put the car seat into the back. Carrie was still asleep, but would probably wake up screaming for sustenance any minute now.

  “I’ll see you later,” I told him, and got in the car while he headed across the street and up to where Dot Mangrum was still standing in the doorway watching us.

  I drove by Mrs. Jenkins’s house on Potsdam, but Victor’s crew was still there, working. There were a couple of white vans parked in the driveway, the kind with ladders lashed to the top, and the front door to the house was hanging open. Through it, I could see a couple of workers doing things to the floor and banister. I could also hear the steady thump of Mariachi music emanating through the open door.

  It would be awkward, not to mention loud, to sit upstairs while they worked, so I didn’t pull into t
he driveway, just kept going down Potsdam Street. On Dresden I took a left, and headed into the more affluent part of East Nashville. Ten minutes later, I pulled into the parking lot behind the LB&A office on Woodland Street.

  LB&A—short for Lamont, Briggs, and Associates—is the real estate firm I work for. I’d joined them back when the place was called Walker Lamont Realty, and then I stayed on after Walker left—or was hauled off to prison—and the name changed. When I’d moved down to Sweetwater in January, I’d thought about switching to a brokerage down there, but the future was uncertain, what with Rafe still attached to the TBI in Nashville just as much as he was to the Columbia PD, so I hadn’t done anything about it. With modern technology, it wasn’t a problem to scan and email documents back and forth over much longer distances than the few miles between Columbia and Nashville, so it hadn’t seemed worth the trouble until I knew for sure that it was going to be necessary. And besides, it wasn’t like I had so much paperwork that it was a problem. The only listing I had was the house on Fulton, and God knew what was going to happen to that after yesterday.

  Carrie was still asleep, so I spent a couple of minutes in the car making phone calls to Darcy and Alexandra Puckett. Darcy had already been updated about last night’s events by Patrick Nolan as well as Dix, and she told me that she had an appointment with a structural engineer at four, and she’d call me after that with whatever his recommendations were. Alexandra agreed to meet me for lunch so I could update her on what had happened since the last time I saw her, which was less than twenty-four hours ago. So much had happened in the last day that lunch with Jamal and Alexandra at Beulah’s felt like it was last week, and not just yesterday.

  That done, I hauled the car seat out of the back of the Cadillac and headed for the back door to the office.

  The reception area is in the front. The biggest, fanciest offices are in the back, farthest from the general population and closest to the kitchen and bathroom, and to the rear door into the parking lot. Back when Walker was here, the big office in the far back was his office, and across the hall from it was Brenda Puckett’s domain. Tim had occupied the slightly smaller and less fancy office opposite that. He’s been working his way into Walker’s desk chair ever since.

  He was sitting in it now, his skinny butt solidly planted on the leather, and his golden curls gleaming in the overhead light. “Well, look who’s here. Top of the morning to you, Savannah.”

  His smile was, as always, just a little bit malicious.

  “Same to you,” I said, and put Carrie’s seat on the floor before I plopped into one of the chairs across from him.

  While I did all that, Tim looked past me to the door. “Is Rafael with you?”

  Tim and my mother are the only two people in the world, or at least the only two I know, who call Rafe by his full name. Mother does it because she’s particular that way. She calls my brother Dix by his full name, too, and has never called Catherine anything but her full, complete name. Tim, meanwhile, pronounces Rafe’s name like a caress, like he enjoys wrapping his tongue around the syllables, and imagines wrapping it around something else instead. Between you and me, it sounds indecent enough to make me squirm.

  I shook it off. “He’s in Nashville,” I told him, “but not here.”

  Tim made a moue. “Pity.”

  “He just found a dead body in a house in Bellevue. He’ll be busy for a while.”

  “Goodness gracious,” Tim said, “it’s like dead bodies just follow the two of you around.”

  And don’t you forget it.

  Since threatening Tim makes no difference to his feelings for Rafe, I changed the subject. “Remember that house I was renovating in Columbia? It went on the market a couple of days ago?”

  Tim nodded.

  “Well, we have to take it back down. Somebody vandalized it Sunday night. It needs repair. And yesterday, somebody blew the front wall and half the roof off.”

  Tim stared at me, speechless.

  “My sister is meeting with a contractor this afternoon. He’ll tell her whether it can be saved or whether we just have to tear it down and start over.”

  Tim shook his head. “Why do these things always happen to you, Savannah?”

  “I guess I’m just lucky that way,” I said. “At any rate, I need you to withdraw the listing. The house isn’t available anymore.”

  “Go see Lauri.” He waved toward the door. “Fill out the paperwork.”

  “We have a Lauri?”

  “New receptionist,” Tim said.

  When I’d first started at Walker Lamont Realty, Brittany had occupied the front desk. That had lasted until last fall, when Brittany’s ineptitude had slid over into deliberate graft, and then Tim had offered the position to me. I’d turned it down flat—I might not be a successful realtor, but there was no part of me that wanted to sit behind the reception desk for eight hours a day—and Tim had put Heidi Hoppenfeldt on it.

  “What happened to Heidi?”

  Heidi was a fixture around LB&A. She’d been Brenda Puckett’s protégée back when Brenda was alive, and then she’d become Tim’s dogsbody after that.

  Tim grimaced. “She left.”

  The reception job had been the final straw, I guess.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. Sincerely, since Tim was probably feeling the loss. Heidi had taken care of all the small and unpleasant things that Tim didn’t want to have to deal with. Now, I assumed, he’d have to do them himself.

  Unless Lauri took care of them for him.

  “She went to ReMax.”

  One of the biggest real estate firms in the world. Where nobody was likely to make her a general dogsbody or saddle her with the reception desk.

  “Good for her,” I said, and then thought better of it. “I mean…”

  “I know what you mean. Go see Lauri. She’ll pull your listing for you.”

  I nodded, and pushed myself to my feet. “Thanks, Tim. You doing OK?”

  “Fine,” Tim said. “Shut the door on your way out.”

  That was clear, anyway. I grabbed the baby and headed out. And pulled the door closed behind me with an irritated little snap before I set off down the hallway toward the reception desk and Lauri.

  When Brittany worked here, the front desk had always looked like it belonged to a teenager. Brittany was young, blond, vacuous, and interested in things like fashion magazines and celebrities. There’d been bobble-heads and cutesy tchotchkies all over her desk.

  Now the desk was ruthlessly organized, with not a pencil out of place, and every piece of paper was organized into stacks by size. A new nameplate—Brittany hadn’t had one—sat facing the front door. Lauretta Biegler it said.

  Lauri sat behind it, as ruthlessly organized as her desk. She looked like she was in her late thirties, with brown hair scraped straight back into a heavy knot at the back of her head, and flawless makeup. Her tiny gold hoop earrings were as different as they could be from the huge circles Brittany used to wear, the kind that were big enough for me to stick my arm through. And she was dressed in a severe, blue jacket and crisp white blouse: a far cry from Brittany’s T-shirts and jeans. It was possible there was a pair of jeans under the desk—I couldn’t see Lauri’s lower body from where I was standing—but I’d stake my life on there being a skirt, and nylons, and high heels there instead.

  “Yes?” she said when I came into view, her voice crisp.

  “Hi.” I tried a friendly smile. She didn’t smile back. “I’m Savannah. I work here.” Sort of.

  “A pleasure to meet you,” Lauri said, and didn’t sound like she meant it.

  On the other hand, she didn’t sound like she actively didn’t mean it, either. It was something she said because it was what she was supposed to say, nothing more and nothing less.

  There were no chairs in front of Lauri’s desk, so I remained standing. “I have a listing down in Columbia. A house I’ve been renovating. It went on the market last week, and yesterday, somebody blew a hole in it.”
r />   Lauri looked at me. “Who?”

  “We’re not sure.” My money was on Rodney and Kyle, especially after Rafe found a supply of Tannerite in Jennifer Vonderaa’s garage, but there was no proof. And as far as I knew, no way of getting any, either.

  “Why?” Lauri said.

  “I have no idea. Either because they could, or because they wanted to.” A message to me after they’d seen me with Jamal and Alexandra that afternoon? Or a message to Rafe, after he’d implied that Rodney might have been behind the vandalism Sunday night?

  “What are you going to do?” Lauri wanted to know.

  This had nothing to do with withdrawing the listing, but I told her anyway. “My sister is meeting with a contractor this afternoon, to see whether we can fix it or we have to tear it down. In the meantime, I need to take it off the market. Tim said you could help me.”

  “Of course.” She opened a drawer, thumbed through a couple of folders, and came up with a form. “Address?”

  I told her the address and she looked up the other pertinent information on the computer that sat on the corner of her desk.

  “Sign here.” She pointed. I scribbled my name on the line, and she took the form back. “I’ll take care of it. Anything else?”

  “No,” I said, a little flummoxed by this kind of efficiency. Brittany had been anything but organized, and whenever I’d needed something like this, she’d hand me the form and tell me to fill it out myself, and bring it back when I was finished. “Thank you.”

  “No problem.” She went back to the computer, presumably to take care of my problem. Brittany would have opened a fashion magazine and left my form sitting on her desk for a few days, until she was good and ready to deal with it.

  I recognize a dismissal when I see one, though, even if this one wasn’t as blatant as the one Tim had given me. I took Carrie and headed back down the hallway toward the back of the building and the exit closest to the FinBar.

  The place I was meeting Alexandra is just down the street from the office. Once upon a time, I’d eaten there with rather boring regularity. It’s one of those new and fancy sports bars, with lots of polished brass and hanging ferns. When I got there, I asked for a booth out of the way—there were plenty of them available, since the lunch rush hadn’t started yet—and explained that I was early for a lunch date with a friend, but that I’d take a sweet tea and an order of pretzels with beer-cheese dip while I waited. If I was going to occupy a table for close to an hour while I waited for Alexandra, I was going to have to order something to eat, before we actually ordered lunch, and beer-cheese dip sounded like it would hit the spot.