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

by Jenna Bennett

  The waitress popped a bubble and left. I extracted myself from my coat, and then I extracted Carrie from the car seat and took her into the bathroom to change her diaper. By the time the waitress came back with the tea, we were back at the table, and Carrie was dry and happy and nursing.

  I took a sip and settled in to wait. And since there was nothing else to do, I fished my phone out of my purse and called Rafe. “Hi.”

  “Darlin’.” I could hear noises and voices in the background.

  “I just wanted to update you,” I said. “I’m at the FinBar waiting for Alexandra Puckett to meet me for lunch. Victor’s people are still at the house, so I went to the office. Tim sends his love.” He hadn’t said that, but it was a safe bet he did. “Are you still in Bellevue? Did Mendoza show up yet?”

  “The ME just got here. And a crime scene crew. It’s gonna be a while before they’re done. Mendoza and I are looking around for anything that can give us an idea who this guy is or how to find him.”

  “What about her phone? It’s still there. And surely she must have called the guy?”

  “There’s a number,” Rafe confirmed. “But it goes to a burner phone. No way to trace where it is or who it belongs to.”

  “Burner phone?”

  “Cheap, over-the-counter phone with prepaid minutes. Anybody can buy the phone and the minutes with cash. And this guy woulda had the sense to do that.”

  “Have you checked?”

  “No,” Rafe said patiently, “but anybody who knows to use a burner phone knows to buy it in a way where it can’t be traced back to him.”

  I guess that made sense. “If he’s that smart, why do you suppose he didn’t take the picture from the fridge with him when he left? He had to know it could be used to trace him.”

  Or could hopefully be used to trace him, anyway. Facial recognition and whatnot.

  “Maybe he forgot it was there.”

  “Stupid of him,” I said, “if he did.”

  Rafe didn’t contradict me. “Or maybe he’s planning to get it when he’s coming back for the ammonal.”

  Maybe. It wouldn’t have taken any time at all to get it before he left the last time, though, so it still seemed stupid to me. “How long will you be staying out there?”

  “Till Mendoza leaves,” Rafe said. “I’ll hitch a ride back to town with him. We have to figure out how to put somebody in the house while we wait for this guy to come back. Hopefully he’s not out there now, watching us. Hopefully we can get done what we need to do before he decides to come back.”

  “I’ll let you go,” I told him, since he sounded stressed out. “I don’t suppose you have any idea what he might want to do with all this ammonal he’s hoarding?”

  “No, darlin’. I surely don’t.” And he sounded frustrated about that, too.

  “Maybe something will turn up. Or maybe he’ll turn up looking for it, and then you can ask.”

  “Maybe so,” Rafe said, but he didn’t sound like he believed it. “I’ll talk to you later, darlin’.”

  “Love you,” I said, and hung up so he could go back to work and worry, and I could finish feeding my daughter and waiting for Alexandra.

  Seventeen

  Before Alexandra got there, the phone rang again. The number was unfamiliar, but I was still a real estate agent, and still—technically—had a house to sell, so I answered in my perkiest voice. “Good morning, This is Savannah. How may I help you?”

  A sniff, then— “Miz Collier?”

  “Yes?” I said, drawing it out while I tried to place the voice. She knew Rafe’s name, which I haven’t really used for business, so chances were it wasn’t about business.

  Another sniff. They weren’t the superior kind, but the watery ones. “This is Felicia Robinson.”

  I blinked. Why would Felicia Robinson be calling me, all teary?

  And then it clicked. “Yes,” I said smoothly, “of course. Officer Robinson. What can I do for you?” And had I ruined it by sounding perkily happy when my husband was supposed to be dying?

  Or didn’t that deception apply to Felicia? She was another cop, maybe it was OK to tell her the truth.

  But no. Some of this information was need-to-know—Clayton’s involvement certainly was, for Clayton’s safety—and Felicia had had lunch with Sergeant Tucker at Beulah’s the other day. If I told her the truth, she might tell Tucker, and I wasn’t sure I trusted Tucker. I had no reason not to, especially as far as this situation went—Rafe had even said so, that he didn’t think Tucker was involved—but I knew he didn’t like Rafe, so I didn’t want to take any chances.

  “I heard,” Felicia said, and had to take a breath to be able to continue, “that Rafe was shot last night…?

  “Yes.” No lie, that one.

  “How is he doing…?” She sounded like she was holding her breath, prepared for the worst.

  “Not well,” I said. He’d just found a dead body, so that wasn’t a lie, either. And in addition to that, his ribs hurt.

  Between you and me, I’m not the world’s greatest liar, especially not face to face, so it helps to tell the truth as much as possible. Or a version of the truth.

  “The chief said he might die…?”

  “Yes,” I said. That one was a total lie, although he might. Not from being shot, but I’d long ago come to terms with the fact that Rafe lived a dangerous life and might die from it.

  “Do you know who…?” She had an irritating habit of trailing off at the end of every sentence. I hadn’t noticed it before, so maybe it was just the circumstances. Or just because this was the first conversation we’d had that had been longer than a sentence or two. Maybe she’d always done it, and I just hadn’t noticed.

  “We have a good idea. The same two people who have been under investigation in connection with the Laurel Hill mess. Rodney Clark and Kyle Scoggins.”

  There was a beat. “I went to school with Rodney and Kyle,” Felicia said, shocked into finishing a sentence on a strong note for once.

  “Did you? Were they always racists?”

  “No,” Felicia said, but she didn’t sound totally sure. “Not Kyle, at least. Rodney, maybe a little. Although he got a lot worse after Natalie was killed.”

  And maybe that was understandable, since he believed—since everyone believed—that Natalie’s killer was Steven Morris, a black man.

  But no, that was still no excuse for wholesale hatred of a whole demographic, and especially no excuse for joining a white supremacy group and advocating for a race war.

  “Will you tell me if…?” Felicia trailed off again. I guess it happened when there was something she didn’t want to put into words.

  “Of course,” I said, since there was no reason at all I would ever have to call her back and tell her that Rafe had died. He was alive and well and working hard in Bellevue.

  “And I’m sorry I haven’t been…”

  …nice to you?

  “No problem,” I said. “It happens all the time.” Some women develop unhealthy attachments to Rafe without him doing anything to cause it other than being himself.

  “Thank you.” She gave another watery sniff.

  “Tell you what,” I told her, with no ulterior motive other than to make her feel better, “if you want to do something to help, why don’t you ask Grimaldi if she can give you something to do?” Rodney and Kyle were under surveillance twenty-four/seven now. Surely Grimaldi could find a shift for Felicia in all of that. Because while I hadn’t liked the way she’d treated me, or the way she’d fawned over my husband, I felt bad for her now. She was barely more than a girl, and obviously distraught, and over something that was a non-issue. And Rodney and Kyle needed to be surveilled. Might as well use her feelings for something good.

  “You wouldn’t mind?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “I want whoever did this to pay. If you can help bring that about, all the better.”

  “Thank you.” She sniffed again.

  “No problem,” I told her
. “Thanks for calling.”

  She hung up, and I tucked the phone away in time to greet Alexandra as she arrived at the table and began the arduous process of trying to wedge her pregnancy into the booth across from me.

  After lunch was over, Alexandra and I walked back to the LB&A parking lot together—she parks there too, since her mother used to be an employee—and I waved her off before I dialed Rafe again. “Any news in your part of the world in the past hour and a half?”

  “Not much. The crime scene crew is still combing Jennifer’s house, but there’s not much doubt who killed her. If we get lucky, there’ll be a fingerprint somewhere we can use to at least identify this guy, even if it won’t get us any closer to finding him.”

  “I assume you’ve told Grimaldi and Bob to keep an eye out for Jennifer’s car?”

  “Yes, darlin’.” His tone of voice was patient. Too patient. I deduced I was being annoying. I mean, of course he’d have thought about that.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just want to do something useful, you know? Something that helps. But I don’t know what that is. Short of driving up to Clarksville, to Fort Campbell, and flashing the picture from the fridge around…”

  “No,” Rafe told me, “don’t do that. Just go on home, darlin’. Put the baby down for a nap. Curl up with a book. Kick Victor’s crew out, if you have to, so you can get some peace and quiet. If it takes another day or two to finish the repairs, it don’t matter. We’re staying busy in Sweetwater for right now. And when I get home, we’ll grab some food and talk about it and see what you can do to help.”

  I grimaced. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear—like Felicia, I wanted to do something that would actually help—but if that was all I could do right now…

  “Any idea when you’ll be home?”

  “Closer to five,” Rafe said. “We got some stuff to set up yet.”

  I glanced at my watch. Going on one-thirty. “I guess I’ll see you then.”

  “Thanks, darlin’. I’ll fill you in when I get there.”

  I told him I’d be waiting, and then I drove home, put Carrie down for her afternoon nap amid the sounds of hammering and sawing—if I was going to be upstairs anyway, I might as well give Victor’s construction workers the run of the downstairs while they wanted it—and settled in with my laptop.

  The crew cleared out by three-thirty, and it was quiet again. By then I had cruised through four years of Jennifer Vonderaa’s Facebook feed and was working my way through the 3,462 people on her friends list to see if there was a connection to the spec ops soldier anywhere. I had also checked the property assessor’s office—one of my first go-tos as a real estate agent—and ascertained that she owned the house she’d lived—and died—in by herself.

  So I was striking out on trying to find him. I kept checking Jennifer’s connections, and their connections, and everybody’s photo feed, but without any luck, and then Carrie woke up, and I changed her, and fed her, and burped her, and put her on the floor for tummy time, and then my phone rang, and it was Darcy.

  I put it to my ear. “What’s going on?”

  “I just finished talking to the contractor.” And she wasn’t happy about it, judging from the disgusted tone of her voice.

  “Uh-oh.” I braced myself. “What did he say?”

  “That it’s going to cost a lot to fix the house again.”

  Tell me something I didn’t know. “Is it possible to fix the house again?”

  “Of course,” Darcy said. “It’s possible to fix anything. The question is how much it costs.”

  “And how much would this cost?”

  “A lot,” Darcy said.

  “Is the structure sound?”

  “He said it was. The roof and walls can be replaced. The foundation wasn’t affected. So the house can be fixed. The problem…”

  She trailed off.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “I don’t want to sound greedy. But I already paid to renovate the house once. I hate having to pay for it again, if we’re not going to be able to charge more. Our profit dwindles each time we have to put more money into fixing it up.”

  Yes. That was definitely true.

  “Hopefully the insurance company will pay out enough to cover this second round of renovations,” I said optimistically.

  “That’s another thing,” Darcy answered. “The house was insured for what we paid for it originally. Not what it was worth after the renovations were done. So they may decide to go with the original value. And if so, we’re out of luck. And out a lot of money.”

  Yes, we were. “Have you spoken to anyone with the insurance company? Have they been out to look at the damage?”

  “I called them on Monday,” Darcy said, “after the vandalism on Sunday night. They didn’t come out on Tuesday, or if they did, they didn’t tell me they were there.”

  “And you didn’t call and tell them about the explosion?”

  “I didn’t see any reason to,” Darcy said. “If they haven’t been there, they’ll see it when they get there.”

  I guess that was true. “So we’re waiting.”

  “Unless we want to make a decision without knowing what the insurance company says.”

  I changed gears. “Have you called Charlotte?”

  Darcy said she hadn’t.

  “I’ll do that, then. Not that it’s really up to her. It’s up to you.” Since it was her money, and all Charlotte and I had put in, was a lot of sweat equity. “Do you know what you want to do?”

  “No,” Darcy said. “Right now I’m so discouraged that I wish we’d never bought the house. It sounded like such a good opportunity at the time. And now it’s all messed up.”

  I nodded sympathetically, not that she could see me. “Maybe we just need to take a little time to breathe. There’s a lot going on, and not just with the house. Maybe we just wait a day or two and see what the insurance company says? They’ll be out by the end of the week, surely?”

  “Surely,” Darcy said, sounding exhausted and disgusted and sad. “Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. Let’s just not make a decision right now. Let’s wait and see.”

  “Sounds good.” I changed the subject quickly. “Are you and Nolan getting together tonight?” Because she sounded like someone who could use some loving, tender care, and Nolan would provide it.

  “He’s working,” Darcy said.

  Come to think of it, a lot of them were probably working. Rodney and Kyle were back under surveillance, and there was spec ops guy on the loose somewhere, possibly in Columbia. I’m sure they were all working.

  “Maybe you should go to your mom’s house and hang out with her and Mrs. Jenkins.”

  “I don’t want to risk making Aunt Tondalia worse,” Darcy said. “She still wants to go out and meet this old friend of hers on Friday, and she’s still not doing well.”

  “Surely, if she’s ill, Audrey won’t let her?”

  “Right now, they’re hoping for the best,” Darcy said.

  “Well, I’d suggest you come up here, but there’s nothing to do here either, and not much fun. Maybe you could call Charlotte, and the two of you could go out somewhere and drown your sorrows in a pitcher of margaritas?”

  “That’s not a bad idea,” Darcy admitted. “Maybe I’ll do that.”

  “Good.” Then she could tell Charlotte the news instead of me. “She could probably use the cheering up, too, and not just because of the house. Her divorce should be final soon, and that’s never much fun, even if the jerk did knock up someone else and then kidnap her and the kids.”

  Darcy agreed. “I’ve been through a divorce. I’ll cheer her up.”

  “Sounds like a good plan,” I told her. “You two talk, and if you come to any decisions about the house, let me know. If you don’t want to discuss it, that’s fine, too. Let’s just let it sit a day or two, and then we’ll decide.”

  And hopefully by then, spec ops guy would be found and arrested, and he, along with Rodney and Kyle and anyone
else who was part of their small group of bubbas, would be locked away somewhere where they couldn’t hurt me or mine, or for that matter anyone else, ever again. And all we’d have to deal with, was whether or not we wanted to renovate a house we’d already renovated once.

  Rafe came home, as expected, a little after five. By then I was ready to get out of the house again, and let him know it.

  “There’s nothing to do here. I can’t cook dinner. There’s no TV in the living room.” And for that matter no furniture or any walls. “I’ve been sitting up here with Carrie for three hours, doing research on my computer, and I’m going crazy.”

  “Let me take you two out for dinner,” my husband said gallantly, without mentioning that he’d been busy combing a crime scene for clues all day, and all he wanted to do was relax his no doubt aching ribs.

  I bit my lip, chagrined. “Are you OK?”

  He smiled. “I’m fine, darlin’. Anything that needed lifting or bending down for, I told Mendoza to do. I’ve been standing around giving orders all day.”

  That was surely an exaggeration, but since it made me feel better—and since his smile seemed genuine—I let it pass. “I just spoke to Darcy. She and Charlotte are going to go get drunk and drown their sorrows in tequila.”

  “Bad news?”

  “Nothing we didn’t expect. Fixing the house on Fulton is going to take a lot of money. Darcy’s discouraged, since it would be her money, and since she’s concerned that the insurance won’t pay what the house is worth now.”

  He nodded.

  “Your grandmother is still under the weather. You may want to call and check on her.”