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

by Jenna Bennett

  “We’ll stop it,” Rafe said. It sounded more grim than confident, so I deduced he was worried about the consequences if he didn’t. “Savannah and I’ll stay on’em the whole way to Columbia. Even if they notice us—and I don’t think they will—they ain’t good enough to lose me.”

  Mendoza nodded.

  “Once we get there, they’ll be under observation every second. If any of’em scratches his—” He glanced at me, “—butt, we’ll know about it.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “What if they don’t get in touch with Lance?”

  “We’ll have to hope they do,” Rafe said, “’cause I don’t know any other way of finding him.”

  “If he really is a sniper, we can identify him from military records. It’ll take a while—”

  “And won’t tell us where he’s holed up,” Rafe completed the thought, “but it’s always good to know who people are. And if he’s local, maybe he has friends or family—other than Rodney and Kyle—he might be staying with.”

  “Might be worth checking motels and short term rentals in your area,” Mendoza suggested.

  Rafe nodded. “We don’t know that he’s staying in Columbia, though. He could be in Franklin, or Pulaski, or Leiper’s Fork, or Damascus. Anywhere within about an hour. He could still be in Nashville.”

  Probably not, unless he drove like Rafe. And he might. But it made more sense that if he was planning to do something in the Columbia area tomorrow, he’d be staying down there.

  “Do they allow camping in Laurel Hill?” I asked. “If he’s former military, he’s used to roughing it.” And could probably subsist on leaves and berries for a while. Not that there were many of those yet. Too early in the year. But there was tree bark. And he could always bring in enough supplies for a day or two.

  Rafe nodded. “There’s a campground. And even if he’s not there, there are places where he could pitch a tent and maybe not be noticed. Good idea.”

  I tried not to preen.

  “I’ll get the sheriff of Lawrence County to send a couple folks out there to look around. And maybe we can get a chopper up. From the park service or something. Take a look from the air. Might help us spot something.”

  He reached for his phone.

  “I’ll go cut them loose,” Mendoza said, turning toward the door. “You better go get ready to follow.”

  “Where’s their truck?” Rafe asked.

  “Out back.” Mendoza inclined his head toward the back of the building. “I had a uniform drive it to the lot yesterday. It wasn’t involved in a crime, so no need to treat it with care.”

  “What about the Tannerite?” I wanted to know.

  “Still at the house in Bellevue. For all we know, it’s Ms. Vonderaa’s Tannerite, and we can’t let anybody take off with it. Not unless they can prove ownership.”

  And since it was Lance who had bought it, at least according to Rodney, and since Lance wasn’t likely to be able to provide receipts, the Tannerite stayed where it was.

  “So they have to go back without it.”

  “No reason to make it easier for them,” Mendoza said, which was certainly true. He reached for the door handle. “You two—or three,” he glanced at Carrie, cooing quietly in her seat, “head out. They’ll be out in fifteen, twenty minutes. There are procedures.”

  “I know,” Rafe said, catching the door on the back swing. “I’ve been here before. After you, darlin’.”

  I picked up the car seat and the baby and preceded him out the door.

  Twenty

  “There they are,” I said thirty minutes later, as Rodney, Kyle, and Clayton came out the back door of the police station and into the enclosed parking lot. By then we had moved into an empty parking spot on the street, and were waiting to fall in behind them when they drove off.

  Rafe nodded, his eyes on them as they high-fived each other and sauntered across the lot looking for Kyle’s truck. “Looking pretty pleased with themselves.”

  They were. But then they’d just avoided getting arrested for murder, so maybe they had reason to be pleased.

  “Weren’t you happy whenever you got to leave a police station without being arrested?”

  He shot a grin my way. “Still am, darlin’. Part of me’s still waiting for somebody to say, ‘Sorry, man, your luck’s run out.’”

  I smiled back, before looking around. “Where’s Mendoza?”

  The detective had offered to ride along in his own car, to make the shadowing a little easier. So far I hadn’t seen him leave the building, though.

  And obviously Rafe hadn’t, either, because he said, “No idea. We’ll pick him up on the road. Or not. He may be good enough that I don’t make him.”

  I doubted that, and told him so. Rafe smirked. “I’m good, darlin’. But so’s he. Could be we have a draw.”

  Whatever. “Either way, neither of you will have a problem following them, right?”

  “No problem at all,” Rafe said, as the sound of an engine being revved cut through the air. “Sounds like they’re coming.”

  “Probably going to make a point by tearing out of the lot a lot faster than they should and sticking their middle fingers out the window.”

  Rafe chuckled. “Prob’ly. Here they come.”

  Here they did. Taking the turn from the lot onto the street much too fast and without looking first, and yes, whoever was on the passenger side stuck a middle finger out the window and waved it at the building as they went by. Down at the corner, they stopped for a fraction of a second, just long enough to make sure they wouldn’t be flattened by oncoming traffic, before they zoomed across three lanes of traffic to the sound of irate horns, and headed east.

  Rafe pulled the Cadillac away from the curb and followed, sedately.

  “You’re not going to lose them before they get on the highway,” I asked him, “right?”

  He shook his head. “The truck’s pretty distinctive. Can’t hide those bumper stickers. And I’m a better driver than whoever’s behind the wheel.”

  No question. And since I trusted him, I settled into the seat and watched the world go by as we crossed the bridge over the Cumberland River and saw the interstate overpass in the distance. The blue truck was already halfway down the incline, going hell for leather toward a red light.

  They had to wait twenty or thirty seconds to make the turn onto Interstate Drive, and by the time they crossed Woodland Street and powered up the on-ramp, we were three cars behind. Rafe hung back, and at the next interstate entrance, a quarter of a mile down, let a few more cars squeeze between us and the truck.

  The next hour was a lesson in evasive driving. Rafe stayed so far behind the truck I was worried we’d lose sight of them—and sometimes we did. Then he’d speed up, just enough that we’d catch sight of them again, before we fell back once more. He’d switch lanes from directly behind, to one lane right and one lane left whenever there were more than two lanes. Past Franklin, where the road narrowed, we stayed even farther back.

  “Nothing to worry about,” he told me. “We know where they’re going.”

  And assuming they were on their way home, I guess we did. I was hoping that they might take us to wherever Lance was—and I’m sure Rafe harbored a secret hope in that direction too, or we wouldn’t be doing this—but most likely they were just going home.

  “There they go,” he added, when the truck zoomed up the ramp to the Spring Hill exit, north of Columbia.

  I looked around. “Have you seen Mendoza?”

  I’d been watching for him, but hadn’t noticed any one car sticking around the truck long enough to be noticeable.

  Rafe nodded. “He’s in the gray compact ahead of’em.”

  “Ahead?”

  There was a smallish, gray car going up the ramp ahead of the truck. It was too far away for me to see clearly, but if Rafe said it was Mendoza, I’m sure it was.

  “Old trick,” Rafe said. “Nobody worries about being followed by the guy who’s ahead of’em.”<
br />
  And I guess that was true. I’d been looking for Mendoza in the cars around us. It hadn’t occurred to me to look for him ahead of the guys we were following.

  “I guarantee you they didn’t think of it, either,” Rafe told me when I said so.

  “So what happens now?”

  “Now we switch off. On these smaller roads, it’s much more likely that they’ll notice us. So we’ll take the first couple blocks, give Mendoza time to circle around, and then he’ll take’em for a couple of blocks. We got Tammy coming, too.”

  So there’d be three cars playing leapfrog with the truck. Mendoza’s nondescript economy car, Mother’s Cadillac, or whatever Tamara Grimaldi was driving today.

  It was interesting, I guess, to watch the maneuvers. We’d stay behind the truck for a couple of blocks, then turn right or left at a light or into a business, and whoever was behind us—Mendoza or Grimaldi, in Rafe’s official issue Chevy—would take up the shadowing. We’d turn around, fall in behind, and then the whole thing would happen again.

  In the end, though, the truck drove straight to a tired-looking ranch house on the northern end of Columbia, and into the driveway.

  “Kyle’s parents’ house,” Rafe said.

  “He lives with his parents?”

  Rafe nodded.

  “How come he doesn’t live with Rodney?”

  He shook his head. “No idea. If it’s important, we can ask. When we arrest’em again.”

  “We… I mean, you will arrest them again?”

  “I imagine so.” He didn’t take his eyes off the driveway, where the truck’s doors opened. Kyle hopped down from the driver’s seat, while on the other side, Rodney jumped out and then Clayton. Rodney and Kyle met at the front of the truck, executed some kind of complicated handshake, and then they separated. Clayton’s Camaro was also parked in the driveway, and he and Rodney got into that. And the chase began again, for another ten minutes, until the Camaro zipped into the parking lot of an apartment complex not too far away. Here, Rodney and Clayton executed a less complex high five, and then Clay got back in the car while Rodney jogged up the stairs to his second floor apartment.

  “No Dodge Charger in this lot,” I said, looking around.

  Rafe shook his head, his eyes on the Camaro as it left the lot and headed south.

  “What happens now?” I asked, as he moved into traffic behind it.

  “Now we give Clay time to debrief anything that mighta been said on the way home, that we don’t know about, while I take you home. Then I go hook up with Tammy, and see what needs doing next.”

  “You’re supposed to be on medical leave,” I asked, “aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” Rafe answered, “but now that we know that whatever Lance is planning, is gonna go down tomorrow, there’s no time for me to be on medical leave. I have to do what I can. And so do you. Your job is to keep yourself and Carrie safe and well.”

  Actually, my job was real estate. “I have a better idea. How about I drop you off with Grimaldi, and then I take the car and have another look at the house on Fulton, now that it’s been a day?”

  “Sure,” Rafe said. “Let me call Tammy.”

  He pulled out his phone. Twenty seconds later—after a lot of Uh-huhs—he hung up and turned to me. “Turns out I gotta go down to Laurel Hill. The chopper spotted a camp they want somebody to check out.”

  “Are you sure you can handle a hike like that?”

  “I imagine we’ll be taking a ranger vehicle,” Rafe said, “but I’ll be careful.”

  Good.

  “Tammy’s following us. I’m just gonna pull in here—” He made a quick turn into a fast food parking lot and pulled into an empty parking space. “All yours.”

  I walked around the car to the door he held open for me, and then raised my face for a kiss. “I’ll see you later. Be careful out there.”

  “Always,” Rafe said, and got into the Chevy next to Grimaldi. She waved at me through the window, and then they took off around the building. I got back into the car, on the driver’s side this time, and turned to look at Carrie. “Just you and me again, baby. Let’s take a look at the house, and then we’ll go home and get some food.”

  She gurgled, almost like she could understand me, and then we headed out of the lot in the opposite direction of Rafe and Grimaldi.

  This was the first time since the Tannerite incident that I’d seen the house on Fulton, and I’ll admit I sat in the driveway for several minutes just staring at it. It hadn’t looked this bad in the dark the other night. In the bright light of day, I could certainly understand Darcy’s demeanor on the phone yesterday, after she’d looked at it again with the contractor.

  It looked like something out of a war zone, or maybe the victim of a tornado or other natural catastrophe.

  There was yellow caution tape strung across the gaping hole in the front wall, and the lawn was littered with pieces of wood and shingle. Someone should get out here and clean that up, and it might have to be me. Not now, though. I’d have to change into gardening clothes and bring a pair of sturdy gloves, since some of those pieces of wood would give me splinters and probably had nails sticking out of them.

  I opened the door and swung my legs out. And walked around the car to grab Carrie’s seat before I made my way over to the front door—or where the front door would have been, had it not been in pieces all over the lawn.

  The stoop was concrete, and hadn’t gone anywhere. I stepped up on it and stuck my head past the yellow tape, into the interior of the house.

  A good chunk of the floor was gone, and dank air wafted up from what used to be the crawlspace. When I looked down, I could see bare dirt.

  The living room didn’t look great, either. The front two rooms, the living room and the bedroom on the other side of the wall, would need total renovation. Studs, drywall, floor joists, sub-floor particle board, and hardwoods for the floor, not to mention windows and a new roof. Plus a new front door and a porch covering the front door. Siding, to replace what had been blown off by the blast. And paint inside and out, to make it all look pretty again once it was finished. Everything needed doing, basically.

  I made a mental note of how much money and time I thought it would take—a lot, and a lot—and looked beyond it.

  The opening between the dining room and kitchen looked all right, and so did everything beyond. On this side of the opening, there was still the evidence of the vandalism, of course, but the explosion didn’t seem to have made anything worse. Not on the back end of the house.

  I twisted as far as I could, and managed to place Carrie’s car seat on the part of the floor that was still intact, five feet beyond the door. Then I wiggled my way onto it, after making sure it was sturdy enough to hold my weight. One of the sharp edges stabbed me in the hand, and I uttered the kind of word Mother would have been shocked to hear fall from my lips. A bead of blood appeared in the middle of my hand, and I reached for my purse and the tissues I keep in there.

  But the purse was on the passenger seat of the car—I had left it there when I switched places with Rafe in the Hardee’s parking lot. I left Carrie where she was, cooing on the ruined floor, and stalked into the kitchen, where I turned on the cold water and stuck my hand under the spray while I reached for a paper towel with my other hand.

  Only to freeze when I heard a movement from the back of the house, down the hall in the direction of the master bedroom.

  I turned the water off again, carefully, and wrapped the paper towel around my hand. “Hello?”

  The cut was still bleeding, and the paper soaked through with water immediately, but I didn’t stop to grab another. “Anyone there?”

  No one answered. But the silence had a sort of listening quality. This house didn’t feel empty, not the way Jennifer Vonderaa’s house had felt yesterday morning.

  I took a quiet step toward the dining room. And then another. And then I scrambled through the cased opening and across what was left of the floor toward the big
, gaping hole in the house. Somehow—and I can’t tell you how—I made it through the gap between where the floor ended and the stoop began, and I did it while snagging the car seat with the baby and taking it with me. And then I hurtled toward the car and around to the back door, where I shoved Carrie’s seat onto the base and waited for the click that signaled she was secure.

  By then, she was wailing, of course. She’d been swung around like a rag doll inside her carrier, and she was probably getting hungry anyway.

  Instead of moving around the car to the driver’s seat, I opened the front passenger door and went in head first, scrambling across the seat and the console—and my shoulder bag—until I could scoot myself under the steering wheel. And the first thing I did was lock all the doors before I dug in my pocket for the car key. It took a couple of tries, because my hands were shaking, before I got it into the ignition. But once it was there, and the engine came to life with a roar, Rafe couldn’t have done a better job of reversing out of the driveway on squealing tires, and taking up off the street.

  As soon as we were going straight, my hand fumbled through the debris of the purse for my phone, and like two nights ago, I had to ask for Siri’s help when it came to dialing the number. Five seconds later, I heard my husband’s voice.

  “Savannah?”

  “You gotta come back,” I told him, my teeth knocking together. “There’s somebody in the house.”

  “On Fulton?”

  “Uh-huh.” I nodded while I glanced in the rearview mirror. Nobody was following us, and I had no idea how anyone could, since there hadn’t been a car in the driveway for anyone to use. That didn’t stop me from looking. “What if it’s Lance? What if he decided that since the house is empty, he’d camp out there for a while? He’d know that, if he was part of blowing a hole in it two nights ago!”

  “Calm down, Savannah,” Rafe’s voice said in my ear, even as the much less calm sound of squealing brakes came through the phone. “We’re on our way.”

  “So am I. I’m not going back there.”