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

by Jenna Bennett

  “No problem,” I told him. “We have all night.”

  Audrey lives in a little Victorian cottage behind a white picket fence near the Albertsons and Sheriff Satterfield, in the old part of Sweetwater near the square.

  The mansion is older, of course, and at one time, everything around it was fields. But the town grew up in the years after the war—that’d be the War Against Northern Aggression for you Yankees—and consists of a lot of Victorian and turn-of-the-(last)-century houses, and the ubiquitous Craftsman Bungalows and cottages that cropped up after WWI. You can see the progression of the architectural styles from the late Victorian town square, radiating through the war years, through the mid-century ranches and out to the more recent subdivisions of McMansions, where Dix and Catherine live with their families.

  But Audrey lives in town, and now, so does Mrs. Jenkins.

  When we knocked on the door, it was Darcy who answered.

  “Oh.” I blinked at her. “I didn’t expect to see you.”

  “I’ve been grocery shopping,” Darcy said.

  “Audrey isn’t sick, is she?” I peered over her shoulder into the interior of the house.

  She shook her head. “Just Aunt Tondalia. And it isn’t bad. I don’t think you ought to bring the baby in, though. Just to be safe.”

  Maybe not. “Maybe we’ll just stay outside,” I told Rafe. “You go in and see your grandmother.”

  He glanced at Carrie and nodded. “I won’t be long.”

  “Take your time,” I told him. “The weather’s nice. We’ll just wait here.”

  I pulled Darcy outside with me, while Rafe went inside and shut the door.

  “What’s going on?” my sister asked.

  “Nothing. I went to the house on Fulton earlier. Someone was inside, but I chased him off.”

  “Who?”

  “I didn’t see him. We’re thinking maybe it’s the guy who blew it up. Or who gave Rodney and Kyle the explosive to blow it up.”

  “You live an interesting life, Savannah,” Darcy said.

  I guess I did. “It isn’t boring, anyway.”

  “No offense,” Darcy said, “but I think I’d prefer things to be a bit more boring myself.”

  There was something to be said for that. However, she was dating a cop, so her life wasn’t likely to be much calmer than mine. Although Patrick Nolan didn’t seem inclined to take quite as many chances as Rafe, so maybe not.

  “How’s Nolan?”

  “Getting off work soon,” Darcy said. “We’re going to grab some dinner.”

  “Nice that he’s not working late again.”

  I’d never had that. Rafe’s schedule was always erratic. A year ago, when he came off undercover work and started working for the TBI as an instructor, his schedule was supposed to become normal—pipe and slippers at the door at five o’clock, or so we’d joked—but that hadn’t panned out. He’d mostly come home every night, so that was an improvement over the times when he hadn’t, but it still wasn’t a nine-to-five job. At this point, I didn’t think it ever would be. He just wasn’t wired that way.

  “He’s going back in the morning,” Darcy said, about Nolan. “But he has the weekend off. We’re thinking about driving down to Alabama tomorrow night, to where my parents are buried. It’s been a while since I was there.”

  Her adoptive parents, she was talking about. She’d grown up in Mobile, then moved to Birmingham after she got married, and then to Columbia, and to work at Martin and McCall, after getting divorced.

  “That’ll be nice,” I said. “To show him where you grew up.”

  “I hope so,” Darcy answered. “You don’t need me for anything, do you?”

  I said I didn’t. “Go have some fun. We’ll talk about the house on Fulton after you get back. Although the little bit I saw of it yesterday,” before I hightailed it out of there, “didn’t look like it would be impossible to fix.”

  Darcy made a non-committal sort of noise. “Will you stay in touch with my mother and Aunt Tondalia? We’ll be back Sunday night, but until then?”

  “Of course,” I said. “I’m sure Mother’s staying in touch with Audrey, too. But we’ll take care of them.”

  “I’m going to go home and get ready for Patrick. I’ll let you know when we’re leaving. If we do.”

  I wished her a good trip and watched her walk through the yard to the street and get into her blue Honda and drive away. And then I waited until Rafe came out, and took my husband to dinner at the Wayside Inn since I didn’t feel like cooking again.

  The phone rang at ten minutes after four, and startled me out of sleep. It took me a second to realize what it was—that for the second night in a row, we’d been woken up in the middle of the night, and not by the baby wanting food—and then I groaned and buried my face in the pillow.

  Rafe, meanwhile, reached over and picked it up. “Yeah?”

  I listened to the faint quacking on the other end of the line for a few seconds before— “I’m on my way.”

  Unlike last night, nobody told him not to bother. It must be serious.

  “What’s going on?” I sat up in bed.

  He stepped into the pair of jeans he’d left on the floor when he took me to bed earlier, and kept talking while he pulled them up over naked skin. “The cop keeping Rodney Clark under surveillance is dead.”

  I blinked. “How?”

  “Double pop to the head,” Rafe said grimly, tucking himself away before pulling up the zipper. He bent to grab the shirt he’d had on from the floor, and got halfway before he stopped, drawing in a sharp breath.

  “I’ll get it.” I slid out of bed and bent to grab the shirt.

  “Any other time, darlin’, that woulda kept me here.”

  Naturally. I was naked.

  I shook out the shirt and held it out for him. “What happened?”

  “Dunno yet.” He shoved his arms through the sleeves and stepped away to do up the buttons. “Thanks.”

  “No problem.” I snagged the comforter from the bed and wrapped it around me. “What do you know?”

  “Not much more than you do. Felicia Robinson’s dead—”

  The world tilted for a second, and I held up a hand. “Wait. Did you say Felicia Robinson?”

  He nodded. “Afraid so.”

  “Oh, God.”

  He headed toward the door, and I added, “Wait for me.”

  “Darlin’…”

  “Don’t you darling me,” I grabbed a pair of panties and began to drag them on. “She called me yesterday, wanting to know how you were. I told her you were at death’s door, because that’s what I was supposed to tell anyone who asked. She probably begged Grimaldi to give her this job, so she could do something to catch the guys who shot you. And instead she was the one who got shot!”

  His face changed. “Darlin’…”

  “No. Don’t you dare leave me, Rafe. I have to go with you.”

  I grabbed a dress out of the closet at random and pulled it over my head. Easier than putting on both pants and a shirt. And then realized I’d need a bra. Under normal circumstances, maybe I wouldn’t take the time—not in this situation—but with Carrie nursing, there was no way I could risk going without. “Wait for me!”

  “I’ll get the car,” Rafe said.

  “No! Don’t you do that, either. You were shot outside this house two nights ago.” And now someone had shot Felicia, at least if I understood the double pop reference right. “You’re not going out there alone again.”

  He sighed. “So what do you want me to do, darlin’?”

  “I want you to wait,” I said, shoving my feet into shoes. “I want you to give me a damn—darn—damn minute to pick Carrie up and get her into her car seat without waking her. I want to go with you, and I want you to let me!”

  “I’ll be downstairs.”

  He headed out. I heard his boots going down the stairs as I hurried across the hall into Carrie’s room and grabbed her, as gently as I could, to try to get her up
out of her bed and into the car seat while not waking her before she’d wake up on her own.

  Twenty-Two

  The parking lot in Rodney’s apartment complex was a zoo. Law enforcement everywhere, stringing crime scene tape and peering at the ground. Someone—probably Grimaldi—had brought in two big lights on wheels, so the lot was as brightly lit as if it were high noon. Something—either the lights or the activity—had woken the neighbors, many of whom were leaning over the railings. About half of them were in pajamas, while the other half were fully dressed.

  Grimaldi stood, hands on hips, in the middle of the activity, keeping an eye on all the moving parts. Rafe pulled one of the strings of yellow tape up high enough that I could scoot myself and Carrie underneath, and we walked up to her.

  She looked at me, and Carrie, and then at him. “Really?”

  “It’s not his fault,” I said. “I spoke to Felicia yesterday morning. She couldn’t stand me, but she thought enough of Rafe to want to make sure he was all right. When I told her he wasn’t—because that’s what we agreed that I was going to tell anyone who asked—she was upset. I was the one who told her Rodney and Kyle were suspects. I told her to talk to you about getting involved.”

  And now she was dead. And it was hard not to feel guilty.

  “This was a girl you told me was coming on to your husband,” Grimaldi reminded me.

  “Yes, but I didn’t want her dead. I wasn’t even worried about it. It was just annoying to watch.”

  “Well, now you won’t have to anymore,” Grimaldi told me, rather cold-bloodedly, before she turned to Rafe. “What it looks like, is she was sitting over there.” She pointed to a small, red economy car over in the corner of the lot. It was surrounded by cops and crime scene techs, and on one side, the big lights reflected on shattered glass strewn across the ground.

  “We figure he walked up from the side, so she wouldn’t notice him in the rearview mirror. Or maybe she noticed and just didn’t think anything of it. Hell, maybe she was asleep.”

  “She wouldn’t be asleep,” I said. “She thought too much of Rafe for that.”

  They both gave me a look. Grimaldi’s was fulminating. I deduced she was probably dealing with some guilt of her own, and the look was less about me and more about that. She was the one who had assigned this job to Felicia. She probably felt worse than I did.

  “He put a pistol to the window,” she continued after a moment, “and pulled the trigger. She died instantly. If she were asleep, she wouldn’t even know it was coming, so you’ll excuse me if I’m hoping for that.”

  I nodded. I could excuse that. Now I was hoping for it, too.

  “At that point, he went upstairs and knocked on Rodney’s door. Rodney came out, and they got in Rodney’s car and left.”

  “Did someone see that?”

  “Tenant in 203.” She gestured to a middle-aged lady in checkered pants and a T-shirt who was talking to a uniformed police officer. “She’s got a job that gets her up early, so she heard the shot, but thought it was a backfire. Then she heard footsteps outside the door, and running down the stairs, and got to the window in time to see Rodney and someone else run out of the lot and down the street to the Charger. She could see it from her window. Felicia wouldn’t have been able to from where she was sitting.”

  So to recap, which I did in the silence of my own mind: Lance had driven here in Rodney’s car and parked on the street. It was before four AM, so not a lot of traffic. He shot Felicia, who didn’t notice him coming, maybe because she was asleep. Then he went upstairs, got Rodney out of bed, and the two of them left, again in the Charger.

  “Nobody knows where they went from here,” Grimaldi said. “We’re pulling footage from the traffic cameras in the area, but it’s going to take time.”

  “Kyle…” I began. God, was there a dead cop outside the Scoggins’s house, too?

  Grimaldi shook her head. “Nothing happened there. I’ve talked to the officer on duty. He’s fine, and so is everyone else.”

  “Are you sure Kyle’s inside his house?”

  “The officer knocked on the door,” Grimaldi said, “and woke them up. They weren’t happy. But he’s there. And hasn’t heard from Rodney or Lance. Or so he says. At this point, the officer’s in the living room with them instead of outside.”

  “Clay?” Rafe asked. His voice was even, but I could feel the tension radiating from him.

  “Sitting tight. The officer on duty outside his place is fine. I’ve spoken to him.”

  Rafe nodded, and some of his tension dissipated. Some of mine did, too. Clayton was safe. Lance and Rodney hadn’t figured out who he was and what he was doing, and gone to kill him. Or killed the person watching him, for that matter.

  “You have someone watching Clayton?”

  “If we put surveillance on Rodney and Kyle and not Clayton,” Grimaldi said, “that’d be a dead giveaway that we know he isn’t really involved, don’t you think?”

  Yes, of course. “Why didn’t you give Felicia that job?” Something safe and simple, that wouldn’t have put her in the crosshairs of this nutcase.

  “Then somebody else woulda been dead,” Rafe told me.

  And of course he was right. Although it wouldn’t have been someone I felt somewhat responsible for.

  Although whether it was Felicia or someone else didn’t really matter. Not in the scheme of things.

  I drew in a breath and let it out while I tried to let that knowledge settle over me. Felicia was dead, and there was nothing I could do. Other than put the blame squarely where it belonged: on the guy who had shot her. “What happens now?”

  “Now I have to go notify her mother,” Grimaldi said.

  “Can’t you let her wake up first?”

  At the same time, Rafe said, “I’ll go with you.”

  Grimaldi nodded. And turned to me. “By the time we get over there, it’ll be pretty close to morning, anyway.”

  “But she’s going to be waking up every morning for the rest of her life knowing that her daughter’s dead.” I glanced down at Carrie, still snoozing in the carrier. “Can’t you let her have this last one before she knows?”

  It was Rafe who answered, with a hand at the small of my back. “There are rules, darlin’. You don’t drag out the time before notification. People have a right to know as soon as possible. And she mighta heard that someone’s gone down. She might already be awake and worried.”

  I guess. Although if it were my daughter, I wouldn’t want to know at all. But of course that was impossible, too. “Can I come?”

  “Not to talk to her,” Grimaldi said. “This is one of the hardest things that woman will ever have to deal with. She doesn’t need an audience while we tell her that her daughter’s gone and her world’s never going to be the same.”

  Of course. “I’ll stay in the car. I just don’t want to go back home by myself.” It was better to keep moving than sitting still and having to think.

  Rafe gave me a nudge. “Text me the address,” he told Grimaldi. “We’ll meet you there.”

  She nodded. We headed back under the crime scene tape and back to the Cadillac.

  Felicia’s mother lived in half a duplex a block or two away from Kyle Scoggins’s house, and not too far from the house on Fulton. It was still dark when we got there, and the house was dark, too. Both sides of it.

  Rafe pulled up to the curb on the other side of the street and looked at it. He didn’t say anything, but I could feel him bracing himself.

  I put a hand on his leg, and he looked at me like he’d forgotten I was there. For a second, he probably had. “Sorry, darlin’.”

  “There’s nothing to be sorry for,” I said. And changed it to, “You haven’t done anything to be sorry for. You were nothing but nice to Felicia—probably made that girl’s weekend last week—and I don’t think anybody foresaw that this would happen.”

  He shook his head. “There was no reason for it. Somebody had to sit outside of Rodney’s place, an
d she got the short straw. But it was simple surveillance. No reason to think something like this would happen.”

  Grimaldi’s official SUV came to a stop behind us, and he twitched his hand out of mine. “Sit tight, darlin’. We’ll be back.”

  “Good luck,” I told him. “I love you.”

  He nodded. And opened the door and got out. Behind us, Grimaldi did the same, and the two of them crossed the street together. I watched as they knocked on the door, and knocked again, and then I watched as the door was opened a crack—probably with the chain on. Then the door opened wide, and a middle-aged black woman in a fuzzy, blue bathrobe stood there, her hair sticking out every which way. I still watched as her knees buckled, and in slow motion she started to crumple to the floor. Her keening cry was shrill enough that I could hear it through the closed windows.

  Rafe caught her before she fell, and—like she weighed nothing—lifted her in his arms. Grimaldi shut the door behind them, and that’s when I leaned my head back against the seat and started to cry, too.

  Rafe came out ten minutes later, and crossed to the car. “Tammy’s gonna stay with her until her sister can get here,” he told me as he slid behind the wheel.

  I nodded, but before I could say anything, he shut the door, leaned his elbows on the steering wheel, and put his face in his hands. “Fuck,” he said, his voice muffled.

  Or at least that’s what I thought he said. And since there was nothing I could say in response to that, I just put my hand on his back and ran it in circles.

  It seemed to do the trick, because after a minute, he straightened. “Sorry.”

  I shook my head. “Don’t be. I’m sure that wasn’t fun.”

  “Not even a little bit.” He turned the key in the ignition. “Hardest part of the job, having to tell some woman that her little girl ain’t never coming back.”

  He pulled the car away from the curb and added, “Or her little boy or her husband or his wife or whoever.”

  “I’m sure.” We sat in silence for a few minutes, while he navigated away from the duplex and toward one of the main roads through Columbia. “Where are we going?”