Survival Clause: A Savannah Martin Novel (Savannah Martin Mysteries Book 20)

by Jenna Bennett

  “The first in this series. She might not be his first overall. But if she were his first…”

  She sat in silence for a second, maybe trying to determine how much to tell me. “The first victim of a serial killer is called an origin kill. Often, that murder is the prototype, in a way, for the others. Some killers continually try to recreate that crime, to kill that person again and again. For others, it’s just the trigger that made them start killing, not necessarily something they’re trying to recreate, specifically. Often, the first victim wasn’t planned, the way the rest were. The first happened, and he started following the pattern after that. Either way, a serial killer’s first victim can give important information about him.”

  Ugh. “Who was this guy’s first?”

  “The first in this series was Laura Lee Matlock. Thirty-three. Born in Damascus. Wound up dead beside the road near Bowling Green, Kentucky.”

  “Damascus?” I repeated. “The town a few miles from here? Where Yvonne lives? And Elspeth Caulfield grew up?”

  She nodded. “Mrs. Matlock hit hard times around thirty. Her husband went to prison for a while. They had two kids, and it was hard for her to keep things together alone, so she started picking up extra money working the night shift at the truck stop down by the interstate.”

  “The same place where the most recent victim was dumped?”

  “Yes,” Grimaldi said. “She was waiting tables, but sometimes she’d go off with a trucker for an hour for some extra cash, too. The assumption was that that’s what happened, although nobody knows for sure.”

  “But she disappeared from the truck stop?”

  “She finished her shift,” Grimaldi said, “but never made it home. Her mother, who babysat the kids overnight, reported her missing halfway through the day. By then, Kentucky State Police had already found her, and it was just a matter of putting the two together.”

  The missing woman and the dead one, I assumed. The same victim.

  “So she got into a truck with somebody, and he drove north from here and pushed her out of the truck an hour and a half to two hours later, in Kentucky.”

  “Longer than that,” Grimaldi said. “It would have taken some time to do what he did to her, too.”

  Right. So maybe three to four hours later.

  “And she was Number One. Numeral I.”

  “Yes,” Grimaldi said. “Although at the time, she was just a dead women with a slash on the inside of her arm.”

  Right. “How long did it take to figure out that they weren’t just slashes?”

  “By Victim Three there was a pattern,” Grimaldi said evenly, not betraying by so much as an eyelash flicker that Victim Three was her mother. “By Victim Four, they became numerals. IV instead of IIII. When Number Five was a capital V instead of four vertical lines with a diagonal line across them, it became a certainty.”

  I nodded. “I wasn’t thinking about the straight lines with the diagonal lines across them. That’s the simplest way to keep track of numbers, isn’t it? All straight lines. I was thinking he might have gone with the numerals because they would be easier to carve than the curves in numbers like 2 and 3.”

  “But straight lines with diagonal lines would have been easier still,” Grimaldi said.

  I nodded. “So the numerals must mean something. Beyond just keeping a tally of victims.”

  “They might,” Grimaldi nodded. “It’s too soon to say that they must.”

  Maybe. “Who would chose to keep track of things with Roman numerals? What kind of person, I mean? Most of us would either think in normal numbers, 1 and 2 and so forth, or the single line tally marks with the diagonal line. Score marks, or whatever they’re called. What kind of person goes to Roman numerals first?”

  “Not necessarily first,” Grimaldi admonished. And continued, before I could argue with her, “Someone who studied Latin? Someone with a parochial school education?”

  “Catholic, you mean? Did you go to Catholic school?” She was Italian; it seemed a logical question.

  “No,” Grimaldi said. “We couldn’t afford private school. Tony and Francesca and I all went to the local public school.”

  “So did I.” And sometimes I wondered why, since Mother and Dad had certainly had the money to send Dix, Catherine, and me to private, or even boarding school. But instead they’d kept us home and let us duke it out with the unwashed masses in general education. “It’s been a few years, but I think Latin was an elective at Columbia High.”

  “You didn’t take it?”

  I shook my head. “French. The Martins come from France originally. Besides, Paris.”

  Grimaldi nodded. “But the local high school offered it. Maybe our unsub went to Columbia High.”

  Maybe. Although— “I’m sure it isn’t the only school along the I-65 corridor that offers Latin.”

  “No,” Grimaldi said, “but it’s where Victim One went, most likely.”

  “Did she grow up in Damascus?”

  Grimaldi nodded.

  “Then yes,” I said. “Unless her family paid for private school—” And that wasn’t likely, if she’d fallen on hard enough times later to have to sell her body to make ends meet, “—or home-schooled her, she would have ended up at Columbia High. All the rest of us did. And Damascus is closer to Columbia than Sweetwater.”

  “Somewhere to start.”

  I looked at her, and she added. “Damascus, and Columbia High. And whoever took Latin class with Laura Lee Matlock thirty-three years ago.”

  “When the baby wakes up,” I said.

  Grimaldi sank back against the sofa and sighed.

  Eight

  I tried to talk Grimaldi into taking the Volvo, since the base for the car seat was in it, but the idea of having someone else drive her around must have been too much, because she insisted we move Carrie’s car seat into the official Columbia PD SUV, where she could take the wheel. She did, however, and reasonably graciously at that, agree to stop by the house on Fulton so I could make sure everything was locked up nice and tight after the photographer had left. Everything looked fine, so I hiked my posterior back into the SUV and nodded. “All good. We can go do what you want now.”

  “Much obliged,” Grimaldi grumbled, and rolled away from the curb. “Any reason to think things would not be fine here?”

  I made myself comfortable against the gray leather. “When we got here yesterday morning, someone had tossed a baseball through the living room window.”

  She shot me an alarmed look—like me, she remembered only too well the many mishaps we’d had last month, including the final one, when half the house blew off—and I added, “I figure it was just kids. But I’m a little more jumpy than usual, after everything that happened before.”

  She nodded.

  “Richelle and her son are still walking around, right?” They were the two people who had vandalized the house the first time. The second time it had been someone else, and I knew where they were: safely behind lock and key.

  “Yes,” Grimaldi said. “The Tremaynes paid their fines and walked away. And I don’t think they’re going to bother you again. Both your husband and the DA’s office made it clear that they wouldn’t get off as lightly a second time.”

  “That was nice of Todd.” Todd Satterfield, Bob’s son—my old boyfriend—is the assistant DA for Maury County. And he didn’t owe me anything, especially since I’d thrown him over for Rafe.

  “He’s a nice man,” Grimaldi said, and kept the SUV zooming down the street.

  “He and Marley are getting married this summer, I guess.”

  She nodded. “Your husband is best man. He has all the details if you want to know.”

  “I’m sure I’ll find out when it’s time. And if Todd doesn’t want me there, watching him marry someone else, that’s his prerogative.”

  “I think he’s over you,” Grimaldi said dryly. “It all worked out the way it was supposed to.”

  Good. And even if it hadn’t, I would have still
chosen Rafe, so there was that.

  “What happened with Sergeant Tucker after the other night?” I wanted to know, as we zoomed down the road toward the little town of Damascus, to the south and west of Columbia.

  Grimaldi’s hands tightened on the wheel for a second. I looked for anything ahead of the car that might have caused the reaction—a squirrel, an oncoming car—and saw nothing. Her voice was even, anyway, when she answered. “He’s back at work. Showed up yesterday morning as usual. When I called him into my office and asked him about it, he said he hadn’t done anything wrong.”

  “I’m not sure he did,” I said. A little reluctantly, since I wasn’t a huge fan of Sergeant Tucker. “The store owner called the police. The shoplifters got away, but Curtis was still there, so it wasn’t surprising that Tucker grabbed him. And I don’t know what happened before we got there, but it’s not impossible that Curtis tried to fight his way out once he realized he was about to be arrested for something he didn’t do.”

  “Or said he didn’t do,” Grimaldi said.

  I glanced at her, but she was staring straight out the windshield, keeping her eyes firmly on the road.

  “Yes. Something he said he didn’t do. It sounded like he was telling the truth, but what do I know?”

  She didn’t answer, so I continued. “It wouldn’t surprise me if Curtis might have had a moment of panic and tried to get away from Tucker. I guess, to Tucker, it could look like resisting arrest. And he wasn’t doing anything to him, other than keeping him in place. Curtis wasn’t hurt.”

  Grimaldi nodded. “Happily for Tucker.”

  “He wasn’t very happy about Rafe coming in and ordering him to leave.”

  She grimaced. “No. And I heard plenty about that.”

  No doubt. “The optics—that’s what Rafe called them—were bad. But for what it’s worth, I don’t think Tucker really did anything wrong. It’s hard to know what else he could have done under the circumstances.”

  “He could have kept the kid upright,” Grimaldi said. “That would have helped.”

  Well, yes. But not having been there when it went down, determining whether Tucker had been out of line or not was above my pay grade. “There was no harm done, though. Curtis isn’t suing, right? And the only thing that seems to have come from the video, is that Rafe has picked up a stalker. It could have been worse.” Riots. Looting. Murder…

  “You said there was another video this morning.”

  I nodded. “The first one was that night. The next day, someone filmed Rafe outside the police station. So this morning, I went in with him, to see if whoever was still there. I followed a car out of town after he went inside, and that’s when I came back and the two of you were dealing with Leslie Yung.”

  Grimaldi nodded.

  “But it wasn’t until after that, that the new video was posted. Someone filmed Rafe kissing me when he walked me out.”

  “So the car you followed wasn’t the stalker.”

  “Unless she realized I was following her, and she decided to follow me back. I never did catch up to her, or see the car again after it turned off the main drag, so it could have happened that way.”

  Grimaldi nodded. “There are cameras on the corners of the police station. I’ll have someone take a look. See if we can catch a glimpse of the car.”

  “I would appreciate that,” I said sincerely. “Let me know if you discover anything.”

  The tiny flyspeck on the map that is Damascus appeared on the horizon, and a minute later we were in the thick of town. A minute after that, we pulled up in front of a small rambler set on a postage sized lot. I looked around. “This is where Laura Lee Matlock lived?”

  Grimaldi nodded.

  “Yvonne’s house is over there.” I pointed across the street and half a block down. “And there is Millie Ruth Durbin’s house.”

  “Who’s Millie Ruth Durbin? Another classmate?”

  I shook my head. “Teacher. Science or something like that. Rafe had her, I didn’t. I think she retired in the couple of years between. She taught Dix and Catherine, I think, but not me.”

  “But all this was much later than Laura Lee.”

  “Oh, definitely. Rafe graduated almost fourteen years ago. I graduated almost eleven years ago. Laura Lee was thirty-three, you said, when she died? She would have graduated fifteen years before that, and that was sixteen or seventeen years ago…”

  “She might know something,” Grimaldi said. “Which house?”

  “Ms. Durbin? The little white one with all the flowers. She gardens. And has cats, I think.”

  Grimaldi gave me a dubious look, but legged it down the street. I grabbed the baby and followed. On the other side of the white pickets, a broad figure started the process of getting from her knees and up to standing.

  Millie Ruth Durbin is a dumpling. Short, round, cute, with swaying skirts and a demeanor much younger than her years. When she got upright, she put her grubby gloves on her ample hips and contemplated us.

  It took a moment, then… “I know you.”

  “Savannah Martin,” I told her. “Collier now. I married Rafe.”

  She nodded. “I remember. And this is…?”

  I made the introductions. “Tamara Grimaldi’s been the chief of police for Columbia since January.”

  “Sad business about Carter,” Millie Ruth said, and stripped the dirty gloves from her chubby little hands. She slapped them against her thigh a couple of times while she contemplated us from under the brim of a ratty sunhat, her eyes bright in the shadows. “We’re outside Columbia here, though. Sheriff Satterfield takes care of us.”

  “We’re just doing some legwork,” Grimaldi said easily. “Savannah’s husband is working with the sheriff of behalf of the TBI, and we’re just tying up some loose ends.”

  Millie Ruth nodded. “Loose ends pertaining to what, exactly?”

  “There was a body found at the truck stop down by the interstate a couple of days ago, and we thought—”

  Millie Ruth nodded. “You thought of Laura Lee. Of course.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “From school,” Millie Ruth said. “And then later, she moved into the house down the street with Frankie.”

  “Her husband.”

  Millie Ruth nodded. “Always in trouble, that boy. I had him in school, too, and he spent more time in the principal’s office than in class.”

  “What happened to him?” I asked. Grimaldi probably had this information already—Laura Lee’s husband would have been a viable suspect, I assumed, before the authorities realized she’d been the victim of a serial killer—but if she knew, Grimaldi hadn’t mentioned it.

  “After Laura Lee died, you mean?” Millie Ruth turned to me. “The kids moved in with her mama. When Frankie got out of prison, he came back into the house for a bit, but it didn’t stick, and within a year, he was back in trouble.”

  “Would you happen to know where I could find him now?” Grimaldi wanted to know.

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” Millie Ruth told her. “He sold the house eventually, took the money and left. Her folks live over in Sunnyside, if that helps.”

  Grimaldi allowed as to how that helped a lot, and took down the names of Laura Lee’s parents. “Savannah tells me you were a teacher at Columbia High.”

  “I told you that,” Millie Ruth said tartly. “Almost forty years I taught. I retired the year before she started.” She glanced at me. “Had her sister and brother and her husband in class, though.”

  “I don’t suppose you taught Latin?”

  “You suppose right,” Millie Ruth said.

  “Who did?”

  Millie Ruth thought back. “When I first started, Mr. Wilkins was the Latin teacher. Older than God, he retired five or six years after I came on. Dead now, rest his soul.” She thought for a moment. “Then we got Mr. Hanson, or maybe Mr. Olson, for a year. But something happened there, something to do with a student, as I recall, and he left under something of a cloud. And
now there’s Miss Stevens.”

  “I remember Miss Stevens,” I said. “She was there when I attended Columbia High.” Not that I’d studied Latin. But I’d known who the Latin teacher was. “Did Laura Lee take Latin? Or Frankie?”

  Millie Ruth giggled. “I doubt that very much. Not really scholars, the two of them.”

  I had assumed as much. Scholars, from what I know about them, don’t usually end up in prison or working at truck stops.

  We bid Millie Ruth a polite goodbye, and went back to the SUV.

  “About Frankie’s prison record…” I said, when the car was rolling down the street.

  Grimaldi nodded. “I’ll pull the records. But I know for a fact that he was locked up when his wife was killed. He was cleared as a suspect because of it.”

  “He might have killed the others, though. You said the origin kill may have tipped the serial killer over the edge, right? Maybe the murder of his wife, by someone else, tipped Frankie over the edge. He wasn’t there to protect her, and she got murdered. That would be enough to tip anyone over the edge.”

  Not into serial murder, of course, but into depression and self-flagellation and guilt.

  “Possible,” Grimaldi admitted. “If he’s been in and out of prison for the past sixteen years, there might have been enough time between sentences to commit the murders.”

  Her eyes were distant, looking beyond the road and into her own head. Behind us, Damascus faded into the background. Grimaldi added, “It would explain the long cooling-off period between murders. There are usually only two things that’ll keep a serial killer from killing, and those are…”

  “Death and incarceration,” I said, since I’ve watched my share of Dateline and 48 Hours.

  Grimaldi nodded. “I’ll get the records, and we’ll see whether there’s any overlap between Frankie’s periods of freedom and the murders. That would make it simple.”

  It would. “Are you certain the Roman numeral I on Laura Lee’s arm was actually a Roman numeral I and not just a scratch? Because if it is Frankie, and he thought it was a numeral I, he could have started marking his own victims from that.”

  “If he didn’t study Latin,” Grimaldi said, “he’d be more likely to go with the usual tally method, most likely. They’re not Serif letters. They’re Sans Serif.”