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

by Jenna Bennett

  “Not sure yet. We lost her in the woods. She was supposed to walk to the road and up to the car while Savannah and I made our way back through the woods, but she wasn’t there.”

  Bob hesitated for a moment. “You look for her?”

  “Not in the woods. Along the road, yes. But we figured, since we’ll have to take a team in there anyway, we’ll find her if she’s there. It isn’t cold enough to worry about exposure, and I doubt she’s suffered anything worse than a twisted ankle.”

  Or a broken leg, possibly, but I wasn’t going to say it. I focused on Carrie, who had woken up, finally, and indicated that she was hungry. At the moment I was sitting in Grimaldi’s office feeding her, while I listened to the plan.

  “I’m getting a team together to retrieve the skeleton,” Bob said. “We’ll make sure we bring medical supplies. And an extra stretcher, in case we come across her and she can’t walk.”

  “That’d be a good idea,” Grimaldi agreed. She was sitting behind her desk doing her best to look and sound calm, but one hand was tapping a pencil against the tabletop in an increasingly rapid rhythm. “I’ll go back out there with you and show you the way.”

  “I’ve got Collier going back to Daffodil Farm with the crime scene crew and the warrant,” Bob added. “He’ll take care of the RV. The warrant’s limited to that, and to the woods. With what we’ve got, we can’t search the house.”

  “There’s not likely to be anything in the house, anyway.”

  Grimaldi tapped for another second before she added, “I’ll meet you out there.”

  Bob said he’d be on his way in a few minutes, and they both hung up. Grimaldi turned to me. “I don’t have time to take you back to Sweetwater. Can you call someone for a ride?”

  “Sure,” I told her, since I could tell she was twitching with nerves and a guilty conscience. “I could call Charlotte, or my mother, or anybody of about a dozen people who’d come pick me up. But you’re not getting rid of me that easily. I feel bad about Yung, too.”

  “You weren’t the one who sent her out in the woods by herself.”

  “Actually, I was. It was my idea originally. And we sent her toward the road, with instructions on how to get there. She should have found it in five or ten minutes, the direction she was going.” We hadn’t had any problems.

  “So why do you think she didn’t?” Grimaldi wanted to know.

  “I have no idea. It was a straight shot through the trees to the road. And she had her phone. I spoke to Rafe while we were in the woods, so we know there’s coverage.”

  “If something happened to her?”

  “What, though? I mean, think about it. It’s a matter of a quarter mile, at most. There aren’t any ravines or waterfalls she could have fallen into. The weather’s good. There wasn’t enough wind for a branch to come loose and hit her on the head, or anything like that. And there aren’t any wild animals to worry about.”

  “There are those rattlesnakes,” Grimaldi said.

  I felt myself turn pale, until I thought about it. “But if she got bitten, she wouldn’t have passed out immediately. She would have had time to call for help. You, or Bob, or 911. Besides, she would have yelled. And we would have heard her. We weren’t that far away.”

  “Maybe she got turned around. Maybe she started off in the wrong direction.”

  “How? You told her to keep the sun at the same angle. If she did, she would have hit the road. If she didn’t, she still would have made it to the road, just farther up or down. There was nothing between her and the road that would have been likely to stop her, and if anything had, and she called out, we would have heard her. It was quiet in there.”

  Grimaldi nodded. “So let’s say she got to the road. What could have happened once she got there?”

  “She got turned around and walked in the wrong direction? Somebody picked her up and gave her a lift?”

  “If so,” Grimaldi said, “shouldn’t she have been here by now?”

  “If she was headed here. She might have been going to the sheriff’s office or home. Wherever home is while she’s in town.”

  “She’s staying at the Hampton Inn by the interstate,” Grimaldi said. “We can run out and check her room before we go out to meet Bob and his team. We have time.”

  “Or you can send someone else to check the hotel while we go meet Bob.” She had a whole police department at her disposal. And if Yung wasn’t at the hotel, going there was a huge waste of time. Let someone else waste it, not us.

  “Bob might have a deputy out that way.” She reached for her phone again. “Excuse me a minute.”

  I nodded, and focused on feeding my daughter while she spoke to Bob and was assured that he would tag the deputy nearest the interstate and have Yung’s hotel room checked. “We’re about to head out,” he told her.

  She glanced at me. I held up two fingers. “We need another couple minutes here.”

  “It’ll be fifteen before we even get to your neck of the woods,” Bob said comfortably, “so take your time.”

  They hung up, and Grimaldi turned back to me. “She would have made it to the sheriff’s office by now, I think, if she was going there.”

  I nodded.

  “So if she isn’t at the hotel…”

  “You’re thinking something,” I said. “What is it?”

  She looked at me. Looked like she was thinking, and then thinking better of it, whatever it was. Finally, she opened her mouth. “She fits the victim profile.”

  “The…? Oh.” The serial killer’s victim profile. “Not really.”

  “Sure she does. She’s the right age and size. She has long, dark hair and medium skin…”

  “She’s Asian,” I said.

  “Part Asian. And he’s killed blacks, whites, and Hispanics so far. No reason to think he’d turn his nose up at an Asian woman if one fell in his lap.”

  Maybe so. “How would she fall in his lap, though? She was miles from the truck stop…”

  It was my turn to trail off.

  “On Art Mullinax’s property,” Grimaldi said.

  “He was over by the house, though. Talking to Rafe and Bob.”

  She shook her head. “Not by then. By then they’d left. He called you, remember, to let you know they were done and leaving? Mullinax could have been anywhere by the time Yung came out of the trees.”

  Maybe so. “Where would he take her? Not to the farm.”

  “Depends on whether he suspected they were coming back with a search warrant or not.” She pushed to her feet. “You ready?”

  “One more minute.” I burped Carrie and stuffed her back into the baby sling. “You’d better call Bob and let him know we’ll be going to the house instead of the woods.”

  Or at least that’s what I assumed we’d be doing.

  “I’ll call from the car,” Grimaldi said and strode out, leaving me to scurry along behind.

  Rafe was there, with a crew of crime scene techs, by the time we made it back to Daffodil Hill Farm. Grimaldi had phoned Bob again to tell him her concerns, and he had agreed that she could go hunt down Art Mullinax just as soon as she’d met him and his retrieval crew, and told them where to go. So we sat on the side of the road and waited for Bob to show up.

  Or more accurately, I sat on the side of the road and waited. Grimaldi had walked back to where she thought Yung might have come out of the woods, and had examined the ground for any signs of accident, struggle, or anything else.

  “I’m pretty sure I found where she came across the ditch,” she told me when she’d made her way back to me. “Something pushed through the branches recently, and slid into the ditch and climbed back out. I saw what looked like a heel mark in the bottom of the ditch, where it’s just wet enough for the ground to hold an impression. I couldn’t testify to it being her, not without a plaster cast of her shoe for comparison, but I’m pretty sure it’s the imprint of a high heel.”

  “Well, then I’m sure it was Yung,” I said. “Who else would have b
een out here in the last day or two in high heels?”

  “I imagine not a lot of people.” Grimaldi shaded her eyes with her hand as she gazed down the road in the direction of town. “At least we don’t have to worry about searching the woods for her. She’s not hurt and helpless in there somewhere.”

  No. But she might be hurt and helpless somewhere else. And I’m sure it was that same thought that caused Grimaldi’s next outburst. “What’s taking them so long? I could have jogged to Sweetwater by now!”

  “Not really. And I’m sure they’re coming as quickly as they can. But it’s not like he—” I nodded in the direction of the woods and the skeleton they contained, “needs help in a hurry.”

  Grimaldi nodded reluctantly, and started to pace back and forth in front of the car instead.

  I put up with it for about two minutes, and was just about to tell her to knock it off when I heard the sound of a car engine coming closer. “That must be them.”

  I scooted off the hood of the SUV and peered down the road. “Yes. There they are. Blue lights and everything.”

  But no sirens. It wasn’t that kind of hurry.

  Bob pulled his sheriff’s SUV up on the shoulder across the road from us, and got out. The crime scene van made a U-turn and parked behind Grimaldi’s car. Bob came toward us. “This the place?”

  Grimaldi nodded. “That’s the cairn of stones. That’s my T-shirt. The body is a five or ten minute hike straight back.”

  “One of Carrie’s blankets is draped over a branch up above,” I added. “It’s bright yellow. You can’t miss it.”

  “I don’t imagine we will.” Bob scratched behind his ear. “I heard from Cletus Johnson. Agent Yung hasn’t turned up at the hotel so far.”

  “We think we found the place where she came out of the woods,” Grimaldi said, including me in the discovery even though I’d been sitting here with the car while she’d done all the work, “so I don’t think it’s a case of her still being in there.”

  “We’ll keep an eye out,” Bob told her, “and holler as we go. But if she made it out, and she isn’t with you, or with me, and she hasn’t gone back to the hotel, I’d say we probably have cause for concern at this point.”

  I’d say so, too.

  “You girls run along.” He waved us off down the road, metaphorically. “We’ll gather up the bones and anything else we might find in the drop zone. You go look for Agent Yung.”

  Grimaldi nodded, “Come on, Savannah. Let’s go.”

  She hustled to the car door while I hurried to keep up. Behind us, two sheriff’s deputies in stout boots and with big bags of paraphernalia prepared to follow Bob across the ditch and into the woods.

  “I feel kind of bad for leaving them to get there and deal with it on their own,” I said, as they faded away in the rearview mirror.

  Grimaldi glanced over. “It isn’t your job. If anybody should feel bad, it’s me.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Not about Jurgensson. Assuming it’s him in there, and I guess we have to assume it is.”

  I nodded. It was probably safe to assume that, under the circumstances. “I can’t think of anyone else it’s likely to be.”

  “But I do feel bad about Yung. If she got picked up by Mullinax, it’s my fault.”

  “Of course it isn’t,” I said, in spite of feeling a little like that myself. Logically we had no reason to. “She’s a federal agent. She’s trained. She’s probably armed. She’s supposed to be able to take care of herself. And we have to assume she isn’t stupid. She wouldn’t be in this job if she were.”

  “So what happened?”

  I shrugged. “I have no idea. But I know it wasn’t your fault. Or mine. All she had to do was walk for fifteen minutes and then wait for us. If something happened to her, it’s tragic, but it isn’t our fault. If you’d walked back to the road and been grabbed by Mullinax, would it have been her fault? Or my fault?”

  “Of course not,” Grimaldi said. “But she’d never even seen Mullinax. She wouldn’t know him from Adam if he rolled up next to her and offered her a ride. He looks like such a harmless old man…”

  I shook my head. “She didn’t need a ride. She was waiting for us. And she wouldn’t take one if he offered. She isn’t five years old.”

  “Well, something happened,” Grimaldi said, her lips tight and her hands white-knuckled on the wheel. “Maybe it was Mrs. Mullinax. Maybe the old lady’s picking up victims for her husband, and Yung went into the car because she thought it was safe. Or maybe it was Mullinax himself, and he shot her…”

  “We would have heard the shot. And I’m not saying that nothing happened. Something did, or she would have been there, waiting for us. Something is keeping her from answering her phone.” Hopefully it was just unconsciousness or ropes, not death. “But beating yourself up over it doesn’t help. She’s a grown woman, and a federal agent. She can take care of herself. If something happened, it was her fault and not yours.”

  I waited a second to see if she’d argue again. When she didn’t, I went on. “The best thing we can do right now is focus on finding her. And what we’re going to do once we have.”

  Grimaldi nodded. “Well, we’re about five minutes from Daffodil Hill Farm. Once we get there, I figure we use the search warrant to go through every room in every building, and every vehicle in the place. If Mullinax isn’t there, we figure out where he is and what he’s driving, and we put out a BOLO on the vehicle.”

  “What if he is there?”

  “Then we make him tell us where he put her,” Grimaldi said. “Hopefully he hasn’t had time to kill her yet. He doesn’t keep the women long, but usually longer than just an hour.”

  I nodded. “There’s the turnoff. See it?”

  Grimaldi took it on two wheels, and we barreled down the track toward Daffodil Hill Farm.

  Twenty

  Rafe was there when we reached the parking lot, directing sheriff’s deputies to the left and right like he was born to it. When Grimaldi pulled up with a spatter of gravel, he arched a brow. “Problem?”

  “Looking for Yung,” Grimaldi told him, assessing the property.

  It had been a working farm at one point, so there were several outbuildings. A big barn sat at the far end of the property, closest to the trees, and looked mostly ready to come down. The three-bay garage looked like it had started life as a carriage house, same as at the mansion. The silver SUV was gone today, but the golf cart and darker gray sedan was still parked outside. And there was a brown and tan RV parked off to the side. A couple of crime scene techs were making their way toward it.

  “That warrant doesn’t cover the house or outbuildings,” Grimaldi said, “does it?”

  Rafe shook his head. “With what we had, this was all we could get. There’s gonna be no evidence of Jurgensson’s murder, so many years later, and there’s no evidence he took the women here before he killed them.”

  “Yung’s missing,” Grimaldi said. “Would that make a difference?”

  “Not less’n you have some reason to think she’s here.”

  Grimaldi went over the reasons we thought she might be here, and Rafe nodded. “You can go talk to the judge. But with what I’ve got, all I can do is search the RV. All Bob can do is search the woods.”

  “Damn.” She thought a moment. “Does Mullinax know that?”

  “He has a copy of the warrant, so I imagine he does.” He glanced at her. “You know the rules. He gets a copy.”

  She nodded. Rafe took her acquiescence as an excuse for greeting me with a quick kiss, and Carrie with a tickle. “Hi, pretty girl.”

  She gurgled and kicked her feet, back in the car seat again. “I think she’s happy to be out of the sling,” I confessed. “She’s spent a lot of time being strapped to my chest so far today.”

  “She’ll be all right.” He kept one eye on her and the other on the door to the RV, where the two crime scene techs had disappeared.

  “I’m going to go talk to him,�
�� Grimaldi declared. “Maybe he’ll let me look around if I ask nicely.”

  If he had Leslie Yung stashed somewhere, I wouldn’t count on it, although if he knew we were looking for her, and knew we suspected him, maybe he’d think twice about killing her.

  And on the plus side, he was here, not wherever she was. So that was one positive thing we could focus on.

  “I guess I should go with her,” I told Rafe.

  He nodded. “Leave the baby with me. If he does something crazy, I don’t want her over there.”

  No argument here. I transferred the carrier from my hand to his, and jogged after Grimaldi.

  I got there in time to hear her greet him, politely enough. “Mr. Mullinax.”

  He nodded. “Chief Grimaldi. Is this your doing?”

  “The sheriff’s. Although we’re working together.” She paused a second before added, “I’m hoping you will cooperate, too.”

  Mullinax gave me a distracted look as I appeared behind Grimaldi. It didn’t seem to occur to him to ask what I was doing there. “I’m cooperating. Nothing else I can do when you’re waving a warrant in my face, is there?”

  “We found bones in your woods,” Grimaldi said, point blank. “The sheriff and a couple of techs are back there retrieving them now.”

  Mullinax hesitated for a second. “I imagine there are a lot of bones in the woods.”

  “Not this kind,” Grimaldi said. “Or at least I hope you haven’t killed more than one person and left him out there.”

  Mullinax stared at her.

  “The warrant only covers the RV and the woods,” Grimaldi added, “but if you want to cooperate, maybe you’d give me permission for a quick look through the house and the other buildings, too?”

  It took a second, and I could practically hear the gears moving inside Mullinax’s skull, but he must have come to the conclusion that he had nothing to lose. “I don’t suppose I should, without a warrant. But I have nothing to hide. Look all you want.”

  “Thank you.” Grimaldi headed for the door. I scrambled to catch up.

  “She won’t be here,” I said as Grimaldi reached for the doorknob.