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

by Jenna Bennett

  “I’m sure he had a good story,” I said. “She might not have been suspicious. Not of an old guy on a quiet country road and with us so close.”

  “Leaving for the moment the question of how he did it,” Grimaldi said, “he got her into the car or truck. I’m guessing she was unconscious at that point. Or got that way pretty quickly. If he gave her even half a chance, she would have taken him out.”

  We drove another few seconds in silence.

  “The question is where he took her,” Rafe said. “And it mighta been home, if he knew his wife was gonna be gone.”

  “He’s friends with Uncle Sid,” I said, “but he wouldn’t have taken her there. I don’t care if he’s my uncle; I refuse to believe he knew anything about this. Any of it. Jurgensson or this other thing.”

  The other two nodded. “Left down here,” Rafe said.

  I continued, “He’s friends with Mullinax, but he isn’t there. And I didn’t get the impression Mullinax knew that his buddy Jacob has been killing women, or that he would approve of it if he did.”

  “Would he have called Drimmel after we left?” Grimaldi wondered.

  “If he did, we’ll deal with it when we get there,” Rafe said. “Right here. Go on, Savannah.”

  “I don’t know that I have a lot more to say,” I answered. “Jurgensson’s dead, Jacob isn’t at Daffodil Hill Farm, and he wouldn’t have gone to Uncle Sid’s. His daughter’s dead, and he didn’t like his son-in-law. His granddaughter’s away at college—not that he’d be likely to involve her—and his grandson’s in high school, and would be there this time of day. If he spent his time working on trucks and traveling, he might not have any other friends.”

  “So he’d take her to the house,” Grimaldi said. “And plan to be finished with her by the time his wife or Curtis comes home.”

  “We’re close,” Rafe said. “Right here.”

  Grimaldi took the right, and two minutes later the fields and woods gave way to the winding roads and large lawns of Sunnyside.

  “Do you remember where to go?”

  She nodded. “It’s just around the corner from here.”

  It was just around the corner. Grimaldi took it like Jeff Gordon, narrowly escaped clipping the postman’s truck that was idling there, and gunned the engine up the street. Twenty seconds later we powered up the long driveway and came to a quivering stop outside the garage.

  There was a moment’s pause.

  “No vehicle,” Grimaldi said.

  “Prob’ly inside the garage.”

  Maybe. Although last time we’d been here, Jacob had been working on a different car inside the garage. “He wasn’t driving anything with fins when you saw him at Daffodil Hill, was he?”

  “Fins?” Rafe repeated. “No, darlin’. He was driving a pickup. Blue and rusty.”

  That might fit into the second half of the garage, then. “Go look,” I said. “See if the pickup and the car with the fins are in there.”

  Rafe slipped out of the SUV and pulled his gun. Grimaldi got out on the other side and did the same, bracing her hands on the top of her open door to cover him as he made his way toward the garage.

  “There are windows on the side,” I called out.

  Unlike last time we’d been here, it was quiet. No big band music seeped out of the garage. But maybe Jacob didn’t like to rape and kill women to the standards. Maybe he needed something different, or the sound of silence, for that.

  Rafe made it to the corner of the house and crept along the brick over to the nearest window, shoulders against the wall behind him. He did a neat a hundred and eighty degree turn, and looked in the window. And ducked back out of sight. After a second, when nothing happened, he leaned over and peered again. “I see the fins. The other bay is empty.”

  “He isn’t here.”

  It was Grimaldi who said it, as she holstered her weapon, and her tone hit somewhere between resigned and hopeless. I knew just how she felt. If Jacob Drimmel had taken Agent Yung, we were the only thing that stood between her and being murdered, and we didn’t know where he’d taken her.

  Twenty-One

  Rafe was halfway down the path toward the SUV when the front door to the house opened. Grimaldi had already holstered her weapon, but Rafe hadn’t, and when he saw the realization on her face, he swung around and brought it up in firing stance.

  “Whoa!”

  Curtis—for he was the one who had opened the door—jumped back, eyes wide.

  “I didn’t do nothing!” he called out. “Don’t shoot me!”

  “It’s all right.” Rafe had already tucked the gun out of sight, in the holster at the small of his back. Out of sight if not out of mind. “Sorry,” he added. “I didn’t think anybody was home. Why aren’t you in school?”

  Curtis’s face fell. “Oh. Um…”

  Rafe waited, and eventually Curtis tried what he obviously thought was a charming smile. “You’re not with the truancy department, are you?”

  “There’s no truancy department. Get over here.”

  Rafe gestured. Curtis looked like he was thinking about jumping back inside and slamming the door, but he moved forward. Slowly. Dragging his feet with every step.

  “We’re not looking for you,” Rafe told him when he’d finally made it halfway down the walk, to where Rafe was standing. “We’re looking for your grandfather. Any idea where we can find him?”

  “He went out to the old Mullinax farm this morning,” Curtis said, readily enough, “to work on a rig.”

  “He’s not there anymore,” Rafe said. “We thought he’d come back here.”

  Curtis shook his head. “I ain’t seen him since this morning.”

  It finally, belatedly, dawned on him that the police, that Rafe, was here for a reason that didn’t have anything to do with him, and he turned pale. “What’s wrong? It it my gramma? Did something happen to my gramma?”

  “Your gramma’s fine. Gone to the homeless shelter with Mrs. Mullinax, her husband said.”

  Curtis nodded. “Mondays and Thursdays. She OK? You sure?”

  “I’m not sure,” Rafe said, “I haven’t talked to her, but I have no reason to think she’s not OK. That’s not why we’re here.”

  “Why’re you here? Other than looking for my granddad?”

  Rafe hesitated. And seemed to decide that he might as well put the cards on the table. “We have a missing federal agent. An FBI agent who came here from Memphis to work with us on a case. She was out at the Mullinax place this morning, and now she’s gone, and we can’t find her.”

  “You think my granddad saw her?” Curtis sounded intrigued rather than worried, at least so far.

  “Something like that,” Rafe said.

  Curtis must have heard something in his voice, or maybe seen it on his face. I don’t know what; Rafe had his back to me. But Curtis’s face hardened, and I saw his hands curl into fists. “You think he took her. That’s why you’re here. Isn’t it?”

  Rafe hesitated, and it was hard to blame him. “We think he might know something. If he isn’t involved, he might have seen her.”

  Curtis shook his head. “You think he took her. Just tell me the truth. That’s what you think. Isn’t it?”

  “We think it’s possible,” Rafe said.

  It was Curtis’s turn to hesitate. For just a second before he said, “I lied, OK? You’re the cops, and I didn’t know what you wanted, so I lied.”

  “About what?”

  Curtis gazed up at him. “That I hadn’t seen him since he left this morning. I did. He was here. About thirty minutes ago. Just long enough to walk in and see that I was home.”

  “You didn’t expect him back?”

  “I didn’t not expect him back. That’s not the point, OK? He was here. He walked in, looking to see if the house was empty, and when it wasn’t, he left again.”

  “Did he tell you where he was going?”

  “He said he was gonna go fishing,” Curtis said, with a glance up at the sky, where
the sun was burning down on us. “Like I’d believe anybody’d go fishing in weather like this.”

  “Where’d he go, then?” Grimaldi wanted to know.

  Curtis looked at her. “My boss,” Rafe told him.

  Curtis gave Rafe a look, gave Grimaldi another one, and shrugged. “Not sure. Coulda been anywhere.”

  “Surely you must have some idea. If he had an unconscious woman in the trunk of his car…”

  “He drives an old pickup truck,” Curtis said.

  “And he wanted to take her somewhere where he could…” Grimaldi trailed off, probably not quite sure how to frame the rest of the sentence for a seventeen year old boy.

  “Don’t sweat it,” Curtis told her. “I’m not stupid. I watch TV. I’ve seen the kinds of skin magazines he keeps in the garage.”

  Ewww.

  “I’ll take you to a place where he might be. Although I guess maybe I oughta get a pair of shoes first.”

  He turned around, brushed past Rafe and into the house.

  “Think he’s going to call his grandfather?” Grimaldi asked, softly.

  Rafe hesitated. “Nothing we can do about it if he is. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

  Grimaldi nodded. Curtis came back outside less than a minute later, with a pair of Nike’s on his feet and a set of keys in his hand. He might have had time to make a call or send a message, but maybe not.

  “It’s gonna be tight,” Rafe told him as they came toward the car. “You’ll have to share the back seat with Savannah and the baby.”

  “I’ll sit in the back.” Curtis moved to the rear of the car, yanked up the hatch and crawled into the cargo space in the back of the SUV.

  Grimaldi shrugged. I guess the fact that he wouldn’t be strapped in worried her less at the moment than getting to where we were going. “Take the wheel,” she told Rafe. “And you—” she glanced into the back at Curtis, “find something to hold onto.”

  Twenty seconds later we took off like rocket down the driveway and took the turn onto the road on two wheels. Curtis let out a whoop as he tumbled sideways like an overturned beetle, but it sounded more like excitement than pain.

  “Told you,” Grimaldi said over her shoulder. She was holding onto the door handle for all she was worth.

  I’m used to the way Rafe drives—even if he only rarely drives like this—so I just swayed back and forth with the motion of the car. “You’re taking this pretty calmly,” I told Curtis, after he had gotten himself back into an upright position and was kneeling on the floor of the car with his arms braced on the back of the seat.

  He gave me a sideways look. “He’s always been a bastard.”

  It’s a long way from bastard to serial killer and rapist, but OK. “Rafe’s grandfather wasn’t much to write home about, either. He shot Rafe’s dad because he didn’t want his daughter involved with a black man.”

  “My granddad wasn’t big on my dad, either,” Curtis said. “He never shot him, though. Just told him he couldn’t come around after my mom died and dad got outta prison.”

  “That must have been hard,” I said.

  Curtis shrugged. “My gramma, she’s all right. She took care of Christie and me. She didn’t let granddad beat on us too bad.”

  Not exactly a ringing endorsement. “I think Rafe’s mother probably tried. But she was just a girl herself, when he was born. Old Jim beat her, too.”

  “If we can stop talking about that for a second,” Rafe interrupted from the front seat, and his eyes met mine in the mirror, “mind telling me where we’re going, Curtis?”

  “Not sure,” Curtis said. “He has a fishing hole down on the Duck River. He coulda gone there.”

  “I don’t think he’s fishing,” Grimaldi began, and Curtis gave her a look.

  “I know he ain’t fishing. But it’s private and out of the way.”

  “That’s what we’re looking for,” Rafe said. “Where?”

  Curtis told him where the fishing hole was located, and Rafe figured out the directions in his head while the car was moving down the suburban road at sixty miles an hour. Once we hit the bigger road, he pushed it up to eighty. “Got any flashers on this thing?” he asked Grimaldi, who leaned over and flipped the switch. The rearview mirror lit up with blue lights.

  “Let’s leave the sirens off for now. We don’t want to warn him we’re coming.”

  No, we didn’t. If we gave him warning, there was a chance he’d kill Yung and dump her in the river before we got there, and if he did, it might be hard to prove he’d had anything to do with it.

  “How far is it?” I wanted to know.

  Curtis shrugged. “Twenty minutes?”

  “I can get us there in fifteen.” Rafe’s tone was grim, and I got the impression that if he did, it would be from sheer force of will.

  “Better hold on, then,” Grimaldi advised. We all took a better grip on whatever was near us.

  He was right, though. It was fourteen minutes and a little more by the time Curtis said, “It should be along here somewhere.”

  He sounded a little breathless, so maybe the excitement of driving with a madman at the wheel had worn off. But we were all in one piece, and nothing worse had happened than that a car that hadn’t gotten out of the way fast enough when we approached had ended up nose down in a ditch. It was a small ditch, so the driver should be able to get up on the other side without much problem. Or so it seemed to me. It hadn’t seemed important enough to either Rafe or Grimaldi to stop. Clearly the car in the ditch was a less urgent problem than Leslie Yung.

  “You’re taking this pretty calmly,” I told Curtis as we moved along at a much slower pace now, looking for the entrance to Jacob Drimmel’s fishing hole. The road was thickly forested, it had been several minutes since we’d seen any sign of habitation, and from the somewhat vague map in my head, I knew we were close to the river.

  He gave me a look. “That my grandfather might be a serial killer?”

  None of us had mentioned that, as far as I could recall, and I had my mouth open to say so when he added, “He’s been watching the news about that woman at the truck stop all week. And reading about it in the paper. When I asked him if he hadn’t been at the truck stop on the day she was found, he told me to mind my own business.”

  “That’s the case Agent Yung came here to consult on,” Rafe said, peering out the window at the trees. “That it?”

  He nodded to a slim opening between two trees that made the entrance to Daffodil Hill Farm look practically opulent.

  Curtis nodded. And then qualified it with an, “I think so.”

  “Better cut the lights,” Grimaldi said and reached for the switch, but Rafe had already done so.

  The SUV crept along the narrow track, with leaves brushing the windows and branches scraping the roof. “Doesn’t look like anyone else ever comes down here,” I said.

  Curtis shook his head. “That’s why he likes it. He likes his privacy.”

  “That why he told you to mind your own business?” Rafe glanced at him in the mirror.

  Curtis shrugged. “I suppose. He’s always liked being alone. Whenever somebody’s truck broke down three states away, so he could be gone for a couple days, he was always excited about it.”

  If those trips provided opportunities for him to stalk and kill women, I could well understand the excitement. “Was he on a trip that day last week when the dead women’s body was found at the truck stop?”

  “Just up to Nashville,” Curtis said. “He don’t go out on the road like he used to when he was working. But that car in the garage? He went up to Nashville and picked it up.”

  “And stopped by the truck stop on his way home?”

  “He knows people at every truck stop in the country,” Curtis said. “He goes over to the one by the interstate and has lunch there at least once a week.”

  So nobody would think anything of it if they saw him there. Especially if he was towing an antique car with fins behind the pickup.

&nbs
p; I was going to ask Curtis about his mother, but before I could, Rafe said, “Looks like it’s opening up ahead. We got a plan for what we’re gonna do when we get there?”

  “If Yung’s there,” Grimaldi said, pulling her gun out and checking it for bullets, “find and secure her. If she isn’t, take him into custody. Alive.”

  Rafe nodded. “You want me to stop here so we can go the rest of the way on foot, or keep going?”

  “Let’s take him by surprise,” Grimaldi said. “Keep going.”

  The SUV rolled forward. The path opened up into a little clearing by the side of the river. The water was muddy and sluggish, the way the Duck River usually looks: an unpleasant sort of greenish-brown.

  Jacob Drimmel’s truck was parked in the middle of the clearing. The engine was off and there was no sign of life.

  Rafe glanced at Curtis in the mirror. “He carrying?”

  “He keeps a gun in the truck when he goes on the road,” Curtis said. His voice was hushed, small, like either the place or the situation had finally gotten to him.

  Rafe nodded. “Stay here,” he told me in the rearview mirror. I nodded, and watched as he pulled the gun from the waistband of his jeans and made his way toward the truck. Grimaldi slid out on the other side of the SUV and left her door open. I guess they didn’t want to startle Jacob, if he hadn’t heard the car pull up.

  While Grimaldi made her way around the SUV, gun out and ready, Rafe sidled up to the rear of the truck and glanced into the bed and through the window before he made it to the front, where he could put his hand on the hood. It must have been warm, because he nodded to her.

  Both of them turned and scanned the area.

  I did, too, from where I was sitting inside the SUV.

  There was nothing to see or hear, just the soft rippling of the water as it brushed along the edges of the river.

  Until a protesting shriek cut through the silence, and was abruptly shut off.

  Rafe took off running. Grimaldi did, too.

  “Move,” Curtis told me, his voice panicked.