Wrongful Termination: A Savannah Martin Novel (Savannah Martin Mystery Book 16)

by Jenna Bennett

  “That didn’t sound like good news,” I said, as the Oak Street Cemetery went by outside the window.

  Rafe shrugged. “Can’t be nothing too bad, or he woulda said something.”

  Maybe. “It didn’t sound like he convinced anyone to let you keep your job, anyway.” Or find him another one.

  Rafe shook his head. “Guess we’ll find out tomorrow.” He turned into the driveway to the mansion. I deduced the subject was closed for now.

  * * *

  Grimaldi was already there when we walked into Beulah’s Meat’n Three at six-thirty sharp, seated in a booth in the rear with her back to the wall.

  Beulah’s is a small cinderblock building with all the charm of a cargo container. But it has a loyal clientele who seems to appreciate the plastic tablecloths and cheap food, so it’s always busy. Or at least that’s the way it had always been when Beulah Odom ran it. Now that it was open again, after several months of Yvonne McCoy haggling with the Otis Odoms over the will, I was pleased to see that the patrons were back, in droves, and that everything still looked the same as it had before.

  Yvonne greeted us at the door, with a wink for Rafe, a “Hello, princess!” for me, and a descent into the baby carrier to gush over Carrie. “She’s gorgeous!”

  “We think so,” I said modestly.

  “Looks like her daddy.” She winked at Rafe, who grinned back. Since I’d told my mother the same thing earlier, there wasn’t anything I could say about this slight insult to my own looks.

  Yvonne looked around. “We’re pretty full up. But if you can wait a couple minutes…”

  “We’re meeting someone,” Rafe told her. “She’s in the back.”

  Yvonne glanced that way. “The new police chief? You in trouble already, handsome? That didn’t take long.”

  “She’s an old friend,” I said, before Yvonne could get any actual ideas and start spreading them around. “We’ll just head on back.”

  Yvonne nodded. “Good to see you, princess.” She turned to Rafe. “And it’s always good to see you!”

  He gave her what I knew was a melting grin, even if I couldn’t see it because I’d started walking. “You too, sugar.”

  “You’re incorrigible,” I told him a few seconds later, when we’d reached Grimaldi’s table. He scooted in next to her, which let me put the baby carrier on the seat next to me. Beulah’s is narrow enough that I couldn’t really leave it in the aisle, and it had the added benefit that Rafe, too, could put his back to the wall.

  Grimaldi arched her brows, and glanced in Yvonne’s direction. “Old friends?”

  “Old bedmates,” I said. “One-night-stand in high school.”

  “That’s a long time ago.”

  The corner of Rafe’s mouth turned up. “What can I say? I’m unforgettable.”

  While that was certainly true, I rolled my eyes and addressed Grimaldi. “We saw Dix this afternoon. And he gave us a slightly clearer picture of what’s going on.”

  Her expression didn’t change. But she also didn’t ask me to explain, so I figured what Dix hadn’t exactly said, and what we’d surmised from it, was pretty close to correct.

  “I gotta couple questions,” Rafe added.

  Grimaldi nodded.

  “I don’t imagine this changes a whole lot of what we talked about earlier.”

  She shook her head.

  “Is there an expiration date on the job you offered me?”

  “You mean, do you have to decide by a certain time? No. I’ll take you anytime I can get you. But sooner would be better.”

  Rafe nodded. “I meant at the end of it.”

  “No,” Grimaldi said again. “I’m the chief of police. It’s official. I can hire whomever I want.” And fire whomever she wanted, I assumed. “If I hire you, you work for the Columbia PD, not me. If I stop being the chief of police, you’d still have a job. If you wanted one.”

  “Do you…” I thought about what I wanted to say, and how I wanted to say it, before I continued, just in case someone at a nearby table was close enough to hear the conversation, “Is there a chance you won’t be staying for long?”

  “I have a contract for a year,” Grimaldi said. “It’s shorter than usual, but under the circumstances—” She proceeded to outline the circumstances, minus what I figured was the most important one. “With me being younger than usual, and not from around here, I figure the city council thought there was a chance things might not work out, so they wanted to give me an easy out if I needed one. If I decide, at the end of the first year, that I want to stay, and I’ve done the job to their satisfaction, there’s no reason why they wouldn’t extend the contract.”

  “They said that?”

  She nodded.

  I opened my mouth to ask something else, but before I could, a waitress appeared next to the table, order pad in hand and gum snapping. “What can I getya to eat?”

  I hadn’t looked at the menu, nor had any of the others. But we’d all been here enough to know that they had the basic fare. I asked for a salad, Rafe for a burger with fries, and Grimaldi for the meatloaf special with green beans and mashed potatoes. The waitress withdrew and we got back to business.

  “Any idea yet what you’re dealing with?” Rafe wanted to know.

  Grimaldi shook her head. “I’ve only been here three days. It’s going to take longer than that.”

  He shifted his weight on the red Naugahyde. The booths have been here for going on half a century, longer than either he or I have been alive, and between you and me, aren’t the most comfortable seating. “I imagine Tucker told you all the reasons you shouldn’t hire me.”

  “I didn’t tell him I was hoping to,” Grimaldi said, “but yes. He has some preconceived notions about you that he wanted to share with me.”

  The waitress approached with my iced tea in one hand, the coffee pot in the other, and the handles of two mugs looped through her fingers. We sat in silence while she deposited the tea and mugs on the table, filled them with coffee, and wandered off again, telling us over her shoulder, “The food’ll be right up.”

  “They ain’t so much preconceived,” Rafe said when she was out of range. “He arrested me once. And hassled me plenty before that.”

  Grimaldi nodded. “So he said.”

  “Do you know what happened back then?” I wanted to know. “With Rafe and Billy Scruggs?”

  “I know enough,” Grimaldi said. “And what I didn’t know, Tucker filled in.”

  Probably not with any degree of accuracy. I opened my mouth to say so, but Rafe shook his head. “Leave it.”

  Fine. I picked up my tea and took a sip instead. Meanwhile, Rafe turned back to Grimaldi. “I imagine he wouldn’t be best pleased to work with me.”

  “I imagine not,” Grimaldi agreed. “But I wasn’t planning to put you in narcotics anyway.”

  “That what Tucker’s doing?”

  “For a while now. I guess he wasn’t doing that back when you knew him?”

  “He was just a patrol officer,” Rafe said. “And on my case a lot.”

  Grimaldi nodded. “If I’d been a patrol officer when you were a teenager, I’d have been on your case, too.”

  And now she wanted to hire him. Funny how that had worked out.

  “I guess you were a law-abiding teenager?” I asked.

  Grimaldi glanced at me. “For the most part. After my mother passed, I acted out a little.”

  Not surprising, I guess. Fourteen is a tough age for a young girl to lose her mother.

  Not that there’s ever a good time. “You grew up in Ohio, right? Columbus? How did you end up here?”

  She opened her mouth, and I added, “In Nashville, I mean. I know how you ended up in Sweetwater.”

  “My college roommate was from Nashville,” Grimaldi said. “She talked about it a lot. And I wanted to work in a city on the I-65 corridor.”

  Interstate 65? “Why?”

  She shifted on the bench seat. Glanced beyond me to the restaurant and
then back to my face. “I grew up in Columbus, Indiana. It’s a small city, forty thousand people or so, south of Indianapolis. Similar in size to Columbia. Nowhere near the size of Columbus, Ohio.”

  “On I-65.” Or so I assumed. Not just because she’d mentioned the I-65 corridor, but because Interstate 65 runs from Alabama up through Nashville, Louisville, and Indianapolis almost all the way to Chicago.

  Grimaldi nodded. “My mother’s body was found at a truck stop off I-65 just at the Kentucky/Tennessee border.”

  A truck stop? I opened my mouth and closed it again.

  Six months ago or so, Grimaldi and I had visited a truck stop off I-65 in Nashville. It was the day after what should have been my wedding day, after Rafe didn’t show up to get married, and we were trying to figure out where the dead body in my bed had come from. The quest had taken us to the truck stop off Trinity Lane in north-east Nashville, where we’d made the acquaintance of some of the lot lizards working the truck stop.

  “Um…” I said. “Your mother wasn’t…?” Was she?

  Grimaldi shook her head. “She worked the night shift at a motel near the interstate. One morning, she didn’t come home. They found her a day later a couple of state lines away.”

  That would be a case for the FBI, then, and not local law enforcement. “Did they never find out what happened to her?”

  “It was obvious what happened,” Grimaldi said. “She was picked up by somebody, raped and strangled, and dumped by the side of the road. But no, no one was ever arrested for it.”

  “How come you didn’t join the FBI?” Rafe wanted to know. “It’d be their case, wouldn’t it?”

  “I wanted to work along I-65,” Grimaldi said. “There have been at least a dozen women found dead along I-65, from Mobile to Gary, in the past twenty years.”

  My eyes widened. “And no one’s been arrested for any of the murders?”

  She shook her head. “I thought, if I kept an ear out, I might learn something new. Something that might help.” After a second she added, “You didn’t come here to talk about this, though.”

  No. Although it was interesting. But I surmised that she was the one who didn’t want to talk about it anymore, and who could blame her?

  “So now you’re here. Not very far from I-65 still.”

  She nodded. “But with more recent crimes to worry about.”

  Indeed. “Brennan called me,” Rafe said, just as the waitress approached with the platters of food. “I’m gonna have to go back and talk to him tomorrow.”

  “Will he offer you your job back?” Grimaldi nodded her thanks to the waitress for the plate of meatloaf that descended.

  Rafe waited until his burger and my salad had also been deposited on the table and the waitress had withdrawn before he answered. “No idea. He didn’t say on the phone. Just asked if I could stop by and see him tomorrow.”

  “Today,” I added. “This afternoon. It was only after Rafe told him we aren’t in Nashville, that he changed it until tomorrow.”

  Grimaldi picked up her fork. “D’you think he’s worked something out and is planning to keep you on? Or offer you a different job?”

  “He already did that,” Rafe said, and detailed Brennan’s suggestions from yesterday. “Unless he’s come up with something better, I don’t figure you need to worry about it.”

  Grimaldi nodded, plunging her fork into the green beans. “I’d like to have you here.” She glanced at me. “Both of you, but for the department side of things, mainly your husband.”

  I nodded.

  “This isn’t going to be an easy takeover no matter how you slice it,” Grimaldi said. “There are plenty like Tucker, who don’t like me because I’m a woman, and younger than they are. By a lot of years. And I’m not local. I fully expect some pushback from that type, for any or all those reasons. There are people in the department who—probably very sincerely—thought they deserved a shot at the chief’s position when Carter left. And instead they got me, and now they’ve got to be polite to me—because I’m rank—and obey my orders. That’s going to stick in some craws. And beyond that, there are the other concerns.”

  The ones we wouldn’t mention by name or definition. But the employees and activities Grimaldi was here to root out, if they existed.

  “None of it’s going to be much fun. And I’d like somebody around I can trust. So I don’t have to rely only on my own observations and instincts.” She toasted Rafe with a green bean on the tines of her fork. “You’ve got good instincts. And we’ve worked together before. I know I can trust you.”

  “I think there are probably a few other people you can trust, too, you know,” I said. “Patrick Nolan is dating Darcy. He’s probably trustworthy. And his partner, Lupe Vasquez. I’ve dealt with her a few times—Rafe has, too—and she seems like she’s a good cop as well as a decent human being.”

  “I’m sure most of them are decent human beings,” Grimaldi said. “Some of them might even be good people but bad cops. And it isn’t always easy to see the difference.”

  Maybe not.

  She turned to Rafe, who told her, “Lemme see what Brennan wants. If it ain’t a nice promotion with a big, red bow on it—and I don’t figure it is—you got yourself a deal.”

  Grimaldi nodded. “I appreciate it.”

  “Don’t mention it,” Rafe said. And grinned. Evilly. “If it gets me the chance to slam the cell door behind Tucker, it’ll all be worth it.”

  “Just make sure he’s guilty first,” Grimaldi said.

  Chapter Seven

  We made it to Nashville in the late morning on Friday, and Rafe dropped me and Carrie at the house. “I’ll just take the bike up to the TBI and see what Brennan wants.”

  “Take the Volvo,” I said. Not only was it cold, but— “You can go and buy beer for tonight on your way home. Hard to do that on the bike.” And I had no particular need to go with him on that errand. Nor any particular expertise when it came to picking out beers.

  Not that they were likely to be fancy beers. We’d probably end up with a few six packs of something like Budweiser or Corona, instead of a hip collection of local craft beers. Rafe isn’t fancy, and I didn’t think any of the others were, either.

  So he helped me inside with Carrie and all her assorted stuff, and then he got back in the Volvo and took off up the road toward Trinity Lane and the TBI.

  I fed Carrie, and burped her, and changed her diaper, and gave her tummy time on a blanket on the floor, and time on her back, all while I watched her intently, because that’s what you do when you have a six-week-old baby.

  When she went down for a nap I spent some time moving around the downstairs tidying up, since we’d have people over tonight. And they aren’t any more likely to care about the dust on the mantel than they are about the beer they drink, but I’m enough my mother’s daughter that I care about presenting my home in the best light. So I dusted, and straightened, and pulled out the vacuum to get the dust bunnies out of the corners. I was down on my hands and knees straightening the fringe on the old Persian rug in the front parlor when I heard a car pull up outside.

  I assumed it was Rafe coming back, and I was busy, so I didn’t go to greet him at the door. Instead, I was still on the floor when the doorbell rang, busily making sure every strand of fringe was going in the right direction.

  When I looked over my shoulder, a head was staring at me through the window in the top of the door, looking sort of disconnected from the rest of its body, which I assumed was also outside.

  I got to my feet with what dignity I could muster, and made my way to the door. Where I kept the security chain on when I opened the door a crack. It’s never a bad idea to be careful. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m looking for Rafael Collier,” the man outside said. His voice was a bit gruff, but otherwise polite enough. And he pulled a wallet out of the inside pocket of his jacket and opened it for a second, flashing a badge.

  “Oh.” This must be Mr. Brennan, who maybe hadn�
��t had the patience to wait until Rafe got there, but had come looking for him instead. “He went to the TBI building. Maybe forty minutes ago. If you hurry, you might be able to catch him.” He’d probably stopped in to talk to Wendell and any of the boys who were inhouse, too, before he went to buy the beer.

  The guy hesitated. I thought he might say something else, but after a second he just nodded and turned away.

  “You’re welcome,” I told his back, and watched as he walked down the steps and got into the vehicle parked behind Rafe’s Harley-Davidson. It wasn’t an official TBI vehicle—they’re white with the TBI logo on the door—but maybe the higher ups at the TBI drove their own cars to work. This was a fairly nice, late model Toyota SUV of the sporty type, with big, beefy tires.

  Rafe rolled in sometime in the middle of the afternoon with the trunk full of beer, all of which went into the fridge to stay cold for later.

  “So did Brennan find you?” I asked after he’d unloaded everything and was sitting at the kitchen table eating a sandwich. I’d done my best, but it couldn’t match my mother’s elegant concoction from yesterday with its little ruffle of lettuce and paper thin onion. Rafe didn’t seem to mind. He was happily scarfing down turkey and Swiss on whole wheat.

  And shook his head at my question. “Whaddaya mean, did he find me?”

  “He showed up here thirty or forty minutes after you left.” After a second I added, “At least I assumed it was Brennan.”

  Rafe swallowed. “Small, skinny guy in his forties? Thinning hair and glasses?”

  Not at all. “Must have been someone else. This guy was tall, almost as tall as you, and beefy. He did have thinning hair, but no glasses.”

  “What did he want?” Rafe asked and took another bite of the sandwich.

  “You. At least that’s what he said. That he was looking for Rafael Collier.”

  Rafe shrugged. “If it was important, I’m sure he’ll be back.”

  Probably so. “So Brennan wasn’t there?”

  Rafe shook his head. “Didn’t come to work today, they said. He did leave word that they were supposed to send me up, but since he hadn’t shown up, they wouldn’t let me in.” He sounded deeply disgusted. “I tried calling him, but he didn’t pick up.”