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

by Jenna Bennett

  “No,” Goins said. And added, “We’ll know it when we find it.”

  Sure. “Well, I’m going to take my daughter inside and put her to bed.” And hope she stayed that way. Although that wasn’t likely, if a herd of CSI techs started to crawl all over the house.

  My phone dinged a return message, and I opened it. Yep, a response from Rafe. A short and succinct one. WTF?

  He won’t tell me what they’re looking for, I texted back.

  A few seconds passed, and then I got another message. Ignore it. We didnt do nothing.

  No, we hadn’t. Ignoring it was easier said than done, though. When someone, or a whole lot of someones, crawl all over your property and search through your things to try to find evidence to tie you to a murder you didn’t commit, it feels like a violation even if you didn’t do anything wrong. But I did my best. Just gave Goins a tight nod, and went to pull Carrie out of the Volvo.

  I had the car door open when a hail went up from one of the crime scene techs on the other side of the yard. I shaded my eyes and saw that she was standing beside the trash and recycling bins I had filled earlier this morning.

  Well, it made sense they’d check those. If we wanted to throw something away, it would be in trash or recycling. In fact, we had thrown away lots of things in trash or recycling.

  Now the empty beer bottles I’d dumped in the recycling bin this morning were all over the grass, looking for all the world like someone in our household had a real problem with alcohol. Goins would probably think Rafe did.

  I glanced at Carrie—still asleep—and closed the door again, gently, before I made my way across the grass. “We had a party last night. It’s not like we usually have this many empty bottles in recycling.”

  Rafe drinks beer, but not in excessive amounts, and I’m nursing, so I’m off anything with alcohol in it for the duration. Since I’d been off alcohol during the nine months I was pregnant, too, I was used to it by now.

  “I put those in there this morning,” I added. “Along with the pizza boxes in the trash can. We don’t usually eat five pizzas by ourselves, either.”

  The crime scene tech gave me a look I interpreted as sympathetic, and Goins leered, as if he didn’t believe a word of what I’d just said. “How about this?” He brandished something. “Did you put this in the bin this morning?”

  It was a knife. A familiar one. “That’s Rafe’s,” I said. “Or at least it looks like Rafe’s. Was that in there?”

  The crime scene tech—a woman in her forties—nodded.

  “Hidden under the bottles,” Goins added, with relish.

  “You mean it was at the bottom of the bin.” Which had had some cardboard in it when I dumped the bottles on top this morning. “That’s not surprising, you know. The knife’s heavier than the cardboard. It would have slid to the bottom.” Or might have. It wasn’t unreasonable to think it would. “That doesn’t mean anyone tried to hide it.”

  “Why would your husband throw his knife away?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “I don’t know that it’s his. It looks like his, but that doesn’t mean it is. One knife looks very much like another.” Just like one gun looks much like another. At least until you do a ballistics test on it. Which you can’t do on a knife. “But if he threw it away, it must be because it’s broken.”

  Goins flicked it open and looked at it. “Doesn’t look broken to me.”

  “Then there’s no reason he would have thrown it away. And are you sure you should be handling it quite so much? Even with gloves on? There could be fingerprints, right?”

  He didn’t say anything to that, although the crime scene tech’s lips quirked as she dug a brown paper bag out of a pocket of her coveralls and offered it. I deduced she might not be any more fond of Goins than me.

  The knife went into the bag. I said, “Unless there’s a law against throwing away your own property, I don’t see that this proves anything. Besides, unless Brennan was stabbed to death, why does it matter that Rafe threw away his knife?” If he had.

  “That’s for me to know,” Goins said.

  I rolled my eyes. “Right. And for me to find out. I’ll be inside. With the baby.”

  I stalked back across the grass to the Volvo. This time, nothing happened to stop me from lifting Carrie out and moving toward the stairs with her. I’d only made it a few steps when both doors in the squad car opened.

  “Oh.” I smiled. And felt some of the tension leave my body. “It’s you two. What are you doing here?”

  “Just keepin’ an eye on things,” Office Lyle Spicer told me. He and his partner, George Truman, were the cops who had answered the 911 call that morning when Rafe and I had found Brenda Puckett dead inside Mrs. J’s house. We’d become friendly since then. They knew Rafe, and liked him, and seemed to like me well enough too, and although they didn’t seem to have anything to do with the search, just the fact that they were here made me feel better.

  Spicer, in his forties with ginger hair starting to go silver, and what’s usually called a lived-in face, bent to look at Carrie. “What’s your husband done now?” he asked.

  “Nothing. He lost his job at the TBI. Then his boss—not Wendell, the guy above Wendell—drove his car off the road a couple of nights ago. We were in Sweetwater seeing my mother and having dinner with Grimaldi. Rafe was nowhere near Ridgetop. But Goins doesn’t seem open to reason.”

  Spicer straightened. His expression said he wasn’t surprised to hear it. “The detective called us. Although I guess I should call her ‘the chief’ now.” His eyes twinkled.

  I smiled back. “I guess so. She’s doing well. I saw her on Thursday. She wants Rafe to come down there and work with her.”

  “He could do worse,” Spicer said. Meanwhile, it was Truman’s turn to look at Carrie. He’s twenty years younger than his partner, half a decade younger than me, and has a tendency to blush if I flirt with him. Since I was a sedate, married woman with a baby now, I didn’t try. Just gave him a smile, too.

  “It’s good to see you both. Do you want to come inside?”

  Spicer shook his head. “We’d better stay out here as long as they’re out here.” His glance took in Goins and the CSI crew.

  “They’re coming in later. When they’re finished here. Feel free to join them.”

  “I don’t think there’ll be much point,” Truman said. “I think they found what they were looking for.”

  “The knife?”

  He shrugged. There was a pair of good shoulders inside the uniform jacket. “Is that what they found in the bin?”

  I nodded. “It looked like Rafe’s, but then a lot of knives look the same.”

  “You could ask him,” Spicer said, and I supposed I could.

  “When I put the baby down. I told him they were here. He might be on his way home.” I wouldn’t be surprised if he were. And I also wouldn’t be surprised if he were somewhat pissed when he got here. Especially as this little exercise had taken him away from the task of helping José and Clayton, probably—or at least possibly—for the last time.

  “We’ll be out here if you need us,” Spicer said and gave Truman a nudge. They made their way back into the squad car. I carried the car seat up the steps to the porch, put it down while I unlocked the door, and picked it up again to carry inside.

  Once she was safely deposited on the table in the parlor—no sense in taking her out of the seat only to put her in her bed; she might as well finish sleeping where she was—I shrugged out of my coat and dug the phone back out of my purse. They found a knife in the recycling bin. Looks like yours.

  It took a few seconds before the response came back. I got mine.

  So it wasn’t Rafe’s knife, then. That was a relief, although it might be hard to prove. He might have had two—or more accurately, Goins might surmise he’d had two—or he could have taken the one he was carrying off someone just today. Wendell or one of the boys, as a logical for instance. They all had the same equipment. When they carried guns,
they were all the same guns, too. Standard issue.

  Want me to tell Goins that?

  On my way, the response came back.

  OK, then. So I could expect my husband to show up in the next fifteen or twenty minutes, after having pushed the Harley-Davidson to its limits on the way here from Antioch or wherever he’d been when he got my initial text. And he wouldn’t be happy.

  I settled into the sofa to wait, with the TV on a rerun of Barnwood Builders.

  Before Rafe got there, though, the search moved inside. Goins opened the door, without so much as a knock, and waved the crime scene crew inside. “Check it top to bottom. Don’t miss anything.”

  “How many stories?” someone asked. It wasn’t the woman from earlier, so maybe the CSI crew had a boss, and she wasn’t it.

  Goins didn’t know the answer, so I supplied it. “Three, plus the basement. The top floor is just a big ballroom. Bedrooms and bath on the second floor. Common rooms down here. Basement entrance in the kitchen.”

  They spread out. Goins remained standing in the hallway, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet.

  “Rafe’s on his way,” I told him. “He isn’t happy. And he’s got his knife.”

  Goins’s eyes narrowed. “Is that a threat?”

  I’d ended up with the same crime scene tech again, wandering around the parlor peering at things, and now she snorted. Softly, but I think Goins heard it, because he scowled at her.

  “No,” I said. “It’s a public service announcement, telling you that my husband is carrying his knife and the one you found outside isn’t his.”

  “That doesn’t prove anything,” Goins said. And of course it didn’t. And anyway, I wasn’t getting paid to argue with him. I turned my attention to the screen, while the CSI tech finished her circuit of the room and moved on the library next door.

  It took her maybe ten minutes to make her way into the kitchen, and then I heard the basement door open. It squeaks. On purpose. It gives the house a sort of spooky feel, but in the event that someone were to make it through the gazebo floor and down the shaft and through the tunnel and into the basement, it also lets us know that someone’s there. At least that was the rationale Rafe gave me when I asked him if he could oil the hinges.

  There was squeaking from over my head, too, where someone was wandering around what used to be Mrs. Jenkins’s lavender bedroom, stepping on the century-old floorboards. And from even farther away, noises from the top floor. There’s nothing up there. Just a big, empty room that was used for dancing a long time ago. There’s a view of the downtown skyline—or at least of the very tops of the taller buildings—from the southwest facing windows.

  Closer to hand, steps stomped down the basement stairs. I wondered whether she’d notice the door into the tunnel—it’s sort of hidden under the stairs—and sure enough… “There’s a boarded-up door here.”

  I got to my feet and wandered into the kitchen. Goins was there before me, already rattling down the rickety stairs into the dank and cold basement. “It’s the entrance to a tunnel that runs over to the gazebo,” I directed down the stairs. “We boarded it up so no one can get in that way. Feel free to pry the nails out as long as you hammer them in again.”

  Nobody said anything, and I went back to the parlor and the TV. Carrie stayed asleep through it all.

  It was a few minutes later that I heard the familiar growl of the Harley coming up the driveway. The sound cut off, and then I heard the slamming of a couple of car doors. Spicer and Truman must have exited the squad car to say hello to Rafe. Or maybe to stop him from barging through the door and pinning Goins to the wall by his throat.

  I got up and peered through the window.

  Yes, there they were, having what looked like a pleasant enough conversation at the bottom of the stairs. The cops had both put themselves between Rafe and the staircase, but he couldn’t be too upset, or he’d have mowed them both down—or moved them both aside—to get in here.

  Instead, they were standing there shooting the breeze. Spicer and Truman were both smiling, and as I watched, the tension left Rafe’s shoulders, too. His eyes turned from flat black to their usual dark brown, and eventually he smiled. The encounter ended with Spicer slapping him on the shoulder before he and Truman went back to the squad car and Rafe came up the stairs.

  I met him at the door. “There are three CSI techs plus Goins. Two of them are upstairs. Goins and the third are in the basement.”

  Rafe’s brow arched, but he didn’t say anything.

  “They found the door to the tunnel. I think they think we’re hiding something back there.”

  “Then they’ll be disappointed,” Rafe said. “Scuse me, darlin’.”

  He headed past me down the hallway to the kitchen. I trailed behind, and stayed at the stop of the stairs when he started down. There was a sound of prying coming from below.

  “You better make sure you nail that up again after you’re done,” Rafe informed them. His tone was friendly, but I don’t think any thinking person could have missed the undertone. Goins’s shadow, which was all I could see of him, straightened its shoulders.

  “We have a warrant.”

  “I didn’t say a word about your warrant,” Rafe told him. “See this?”

  There was a pause, then Goins’s voice came back. “Are you threatening me?”

  “Hell, no,” Rafe said. “What I’m doing, is showing you my knife. That I’ve had in my pocket all day. All day yesterday, too. And the day before that. So whatever you found in the bin outside didn’t belong to me.”

  “You might have had two,” Goins said.

  Rafe’s voice stayed friendly, yet distinctly unsettling. “No law against a man having more than one knife. But as it happens, I only have this one.”

  “How do I know one of your friends didn’t give it to you this morning?” Goins wanted to know.

  There was a beat. Then— “You don’t. You could ask’em. But you’re gonna have to hurry, since two of’em are on their way outta town.”

  “Fleeing!”

  I don’t know if Rafe rolled his eyes, but I was tempted to. “They’re all four of’em gainfully employed by the TBI, Detective. Neither one’s any happier about Brennan being dead than I am.”

  “There was someone in the yard last night,” I said down the stairs. “I saw him, or her, when I woke up to feed the baby. It was a little after two, I think. By the time Rafe got down there, whoever it was was gone. But obviously that’s who dropped the knife in the recycling bin.”

  “Likely story,” Goins said, with a heavy dose of disbelief running through his voice. “Why would anyone want to drop their knife in your recycling bin?”

  Let me count the ways… “He used it to rob someone two blocks over, and didn’t want it on him in case the police caught up?”

  “Was there a robbery two blocks over?” Goins asked.

  “That’d be your job to figure out, Detective,” Rafe said. “We’re civilians.”

  “But there are often robberies around here,” I added, still talking down the stairs. “You may have noticed that this is what they call a transitional neighborhood. For the most part, the criminal elements leave us alone, but this guy might not have known whose recycling bin it was he dropped his weapon into.”

  “Or he mighta thought the trash would get picked up before anybody found it,” Rafe added. “No reason to think anybody’d be turning my property over this weekend, after all.”

  No reason at all.

  “Or maybe that’s the knife you used to cut Brennan’s brake cables,” Goins said triumphantly.

  “You keep saying that,” I told him. “But you still haven’t told us for sure that that’s what happened.”

  And didn’t this time, either. The CSI tech must have gotten the door open, or maybe she came back from crawling the tunnel to the end and back. In either case, I heard her say, “Nothing.”

  “Let me in,” Goins said.

  I pictured him crawli
ng down the dirt tunnel on hands and knees, and shook my head. Rafe must have had the same thought, because when he came up the stairs a few seconds later, he told me, “Ain’t no talking to some people.”

  I shook my head. “I’m sorry you had to come back for this. I could have handled it on my own. It isn’t like they’re going to find anything, after all.”

  “They found a knife,” Rafe said. He put his hand on my lower back and nudged me down the hallway toward the front door and the parlor. “This guy you saw in the middle of the night. Could it have been somebody putting a knife in the recycling bin?”

  I glanced over at Carrie. She was still asleep. “Of course it could have. I only got a glimpse of him out the window. He might have been a she. That’s how little I saw. But it was on the side of the house where the bins are.”

  Rafe nodded. “This is circumstantial evidence in any case. The knife was outside, not in the house. Anybody coulda put it there. And we were an hour away on Thursday night, nowhere near Brennan’s house. It’s nothing to worry about.”

  I wasn’t really worried. But in deference to the fact that we had six cops, or three cops and three crime scene investigators, on the property, I lowered my voice. “Do you get the impression someone’s trying to set you up?”

  “Goins,” said Rafe.

  I shook my head. “Not Goins. He’s just following the trail. Grimaldi said he didn’t have much imagination. But somebody put that knife there. And there’s too big of a coincidence that it wouldn’t have something to do with Doug Brennan. Besides, how did Goins know to get a warrant and search the place? We’ve both told him we weren’t in Nashville on Thursday night. He spoke to Grimaldi and she told him the same thing. There’s a reason he keeps coming back to you for this.” And it wasn’t because Rafe looked guilty. Any idiot could see that he wasn’t.

  Except maybe the idiot that was Rick Goins.

  “You know,” I said, “we got very lucky with both Grimaldi and Jaime Mendoza. And for that matter with Spicer and Truman. It’s probably just the law of averages that we should end up with someone like Goins sooner or later.”

  Rafe grunted, but he put his arm around me and dropped a kiss on the top of my head. “Makes me wanna go to Sweetwater and work for Tammy, if this is the way it’s gonna be from now on.”