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

by Jenna Bennett

  He and Truman must have either been in the area, or had recognized our address when the call came over the radio, and had high-tailed it over here.

  It must have been an official question, because Rafe explained that we’d come home from dinner and had found Malcolm on the porch. The lights had been off, and we hadn’t noticed him until we’d stopped the car. At that point, Rafe had opened the door first, to get the light turned on, before he’d done what he could for Malcolm. “There’s a knife—” he began, and Truman went to pick it up.

  At that point, the paramedics must have done what they could for Malcolm, and loaded him into the ambulance to take to the hospital. He must still be hanging on, and they had hopefully attached him to a bag of blood, so he’d continue to hang on, because they squealed down the driveway—or more likely across the grass—with sirens screaming.

  “C’mon inside,” Rafe said in the silence that ensued. “It’s cold out here. And I wanna wash my hands.”

  They came into the foyer. I twisted my head so I could nod at them over the back of the sofa. I managed a sort of grimace that might pass in low light, but it wasn’t in me to smile graciously at the moment. Even Mother couldn’t have faulted me for that.

  “Savannah’s feeding the baby,” Rafe said; they both blushed, not just Truman, “so why don’t we go back to the kitchen. I’ll stop in at the bathroom on our way past.”

  That seemed to be acceptable, because all three of them stomped down the hallway. Nobody said anything about Rafe not washing his hands. I heard the water kick on in the small powder room off the hallway, and a few seconds later, the scraping of chair legs in the kitchen, as Spicer and Truman seated themselves.

  Rafe came out a minute later, and the interview continued. “So y’all came home from dinner,” Spicer said, “and found the young man on the porch. Any idea what he was doing there?”

  I imagined Rafe shaking his head. “He lives two houses up. Works at the gas station on the corner of Dresden and Dickerson. Mighta wanted to ask a question. Mighta seen the activity earlier and wanted to know what was going on.”

  That would certainly make sense.

  “Or he mighta wanted to tell us something. Somebody was in the yard last night. Somebody who maybe put that knife in the recycling bin. The knife that Goins found.”

  This time I imagined Spicer and Truman nodding.

  “Malcolm works the late shift sometimes. He mighta been on his way home last night, and seen something. Maybe he came to tell us about it. Or maybe he saw somebody now. Somebody doing something he oughta not be doing. And maybe Malcolm went to confront him, and the guy stabbed him.”

  “What do you figure this somebody was doing,” Spicer wanted to know, “that he didn’t want anybody seeing?”

  I imagined Rafe shrugging. “Coulda been anything. Trying to break in. Trying to steal the Harley. Trying to plant more evidence.”

  “You think somebody’s trying to frame you for Doug Brennan’s murder?”

  “I think somebody’s trying to do something,” Rafe said. “I’m not even sure Brennan was murdered. But somebody seems bent on involving me in it. I wasn’t even here that night. I was in Sweetwater, in Savannah’s mama’s house. But Goins don’t seem like he wants to let go of the idea that I had something to do with it. And he didn’t come up with that on his own. Somebody told him Brennan fired me. Somebody prob’ly made it sound a lot worse than it was. And somebody mighta had a good reason for that.”

  “Because he’s the one who killed Brennan!” Truman said.

  Rafe didn’t respond to that, but I imagine he nodded. Or at least shrugged. “Goins ain’t gonna tell me nothing. Tammy’s in Columbia, and I don’t wanna ask Mendoza for a favor.”

  I hid a smile. I don’t know why I bothered, since nobody but Carrie could see me. But no, while my husband and Jaime Mendoza get along just fine, Rafe isn’t likely to ask Mendoza to go out of his way for him. He heard that Mother asked Mendoza to marry me while Rafe was missing, but while I don’t think he’s in any doubt as to how I feel about him—or how Mother feels about him at this point—there’s no denying that Mendoza is both gorgeous and charming.

  There was a pause after Rafe’s statement. I figured Spicer and Truman were contemplating what Rafe was saying, or rather, what he hadn’t said, in so many words.

  “Whaddaya need?” Spicer said finally, signaling his willingness to at least consider it, even if he wasn’t quite committed to doing whatever it was yet.

  “I just need to know who Goins spoke to at the TBI, who put the bug in his ear that I mighta wanted Brennan dead. I don’t have access there anymore. Wendell’s still there, and Jamal Atkins, but Wendell’s leaving too, and I ain’t asking Jamal to stick his neck out for me. He needs that job.”

  There was another pause. I imagined the two officers glancing at each other, communicating silently. “We can find that out,” Spicer said. And added, “You know Goins is on his way here.”

  “I figured he was.” Rafe didn’t sound worried about it.

  I hadn’t thought about it, to be honest, but if he wasn’t worried, I guess I needn’t be, either.

  “He’s gonna wanna know where you were when this all went down.”

  “We were having dinner,” Rafe said, and raised his voice. “Hey, Savannah? You remember the name of the place?”

  I told him the name of the place. “It’s up on the north side of town. Millersville area.”

  “Before you get to Ridgetop,” Spicer said blandly.

  I could hear the grin in Rafe’s voice. “That’s right.”

  “If Goins goes out to Brennan’s place, I don’t imagine he’ll see any sign that you’ve been there?”

  “Course not,” Rafe said.

  “So you were having dinner. When did you get there, and when did you leave?”

  Rafe told him the particulars, and no sooner had he stopped talking, than I heard the crunch of gravel outside. I raised my voice. “Someone’s here.”

  “Prob’ly Goins,” Rafe said. I heard the scrape of chair legs, and then he must have changed his mind, because he added, “Maybe one of you two’d better do the honors.”

  “I’ll do it,” I said. By now Carrie had finished eating and was leaning on my shoulder while I patted her back. My blouse was back in place and I was presentable enough to open the door. Which I proceeded to do.

  It was indeed Goins’s Toyota that had come to a stop behind the squad car, and Goins himself who was stomping his way up the driveway to the house, scowling at the empty space between the squad car and the Volvo, where the ambulance had been before it left.

  “Sorry,” I told him. “The ambulance was there, and the officers didn’t move their car up after it left.”

  He switched the scowl to me. “What the hell happened here?”

  It was the same thing Spicer had asked, but in a very different tone.

  “You’d better go in the kitchen,” I told him. “The officers are talking to my husband. Now that I’ve finished feeding the baby, I planned to join them.”

  His brows beetled. “You stay right here, missy. No influencing each other’s testimony.”

  I refrained from rolling my eyes. I also refrained from telling him that I could hear every word. “Fine. I’ll just stay in the parlor.”

  He gave me a sort of regal nod before he bustled off down the hallway. I shut and locked the front door and went back to the sofa with my daughter.

  “Well, well,” Goins’s voice said, “isn’t this cozy?”

  I couldn’t imagine what was cozy about it. Rafe hadn’t offered anyone a beer, that I could recall, so at most they were sitting around the kitchen table talking. There might have been a bowl of fruit there, but either way, it wasn’t like they were engaged in any kind of festivity.

  “Just taking statements, Detective,” Spicer said blandly. Goins must have given him a look, because he added, “Witness statements. These folks aren’t suspects. They’re witnesses.”

 
There was a moment of silence.

  “Pull up a chair,” Rafe said, in a tone that didn’t invite to argument. “We’re almost done.”

  I heard the scrape of chair legs, so Goins must have opted to sit rather than stand, but he couldn’t keep from a bit of unpleasantness even so. “You’re not in charge here. You don’t decide when you’re done.”

  “You’re in my house,” Rafe said, and probably included Spicer and Truman in the statement, too, “so yeah, I’m in charge, and I can decide when we’re done. So far, I haven’t minded talking to the officers. If you do anything to change that, I’ll show y’all the door. And if you wanna talk to me after that, it’ll be through my attorney.”

  Goins snorted. “You don’t have an attorney.”

  I raised my voice. “Actually, my brother, my sister, and my brother-in-law are all attorneys. And my mother’s boyfriend’s son is the assistant district attorney for Maury County. We can come up with quite a few attorneys if we need one.”

  Not to mention that I’d had some legal training of my own. I’d dropped out of law school to marry Bradley Ferguson, but that didn’t mean that lawyering wasn’t in my blood. My father and grandfather had been lawyers, as well.

  Goins didn’t respond to that, but I imagine he scowled. Just as I imagined Rafe grinning. “Thanks, darlin’.”

  “Don’t mention it,” I said.

  * * *

  The discussion in the kitchen went on for a few more minutes, but Spicer and Truman had covered all the salient details. Anyone reasonable would have been satisfied.

  Goins, of course, wasn’t. Neither satisfied nor reasonable. He kept pushing on our alibi, asking over and over where we’d been, when we’d gotten there, when we’d finished eating, what we’d ordered. As if chicken fried steak versus hamburger and fries made any difference at this point. Rafe kept answering the same questions over and over, with his voice becoming less and less patient as time went on.

  “Listen,” he said eventually, “I ain’t gonna change my alibi if you keep pushing at me. If you have a question about it, call the café and ask’em when we came and left, and what we ate. Ain’t that many mixed race couples frequenting the place, and the waitress liked the baby. They’ll remember us.”

  “We have the receipt,” I added, still from the parlor. “It probably has a time stamp on it.”

  There was silence, and then some rustling. I imagined Rafe pulling out his wallet, and digging out the receipt, and handing it to Goins.

  The detective grunted.

  “If we’re done here,” Rafe said, “I’d like to get to the hospital to see how Malcolm’s doing.”

  “Not quite yet.” Goins tried to sound like he was in charge. “Tell me again how you know the victim.”

  Rafe told him again how we knew Malcolm.

  “And he works at the gas station on the corner of Dresden?”

  “Last I saw him,” Rafe said. “He was there when we filled up the car before we drove to Sweetwater on Thursday morning.”

  “Did you speak to him?”

  “For a minute,” Rafe said.

  “About?”

  “Good to see you, how’ya doing, thirty bucks on pump six ’cause the machine ain’t working.”

  “Is that all?”

  “What else would there be?”

  “I thought,” Goins said silkily, or with his best attempt at achieving silky, “that maybe you’d told him you were leaving, so the coast was clear for him to cut Doug Brennan’s brake cables.”

  There was a second’s silence. I imagined that Rafe was too flabbergasted to say anything. I was a bit flabbergasted myself, to be honest.

  Goins continued. “He worked with cars. He’d probably know how to do it.”

  “He worked behind the counter at a gas station,” Rafe said, and I could hear the anger lacing through his voice. “He had a lot more to do with ringing up candy bars and selling lottery tickets than he did cars. It ain’t a shop. Just a convenience mart.”

  Goins didn’t say anything to that, and after a moment Rafe added, his voice tight, “Lemme guess. Next, you’re gonna tell me that after I talked him into cutting Brennan’s brake cables, Malcolm came to me for payment this evening, or maybe he came to tell me he was gonna rat me out to the cops, so I tried to kill him to shut him up.”

  “You said it,” Goins said, “I didn’t.”

  Uh-oh. I got up from the sofa and headed toward the kitchen, still holding the baby.

  “My wife and I went out to dinner,” Rafe said. “We found him on the porch when we came back.”

  “And stabbed him,” Goins said.

  “No!” Rafe took a breath, and another. And continued, his voice calmer. “No. He’d already been stabbed when we got here.”

  “The paramedics said you had blood on your hands,” Goins said. I arrived in the doorway in time to see him look at them.

  I also saw them curl into fists. It was hard to blame Rafe. I would have been tempted to hit Goins, too.

  “Damn straight I had blood on my hands! I spent the time between when we found him and when the ambulance came making sure the kid didn’t bleed to death.”

  “You washed the blood away?”

  “In the sink,” Rafe said tightly, “before we sat down. You woulda had blood on your hands, too, if you’d found him like that. Or at least you woulda, if you’d tried to help.”

  “Nobody’s disputing that it was Malcolm’s blood,” I added. They all turned to look at me. It seemed the conversation had been intense enough that neither of them had noticed my arrival. Not even Rafe, and he doesn’t usually miss much.

  Goins brows drew together. “I thought I told you to stay in the living room.”

  “Parlor,” I said. “You’re back here accusing my husband of things he didn’t do. Things I know he didn’t do, because I was here. Malcolm was on the porch when we arrived. Flat on his back, with a lot of blood everywhere. The knife was in the bushes at the bottom of the steps, where I assume whoever stabbed him threw it after they were finished.”

  Spicer nodded. He indicated the bag. Goins pulled it closer, opened it, and peered in. “Same as the other knife.”

  “They’re all the same,” Rafe said. He dragged his own knife out of his pocket and slapped it on the table. Resisting the temptation to drive the point into the wood to relieve some of his feelings, no doubt. “Standard issue. Everyone at the TBI has one. Or anyone at the TBI who needs a knife.”

  “Brennan?” Spicer asked.

  Rafe shook his head. “Brennan did desk work. All he’d need a knife for, was peeling apples. But I’ve got one. Wendell’s got one. Each of the boys’ve got one. Everyone else who does undercover work or fieldwork’s got one. And you can go to the store and buy’em, too. Sally sells’em.”

  “Sally?” Goins echoed.

  “A small, yellow bungalow on Franklin Road in the Berry Hill area,” I said. “Sally sells knives and throwing stars and Mace and things like that. Detective Grimaldi knows her.” And had sent me there for a couple of small lipstick cylinders with pepper spray and a small, serrated blade at one point. They were still in my purse, but I hadn’t needed to use either of them in a while.

  And it was probably better if I didn’t mention them to Goins, who’d insist on taking the knife in for testing, just in case I had stabbed Malcolm with it.

  He grunted and pushed away from the table. “I’m off to the hospital. Don’t go anywhere.”

  “We’ve been over that,” Rafe told him. “But for the time being, I ain’t planning to leave town. And if you’re going to the hospital, we might see you there.”

  “I’m putting the boy under guard,” Goins warned. “You won’t get another shot at him.”

  I saw temper flash in Rafe’s eyes, but he didn’t let it out. “Glad to hear it. Make sure your guard knows to keep an eye on anyone else who comes in to see him, too. It’d be a real shame to lose him before he can tell you who stabbed him.”

  “Wouldn’t it?
” Goins agreed, and brushed past me into the hallway. A second later we heard the front door open and then close again with a slam.

  “Well, well,” Rafe said. “Wasn’t that fun?”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Malcolm had been taken to Skyline Hospital. As I already mentioned, it was the closest hospital to us, and although some of the others—notably Vanderbilt—have more experienced trauma units, I guess Malcolm’s injuries weren’t so bad that Skyline couldn’t handle them once the paramedics had gotten him stable and had started blood transfusions.

  Rafe had called Wendell, who still had a valid TBI ID, and Wendell met us there to make sure we got up to the room. Hospitals don’t like to let just anybody in and out, especially in circumstances like these, and since he’d had to give up his own badge and ID, Rafe had to rely on the kindness of strangers—or in this case Wendell—to get where he wanted to go.

  “Good reason to get yourself another badge,” I told him, softly, as we were in the elevator on our way up to Malcolm’s floor.

  He didn’t look at me, or give any other indication that he’d heard me, but he nodded.

  As Goins had said, there was a uniformed cop on the door. He straightened up when we came walking down the hall, but when Wendell showed him the badge, he just nodded. And looked past Wendell to us.

  “They’re with me,” Wendell said. The young man looked like perhaps he wanted to protest, but when Wendell nodded us through the door ahead of him, the cop didn’t actually try to stop us.

  Malcolm was inside, in a hospital bed, hooked up to a lot of tubes and beeping machines. There were several different solutions going into his arm, a clear liquid as well as more blood. He was gray under the brown, and his eyes looked sunken. His whole chest, or what I could see of it above the blankets, was covered in bandages.

  His grandmother, a black woman who looked barely old enough to have grandchildren, and certainly none Malcolm’s age, sat on a chair next to the bed. She looked exhausted, and I could see tracks on her cheeks where tears had run. She wasn’t crying when we came in, but when she recognized us, her eyes filled again. “Thank the Lord you came home when you did, or my boy woulda died!”