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

by Jenna Bennett

  “He ain’t gonna shoot me,” Rafe said calmly. “Are you, Goins?”

  Goins sneered.

  “Sorry.” I shook my head. “I’ll believe it when he puts the gun away. Until then I’m staying right here.”

  I waited. Goins didn’t lower the gun. On the upside, Rafe didn’t try to move me out of his way anymore, either.

  Into this impasse came the arrival of a black and white squad car. It squealed to a stop next to us, and two uniformed cops tumbled out. Suddenly two more guns were pointed our way.

  “We’ve got it, Detective,” a voice said. “You can put the gun away.”

  Goins hesitated, but after a few long, very long, seconds, he holstered his weapon.

  Rafe relaxed, and so did I. Until Spicer said, “We’re gonna need you to come downtown with us, Mr. Collier.”

  “Why?”

  Rafe and I said it at the same time, and glanced at one another.

  “There’s been another death,” Spicer said, shoving his gun back into the holster. On the other side of the car, young Truman did the same thing.

  “Who’s dead?”

  “We’ll talk about it downtown,” Spicer said. He opened the door to the back of the squad car and gestured with his head. “Mr. Collier?”

  Rafe hesitated for a second, but I guess he didn’t see the point in making a fuss. Or maybe he wanted to know what was going on, and figured this was the best way to find out.

  “What about me?” I asked, as he walked the few steps over to the squad car and prepared to get in.

  Spicer glanced at me. “You’re free to go, Mrs. Collier. We’ll bring your husband back to you after we’ve finished talking.”

  “Unless he gets arrested and charged,” Goins added, smirking.

  I ignored him. “Can you at least tell me who’s dead?”

  “James Foster,” Spicer said, closing the door behind Rafe. “We’ll see you later, Mrs. Collier. Detective.”

  He gave Goins a barely civil nod before both he and Truman got back in the squad car. Goins gave me a final sneer and galloped back to his own vehicle to follow the squad car out of the lot. I was left standing in the middle of the rows of cars, alone, reflecting that it was almost like old times. The only difference was the ring on my finger and the baby staring up at me from the car seat.

  And the fact that this time, I knew my husband hadn’t been involved in whatever Detective Goins was trying to pin on him.

  I picked up the seat with the baby and headed for the Volvo.

  * * *

  I called Tamara Grimaldi as soon as I’d walked through the door at home, and had put the baby down. I didn’t even take the time to wrench out of my coat first. And when she picked up, I didn’t waste any time in telling her, “You’ve got to talk to somebody and put a stop to this. Spicer and Truman just hauled Rafe downtown for questioning.”

  “Still going on about Douglas Brennan?”

  “Yes.” I took a breath and tried to calm down. “No. Someone else is dead. A guy named James Foster. He also worked for the TBI.”

  “And he’s dead?”

  “That’s what Spicer said. And that’s all he said. Rafe probably knows more, but he’s downtown, probably shackled to a table in an interview room somewhere, and I can’t ask him!”

  “We don’t shackle people to tables in downtown,” Grimaldi said. “And Lyle and George would know that your husband didn’t have anything to do with this.”

  “They pointed their guns at him! All three of them. In the parking lot at Skyline Hospital. I thought Goins was going to shoot him!”

  After a second I added, “He was holding the baby, too.”

  “That was really stupid of Rick,” Grimaldi said. “Did your husband hurt him?”

  “He had a gun!” I took a breath. “No, Rafe didn’t do anything to him. Or to Spicer and Truman. Just got in the car and let them take him away.”

  “They’ll bring him back,” Grimaldi said.

  “They said they would. And then Goins said, ‘Unless he gets charged.’ Can he charge him?”

  “He can do anything he wants,” Grimaldi said, “but he’s not stupid enough to risk a wrongful arrest charge.” After a second she added, consideringly, “At least I don’t think so.”

  “That’s encouraging.” Not.

  “Did your husband have anything to do with Doug Brennan’s death, Ms…. Savannah? Or this other guy’s? Foster’s?”

  “Of course not!”

  “Then don’t worry about it. If there’s no evidence, nobody’s going to charge him.”

  “Easy for you to say,” I said, finally sitting down on the sofa, still with my coat on. Carrie blinked at me from the car seat in the middle of the table. It was good she was such an easy baby, because I certainly wouldn’t win any awards for taking care of her at the moment. “I don’t trust Goins. He’s a nutcase.”

  “He can be trying,” Grimaldi agreed, “but he gets there in the end. Is there anything I can do?”

  I thought about it, more calmly. When I’d called, I’d wanted her to fix things. Things she probably wasn’t in any kind of position to fix from where she was. “Is there anything you can do?”

  “Not much,” Grimaldi said. “I’ll contact Lyle and find out what’s going on. If there’s anything you need to worry about, I’ll let you know. But it’s probably nothing. They’ll talk to him. He’ll tell them what he knows, or that he knows nothing. Rick will throw his weight around, and then they’ll let him go.”

  I hoped she was right. “How are things where you are?”

  “Fine,” Grimaldi said. “First time I’ve gone a week without having to investigate a murder in my career.”

  Must be nice. “Up here they’re dropping like flies. First Brennan, then someone tried to kill Malcolm, and now Foster.”

  “I heard about Malcolm,” Grimaldi said. “The kid from up the street, right? How’s he doing?”

  I told her he was awake and mostly aware, but couldn’t remember the attack itself. “But he saw someone in our yard the night before. Rooting in the trash. Malcolm thought it might have been a homeless guy looking for food, but it was obviously whoever left the knife in the recycling bin for Goins to find.”

  Grimaldi made an encouraging sort of noise. I guess she agreed.

  “But it was late, and dark, and the guy ran when Malcolm turned his car down the street. He couldn’t even tell if it was a man. He thought it was, but he didn’t rule out the possibility that it might have been a female.”

  “Do you suspect anyone female?” Grimaldi wanted to know.

  I explained about Pavlova, and then, for good measure, I also explained about McLaughlin, Hammond, and Grant. “The other most obvious suspect was Foster. But if he’s been killed, too, I guess it wasn’t him.”

  “Unless he wasn’t killed and killed himself,” Grimaldi said. “How did he die?”

  “No idea. Spicer and Truman didn’t say anything beyond the fact that he’s dead. I’m sure Rafe will tell me when he gets home. If he gets home.”

  Over in the car seat, Carrie scrunched up her face and made a sound.

  “I know,” I told her. “I don’t like that idea, either.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” I told Grimaldi. “Just talking to the baby. She’s starting to fuss.”

  “Go take care of her. I’ll see what I can find out and call you back.”

  I told her I appreciated it. “Did you have a good time with Dix and the girls yesterday?”

  “Disney princesses,” Grimaldi said. “What’s not to love?”

  She hung up before I could say anything else. I shrugged out of my coat and went to take care of my own small princess.

  * * *

  By the time Rafe got home, it was late. Grimaldi had let me know that she’d left a message for Lyle Spicer but hadn’t heard anything back from him, and she would contact me when she did. By the time Rafe walked through the door, I still hadn’t heard anything else.

&
nbsp; I had completed the evening ritual for Carrie, and put her to bed, but I was too wired and worried to sleep myself, so I was sitting in the living room with the TV on. I was even sort of watching it, although I couldn’t have told you who the House Hunters were, and what they were looking for in a house. It was all just a blur of colors and lights and noise, while my own mind churned over the same ground. Someone else was dead. The MNPD—or at least Detective Goins—thought Rafe had something to do with it. Goins was going to arrest Rafe. I’d be a single parent until he could prove that he hadn’t done anything wrong, and what if he couldn’t prove it? It was all well and good for Grimaldi—and for that matter Rafe—to say that he wasn’t guilty, so he didn’t have to worry, but innocent people are convicted every day. What was to keep them from doing it to my husband?

  By the time I heard the crunching of gravel outside, and then a car door slamming and footsteps on the stairs and porch, I had worried myself into a semi-trance. It wasn’t until I registered the key in the door, that I realized he was home.

  I made it to the foyer before the front door closed. He kicked it shut with his foot while his arms came around me and he buried his nose in my hair. “Hi, darlin’.”

  “I was worried,” I said into the soft leather of his coat. “I wasn’t sure you’d be back.”

  For once he didn’t give me a facile answer along the lines of, “Of course I was coming back.” Instead, he just held me. “Sorry.”

  “They kept you a long time.”

  “We had a lot to talk about.”

  “I called Grimaldi,” I said, finally pulling away. “She said she’d contact Spicer and see what she could find out, but she hasn’t gotten back to me.”

  “Lyle’s been a little busy, wielding a rubber hose.” He grinned, but it was a tired grin.

  “Surely Spicer, at least, knows better than to think you did anything to James Foster.”

  He shrugged out of the leather jacket and tossed it onto the coat tree. “Sure. But he still had to make it look good for Goins.”

  Who did believe that Rafe had done something to James Foster. Right.

  “What happened?”

  “To Foster?” Rafe looked around. “Baby in bed?”

  I nodded. “You can look in on her later. For now, let’s sit down so you can tell me what happened. Are you hungry?”

  He shook his head. “We swung by a fast food place on the way home. I’m good.”

  “Beer? Something stronger?”

  He grinned. “No, darlin’. Let’s just get it over with.”

  Fine. I walked into the parlor, around the sofa, and dropped down. “What happened to James Foster? And why would Goins think you had something to do with it?”

  Rafe skirted the sofa and sat down in the chair opposite. “Foster’s dead. Carbon monoxide poisoning in his fancy new garage, courtesy of his fancy new car.”

  “So he did it to himself?” And as a side note, that would make the house so much harder to sell. Nobody wants to buy a house where someone died an unnatural death. People aren’t that keen on natural deaths, either, but suicide or murder beats heart attack in bed every single day.

  “No way to know,” Rafe said. “Goins thinks I did it.”

  “Why, for God’s sake?”

  “Talked to somebody up the street who described the Volvo. Figured that meant I was on my way to Foster’s house to do him in.”

  Of course he would think that. “I suppose you told him I was with you, and we never stopped and never left the car?”

  “Course,” Rafe said. “It didn’t matter to him. I was there, so I did it.”

  “Did it happen while we were there?” We hadn’t rolled down the windows, and even if we had, I wasn’t sure we would have heard the engine of Foster’s car running inside the garage. But it was disturbing to think about what might have been happening in the garage while we’d been a few yards away, out on the street.

  “I don’t imagine it did,” Rafe said, whether that was true or he just didn’t want me to think there was anything we could have done.

  “Did he leave a note?”

  “Nobody mentioned one,” Rafe said, “I imagine, if there’d been a note, they wouldna given me the third degree.”

  Probably not. “But he still could have done it himself.”

  Rafe nodded. “I floated the idea that maybe Foster was the one killed Brennan, and maybe now he killed himself so he wouldn’t get caught for it.”

  “I don’t suppose Goins liked that idea.”

  “Not as much as he liked the idea that I did it to throw suspicion off myself.” He got up. “I’m gonna get a beer. Want something?”

  I shook my head. And waited until he came back. “So what happens now?”

  “We go to bed,” Rafe said, “and hope that Malcolm’s memory comes back. And that Foster has information somewhere, on his computer or in a drawer, that proves he killed Brennan and I didn’t. Then we go to Sweetwater and forget about all this.”

  I could get behind that. Unfortunately, I had a feeling it wasn’t going to be quite that easy.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I’ve been working for Lamont, Briggs, and Associates since I first got my real estate license more than a year and a half ago. It was called Walker Lamont Realty back then, and I chose it because it was conveniently located, close to the apartment I rented on Main Street in East Nashville.

  But after Walker Lamont ended up in prison—long story—Timothy Briggs became broker, and he changed the business name to LB&A, to try to avoid association with Walker. Or to make the association less obvious, anyway. I have no idea why he didn’t change the company name to something else entirely, and avoid the Lamont name altogether, but maybe Walker still owns the company and Tim couldn’t. I’ve never asked.

  At any rate, it’s been my place of employment for a while. In that time, I haven’t brought in much money. Selling real estate is a lot harder than I thought it would be when I came up with the idea of doing it. In my defense, I’ve also had a few other things to think about over the past year. Like Rafe, and keeping him alive, and all the dead bodies that seem to follow him around.

  Or follow me around, since I’ve been responsible for my own share of them.

  All of which is to say that when I walked through the door of the conference room for the sales meeting on Monday morning, Tim was flagrantly surprised to see me.

  “Savannah! What are you doing here?”

  “I still work here,” I said, “don’t I?”

  “Yes, of course. But we haven’t seen much of you lately.”

  Well, first I’d had a baby. And before I was fully recovered from that, there was Christmas. And then New Year. And now I was here.

  “There’s a chance we’re moving to Sweetwater,” I said. “I wanted to talk to you about it.”

  Tim straightened, a well-manicured hand pressed to his chest. “Sweetwater? You and Rafael?”

  Obviously. “He got a job offer from the Columbia PD when we were down there over Christmas. He’s thinking about taking it.” Since he now didn’t have another job. But there was no need to mention that.

  “But…” Tim said.

  “I know you enjoy seeing him.” What’s not to enjoy? “But we’re thinking it would be good for the baby to be in Sweetwater, so she’ll grow up with family around.”

  “Dear me,” Tim said, flapping that same hand back and forth in front of his face like a little Victorian lady having palpitations.

  I shook my head. “Come off it. You have a boyfriend now. Don’t you? I saw you and Kenny Grimes at some restaurant or other not too long ago. You don’t need my husband to be happy.”

  “Kenneth and I are seeing each other socially,” Tim said demurely, “but I need your husband to be happy, Savannah. I really do.”

  I’d walked right into that one. “Well, you can’t have him. He’s mine. And I’m taking him to Sweetwater. At least I think so.”

  Tim made a moue. “Well, you’ll have to
do what’s best for your family, darling. But I hope you’ll reconsider. The loss would be great. Not just for me, but for all of Nashville.”

  No arguing with that.

  As the other agents filed in around us and got comfortable at the table, I changed the subject. “Remember that house you had listed in The Nations over the summer? Big three-story with a rooftop deck?”

  “Of course,” Tim nodded. “I never forget a house.”

  “Well, the owner died yesterday. Killed himself in the garage, apparently.”

  Tim tsked. “That’ll make it hard to sell.”

  No doubt.

  “Not that I’m likely to get the job,” Tim added. “How do you know?”

  “He was a colleague of Rafe’s. A supervisor at the TBI. Name of Foster.”

  Tim nodded. “I remember. Nice-looking guy. Made my heart go pitter-patter at the final walk-through before closing.” He put that hand to his heart again, and mimicked swooning. For a second before he added, prosaically, “Not as handsome as your husband, of course.”

  Of course. “I’ve never met him,” I said. “Did he seem depressed to you?”

  Tim shook his head. “Happy and on top of the world. Flush, and planning the parties he was going to have on his rooftop deck. It was a cash deal, you know.”

  Was it really? “It was an expensive house, wasn’t it?”

  “Highest price in the neighborhood until then,” Tim said, looking pleased. “Might still be the highest price in the neighborhood. I haven’t checked.”

  I hadn’t, either. Although it probably didn’t matter, anyway. It was enough to know that Foster had spent a lot of money on his house, on a law enforcement salary that maybe didn’t stretch that far without some supplementation.

  And not just that, but without a loan. Somehow, he’d ended up with half a million dollars in cash he could use to buy an expensive house.

  Of course, he could have inherited the money. Or played the stock market and struck it rich. Or maybe he had a sideline business—not related to the TBI—that brought in extra money. Just because a guy bought an expensive house with cash, didn’t automatically mean he was dishonest. He could be leveraged to the hilt, with maxed out credit cards, and have killed himself because he’d gotten into living a lifestyle he couldn’t afford. Because in a few weeks another credit card payment would be due, and he didn’t have the money.