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

by Jenna Bennett

  But no. What I was looking at, was what Rafe had told me yesterday was Wendell’s townhouse. It was unadorned except for a prosaic black doormat, and was stuck between two other townhomes, identical but for the fact that one had a leftover Christmas wreath still on the door, and the other some sort of sign that said—I threw my mind back to when I’d seen it in the daylight—Welcome to the… Masons, was it?

  Wendell’s door had neither. The guy was coming out of Wendell’s door.

  He—definitely a man, too tall to be female, and dressed all in black—pulled the door shut behind him. Wendell hadn’t turned the light next to the door on—probably because he hadn’t been home since yesterday morning—so I couldn’t see his face, but the shape was male. A lot less muscular than Rafe, but with male shoulders and male hips. Broader on top than on the bottom, inverse to most women.

  There wasn’t much light in the parking lot, and he kept his head down as he walked between the cars. He didn’t cross close to mine, and I moved my head slowly to watch his progress. Any kind of movement in a world that’s otherwise sitting still is very noticeable, and I didn’t want him to notice me. Wendell hadn’t mentioned that there’d be anyone else at his home, and if someone was supposed to be there, I felt sure he’d have let me know when he gave me the keys.

  Ergo, this guy didn’t belong. And since he didn’t, I didn’t want him to notice me.

  He crossed the small patch of grass between where I was parked and the parking area on the other side. He must have left his car door open, because there was no sound of him unkeying the lock remotely. He just opened the door and got in. And the dome light didn’t come on when the door opened, so he must have disconnected or otherwise turned it off. Yet another reason to suspect he was here doing something he shouldn’t be.

  He sat behind the wheel for a second—maybe doing the same thing I was doing, taking a breather after his experience—and then he turned the car on and reversed out of the space. He didn’t flip the headlights on until he was sitting at the exit, waiting to turn onto Lebanon Road.

  I turned my own car on and hurried after, just as quickly as I could. And while I wasn’t worried about any of the residents looking out the window and noticing my car, I didn’t want him to see me exiting the subdivision right on his heels, so I kept my own lights off, too, until after I’d turned onto Lebanon Road.

  We were headed in the direction of downtown. Of home. My home. It obviously wasn’t Christina Pavlova in the car ahead of me, so it made sense that we weren’t going toward Mount Juliet and Wilson County.

  I didn’t think it knocked any of the other suspects out of contention. Hammond lived near the lake. He could have gone left out of the subdivision, but he could also turn left closer to town. Grant lived in East Nashville. McLaughlin lived in Brentwood. And any of them could be on his way to the TBI.

  Or it could be someone I didn’t know, the hypothetical handler or undercover narcotics agent we’d been talking about earlier. If so, he could be going home, or going to work, or going somewhere else entirely.

  Hell, he could be going out for breakfast, to reward himself for a job well done.

  I could see the taillights of the car up ahead. It was still early, and the roads were still pretty deserted. I didn’t want to move too close to him for fear he’d notice me. As a result, every time he moved around a curve or crested a hill, I was afraid I’d lose him by the time I got there myself.

  I could call Rafe, though. He’d saved my cell phone from the bedside table, and had put it in the pocket of the coat he’d brought me from upstairs earlier. I dug it out and dialed.

  He picked up immediately. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” I said, and amended it to, “Nothing much. There was a guy at Wendell’s place when I got there.”

  “Scuse me?”

  “When I got there, I stayed in the car for a minute or two.”

  He didn’t answer, and that made me feel I had to explain. “I was a little shaken up from everything, and Carrie was asleep, and I didn’t want to wake her, and it’s weird to walk into someone else’s house anyway, when they aren’t home…”

  Although I should be used to that, being a real estate agent.

  “What happened?” Rafe said, and I reined myself in.

  “Nothing. I was sitting there, as I explained, outside, and the front door opened. And this guy came out.”

  “Can you describe him?”

  I could, but I didn’t do a very good job. “Maybe six feet, maybe not. Not too muscular. He was dressed all in black, with a black hat. The kind you wear when it’s cold. And it was dark. I didn’t see his face.”

  “White guy? Black? Latino?”

  That I could answer. “White. If he was anything else, he was very light-skinned.”

  “Young? Old?”

  Um… He hadn’t moved like someone young, but not like he was feeling his age, either. “Somewhere in the middle? Older than you, but younger than Wendell? Forties, maybe?”

  If he was disappointed in my powers of observation, Rafe didn’t say so. “Then what happened?”

  I described how the man had gotten into his car and left, and how I was following him down Lebanon Road toward town. “We’re just passing the Donelson YMCA. The turnoff toward the lake is just around the corner. If he goes that way, maybe it’s Hammond.”

  “How close are you to him?”

  “Not close enough to see him clearly. I don’t want him to notice me. But I’ll see if he turns.”

  Once I caught up and made it around the curve.

  “What kinda car?” Rafe asked.

  “Oh. Um… SUV. Not too big. Dark. Smaller than Goins’s Toyota. Darker in color, too.”

  “I didn’t think it was Goins,” Rafe said. And added, “You woulda recognized Goins, right?”

  Probably. “Sure. This isn’t someone I’ve seen before. At least I don’t think so. He didn’t look familiar.”

  “What’s he doing now?”

  I peered through the windshield. “Not turning. Going straight on Lebanon Road. We’re approaching Donelson Pike. If he wants the interstate, that’s the way he’ll go.”

  But he didn’t. Just zoomed across that intersection, too. It was early enough that the main roads, like the one we were on, had flashing yellow lights at every intersection, all the way into town. The smaller, merging roads had red blinking lights and had to stop before merging. But so far, it had been smooth sailing for the two of us, and the two or three other cars on the road.

  Up ahead, the SUV started up the hill over the railroad tracks where the commuter train runs. I could see the taillights crest the incline and then disappear over the top. I pushed down on the gas so I’d catch up sooner. And headed up the hill, too, to the top.

  And— “Damn!”

  Chapter Twenty

  “What?” Rafe said.

  “I don’t see him.”

  We’d reached the part of Donelson where all the stores were. And some of them were open this early. There was a gas station with its lights lit, the donut place, a couple of twenty-four/seven drugstores and grocery stores. And more cars. Some people shop this early to avoid the rush.

  I cruised along, peering left and right, while I kept the phone to my ear. “There are more cars now. There are residential neighborhoods on the left and right out here, and more cars merging onto the main road.” Not that many, admittedly, but where there had been two or three, beyond the two of us, now there were five or six. Maybe seven. “I can’t see him. He must have turned off. Do you want me to go back and look for him?”

  “Would you recognize him if you saw him?”

  He didn’t wait for me to answer. “No. Just go back to Wendell’s place and get some sleep. See what damage this guy did inside.”

  That made sense. “What’s going on where you are?” I asked, while I made a highly illegal U-turn I felt comfortable making, since there were so few cars on the road. Then I headed back the way I’d come. “Are the f
irefighters still pouring water on the house?”

  “They’re mostly done by now. Still standing around shooting the breeze. I’m gonna use some of the wood from the gazebo floor to bar the front and back doors on the house.”

  “What about the gazebo?” Not only could someone fall in, but if they did, they could make it into the house that way, which seemed to defeat the purpose.

  “If anybody’s determined enough to push loot ahead of’em back and forth through that tunnel, they’re welcome to what they can carry,” Rafe said, and I guess he had a point. “I’ll go to the hardware store in a couple hours and get some plywood. For now we gotta make do with what we have.”

  That made sense, too. “I’m crossing Donelson Pike now, going in the other direction. Still no sign of the SUV. But… shit.” I mean… shoot.

  “What?”

  “Blue lights. In my rearview. It must have been that U-turn I made earlier.”

  I hadn’t noticed any police cars, or I wouldn’t have done it, but they aren’t always marked and easy to see. Someone had obviously seen me, though. Someone who was now flashing blue lights at me from behind.

  Maybe there’d been a cop parked outside the donut place, and I just hadn’t noticed.

  “I’ll pull over,” I told Rafe, “and call you back later.”

  “Don’t—”

  I didn’t wait for him to finish what was probably an admonition to behave and not do anything stupid. As if I would. I don’t often get pulled over, but when I do, I do know how to behave. And anyway, I’m a white woman with a baby in the backseat. My chances of getting out of this without a ticket—and with my life—were a lot better than Rafe’s would have been.

  So I disconnected the call before I heard the rest of what he’d been planning to say, and dropped the phone in the console. Better not to be on the phone, anyway, when you’re pulled over. It isn’t against the law—texting while driving is illegal, talking isn’t—but I wanted all my attention free to talk myself out of the ticket if I could.

  The car—just a dark bulk I couldn’t see well because of the flashing blue light and the headlights, although it was clearly unmarked and not your usual white and blue squad car—pulled in behind me. A second passed, then the door opened. I guess he hadn’t bothered to run my license plate before approaching. Sometimes they do.

  I powered my window down, and kept both my hands visible on the wheel. Carrie was still asleep, bless her, and didn’t seem bothered by the cold air flooding into the car. It bit at my own nose, but there was nothing I could do about that. At least I was wearing a coat over my pajamas.

  The cop ambled up to the window. He didn’t lean down, just stood there, so that all I saw when I turned my head, was the bottom of a black windbreaker, zipped, and the top of a pair of black pants. Plus a belt with, among other things, a holstered gun on his hip. “Are you aware you made an illegal U-turn back there?” his voice inquired from above.

  “I’m sorry,” I said humbly. Nothing else I could do, after all. I mean, everyone knows that U-turns are illegal. And I couldn’t very well claim that I couldn’t remember doing it.

  His voice was not impressed. “License and registration, please.”

  “Of course.” I reached for my purse, which is usually next to me on the passenger seat, and stopped. “I don’t have a license.”

  “You don’t have a license?”

  “On me. I don’t have a license on me.” Or at all, really. It had been in my purse, and my purse had been downstairs in the foyer, and anything that had been in the foyer was now reduced to ashes. “It’s a long story. See, we had a fire in our house last night, and—”

  “A fire?”

  I nodded. “Someone threw something through the window, and it sort of exploded, and the whole foyer burned, and the parlor, and some of the rest of the downstairs, including my purse with my license and all my credit cards and everything else I own…” And Lord, the extent of what I was going to have to deal with tomorrow just hit me. All those credit cards and debit cards I’d have to replace, all those phone calls I’d have to make, not to mention a trip to the DMV, which is always a time-consuming and annoying task…

  “Your name?”

  “Savannah Martin,” I said. “Collier.”

  “And you survived a fire?”

  “By the skin of our teeth. See, we live in this old house in East Nashville, and at some point someone dug a tunnel from the basement to the gazebo in the yard—I’m thinking maybe there was another house there at some point, because why would anyone dig a tunnel to a gazebo?—but when the fire started, and we couldn’t get out the front door, and there was another fire on the back porch so we couldn’t go out that way either, we went into the basement and through the tunnel and ended up in the gazebo. And that’s how we made it out.”

  It was quite an exciting story. I had expected better than a “Wait here,” delivered in a sort of choked voice. Maybe he was trying not to laugh, although I didn’t think my recounting had been that funny.

  “Sure,” I said, but he was already on his way back to his own car. And that was when, as I watched him walk away in the rearview mirror, his back to me, I realized that there was something familiar about him.

  That I had, in fact, seen this guy get into his car just a few minutes ago.

  That this was the same guy who had come out of Wendell’s house. The same guy I’d been following.

  He must have noticed me, and turned off somewhere where I couldn’t see him, and when I’d turned around, he’d doubled back behind me, and then he’d turned on his blue lights—which it wasn’t surprising that he’d have, if he worked for the TBI—and had used my U-turn as an excuse to figure out who I was and what I was doing, following him.

  By now he had figured out that Rafe was alive. I mean, I’d told him as much, with my story about crawling through the tunnel to safety.

  He must have gone to Wendell’s house after he threw the Molotov Cocktail through our window. He’d probably seen and recognized Wendell’s car parked outside our house, which he would if they worked together, and had realized that Wendell’s place would be empty. And I guess he’d been worried that there might be something there that would incriminate him. He wouldn’t realize that Rafe’s phone calls last night had been a shot in the dark, made to more than one person to see who’d react. He’d thought we knew who he was, and what he’d done, and he’d reacted.

  And now he’d react again. If I stayed here, he might do something to hurt me. He had a gun on his hip, after all. I’d seen it.

  All this went through my mind rather quickly. He was just reaching for his door handle when I yanked the Volvo into gear and floored the accelerator, and took off down the road in perfect Rafe-like fashion, like a bat out of hell.

  The sound was enough to wake Carrie, who made a couple of startled sounds before starting to scream.

  “Sorry, baby. Sorry.”

  I couldn’t worry about it at the moment. If I could get far enough down the road, fast enough, maybe he wouldn’t bother chasing me. Maybe he’d just let me go. I hadn’t seen his face, and couldn’t actually identify him. And so far he hadn’t done anything to harm me. Maybe he’d just leave it at that, and let me go.

  But no. The SUV took off from the curb with a roar and fell in behind me, blue lights flashing. For a second I wondered whether I’d lost my mind, whether I was actually trying to run away from a legitimate cop who’d just pulled me over because I’d committed a traffic violation earlier. I could wave goodbye to a simple ticket if that was the case. I’d end up in jail.

  But no. It was him. The guy from Wendell’s townhouse. As we roared through the intersection at Stewarts Ferry, under the flashing yellow lights, I recognized the SUV. And it didn’t look like any official MNPD car I’d ever seen.

  He was still a couple of car lengths behind, and I aimed to keep it that way as we approached and then passed the Donelsen Y going back toward Hermitage. A small shopping area was coming up on
the right, along with the Hermitage House Smorgasboard, a little family restaurant that’s been in the same spot for close to fifty years. After that, there would be the bridge over the Stones River, and then Hermitage proper, with more houses and apartments, with Wendell’s townhouse and more people.

  The car behind me was gaining, and I pushed down on the gas pedal. The small brick building housing the Hermitage House came and went in my side window. Carrie kept squalling. “Sorry, baby,” I muttered. “I can’t get you now. Sorry.”

  The SUV and my Volvo were the only two cars going in this direction. Everyone else was headed the other way, toward downtown, and there still weren’t many cars. We were at a pretty deserted stretch of road, between the more densely populated neighborhoods of Donelson and Hermitage. As we approached the river, the SUV made its move. It put on a burst of speed and came up on the side of me. The driver turned the wheel to the right and started pushing me toward the side of the road.

  I could see the bridge coming closer as I fought to keep the car moving forward. It was only a few months since I’d ended up in the water. It had been the Duck River in Sweetwater, and I’d still been pregnant with Carrie. For a few eternal minutes I hadn’t thought I was going to be able to squeeze through the car window to get myself to safety.

  That wouldn’t be a problem this time. I’d fit through the window. But this time I’d have to get Carrie out of her seat and take her with me when I went. And there was a very long drop from the bridge to the water here. Not like the gentle boat ramp I’d gone down into the Duck, where the car I’d been inside had ended up half in and half out of the water.

  No, if Carrie and I went off the road and into the river here, it would be straight into the deepest part of the Stones River, and I wouldn’t give much for our chances of survival.

  The SUV kept pushing me closer to the edge of the road. I kept trying to resist, but it isn’t easy. His car was heavier than mine, bigger and bulkier. The bridge kept coming closer.