“They?”
He glanced at me. “You know they’ve been going over the Skinners’ property since the murders.”
The Skinners—Art and Linda, their son AJ and their daughter Cilla, Cilla’s boyfriend, along with Darrell and Robbie, Art’s brothers—had all been murdered in their beds one night last fall. Rafe had been sent down to Maury County on Sheriff Satterfield’s request, on loan from the TBI, the Tennessee Bureau of Investigations, to help out. Like Katie Graves, the Skinner boys had also gone to Columbia High, and Rafe had known them, or at least known of them. Like Katie, they’d all been older than me, so I hadn’t. But if memory served, Darrell had been the youngest, at a year or two older than Rafe, and I supposed he might have known her.
At any rate, the Skinners had been involved in a fair few unsavory endeavors at the time of their deaths. Pearl, the gray pitbull terrier mix who had lifted her head from her pillow over in the corner, and was thumping her tail at the mention of bones, was a casualty of the dog fighting operation they’d been running. We’d rescued her from being chained underneath Robbie Skinner’s trailer back in October.
In wandering around the Skinners’ adjoining properties, which took up a lot of space in the hills leading up to the Devil’s Backbone, we’d also run across a large scale marijuana growing operation, with several greenhouses on several properties. There had been agents from all sorts of alphabet agencies crawling all over the hills in Middle Tennessee over the past few months.
“Someone found bones on the Skinners’ property?”
“One of the ATF guys ran across’em back in November,” Rafe said. “Not a complete skeleton. Just the skull and a few bones.”
I put down my fork. “What happened to the rest?”
He shrugged. “Animals, maybe. It’s wild up there.”
It was. Most of the land that belonged to the Skinners was just woods. And yes, there are animals. No bears or anything like that, but raccoons and coyotes and various birds of prey, who might pick at a corpse and carry some of one away.
I steered my mind firmly away from the Skinners’ dogs, and from Pearl. Much better not to go there. Not that she can help being what she is. But I’d be happier if I didn’t think about it. “If this happened in November, why are we only hearing about it now?”
“The sheriff heard about it then,” Rafe said. “He went up and gathered what they could find of the remains and sent them to the lab. It’s the lab that’s been dragging their feet getting back with the results.”
Labs are notorious for that. It isn’t the tests themselves that take a long time, it’s waiting for the lab to find the time to do the test.
And we were halfway through January now. If the bones had been discovered in November, there’d been Thanksgiving and then the whole Christmas season to get through, with holiday closings, annual Christmas parties, and the like. Not to mention the increased crime that usually happens around the holidays, that would have taken precedence over a few old bones. No, it was no wonder the sheriff hadn’t heard anything before now.
“And it’s Katie?” I asked.
“Seems so,” Rafe answered.
I picked up my fork again. “Which of the Skinners’ land was she found on? Has she been up there all this time? Ever since she disappeared?”
“I dunno yet,” Rafe told me. “The sheriff just called Tammy this afternoon.”
Tammy is Tamara Grimaldi, formerly of the Metropolitan Nashville police department, homicide division, and since the first of the year, chief of the Columbia PD in Maury County. Since two days ago, she’s also Rafe’s boss, at least for the time being.
It’s a long story. And one that probably doesn’t matter right now.
“About the bones?”
He nodded. “Katie disappeared from Columbia, so he wants somebody there involved. I was part of the Skinner investigation, and I knew Katie a little.”
“So you’re the obvious choice.”
“That,” Rafe said, “plus he asked for me.”
Good to hear. For a long time, a very long time, my mother’s boyfriend suspected Rafe of involvement in anything that happened in and around Maury County. And admittedly, he’d had some cause, since Rafe hadn’t been the best behaved teenager. But it was nice that the sheriff finally saw him as a colleague, and not a suspect.
“Just out of curiosity,” I said, “did they talk to you back when Katie disappeared?”
He arched a brow. Just one. And didn’t say a word.
“Sorry. But the sheriff used to think you had a hand in everything that went wrong around here. I was just curious whether he’d talked to you about Katie back then.”
“No,” Rafe said. “He wasn’t sheriff back then. And it was Columbia’s case. Can’t remember who was in charge of the Columbia PD sixteen years ago. But nobody talked to me about nothing.”
After a second’s pause he added, “The school did an assembly. The principal talked about it, and said if anybody knew something, to go tell the cops.”
“But of course you didn’t.”
He shook his head. “Wouldn’t have, even if I had known something. Not like I was gonna go volunteer information. Then they’d think I had something to do with it for sure.”
Sadly, they probably would have.
“Not like I had anything to share,” Rafe added, and turned back to his dinner. “Like I said, I didn’t know Katie.”
“No problem. I was just curious.” I rearranged some of the broccoli on my plate with the tines of my fork. “Is it certain it’s Katie?”
“The sheriff seems to think so. He called Tammy and told her he was gonna reopen a cold case from her jurisdiction because the body had turned up on the Devil’s Backbone. And could she spare someone to help out, since there’d be overlap between her jurisdiction and his.”
“And he asked for you.”
“I figure there’s a reason for that,” Rafe said calmly, “and it ain’t because I went to school with Katie.”
No, it wasn’t likely to be. Part of the reason Rafe was here—part of the reason Grimaldi was here—was that Sheriff Satterfield had wanted someone in charge of the Columbia Police Department who could figure out whatever the hell—pardon my French—had been going on there. The reason there was a vacancy at all, was that the previous chief had been corrupt. He’d been removed back in November. But when the head is rotten, there’s quite likely to be some rot elsewhere too, and the sheriff wanted to root it out. He’d offered the job to Rafe first. My husband had turned it down flat, without realizing what the sheriff was really after. Then the sheriff had approached Grimaldi, and she’d accepted. He’d probably been more open with her. And she had prevailed on Rafe to help. So now they were both here—and I was, too—and in addition to keeping the peace, and solving any crimes that came their way, between the two of them, and the sheriff, they had to figure out whether anyone else in Chief Carter’s old command, and Grimaldi’s new one, was corrupt and had to go.
And that was most likely the reason the sheriff had asked to work with Rafe. Under cover of the Katie Graves investigation, they could discuss and confer and sniff out other things, as well.
“I start tomorrow morning,” Rafe added. “Jarvis is pissed.”
Detective Paul Jarvis was one of Rafe’s new colleagues in the Columbia PD. And while we had no particular reason to think he was corrupt, or at least no more reason to suspect him over anyone else, I don’t care for him. “Why?”
“High profile case,” Rafe said, “lots of interest. He likes the attention.”
“Is that your opinion of him after working together for two days?”
“It’s my opinion after seeing him throw a tantrum ’cause Tammy didn’t loan him to the sheriff’s department instead of me today,” Rafe said. “He slammed outta there at the end of the day like a five-year-old taking his toys and going home. Damn near ran me down in the parking lot.”
“You’re kidding.”
He shook his head. “If he co
ulda gotten away with it, I think he’d’a done it. I’m guessing he was Chief Carter’s pet investigator, and he figured it’d be the same with Tammy.”
“And instead, you’re the pet investigator.” I smiled.
He gave me a look. “Nobody’s the pet investigator. The sheriff asked for me. You know why.”
I did know why. “Why do you think Jarvis was Carter’s pet investigator? Is Jarvis corrupt, too? Or is he stupid, so Carter assigned him cases he didn’t want solved, because he knew Jarvis couldn’t solve them?”
“He solved cases,” Rafe said. “Tammy’s going over’em, to make sure they got solved the right way, but he don’t seem stupid.”
Corrupt, then.
Or maybe he was neither corrupt nor stupid. Maybe Carter kept him busy with as many investigations as he could load Jarvis up with, because he knew Jarvis was both smart and driven, and if he kept him busy with other things, maybe Jarvis wouldn’t notice what Carter was doing.
Rafe nodded. “Could be. Either way, I’m on this one, and Jarvis ain’t.”
“Too bad for Jarvis,” I said. Without a smidgeon of sympathy, I might add.
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About the Author
New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Jenna Bennett (Jennie Bentley) writes the Do It Yourself home renovation mysteries for Berkley Prime Crime and the Savannah Martin real estate mysteries for her own gratification. She also writes a variety of romance for a change of pace.
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WRONGFUL TERMINATION
Savannah Martin Mystery #16
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Copyright © 2018 Bente Gallagher
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