Bad Debt (Savannah Martin Mysteries Book 14)

by Jenna Bennett

  “Your father called the TBI for help with a case,” I said. “I came down with Rafe. If you’re asking what I’m doing here, specifically, I just came out of the hearing into Beulah Odom’s competency.”

  “How did Judge Hopkins find?”

  “That there’s no reason to think Beulah was non compos mentis or under undue pressure. The will stands.”

  Todd nodded. “So Yvonne McCoy gets the restaurant.”

  “If she doesn’t,” I said, “it won’t be because of Beulah’s mental state. I suppose the Odoms could come up with some other complaint, although I don’t know what that would be.”

  “It would have to be something good.” Todd changed the subject. “What kind of case does Dad need help with?”

  I told him. “Do you know the Skinners? Are there any more of them?”

  “Robbie has a daughter and an ex-wife,” Todd said. “They don’t live around here. Pulaski, I think. But...”

  I nodded. “You should let your dad know, so he can check and make sure they’re all right. Or I can tell Rafe.”

  “Go ahead. I don’t want to get involved in my dad’s job.”

  Fine by me. I had to call anyway, to let Rafe know that Yvonne was out of court and could be questioned.

  But before I could do that, I’d have to get rid of Todd. “Was there something you needed?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I just saw you when I came through the door and thought I’d say hello. I’m on my way to a meeting.”

  “It was nice to see you,” I told him. I suppose it had been. Or at least it had been less awkward than in the past. Marginally. Maybe he’d finally gotten over me and moved on.

  Todd nodded. “I’ll see you later, Savannah.” He turned to go.

  “Say hello to Marley,” I told his back. He flinched, sort of like from a mosquito bite, but he didn’t stop and he didn’t speak. I waited until he was an appropriate distance away, and then I opened my door and slid behind the wheel. And pulled out the phone.

  “Yes, darlin’,” my husband’s voice said a few seconds later.

  “Sorry to bother you again. I just wanted to update you on a couple of things.”

  “Go ahead.”

  I told him what had happened in the courtroom, and that Beulah had been judged competent to dispose of her property the way she wanted. “So Yvonne gets the restaurant. Unless something else happens.”

  “What could happen?”

  I had no idea, and said so. “The will has to go through probate. It’ll take a few months. Anything could happen. The place could burn to the ground. Or Yvonne could keel over from a heart attack.”

  “Or something worse,” Rafe said grimly. “Tell her to watch her back.”

  I told him I would, the next time I saw her. “I also saw Todd.”

  “Did you, now?”

  “He came out of the DA’s office and saw me. And decided to be polite.”

  “Bastard,” Rafe said.

  “He told me that Robbie had an ex-wife and a daughter. Todd thinks they might live in Pulaski. Someone should check and make sure they’re all right.” And, I suppose, tell them the news.

  Notifying next of kin. One of my least favorite things to do.

  “C’mon up here and get me,” Rafe said. “We’ll go do it now.”

  We? “I’m not sure the sheriff wants me to get involved in his case.”

  “It’s one less thing he has to do himself. He’s kinda busy. And I’m sure he’d rather have us do it, than ask the Giles County sheriff.”

  “I’m on my way,” I said, as I put the car into gear and pulled away from the Martin and Vaughan sign, “but make sure the sheriff knows I’ll be coming with you. I don’t want him to be upset with me.”

  Rafe said he would. “But I don’t think you gotta worry about that. It’s not like we’re gonna be investigating anything. We’re just gonna do a notification.”

  And see what, if anything, Robbie’s ex-wife knew. But since there was no sense in pointing that out, I didn’t. “Twenty minutes,” I said instead. “I’m on my way out of Columbia now. Tell me where to go once I’m past Robbie’s place.”

  He gave me directions for how to get from Robbie’s to Art’s, where he was at the moment, and I hung up so I could concentrate on driving. The directions weren’t complicated—it sounded like the Skinners had lived a couple of miles apart, if that—but it was still overcast and misty, visibility was poor, and I wanted to keep both hands on the wheel.

  As a result, it took a little longer than the twenty minutes I had promised before I made it back up into the foothills and found Art’s place, at the end of another long, winding dirt road liberally decorated with No Trespassing signs.

  When I came out in the clearing at the end, I might as well have been back at Robbie’s place. Same run-down trailer, same flashy, new truck with big beefy tires. Next to this one, a small Honda perched, and beyond that another truck, older and less flashy, a sort of poopy brown color. Off to the side, another Airstream—smaller than Robbie’s—perched.

  Several official cars rounded out the collection: the sheriff’s SUV, of course, two other sheriff’s department vehicles, a van with the TBI’s logo on the side—the borrowed crime scene techs Rafe had sent down before we left, most likely—and a car from the Columbia PD, that said it belonged to the chief of police. He had no jurisdiction here, miles outside the Columbia city limits, but maybe the sheriff had called him in to consult.

  Rafe was watching for me. No sooner had I pulled into the clearing, than he came out of the nearby trailer and made his way toward me, long legs eating up the distance between us. He yanked open the passenger door and fit himself inside. “Drive.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to drive?” I swooped around the wet grass and mud and headed back toward the road. Usually he wants to do the driving. I don’t drive fast enough for him.

  He shook his head. “Just get the hell outta here.”

  I glanced at him. A quick glance, since I was trying to make my way down the dirt track to the road, and since the track was narrow and wet and—if I got too close to the edge—a little loose. “What happened?”

  He glowered. Not at me, out the windshield. “Politics.”

  “I was wondering what the Columbia chief of police was doing there.”

  “Big case,” Rafe said. “I guess he don’t want the sheriff to get all the glory.”

  “There’s glory in solving a case like this?”

  He shrugged. “He gotta taste of it back in the spring, I guess.” During my high school reunion. “This is the biggest case to hit Maury County since.”

  The biggest case to hit Maury County ever, I would say. And did.

  Rafe nodded. “This don’t come along every day. He musta wanted in on it.”

  I flicked my turn signal on, peered left and right through the mist, and turned onto the paved road, back in the direction of Columbia. “The sheriff didn’t call him in?”

  “I dunno who called him,” Rafe said, adjusting the passenger seat to get comfortable. His legs are a lot longer than mine. “He just showed up.”

  “Can’t you ask him to leave? He’s out of his jurisdiction, isn’t he?” And on someone else’s crime scene, spreading his own germs and DNA around.

  He shook his head. “Cooperation goes a long way in a place like this. If the sheriff tells the chief to get the hell off his crime scene, the chief won’t be inclined to help the next time the sheriff needs a hand.”

  No, I could see that. It was annoying, and unquestionably a lot more annoying for the sheriff and for Rafe than it was for me, but there seemed to be no way around it. “Was he rude to you?”

  Rafe shrugged. “Nothing I haven’t seen before.”

  No doubt. He’d seen rather a lot. However— “What’s the problem? Does he remember you from when you were a kid? Were you in trouble with the Columbia PD as well as Sheriff Satterfield?”

  He shook his head. “I kept mostly to the county.
And this guy’s new, anyway. The old chief retired a few years back, the sheriff said.”

  “So what’s the problem?” If they didn’t know one another from before, and the chief had no preconceived notions about Rafe’s questionable past, why didn’t he like my husband?

  “He just don’t like the TBI,” Rafe said. “Made it very clear that between the two of’em, they could handle this, and my services weren’t required.”

  I arched my brows. “Isn’t it a bit too late for that? I mean, you’re here.” And Sheriff Satterfield had invited him. “Is the sheriff telling you to leave?”

  He shook his head. “Between the two of us, I think the sheriff’d rather have me.”

  I smiled. “That’s a nice change, anyway.”

  Rafe grimaced, but didn’t say anything. I added, “He’s being nice to you, right?”

  “Sheriff Satterfield? Sweet as pie. It’s the Columbia chief who’s the problem.”

  “Well,” I said, “you don’t have to work with him, right? Or does the sheriff seem inclined to let him play?”

  “He seems inclined to tell him to go to hell. But he won’t, since they’re gonna be working in the same county long after this case is dead and gone.”

  Understandable.

  “I guess you’ll just have to put up with him. Maybe they’ll find some kind of connection to Columbia, and he can focus on that.”

  Rafe muttered something unkind and folded his arms across his chest. “Take the road through Damascus.”

  “The one coming up?” There was an intersection up ahead.

  He nodded. “No sense in going all the way through Columbia and Sweetwater when we can cut through the west side of the county. Unless you want I should drop you off at your mama’s house and go to Pulaski by myself?”

  “No,” I said, my hands steady on the steering wheel as I made the turn onto the Pulaski Highway. “That won’t be necessary. I want to come with you.”

  “This ain’t gonna be a fun trip, you know.”

  “I’m sure it isn’t.” Best case scenario, we’d be telling Robbie’s ex-wife that her ex-husband and the father of her child was dead. Worse case scenario, we’d have to tell Robbie’s daughter that she was an orphan. She’d probably take it harder than her mother. If Mrs. Skinner had left Robbie, there might not be much love lost between them. And worst case scenario, we’d walk into another crime scene, and they both—or at least one of them—would be dead, too.

  No, I had no illusions that this was going to be anything but difficult.

  “You sure you don’t wanna go home?”

  “I’m positive,” I said. If he was going, I was going. I might not be able to do much, no matter which scenario we found ourselves faced with, but at least he wouldn’t be alone.

  “Suit yourself.” But he didn’t seem upset as he leaned back in the seat and relaxed.

  Neither one of us spoke for several minutes. I concentrated on driving, and Rafe on whatever thoughts were in his head. But as we neared Damascus, a small town southwest of Columbia on the way to Pulaski, he roused enough to ask, “D’you remember where Yvonne lives?”

  “Of course. I was there just a couple of months ago.” And not for the first time. Once, last year, I’d gone there—with Rafe—in time to save Yvonne from bleeding out on her living room floor. It wasn’t a place I was likely to forget. Not in this lifetime.

  “Remember how to get there?”

  I did. Again, it wasn’t that long ago that I’d been there. I had come from the other direction, from Sweetwater, granted. But it wasn’t hard to find. A few minutes later, we pulled up in front of the tiny tract house Yvonne called home.

  The living room light was on, a bright, happy beacon through the dreary gloom.

  “Guess she’s home,” Rafe said.

  I pulled into the driveway behind Yvonne’s car. “Guess so. She had court this morning, so she’s probably not working today.” She wouldn’t have known how long it would take Judge Hopkins to make up his mind about Beulah’s competency, after all. I’m sure she wouldn’t have scheduled a work shift after court.

  “I thought the restaurant was closed,” Rafe said, as I turned off the engine and withdrew the key from the ignition.

  “It is. Didn’t I tell you? She’s working at the drugstore in Sweetwater while she’s waiting to see how this whole thing pans out.”

  I had discovered that several months ago, and was pretty sure I’d told him. Then again, that was during the time he’d been involved in a gang war, and I’d been trying to figure out who Darcy’s biological parents were, so we’d both had other things on our minds. I might have told him, and he’d forgotten, or I might not have told him at all.

  Yvonne opened the door on the second knock. She’d changed out of the prim and proper court attire Catherine had had her dressed in, and into a pair of tights and a loose sweater. It was low cut enough that I could see the faint remains of some of the scars from the knife attack last fall. Not the worst of it—that was hidden below—but enough to remember walking into this living room and seeing Yvonne dead—or so I’d thought—on the floor.

  She also looked like she’d been crying. Her eyes were red-rimmed and swollen.

  For a second nobody moved. Then her bottom lip started to quiver and Rafe stepped through the doorway and pulled her into his arms. I closed the door behind us all as she started sobbing, and headed for the kitchen to make some tea.

  Six

  “I dated Darrell in high school,” Yvonne said five minutes later. To me, since Rafe had obviously known this already.

  She and I were sipping tea. Rafe had declined. He’s not a big tea drinker to begin with, and I think he might have been trying to maintain some semblance of official standing. Which wasn’t easy when he’d just held the witness through a storm of sobbing. His shirt was still wet on the shoulder; a darker patch against the pale blue.

  “I don’t remember Darrell,” I told her. “Rafe said he thought Darrell graduated before I started at Columbia High.”

  Yvonne nodded. “He was older than me. All the Skinners were.”

  And now all the Skinners were dead. “Did you have anything to do with them—with Darrell—after high school?”

  This storm of tears seemed a little out of place, if not.

  She sniffed. “On and off. We dated for a couple years a couple years ago.”

  “Why did you break up?”

  “He was a bastard,” Yvonne said. A tear leaked out of the corner of her eye, and she lifted the tissue in her hand to wipe it away.

  OK, then. So the victim—one of them—had been a bastard, but she cried for him anyway.

  “In what way?” I wanted to know.

  Rafe rolled his eyes, but let me keep talking. Maybe he was hoping he’d learn something from my curiosity. Or maybe he was waiting to come in for the kill, metaphorically speaking, after I had softened Yvonne up.

  Not that she could get much softer than she was at the moment. She was slumped against the back of the sofa like her spine couldn’t keep her upright, clutching a wet tissue.

  “He cheated,” Yvonne said. “Couldn’t keep it in his pants.”

  Another tear appeared and she swatted at it.

  “Who’d he cheat with?”

  “Marcy Coble,” Yvonne said.

  I remembered Marcy Coble. She’d been several years older than me—Rafe’s age; a high school senior when I was a freshman—and a cheerleader as well as, I thought, homecoming queen the first year I was in high school.

  “Back then? Or now?”

  “Then,” Yvonne said, leaning her head back against the sofa. “Bitch.”

  I glanced at Rafe. He shrugged.

  “How about more recently?” It wasn’t likely that Marcy Coble—cheerleader and homecoming queen—would have shot Darrell Skinner and his entire family more than a dozen years later, after all. Even if he’d been a bastard. Or at least I wouldn’t think so.

  “Some high-class skank,” Yvonne said, to
the ceiling. “Someone he met at the Pour House.”

  “The poor house?”

  “Bar in Thompson Station,” Rafe said, naming a small community about halfway between Columbia and Franklin. “How long ago?”

  “Last year.” Yvonne was still talking to the ceiling. “It wasn’t the first time. I took him back twice before that. All women he picked up in some bar or other when he was drunk.” She lifted the tissue to dab at her eyes.

  “Was he drunk a lot?”

  Yvonne shrugged.

  “I don’t suppose you happen to have a picture of him?”

  I was curious, to be honest, what this guy had looked like, to be able to attract women like flies to honey. From what I’d seen of Robbie—and admittedly, he hadn’t been at his best, in his dirty tighty whities in the rain—he wasn’t what I’d call a heart throb.

  “Somewhere.” Yvonne fought her way out of the sofa and padded across the floor in stocking feet. She disappeared into the back end of the house, where the bedroom was.

  “Should I go with her?” I asked Rafe in a whisper.

  He shook his head. “She’s gonna come back. Not like she’s hiding anything.”

  I guess not. “She seems distraught.”

  He nodded. “She was hung up on Darrell for a long time. And he on her. Remember that time you drove me back to the Bog from Columbia?”

  Of course. It had been just after he graduated from high school. Maybe even the day of. He’d been eighteen, I’d been fifteen, and I’d been on my way home from the movies with Todd Satterfield, my brother Dix, and my best friend Charlotte, when we’d stumbled upon Rafe, drunk and bleeding, sitting on a curb in Columbia. I had insisted on taking him back to Sweetwater with us, and in the process, had ruined Dix and Charlotte’s plans of necking in the backseat, while Todd had spent the entire ride worrying that Rafe was going to throw up all over the brand new leather interior.

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “That was Darrell Skinner?”

  “And the other Skinners. He’d found out about Yvonne and me.”

  And had had his brothers help him beat Rafe to a pulp. Three of them, all older, for all intents and purposes grown men, beating up on someone who wasn’t much more than a boy.