Bad Debt (Savannah Martin Mysteries Book 14)

by Jenna Bennett

  I nodded. “You’re a few years younger than we are. And not from Sweetwater. But Rafe and I both went to high school in Columbia, so we know people here. And they know us.”

  She didn’t respond, so I went on, talking to myself as much as to her, working it out in my head. “It had to be someone he met last night—he went bar hopping, trying to find out what people were saying as far as the Skinners were concerned. Someone must have recognized him and realized he was investigating. That means it’s someone who knew he works for the TBI, because I’m sure he didn’t flash his badge around. A lot of people are leery around badges.”

  Lupe Vasquez nodded. She’d know that, too.

  “Although he did once. At Dusty’s. So it might have been someone there. In any case, whoever called knew enough about Rafe to figure he’d be able to get in touch with him through my mother, and enough about the Skinners to know that they were growing pot on a large scale. And he had some sort of incentive for wanting that fact known.”

  “I can’t help you there,” Lupe Vasquez said. “I have no idea who’d fit that criteria. It wasn’t about getting the Skinners put in jail, obviously, since they’re already dead.”

  I shook my head. “It can’t have been. And it couldn’t be about making sure the pot got off the streets either, since—with the Skinners dead—who’s left to deal with it?”

  We sat in silence a moment.

  “They might have had a partner,” Lupe Vasquez suggested. “And whoever called your husband wanted to make sure the police found the plants before the partner could move them.”

  Possible. Although moving three hundred marijuana plants, some of them close to ten feet tall, would be a big undertaking.

  Doing it in close proximity to three crime scenes would be crazy.

  On the other hand, the prospect of losing close to a million dollars would make a lot of people do crazy things. And if the partner just lay low, there was always the chance that the police wouldn’t notice the grow sites. They hadn’t until the mysterious caller had drawn Rafe’s attention to them.

  “Another possibility,” Lupe Vasquez said, “is that the pot was the reason for the murder. They were killed because they were messing in someone’s business. Your caller knew that, and wanted to make sure the police knew, as well.”

  I nodded. Then the pot wasn’t the reason for the call, or only peripherally. The real point had been to give the police a clue as to the motive for the murders. The Skinners had been involved in the pot industry, and that’s why they’d been killed. “So we’re back to the same question. Who runs the drug business in Columbia? I’m sure the sheriff has some idea as far as the rest of the county goes, but in this area, you’d know better. You’re a patrol officer. You see things. Who would I talk to if I wanted to buy pot?”

  “If you think I’m going to tell you that,” Lupe Vasquez told me, “you’re nuts. I’m not going to be responsible for a civilian going head to head with someone who deals drugs for a living, trying to get him to tell you who killed the Skinners. No way.”

  “But I need to know!”

  “No,” Lupe Vasquez said. “You don’t. Your husband does.”

  “If this is an excuse to talk to my husband...”

  She rolled her eyes. Big, expressive, brown eyes. “I’m not interested in your husband. He looks good, sure, but he’s married. And anyway, he isn’t my type.”

  Fine. “How about you tell me, and I tell Rafe? And I promise not to go near the guy myself. Whoever he is.”

  She snorted. “Like I’d take your word for that. I know you have a habit of sticking your nose into everything. It’s just a couple of months ago that I came this close—” She held up a hand, thumb and forefinger an eighth of an inch apart, “—to arresting you and your brother and sister for burglary.”

  “They were medical files!” Thirty-five year old medical files. “Darcy had to find her birthmother!”

  “Still burglary,” Lupe Vasquez said. “Here’s what you need to do. Call your husband. Have him call Chief Carter and ask for two uniforms to help out with the case. Tell him to mention, sort of off-hand, that he was involved in the serial murder case back in May, and that he’d like the same two officers he met then, since he’s already familiar with them. See if the chief will agree to assign me and Nolan to the Skinner case. There’s a good chance he will. The sheriff sort of brushed him off, since it’s out of our jurisdiction, and if the chief can get someone assigned, so he can keep his hand in, I think he’ll grab it.”

  That sounded like a plan. A good one.

  “I’ll call right now.” I reached for my phone.

  “At least wait until I’m back inside,” Lupe Vasquez said, getting to her feet. “And maybe step outside while you talk. Just in case.”

  In case the walls had ears. Or in case the sergeant on duty at the desk decided to share the conversation with his boss.

  “How long do you think they’ll be in there?” Yvonne and Catherine and Detective Jarvis.

  “Probably a bit longer,” Lupe Vasquez said.

  “He won’t arrest her, will he?”

  “What for?” Lupe Vasquez headed for the door to the interior of the building. “If it wasn’t murder,” she added over her shoulder, “there’s nothing to arrest anyone for.”

  She ducked through the door. I put Guns and Ammo on the bench and headed for the door to the outside to make my call.

  * * *

  Rafe was still walking. I guess it hadn’t been that long since I spoke to him, really. It felt like a lot had happened, but it had really only been twenty minutes or so.

  “You’re walking a long way,” I said.

  “It’s been a couple miles, I guess. Good thing I’m wearing comfortable shoes.”

  “Any idea how much farther you have to go?”

  But no. Of course not. “This is all Skinner land, I’m betting. Private. I tried to look on the phone, but I’m just a blue dot moving through a big area of white. The track I’m walking on isn’t on there. There’s a road looks like about three miles away, but I’m hoping I’ll get to something before I have to walk all the way there.”

  I hoped so, too.

  “So what can I do for you?”

  I told him about Lupe Vasquez. “She wouldn’t tell me anything. But she said if you can get the Columbia chief of police to agree to assign her to you, she’ll help you out.”

  “You think she knows anything?”

  “I got the impression that she might. Or at least that she thinks she does. You remember her, don’t you? From back in May?”

  Rafe said he did. “Fine. I’ll tell the sheriff later.”

  “Did you let him know that the Columbia PD has pulled Yvonne in for questioning?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Why not?” I had wanted him to tell the sheriff right away. Just as I wanted him to share this news right away.

  “I’m out here in the middle of nowhere,” Rafe said. “I don’t know how long before my phone runs outta power. There ain’t nowhere I can charge it until I get back to the house. The sheriff might not be carrying a charger in his car.”

  True.

  “I wanna make sure I don’t run outta juice. I’ll tell him when I call to let him know I’m outta the woods. If I still can.”

  And every second I kept talking to him was leaching more power from his phone.

  “I love you,” I said. “I won’t call again. Be careful out there. And call me when you get back to civilization.”

  I didn’t even give him time to respond, just shut the phone down with a snap. And headed back inside the police station to wait for Yvonne and Catherine to come out.

  Fourteen

  By the time that happened, my stomach was howling and I was feeling faint. Catherine took pity on me and suggested lunch. We ended up in the same little restaurant as yesterday, eating the same salad. Yvonne looked a little the worse for wear, and my sister was snapping her teeth on bites of lettuce, leading me to deduce she w
as upset.

  “So tell me what happened.”

  Yvonne glanced at Catherine. Catherine masticated furiously, her eyes angry. Yvonne turned back to me. “They’re trying to say that I killed Beulah.”

  “But that’s crazy. Beulah wasn’t killed. It was determined to be a natural death. And who are ‘they?’”

  “Detective Jarvis,” Catherine said, in the same tone she might have used to say Detective Fathead or Detective Dipstick. “But I’m pretty sure I sensed the presence of the Odoms in the background.”

  “The Odoms told Detective Jarvis they thought Yvonne killed Beulah? Why didn’t he tell them to go pound sand? She wasn’t murdered.”

  “They have to investigate,” Catherine said, sounding a little bit calmer now. Maybe talking about it helped. “It’s new information. Or could be. There’s always a chance the natural death determination was wrong. It happens.”

  “Sure. People miss things, whatever. But there’s usually some reason to suspect foul play, even if there’s no evidence of it. Like when LaDonna Collier died.”

  Rafe’s mother. She’d died of an overdose a year and a half ago.

  I added, “The sheriff was absolutely convinced Rafe had something to do with it, remember? Even though there was no evidence whatsoever that she didn’t just give herself the drugs.”

  Catherine nodded. “But that time he was actually right. Someone did kill her.”

  “But there was no evidence. Not against Rafe, and not against anyone else.”

  “So maybe he just had a gut feeling,” Catherine said.

  Maybe so. “In any case, he didn’t have one this time. I asked him about it at least a month ago, probably more, and he said he’d been there at the crime scene and it looked normal. He discouraged me from wondering whether it was murder, because there was no evidence that it was.”

  “Why did you wonder whether it was murder?” Yvonne wanted to know, finally getting a word in edgewise.

  I turned to her. “No real reason. I’m just suspicious. I asked both him and Lupe Vasquez, the girl cop who drove you here, and they both said it looked normal. No signs that anyone else had been there, no evidence of foul play.”

  “Well, they must have found some,” Catherine said. “Either that, or they’re grasping at straws. That would be the Odoms, I guess. They thought they could get the will overturned, and when that didn’t work, they came up with this.”

  Yvonne and I both nodded. That was the most logical explanation.

  “Hopefully it’ll just die a natural death. If there’s nothing to it, I’m sure it will.”

  I wasn’t, but I didn’t contradict her. It would only serve to make Yvonne more nervous and upset. But between you and me, I wasn’t sure the Odoms were finished. Even if this turned out to be nothing, I had the feeling they’d come up with something else. They seemed bound and determined to get their hands on that restaurant.

  “Did the detective say anything else?”

  “He was asking me about Darrell,” Yvonne said. “About our ‘relationship.’”

  Her tone made air quotes around the word.

  “Why would he care about that? It doesn’t have anything to do with Beulah.”

  Was it possible that this whole thing was just an excuse for Detective Jarvis—and I guess in turn his boss—to fish for information about the murders that they thought Sheriff Satterfield hadn’t shared with them?

  It seemed like a roundabout way of gathering intel. It also made it seem like they—or the chief, at least—was inordinately interested in the Skinner murders. And maybe a bit paranoid in his fear that people were keeping things from him.

  Or maybe I was just imagining the whole thing. I forked up a bit of lettuce and ferried it to my mouth.

  “I think,” Yvonne said, in response to my question, “he thought I might have talked Darrell into killing Beulah, and then, the day before the hearing, I got worried that he might rat me out, so I killed him.”

  “That’s crazy. And anyway, what about the other Skinners?”

  “He probably thinks I killed them, too,” Yvonne said. She was picking at her salad, just pushing lettuce around on her plate. If I’d been in her position, I might have lost my appetite, too.

  Or maybe not. I couldn’t seem to not eat these days.

  “But that doesn’t make any sense,” Catherine objected. “If you wanted Beulah dead, it would have been much easier for you just to kill Beulah. This way, you had to shoot all seven of the Skinners.”

  Yvonne shrugged, a bit jerkily. “I didn’t want Beulah dead. I loved Beulah. By now, I’m not even sure I want the restaurant anymore.”

  “Oh, no.” Catherine shook her head. “After all this, you’re not giving up until you do. You’ll get it, and you’ll run it, and you’ll thumb your nose at the Odoms for the rest of their natural lives. They’re not getting away with this.”

  I nodded. “If you give up now, they’ll win. And anyway, if anyone killed Beulah, it was probably them. They seem crazy determined to get their hands on the place. Just won’t accept the fact that they won’t.”

  “Nobody killed Beulah,” Yvonne said, but she seemed a bit cheered by the thought that the Odoms might have.

  I rather liked the idea myself. It made sense. There she was, an older woman with a successful business, health problems, and no other family. It must have seemed a no-brainer. Put something in her medicine to make it look like a natural death, and presto, you owned her restaurant. There was no other family to consider, and who would have guessed that she had made a will giving it away to strangers? They might even have checked her house before they killed her, sometime when she was at the restaurant working her usual ten-hour shift. There was no will in the house, so they’d assumed one didn’t exist. Bump her off and get it all.

  Except there’d been a will at the restaurant, where they hadn’t looked for it, and suddenly they’d committed murder for nothing.

  No wonder they were behaving like crazy people.

  “That’s horrible,” Yvonne said when I laid it out. She shuddered. Since she’s generously endowed, the shudder resulted in a corresponding jiggle of the assets under her sweater, and a man on the other side of the room stopped chewing for a second and just stared, mouth open and eyes bulging out of his head.

  “Maybe, but it makes sense.”

  “Hypothetically,” Catherine warned me. “You have no proof, and you can’t go around accusing people of things like this, no matter how much sense it makes.”

  “Isn’t that what you said the Odoms did to Yvonne?”

  It was, but Catherine still stuck to her guns. “You said it yourself. There’s no proof that Beulah was murdered. Sure, you can spin any kind of story you want about her death might have happened, but that’s all it is. Stories. Until you can prove that Beulah was murdered, you can’t accuse people of killing her.”

  I most certainly could, at least here among friends. “We might just mention it to Detective Jarvis. It makes as much sense as his theory—or the Odoms’ theory—that Yvonne did it. More. The whole Darrell angle is insane.”

  They both agreed with me. However— “I don’t think Detective Jarvis will be open to an alternate explanation,” Catherine said, “whether it makes sense or not.”

  “You’re saying he’s going to pursue this, even though there’s no evidence that Beulah was even murdered? He’s going to come after Yvonne for a murder nobody committed?”

  “I hope not,” Catherine said, while Yvonne paled, “but I didn’t get the impression he had a very flexible mind, if you understand what I’m getting at.”

  I understood exactly what she was getting at. One of those people with mental constipation, who got an idea into their heads and weren’t willing to relinquish it, even in the face of evidence to the contrary.

  “Well, he’s going to have to prove it was murder before he can prove anything else. You can’t charge and convict people of murder when the M.E. determined natural causes.”

&n
bsp; “Tell that to O.J. Simpson,” Catherine told me.

  “What are you talking about? The O.J. Simpson murder wasn’t natural causes.”

  “But he was acquitted. And they threw a civil suit at him anyway, and won. He had to pay twenty-five million in damages.”

  Yvonne gasped.

  I glanced at her, and back at Catherine. “So you’re thinking the Odoms will try to file a civil suit? Even though it wasn’t determined to be murder?”

  “I think we should be prepared for it,” Catherine said. “They’ve already shown they’re willing to accuse Beulah of being non compos mentis and Yvonne of murder. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s their next step. At this point, it looks like they’ll do anything they can to get their hands on that business.”

  “It’s mind boggling.” A second after the words were out of my mouth, I realized what I’d said, and shot a guilty glance at Yvonne. “I mean, I know it was a popular place. People around here liked it. But it surely wasn’t that big a money maker. The prices weren’t very high.” You could get breakfast for well under ten dollars, and the blue plate special was something like $6.99. “And the Odoms don’t look like they’re hurting for money. Not the way they’re dressed.”

  “Otis Odom died a couple years ago,” Yvonne said. “He was the one making the money.”

  Catherine nodded. “Maybe they were living above their means. Maybe things were all right for as long as Otis was bringing home the bacon, but they may not have been able to save anything. And now that he’s dead, they don’t have the income they’re used to. Maybe that’s why they want the restaurant.”

  That all made sense. “I really can’t see either one of them wanting to run a meat’n three, though. Can you?”

  The mental picture of Mrs. Odom sitting behind the cash register inside the door at Beulah’s, her hair perfectly done and her nails manicured, was incongruous, to say the least. And her daughter... I tried to imagine the elegantly turned out Ms. Odom in an apron and support hose, with her hair in a ponytail, waiting tables. The brain rebelled.

  “Maybe they’re planning to hire someone to run it for them,” Catherine said.