Close to Home

by Jenna Bennett

  “Hold on, I’m coming!”

  There was a part of me that thought it might be Rafe outside the door. I don’t get many visitors. My family is all in Sweetwater, my ex-husband is busy with his new wife, and I don’t have many friends. Lila was my closest girlfriend in Nashville, and she was murdered a couple of months ago. And I’m not close enough to my colleagues that any of them are likely to come knocking on my door at seven thirty in the morning on a Saturday. Alexandra Puckett might, but I wasn’t sure she knew where I lived. But Rafe knows where to find me, and he isn’t the type to bother with a phone call to announce his arrival. If he got back to Nashville overnight, and if I meant anything to him at all, he might have stopped by to tell me he was here, and safe. My heart was beating double time when I unhooked the security chain and pulled the door open.

  And then I felt that same heart rocket to a stop in my chest when I came face to face with Detective Tamara Grimaldi of the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department. The same Tamara Grimaldi that Rafe had told me to contact if I needed to get in touch with him. The Tamara Grimaldi who knew where Rafe was and what was going on with him.

  I felt my hand close convulsively around the door handle as the smile froze on my face. Detective Grimaldi’s dark eyes were hooded and her face was grim. “Ms. Martin,” she said; we haven’t really progressed to first names yet, “I’m afraid I have some bad news—”

  And that was all I heard before everything went black and I fell to the floor in a dead faint.

  Chapter 6

  When I woke up, I was flat on my back on the sofa, and the front door was closed and locked. Detective Grimaldi was sitting in the chair on the other side of the table, one leg crossed over the other, dressed in her customary pantsuit and low-heeled boots. She must have dragged me here after I fainted. And then she’d gone to the refrigerator. On the table next to me was a small dish with a handful of saltines and a glass of what I could only assume was ginger ale. It looked like ginger ale.

  “You scared the crap out of me,” the detective said when she saw my eyes were open.

  “You scared the crap out of me too,” I retorted.

  “I’m sorry. I guess my first words should have been, ‘he’s fine.’”

  There was no need to specify who ‘he’ was. I felt myself starting to breathe again. “Really?”

  “As far as I know. I haven’t heard anything to the contrary.”

  I moved to sit up, my head still spinning. “When I saw you standing there, I thought...”

  There was no need to finish that sentence, either. We both knew that I thought she’d come to tell me that Rafe was dead.

  “I check in with Mr. Craig every week, and the last time I spoke to him, everything was normal. He’d tell me if it wasn’t.”

  I nodded. Wendell Craig is—in the parlance of the TBI—Rafe’s handler. His contact while he’s undercover. And since he’s spent most of the past ten years undercover, he and Wendell have a strong relationship. Wendell would know if anything was going on, and I thought I could trust Wendell to tell Tamara Grimaldi the truth.

  “Something you want to tell me, Ms. Martin?” Grimaldi added as I reached out a hand for the ginger ale.

  “About...? Oh. I don’t imagine I have to, do I?” Not if she’d figured out that I needed saltines and ginger ale. There was really only one thing that would cause that reaction, and bad news wasn’t it.

  “I thought you said Mrs. Jenkins was mistaken.”

  “What?” It took me a second to catch up. Put it down to low blood sugar.

  Mrs. Jenkins is Rafe’s grandmother. She’s in her seventies and struggles with dementia, and about half the time, she loses track of time and thinks that Rafe is his father, Tyrell, and I’m LaDonna Collier, pregnant with Rafe. She keeps asking me how the baby is doing and telling me to take care of her grandson. Detective Grimaldi was with me once when Mrs. J lost her grip on reality, and I had to explain that Mrs. Jenkins was old and confused. Now it seemed the detective had decided to give me hard time about it.

  “Does he know?” was the next thing she asked. There was no need for specification now either. And because she already knew I’d slept with Rafe, I didn’t bother trying to pretend it might be someone else’s baby.

  “How could he?” I put the glass down and lifted a saltine. “He’s been gone. I haven’t seen him or heard from him. That was the rule, right? No contact? If I’d tried to get in touch with him, you’d have known. He said to go through you.”

  “Do you want me to tell him?” Her dark eyes were steady. I came close to choking on the cracker.

  “God, no. Please don’t. I don’t want him to know yet. Not until I figure out what to do.”

  She was silent for a moment, and then she leaned forward and put something on the table between us. “I found this in the kitchen.”

  It was the abortion pill Dr. Seaver had given me. Every time I went into the kitchen for something, I picked it up and contemplated it. So far I’d always put it back down again. I drew in a lungful of breath, but let it out without speaking.

  “You haven’t taken it,” Grimaldi said.

  I shook my head. When she didn’t comment, I added, “I had a miscarriage once. A spontaneous one. While I was married to Bradley. It was awful.”

  She nodded.

  “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  I shook my head. I was all talked out. It wasn’t like I could say anything different to Detective Grimaldi, or like I’d hear anything different from her, than I’d already told or heard from Dix. I knew my options, and no one but me could make this decision. “I’m sure you didn’t come her to talk about my personal problems. What can I do for you, Detective? If you’re not here to tell me that Rafe’s dead, what the matter?”

  Tamara Grimaldi made a face as she dug in her pocket. An iPhone came out, and she manipulated buttons and icons. After a few seconds she looked up at me. “I’m sorry to do this. Especially under the circumstances. If I’d known...”

  “It’s all right. Just give it to me.” My heart was beating hard. If it wasn’t Rafe, then it was someone else I knew. Detective Grimaldi wouldn’t come here unless it was serious.

  She put the phone in my hand and watched my face. I looked down at the display and felt my vision tunneling again. “Oh, my God.”

  “You know her?”

  “Of course I know her.” I swallowed. “It’s Sheila. My sister-in-law.”

  I made it to the bathroom just in time, and rid myself of the ginger ale and crackers. This time I didn’t blame the pregnancy. When I came back out, pale and shaky, Detective Grimaldi was standing at the balcony doors, the phone to her ear. “In about an hour,” I heard her say. “Yes, of course. I’ll see you then.”

  She turned when she heard me open the door. “Everything all right?”

  I waved a limp hand. “Nothing seven months and delivery won’t take care of. I do this every day.”

  “If it’s bad, there’s medicine you can take for nausea, you know.”

  “It isn’t bad. It’s just morning sickness. This was worse because of...” I stopped and swallowed, feeling my stomach riot again. The sight of Sheila’s pale and sunken face, even on the tiny iPhone screen, seemed burned into my brain. “Have you called Dix?”

  “Dix?”

  “My brother. Sheila’s husband.”

  Detective Grimaldi shook her head, her short dark curls bouncing. “I came here first. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right. I’d rather know. This way I can prepare Dix.”

  Grimaldi opened her mouth, maybe to say that it was her job to notify next of kin, and then closed it again.

  “I spoke to him last night,” I said. “He was concerned, because she’d gone out and wasn’t back by the time the kids were supposed to go to bed. But then he heard a car outside and told me had to go, because he thought it was her. I can’t let him hear it from the police. Please let me talk to him fir
st.”

  I was already dialing when she nodded.

  When he answered the phone, my brother sounded even more frazzled than last night, but at least he’d taken the time to look at the display this time, and knew who I was. “Hi, Savannah. I can’t stay on long. Sheila didn’t come home last night, and I don’t want to tie up the line in case she calls.”

  “She isn’t going to call,” trembled on the tip of my tongue, but I bit it back. There were kinder, gentler ways of telling him the news. “That’s why I’m calling,” I said instead.

  “That’s nice, but really...”

  “Wait, Dix.”

  I paused to make sure he’d stopped, and not just for breath, before I went on. “I’m really sorry, but something’s happened to Sheila.”

  “What?” Unlike Alexandra’s what, this wasn’t a request for information. It was an exclamation of disbelief and fear.

  I gentled my tone. “My friend Tamara Grimaldi is here. She works for the Nashville PD...”

  “You’ve told me about her,” Dix said, his voice somehow faint even though it hadn’t diminished in volume. “She works homicide.”

  “I’m going to let you talk to her, OK?” I handed the phone over to Grimaldi, who put it to her ear.

  “Mr. Martin? I’m so sorry to be the bearer of bad news.”

  Dix’s voice quacked, but I couldn’t hear what he said. Grimaldi continued, “I’ll need you to drive up to Nashville, all right? She’s at the medical examiner’s office right now. Your sister will be able to do the formal identification, but I’m sure you’ll want to see her for yourself.”

  Dix’s voice sounded again. I shook my head and headed for the bedroom to get dressed for the day.

  “What happened?” I asked twenty minutes later, when we were in the car on our way to the M.E.’s office in Inglewood. It had taken me a little time to get ready, since I’d had a hard time finding something to wear. I didn’t think it would be right to dress up—skirt and blouse and high heels—especially since I wouldn’t be going to the office afterwards, but my pitifully small selection of casual clothes proved to pinch. My favorite pair of jeans—one of only two I owned—had gotten too tight around the waist. It wasn’t by much—I could still get the button closed—but they hurt. I ended up pulling on a pair of leggings and an oversized sweater instead, and dressing the ensemble up with high heeled boots, earrings, and a necklace. I’ve had it drilled into me from an early age not to go outside the front door looking less than my best. The fact that I didn’t spend fifteen minutes on my face was a concession in itself. I did put on mascara and lipstick; without it, I literally looked like death warmed over.

  Tamara Grimaldi glanced at me. She was driving the unmarked SUV, I was sitting in the passenger seat. “She was found late last night. By the showboat.”

  The Cumberland River runs straight through downtown Nashville, and it’s full of boats. Barges carrying things like sand and gravel and containers up and down the river; small fishing and pleasure boats, and one old-fashioned paddle wheeler that belongs to the Opryland Hotel. It’s called the General Jackson—after Andrew—and it’s something like a floating dinner theatre.

  “She drowned?”

  “We haven’t confirmed that yet,” Grimaldi said. “There’s a compression on the back of her skull that may have come pre- or post-mortem. We’ll know more after the autopsy. The M.E. will look for cause of death and anything unusual.”

  The saltines and ginger ale threatened to make a repeat performance. I swallowed. “Don’t mention the autopsy again. Please.”

  “Sorry.” She signaled to turn the car onto the ramp for Ellington Parkway North. “I caught the case. We fished her out and brought her to the morgue, but there was no identification in her pockets and her prints aren’t in the IAFIS.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System. IAFIS.”

  Right. “So how did you know to come to me?”

  “Someone found her car this morning,” Grimaldi said. “In a parking lot near the river.”

  “Was her purse still in it?” And her identification?

  Grimaldi shook her head. “Purse was gone. I had to run the registration on the car. When I found out her last name was Martin and she had an address in Sweetwater, I thought you might know her. I didn’t expect it to be your sister-in-law, though. I thought maybe a cousin a few times removed, or something. Sorry.”

  “It’s all right. What happened?”

  “So far we have no idea,” Grimaldi said. “With her purse gone, it looks like perhaps robbery. Then again, someone could easily have taken her car, with the keys in it, and they didn’t. So perhaps the motive wasn’t robbery after all.”

  “What was she doing there? In the parking lot?”

  “That’s something else we’ll have to find out. I’ll check whether anyone who works there has any connection with your sister-in-law, but on the face of it, the business doesn’t enter into it. They’re not open at night. Once I track down whoever was the last man out last night, I’ll ask whether the car was in the parking lot at that time.”

  “She could have gotten lost, I suppose,” I said.

  “Her car had a GPS system.”

  “What do you think she was doing there, then?”

  “I have no idea. Any chance she could be looking to score?”

  “What does that mean?” If it meant that Sheila was looking for sex, I doubted it. If she didn’t sleep with my brother, surely she wasn’t sleeping with anyone else either.

  “Buy drugs,” Grimaldi said.

  I shook my head in automatic rejection. “No way.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “We’re a close knit family.”

  She just looked at me, and I added, “Yes, I’m here in Nashville, so I don’t see her that often. But the rest of them live within a few minutes of one another. Dix and Jonathan work together. Abigail and Hannah—Dix and Sheila’s daughters—spend a lot of time with Catherine and Jonathan’s kids. If my sister-in-law had a drug habit, I think someone would have noticed.”

  “Most likely,” Grimaldi admitted. “But not necessarily. Especially if it hasn’t been going on long. Do you know if your sister-in-law’s personality has changed recently?”

  I bit my lip. “Dix said she had a miscarriage four or five months ago. Since then, she’s been different. They’re not as close anymore, and she doesn’t want to... you know...”

  Grimaldi nodded. She’s used to my Southern Belle sensibilities. “I’ll have to ask him for the details, I suppose. One of the aspects of my job I really don’t enjoy.”

  She turned the SUV off the parkway and onto the exit ramp. To the right, behind a clump of trees, I saw the tall antennae of the Tennessee Bureau of Investigations reach toward the sky. The medical examiner’s office is just down the road from TBI headquarters a quarter mile or so.

  I’d been here once before. It was back in early September, and I’d been showing someone a house in Inglewood (Gary Lee and Charlene Hodges, who had finally closed on their townhouse a few weeks ago; my first real estate commission!) when I got a call from Tamara Grimaldi telling me to hotfoot it over to Gass Boulevard. When I got there, I realized she’d asked me to meet her at the morgue. And then she sprung it on me that my friend Lila Vaughn had been strangled. I didn’t have good feelings about the place.

  Last time I was here she had taken me up to an office on the second floor, and had shown me photographs. I wasn’t kin to Lila, and had no real business looking at her. This time we went down, into the basement. To where the corpses were.

  I’d never been downstairs before, and although I’d seen more than my fair share of dead bodies in the past few months, it wasn’t like I was used to death. My hands were shaking when we walked along the hallway toward the viewing room, and my stomach was roiling unpleasantly.

  “There are three coolers,” Detective Grimaldi explained, probably in an effort to keep my thoug
hts occupied more than because she thought I needed, or wanted, to know. “One for new bodies awaiting autopsy. One for bodies that have been autopsied and are awaiting pickup from the funeral directors, and one for decomposing bodies.”

  “Is there a soda machine?”

  She looked over at me. “Feeling queasy?”

  “It’s the talk of autopsies and decomposing bodies.” Coupled with the fact that it was still early and I was pregnant.

  “I’ll get you a Coke.” She detoured. “Just sit over there for a minute.” She waved a hand toward a sofa against the wall. I waited there until she came back, Coke in hand. I didn’t even say anything about the fact that she’d gotten me the real thing, not the diet. Now was not the time to quibble about a few extra calories.

  “Ready?” She waited until I had opened the can and taken a sip, and then she guided me toward the closest door. It had a plaque with a number one on it.

  Inside the small room was a gurney, pared down and almost skeletal compared to the cushy ones you see in hospitals. No need to make these patients comfortable, I guess. A still form lay on it, covered with a sheet.

  “Over there.” Grimaldi waved me to one side of the gurney while she went to the other. I clutched my soda can, feeling the cold seeping into my fingers as I waited for her to fold back the sheet.

  I guess I thought, or at least hoped, there might be some mistake. I’d seen the picture, so I knew it was her, but until I actually saw the body, there was some little part of me that clung to the hope that it might not be Sheila. When Tamara Grimaldi turned back the sheet and I looked down into my sister-in-law’s face, it was still a shock, even though I’d been prepared.