Change of Heart

by Jenna Bennett

“You didn’t answer my question,” I said, as he sat down on the edge of the bed.

  He nodded. “Yeah, I saw it. That’s why I wanted to call her. To let her know. I forgot all about it till you asked.”

  “What kind of car was it?”

  “Mini Cooper,” Rafe said.

  I stared at him. “What kind?”

  “A blue Mini Cooper. With a white stripe down the middle.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  He shook his head. “Why?”

  “That’s the kind of car Beau Riggins drives. Or drove.”

  “He wasn’t driving it this morning,” Rafe said.

  Obviously not, since he was dead. “The police would have confiscated his car, surely?”

  “You’d think. Unless it wasn’t at his house when they got there.”

  “I saw a car like that a couple days ago. Monday night. When I was leaving Mrs. Armstrong’s house. I thought maybe it was Beau coming to visit the widow.”

  He arched a brow. “What gave you that idea?”

  “She’d mentioned having a cleaning service. I saw the car turning down the street when I drove away. And I knew he slept with Connie Fortunato last year. I guess my mind added two and two together.”

  Rafe was silent for a moment. “Did you go back around the block?”

  “Of course. And knocked on the door and told her I’d lost my cell phone. She wouldn’t let me in. Left me standing on the porch. Didn’t I tell you this?”

  “You didn’t mention what kind of car it was,” Rafe said and stood up. “C’mon.”

  “Where?” I watched as he opened a bureau drawer and pulled out a pair of black boxers.

  “Mrs. Armstrong’s place. I want a look around for that car.” He reached into the drawer again and grabbed a bra—blue satin—and tossed it my way. It hit the bed with a plop. A pair of panties—pink lace—followed a second later.

  “Those don’t match,” I pointed out.

  He shot me a glance, in the process of tugging the snug cotton up over his legs. “I won’t tell nobody. Unless you wanna stay here and have me go alone?”

  “No.” I scrambled out of bed and began putting the mismatched lingerie on. It wasn’t like my mother would ever know, after all. And the chances that I’d have an accident and would end up in the hospital, where Simon Ramsey would see my underwear, was surely a long shot.

  Five minutes later we were in the car on our way to Erin Armstrong’s house. I was driving, so Rafe could keep dialing Tamara Grimaldi. She must have turned off her phone, however, and wasn’t simply screening calls, because if she’d noticed the back-to-back calls from his number, I don’t think she would have ignored him.

  Eventually, when he couldn’t get through, he ended up calling the Metro PD and leaving a message for Spicer and Truman, telling dispatch to let them know where we were going and why. And since that was all we could do, he settled back to wait.

  He didn’t have to wait long. Another minute or two, and we pulled up to the curb across the street from the Armstrong residence.

  “No Mini Cooper,” I said. “There wasn’t the other night either. I probably just made a mistake and it belonged somewhere else.” Erin Armstrong might just have been rude to me because she’d thought she was settled for the night, in her robe with her wine, and then I came back to disturb her again.

  “Maybe,” Rafe said, “maybe not. Drive around the block and see if there’s an alley.”

  I took my foot off the brake and the Volvo slid away from the curb. “I’m sure there is. This is an old neighborhood. Pre-1900. They built in grids back then, with alleys.”

  “Let’s see if there’s a garage back there.”

  Sure. I turned the corner and took a left into the alley behind the Armstrong house.

  As it turned out, there were a lot of garages fronting the alley, including one that belonged to the Armstrongs. A nice, big two-story one, with two bays and what was either guest quarters or storage up above. Or maybe just a vaulted ceiling in the garage itself, although that didn’t make a whole lot of sense, I guess.

  Rafe slipped out of the car and over to the garage. I idled while he disappeared around the side and back.

  A minute later he came back, and bent to talk to me through the window. “Car’s there.”

  “Beau’s car? A Mini Cooper? Blue with white stripes?”

  He nodded. “I don’t think it’s Beau’s car, though. This one has California tags.”

  “Beau’s from Michigan. Grimaldi told me.” And I think I would have noticed if Beau’s car had had anything but the normal Tennessee plates. I’d only seen it a few times, but that’s the kind of thing you notice. And remember. “That’s quite a coincidence, isn’t it?”

  “Not that big,” Rafe said. “The factory did produce more than one blue Mini Cooper.”

  Well, sure.

  “Come take a look.” He held out a hand.

  I turned the Volvo off and made my way over to the back of the wooden building, where there was a high window. Rafe gave me a boost so I could see in, and sure enough, there was a blue Mini Cooper inside the garage. With a California license plate clearly visible. H0TSH0T, it said, with zeros in place of the O’s.

  “Someone thinks highly of himself,” I remarked when Rafe lowered me back to the ground.

  He nodded. “Could be Armstrong’s car. Or Mrs. Armstrong’s.”

  “Erin drives a Lexus SUV. She parked it at the curb the other night. And it wasn’t Brian Armstrong who drove this on Monday night. He was already dead.”

  “Helluva lot of dead people driving around in this car.”

  I nodded. “Is this the Mini Cooper you saw leaving Fort Negley this morning?”

  Rafe shrugged. “Looks the same. But I didn’t get a look at the tags. Wrong angle.”

  I glanced around. And called up the mental picture of the front of the house. “The Lexus isn’t here.” Not in the garage and not parked at the curb out front.

  He glanced at me. “So?”

  “She must be at work. The place is empty. We could go inside the garage and see if the Mini’s been outside in the last couple of hours. If it has, there might be water and sand in the tires, right?”

  He nodded.

  “If the car stays inside the garage much longer, that might dry up.”

  He grinned. “You asking me to commit another felony, darlin’?”

  “Well...” It wasn’t like I was asking him to break into the house, right? That seemed a lot worse. This was just the garage. And we weren’t planning to steal anything. I just wanted to look at the car.

  Maybe it was a felony, as he’d pointed out several times now. But it didn’t feel like one.

  “While you stand there and dither,” Rafe said mildly, “how about I just go open the door?”

  I dithered some more. He shook his head and walked away.

  I trotted after. “Shouldn’t we at least make sure the place really is empty?”

  “Sure,” Rafe said. “Give her a call. Make up an excuse. Find out where she is.”

  Easy for him to say. I’m not used to fibbing. But I squared my shoulders, scanned through my call logs until I found Erin’s number, and dialed.

  She picked up a second later, her voice brisk and businesslike when she introduced herself.

  “Hi,” I said apologetically. “This is Savannah Martin, from LB&A. We met a few days ago?”

  There was a pause, while she either tried to place me or wondered why I called.

  “I... um... just wanted to check in with you. See how you were.”

  “I’m fine,” Erin said. And added, “Everything considered.”

  “I took the house off the market two days ago. By now it should have trickled down to all the websites. I hope you’ve stopped getting requests for showings?”

  “Yes, thank you,” Erin said.

  Not much I could say to that, beside, “Good.” While I racked my brain for something else to move the conversation forward, she inter
rupted. “This isn’t a good time to talk. I’m at work.”

  “Oh.” Thank you. “Of course. I’m so sorry. I’ll let you go. Please let me know if there’s anything else I can do for you.”

  Erin promised she would and hung up, but not before giving me a little parting shot. “I’m glad you found your cell phone, Savannah.”

  The smirk was evident in her voice. I grimaced and dropped the phone in my pocket before turning my attention to the garage.

  Rafe hadn’t waited for me. The garage door stood open and he was already inside the dusky room, peering at the Mini’s tires. As usual, I took a moment to enjoy the way his jeans fit across his posterior before pulling the door shut behind me, just in case someone should happen to walk by and notice the garage sitting open. “How does it look?”

  “Good,” Rafe said. “Water and dirt in the tires. Mud spatters on the chassis. We have a winner.”

  “I wonder whose car it is. Erin drove an SUV the other day, and when Brian moved out, I’m sure he took his car with him. He’d need it to get around.” Nashville isn’t the kind of town where anyone who doesn’t have to chooses to use public transportation.

  “Might be a toy,” Rafe said. “Maybe she or Brian brought it from California to drive on the weekends. While they kept the fancy cars for work.”

  Maybe. But— “If so, the plates would be expired or changed to Tennessee plates by now. Grimaldi told me the Armstrongs had been here a couple years.”

  “Tags are current,” Rafe said.

  “Maybe there’s registration information in the glove box.”

  He reached for the passenger door handle. The door opened, and he leaned in and came back with a handful of papers. Registration, proof of insurance, even a photo ID card, all in the same of— “Neil Donnelly,” Rafe read.

  “Irish name. Like Erin. Maybe it’s her brother.” I reached for the paperwork. While he handed it over, I added, “Unless she has another brother, he’s also her alibi for her husband’s murder. She was on the phone with him at 1 o’clock on Friday night. 11 PM on the west coast.”

  “If he got the news Saturday morning,” Rafe said, obviously reading my mind, “he coulda made it here by Monday night, when you saw the car.”

  “If he drove straight through and didn’t sleep for three days straight.”

  Rafe shrugged.

  I peered down at the paperwork in my hand and added, “Anyway, he didn’t.”

  “How d’you know?”

  “Because if this is him,” I brandished the ID card; it showed him as a card-carrying member of Bottoms Up, an exclusive gay hangout in L.A., “he was here long enough to get friendly with Beau Riggins.”

  “No kidding?”

  “None at all. This is the twink from Beau’s Facebook page. Sally said she’d seen him at Chaps.”

  Rafe had his mouth open to answer, but he never got to say a word—not about that—because there was a sound from above—where I had surmised that there might be an apartment—and there stood Neil Donnelly himself, in the flesh.

  Chapter Twenty Four

  It was rather nice flesh, too, if you happened to go for that kind of thing.

  He looked just like his picture: young, cute, and gay, in slightly too tight pants and slightly too well-coiffed hair, with a shirt that was open several inches too far down his chest. He was almost angelic-looking, with that golden crown and those bright blue eyes.

  The only thing that detracted from the picture was the gun in his hand. It looked too big and heavy for his rather slender wrist, although in justice to him, he had no problem keeping it pointed. As he came down the stairs and stopped in front of me, the gun didn’t waver at all.

  I’ve looked down the barrels of a few guns over the past six or seven months—more than I’m comfortable with, strictly speaking—but it never gets easier. At least not until you’ve looked down the barrels of as many as Rafe has, and between you and me, I hope I never get to a point where being threatened with another gun becomes commonplace.

  But I digress. And anyway, Rafe turned rigid at the sight of this one too, although I think it was more because it was pointed at me than for any other reason. And probably because there was nothing he could do, not with the gun pointed squarely between my breasts. From the other side of the car, he couldn’t even step in front of me, and by the time he’d made it over here, Neil would have had time to pump a half dozen bullets into me. I could see Rafe’s body tense, as if he was thinking about it, but he didn’t actually move.

  Neil glared at him. “You again. I should have put a bullet in you when I had the chance.”

  “You tried,” Rafe answered. His voice was light and his lips curved in a smirk, although I recognized that stone cold fury in his eyes that I’ve never seen on his own behalf, only ever on mine. “I can’t help it that your aim’s for shit.”

  Neil flushed angrily. “It isn’t too late.”

  Rafe actually grinned and spread his arms. “Take your best shot. If you think you can manage to hit me this time.”

  Neil’s eyes narrowed and the gun wavered, from me and in the direction of Rafe.

  “Have you lost your mind?” I exclaimed, and Neil’s attention turned back in my direction again. Rafe scowled, but I’m used to that.

  Under other circumstances, I might have tried to talk my way out of there. Pretending I had no idea what Neil was guilty of, and just trying to get out of the garage with our skins intact. But he’d already given himself away when he recognized Rafe, so that was not an option.

  The second best thing would be to keep him preoccupied and distracted, I figured. Maybe Rafe could figure out a way to take him down without getting either of us shot in the process.

  I prepared to build rapport. I’ve been brought up to put a man at his ease, although I don’t think my mother ever imagined the training would come in handy in situations like this. “You’re Erin’s brother, right?”

  He nodded.

  “How long have you been in Nashville?”

  “A couple of weeks,” Neil said.

  Since before Brian died, then. Not that that came as a surprise, since I was beginning to realize some things I hadn’t realized before, when I hadn’t known he was here.

  “What I don’t understand,” I told him, not only to draw his attention away from Rafe but also because I really did want to know, “is how Tim got involved in this.”

  Neil contemplated me in silence for a few seconds before he deigned to answer. “He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “You mean, he was at Chaps on Friday night? You didn’t plan that?”

  He shook his head. “I was going to pin the murder on Beau, but then Tim got into it with Brian and it seemed like fate.” He shrugged, the motion spare and elegant.

  “They got into it?”

  “Brian wanted Tim to go home with him,” Neil said. “He wasn’t inclined to take no for an answer.”

  “So they argued?”

  “And everybody saw and heard them. It was too good an opportunity to pass up.”

  “So until then you were going to pin the murder on Beau? Why?”

  “It was his fault,” Neil said, boyish face darkening.

  “What was his fault?”

  “He slept with Erin,” Neil said. “If it hadn’t been for that, none of this would have happened.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He squinted at me. And then I guess he decided that if he was going to shoot me anyway, he might as well satisfy my curiosity. “If Beau hadn’t slept with my sister, Brian wouldn’t have moved out and started divorce proceedings, and if he hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t have had to kill him.”

  “So it was for the money?”

  “No,” Neil said, “it wasn’t for the money. I wanted to kill him all along. It was Erin who told me to wait, to make him suffer. But if he was leaving, we couldn’t make him suffer anymore. So he had to die.”

  I understood all the words he used, but I had no i
dea what he was talking about. “What do you mean, you wanted to kill him all along? Since when? Since your sister married him?”

  That was rather extreme, if you asked me. My family wasn’t thrilled about my involvement with Rafe, but I sincerely hoped that none of them would ever consider murder to rid themselves of him.

  “Before that,” Neil said.

  Before Erin married him? “Why?”

  “Because he ruined my life.”

  I looked at him. He didn’t look ruined. He was young and handsome and seemed to be healthy. Granted, best as I could figure it, he was also headed to jail for the rest of his life for a couple of murders, but really, apart from that, he didn’t seem like he should be complaining.

  As Rafe often tells me, I’m not a good liar. My face gives away my feelings in a most unladylike manner, according to my mother.

  Neil flushed. “Six years ago,” he said, his voice almost choked with anger, “I was sixteen. I knew I was gay, and I was just starting to figure things out, to experiment. And I met Brian.”

  Ouch. I could imagine what happened only too well, from what he said, and what he didn’t. Young, impressionable Neil going out looking for understanding and reassurance and guidance, maybe even hoping for love, to figure out who he was and how he fit into the world, and instead falling into the greedy mitts of an experienced, older, seasoned sexual sadist. “I’m sorry.”

  “He hurt me,” Neil said, his voice brittle. “He hurt me, and he liked it. He told me I had to learn to like it too. He didn’t let me leave until I told him I did. Until I thanked him for hurting me. And until I signed a paper saying I’d submitted voluntarily.”

  My stomach twisted, and I had to focus on keeping my voice level. “Did you report him to the police? Afterwards?”

  “No,” Neil said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because they wouldn’t believe me. They would say I was looking for it. That I agreed to it by being there, and being drunk, and not fighting hard enough...”

  “You were sixteen. Underage. They would have listened.”

  He shook his head. “Erin was raped once. That’s what happened to her. They made it sound like it was her fault.”

  “I’m sorry.” It does happen that way sometimes. I’ve heard of it myself. The whole idea of putting the victim on trial because she’s wearing a tight dress and high heels and because she was there and drinking and that must mean she wanted it. It isn’t good, and it isn’t right, but it happens.