Right of Redemption

by Jenna Bennett

  “Of course, darling,” Mother said. “We took you kids down there a few times when you were small.”

  ‘We’ being her and my dad, I assumed. Not her and Bob.

  “We could always take a drive over ourselves, if you wanted. And see what’s going on.”

  The creeps in the masks, if they were there this weekend, weren’t likely to be interested two white women with blond hair. And they’d have their hands full with the combined power of the sheriffs, Tamara Grimaldi, and Rafe, anyway.

  “Aren’t you working on the house?” Mother asked.

  Actually, I was. Or would be. And besides, Rafe wasn’t likely to be happy if he ran across me and Mother in Laurel Hill while he was there. I didn’t think Bob would be, either. “Maybe some other time.”

  “Of course, darling,” Mother said. “Have a good evening.”

  I wished her the same, and then I carried my daughter to the car, and drove her and my dog and myself home, to wait for my husband.

  Seven

  When Rafe ambled through the back door a little after seven, the chicken enchiladas were about ready to come out of the oven, the condiments—chopped tomatoes, guacamole, shredded cheese, and sour cream—were nestled in a line of small blue bowls along the counter, and the Spanish rice had almost finished steaming.

  “Wow,” I said, looking him up and down as he shut the door behind him.

  He shot me a grin. “Evening, darlin’.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It is.”

  The grin widened. “’Scuse me?”

  “Nice to see you, too.”

  That didn’t make much sense, either. But it was nice to see him. Very nice. And not just because he’s my husband and I love him, but because he was dressed head to toe in SWAT black, only missing the body armor, and looked good enough that I forgot all about the food. The way that tight black T-shirt molded to every muscle in his arms and chest, and stretched tight across his shoulders, had my mouth watering for reasons that had nothing to do with the enchiladas. Not to mention the way those black cargo pants hugged his thighs and butt, and molded to…

  But I digress. When he came closer, and then bent to fit his lips over mine, my eyes rolled back in my head, and if it hadn’t been for the arm he snaked around my waist, I would have dribbled into a puddle on the floor.

  “Hungry?” he asked against my mouth.

  My eyes were closed, but I managed a confirming murmur. “M-hm.”

  “For food?”

  That, too. But it was far distant to the other appetites.

  “We could go upstairs, and—”

  The baby cooed. My eyes popped open, and he grimaced. “Guess not.”

  “Parenthood,” I told him, and scooted away so I wouldn’t fall into temptation to attack him again. “Keep your clothes on.”

  He arched a brow. “I wasn’t thinking I’d eat dinner in the altogether, darlin’.”

  “I meant keep them on rather than getting a shower. If you can wait an hour or two, until the baby’s asleep, I’ll help you take them off later.” With my teeth, if he’d like.

  A cocky smirk made it look like he’d heard the part of the sentence I hadn’t spoken out loud. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d read my mind. He didn’t comment, though. Just said, “Yes’m,” while his eyes laughed.

  “SWAT team?” I asked, my cheeks still a little hot, as I started to dish up the food, and as Rafe sauntered over to where Carrie was sitting to greet her.

  He nodded, eyes on the baby. “Just in case.”

  I thought about asking in case of what, but I figured I knew. They were going back to Laurel Hill tomorrow. And depending on what they found, a SWAT team might come in handy. “Do you think there’s anything to worry about?”

  I was hoping he’d say no, that a bunch of wannabe storm troopers running around a wildlife preserve preparing for a war they had no chance of winning, wasn’t a concern. He didn’t.

  “They obviously got firepower,” he said instead, straightening, “if the bullets we found were anything to go by. They got semi-automatic weapons, so if they put a finger on the trigger, the gun’ll spew out bullets till the magazine’s empty. Most of’em, when it comes right down to it, maybe ain’t likely to aim at another human being and squeeze the trigger. But there’s always one or two.”

  Yes. In any crowd, there’s always one or two. And that one or two, with a semi-automatic weapon, could do a lot of damage in a short time.

  And he’d been practicing tonight to walk into the line of fire of that one or two.

  I swallowed. “You’ll be careful, won’t you?”

  “I’m always careful, darlin’.” He gave me a grin, and I smiled back, in spite of knowing for a fact that no, he wasn’t always careful.

  And then he glanced at Carrie and added, “I got more reason to be careful now than I used to.”

  Good. “I know it’s your job,” I said, as I put two plates of enchiladas and rice on the table. “I know someone’s got to do it. But I’m not real happy that it has to be you.”

  He gave me a level look as he took a seat on one of the stools at the island. “Who better’n me, darlin’?”

  Well, nobody better than him. For a lot of reasons. But the reason why he (and the sheriff of Giles County) had to do this, was the same reason I was worried. So I guessed we were at an impasse.

  “Eat,” I told him, trying to put some levity in my voice. “You’ll need your strength for later.”

  “Yes, darlin’.” He smiled at me, but as he picked up his fork, he added, “For what it’s worth, I don’t think you have to worry about tomorrow. Even if they’re there, we ain’t gonna be engaging with’em. Just make note of where they are, what they’re doing, and seeing if maybe we can follow a few of’em home, to get a bead on who they are.”

  I nodded. “That makes me feel better.”

  “Good.” He drove the fork into the enchiladas. “So what’s going on with you?”

  I opened my mouth to tell him about Steven Morris’s visit and the fact that we might lose the house before we’d even gotten properly started on the renovations—but not soon enough that we hadn’t spent too much money—but then I rethought the impulse. He had other things to worry about, and in the scheme of things, they were more important things. He didn’t need my worries on top of his own. So I just told him that we’d gotten to a point where all the popcorn was off the ceilings, and the wallpaper was down, and the carpets were up, and we were ready to start putting things back into the house again. “If you can spare an hour on Sunday to go over there, I wouldn’t mind getting your opinion on what we should do next. Unless you’re busy tailing neo-Nazis by then.”

  “I might be busy tailing neo-Nazis. But if I’m not, then I’ll go over with you and take a look.”

  “I appreciate it,” I said.

  So we ate, and talked—about innocuous things, no more neo-Nazis or rights of redemption—and then I cleaned up the kitchen while he spent time with Carrie, and after we fed the baby and put her to bed, I took his clothes off—not with my teeth—and we made love. And the next morning, he kissed me goodbye like he didn’t have a care in the world, and since he didn’t seem worried, I pretended I wasn’t either, just told him to be careful before I waved him off and got ready to get Carrie and myself over to Fulton Street.

  When I got there, Darcy’s blue Honda that was parked at the curb, but there was no sign of Charlotte’s minivan. I pulled up behind her and cut the engine, and faced her across the roof of the car. “Morning.”

  She opened the back door before I could get around to the other side, and unhooked the baby carrier from the base. “Hello, gorgeous.”

  The compliment was directed at Carrie, not me. My daughter blinked up at her, and showed off a big, gummy smile.

  “You didn’t have to wait outside, you know,” I said. “It’s your house. You could have gone inside.”

  “I don’t have a key,” Darcy said, looking up from the baby.

 
Well, of course. “I’m sorry. I should have given you a spare when I had the locks changed on Tuesday. We have a couple of spares inside. I’ll get you one.”

  “How far have you gotten?” Darcy wanted to know, peering into the dumpster as we made our way up the driveway and toward the door. “We were too preoccupied last night to talk about it.”

  “Oh.” Yes, of course we’d been. “We’ve taken down the wallpaper, the popcorn on the ceilings, and ripped up the carpets. The plastic shower surround still has to go, and the toilet and bathroom vanity—they’re both old and ugly, so we need to replace them—but since there’s just the one bath, we’re leaving them as long as we can, so we have a bathroom to use while we’re here.”

  Darcy nodded.

  “There’s a cabinet maker from Leiper’s Fork coming on Tuesday to talk about putting custom cabinet fronts on the existing cabinet boxes; that way we won’t have to worry about replacing the cabinets themselves. They’re solid wood and they go all the way up to the ceiling, so we can save some money by keeping them and just adding new doors.” And hardware. And counters. And a sink. And tile on the backsplash. And new appliances. And flooring.

  There were plenty of other things to spend on our money on in the kitchen, and every little bit of savings we could manage would help.

  I dug my key out of my purse while I continued. “Maybe I should have called last night and told him not to come. Just in case the house isn’t ours anymore by Tuesday. It’s just that he’s really busy—I called him on Monday, and this Tuesday was the earliest he could come out—and I didn’t want to miss the chance to talk to him.”

  Darcy nodded. “Have him come out and take a look. Get a quote. Just hold off on committing to anything until we know how the Steve Morris situation is going to work itself out.”

  Good idea. “You’re smart,” I said, and inserted the key in the lock.

  Darcy grinned. “You would have thought of it too, if you hadn’t been so rattled.”

  Maybe so. I turned the key, withdrew it, and pushed the door open. “It’s just that I feel guilty, you know? I got you into this…”

  And then I stopped, when a breath of cold air hit me in the face. “Why is there a draft in here? Did we accidentally leave a window open?”

  Hard to see how we could have, when it was February and cold outside. I certainly hadn’t opened any windows yesterday. But maybe Charlotte had, and then Steve Morris’s appearance had made her forget to close it again.

  “God,” I said, “I hope we haven’t been ripped off.”

  Houses under construction are easy pickings for people looking for stuff to fence for a quick buck. Tools, materials, even copper pipes are worth good money. And since houses under construction just sit empty at night, they’re easy to get into, too.

  “Not sure we have anything worth ripping off,” Darcy said behind me, but I didn’t listen, just charged into the house. The kitchen looked OK. Everything that was supposed to be there was still there. Same with the bathroom. Nobody had ripped a hole in the wall to get to the plumbing pipes, and the window above the toilet was shut. The draft was still blowing down the hallway, though, from somewhere in the back of the house. I followed it past the two small bedrooms and into the garage addition.

  At that point, I’ll admit I was starting to get an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of my stomach. I’d been here before, once or twice. Or not here, specifically. But the situation felt familiar, if not exactly comfortable. By the time I turned the last corner and peered into the big room in the back, and saw the figure lying on the floor, it almost didn’t come as a shock at all.

  At least not until I looked closer and saw the handle of the screwdriver that stuck out of his chest like the hilt of a knife. At that point I’ll admit to a wave of nausea and lightheadedness.

  I fought them both back. There was no time for vapors.

  There was no question who it was, of course. Not only did I recognize him, and the clothes he’d worn yesterday afternoon, but there was a certain inevitability to this.

  Not that I’d been expecting it. Of course not. But if anybody was going to turn up dead—murdered—in our house-under-renovation, of course it would be Steve Morris.

  “Don’t come in here,” I told Darcy, who had followed me down the hall. I glanced at Carrie, still in the carrier over Darcy’s arm. “I don’t want her to see this. I have no idea whether she’d have any idea what she’d be looking at, but I don’t want to scar her for life.”

  Darcy arched her brows and put the carrier carefully on the floor just outside the door before she stepped down into the garage.

  “Oh,” she said after a second, sounding remarkably calm. “Steve Morris, I presume?”

  I nodded. “You presume right.”

  There was a pause while Darcy looked at him. “I guess that’s one of our screwdrivers? If that’s what it is? A screwdriver.”

  I confirmed that it was, indeed, a screwdriver, and that it did belong to us. Or it belonged in the garage at the mansion, at any rate.

  “I had dinner with Patrick last night,” Darcy said, “after he got back from the SWAT thing. We spent the night together.”

  OK. Not that I’d been in any doubt that my sister was sleeping with her boyfriend.

  And then I realized why she’d mentioned it, and my stomach sank. Yes, of course we’d be considered suspects in this. It was our murder weapon and our crime scene, and Morris had been threatening to take it away. We’d better make sure we had alibis.

  I’d better make sure I had an alibi, after the discussion with Dix yesterday.

  “Rafe was home by seven,” I said steadily. “We were together after that. In the same room. Until he left this morning.”

  So that was the two of us taken care of. And I didn’t think I had to worry about Dix. Given his outraged reaction to my suggestion that something might happen to Steve Morris, I didn’t think my brother had driven over here to do this.

  Darcy eyed the body. “Any idea when he was killed?”

  Not without going closer and touching him, and I had no intention of doing that.

  “Sometime overnight. He broke in, clearly—” One of the small panes in the fifteen-light French doors had been broken, right next to the handle and lock. That’s where the whistle of cold air was coming from. “—and he probably waited until it was dark to do it. It’s the kind of neighborhood where people pay attention to what’s going on. If he used to live here, he would have known that.”

  Darcy nodded. “Not in the past thirty minutes, though?”

  No. Probably not in the past thirty minutes. So we were both alibied.

  “I should call it in,” I said, looking around vaguely for my phone

  “I’ll do it,” Darcy said, reaching in her pocket. “You said Rafe’s on his way to Laurel Hill with Chief Grimaldi, so it won’t do you any good to call either of them. They have other things to worry about.”

  They did. And yes, that had been my intention, to call my husband or Grimaldi directly. When you have a straight line to the top, why not use it?

  “I’ll call Patrick,” Darcy said, but before she could suit action to words, a voice behind us asked, “What’s going on here?”

  It didn’t, as you might suspect, belong to Charlotte, but it was familiar nonetheless. I pasted a smile on my face and turned, not sure whether this was going to turn out to be good or bad. “Officer Enoch. What are you doing here?”

  “Saw the door standing open,” Enoch said. “Thought I’d make sure everything was OK.”

  He glanced at Darcy, and then beyond us to the body. His shoulders stiffened and his eyes turned cop-flat. “What happened?”

  “We just got here,” I said. “We opened the front door, felt a draft, and followed it back here. He must have broken the window, reached through and unlocked the door, and gotten in that way.”

  Enoch glanced at the back door and then returned his attention to the body. “Did either of you touch him?”

&nb
sp; We both shook our heads. “We haven’t been any closer to him than we are right now.” Which was a good ten feet away. It was a big room.

  Enoch walked over the body. He didn’t touch it, though. There was no point. I could see from where I was standing that life was extinct. Steve Morris wasn’t breathing.

  Enoch squatted next to him for an up-close look. “Do you recognize the murder weapon?” he asked after a moment.

  I looked at it again, sticking out of the center of a brownish red stain on Steve Morris’s blue shirt. “Yes.” My voice sounded like it came from far away. “It’s one of ours. The last time I saw it, Charlotte was using it to unscrew the ceiling fan.”

  A couple of days ago now. I couldn’t rightly remember where it had spent the time since, but it was a certainty it had stayed in the house. Neither of us would have had a reason to take it home.

  Enoch glanced up at the hole in the ceiling where the (really ugly) ceiling fan had been, and back at me. “Charlotte is your friend with the brown hair?”

  I nodded.

  “Where’s Charlotte this morning?”

  “She hasn’t gotten here yet,” I said. My voice still sounded weird, at least in my ears.

  “Did she call to say she’d be late?”

  No. But… “We didn’t plan to meet at a certain time.”

  Next to me, Darcy shifted her weight, and I glanced at her. She looked back at me, and I remembered that, yes, we had indeed arranged to meet at a certain time. “Around nine?” I’d said, and Darcy had nodded.

  And then the reason for Enoch’s line of questioning penetrated, and I turned my attention back to him. “You can’t be serious! Charlotte wouldn’t have done this!”

  Enoch just looked at me, and I added, “She lives thirty minutes away, in Sweetwater, with her parents and children. She had better things to do last night than to hang around here. We finished work around four yesterday, and went home.”

  Or at least she’d gone home. I hadn’t. Not until later.