Unfinished Business (19 page)

Once they were past us and inside the
bedroom, I added, “Can you make it down the stairs on your own if
you hold onto the banister? I’ll walk in front of you in case you
fall.”

“You’ll walk behind me,” Rafe corrected,
grabbing the railing hard enough that his knuckles turned white,
“so I don’t take you out if I do.”

“That doesn’t make any sense—”

“You’re pregnant, darlin’.” He took the
first step down. I held my breath. “Falling down a staircase
wouldn’t do you or the baby any good.”

No arguing with that. I walked behind him
instead, and wrapped my hand in the waistband of his jeans. If he
stumbled, maybe I would be able to keep him standing.

But he kept on his feet, and we made it
safely to the first floor. Back in the kitchen, Rafe dropped down
onto the chair with a grunt, and drooped like a wilted lily.
“Shit.” He had a hard time catching his breath.

Wendell looked sympathetic, but said
bracingly, “At least you’re wearing real clothes.”

“We have to go back to the hospital,” I told
him, taking my own seat on the other side of the table. “He’s
bleeding again.” I turned to Rafe. “And this time I’m going to make
sure they handcuff you to the bed!”

“Darlin’...” Rafe muttered. I rolled my
eyes.

“I should have just put you to bed in one of
the other bedrooms upstairs. The crime scene crew would have left
you alone.”

“No offense, darlin’,” Rafe told me, “but I
managed to stay outta Marquita’s bed when she was alive. I ain’t
going there now. And sleeping in my grandma’s bed is just weird.
Specially after your mama spent the night there.”

“We may not have a choice,” I told him.
“Because I don’t feel real good about sleeping in our bed tonight.
Even after the body’s gone.”

“I’ll get the boys over here to haul away
the mattress,” Wendell offered. He looked at Rafe. “And don’t you
give me no lip about moving it yourself, boy. You can barely keep
on your feet. Ain’t no way you’re moving nothing.”

Rafe shook his head. At least he seemed
aware that some things were beyond his abilities at the moment.
“You going back out to Wilson County?”

Wendell nodded. “We could use you, if you
think you’re up for sitting in a car for a couple hours. The boys’d
be happy to have you.”

“I dunno...” Rafe said, glancing at me.
“With Huron on the loose, I don’t feel so good about leaving
Savannah on her own.”

“It’s broad daylight,” I told him. “I have a
house full of cops. I don’t think he’ll try to do anything to
me.”

He looked doubtful.

“Unless you don’t think you’re up for it. If
you just want to go to sleep. Or back to the hospital. You should,
so they can look at—”

“No,” Rafe said. “I feel all right. I just
tried to do too much.”

No kidding.

“But I can sit in a car for a couple hours
and watch other people work. And I wanna be there when they take
him down.”

“I don’t think we’ll be taking him down
today,” Wendell said. “I dunno...” He glanced at me. “Maybe she’s
right. Maybe you need to go back to the hospital.”

Rafe looked mutinous. I threw my hands up,
literally and metaphorically. “Take him. Just make sure he takes it
easy. If he’s bleeding when you bring him back here, I’m going to
be angry.”

“I’ll be good,” Rafe promised.

“That’ll be a first.”

“That ain’t what you usually tell me.”

While I sputtered, he added, “I’m gonna need
a pair of socks. I ain’t walking around barefoot. And tell Tammy
she’ll have to stick with you till I get back.”

Rafe is the only person in the world who
calls Tamara Grimaldi Tammy and gets away with it. She told me once
her own mother didn’t even call her Tammy.

“I’m sure she’ll be thrilled to do that,” I
answered dryly. “You can’t just dump me on her, Rafe. She’s
working. She’s got a fresh homicide to deal with. She’s not going
to want to babysit me.”

“And I don’t want nothing happening to
you.”

I didn’t want anything happening to me,
either. So I got to my feet. “I’ll go talk to her. And get you a
pair of socks. I’ll be right back.”

I left the two of them sitting there while I
headed back upstairs. If Grimaldi didn’t feel good about being
stuck with me for the rest of the afternoon, I guess I could just
stay in the house for as long as the crime scene crew was here, and
then lock and bolt all the doors when they left.

“Rafe wants to go to Wilson County with Wendell,” I told Grimaldi,
after I’d dug a pair of socks out of Rafe’s underwear drawer. The
crime scene crew was surrounding the bed, as well, so between the
five of us, there was standing room only in the bedroom. “He wants
me to stay here with you.”

“I’m not staying here.” She didn’t take her
eyes off the techs who were circling the bed and the dead girl. “I
have a homicide to solve.”

“He thinks he’s seen her before,” I told
her. “At Gabe’s—or outside Gabe’s—on Friday night.”

She glanced at me. “Is that the truth? Or is
he trying to give me incentive to babysit you?”

“Maybe a little of both?” I shrugged. “If he
says he thinks he saw her, I’m sure he thinks he did. I’m not sure
how reliable it is, since he only thinks so, and since it might
have been just before Hernandez hit him, and so his memory might be
a bit wonky.”

Grimaldi nodded. “Are they still
downstairs?”

“As far as I know. I don’t think they’d
leave before they know for sure that I’m safe.”

“Then let’s go,” Grimaldi said, and shooed
me out the door and down the stairs ahead of her. “You can’t
babysit your own girlfriend?” she added when we walked into the
kitchen.

Rafe broke off in the middle of a sentence
to turn to her. “First,” he said coldly, “I gotta go to Wilson
County. I figure she’d rather stay here where it’s cool, instead of
sitting in a car in the middle of the woods in the heat.”

He had a point. Then again, not necessarily.
I mean, it was cool in the house and hot outside, but there was a
dead woman in my bed. A dead woman who had gotten the same
treatment Rafe had gotten last night, with—I assumed—some
additional sexual thrills thrown in for good measure. I didn’t
necessarily want to sit around down here while the crime scene crew
and the ME were messing around upstairs.

“And second,” Rafe continued, “let’s just
say I’m not in the best shape I’ve ever been. There’s a chance
we’ll run into Huron out there. I’d feel safer if Savannah was here
with you.”

It was the closest he’d probably ever come
to admitting he wasn’t sure he could protect me, and it almost
broke my heart.

But since he hadn’t actually come out and
said so, not straight out, for me to tell him I’d trust him with my
life—any day, any time—would only make him feel worse. So I
didn’t.

Grimaldi huffed. “Fine.”

“You both make me feel all warm and fuzzy
inside,” I said, scowling. “If neither of you wants to be saddled
with me, I can stay here with the crime scene crew. Or go to the
nearest mattress warehouse, so we’ll have something to sleep on
tonight.”

They both shook their heads. “You’re going
with Tammy,” Rafe said.

“You’re coming with me,” Grimaldi said at
the same time.

She shot him a look, and continued, “I’ll
make sure you stay in one piece.”

“We’ll take care of the mattress,” Wendell
added. “Let us know when the CSI crew is gone, and the boys and
I’ll haul out the old mattress and bring in a new.”

Grimaldi nodded. “Stay in touch. Let us know
what happens on your end.”

“You do the same,” Wendell said, and
Grimaldi promised she would, before turning to Rafe.

“Savannah said you might know her?”

There was no question who ‘she’ was.

Rafe shook his head. “Not to say ‘know.’ I
mighta seen her on Friday night. Outside Gabe’s.”

“When was this? Before or after Hernandez
clubbed you?”

He gave her a look. “Before. After, I was
rolling around the back of the van. I didn’t see nothing but the
insides of my eyelids. And anyway, it was earlier. When we got
there. Seven o’clock, maybe. Seven-thirty.”

Grimaldi had pulled out her notebook and was
scribbling. I couldn’t imagine why, since this information wasn’t
exactly hard to remember. But maybe she had to keep notes for the
file. “What was she doing?”

“Walking,” Rafe said. “Through the parking
lot.”

“To the bar? Or away?”

“Neither,” Rafe said. “There’s a sleezy
motel back there, behind the fence and down the hill. I figured
they came from that.”

“They?”

“There were two of’em. The redhead and a
brunette. They took a right outta the parking lot and started
walking down the side of the road.” He shrugged. “I figured they
were headed for the truck stop.”

“Hooker?” Grimaldi asked.

“That’s what I thought. She,” he glanced at
the ceiling, “asked me if I wanted to get lucky.”

I sniffed, and he chuckled. “Don’t worry,
darlin’. Sixteen-year-old redheads don’t do it for me no more.”

Grimaldi and Wendell looked at him, and then
at me.

“He slept with a girl named Yvonne McCoy
back in high school,” I explained. “She was a redhead.”

“Still is,” Rafe added.

I scowled—yes, she was, and wasn’t above
flirting with him whenever she saw him, either. “But she isn’t
sixteen anymore.”

“That she ain’t.” He grinned before turning
back to Grimaldi. “Regular women sometimes ask if I wanna get
lucky, too. But she looked like she was hooking. Tiny shorts,
skimpy top, lotsa makeup. A little desperate.”

Grimaldi nodded. “What about the other
girl?”

“Fluffy brown hair,” Rafe said. “Short
skirt, pink backpack. Less comfortable with the whole thing.”

“And you think they were headed for the
truck stop.”

“That was just a thought I had,” Rafe said.
“I didn’t watch’em or nothing. But they were going that way, and
that’s where I figured they were headed.”

Grimaldi nodded. “We’ll go check if anyone
at the truck stop knows her. It might be her usual place of
business.”

“She wasn’t very old,” Rafe said. “Prob’ly
younger than Ginger was back then. Might be a runaway.”

“I’ll check with missing persons.” She
hesitated. “This guy Hernandez... did he have a thing for
redheads?”

Rafe shook his head. “Liked’em young,
though. But I don’t think he cared if they had red or black or
brown hair.”

“The other two women you said you saw him
with, four years ago...”

Rafe nodded.

“Were they as young?”

“Older than Ginger. But not by much. No
more’n twenty.”

“You looked for them, right?”

“Yeah,” Rafe said, with heavy patience. “We
couldn’t find’em. Alive or dead.”

“Did you check missing persons reports?”

Rafe shook his head. “I was deep undercover.
I couldn’t go to the police station to look at pictures of
runaways. I had to keep doing my job, and keep the focus off me as
much as possible. Wendell did some looking—” he glanced at Wendell,
who nodded, “but he hadn’t seen’em, so there wasn’t much he could
do.”

“I spent a couple nights driving around,”
Wendell said, “talking to working girls. Never found anyone who
admitted being picked up by Huron, or knew anyone who was. I asked
about girls going missing, but there’s always someone. Hookers
disappear all the time, especially if they’re runaways. They show
up in other neighborhoods and other towns. They go home. They leave
the life. Sometimes they die, although we never did find any
bodies.”

“We found this one,” Grimaldi said.

“And this time we’ll get him for it. Now’d
be a good time to tie in the other girls, too. He wasn’t tried for
murder last time. Not enough evidence. And double jeopardy.”

Grimaldi nodded. “If you don’t have the
evidence, it’s much better to wait until you do.”

“Hopefully this time we will.” Wendell
glanced at Rafe, and got to his feet. “Ready?”

“Socks,” I said, crouching next to his chair
to help him get them on. I’m not sure he could have bent over if
his life depended on it. “Want a hand getting up?”

“I can do it.” He put his hands flat against
the tabletop.

“Knock it off,” I told him. “There are
stitches in that arm.” There had to be. Top and bottom, if the
knife had gone straight through. “You’ll pop them, doing that.”

He scowled, but didn’t object when I grabbed
one of his arms and nodded to Grimaldi to grab the other. Between
us, we managed to get him to his feet.

“Weak as a baby,” he muttered,
disgusted.

I shook my head, but it was Grimaldi who
told him, “Most people would be in the hospital. Hell, most people
wouldn’t have made it home at all.”

And then she capped it off by adding, “So
stop whining.”

Rafe’s lips curled. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Take care of yourself,” I told him. “Please
don’t overdo. I don’t want to spend another night at the
hospital.”

“They prob’ly wouldn’t take me back anyway.
Not after the way I tore outta there earlier.”

Perhaps not. I hadn’t been there to see his
departure, but I could imagine, based on the way he’d come into the
house, what it might have been like. “Did they at least give you a
prescription for painkillers before you left? You’re not going to
be able to get through this on aspirin.”

Rafe shook his head, but Wendell nodded. “I
was the one had to stop at the desk to sign him out. I told’em to
call something in to the pharmacy. We’ll stop on the way to Wilson
County and pick it up. And stop for a new mattress on the way
back.”

“Thank you,” I said. Sincerely.

He smiled. “No problem. Me and the boys’ll
get him back to you in one piece.”

“I’ll hold you to that.”

I turned to Grimaldi, who said, “Unless you
want to kiss your boyfriend goodbye, we’re ready to go.”