Survival Clause: A Savannah Martin Novel (Savannah Martin Mysteries Book 20), стр. 7
He was in bed when I tiptoed across the hallway and into our room. (Mother might have been living in sin with the sheriff, but I hadn’t felt comfortable enough to move my husband and myself into the master bedroom yet. In my mind, that was still my parents’ room. So it was sitting empty at the end of the hall while Rafe and I slept in what had been my room as a girl, across the hall from Carrie’s nursery in Catherine’s old room.)
He was lying on his back with his arms under his head when I appeared in the open door. He turned to look at me, and the corners of his mouth turned up, but he didn’t say anything. I floated across the floor and slipped under the comforter next to him. “You OK?”
He turned and pulled me in. “Fine. You?”
“Everything’s good here.” I tucked my cold toes between his feet. The air conditioning can be freezing in the middle of the night when you’re not wearing slippers. “Carrie’s back to sleep. And nothing else happened after you left.”
He didn’t respond, just kept his nose buried in my hair, breathing deeply. Trying to get the scent of death out of his nostrils, maybe. I’ve smelled it, and it’s hard to get rid of. I was under no illusions as to why he’d needed another shower when he came home, just a couple of hours after the previous shower.
His hair was still a little wet, and I ran a hand over it. It was like the slightly rough, slightly silky nap of a Persian rug against my palm. “Was the crime scene bad?”
“I’ve seen worse,” Rafe said. And added, “So have you.”
Perhaps. I’ve seen some things that keep me up at night if I think too hard about them. And I know for a fact Rafe has seen a lot worse than I have.
“This wasn’t too bad,” he told me. “She was killed somewhere else and dumped there, so there was nothing to the crime scene other than the body. Not much blood, all of it dry. Death was from strangulation. She was naked, so whatever she’d been wearing when he picked her up, he took with him.”
“Or dumped it somewhere else,” I suggested, while I marveled, with half of my mind, at what constituted pillow talk in our family.
He nodded. “Or he dumped it elsewhere. But not there. Tammy’s crime scene crew checked inside the dumpster—glad I wasn’t assigned that job—and everywhere else we could think of, and there was nothing that looked like it was related. They have to take it all back to the lab, to check it for fingerprints and DNA, just in case the killer happened to toss out a Styrofoam cup or empty his ashtray at the same time he dumped the body—”
Another job I wouldn’t want to take on. Not, in this case, because it would be unpleasant—although sorting through so much icky, smelly trash probably wouldn’t be fun, either—but because it would be tedious and would take forever and at the end, probably wouldn’t result in anything useful. But it had to be done, and I guess it was good that there were people out there willing to do it.
“I’m glad it wasn’t too unpleasant,” I told my husband, who was starting to act drowsy. His eyes were at half mast and his breathing was getting deeper. “Go on and get some sleep. You’ll have to be up again in a few hours.”
“Team briefing at nine.” He snuggled a little closer. “You sure you don’t wanna…?”
“Positive,” I said. “I’d rather wait until you’re more awake.”
“Tomorrow morning.”
“No problem,” I said, and held him as he drifted off to sleep.
He was up bright and early the next morning, and when I use the word up, I use it advisedly. I woke to him nuzzling the back of my neck and the area behind my left ear, while his hand was busy under my nightgown.
“Careful,” I murmured as I turned to meet him. “It’s been a few hours since Carrie’s last meal—”
He silenced me as soon as I’d turned around enough that he could reach my mouth with his own, and that, as the saying goes, was all she wrote. He sauntered off to the shower with a distinct jaunt to his step, and I burrowed back into the mattress and tried to get comfortable again. But then Carrie woke up, and by the time Rafe came out of the shower, I was wrapped in a robe and sitting in the rocking chair in the nursery feeding my daughter.
He dropped a kiss on the top of her downy head, and a longer, more leisurely one on my mouth—he tasted minty fresh; I did not—before he told me, “I’m gonna go get the coffee started.”
I glanced at the clock ticking away on the wall. “Didn’t you tell me you have a briefing at nine?”
It was barely six-thirty now.
“Team briefing,” Rafe corrected. “I gotta be there sooner.”
“For the super secret, inner circle briefing that only you and Grimaldi and Bob Satterfield get to attend?”
His lips curved. “Something like that. Mostly I need to find out if Ben McLaughlin has authorized me working on this, or whether somebody else is gonna come down and take over.”
“He wouldn’t be that stupid.” I shifted Carrie from one arm to the other. “I only met him once, but he seemed like a reasonable guy. And it doesn’t make sense to send someone else when you’re already here.”
Rafe gave a shrug. “Guess we’ll find out.”
“Leave me some coffee,” I told him.
He nodded. “What’ve you got going on today?”
I made a face. “Another trip to the house on Fulton, to make sure everything’s done and ready so we can get the place back on the market.”
A couple of months ago, my sister Darcy,