Survival Clause: A Savannah Martin Novel (Savannah Martin Mysteries Book 20), стр. 81
“Art did that on his own. Him and that nephew of his, I guess. Or maybe the kid’s father. The kid might not have had it in him.”
He said it like it was a bad thing, and to him I guess maybe it was.
By now there were sounds from the woods opposite the car, and after a few seconds Grimaldi appeared between the trees.
“I called for an ambulance,” she told Rafe, calmly, as if she couldn’t see me standing here in Jacob’s embrace with the muzzle of a pistol pointed at my head. “She’s not walking out of here. And since you both ran off…”
She turned to Jacob. “Mr. Drimmel. I’m Tamara Grimaldi. Police chief of Columbia. You killed my mother.”
As I waited for what sounded like the obvious end to that sentence, “Prepare to die,” I wondered, slightly hysterically, whether I was losing my mind.
Jacob didn’t seem to have heard anything funny in the statement. Maybe he wasn’t familiar with The Princess Bride. “Which one was she?” he asked, with every indication of interest.
“Her name was Maria Grimaldi. Number three.”
Jacob thought about it. “I think I remember her,” he said finally, as if pleased with himself. “Pretty woman, but she looked tired. Not a hooker.”
“No, she wasn’t. She worked the night shift at a motel near the interstate. That’s why she was tired. She’d just come off a work shift when you picked her up.”
Jacob nodded. I waited—we all waited—for him to say something else, but he didn’t. And to be honest, I’m not sure what he could have said. He wasn’t sorry, and nobody would believe him if he said he was. And I certainly didn’t want to hear any of the details of the crime. I’m sure Grimaldi didn’t, either.
“I’ve been looking for you for a long time,” she told him. Still calm, as if they’d met in much more pleasant circumstances than across the roof of an SUV in the middle of the woods. “It’s thanks to you that I became a cop. I wanted to figure out what happened to my mother.”
Jacob didn’t say anything to that, either, and Grimaldi continued, “I’d like to know about the numbers. The Roman numerals. That’s why we started looking at Kent Jurgensson and found the remains, you know. We thought it might have had something to do with the Latin classes at the school.”
Jacob giggled, and all the little hairs on my body rose again. “I got those off those old books of my wife’s. In the living room at the house.”
“The Encyclopaedia Brittanica.” I’d noticed them—a lot of volumes in leather bindings—but hadn’t gotten close enough to see the Roman numerals stamped on the spines. I knew them, though. We have a similar set at the mansion. There’s stuff at the mansion from generations back.
“Always thought she was better than me, with her la-dee-dah ways. Lunching with Debbie Mullinax and volunteering at the homeless shelter, like there isn’t plenty of work to do at home.”
He turned his head and spat, an eloquent opinion of his wife’s airs. I braced myself for Rafe to shoot him while his head was turned and his attention wasn’t on me, but it didn’t happen.
“You killed Laura first,” Grimaldi said. “Your daughter. You want to tell me about that?”
Jacob stared at her. “Why’d I wanna tell you anything?”
“It might be the last chance you get to tell your story.”
Jacob chuckled. “You gonna shoot me dead right here? I don’t think so. Not while I’ve got this.”
He wiggled the gun at my temple. I gulped.
“Then maybe you owe it to your grandson to let him know the truth,” Grimaldi said. “He’s been without his mother a long time. Don’t you think you ought to tell him how it happened?”
Jacob glanced at Curtis, standing still and pale on the other side of the car. “You wanna know what happened to your whore of a mother, son?”
He didn’t give Curtis a chance to answer, and it was just as well. “Your good-for-nothing father had gotten himself arrested, finally. I told her from the start that he was no good, but no, she had something to prove, so she married him. And look where it got her. Alone with two kids, one barely out of diapers and the other one just a baby. I figured she’d come crawling back then, but no. She took a job serving food at the truck stop. I had to run out that night—had a broken-down truck an hour and a half north, in Kentucky—and I stopped in to see her on my way past. Got there just in time to see her crawl into the cab of some trucker looking for a lot lizard while his wife was at home…”
The injustice of that was rather breathtaking, considering what he’d been doing while his wife was at home, but it didn’t seem like a good idea to mention it.
“Too proud to take money from her parents,” Jacob said bitterly, “but not too proud to sell her body for twenty bucks at a truck stop.”
Curtis had, if anything, turned even paler, but he didn’t say a word, just stared at his grandfather, his eyes like black holes.
“So you waited for her to come out,” Grimaldi prompted.
Jacob gave a little shudder. I could feel it in the arm that held mine pinned, and felt the pistol shiver against my skin. “She didn’t expect to see me. Gave me lip, the little bitch. Stood there smelling of this man, telling me it was none of my business what she did. That I gave up the right to tell her what to do when she married Frankie. So I slapped her.”
He said it like it was something that happened every day, like it wasn’t momentous. And maybe it wasn’t. From