“Please,” Barrett’s grandmother begged. “The old trouble is starting all over again.”
“What trouble?”
But she didn’t hear my question.
Or she didn’t want to answer it.
“I can’t offer you much, Miss Sinclair, but if you wouldn’t mind staying here on the farm, I can guarantee you a soft bed, good home-cooked meals, and all the money I have set aside. Please, please do what you can to help my Adam.”
I squirmed in my desk chair. Taking an old lady’s life savings wasn’t my style. And Barrett had made it crystal clear he wasn’t keen on having me anywhere near him and his old buddy Vance McCabe.
So I knew what I ought to say.
When I spoke, however, I heard myself saying something else altogether.
“I’ll pack a bag. I’ll be on the road in less than an hour.”
And I wasn’t sure, but I think I made Barrett’s grandmother cry.
Midnight found me true to my word. With a small suitcase in the trunk of my Jag and my Beretta 9000S hitched to my hip, I pointed my car north and headed for one of the addresses Mrs. Barrett had given me—in Fallowfield, New York. The Jaguar’s navigation system said it knew exactly where to find the place. And that was a good thing. Because I’d never heard of it.
I suspected, however, that Fallowfield was a far cry from that world-famous New York, the Big Apple itself. And as the night wore on and the bright lights of the big cities ranging up and down the Eastern Seaboard grew dim with distance, I became convinced of it. Fallowfield wasn’t any too near that other New York, either: the one snugged beneath the Great Lakes where mill towns by the names of Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo had made the most of the Industrial Revolution to become a latter-day high-tech corridor. No, Fallowfield belonged to the third New York.
That New York is the one most folks will never know. It’s a rural place, rich with the history of Iroquois nations and Dutch settlers who lived on this continent long before 1776. Vast national forests, bottomless lakes, and entire mountain ranges make it a wild place. Only parts of it have been tamed by struggling family farms. Agriculture is king of its economy. Or at least it used to be. But even today, its back roads are a world away from the concrete canyons of Manhattan. And the rising sun met me on one of them.
Under a red sky that would’ve given any sailor warning, the highway I’d followed from the interstate T-boned into a narrow county road. Weeds, brittle and blanched by autumn winds, waved at me from the ditch across the way. Behind a ragged barbed-wire fence, black-and-white dairy cows paid me no mind as they browsed among the remains of closely cropped cornstalks.
My navigation system spoke up, urged me to hang a right, so I did. The road wound between fields ridged from a farmer’s plow and forgotten copses where the trees’ tawny leaves were beginning to turn brown. Houses appeared. Some featured the clapboard and tall windows of the Victorian Age, but most were of a more recent vintage. All of them stood on wide lawns carved from the surrounding cornrows. When the yards got smaller and the posted speed limit dropped, I knew I was near town.
And then I spotted a blue-and-white sign mounted along the roadway and welcoming me to Barrett’s little burg. With heavy script and curlicues, it spelled out: FALLOWFIELD. POPULATION: 9,718.
But my GPS wasn’t routed for downtown. It wasn’t even set for Miranda Barrett’s house. So my first glimpse of Fallowfield itself would have to wait.
I had a pit stop to make.
Near a volunteer fire station and not far from the dog pound, I found Fallowfield’s jail exactly where my Jag said it would be. It was a narrow affair hitched to the Sheriff’s Office, though whether this was for logistical convenience or to cut down on construction costs, I couldn’t tell. In any case, I parked my XJ8 among the rusted pickup trucks and bumper-stickered SUVs in the gravel parking lot, stowed my sidearm in a special compartment built into the trunk, and made my way inside.
The place had been designed by the same minds that had built ugly concrete boxes in the 1960s and called them homes—and the effect was just as charming. Speckled terrazzo ran from the arching metal detector in the aluminum-and-glass entrance to a bulletproof booth at the back of the lobby. Its glass separated a deputy at a counter from the rest of the world.
The deputy had a single shaggy eyebrow where two of them should’ve been and a mustache on his upper lip to match. He’d tucked the desk phone’s receiver between his shoulder and his chin. And he scratched notes on a legal pad while someone on the other end of the line yammered in his ear.
“Yes, ma’am,” he shouted into the mouthpiece as his caller continued to squawk. “Yes, ma’am. Yes, I’ll speak to Mrs. Mercer about keeping her cat out of your potting shed.”
He hung up and I spoke to him through a chrome grill in the bulletproof pane.
“I understand you have an Adam Barrett in custody. What’s the charge?”
The deputy looked down his nose at me with the air of a fellow who’d been up all night for half a dozen no-good reasons. I got the impression Barrett had been one of those reasons. Especially when he turned his head and hollered over his shoulder.
“Sheriff? There’s a lady out here asking about Adam Barrett.”
The sheriff—morning fresh with a close shave and a starched tan uniform—emerged from an office near the end of the corridor. His nose was as crooked as an Irish walking stick and his jaw was as square as a cinderblock. But his most striking feature was the puffy black bruise stamped on his left eye.
He caught sight of me on the other side of the glass and the hitch in his step suggested he’d been expecting Miranda Barrett to come calling. As a result, his face shuttered the way cops’ faces do. This gives a police officer a chance to assess a situation—without being assessed.
He joined the deputy at the service counter.
“I’m Sheriff Luke Rittenhaus,” he informed me. “Who might you be?”
I figured now was as good a time as any to present my credentials to local law enforcement, so I slid my PI license into the little divot cut into the countertop. Rittenhaus picked it up. He read it, frowned, and buzzed me through a heavy door to my left.
On his side of it, the hard terrazzo gave way to industrial-grade carpeting the color of mud. The walls, with dark paneling straight out of a 1970s rec room, weren’t much prettier. But Rittenhaus wasn’t here to do a story for House Beautiful and neither was I.
He led me down the drab hall, swerved into his office, and pointed me to a straight-backed chair on the near side of a crowded desk. Like a house-of-cards game gone crazy, stacks of manila file folders made a virtual cityscape on the desk’s surface. A fat black plastic travel mug teetered on top of the heap by my elbow. An angular logo on the face of it read: THE APPLE BLOSSOM CAFÉ.
Rittenhaus dropped into his seat behind the desk and said, “Just so you know, if Miranda Barrett’s paying your bill, she’s wasting her money.”
“Wait,” I replied. “I’ll write that down.”
I couldn’t have been the first smarty-pants Rittenhaus had ever encountered, but at that moment, I was his least favorite. His lips clamped together in a tight white line. I wondered if his reaction to me had anything to do with Barrett heating a seat in his lockup.
I said, “I’d like to know why you’re holding Adam Barrett.”
“I picked him up on a drunk and disorderly charge.”
“Drunk and disorderly?”
That didn’t sound like the Barrett I knew. His father had been a soldier—and had been killed by an unidentified drunk driver before Barrett turned sixteen. He was the reason Barrett had become a military cop in the first place. As a military police commander in his own right, Barrett shouldered a responsibility to keep the peace. And it was a responsibility he’d always taken seriously.
At least, that’s the way it had always seemed to me.
“Adam and a pal were out at the Cherry Bomb last night,” Rittenhaus answered. “That’s a strip club, in c
ase you were wondering. They got pretty liquored up.”
“Would this pal be named Eric?”
“No. He was with a fellow named Vance McCabe. I take it you haven’t run across him.”
“I met him once,” I said. “Briefly.”
I didn’t expound on the subject of Vance McCabe. But Sheriff Rittenhaus seemed to get the message in any case. He ran a hand over his lantern jaw, considered me through narrowed eyes, and flinched as if the shiner ringing his left peeper complained.
“Look,” he said, “Adam’s a good guy. He always was. Most of us have always known that despite…Well, despite the past. Take him home—wherever that is—sober him up, and keep him there. All right?”
I shook my head. “Barrett received a report that an individual named Eric—”
“—was suicidal?”
I blinked. The suicidal part was news to me. But I wanted to think it went a long way to explaining why Barrett had left me in such a hurry.
And if the worst had happened—and his friend Eric had died—I wanted to think it explained how he’d ended up sauced in a strip club and taking swings at the local sheriff.
But then Rittenhaus said, “That report was just plain wrong.”
“You’ve seen this Eric, then?”
“Sure. I saw him the night before last. Eric Wentz plays poker with me most Thursday evenings.”
“But you didn’t see him last night?” I pressed.
“No.”
“Then how do you know the report of his being suicidal wasn’t accurate?”
“You’re not from around here,” Rittenhaus said, “so I’ll fill you in. The Wentz family has had its share of heartache, but Eric and his father, Marty, are stalwart members of this community. They belong to the Chamber of Commerce. They sponsor the Little League. If Eric wanted to do himself in, we’d all know it.”
“Well, that’s fine and dandy,” I replied. “Unless Adam Barrett knows something the rest of you don’t.”
Rittenhaus rose to his feet.
For a moment, I thought he was kicking me out.
Instead, he towered over me, touched a stubby finger to his black eye. “Adam knows how to throw a right hook; I’ll tell you that. Since he gave me black eyes plenty of times while we were growing up, though, I’ve decided not to hold it against him. Now, if you’ll step around back, Miss Sinclair, you can pick him up. I’m releasing him and Vance this morning.”
But I still couldn’t wrap my head around everything the sheriff had just said. “Barrett really punched you?”
“Yes, he did,” Rittenhaus replied. “So do us all a favor. Get him out of Fallowfield.”
Chapter 4
Having worked with law enforcement types my entire adult life, I knew Sheriff Rittenhaus had been as helpful to me as he could. And I was thankful for it. Especially when, instead of tossing me out on my ear, he himself conducted me along the cops-only corridor to the solid steel door separating one half of the edifice from the other. Rittenhaus unlocked it with a series of keys. He handed me over to two deputies. Each was big enough to play professional football.
The deputies escorted me to another lobby. This one was cold and gray and notched into the side of the building. Lawyers and bail bondsmen got to use this entrance.
So did forlorn families.
One deputy said, “You’ll have to wait here, ma’am.”
Both of them disappeared through a slalom of checkpoints and portals that probably led to the back reaches of the facility.
On my own, I tried my best to remain patient. But the truth of the matter was I felt uneasy. Since his friend Eric was reportedly alive and kicking, I couldn’t imagine what would drive Barrett to drink to excess at a seedy strip joint. I certainly couldn’t fathom him striking another peace officer. And after all we’d been through together since meeting seven months ago, I couldn’t believe he’d turn his back on me. But he had. On all counts.
The root of Vance McCabe’s bad behavior was no mystery, however. When he’d stormed my house, his eyes had been as dilated as wishing wells and his hands had shaken like a crack addict’s. And given what the sheriff had said, I had to wonder if Barrett had taken on some of Vance’s habits.
After an eternity of waiting in the jail’s depressing lobby, a reinforced door, thick with rivets, finally buzzed. Its electronic locks retracted with a thunk and it swung open. Barrett limped through it under his own steam. His crutches were gone. And so was his cast.
Vance was nowhere in evidence and I was glad for that.
The sandy scruff of a three-day beard darkened Barrett’s jaw, betraying that he probably hadn’t shaved since he’d left my house. He probably hadn’t showered, either. He wore a sweatshirt stained with blood and other fluids. I guessed at least one of those fluids was cheap tequila—because even though he was still halfway across the room, I’d be able to swear before a congressional hearing that he smelled like a distillery.
He squinted against the green sheen the fluorescent lights blasted from the ceiling as if he had one hell of a hangover. If he did, he deserved it. I crossed my arms against my chest and that’s when his eyes fell on me, standing in the middle of the concrete floor.
Immediately, Barrett’s face went flinty, the way a cop’s does when he’s expecting trouble.
Or the way a man’s did when he wanted to close out a woman.
“Nice pants,” I said, chucking my chin at the rumpled khaki cargoes he wore.
“What’re you doing here?”
“Who, me?” I shrugged. “I run a taxi service for soldiers who can’t keep their cool.”
And unless I was mistaken, Barrett winced at the comment. The reaction was quick and it was fleeting. But it was there.
It meant he wasn’t as cold and callous as he wanted to seem.
“Come on,” I said. “I’ll give you a ride to your grandmother’s place.”
He didn’t argue. In the car, he didn’t talk, either. The GPS system had to carry the conversation for both of us.
At the computer’s suggestion, I drove along one twisting country road after the other. Some were blacktopped; most weren’t. Pastures and woodlands ran alongside them all.
One road took us up and over a small knoll. On the backside of the rise, a shallow valley stretched before us. More spotted cows browsed the fields past the passenger window. They could’ve been the same bovines I’d seen two hours ago. I didn’t know.
But on the driver’s side, an entire orchard of apple trees dotted the gentle slope. Dark and lovely, the trees stood in their rows as orderly as soldiers at parade rest, and crimson leaves fluttered on their gnarled branches. They were beautiful.
Farther on, a sunny yellow sign with big block letters spelled out BARRETT ORCHARDS: FARMER’S MARKET, PICK-YOUR-OWN & PRESERVES SINCE 1799.
And my nav program proclaimed, “You have reached your destination.”
I nosed the Jag past the sign and into a driveway framed with dying tiger lilies. The drive swooped past a festive scarecrow grinning from atop a display of straw bales. It swung toward a clapboard-covered farmhouse. The house featured Victorian peaks and a pretty yellow paint job. White gingerbread laced the roofline.
But the lane didn’t stop in front of the farmstead. It arced past the house and blazed a trail to a bright red barn. A greenhouse-turned-gift-shop had been built into its side. I could see a placard in the shop’s window, make out the word CLOSED.
A teenager with a perky brown ponytail emerged from the shop. She lugged a massive pumpkin to a pile of the things stacked on an old-fashioned flatbed wagon and arranged it just so. When she saw my car, she waved.
“Pretty girl,” I said.
Barrett reached for his seatbelt, released it with a snap. “Thanks for the ride. Leave now and you’ll be back in D.C. before tonight’s rush hour.”
“It’s Saturday, Barrett. There is no rush hour.”
Besides, I had no intention of going back to D.C. until I’d met my obligation to Bar
rett’s grandmother—and delivered her grandson to her doorstep.
So when he got out of the Jag, I got out, too.
“I mean it, Jamie.” Barrett growled at me over the roof of my car. “I don’t want you here.”
“Well, that makes two of us,” I snapped, “because I don’t particularly want to be here, either.”
And, given the circumstances, that was the unvarnished truth.
Confronted with it, Barrett’s chocolate-brown eyes slid away from mine as something like shame colored the hollow of his cheek. But any reply he might’ve made got lost as the house’s screen door screeched open and flapped shut. An elderly lady hobbled down the porch steps.
I knew in an instant she was Barrett’s grandmother, Miranda.
Miranda Barrett was a bird of a woman. And she had to be eighty if she was a day. But her back was straight and her cornflower eyes were clear, even if fretfulness for her grandson had etched itself into the lines bracketing them.
Her hair was as white and wispy as dandelion fluff, and she’d wrangled most of it into a knot at the back of her head. As some women of her generation are still prone to do, she wore a shirtdress with flat buttons down the front. The dress was deep lilac and a wide skirt flared around her knees. She’d cinched the dress at the waist with the ties of an honest-to-goodness apron. The apron was royal-blue calico and I bet the white dots scattered across it would prove to be flowers upon closer inspection.
She hustled down the sandstone walk in black shoes thick with orthotics. “Adam Aaron Barrett, I’ve been beside myself with worry. What have you been up to?”
He mumbled something about beer and bumping into Luke Rittenhaus.
He neglected to mention the beer had been served at a girlie show, the bump had been more like a punch, and that his pal Luke had hauled him to jail for it.
Still, Miranda Barrett hugged her grandson around the middle anyway. Her head barely cleared the center of his broad boxer’s chest. She released him, shook her head as if she couldn’t believe even the tame tale he was telling her, and she turned her eagle eye on me.
The Kill Box Page 3