“Me, too,” I admitted. But that was as far as I could go. “I only wish you’d been around to help me pull the dead Delmonico boys out of the river.”
Kev’s mouth puckered as if he’d bitten into something bitter—or maybe he was biting back bitter words meant for me.
Before he could voice them, I said, “Of course, you did everything by the book. So I suppose that’s some consolation to the Delmonico family.”
A red flush swept into Kev’s cheeks. He still didn’t say a thing. He just turned on his heel and walked away.
Matty watched him go, then slid onto the tailgate beside me. “I hate to say it, but this time I’ve gotta agree with the Feeb, girlie girl. You cut this one too close.”
“I’m sorry, Matty.” And I was.
“Save your sorry for someone else. Like Frank, maybe. He’s right, too. If you was still married to that piss-poor excuse of a husband, what’re the chances you’d have been out here doing the tango with a nut-bag who’s got a history of stalking women?”
We both knew the answer to that one. Slim to none. Tim wouldn’t have allowed it.
“But what are you doing?” Matty demanded. “Sticking your neck on the chopping block for this client and her kids?”
“Matty—”
“Hell, since your divorce you stick your neck out for every client with kids. And what for? You keep this up, you’re gonna get hurt for good, girlie girl.”
As if he agreed with Matty, the EMT slapped a bandage on my neck wound. I wish he could’ve done the same for my peace of mind. I knew I’d picture the faces of those three drowned boys for years to come. And now I’d hear the words of Charles Chapman Brown.
Come back to me. We’ll be together.
My cell phone bleated. I dug under Marianne’s coat to find the thing. The caller ID log listed the incoming number as “Government Number.”
In my line of work, this could have been anybody calling for any reason. My Washington, DC–based business provided security services for high-profile, high-risk clients, including a jeweler whose name was as recognizable as Tiffany’s, a Philadelphia rap-star-turned-Academy-Award-winning-actor, and several members of Congress. Unfortunately, my caller was none of them.
“Jamie?”
I hadn’t heard this voice in years. But I recognized it in a heartbeat. Because this voice belonged to my ex-husband.
Chapter 2
I dodged Matty’s questions and the EMT’s ministrations to seek some privacy on the far side of the ambulance. Behind me, Philadelphia’s finest still sorted out the bloody mess Charles Chapman Brown and I had made of Marianne Lewis’s Camry. Traffic squeezed past ruby-red flares to continue along City Avenue. And the press still clamored for a story. I, however, was blind to all of it.
In my ear, my ex-husband said, “Thank God I reached you.”
But Tim Thorp wasn’t calling after all this time to express his gratitude. “What do you want?”
“Your father told me to call you…”
Anger flashed through me, but burned out when it couldn’t find anywhere to go. After all, getting mad at Tim wouldn’t prevent him from calling me at this point. And getting mad at my father had never accomplished anything.
“…he knows how much we need you.”
“We?”
“Brandy and I.” Tim had the grace to hesitate. “You remember Brandy?”
Of course I remembered her. Unbeknownst to me, Tim had slept with her during one of his many out-of-town assignments. Weeks later, she called him at his office. When he came home, he announced he wanted a divorce. Because Brandy got pregnant.
“Tim, what do you want?”
“Your help. I need your help.”
I sincerely doubted that. Tim was a U.S. Army officer. He had all the help he needed stationed on military installations all over the world.
Before I could point that out, he said, “Something’s happened. You have to help me.”
I didn’t have to do any such thing.
Tim misinterpreted my silence. “I’ll pay you.”
As if I wanted his money. Or needed it. “I don’t do investigations anymore. I specialize in security now.”
“I know. Security. Investigations. I need both.”
“Then I’ll give you the name of a firm near you. Where are you stationed?”
“I need you, Jamie. Not someone like you.”
Well, he’d had me. And he’d given me up. Apparently, Tim couldn’t appreciate the irony. Or maybe he could. He drew a raspy breath and said the one thing I’d rarely heard him say. “Please, Jamie. Someone’s kidnapped my daughter.”
“What?” Tim’s daughter was barely three years old.
“Someone stole her tonight. Someone took her from her bed.”
“Did this happen on an army post?”
“Yes. On Fort Leeds.” Then, Tim added insult to injury. “I have your father’s old command. Jamie, I’m begging you. She’s just a little girl. Please help me find her.”
I wanted to refuse. I wanted to tell Tim he’d made his bed and I didn’t sleep in it anymore. I wanted to tell him his problems were his alone—except they weren’t. Now they involved an innocent child. And it wasn’t her fault her father had screwed me over.
I gritted my teeth, knowing what I was about to say and already hating myself for it.
“I’ll be there,” I told him, “as soon as I can.”
—
Just short of 6 A.M., I reached Fort Leeds, New Jersey. And it wasn’t in some picturesque corner of the Garden State. On the contrary, the Department of Defense had buried Fort Leeds so deeply in the conifers and quicksand of the Pine Barrens, only the Jersey Devil would ever be able to dig it out.
Any fool could find it, though, and that included me. I exited the Interstate, flew along a minor highway I remembered from my youth. It had been four hours since Tim called me. His daughter and her kidnapper could’ve been anywhere by then. For her sake, I hoped she was still on the post—and that her abductor would be sighted at any moment trying to sneak her out—but I doubted that would be the case.
When the county road in front of me narrowed to a single silver shot in the moonlight, I knew I was close to Fort Leeds. When a gatehouse of bulletproof glass rose from the middle of a clear-cut field, I knew I’d arrived. Chain link and barbed wire ranged along both sides of the structure, and under a ring of white light, a slalom of concrete barriers blocked the roadway. Two military police cruisers sat behind the barricade. Their blue strobes striped the night.
I remembered the gate protocol so I followed it, slowing to a crawl, dousing my headlights, and powering down my window. A soldier stepped forward to confront me. He wore ACUs—the green-and-gray-patterned army combat uniform civilians call fatigues—and a black beret.
An M-4 automatic rifle with a night scope completed his ensemble.
Three more armed soldiers hovered just inside the blockade. Two of them had dogs, German Shepherds that could run down a suspect in seconds. Man and beast all displayed an intense interest in my arrival.
I handed my driver’s license to the first soldier. He didn’t say a word to me, so I didn’t say a word about being a licensed private investigator and a security consultant. I didn’t mention the Beretta 9000S nine-millimeter semiautomatic handgun I wore under my tailored leather jacket, or the Beretta Bobcat .22-caliber pistol strapped to my ankle, either.
He said, “What’s your business on Fort Leeds tonight, ma’am?”
“I’m here to see Colonel Tim Thorp.”
But that was the wrong thing to say. The soldier’s rifle snapped to his shoulder. Its black bore stared at me like the eye of a Cyclops.
“Step out of the car, ma’am.”
This wasn’t a request. It was an order. So keeping my hands in plain sight, I did as I was told.
“Now, don’t get excited,” I said. “Let’s just give Tim Thorp a call.”
No one offered to phone him for me, so I reached for the primary weapon of my tr
ade—my BlackBerry. Unfortunately, it was clipped to the waistband of my Donegal wool trousers. When I reached for it, some soldier got a glimpse of the nine-millimeter riding behind it.
“Gun!” he shouted, and the rest of his colleagues started hollering, too.
“Hands in the air!”
“Turn around! Slowly.”
“Place your hands on the hood of your vehicle. Do it now!”
“I’m just reaching for my BlackBerry,” I said.
Fat lot of good saying it did me.
An enthusiastic soldier slammed a hand between my shoulder blades. He shoved me forward and down, bending me over until my cheekbone banged the curves of my Jaguar XJ8. He lifted my nine from its holster, kicked my feet apart and back. The move threw my center of gravity forward, made me support my weight on my hands. And made it harder for me to fight, if that’s what I’d had in mind.
Another soldier frisked me. His fingers were light and not very thorough. He missed the .22 on my ankle altogether.
When he wrenched my right hand behind my back, when he slapped a cuff on my wrist, and when he repeated the process with my left, I thought things couldn’t get much worse. But he ordered me to stay there, my face planted on my car’s paint, my body folded halfway to the Downward Dog position, and my rump in the air. The posture was procedure, not exploitation, but that didn’t do anything to lessen my embarrassment.
Especially when the brass showed up.
Like a boxer, the arriving officer was broad through the chest and strong in the shoulder, and when he climbed from his cruiser, the soldiers around me stood a little bit straighter. Like them, he wore ACUs. I glanced up and over the squared-off rims of my nerdy glasses and determined he looked good in uniform. A black beret capped his sandy hair and a gun belt hung on his hips. He looked good in those, too. The insignia stitched to his collar and the embroidered strip of tape above each breast pocket indicated his rank, his branch of service, and his name. He was Lieutenant Colonel Barrett, U.S. Army. His face indicated nothing. But I’d have bet all the bullets in my Bobcat he commanded the military police here at Fort Leeds.
He said three words. “Let her up.”
They were the best words I’d ever heard.
I straightened, gladly gave up the bracelets on my wrists, and began rubbing the circulation back into my hands while a soldier handed Barrett my handgun and my driver’s license. His brows knit as he compared my photo to the real thing. His eyes were as dark as the best Belgian chocolate.
I’d always had a weakness for Belgian chocolate.
“You’re Jamie Sinclair?” Barrett asked.
“Yes.”
“Any relation to Major General James Sinclair?”
Hardly anyone referred to my father as “Major General” anymore. It wasn’t that no one remembered his heroism in Vietnam or his leadership in the First Gulf War. It was just that most folks were starstruck by his new job.
My father was now a United States senator.
Barrett’s choosing my father’s old title over the new one surprised me, but I didn’t let it sidetrack me.
“Come on,” I said. “You’re wasting time. I know the child’s been kidnapped. Colonel Tim Thorp called me. Now, he’s expecting me.”
“Is Colonel Thorp also expecting you to bring this?” Barrett hefted my nine-millimeter in the flat of his hand.
I flashed him the I-outrank-you-and-there’s-nothing-you-can-do-about-it smile I’d learned at my father’s knee. “Why don’t you ask him when we see him?”
Barrett regarded me for an icy moment.
For a second, I thought maybe I’d be calling Tim from the Fort Leeds lockup.
But then Barrett nodded. “All right. We’ll ask him when we see him.”
Of course, Barrett didn’t let me drive to Tim’s. He didn’t let me have my Beretta, either. Each component—weapon, clip, bullets—disappeared into the cargo pockets running down the leg of his combat uniform. Me, he relegated to the passenger side of his cruiser. It beat riding handcuffed in the back, though.
We pulled away from the gatehouse. The night wasted no time closing in on us. The scent of pitch and decaying pine slipped in through the car’s vents and teased my nose. In the distance, stadium lights spilled their glare on brown brick barracks where young soldiers slept before shipping out to war. Shrouded side roads ran where the light couldn’t reach.
Barrett turned onto one of them.
He said, “Is Colonel Thorp a friend of yours? Or a relative?”
“None of the above.”
“Do you usually bring a gun when you visit none of the above?” He made it sound like I’d brought a hostess gift to a dinner party.
In answer, I dug into the breast pocket of my tailored leather jacket, found documentation the gate guard had missed. I passed it to Barrett. It was my PI license.
Barrett tipped it into the glow of the dashboard lights, whistled long and low through his teeth when he read it. “So General Sinclair’s daughter grew up to be a gumshoe.”
“Actually,” I told him, “I’m a security specialist. And I haven’t said General Sinclair’s my father.”
“Actually,” he replied, “you haven’t said a lot of things.”
That’s when Lieutenant Colonel Barrett smiled at me. Like a lighthouse beacon along the jagged coast, his grin drew me in. Part comfort, part warning, it made my heart stutter. But I didn’t like that one bit. Because, to see Tim, I needed my heart to be strong.
I knew I’d see him soon when houses, arranged in tight little neighborhoods, popped up like toadstools past the passenger-side window. Built in a hurry during the Second World War, they featured yellow brick and brown siding. Each was practical.
None were pretty.
Sidewalks ran past them like crooked mountain streams. Here, in my youth, my fellow army brats—the children of other soldiers—played games that had spilled into the street. I wondered if Tim’s daughter did the same.
And then I wondered more than that. Was she afraid at this very moment? Was she begging for her mother?
My heart grew sore at the thought. Once, as a little girl, I woke from a nightmare and begged for my mother. She never came to me, though. She would’ve, I’d supposed, but she’d died the day I was born. And that was no comfort to a child alone in the dark.
I couldn’t bear to think of any child terrified in the dark. Not even the child of someone I detested as much as Tim. So I vowed to think of something else.
I vowed to think of how to find her.
All too soon, we reached the house where I’d lived with my father—and the home where my ex-husband now made a life with his mistress. Every light in and around the two-story brick structure blazed against the darkness. Pajama-clad neighbors gawked from both sides of the street. They stood clustered on lawns and in driveways, talking to one another—and to uniformed military police.
MPs’ cars clogged Tim’s driveway. Black cruisers bearing the star of the local sheriff’s office blocked the street. And a crime-scene van sat on the front lawn.
Barrett squeezed into an opening along the curb. I jumped from his cruiser even before it stopped moving. Barrett caught up with me before I reached the house.
An MP tried to bar me from the front door. At a word from Barrett, he let me in. As I crossed the familiar threshold, I took a good look at the house’s hardware. The solid-core door bore a standard lock, the metal dull with age. It was a deadbolt, but it wasn’t countersunk. Anyone with a grudge and a crowbar could rip right through it. This lock, though, was still intact—and had been for years. The kidnapper hadn’t entered the house this way.
Inside, I found the same skinny foyer, with the same skinny staircase, giving way to the same skinny living room I’d known as a teenager. All were painted the same standard shade of Housing White. A warm wave of nostalgia washed over me, but it evaporated as quickly as it came.
Near the fireplace mantel, where my father had displayed the sword he’d worn as a W
est Point cadet, stood a man who made my molars grind. He’d made good time from Philadelphia—I had to give him that—but I wasn’t happy to find him here. In all fairness, though, judging by the way the dent in his chin deepened when I nodded to him, Kev Jaeger wasn’t happy to see me, either.
In front of him, someone had parked an ugly Modern sofa across the hearth. A couple sat on it, talking to Kev with their backs to me. I knew the man instantly.
It was Tim.
He’d slung an arm around the young woman huddled next to him. I didn’t recognize her. And then it hit me.
This was Brandy—the woman who’d slept with my husband.
And had taken him away from me.
I’d never seen her before. Now I found I couldn’t look away. All peaches-and-cream perfection, Brandy wasn’t more than a girl, really. With her blond hair pulled into a ponytail that mimicked my dark one, and a mint-green tracksuit hugging every curve, she looked like a reigning teen beauty queen at home after cheerleading practice.
“Jamie?”
A man with glasses that made his eyes as blank as Little Orphan Annie’s laid a hand on my arm. His name was Pearce Schuyler. Once upon a time, he’d shocked his moneyed Massachusetts family by becoming a minister—and an army chaplain. But not just any chaplain. When Tim told me our marriage was through, Pearce had been my chaplain.
“Jamie, it’s good to see you.”
Pearce folded me into a bear hug, lifted me from the floor before setting me down again. He pushed me to arm’s length and surveyed me from head to toe. His eye ran over the made-to-measure Italian leather jacket I wore, took in the cashmere turtleneck barely hiding Charles Chapman Brown’s handiwork, and got hung up on the Cartier Roadster glinting on my wrist.
Pearce squared his shoulders and licked his lips. “I see you’ve done well for yourself, my dear.”
Since my divorce from Tim? I’d done very well, indeed. But this wasn’t the time to harp on it.
Pearce hugged me again. “What are you doing here?”
Not trusting myself to answer, I shrugged my way out of his embrace.
Ever intuitive, he frowned. “Tim shouldn’t have called you. He should’ve let you be.”
The Kill List Page 2