The Kill List

by Nichole Christoff

  The agents paired off, fanned out. Barrett pulled a small Maglite from his belt and fired it up. I stuck to him, watching his back, my Bobcat at the ready.

  We’d picked our way past an old tricycle and a stack of buggy firewood when I saw it. I laid a warning hand on Barrett’s shoulder. That’s when he saw it, too.

  A chest freezer stood against the far wall, black mildew flecking its enamel surface.

  With the same thought, Barrett and I rushed to it. He grabbed the lid, hauled it open. And I braced myself for whatever lay inside.

  Chapter 6

  A thick layer of mold covered the bottom of Albert Foley’s deep freezer. Nothing more. Which meant we could keep looking for Brooke—and find her.

  Midday came and went as we uncovered a collection of roach-infested takeout containers from every fast-food joint within a ten-mile radius, surveillance-style snapshots of kids playing on local playgrounds, and downloads of the violation videos men like Foley affectionately call kiddie porn. None of us, though, turned up a lead on Brooke. Afternoon shade crawled across the backyard before we were willing to admit this to ourselves.

  Frustrated and trying not to show it, Kev and the sheriff, Barrett and I cleared out, leaving Foley’s house in the hands of Kev’s FBI crime-scene techs. Though it was only five o’clock, the air breezing through Foley’s backyard was clear and cool and full of promise for a frosty night. I gulped it down, glad to be out from under a pedophile’s roof where my chest had felt tight every time I’d taken a breath.

  I noticed I wasn’t the only one to do so. Barrett closed his bittersweet brown eyes and inhaled as if he’d buried his nose in a big bouquet of roses. The moment didn’t last long, though.

  “You know,” he told Kev, “unless you take Foley off my hands tomorrow, I’ll have to cut him loose.”

  “I know.”

  Kev fisted his hands on his hips, rolled his head to loosen the muscles of his neck, and glared at the pale blue sky. He had to be thinking what we were all thinking. Whatever Albert Foley’s current crimes, they didn’t appear to involve little Brooke.

  “I want to say Foley grabbed the girl and carried her through the woods,” Kev announced, “but if he did, he’s sharper than he looks.”

  “He could be,” the sheriff said.

  “With those photos lying around and those videos on his hard drive? You saw that shit. Foley can’t cover his tracks in his own house. Whoever took Brooke Thorp through the woods knew what he was doing. The dog picked up a scent, but we didn’t get more than some shallow footprints where the soil was dusty. A full left and partials of the right. Looks to be a man’s Saucony running shoe, size eleven.”

  Foley had been arrested with well-worn, steel-toed work boots on his size-ten feet. In his closet, we’d found only a decrepit pair of cross-trainers. Of course, he could’ve bought an oversized pair of Sauconys to grab Brooke. And he could’ve dumped them afterward. But Kev had a point. Complex thought wasn’t Foley’s strong suit.

  “Well,” Barrett said, “whoever the kidnapper is, he didn’t just walk off Fort Leeds with a three-year-old child in his arms. Someone had to meet him on that gravel road behind the woods.”

  Kev frowned. “There’re tire tracks all over the place, but no evidence anyone parked out there for any length of time.”

  “Then we start over,” Barrett told him, “and review all the evidence we’ve got.”

  Barrett’s attitude got Kev’s rear in gear. I was glad of that. After all, even if we knew nothing much, I knew for certain that standing on Foley’s porch wouldn’t bring Brooke home.

  I also wanted to get back to Fort Leeds. I needed to question Tim again. When I’d suggested a jealous husband had snatched little Brooke, he’d blown off the idea a little too quickly—and he’d never explained where all the cash in his safe had come from.

  Barrett and I didn’t get very far, though. We cut through Foley’s yard, came up against the wall of gawkers Howdy and Hickory kept at bay. The deputies had convinced most folks to keep moving—except the ladies and gentlemen of the press.

  Armed with cameras and microphones, they’d descended on this quiet street like buzzards on carrion. They jostled one another on the sidewalk, mindful of the law that kept them off private property like Foley’s hardscrabble yard. But that law didn’t stop one enterprising Newswatch Nine reporter from recognizing and calling out to me.

  “Ms. Sinclair, where is Brooke Thorp? Is Charles Chapman Brown involved in her disappearance? Do you have a message for Charles Chapman Brown?”

  I’d never admit it, but just hearing Brown’s name gave me the willies. Without even trying, I could feel Brown’s tears sliding against my cheek. And his knife burning against my throat.

  “Charles Chapman Brown is a sick man,” I told the journalist. “I’m glad he’s getting help. I hope he stays in treatment and I hope he stays far away from television reporters’ children.”

  My interviewer blanched. Too late, I wondered if she had kids of her own. Some days, motherhood seemed like a mystery every woman in the world had mastered except for me.

  In any case, I hadn’t meant to scare this young woman. An apology balanced on the tip of my tongue. She forgot all about me, though, when her videographer swung the camera the other way. Kev had just reached the sidewalk. And his FBI badge always drew the press like flies to a cowpat.

  I wasn’t sorry to see my reporter run after him and, unless I missed my guess, neither was Barrett. He slipped a protective palm into the small of my back and guided me firmly toward his cruiser. The move made me feel like his prom date, but I was rather glad of the contact—and the moral support.

  Howdy Doody caught up with us just as we reached Barrett’s car. “Excuse me, ma’am. A package came for you. I left it on the passenger seat.”

  It was a lumpy thing bending the dimensions of an ordinary nine-by-eleven manila envelope. My name had been scrawled across the front of it. I slid into my seat, released the envelope’s clasp, and dumped the contents into my hand.

  A scrap of paper fluttered out.

  And a moist mass of fur tumbled into my lap.

  I didn’t squeal, thank God. But I jerked as if I’d been touched by a live wire. Barrett grabbed the offensive object, whisked it away.

  “What the hell is that?” Howdy said, his face chalk white under his freckles.

  It dangled from Barrett’s hand by a mangled tail.

  Quaking, I clapped a hand to my nose. The gamey scent of death and decay threatened to make me sick. “It’s a dead squirrel.”

  “It’s more than that,” Barrett said, and his voice rumbled like thunder. “It’s a threat.”

  —

  The late-day sun blazed across the cruiser’s windshield as Barrett and I sped toward Fort Leeds. Mr. Squirrel had been surrendered to the FBI crime-scene techs. Judging by the way Kev grumbled about it, I’d have thought I ran down the poor creature in front of him with his own car.

  Neither Howdy nor Hickory could tell me anything about the man who’d dropped off my pretty package. Howdy described him as a young guy in a navy-blue hoodie and oversized jeans, but that description fit half the population of New Jersey. None of the reporters matched it, and none of them had seen anyone approach the deputies.

  The scrap of paper accompanying my little gift offered no obvious clues. It bore the same scrawl as the envelope. And it read: Leave the Little Girl. Come Back to Me. The message had my stomach twisting into a sick knot. Unfortunately, I wasn’t the only one to find it disturbing.

  “Hell of a reunion invitation,” Barrett muttered.

  I remembered the panicked scream of Charles Chapman Brown while Kev pinned him to the asphalt—Come back to me. We’ll be together. Forever.—and suppressed a shudder. “Most men just send me flowers.”

  Barrett didn’t find my joke funny. “Who knows you’re working Brooke’s disappearance?”

  “You mean besides my staff, your military police force, all the FBI in the tri
-state area, a detective with the Philadelphia Police Department, a dozen members of the press, and anyone who watches TV?”

  “Okay, who would want you out of the way?”

  “You mean besides my staff, your military police force, all the FBI—”

  “Who wants you back?”

  In my mind’s eye, I saw the tear-streaked face of Charles Chapman Brown.

  Barrett said, “Did you break a boyfriend’s heart recently?”

  His question was entirely professional. The way his hands stilled on the steering wheel as he waited for my answer, though, made it feel personal. Truth be told, during the Delmonico case, someone had been ready, willing, and able to fill my boyfriend void. But he hadn’t had a heart to break. Only a rule book beneath his ribs.

  That was then, however.

  This was now.

  “There are no boyfriends, Barrett.”

  He took that in with a thoughtful nod. “An ex-husband, then?”

  “I only have one. He hired me to find his daughter.”

  “Tim Thorp’s not a friend.” Barrett’s hands flexed and fisted on the wheel’s soft grip. “And he’s not a relative.”

  “No, indeed.”

  We drove on in silence.

  “Call him up,” Barrett said. “Tell him you quit.”

  “Quit?” I felt like Barrett had just elbowed me in the solar plexus. “I can’t tell Tim I quit.”

  “Then I’ll tell him for you.”

  “You most certainly will not.”

  I clutched the dashboard as Barrett swerved to the curb. He cut the engine, turned toward me. “You take on a job for your ex-husband and someone traces you to a pedophile’s house to hand-deliver a dead animal to you. What does that tell you?”

  “It tells me a lot of things.”

  “Well, it tells me someone wants you out of the picture so badly, they’d risk walking up to a sheriff’s deputy to make it happen.”

  “First of all, Barrett, those deputies are nice guys, but unless you’re a shoplifter at the mall, they don’t pose much of a threat. Secondly, you don’t need to worry about me. If I get hurt, I promise I won’t bleed all over your army post.”

  “If you get hurt,” he said, “my army post will be the last thing I’ll think about.”

  That shut me up. Because this man meant what he said. I could see it in the set of his shoulders and hear it in the growl of his voice.

  His kindness to me didn’t change the facts, though. A diabetic three-year-old was still out there somewhere, stolen in the night from her parents. And that meant I had only one option.

  “I can’t quit,” I told Barrett. “Now, please, drop me off at Tim’s house. His daughter’s missing and he has a lot to answer for.”

  “Answer a question for me first.”

  “What is it?”

  “Since no one’s sending roadkill to me or to the FBI, why’s someone sending it to you?”

  Chapter 7

  Barrett’s question worked its way under my skin and aggravated me all the way to Tim’s house. I had no idea why someone had sent me a dead squirrel, but it would take more than a mangled rodent to keep me from bringing Brooke home. It would also take more than my ex-husband’s evasive manner and a fistful of his cash to keep me from asking him some tough questions.

  Still, when Barrett halted in front of Tim’s house, I didn’t move. The bandage under my turtleneck itched and the wound from Brown’s knife burned. My stomach was so empty it had given up growling, and I was tired.

  Tired to the bone.

  And tired in my soul.

  I hadn’t felt this tired since the day my divorce came through. And that day felt like a lifetime since my father had introduced me to Tim. Tim had been a newly commissioned officer then. I’d been a college senior. Our meeting at a party in this very house seemed like a coincidence at the time.

  In reality, my father had arranged it.

  I thought of my father himself. Of rising early to run with him along this street and through the woods on misty mornings. I thought of running out of the house to show him my acceptance letters to Rutgers and to Princeton and to Georgetown. Of seeking his approval and of finding it sometimes. Or sometimes not.

  Now here I was again. At my father’s house. Only this time, I was with Barrett.

  “I spent my teen years in this house,” I told him.

  “I know,” he replied.

  Surprise had me turning to look at him.

  “Fort Leeds was my first assignment. I came here straight out of ROTC. I drove a patrol car and was under orders to keep an eye out for General Sinclair’s daughter.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  And I was. No doubt Barrett and his fellow MPs had had better things to do than spy on an army brat like me. Such as learning the skills that would keep them alive when they shipped out to take on military police duties in Iraq or Afghanistan. My father, though, had ordered them to waste their time keeping tabs on me. As a result, it was a wonder Barrett let me on the post as a grown-up.

  But Barrett smiled that traffic-stopping smile. “Watching out for you wasn’t a hardship. You were a pretty good kid.”

  “Well, not on purpose. Do you know how many times I sat in a car here, in this same spot, with boys too afraid of my father to make a pass?”

  As soon as the words were out of my mouth I wished them back again. Because Barrett wasn’t one of the boys of my youth. He was a red-blooded, American man. Yet, here we were, in his car, in front of my old house, in the growing twilight. We were like a couple coming back from a date. And the fact wasn’t lost on him.

  “I guess,” he said, “it’s a good thing your father doesn’t live here anymore.”

  I didn’t agree. I didn’t disagree. I didn’t want to notice the inviting bow-curve of Barrett’s top lip, but I did. Even though I had a job to do, even though I’d been down this road with another investigator before, and even though that had ended badly, I was attracted to Barrett—and for my own self-preservation, I didn’t want to be.

  I bailed from his cruiser, started up the drive. I didn’t leave Barrett in my dust, though. He caught up with me before we reached the house. One of his military cops stepped from the carport to meet us, hand on the sidearm holstered at his waist. When Barrett stopped to speak to him, I took advantage of the situation and headed for the backyard on my own.

  I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but Barrett had been right about one thing. Since Foley had proved to be a dead end, we needed to start from scratch and consider the evidence we had. I’d come here to turn up some more—from Tim himself or from the things he touched.

  I bypassed a navy-blue Jeep Liberty that sat at the mouth of the carport. A late-model silver BMW sheltered inside. The car sat nose in, giving me a good look at the child’s safety seat installed in the back and the personalized New Jersey plate on the rear bumper. I had no doubt the car was Tim’s little baby. After all, the plate read MINE.

  Out back, one of Kev’s agents emerged from the tree line to check me out. I offered her a cheery wave. She didn’t return it.

  She also didn’t return to the woods.

  I crouched alongside the flower bed. Winter’s weather had worn the bed’s mulch chips to a faded gray. I couldn’t spot any that had been overturned or pressed into the ground by the feet of a ladder. Maybe, I reasoned, the ladder had rested in the grass. But I’d never know. Like the morning’s dewy footprints, any other marks were long gone.

  Disgusted, I returned to the carport. As I brushed past Tim’s Beemer, the seam of my Donegal wool trousers snagged on an imperfection in the front fender. I freed myself and knelt to peer at the mark on the car. Something had strafed its perfect paint and lightly gouged the fiberglass beneath. It was so slight, it could’ve been the result of half a dozen things.

  A rock from the road.

  A stray shopping cart.

  My experienced eye, however, identified it as something else. Something that meant Tim’s
daughter hadn’t merely been abducted. This was bullet damage. Tim had come under fire. And he hadn’t bothered to tell anyone about it.

  A familiar frustration wormed its way through my gut. As I’d learned during my marriage, Tim wasn’t just a world-class liar. He was also the king of keeping self-serving secrets. But keeping secrets wouldn’t help his daughter. And if this gouge was any kind of indicator, his daughter was in need of a hell of a lot of help.

  “Find something?” Barrett asked.

  I shot to my feet. He looked taller in the gathering gloom of the carport. And not the least bit surprised to find me fingering a bullet trail in my ex-husband’s bumper.

  Before he could say anything about it, the kitchen door creaked open. Brandy stood on the threshold, an Ed Hardy handbag thrown over her arm and her Jeep keys in her hand. She’d gnawed her bee-stung bottom lip until it was bloody.

  She jumped like a skittish kitten when she saw me standing at the nose of Tim’s car.

  “I—I thought you were gone.”

  “I was,” I said, “but I came back.”

  This revelation didn’t make her feel better. Neither did the sight of Barrett. Her knuckles went white as she clutched her keys.

  “Y’all found my baby Brooke, didn’t ya?”

  “No, ma’am,” Barrett replied, gently. “We just came for a word with Colonel Thorp.”

  “Oh. Oh, sure.” Brandy nodded like a bobble-head doll. “My husband’s in his study. Y’all can go on through.”

  But I didn’t think leaving her was a good idea. She trembled as if the chilly spring wind blew through her. All I needed was to have her pass out on us.

  “Maybe you should come with us,” I suggested. “You could lie down in the living room.”

  “No, no. I’ll be fine. I just startled when I saw you in the carport. I’ll go upstairs and get some rest. Would y’all excuse me?”

  I thought her manufactured smile would shatter like glass, but it didn’t. With a wobbly walk, she tottered through the kitchen and into the main part of the house. Barrett and I watched her go.