The Kill List

by Nichole Christoff

The bartender, who’d tramped by a time or two during our conversation, parked himself opposite me. He planted thick ham hands on the splintered surface of the bar.

  “Derrick’s done more than all right, lady. Outside Fallujah, he pulled four guys from their burning truck after they hit a bomb. My son got knocked out by the blast, but Derrick dragged him to cover—even though a piece of that truck was stuck in his thigh.” He slapped down sloshing shot glasses beside our beer mugs. “Whatever this guy’s telling ya, you’d do best to listen to it.”

  But Derrick had said all he meant to say. He slid from his stool. “I’ve got to go.”

  I caught his sleeve. “Before you leave, tell me why you’re giving me copies of Colonel Thorp’s hate mail now.”

  Jeers broke out as one of the teams on the TV did something devastating. The woman down by Matty threw peanuts at the screen. Derrick’s eye slid to her, then back to me.

  “I know you came here to help the Colonel, but the Colonel can take care of himself. It’s why he won’t say he got hate mail or got shot at. Now that you know that, you can help the little girl instead.”

  “That’s all I ever wanted to do, Derrick. Help a three-year-old child.”

  “Good. You help her. Let the Colonel rot in hell.”

  Derrick left me then. As he passed behind Matty, my right-hand man slid from his stool and followed him out the door. Matty would head for his Bronco, but he’d take the long way around. Just in case trouble was waiting for Derrick outside. Or for me.

  I watched them go, courtesy of the mirror behind the bar.

  And caught movement down the long, dark hallway opposite.

  I’d have bet the hall led to the toilets. But the red letters of a crooked box-light also promised it led to the Last Stand’s rear exit. I tossed some cash beside my untouched drink, nodded my thanks to the bartender, and slid from my stool.

  No one lurked in the corridor. And it did indeed run past the bathrooms. From the odor rising from the floor, though, I’d have said some of the Last Stand’s patrons had confused this corridor with the facilities. I found no one in the men’s room, no one in the ladies’.

  My shoes stuck to the linoleum as I made my way to the tin-clad fire door. It was a heavy, Depression-era oak thing. I had to use both hands to convince the latch to release. Apparently, the Last Stand had never heard of the Garden State’s fire code.

  The door swung wide, dragging me across the threshold. The back of the building was as dark as the hall had been, but damp air blew fresh with the scent of the nearby pines, despite the hulking Dumpster just a few feet away. Alive to every movement, I started for my Jag. I didn’t see Derrick Larkin in the feeble moonshine. I didn’t see Matty, either.

  The danger, I figured, would come when I moved away from the building.

  With that in mind, I quickly slipped between a pair of parked cars, dropped to a crouch. I drew my Beretta, but kept it aimed at the ground. No one advanced on me. Nothing on two feet moved. Still, I kept to cover, passed behind one line of vehicles and then another.

  I’d almost reached my Jag when he stepped from the shadows.

  “Tell me you’re not going to drink and drive.”

  Chapter 17

  I holstered my weapon. “What the hell are you trying to do, Barrett? Scare me to death?”

  He’d stepped into the open so I could see him now, his features outlined in the night’s sepia tones. He wasn’t in uniform. The suede jacket he wore made his shoulders seem even wider—and, as I walked over to confront him, made my breath come just a little bit quicker.

  Behind him, the shadows shifted. I didn’t warn him. But I didn’t need to.

  Barrett whirled to meet Matty, his own firearm instantly in his hand. Matty stopped short. His hands were fisted in his jacket pockets, and he made no move to remove them.

  “Everything okay, girlie girl?”

  “Everything’s fine. Lieutenant Colonel Barrett, this is Matty Donnelly.”

  Barrett’s weapon disappeared as he offered Matty his hand. “You must be one of the associates at Sinclair and Associates.”

  “That I am, sir.”

  “Lieutenant Colonel Barrett commands the Military Police at Fort Leeds,” I said, hoping Matty would take the hint and hush.

  “Does he, now?” Matty pumped Barrett’s hand like a piston. “It’s an honor to meet you, sir.”

  “Call me Adam,” Barrett said.

  I fought the urge to roll my eyes.

  “I’m an old soldier myself,” Matty bubbled. “Twenty-eight of the best years of my life.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “Yes, sir. I—”

  “—have to be going,” I said.

  Matty grinned like the Grinch who stole Christmas. “Sure. I have to be going. Good to meet you, sir.”

  “Likewise,” Barrett said.

  Matty made his exit, climbing into his Bronco and driving away. I wasn’t so lucky. Before I could move along, Barrett’s hand hooked my elbow.

  “What did Larkin have to say?”

  “You mean you couldn’t hear him from that dirty corridor?”

  “Let’s start before the corridor. Tell me about your meeting with the Colonel.”

  So the sergeant who’d rolled up in her patrol car while I’d been inside the house had called Barrett. No doubt his had been the vehicle that followed me from the housing area. He’d one-upped me then, and he’d done it again on the way to the Last Stand. I hadn’t spotted him on the road. And that rankled.

  “My, my,” Barrett said. “I do believe you’re speechless.”

  He shifted closer to me in the moonlight and let go of my arm in favor of capturing my hand. Suddenly the night didn’t feel so chilly. But I wasn’t going to let myself get distracted.

  “I handed Tim his retainer,” I said. “But I’m not quitting the case. I won’t quit until Brooke is safe at home.”

  “Knowing you, I wouldn’t expect anything less.”

  Barrett meant it. I knew he did. And it pleased me.

  “What about Derrick?” he said.

  “It’s late. Derrick’s long gone. Which reminds me…” Dismissively, I pushed at Barrett’s fingertips. He let me go and I struck out for my car.

  My steps slowed as I neared it, though. In the sketchy light of the lot, I could make out the slant of my windshield. It was patterned as if frost had fallen on it for the night.

  Except this wasn’t frost.

  Someone had smashed a gaping hole on the driver’s side of the windshield. The rest of the windscreen had shattered like cracked ice. The fractured glass clinging to the inside of the frame was as frilly as a lace collar.

  “That’s just great,” I muttered.

  Barrett frowned at the so-called security light blinking like an electric-blue strobe over the bar’s entrance. “Between the booze and the bad lighting, this lot must be a magnet for random vandalism.”

  Funny enough, that wasn’t any consolation. I hit my key fob, yanked open the Jag’s door. And froze to the spot.

  On the British tan leather of the driver’s seat, a dark, furry lump awaited my return. It smelled of disease and decay. Barrett hit it with the beam of a pocket flashlight. The light bounced off the white stripe tracking across the black, broken body.

  It was a dead skunk.

  And a single sheet of paper, with two lines of angular scrawl, lay propped against it.

  “ ‘Come back to me,’ ” Barrett read.

  And in that moment, the darkness of the night seemed much too close to me.

  —

  Barrett insisted on calling Kev. I didn’t want him to, but I had to admit it was the wisest thing to do. Once Kev’s crime-scene crew saw the damage to my car—and the dead critter on my custom-contoured seat—they decided to haul away my vehicle, lock, stock, and barrel. That left me without wheels. And with a lot of questions to answer.

  Unfortunately, Kev got to be the one to ask them. We were standing in the muddy gravel outsid
e the Last Stand. He was backlit by the headlamps of his fleet sedan. Their blue glare formed a full-body halo around him, but they were giving me a headache. And Kev’s continued persistence only made the pounding in my temples worse.

  I wasn’t about to spill the beans about meeting Derrick Larkin, though. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to fork over the flash drive Derrick had given me. After I’d had a chance to see the contents of the drive, maybe Kev and I could talk. Before then, the poison pen letters on the drive were my lead and I intended to work them my way. Meaning by the book―or not.

  Kev, however, clearly sensed I was keeping info from him.

  And like a dog with a bone, he was reluctant to let me go.

  “Several customers claim you met a man for a drink,” he said, not for the first time. “I want to know who you met and why.”

  “Drinks at a bar? Sounds like a date.”

  Kev drew himself up. “Is that what you were doing out here? Meeting Barrett for a date?”

  I didn’t want to put that idea in Kev’s head. Barrett had watched my back until the FBI arrived. He’d been good enough to supervise the careful loading of my Jag onto their flatbed truck. He knew I’d come here expressly to meet Derrick Larkin, but for some reason he hadn’t let the cat out of the bag. And day in and day out, he had to put up with Kev, playing second banana in his own jurisdiction. If he wasn’t going to try to gain ground by telling my secrets, I surely wasn’t going to secure myself some slack by dropping him into this mess.

  “I haven’t been meeting Barrett anywhere. I came out here for the shrimp cocktail and I stayed for the Baked Alaska.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  Neither was the idea that someone was sneaking around the New Jersey countryside, leaving me dead animals and notes that echoed the pleas of Charles Chapman Brown. If that occurred to Kev, he didn’t comment on it. And not long after that, he figured out he’d have better luck turning water into wine than getting me to confess to salacious activities at the Last Stand.

  Barrett, who’d waited all this time on the periphery of the parking lot, offered to drive me to my hotel. I gratefully accepted. With narrowed eyes, Kev watched us leave.

  All the way back to the Pines, I tried not to think about the dead skunk in my Jag. I didn’t want to mentally replay my meeting with Derrick, either. I tried not to dwell on my conversation with Brandy. And above everything else, I didn’t want to recall cadaver dogs searching the woods for a little girl’s body. But riding on the dark roads of the Pine Barrens, I thought of these things and more.

  Before Barrett could even pull into a parking space, I thanked him for dropping me off, wished him a good night, and got out of his pickup truck as quickly as I could. Matty had beaten me back to the hotel and set up our surveillance receiver. I knew this because he hadn’t merely drawn the curtains across the window of his room; he’d clamped them shut with hardware he carried for that purpose. I could tell he’d done this, since very little light escaped around the curtains’ perimeter. And because I’d seen him do it before. After all, anytime we set up shop in a hotel, motel, or bed and breakfast, it wouldn’t do to have every guest, handyman, and housekeeper spy on us while we spied on other people.

  When I rapped on Matty’s door, he answered it, a cheeky grin on his face.

  “What kept you, girlie girl?”

  I kicked off my boots, sat cross-legged on one of the double beds, and told him about my shattered windshield, the dead skunk, and the love letter.

  Matty listened gravely. Then he said, “You sure that’s all you had going on out at that bar?”

  I glared at him.

  “Aw, don’t be that way.” Matty parked his bulk in the room’s desk chair. On the work surface in front of him sat our surveillance receiver. It was half the size of a shoe box. Black, red, and white cords connected it to a digital recorder small enough to fit in a lady’s evening bag. “That Barrett seems like a decent guy. Looks like he cleans up nice. He’s gainfully employed.”

  “He’s an army officer.”

  “That’s what I’m sayin’. Plus, if you run into the scumbag who’s leaving you these love notes, it wouldn’t hurt to have a soldier on your side.”

  “A soldier.” I rolled my eyes. “Been there, Matty. Done that. Did you forget how it turned out?”

  To my surprise, talking to Matty about my failed marriage didn’t hurt nearly as bad tonight as it once had. He wasn’t to know that, though. He scowled, sending the receiver a dirty look. Soft sounds filtered through the tabletop speaker Matty had plugged into it. These were the sounds of Tim’s home at night.

  “We’ve got a bug in the living room,” I told Matty, “and one in Tim’s study. I slipped one in his sweatshirt, but when it goes through the wash, it’ll be toast.”

  Matty laid a paw on our little setup. “We tune this puppy right, we may have more than that. I took a look in the phone box while you was in the house. Your ex has got himself a tapped telephone, girlie girl.”

  This was news. And it flicked a switch in my mental attic. “Kev’s got a trace on Tim’s phone?”

  This meant Kev didn’t believe Tim’s take on matters any more than I did.

  Or it meant Kev was hoping for a ransom demand.

  As far as Brooke was concerned, this was the worst possible situation. Because it suggested that in the nearly forty-eight hours since Brooke’s disappearance, Kev didn’t have a credible lead on her kidnapper. That he needed a ransom demand. In either case, Matty’s discovery explained Kev’s presence at Tim’s this evening. Kev had been manning trace equipment.

  Matty shook his grizzled head. “I didn’t find signs of a trace. I found a wiretap. A radio relay. Like a weaker version of our listening devices, except it’s wired in where the phone line meets the terminal on the side of the house. That doesn’t take a warrant, Jamie. Just a fool with a screwdriver.”

  “And a receiver.”

  “And a receiver,” Matty agreed.

  “So,” I said, trying to wrap my tired mind around what we’d figured out, “someone’s sitting in a parked car on Fort Leeds and listening in on Tim and Brandy’s phone calls.”

  “In a car,” Matty agreed, “or in a neighboring house or building.”

  Well, all this ruled out Kev. To him, protocol was sacred despite the lessons the deaths of the Delmonico boys should’ve taught him. Kev would follow official channels, get a warrant, and make recordings at the phone carrier’s switching station in order to preserve evidence for the prosecution. Add in the short range of the tap’s radio signal and, to my mind, that left only one possibility: Barrett was the one who’d illegally tapped Tim’s phone. And he hadn’t bothered to share that little tidbit with me.

  Chewing this over, I left Matty to get what sleep he could. In the morning, he’d fast-forward through the overnight recording of Tim’s place in case anything interesting had occurred. I doubted he’d hear anything but silence.

  In my own room next door, I powered up my netbook. I plugged in the drive Derrick had given me and had a go at the files inside. Just as he’d said, these communications, sent to Tim’s office, were hateful all right. Many of the letters, emails, and faxes wished Tim dead. Worse than that, quite a few wished his child dead.

  Of course, the messages Derrick had saved on the drive were more than prime examples of hate mail. Each missive represented the life of a soldier that had been cut short because of a decision Tim had made. And most of the mail had been boldly signed by a grieving father, mother, best friend, sibling, or sweetheart.

  Of course, I wasn’t sure any of the signatures were legit. But I was certain of something else. Altogether, 256 messages had reached Tim’s office. That made at least 256 accusations. I didn’t know if Tim deserved such invective, but the possibility made me sick.

  Because from the looks of things, Tim’s actions may’ve gotten soldiers killed.

  And his choices may’ve put his daughter in terri
ble jeopardy.

  Chapter 18

  Later that night, under the spray of a very hot shower, I tried to convince myself that Derrick’s thumb drive would yield the break in Brooke’s case.

  Because the three-year-old had now been missing for forty-nine hours.

  Desperate for a lead, I’d emailed Derrick’s file to my office staff. I ordered background checks on the 256 names. Most private detection is a matter of paperwork, trolling through public databases, and making phone calls, so I hoped these tried-and-true methods would weed out those who’d written threats to Tim merely to vent their anger—and identify those who’d take out their rage on a three-year-old child.

  It was this hope that propelled me out of the shower and into some skivvies. I’d just hung up my towel when a soft knock sounded at the door. I knew it couldn’t be Matty.

  I pulled on a thick, terry-cloth robe that bore the heavily embroidered logo of the Pines and crossed the room to press my eye to the peephole.

  I made sure my nine-millimeter crossed the room with me.

  Of all the people who might come to my door in the dark of the night, I never dreamed Kev Jaeger would be one of them, but there he stood, on the welcome mat. The spill of the porch light slanted across his face, getting lost in the hollows under his eyes and the split in his chin. He’d tugged his power tie loose and his handmade suit coat was long gone. He’d run his fingers through his typically tidy hair, too, disarranging it in his frustration. Or some other emotion.

  Uneasiness rocketed through me. He’s here, I thought, because something about the skunk, something about the note in my vandalized car, pointed him toward Brooke—and she’s dead. The idea made my hands shake so hard I almost couldn’t get the security lock off the door.

  When I finally opened it, Kev said, “Sorry to stop by so late. I saw your light on under the curtains.”

  I nodded, waiting for him to break the bad news.

  He peered past me and into my room as if he expected an ambush. “Nice place.”

  Now, I thought. Now he’s going to tell me Brooke is dead.

  Instead, he said, “You’ve got the safety engaged on that thing, right?”