The Kill List

by Nichole Christoff

  A gravel drive worked its way off the road and disappeared behind the house. I couldn’t see a vehicle there indicating whether Barrett was home, but where else would he be? I parked in the drive, mounted the steps, and pounded on Barrett’s front door.

  I got no response.

  I hammered on the door again.

  From somewhere deep in the house came the creak of old hardwood. I pounded on the door a third time. It opened.

  Barrett stood on the threshold, glaring at me, his irritation more than obvious.

  So was the fact I had the worst timing in the world.

  His blond hair stood up in delicious little licks all over his head. His sculpted shoulders and the planes of his chest glistened wetly. He wore an emerald-green towel.

  That was it.

  Just a towel.

  The towel was damp. It clung to his narrow waist, outlined the curves of his strong thighs. And that wasn’t all it outlined.

  I jerked my eyes to his.

  “Hi,” I mumbled, heat rising to my cheeks. And no more words came to mind.

  But Barrett was willing and able to fill the gaps in the conversation. “Did you want to talk to me about something? Or did you get a second job as New Jersey’s shower inspector?”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “You have a BlackBerry for that. I’ve seen you use it.”

  My mouth opened; no sound came out.

  He frowned. “You might as well come in.”

  He stepped back to admit me. I had to pass close to him in order to cross his threshold. Very close to him.

  At this range, he smelled of citrus and spice. Almost like breakfast. Mimosas and French toast—but better.

  He closed the front door with a thump. “After you.”

  Barrett gestured toward the staircase, and presumably, the second floor. I’d have preferred to stay where we were, in the very open, very public part of the house. But since he was wearing almost nothing, I decided to let him call the shots.

  I turned for the stairs, my eyes raking over him again. Along his right side, riding just above the towel, and probably well below it, were scars. They were scythe-shaped, white and ridged, and way too many to count at a glance.

  They were shrapnel scars.

  I recognized them by their size, their shape, and their scatter pattern. And they meant at some time in the not-so-distant past Barrett had taken a belly full of the stuff. I had to make myself stop looking at them.

  I topped the stairs, found myself in Barrett’s bedroom.

  He pointed me toward the foot of his rumpled bed.

  “Have a seat.”

  He meant on the bed.

  I hesitated. The sheets were fawn-colored flannel, the duvet, pine-needle green. And they smelled delectably of him.

  But I couldn’t just stand there, staring at his bed. Self-consciously, I sat ramrod straight. I drew my knees together, crossed my ankles, and tucked my feet to the side like the prodigy of some Swiss finishing school.

  When I shifted, when I slipped one silky, stocking-clad calf over the other, Barrett followed the motion. His attention traveled the line of my leg. And touched the hem of my skirt.

  I should’ve minded. And I should’ve objected. But I didn’t want to do either.

  Like a man waking, though, Barrett shook his head, scrubbed his fingers over his face. He folded his arms over his chest and stared down his nose at me. “Where have you been?”

  “Philadelphia.”

  “All day and all night?”

  “Yes.”

  He paced away, raked a hand through his hair. “I left you messages.”

  “I know.”

  “After you asked me to call.”

  “Thank you.”

  He stopped in front of me again. “I saw the news. That maniac jumped you in the courtroom.”

  “He did.”

  “Kev Jaeger wouldn’t tell me if you were okay.”

  I bet Kev loved fielding Barrett’s questions about me.

  “Matty Donnelly wouldn’t tell me, either.”

  “You went to Matty?”

  Barrett didn’t answer my question. He crossed his arms over his body again. That beautiful boxer’s body. “What do you want to talk to me about?”

  “You got it wrong about Tony Padilla.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Considerably underwhelmed by my well-spoken argument, Barrett turned to head across the room. His posterior view was as good as the anterior. When he disappeared into a walk-in closet, I huffed out a breath, willed my pulse to slow.

  “He’s not violent. Not like Charles Chapman Brown,” I called.

  Barrett appeared at the door of the closet. He’d traded the towel for the lower half of his army combat uniform. The trousers, with their button fly, fit him just as well. “You know this how?”

  “Because.”

  When I failed to offer details, Barrett disappeared inside the closet again.

  I called after him. “I found Beth Padilla.”

  Barrett materialized immediately. He had one arm in the sleeve of a regulation T-shirt. “Where is she?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  Barrett donned the shirt, pulling it up and over his head. The lateral muscles along his ribs rippled with the move. Still barefoot, he padded across the room to glare down at me. “You can’t tell me? Two kids could be—”

  “The kids are fine.” I remembered the fear I’d glimpsed in their faces yesterday. “Well, maybe they’re not ‘fine.’ But they will be.”

  Barrett’s lips formed a grim line.

  “Adam, she left him.”

  A strange tension took hold of Barrett’s shoulders. He looked away. And in that moment, I pictured the finger painting on his office wall. Blue boys; two boys. Yet no woman stood with them. Or with the green man. Why hadn’t I noticed?

  My eye strayed to Barrett’s empty bed. Was it empty because Barrett’s wife had left him? Was she out there, somewhere, married to him, but absent? I refused to let myself think about it. Because the notion of a married Barrett bothered me to the bottom of my heart. And I didn’t like that one bit. To get through this investigation, to get Brooke back, and to put Charles Chapman Brown behind me, I needed to use my head.

  “Padilla’s only been home five weeks,” I said. “You can probably guess he saw some ugly things.”

  “PTSD.”

  Post-traumatic stress disorder. Many combat veterans experienced it in one form or another. A century ago we called it shell shock and gave doughboys Jane Austen to read.

  But now we knew Tony Padilla—and generations of soldiers like him—needed more than Sense and Sensibility.

  “You were right,” I admitted. “Padilla needs that psych evaluation after all.”

  Barrett sat beside me on the bed.

  I wished he hadn’t.

  “I spoke to Pearce Schuyler,” I persisted. “As a chaplain, he can recommend Padilla to an outpatient program. But he won’t get in—”

  “—with assault charges pending.”

  I nodded. I still couldn’t quite meet Barrett’s eye. Instead, I touched a fingertip to the tail of his T-shirt where it met the duvet between us—and felt a spark when his fingertip stroked mine.

  He said, “Are you okay?”

  “Yes.” But I heard a telltale tremor in my voice. “No. Brown dragged me into a supply closet. He—he—”

  I shuddered with the memory of it. Barrett wrapped me in his arms. He drew me to his chest.

  “Hey, it’s okay. You’re allowed to be scared.”

  I shook my head, squeezed my eyes shut. With his clothes on, Barrett smelled like the sunrise after a dark and terrible night. I just wanted to sit there and breathe him in.

  “I fought Brown off,” I said, “but he got away.”

  Barrett tried to shush me, tried to soothe me.

  I pushed my way out of his embrace. “I’m not supposed to get scared. I’m not supposed to let the bad guys get away
. I’m a security specialist. It’s not what I’m supposed to do.”

  And it wasn’t how my father had taught me to behave. Of course, I didn’t add this point to my argument. But then Barrett offered a counterpoint of his own.

  “Do you know what MPs like me do in places like Iraq and Afghanistan?”

  I froze. I knew. But I needed him to tell me.

  Barrett drew a soft breath. Then, in the language of every military brief that had ever crossed my father’s desk, he began. “One of the complications of warfare in places like Iraq is the urban environment. The opposition takes advantage of the man-made landscape and dense civilian population to shield them during their offensives.”

  I picked up the narrative. And sounded like a military history student. “Specialized units familiar with operating in urban settings are required to locate and neutralize these individuals and/or cells.”

  Barrett shrugged, and then he sighed. “That’s what cops do. So that’s what we did. That’s what I did, Jamie. Sometimes, I got to the bad guys before they got to us. But sometimes, I scared little old ladies and taught little boys might makes right.”

  “Barrett…”

  But he wouldn’t be comforted. “We’d do routine sweeps, section off the neighborhoods of Mosul. One day, we had to search this house. Our intel said the man there was harboring two of his cousins, insurgents from Syria. So we rousted the family. Our translator asked if anyone had seen the guys we were looking for. Of course no one admitted they had. We split the family up, started asking again. Two other guys and I kept the man in his front room. The women were all out front, scared to death we’re going to beat the guy. And being scared like that takes its toll. On them. On us.”

  In my heart, I agreed. But what did I really know? Being a military brat, and a military spouse, was as close as I’d come to serving my country. Really, I was just like everybody else. I went to Starbucks for imported coffee and to lunch with my well-manicured investments manager because the wars we fought these days, in many ways, were nothing more than a brief report on the nightly news.

  “The guys with me weren’t new to the game. This was Johnny’s second time in the Sandbox. He’d just found out his dad, back home, had broken his hip and he couldn’t do a thing to help him. Lucky had been in Afghanistan before. This was his third tour in Iraq. He was twenty-one.

  “So we’re in the house with the head of the family,” Barrett continued, “and all the women are outside. At least, we think they’re outside. Until somewhere in the house, a door creaks open. We snap our weapons to our shoulders. Then this little kid runs into the room. She couldn’t have been more than four. And she smiles at us.

  “Here we are, three big guys all kitted out in body armor and helmets. We’re armed to the teeth. We’re ordering her family to do this, to do that, and this kid isn’t afraid of us. She’s smiling. Which makes me smile back. When I do, one of the insurgent cousins steps up behind her. He throws an incendiary device into the room. And Lucky loses it. He opens fire. On all of us.”

  “Oh my God.”

  But Barrett’s story wasn’t over. “I didn’t think. I just grabbed the girl, dove for the floor. It was stupid of me. Lucky was still going nuts, pumping rounds into anything that moved.

  “I didn’t see the bomb blast. Or hear it. But I felt it. It was like getting hit by a speeding garbage truck. It threw me a good six feet before I slammed into a wall. And I felt all these white-hot fragments searing into my hip and thigh, along my side.”

  I’d seen body armor. It sits low, to protect the abdomen. But it’s cut higher at the leg so soldiers can walk in it.

  I thought of the scars on Barrett’s body.

  “What happened to the little girl?” I whispered.

  He chuckled. “Didn’t have a scratch on her. She screamed bloody murder at first and then cried like there was no tomorrow. Her father couldn’t believe I’d tried to protect her.”

  But Barrett hadn’t just tried. He had protected her. “Because you were an American?”

  He shrugged a shoulder. “Not all Americans are worth believing in.”

  You are, my heart whispered fiercely. I refused to listen. Out loud, I said, “What happened to Lucky? To Johnny?”

  Barrett was silent, and I realized I wasn’t going to like the answer.

  “As the bomb blew, Lucky kept firing. He didn’t stop with killing the insurgent. The blast knocked him off his feet, through the door. So he fired outside, on the women. And he came back in, gun blazing. He hit Johnny. Got him full in the face. And then he turned toward me.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I killed him, Jamie.” Barrett’s voice flatlined as he said it. “With a little girl pinned under me in the dirt and unarmed, injured women screaming outside. I killed him. Lucky didn’t come home because of me.”

  “No.” Anger surged through me. I clasped Barrett’s hand, held it tight. Fragging—when overstressed soldiers fired on their fellows—wasn’t new. But it was increasingly common. And always devastating. “He didn’t come home because he couldn’t. But you made it. You. Came. Home.”

  Barrett looked into my eyes for a long moment. In their dark depths, I saw something shift. Some other hurt I’d seen flicker there before. When he’d said he didn’t have children. When I’d told him Beth Padilla had left her husband.

  “Barrett, what happened when you came home?”

  But Barrett was done playing show-and-tell. He left the bed in a heartbeat, snagged his gun belt from the top of his dresser. He slung the belt around his hips as if buckling it took all his concentration.

  “I’ll drop the charges against Padilla,” he said, “provided he stays in treatment. But I’ll need a statement from his wife about her disappearance.”

  “I’ll introduce you.”

  “Good.”

  “Good.” I didn’t know what else to say. “Thanks, Barrett. This will mean a lot to them.”

  “What happened to calling me Adam?”

  His face had taken on that stony edge again, but this time, there was a vulnerability to it. As if my calling him Adam meant a lot to him. And realizing that, I began to suspect Barrett meant a lot to me.

  Before I could call him anything, though, my BlackBerry rang. I cleared my throat, answered it. It was Matty.

  He said two words.

  “Shots fired.”

  Chapter 22

  My tires screeched on the pavement as I pitched to a stop outside Tim’s house. Barrett drew up behind me. Kev roared onto the street as I unbuckled my seat belt.

  He didn’t like being the last to arrive.

  Emergency response vehicles were everywhere. The Feds’ unmarked sedans were scattered among the MPs’ cars like so many Matchbox toys. An ambulance idled on Tim’s lawn.

  Matty waited for me in his Bronco, parked up the block. He knew better than to get too close to a crime scene with MPs and FBI crawling all over it. Barrett zeroed in on him anyway, caught up with me in Tim’s driveway.

  “You want to explain what one of your associates is doing on my post?”

  “No,” I snapped, “I don’t.”

  I outstripped him as I entered the house. On the ugly divan in the living room, I found Tim. He wore running shorts, the sweatshirt I’d bugged, a compress against his face, and a blood pressure cuff on his arm.

  The cuff was attached to a paramedic. Brandy hovered at Tim’s side, her face white with terror. Pearce held her shaking hand in his firm grip. Whatever he’d seen and whatever he’d heard didn’t show on his face. And no emotion made it through the reflecting glasses covering his eyes.

  Two of Barrett’s military cops were with them. One jotted down every word Tim said. “He fired two shots. Pop, pop. The sound seemed to come from everywhere…”

  In the entryway, shoes squeaked on the parquet floor. Kev appeared. He didn’t speak. He just grabbed me by the upper arm and hauled me to the kitchen. The door pivoted shut behind us.

  “You’ll wan
t to let go of my arm,” I warned him.

  “Back in town, I see.”

  The door sighed open on its hinges. Barrett joined us. Pearce was hard on his heels.

  “Jamie?” Pearce asked. “What’s going on in here?”

  Kev ignored him. “I saw Matty Donnelly sitting in his Bronco when I drove up. Don’t tell me he’s added contract killing to his résumé.”

  “If he had,” I retorted, “he wouldn’t wait around for you to figure it out.”

  “Wouldn’t he? Tell her, Barrett.”

  Barrett’s face went flinty, whether from what he knew or from Kev telling him what to do, I couldn’t tell. “I just had a word with the first-responders. We’ve got a shell casing in a neighboring yard. Looks like the shooter staked out a spot in the undergrowth.”

  “Crawling through the brush on his belly is Matty’s specialty, isn’t it?” Kev said. “What kind of weapon does he carry these days?”

  “Is that all you’ve got, Kev? A shell casing and jealousy for Matty’s skills in the woods?” I mustered up all the disdain I could manage.

  Or did all this have to do with personal rejection? I didn’t say that out loud. But I wondered if Kev’s invective came from the investigation—or the fact I’d sent him packing when he showed up at my hotel room.

  Anger, as red as a rash, swept into Kev’s cheeks as if he were thinking about that moment, too. “When I factor in the recent shootings in that stretch of pine forest where you and Barrett were poking around, I’ve got plenty of solid reasons to question you.”

  “We’ve also got a footprint where the shooter ran behind the house next door after firing,” Barrett said, slowly. His tone was cool and his face, unreadable. “It’s a running shoe, size eleven.”

  “Then I guess the glass slipper doesn’t fit,” I told Kev. “Matty weighs in at two hundred forty pounds. He wears a size thirteen.”

  But Kev wasn’t convinced. “Where’ve you been, Jamie?”

  Pearce laughed. “Jamie? What would she have to do with this shooting business?”

  I didn’t find Kev’s question funny. “I was in Philadelphia.”

  “Alone?”