The Kill List

by Nichole Christoff

  That’s when the chill of the building threatened to crush me. I turned on my heel and hightailed it outside. Never had I been so grateful to feel the weak spring sunshine on my skin.

  “Every day?” I asked Barrett brokenly, when he joined me.

  “Sometimes twenty-four hours a day.”

  “Promise me you’ll never come home that way.”

  Barrett offered me a bittersweet smile.

  But that was all he offered.

  “And Tim?”

  “To my knowledge, Colonel Thorp has never come to see this.”

  “Well, he sure as hell should.” Anger overrode every feeling of grief that had swamped me moments before. “He signs off on orders for soldiers that end up making the ultimate sacrifice. The least he could do is come and honor that sacrifice.”

  Barrett didn’t say anything, but then again, he didn’t have to. Tim’s indifference spoke for itself. So did the hate mail that had reached his office. Thanks to Derrick, I’d seen 256 prime examples of it. But that’s when it hit me.

  Derrick hadn’t said a peep about hate mail coming to Tim’s house.

  But if a grieving father, mother, brother, or best friend had harassed Tim at home, that same someone would know where to find my ex-husband for a little target practice. He or she would know where to find baby Brooke. And he or she might snatch Brooke from her bed as revenge.

  Chapter 24

  The street in front of Tim’s house was just as busy as when Barrett and I had left it. The curious neighbors had retreated to their houses, but Barrett’s MPs stood in plain sight with assault rifles and bulletproof vests, keeping watch from behind their wraparound sunglasses. Up and down the neighborhood, Kev’s crime-scene team still beat the bushes and crawled through the grass as they looked for trace evidence.

  Inside the house, agents conferred in clusters. Barrett’s palm found the small of my back. His voice in my ear was a whisper, but it sounded like the growl of a guard dog. “Do you want to ask Thorp about Hangar Six and those death threats, or can I?”

  “Be my guest. I’ve got something else to do.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Toss Tim’s study.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  “Are you going to stop me?”

  Barrett frowned, but then he moved off in Tim’s direction.

  I encountered agents in the dining room and agents in the hall. Tim’s study was deserted, though. And that was the way I’d wanted to find it.

  He’d tried to get some work done. That much was obvious by the avalanche of paper on his miserable glass desk. I boogied across the room, had a seat in his chair.

  Most of the papers on Tim’s desk were printouts from Personnel. Lists. They contained the names of Fort Leeds’s soldiers bound for duty overseas, soldiers missing in action, and soldiers who’d died. As post commander, Tim had to sign off on these lists. He had to have at least a passing acquaintance with the names on them.

  One list, however, was handwritten.

  According to the numbers scrawled at the top of each sheet of plain white office paper, the handwritten list was 186 pages long. Each page bore approximately twenty-five names. And each name—all 4,650 or so—was etched into the paper with flat black ink. I recognized the script. It belonged to Tim.

  A single heading, penned in his hand, identified the top sheet. It read: “Change of Assignment.” And change of assignment was the first complaint in nearly every angry communiqué Derrick had given me.

  Tim had made notes in the margins of his list. He’d jotted types of occupations. They ranged from teacher to banker to bus driver.

  I wasn’t sure why he’d done that. And I wasn’t sure why he’d written this list by hand. Or why he’d written it all. Really, a document like this should’ve come from Personnel. Unless, of course, this was a list of soldiers about to send a change request to Personnel. But this wasn’t a list of the odd soldier here and there who might be planning to file a request.

  This was an exodus.

  “You shouldn’t be in here.”

  The sound of Larkin’s voice nearly made me jump out of my handmade shoes.

  “It’s okay,” I told him. “I used to live here.”

  I could hear the gears grind in his mind while he tried to work that one out.

  I grabbed the stack of papers comprising Tim’s Change of Assignment list. “Why is this handwritten?”

  But Derrick wasn’t easily distracted. He wasn’t easily dissuaded, either. “What do you really want, ma’am?”

  I wanted the three-year-old angel who loved her teddy bear to come home safe, I wanted Tim’s shooter to lay down his gun, and I wanted Charles Chapman Brown behind bars and out of my life. The lists on Tim’s desk had given me none of these things.

  “I want the death threats that were sent here, to Colonel Thorp’s home.”

  “I wouldn’t know anything about that, ma’am.”

  “Sure, you would. You’re his exec. His aide-de-camp. You manage all his communications every day.”

  “Opening the mail, sorting email, and answering the phone are among my duties”—Derrick’s footfalls were silent as he moved into the room—“at the office.”

  “And the Colonel has never directed you to handle his snail mail here at home?”

  Derrick shook his head.

  “What about his personal email? Have you ever answered his home telephone?”

  “No, ma’am, I have not.”

  I believed Derrick’s sincerity. I drummed my fingernails on the transparent desk. I needed another game plan.

  What I got was more company. Brandy tiptoed past the study with her Ed Hardy bag on her shoulder. When she saw me in her husband’s swivel chair, she froze.

  “What are y’all doing in Tim’s office?” Her Southern accent didn’t hide her suspicion.

  “It’s all right,” I assured her. “I’m just asking Derrick about some mail that came for your husband.”

  “Oh. All the mail that comes to the house is in the file cabinet.” She pointed to the storage closet where Tim’s safe resided.

  Sure enough, inside the closet, across from the safe, a tall steel cabinet had been wedged into the remaining space. I attacked the top drawer. It was unlocked. Like bricks, boxes of spare and cancelled checks lay in the bottom of the drawer. Tim had always kept all his checks.

  Brandy drifted closer to Tim’s transparent desk. “Is this about the money y’all had on the desk the other night? Has the mail got something to do with it?”

  “No.” I dragged open the second drawer. Copies of Tim’s tax returns stood in it like new recruits at boot camp. “This has nothing to do with Tim’s money.”

  “Tim’s money?”

  I stopped digging through returns long enough to look up at her. Her face was as blank as a Kewpie doll’s. She really had no idea her husband kept wads of cash in the house.

  I plowed into the third drawer, found water bills and come-ons from the cable company. “Brandy, the Colonel practically has a mint in his safe. That’s why we’ve been so worried Brooke was taken for ransom.”

  “Ransom?” And then, without warning, she crumpled.

  Derrick caught her by the elbow, helped her to a chair.

  “So you’re looking for more hate mail to help the little girl?” he asked me, frowning.

  “Yes.” In the fourth drawer, I found a bottle of bourbon and last September’s Penthouse. But no letters full of death threats. I kicked the cabinet. “Damn.”

  Brandy had pointed me to Tim’s mail, all right. It just wasn’t the kind of mail I was interested in. If he’d received death threats here at the house, he’d hidden them elsewhere. They certainly weren’t in this cabinet. Or maybe they were—and Brandy knew Tim’s filing system better than I ever had.

  I snatched up the Penthouse. Among the pages where the columns began with Dear Penthouse, I found three envelopes crammed against the spine. None of the three were addressed to Tim at work. The
y were addressed here, to his house. I didn’t touch them. I didn’t dare, in case they actually bore fingerprints or other trace evidence. But I could see the postmark stamped plainly on the first letter’s corner. It carried a zip code I didn’t recognize. I whipped out my BlackBerry, plugged the numerals into the U.S. Postal Service’s website, and was rewarded with a place name I’d never heard of.

  “Where’s Webster’s Trench?” I asked Derrick.

  His eyes narrowed with suspicion. “How does that help?”

  “I think Colonel Thorp’s shooter mailed these letters from there.”

  “That doesn’t help the girl,” he said. “That helps the Colonel.”

  But I didn’t take the time to explain the possible connection between the shootings and the kidnapping to him. I carried the letters to Kev, Penthouse and all. Tim’s puss soured when he saw the mag in my hand.

  “What have you been doing, Jamie—going through my filing cabinet?”

  “These envelopes wouldn’t contain death threats, would they, Tim?”

  My ex-husband glared at me. Kev pulled latex gloves from his pocket. Barrett looked over his shoulder while he examined the envelopes’ contents.

  Barrett looked up. “They’re death threats all right. Anonymous. Mailed directly to the house.”

  And that was all I needed to know.

  Chapter 25

  Barrett caught up with me just as I climbed into my rental car.

  “Hey, where are you going?”

  “Webster’s Trench.”

  “Alone?” Barrett grabbed the car door before I could swing it shut. “The hate mail that came directly to Thorp’s home is postmarked Webster’s Trench.”

  “Exactly.”

  “You don’t know what you’re walking into. The shooter could be holed up there. If he’s the same guy who opened fire on us in the woods, you already know he’s not afraid to shoot at you. Jaeger’s calling the locals up there now. He’ll have field agents there by dawn. Let them investigate.”

  “I can’t wait for dawn. If this mail’s from the shooter, and the shooter’s got roots in Webster’s Trench, Brooke could be there, too.”

  “You won’t be doing her any favors if you show up dead.”

  Barrett was right, but that didn’t help. All my frustrations with Kev and Tim, all my grief in witnessing the ceremony in Hangar Six, and all my fears about Brooke and Charles Chapman Brown shimmered behind my eyelids like tears. Yet, I couldn’t stop to cry now. Not when I was so close to saving a child’s life.

  “What do you want me to do, Barrett? Pretend I’ve never heard of Webster’s Trench?”

  “No, I want you to get out of that car—”

  My heart sank.

  “—and get in my truck. I don’t want you driving up there alone.”

  My heart soared.

  It took five hours to reach Webster’s Trench. Beyond the reach of William Penn’s initial land grant, the town had probably sprouted and grown during the height of Pennsylvania’s 1870s coal-mining boom. And from the look of the newspaper articles I managed to dig up online, not much had happened since.

  Except when it came to one of the town’s sons, Donnie Mullany.

  As Barrett drove, I read Donnie’s obituary out loud.

  “He was only twenty-three years old,” I said, “but on his third tour in Afghanistan.”

  “That’s not uncommon,” Barrett replied, and I knew this was true.

  I wondered how many times Barrett had been in and out of war zones in the last few years, but I hesitated to ask.

  He didn’t offer to tell.

  “I hate to say it, Barrett, but Donnie’s family could be prime candidates for sending those anonymous threats to the house. And for firing a few rounds at Tim.”

  “I hate to agree, Sinclair, but you may be right.”

  We rode in silence until he exited the main highway. A web of state routes and county roads led us deeper into the countryside and eventually brought us to Webster’s Trench’s Main Street. Smaller than the town of Leeds, it didn’t even have a stoplight. Many of the businesses had closed years ago, if the rotted plywood covering their windows meant anything. Only a drive-thru carry-out decorated with wilting cardboard cutouts of beer cans and long-necked bottles appeared to see much traffic.

  Barrett pulled into a gas station, his tires crunching dust that had once been gravel. While he filled the tank, I took my chances with the ladies’ room. It wasn’t as neglected as it might’ve been, and when I joined Barrett at the cashier’s counter, I realized why.

  In a pea-green smock that did her no favors, a female gas station attendant flirted with Barrett like he was the last man on earth. Of course, in a town the size of Webster’s Trench, maybe it felt like he was. With black hair frosted blond at the tips and a slack figure probably maintained by too many cigarettes, she was on the downhill slide into a hard middle age. I recognized the look in her eye that suggested life had passed her by. Like all she had to look forward to was scrubbing down the ladies’ room—and praying to meet an attractive stranger.

  Barrett certainly fit the bill.

  When he turned on the low-wattage version of his spectacular smile, she batted her lashes and an irritable feeling spiked through me.

  “Mullany?” the woman was saying. “That would be Annie’s oldest boy.”

  “Where can I find her?” he asked.

  Without asking his intentions, the attendant grabbed a flyer advertising a community rummage sale from a stack beside the lottery tickets. She scribbled a simple map on the back of it.

  “Thanks,” Barrett said when she handed it to him.

  “You’re more than welcome, handsome.” She leaned across the counter, displayed an indecent amount of pasty bosom.

  But Barrett’s eyes were on the drawing. “What’s this X on the other side of town?”

  “My place,” she said. “I get off at midnight.”

  And winked.

  I refrained from making any editorial comments until we were halfway to Barrett’s truck.

  When I couldn’t keep my criticism to myself any longer, I said, “She’s subtle.”

  Barrett merely chuckled.

  “How did she know I wasn’t your girlfriend?” I demanded. “Or worse yet, your wife?”

  “Maybe I look single.” Barrett opened the passenger-side door of his truck for me. “Maybe you do, too.”

  “Okay, wise guy.” I stepped up on the running board and levered myself onto the bench seat, attempting to keep the hem of my splendid black skirt somewhere in the vicinity of my knees. “What does single look like?”

  “Pretty good, from where I’m standing.”

  “Careful, Barrett. A woman could take a comment like that seriously.”

  Like a supernova, his smile came and went while he slammed my door, circled the truck, and slid behind the wheel.

  “Now that you mention it,” he said, shifting the truck into a gear, “a woman did take my comments seriously once.”

  “Really? How’d that work out?”

  “Not well. We got married.”

  “Oh.”

  Barrett’s tires whirred as we picked up speed on the pavement. “For the record, Jamie, I’m divorced.”

  “Oh,” I said again, lamely, and wanted to kick myself for it. Strangely, the idea of a married Barrett had left me feeling lost. Now I was found. I just didn’t see any need to show it. “That’s good to know.”

  “Is it?”

  It was a simple question.

  But answering it felt complicated.

  “Slow down,” I told him. “You’ll miss the next turn.”

  Barrett tapped his brakes.

  And grinned in the glow of the dashboard lights.

  It was well after dark by the time we found Annie Mullany’s house. Situated on a bend in the washboard road, we passed it twice before we realized it wasn’t derelict. It was a light in the front window that finally changed our minds. It snapped on during our third pass,
as yellow as a nicotine stain on a smoker’s finger.

  Barrett drew alongside a rusting minivan that squatted in front of the house. It was so old and the night so dark, I couldn’t tell its make or model. The front porch sloped to meet us and Barrett grabbed my elbow, hauled me vertical when I nearly stepped through a hole in its floorboards.

  I raised my hand to knock on the patchy screen door. The interior door stood open wide, though why anyone would want to let in the chilly night air, I had no idea. Then I heard the slip and click as a bolt-action rifle seated a bullet in its chamber and I realized the door wasn’t open for the breeze.

  “Who are you?” a woman’s voice shrilled. “What do you want?”

  “I’m Lieutenant Colonel Adam Barrett. My colleague and I drove all the way from Fort Leeds, New Jersey, to speak with you about your son.”

  “About Donnie? You’re from Fort Leeds?”

  “Yes, ma’am, but this is an unofficial visit.”

  Carefully, I glanced over my shoulder, gauged the distance between us and Barrett’s truck. Even if we ran for it, only one of us would beat the rifle’s bullet. Barrett, meanwhile, remained absolutely still.

  Eventually, a long shadow shifted inside the house. Annie Mullany met us at the screen door. She carried her rifle over her arm. She retracted the bolt, and the brass bullet casing winked at us from the slide. All she had to do was slam the bolt down and closed and she could fire on us from her hip.

  “Come in,” she said.

  We did, though I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

  She waved us toward a pink flowered sofa with shot springs and threadbare arms. I perched on the edge of it. Barrett maneuvered between me and Annie’s gun, then sank to the cushion beside me.

  “After all this time,” she said, “why are you here?”

  To ask if she’d sent death threats to Tim’s house.

  To see if she was capable of shooting at him.

  To find out whether she’d stolen his daughter.

  “To offer our condolences,” Barrett said.

  Annie’s bottom lip quivered before she bit down on it hard enough to draw blood. She wasn’t an old woman. She was hardly older than me. She looked tired, though, as if she’d lived three lifetimes in the span of mine. Her pale face was as washed out and wrinkled as the colorless slipcovers on the chair she sank into.