The Kill List

by Nichole Christoff

  “Donnie was a good boy,” she told us. Her boney fingers caressed the walnut fore-end of her gun. I could too easily imagine her outside Tim’s house, stock to her shoulder. “He saw his duty and he did it.”

  “For his country.” Barrett nodded.

  “For all of us. For me and his stepdaddy. For his little brother, too. He’ll tell ya.”

  I didn’t see any sign of the stepdaddy or the little brother, so I couldn’t ask either one to tell me. Moreover, I didn’t see any sign of a computer, laptop, or printer that could’ve produced those anonymous death threats. The front room, with its peeling wallpaper and console television, was painstakingly clean, but money hadn’t been spent on it in twenty years.

  Before I could come up with an excuse to see the rest of the house, Annie asked, “How did you know my Donnie?”

  I paled, certain we’d be staring down the business end of her rifle before she threw us out.

  Barrett, though, answered her truthfully. “We didn’t know him at all.”

  “But you’re from Fort Leeds?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I am.”

  “Donnie got assigned there. Then his orders got changed. He wasn’t supposed to go back to Afghanistan for a third tour, but you know. Paperwork.” Her eyes were bleak. “Two days before he was meant to come home, his truck hit one of those roadside bombs in Helmand Province. Two days! Who ever heard of Helmand Province, anyway?”

  “Do you remember,” I asked, “who signed off on his paperwork?”

  “I think of him every damn day. It was some officer named Thorp,” Annie said, her hands tightening on the gun.

  Her sentiment and her shotgun sent lightning through my system. I couldn’t guarantee Annie Mullany was Tim’s shooter or Brooke’s kidnapper. But, looking at her now, I wouldn’t have put it past her.

  “Well,” I said, rising, “we’ve kept you long enough. It’s getting late. And we need to get to the library before it closes.”

  Barrett looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. Maybe I had. But if I had, Annie didn’t seem to notice.

  She said, “Webster’s Trench doesn’t have a library.”

  Disappointment stripped away any hope I’d carried with me from Fort Leeds. A public library could’ve meant a computer for the public’s use as well as a printer. And those things could’ve meant Annie had sent the anonymous death threats to Tim.

  But then Annie said, “The closest thing we’ve got to a library is the reading room at the nursing home.”

  “Nursing home?”

  “Maple Shade. I work there as an aide.”

  I could just imagine a nursing home in a town as down and out as this. Miners who’d spent their whole lives deep underground to support their families probably found themselves parked in patches of sunlight, their wheelchair tires locked in place while too few nurses tended those who couldn’t get out of bed. Aides like Annie would be run off their feet. But while the work would be just a job for some, it would be a calling for others. I hoped Annie was one of these.

  I didn’t voice this opinion. Annie, however, shrugged as if I had. Lying in the crook of her arm, the rifle rose and fell with the action of her narrow shoulders.

  “Not all of us have children,” she said, “to take care of us in our old age.”

  I felt the truth of what she said to the bottom of my heart.

  I just hoped Tim’s child lived to her own old age.

  Chapter 26

  I tried to call Maple Shade the second Barrett’s taillights threw red streaks at Annie’s house.

  As we made tracks for the highway, Barrett said, “I’ll carry your library books if you let me walk you home from school.”

  I chose to overlook his sarcastic remark as well as his deadpan delivery. “Damn. My BlackBerry can’t get a signal. Is your cell phone working?”

  He slipped an iPhone from a pocket along his leg, handed it across the truck’s seat to me. It was as dead as mine. I said, “How long until we reach the Interstate?”

  Barrett bounced us over another series of potholes. “On this road? You might make better progress with a pack mule.”

  Still, unlike the meandering trace we’d taken to reach Annie Mullany from the center of Webster’s Trench, this was the most direct route out. So I bit down on my impatience. And told myself I’d be checking out her story soon enough.

  A sliver of moon had risen above the hills, illuminating the dusty ditches that fell away on either side of the truck. Bare branches scratched at the doors. Barrett’s headlights sparked across a reflective orange sign positioned at the side of the road. CAUTION, it read. ONE LANE BRIDGE. MEN AT WORK.

  Not at this time of night, I thought.

  But judging by the condition of the structure, maybe they should’ve been.

  Barrett drove slowly onto the iron tongue of the bridge and I could see old oak planks that reached from one low wall of river stone to the other. The masonry looked sound, but those planks? The headlamps highlighted a swath that an army of giant termites had apparently chewed up and spit out. Boards were splintered, shredded, and in many cases, missing. The entire bridge shivered and shimmied under our weight.

  The whole experience was enough to make my stomach twist into a bow tie. And then the truck pitched. It dipped suddenly to the right. Metal rasped on wood. I clutched at the seat-belt strap cutting across my chest and Barrett stomped on the brakes.

  The wheels squealed, then locked. We stopped hard. The truck listed to my side. But we weren’t moving forward and we weren’t falling through the bridge’s floor, so I could live with it.

  Barrett leaned across me, rummaged in the glove box for a flashlight. I threw open my door, and thanks to the truck’s tilt, got out with a gravity assist. Barrett slid out after me. His boots thudded on timber and I glanced down to see the sparkle of a fast-moving stream through gaps as thick as my thumb between the boards. Over the stone wall that barely reached my hip, I saw the river in all its glory, sparkling in the feeble moonlight and twisting through a valley that was just one long free fall away.

  Barrett flicked on the flashlight, inspected the rear tire.

  “Flat,” he declared.

  At the news, I tried to hug a little warmth into my body, but spring was still a dream in coal country. I’d dressed for a courtroom, not for the weather out here. I wasn’t dressed for a hike, either, but I could see necessity demanding as much if Barrett didn’t have a spare. After all, we had no phone service and the highway was miles away. The only lights twinkling in the night belonged to a myriad of stars overhead, not neighboring houses. I squinted into the grayness beyond the reach of the headlights at the far side of the bridge’s span. I didn’t hear any approaching cars.

  Barrett brushed past me on the narrow bridge. He crouched by the front tire, shone his light on it. “This isn’t good.”

  “It’s flat too?”

  “It’s worse than flat. Come look.”

  I crouched beside Barrett. The tire’s rubber had run completely off the rim, leaving the metal edge of the rim exposed. We couldn’t get far without ruining the wheels—and if we did that, we wouldn’t get anywhere.

  The tread itself was as shredded as a cake of chewing tobacco. I touched it and it fell apart in my fingers, leaving me holding a trio of nails that had been twisted together by anodized tools and an inventive mind. No construction crew had done this, and they certainly hadn’t brought this mess here to fix the bridge.

  Barrett plucked the cluster of spikes from my hand, examined it beneath the flashlight beam.

  That’s when I realized what it was.

  “Caltrop,” I said, and wished I hadn’t.

  Developed a couple thousand years ago and used in Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, and Medieval Europe, caltrops were a strategic weapon. Tossed onto roadways by the dozen, their design guaranteed that one spike would always stick straight up. And that spike would be sharp enough to pierce the hooves of an unwary rider’s horse.

  Knights of old,
riding across the countryside, watched for caltrops because a single one could lame a horse. This would force the knight to dismount and continue on foot, leaving him vulnerable to ambush. Now the same low technology had disabled Barrett’s Ram and had drawn us into the unprotected open.

  Except this wasn’t an ambush.

  Or was it?

  The thought must’ve occurred to Barrett the same moment it blossomed in my mind. He killed the light, seized my hand, and dragged me to my feet. “Get in the truck.”

  Heart in my throat, I did as he said—just as the first gunshot cracked through the night.

  Barrett scrambled into the vehicle after me, cursing the interior light that made us perfect targets in the night. A second shot rang up and down the valley. I heard the punch as the slug penetrated the wall of the truck, flinched as paint chips nipped at my cheek.

  “Get down,” Barrett ordered.

  He swung himself over me and into the driver’s seat, cranked the engine, and pounded the accelerator. With two tires out, the truck fishtailed across the flimsy planks. The front right rim shrieked. Where their steel met iron rivets, the wheels threw a shower of sparks that arced high and wide.

  I ducked low, pressed my nose to the passenger window. Down in the creek bed, I saw the muzzle flash as our sniper fired again. This time, his shot hit the glass above my head. It fractured into a crystalline spiderweb. A perfect hole winked at its center.

  “Get on the floor!” Barrett shouted.

  I took his advice. Bullets slammed into the truck three more times as we surged forward. With a jolt that made my teeth rattle, we crashed across the bridge and onto the gravel road beyond.

  I scrambled up from the floor mat, sank a knee into the seat, and clung to the headrest as I tried to peer down the road behind us. Dust billowed from under the tailgate like a pennant on the stern of schooner. As a defensive maneuver, Barrett made sure we were running dark, without benefit of head- or taillights, but the pale dust against the dark sky telegraphed our position as disastrously as any smoke signal.

  “We’ve got to get off this road,” I told him.

  “I’m working on it.”

  He was, but the ruined tires weren’t cooperating. The truck rocked like a roller coaster. It wouldn’t be long until the naked rims gave out—and when they did, the suspension would fail and the axles would be driven into the beaten blacktop.

  We’d be sitting ducks.

  I strained my eyes to see through the scrub alongside the road. Any intersection with a road rising from the streambed meant the shooter could cut us off. And gun us down.

  “Here.” Barrett unholstered his sidearm, slid it across the seat to me. “If you see headlamps…”

  I nodded, clutched Barrett’s nine in my lap, just as two pinpoints of light pricked the horizon. I braced my feet on the floorboards, gripped the gun tighter. I didn’t like the idea of shooting blindly into the windshield of an oncoming car, but it was better than getting shot.

  Barrett toed the accelerator and the truck bounced against the old asphalt. My hands grew sweaty on the stock of his weapon. The headlights ahead of us grew larger—then veered west. Another pair popped up behind them. They did the same thing. Lights swooped from the opposite direction. These flew eastward.

  It took me an eon to understand it, but when I heard a distant whir, I finally realized we weren’t seeing the shooter catching up with us from a side road. This was traffic on the interstate. We’d reached it at last.

  —

  The local dispatcher didn’t seem to think much of my distress call. The second Barrett and I hit the highway, my BlackBerry connected to a wireless network and I punched 9-1-1. The story of a sniper standing beside the creek bed in Webster’s Trench was just too fantastic for the emergency operator.

  The Pennsylvania State Police, however, believed our tale wholeheartedly. Maybe it had to do with the fact Barrett drove into the lot at their local barracks with two ruined rims, a shattered side window, and ten bullet holes in his truck. Or maybe it had to do with the FBI field agents who descended on us shortly after Barrett placed a call to Kev.

  As Barrett told them all about our visit to Annie Mullany, the son who died in a roadside bomb blast after Tim sent him to Helmand, and the ambush on the one-lane bridge, my BlackBerry rang. It was Frank. And he had news.

  “Look out, Jamie. Charles Chapman Brown’s headed your way.”

  Like a bunny rabbit, I suddenly wanted to find a hole, crawl inside, and curl up until Brown went on his merry psychotic way.

  But hiding wasn’t my style.

  Frank said, “I talked to Matty already. And to that Feeb in charge of the Thorp case.”

  “Kev Jaeger.”

  “Yeah. Jaeger told me about the skunk in your car. And that stinking note.” Behind Frank, I could hear the city streets of Philadelphia. Honking horns and the hiss of hydraulic brakes competed with his deep baritone. A hot dog hawker’s voice rode above the noise as he offered mustard to his customers. “The language on that note sounds a lot like Brown, Jamie.”

  I didn’t even have to try to remember how it went. The words came to me whether I wanted them to or not and they chilled me to the bone. Leave the little girl. Come back to me. Well, I wasn’t going to do either.

  “The note can’t be from Brown,” I told Frank. “He was still in the psych ward when I got the first one special delivery, wrapped around a dead squirrel.”

  “Well, I told that Jaeger this particular squirrel could be hunting you in his backyard and he wanted me to confirm you was here for Brown’s court date. Like you ducked into that closet with him before driving him to Atlantic City.” Frank’s snort provided an eloquent editorial comment. “I told that Feeb where the exit ramp is.”

  I smiled, imagining that conversation, then blushed, remembering what Kev had said and done while we’d talked the previous night. “Thanks, Frank, but that’s Jaeger. Always by the book. And always thorough.”

  “Yeah, well, so’s the Philly PD. Look, Jamie, we figure Brown must’ve had help. Otherwise, he’d never have gotten out of the courthouse. And if he had help, he’s probably already out of the city.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  And I did. Brown on his own was one thing. Brown with help was something else entirely.

  I clipped my phone to the waistband of my skirt and went in search of Barrett. I found him in the Troopers’ ward room—engaged in a polite squabble with two of Kev’s field agents. Three State Troopers looked on, and I got the impression they weren’t fond of the Feds any more than Frank was.

  “Sir, you are a military officer, not an FBI agent.” The agent standing toe-to-toe with Barrett was petite and blond. “You are to return to your duty station. We’ll speak with Mrs. Mullany and we’ll comb the creek bed, too. Am I making myself clear?”

  “Annie Mullany’s son was killed in action two days before he was due to board a plane and come home,” Barrett insisted. “Mrs. Mullany freely admits she holds my commanding officer liable for her son’s death. She met me and my colleague with a bolt-action rifle in her hands within hours of a sniper assault on my post. She could be our shooter and she could be responsible for kidnapping my CO’s kid three nights ago. That’s U.S. Army jurisdiction.”

  A smile curled the corners of Blondie’s mouth. “No, sir. That’s a reach.”

  And with that parting shot, she, her partner, and the Troopers left the room.

  “Don’t mind her,” I said, slipping my arm through Barrett’s. “Just because the FBI won’t play nice doesn’t mean we can’t win.”

  I led him to all the comfort of a pair of hard-seated, straight-backed chairs. From there, Barrett and I conducted our own investigation over our cell phones. A quick search yielded the phone number for Maple Shade, the nursing home where Annie allegedly worked. The attendant on duty assured me Annie Mullany did indeed work there—and that the only computers on the premises were in the secretary’s and administrator’s offices. A
nurse’s aide such as Annie, the attendant swore, could never get her hands on them.

  Frustrated by that dead end, I told Barrett, “Annie’s not looking good for writing the anonymous threats.”

  “She’s not looking good for the caltrops, either.” Barrett rose from his chair, paced like a caged tiger. “The clerk at the hardware store knows her. He says she’s not the do-it-yourself type. Annie doesn’t know a wrench from a ratchet, so she probably didn’t make them. Of course, you can buy them on the Internet—”

  “—but she’d need a computer for that, she can’t get to the ones at work, and there’s—”

  “—no library in Webster’s Trench.”

  “I suppose,” I said, “she could’ve asked someone to order them for her. She’s a capable woman.”

  “She is, but do you think she’s got a working knowledge of military history?”

  Barrett had a point. Deploying caltrops was an ancient strategy. Annie could’ve seen the newer version of that old idea on the nightly news. Long and skinny and full of spikes, today’s police use bars called Stop Sticks the way medieval knights once used caltrops. But Barrett and I hadn’t run over sticks. As a result, I could draw only one conclusion: whoever had scattered the caltrops in our path, whoever had shot at us, whoever had shot at Tim, and whoever sent hate mail to his house from Webster’s Trench wasn’t Annie Mullany—and consequently, Annie Mullany wasn’t Brooke’s kidnapper.

  Chapter 27

  Just short of midnight, Barrett and I said goodbye to the great state of Pennsylvania. One of the Troopers had hooked us up with a mechanic who’d taken pity on us—but not too much pity. For a princely sum, he sold Barrett a pair of reconditioned rims and some brand-new tires, and gave him enough cardboard and duct tape to prevent the passenger window from crumbling inward onto me.