The Kill List

by Nichole Christoff

  I didn’t dare enter the room to wake him. Not while he was like this. A soldier’s training and experience drove him now. Asleep, he couldn’t think. He could only act.

  And his actions could get me killed.

  I called to him again, whispering a different name. “Adam? Adam, you’re home.”

  His eyes blinked open. He scrubbed a hand across his cheeks, glanced around the room as if it were foreign, yet familiar. I stole to his side.

  “Someone’s in the backyard,” I breathed.

  He understood instantly. “Stay here.”

  Barrett glided to his feet, swept his nine-millimeter from the coffee table he’d placed just beyond arm’s reach. His bare feet made no sound on the hardwood floor as he padded to the back of the house. Despite his order, I trailed him to the kitchen.

  Outside, a repetitive click-click-click tracked across the porch. The sound was much too close to the door for my liking. I lifted a butcher’s knife from the block on Barrett’s counter, my hand sweaty on the hilt.

  If Charles Chapman Brown had come to claim me, I’d be ready for him.

  Pressing flat to the wall beside the windows, Barrett peered past the framework. Without warning, he reached for the back door, pushed it open wide. Instead of seeking cover, he stood on the threshold.

  His shoulders filled the doorway.

  I thought he’d lost all sense.

  At the corner of the house, a shadow blurred into the bushes before retreating into darkness. It shuddered, crept forward. Against the ring of light circling Barrett’s truck, I made out a silhouette.

  Of a muzzle.

  It wasn’t the muzzle of a gun, though. This muzzle was decidedly canine. Lop ears pricked behind it.

  The rangy black dog from Bertie’s deli emerged from the dark, tail twitching in a tentative wag. Before I could smile, he took off at a scuttling trot and disappeared behind my car. Barrett crouched, extended a hand.

  “Hey, boy. Hungry?”

  The dog might’ve been. But not hungry enough to approach us. Not while he could sense our tension. Barrett had relaxed, but the last of my apprehension poured off me like water.

  With an eye on the dog, Barrett shepherded me inside. He didn’t close the door, though. And he didn’t turn on the light.

  In the blue of the night, he grabbed a skillet from an overhead rack, fired up the range. Working quickly, he grabbed a carton of eggs from the fridge, dropped a pat of butter in the skillet. It sizzled instantly, throwing off a salty scent that made my mouth water.

  Behind me, on the porch, I sensed motion. I didn’t dare move. I didn’t want to scare the black dog away.

  Barrett snagged a ceramic mixing bowl from a lower cabinet, loaded it with the scrambled eggs he’d made. He set the bowl in the middle of the kitchen floor. It looked lonely there, shining starry-white in the half-light of night.

  That done, he retreated to the counter. Far from the door. And waited.

  He didn’t have to wait long.

  The black dog’s nose emerged from the shadows.

  He slunk into the kitchen, obsidian eyes on Barrett. Saliva dripped from his mouth. He approached the bowl, pausing long enough for a dignified sniff.

  Then he gobbled up the scrambled eggs in three seconds flat.

  Once he knew he’d eaten all there was to be had, he turned tail and sped outside.

  Barrett moved then, digging around in another cabinet and coming up with a plastic takeout container. He filled the container with water, collected the mixing bowl, and set them both outside on the porch. He came in, closed the door, and locked it.

  He said, “I think I’ll save the cleanup for morning.”

  “I’m sorry I woke you. If I’d known it was the dog—”

  “It’s okay. He was hungry.”

  And he’d come to Barrett, certain he’d feed him. More than that, though, Barrett had. Such compassion brought a lump to my throat.

  “Here.” Barrett lifted the knife from my hand. I’d forgotten all about it. He laid it on the table.

  “I thought it was Brown outside. I thought—”

  “You’re shaking.”

  “It’s the adrenaline.”

  “It’s not.” Barrett slipped his arms around me, pulled me close to him.

  I allowed myself to rest my cheek against his hard chest, let my hands lay lightly at his waist.

  “He won’t find you,” Barrett vowed.

  “I’m not afraid of Brown. Not really.”

  The fingertips of Barrett’s left hand drew a lazy line along my spine. Electricity sizzled from the small of my back to the nape of my neck.

  When his hand came to rest there, Adam Barrett whispered, “What are you afraid of, Jamie?”

  Chapter 33

  I wouldn’t answer Barrett’s question. Not out loud. I knew exactly what I was afraid of. I was afraid to start anything with him because, just as it had with Tim and just as it had with Kev, I was afraid it would end. But I couldn’t say that to Barrett.

  Instead, I said, “Brown’s not working alone.”

  “No, he’s not. He’s former army, you know.”

  Shivers shimmered through me. They had nothing to do with the nighttime chill rising from Barrett’s kitchen floor. “You think Brown’s in contact with Tim?”

  “Tim’s phone call got you to All Saints’.”

  And at All Saints’ I’d gotten clobbered. But even if Brown was entangled somehow with Tim, he couldn’t have kidnapped Tim’s daughter. He’d been wrestling with me in a car on Philly’s City Avenue at the time.

  I told Barrett as much.

  He nuzzled my temple in a slow shake of his head. “There’s got to be a connection.”

  “Between Brown and Brooke’s abduction?”

  “Between Tim and Brooke’s abduction. For better or worse, he’s been reassigning soldiers. Well, Brown was a soldier. Like your Philly cop friend said, he had a breakdown overseas. Who knows what happened when he came home?”

  I didn’t want to think about Brown anymore. Thinking had made my head hurt. Now I just wanted to rest it against Barrett’s strong shoulder.

  He still hadn’t put on a shirt. His skin was warm, smooth to the touch. I allowed my fingertips to wander to the crazy crescents, the scattering of scars, along his right side. He’d earned those scars saving a little girl’s life overseas. But he’d never said what happened after that.

  “Barrett? What happened when you came home?”

  He didn’t reply.

  And his stillness spoke pages.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I didn’t mean to pry.”

  “You didn’t.”

  But I had.

  I knew it.

  Then Barrett said, “I was married once.”

  He’d already told me as much. But hearing him say it again made my heart stutter. They were divorced.

  But maybe Barrett wished they weren’t.

  “She called me, when I got shipped back to the States. I was flat on my back in Walter Reed and she called me every day, but she never came to see me. So I pushed for release, got out of the hospital.”

  “Barrett—”

  “I tried to make a plane reservation, but my card was denied. That didn’t make any sense, so I went to an ATM. Turns out she’d run our joint checking account down to its last two hundred dollars. I spent all of it on a flight. I didn’t even have the money to get from the airport to my apartment building. A vinyl-siding salesman saw my duffel and offered me a lift. He was a Vietnam vet. I didn’t turn him down.”

  Beneath my cheek, Barrett’s heartbeat was strong and steady. But I imagined him in that airport, weak and worried. He wouldn’t have wanted to admit to being either one.

  He said, “A mover’s van sat at the entrance. They were loading a sofa that looked a lot like mine. I told myself I was being stupid.

  “There were packing boxes in the hall. Packing boxes outside my door, too. The door was open, so I went inside. The walls were
bare and most of the furniture was gone. I thought maybe I’d walked into the wrong apartment.

  “Then I heard voices in the kitchen. A young woman I didn’t know was kneeling on the floor, tucking the last of Susannah’s china into a cardboard packing crate. And there was Susannah holding a vase in her hands. My sister had given us that vase as a wedding present.”

  An emotion of some kind speared through my chest. It felt a lot like jealousy. I was silent.

  “That day, she’d tied back her gold hair with a blue ribbon. I remember thinking it matched the blue of her little cotton sundress. She’d kicked off her shoes the way she always did when we were at home. And she was pregnant, Jamie. I’d wanted kids for so long.”

  “Oh!”

  “When she saw me, she started to cry. She said, ‘I’m sorry you got hurt.’ To this day, I’m not sure if she meant in Iraq or there, in the kitchen. I hadn’t seen her in ten months. She was eight months pregnant.”

  He was still hurt. I could feel it in the center of his soul. But unless I missed my guess, he was past missing Susannah. No, some other part of their split had hurt him very deeply. And that’s when he told me what it was.

  “She’d been seeing someone else—sleeping with someone else—for two years. And do you know why?”

  I shook my head, not certain I wanted to hear the answer.

  “Because he came home every night. He was a high school math teacher, I was a soldier, and in the last two years of our marriage, I’d been home a total of seven months.”

  Such betrayal wasn’t right, and the injustice of it seared the inside of my heart. Barrett hadn’t gone away because he wanted to. He’d done it because he’d made a commitment to his country—and going away was what his country had asked him to do.

  “Jamie, going away will never be my choice—”

  “I know.”

  “—but as long as I’m an army officer, going away will be my duty.”

  I understood this kind of commitment. I respected it and I admired it. Still, I didn’t trust myself to say so. Especially after it dawned on me that Barrett wanted me to know this—because he wanted to be with me.

  But he wouldn’t stay with me. He couldn’t. And whatever we had would end, just as my marriage had ended.

  Painfully.

  “Barrett, I don’t think—”

  He swept a thumb across the curve of my cheek. “What’s this?”

  It was then I realized I was crying. Crying for his past heartbreak. And crying for the heartbreak I knew would come if I continued down this path with him.

  Before I could gather the strength to pull away, Barrett kissed me, the move urgent, his mouth urging. And something in me snapped. I didn’t care about the misery that would be headed my way. I only cared about the here and the now and the way Barrett made me feel like I could do anything without fail.

  I arched into him in open invitation and gave my hands permission to slide along his waist. To cruise along those crescents in his skin. To run over his muscled back until they found his shoulders.

  Barrett’s fingers hooked the strap of my cami, slipped it from my shoulder, stroked the skin along my collarbone. He pressed a kiss to my cheek, to my chin, to my throat—and found some secret spot there known only to him. I gasped at the wonder of it, trembled with every breath he took.

  Against his back, my palms drew into fists. My nails scraped his skin. And his breath caught.

  His palm skimmed the small of my back, flattened there, pulled me tight to his hips. I became sure of his arousal. And of mine.

  “Adam…”

  He nuzzled my ear, nibbled it, whispered into it. “Go upstairs.”

  My blood fired with possibilities.

  “Get some sleep,” he murmured. “I’ll stay down here.”

  Understanding dawned. Embarrassment followed. He hadn’t voiced an offer.

  And I’d wanted one.

  Unable to look him in the eye, I nodded. I slipped from his arms and turned away. But Barrett yanked me to him for one last, long kiss.

  As I left the kitchen, I didn’t look back. I had no doubt Barrett would stay downstairs. After all, he’d said he would.

  But I was just as certain I didn’t want him to.

  Chapter 34

  Barrett had been as good as his word. He’d stayed downstairs. Though his joining me upstairs had been very much on my mind. Whether he’d slept, I couldn’t say. For my part, I tossed and turned for the rest of the night.

  As soon as Barrett had driven away in the morning, I shot out of bed and into the bathroom. After a quick shower, I carried my suitcase and the silver case Matty had given me down the stairs. I got as far as the living room when I noticed the photographs.

  Each captured honor’s triumph over death. And seemed so right in this man’s house. The first was of Britain’s monument to its war dead, Wellington’s Arch. In the second, a young boy gazed up at Napoleon’s iconic greatcoat and hat at France’s memorial at Les Invalides. He’d tucked his own hand in his shirt à la the Emperor. But the photo that caught my eye and wouldn’t let it go hung over the fireplace.

  The black-and-white portrait caught a soldier—a sentinel—keeping winter watch at Arlington’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Snow slanted across the frame. And the sentinel, his eyes obscured by regulation shades, stared stoically into the camera lens.

  “That’s our father.”

  Elise leaned against the doorjamb to the kitchen. Her honey-blond hair had been tucked into its customary French braid. She wore fresh khakis and a chunky green sweater and she cupped a mug in her hands. I could smell the bracing scent of English Breakfast from where I stood.

  “Your father was a Tomb Sentinel?”

  Elise nodded. “Our mother took that picture the winter before Adam was born. Adam had that photo printed from the negative of the snapshot a few years after Dad died. I think he was sixteen.”

  He’d lost his father before he’d turned sixteen. Now, that explained a lot. The thought must’ve shown on my face because Elise smiled.

  “I see he told you about the hit-and-run, and why he became an army cop.”

  I nodded my head, tired all of a sudden. My headache had returned. With a vengeance.

  That’s when Elise noticed the luggage at my feet. Her smile faded. “What happened?”

  Between Barrett and me? Nothing. Everything.

  I didn’t give her either of those answers.

  “Elise, you’ve been great. I really appreciate your help. But I’ve got a missing child to find, and—”

  “Does Adam know you’re leaving?”

  “Not yet. Please don’t call him. I’ll tell him when I see him today.”

  “Will you?”

  Elise’s criticism. My own conscience. Each echoed the other.

  I said, “Look, whatever you think is going on between your brother and me isn’t.”

  “Well, it could.”

  I shook my head, grabbed my bags. I had to get out of here. Because Elise was right. I could get tangled up with Barrett. He was a man of strength and kindness who cared for stray dogs, treasured his nephews’ finger-painted artwork, and regretted not having children of his own. That would make him desirable to almost any woman. It made him damn near perfect, if anyone were to ask me.

  Still, I knew the truth. I couldn’t get involved with him. Because it wouldn’t work out for either of us. And when it ended, it wouldn’t just hurt me. It would crush me.

  I was halfway through the kitchen when Elise’s words stopped me cold.

  “Please, Jamie, don’t hurt my brother.”

  Numbly, I followed Elise upstairs. I watched her stash my gear in Barrett’s bedroom. She sat on the foot of his bed and patted the place next to her.

  I sat.

  “Adam,” his sister said, “is as serious about relationships as he is about serving this nation. I can tell he’s serious about you. Give him a chance, Jamie.”

  I sprang to my feet, paced to the window
. I looked down on the drive. From his spot in the shade of a pine, the shaggy dog blinked up at me and I could’ve sworn he smiled.

  “Once upon a time,” I said, “I was married. Until another woman did the one thing I can’t.”

  Elise fretted the edge of Barrett’s comforter with her precise doctor’s fingers. “What was that?”

  “She got pregnant. And according to a half dozen doctors I’ve seen, I never will. I can’t tell you how awful that makes me feel. So you see, I know your brother won’t find what he’s looking for with me. It’s best for both of us if we just admit that now.”

  “No.” Elise joined me at the window. “The best thing is to admit you might be surprised by what Adam’s looking for. But you’ll never know what that is—unless you stay to let him tell you.”

  In the end, I found it hard to argue with Elise’s logic. Frankly, my heart wouldn’t let me. So against my better judgment, I left my cases in Barrett’s bedroom.

  Elise walked me to the porch, and while the scruffy black dog looked on from under one of Barrett’s pines, she pressed a bottle of Tylenol into my palm. She warned me that my head injury was far from healed and invited me to call her about my health. Or anything else. I wasn’t sure I’d actually do that. But I appreciated her offer all the same.

  I got in my rental car and pointed it toward Fort Leeds. I had every intention of driving to military police headquarters, but as I thought about how to connect the dots between little Brooke, Tim, and Brooke’s kidnapper, I ended up making a detour. I found two Franklin Contracting trucks sitting in front of the Padilla household when I pulled up to the curb. The front door was propped open. I rapped on the doorjamb, but no one answered. I walked in, smelling drywall dust and fresh paint. And freshly brewed coffee.

  “Hello,” I called.

  “In the kitchen,” Beth Padilla replied. Her voice was confident and I could hear contentment in it. When she saw me, she squealed, “Jamie! Come in! Sit down. Can I get you a cup of coffee?”

  “No thanks. I just stopped by to see how you’re getting along.”

  “We’re great,” she said. “The boys. Me. Tony.”

  The light in her eyes confirmed this. So did the state of her kitchen. Though it was shortly before nine, fat chocolate-chip cookies cooled on the rack on the counter. Bright crayon drawings adorned the refrigerator.