The Kill Wire

by Nichole Christoff

  Barrett turned a little green around the gills when I said that, but he said, “If you aren’t tempted, you aren’t breathing. The trick is to stick to your guns. And your principles.”

  Well, my principles had driven me to ransack the U.S. Attorney’s files at DocuDefense. And to kill a man in the Strathmeyers’ kitchen. “I’m not sure I’ve got many of those.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Barrett’s face flashed flinty with anger. “Sticking to your principles is in everything you do. You never stop chasing what’s right, Jamie. You’re the only person I know who’ll do whatever it takes for the little guy.”

  But the phrase little guy brought Cody sharply to mind.

  “Barrett, Marc’s son…Max Ribisi snatched him overnight.”

  Barrett blinked at me.

  “I’ve got to get him back.”

  Barrett nodded.

  “I’ve got to go as soon as Marc’s ready.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Barrett said, “if you can use my help.”

  The thump of Marc’s overnight bag hitting the ground caused both me and Barrett to look at him. I wasn’t sure how long Marc had been standing in the snow between the cabin and the car. And I wasn’t sure how much he’d overheard.

  When he advanced on Barrett, I wasn’t sure he wouldn’t start swinging, either. The light in Marc’s obsidian eyes was wild and desperate. Barrett pushed off from leaning against the car. He stood a little straighter. And took half a step to shield me from whatever was about to happen next.

  Marc’s arms hung loose and ready. The holster of his semiautomatic handgun peeked from beneath his jacket. He said, “This is hard to say.”

  “Take your time,” Barrett replied, “then say it.”

  Marc nodded, drew a deep breath. “My boy is everything to me, Barrett. I’d appreciate your help. If your offer to Jamie includes helping me.”

  “It does,” Barrett assured him. “And I will.”

  Marc’s eyes grew suspiciously moist when Barrett told him that. But he covered for it by turning away to throw his bag into our SUV. Barrett’s reaction may’ve surprised him. It certainly moved him. It moved me, too, but it didn’t surprise me in the least, because I already knew that this was the kind of man Adam Barrett was.

  When Marc got himself together, we regrouped. I gave Barrett the rundown on the situation—and this time I named names. And then Marc told us he’d texted Elena.

  “If Ribisi wants her,” he said, “taking Cody is a surefire way to bring her out into the open.”

  “Revenge against Elena?” Barrett asked. “That’s Ribisi’s center of gravity?”

  The question made Marc’s forehead wrinkle. Because center of gravity was a military term. And having been the daughter of a lifelong soldier, I could explain.

  “In army parlance,” I said, “the ‘center of gravity’ is the driving force behind the opposition’s motivation to do what they do. This one reason is so precious, an entire culture—or a subset of that culture—will risk nearly everything for it.”

  “What’s the one reason,” Barrett asked, “pushing Ribisi’s buttons?”

  “Payback,” Marc replied.

  But I disagreed.

  “The U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force all philosophize that the center of gravity can be distilled to a single reason. But the Marines advocate considering a cluster. And I think that’s what we’re dealing with here. Ribisi’s got a cluster of reasons going around in his head.”

  I ticked them off on my fingers.

  “He might want to avenge himself on Elena for enabling his ex-wife, Lucy, to fork over the evidence that convicted him before she disappeared into the Witness Protection Program. But he might want to shaft Lucy for what she did, if she’s still alive. And even if she’s dead, Ribisi might want the daughter he hasn’t seen in half a dozen years. She’d be twelve years old now.”

  “And Elena’s the link between all of them,” Marc muttered.

  “Exactly.”

  “So we split up,” Barrett decided. “Marc goes to San Antonio to track his son. And Jamie and I go after Elena.”

  “Elena hasn’t left a trace,” Marc pointed out.

  “That’s all right,” I replied. “We’ll go after Lucy instead.”

  “Lucy’s dead,” Marc said. He dragged a hand through his hair in frustration.

  “We’ve only got Marshal Douglas’s say-so on that,” I reminded him. “And that’s not enough for me.”

  “Then what’s the plan?” Barrett asked.

  “We say goodbye to North Dakota. But first,” I said, “we pay a parting visit. Marc, are you in?”

  “Babe,” he said grimly. “I’m all in.”

  And as the springtime sun began its climb high in the sky, turning last night’s snow into nothing more than mud, Marc, Barrett, and I roared into Hunter’s Haven.

  Barrett, in the SUV, blocked the marshals’ sedan from behind while Marc and I burst from Barrett’s rented Camry to pound on Douglas’s door.

  “He’s armed,” Marc reminded me.

  “I’ll be careful,” I promised.

  But I was determined, too.

  “Douglas?” I hammered on his door with the side of my fist. “It’s Jamie Sinclair! I’ve got to talk to you!”

  Marshal Ingram rushed from her cabin, shoving an arm into her gray suit coat and hauling it on over her flannel nightgown.

  “What’s going on?”

  Barrett moved to intercept her. “Excuse me, miss. Is this your car?”

  Douglas’s door whipped open. He stood on the threshold in boxer shorts and a dark-blue T-shirt. The hair ringing his head like a tonsure stood up in unruly tufts—and I was certain he gripped his service weapon in the hand hidden behind the door.

  “Something’s happened,” I told Douglas, breezing past him and into his cabin. I crossed to the far side of the room so he’d turn to face me.

  “What is it?” he asked, genuine concern forming a dent right between his eyes.

  He’d left the cabin door open. I’d have to be quick. Ingram wouldn’t let Barrett sidetrack her for long.

  I said, “Special Agent Sandoval received an urgent phone call this morning.”

  “My son—” Marc said, drawing Douglas’s attention in the opposite direction. “Elena Preble’s son—has been kidnapped.”

  And while Douglas wasn’t looking at me, I stepped to his nightstand, lifted his cellphone, and slipped it into my pocket just as I’d done with Kelly McKenna’s assistant’s pass. But as soon as the deed was done, I glanced up. Ingram stood in the doorway, her gaze pinned to me.

  She opened her mouth.

  And dread churned in the pit of my stomach.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “to hear that. Where did this occur, Agent Sandoval?”

  Ingram quit eyeing me to look at him.

  And relief nearly made me weak in the knees.

  “San Antonio, Texas,” Marc replied. “Jamie and I are on our way to the airport now.”

  “But we wanted to let you know,” I told Douglas, striding past him and toward the exit. “Because it looks like Max Ribisi is behind this.”

  “Good call,” Douglas said.

  “Good luck,” Ingram added, making eye contact with me once more.

  I offered her a nod of thanks.

  “Stay in touch,” Douglas directed.

  “I’ve got your number,” I told him.

  Marc and I beat a hasty retreat, and Ingram didn’t stop us. We rendezvoused with Barrett in the empty parking lot of Dustin Toomey’s church. And there, we delved into the secrets that Marshal Tyler Douglas had kept hidden on his phone.

  Chapter 38

  Marc and I climbed into the backseat of our rented SUV. Barrett, behind the wheel, turned to watch as I produced the goods. With a flourish, I proffered Marshal Douglas’s mobile phone on the palm of my hand.

  “How long do you think we’ve got until he comes after us for that thing?” Marc asked.

  “I don�
�t know,” I replied. “But I suspect Ingram will do her best to distract him.”

  “You make it sound like she’s on our side.”

  “She may be.” I grinned at Marc. I couldn’t help it. “She saw me lift it.”

  Why she didn’t rat me out, I had no idea. Except Ingram, I’d noticed, had kept a sharp eye on Douglas during our interactions. She must’ve realized, just as I had, that everything he said didn’t always add up. But she hadn’t been able to put her finger on the what, the how, and the why. Maybe, with his phone in my possession, I could do that for all of us.

  I laid a fingertip to the phone. Its touch screen came alive, ready for Douglas’s four-digit pass code—but I didn’t have it. And though I had a tech guy on my staff at Sinclair and Associates who could generate every potential code combination and feed them from his computer, through my tablet, and into Douglas’s device via one of those USB cords everybody has, the security settings on the marshal’s gadget probably meant it would wipe itself clean after two or three failed attempts.

  Where there’s a will, however, there’s a way.

  I popped the charcoal carbon-fiber cover off the thing and ran my thumbnail along the seam where both halves of the phone’s casing came together.

  “I don’t suppose either one of you gents has a pocketknife on you?”

  I wasn’t keen to handle Marc’s, since the last time I’d asked for it, a good man had died beneath its blade despite my best efforts to keep him alive. And from his downcast expression, I didn’t think Marc wanted to touch the knife again, either. But Barrett had one, and he passed it to me, and I used it to open Douglas’s phone wide before performing the same procedure on mine.

  Both our phones were a riot of circuitry on the inside. And both featured the little black SIM cards that tied each of our devices to our respective cellular service accounts. I snapped Douglas’s card into my phone, and now my mobile displayed his data, including his contacts, his call history, and his text messages.

  Lucy Ribisi’s name didn’t appear in any of Douglas’s lists, and I didn’t expect that it would.

  But the single name of Lacey did.

  Lacey’s name appeared frequently, in fact. Betting that this was Lucy’s new moniker, provided to her by the Federal Witness Protection Program, I opened a string of text messages. And whistled softly when I read their content.

  “No wonder he lied for her,” I murmured.

  In the intervening years since Lucy Ribisi helped to send her husband to prison, she and one of the U.S. marshals responsible for her and her daughter’s safety had fallen in love. The history was all there on Douglas’s phone. With the help of Douglas and the Program, Lucy, or Lacey as she was known today, had moved to Omaha with her daughter, Ruby. Free of the fear that comes with being the abused wife of a criminal scion, Lucy, with her knack for cookery, had worked and saved and opened her own bed-and-breakfast. And Douglas, it seemed, had done more than monitor her situation over time.

  The marshal’s professional visits had turned to personal ones.

  When Maximillian Ribisi, released on parole, dropped off the radar, Douglas may’ve committed a felony by burning down Lucy’s business and faking her death, complete with the appropriate paperwork. With Douglas’s help, his own financial investment, and the business’s insurance money, which had been pretty forthcoming because Douglas, as a U.S. marshal, had filed the report, Lucy and Ruby moved outside of Austin, Texas. And there, in the Hill Country of the Lone Star State, Lucy had held the grand opening of the Bonnie Bluebonnet B&B just last week.

  “Well,” Barrett said, “looks like we’re all flying to Texas.”

  And that’s exactly what we did.

  The three of us snagged the last seats on a flight from Minot, North Dakota, to deep into the heart of Texas. On the ground once more, at the San Antonio International Airport, Barrett and I claimed a rental car. We would race to Lucy’s Bonnie Bluebonnet B&B to learn anything we could about Max Ribisi’s intentions and his all-important center of gravity. Marc, in the meantime, picked up a car to drive to his mother’s home. There, he’d meet with police for an update on Cody’s disappearance.

  I didn’t know how the weight of the situation didn’t grind Marc straight into the ground. As a federal agent, he knew how child abduction cases often turned out. In this instance, we could hold on to the hope that Ribisi would keep Cody healthy in order to use him as some kind of bargaining chip. But there were no guarantees. Ribisi was a man who’d once tried to strangle his own father so he could take over the family business. And he’d made no bones about garroting Cody’s grandfather as well as the boy’s potential stepfather. Such ugly handiwork had to be Ribisi’s very own, and I didn’t like what it said about the man.

  If similar thoughts dogged Marc, he did his best not to let it show. Still, I detected a diamond hardness to him that I’d never seen before. And although I shouldn’t have done it, before Marc got in his rental and drove way, I twined my arms around his neck, right in the middle of the car lot.

  Marc allowed his iron will to melt. But only for a moment. He wrapped his arms around me, buried his face in my hair, and hugged me tight—and then he was gone, driving away without a final word to Barrett or to me.

  I got into the vehicle Barrett and I would take, tried to program the GPS for the shortest route to Lucy’s. The display’s icons kept blurring into one another, which frustrated the hell out of me, and wouldn’t let me get the job done. I tried again and again to enter our destination while Barrett made a quick trip to the rental desk. When he returned, he handed me a box of Kleenex. And that’s when I realized I’d been crying.

  An hour and nineteen minutes later, Barrett eased our Chevy Cruze to the berm of a peaceful country road southwest of Austin and rolled down his window. The cool evening air held a hint of the summer heat to come, but on this night, it was March and spring in Texas, even if we’d just had snow in North Dakota. And in front of the tall Victorian house across the way, the sunny faces of black-eyed Susans, bright spears of Indian paintbrush, and a carpet of iconic bluebonnets bloomed.

  The stark white house behind them dripped with gingerbread trim. A rattan settee, piled with plump blue cushions, waited on the welcoming porch. An oval sign swayed beneath the porch’s overhang. THE BONNIE BLUEBONNET B&B, it read. LACEY VERNON, PROPRIETRESS.

  A flagstone path curved around the side of the house and a middle-aged couple drifted along it, pausing to point out particularly pretty flowers to each other. The front door’s screen screeched open and another couple appeared. Holding hands, they settled into the rattan sofa and snuggled up like newlyweds.

  “She’s got customers,” Barrett said. “Probably a full house, thanks to wildflower season.”

  “That’s all right. They may make her talk faster.”

  Barrett and I got out of the car, strolled across the asphalt. As we passed through the gate of the white picket fence, Barrett reached over to take my hand in his. Barrett’s hand was strong and sure, and the contact was comforting. Strictly speaking, it was also completely unnecessary. Yet he’d done it anyway, and I glanced up at him, surprised.

  “Got to look the part,” Barrett said, but that was just an excuse and his grin gave him away.

  Barrett’s smile had always been like a welcome light in a frosty window on a New England winter’s night. The promise of it had always had the power to warm me inside and out. And seeing him smile at me now, after difficult days and worse nights, was no exception.

  The honeymooners paid us no mind as we crossed the porch and entered the Bonnie Bluebonnet B&B, drawn on by the sweet scent of baking cookies and more. A broad staircase, paneled in quarter-sawn oak, filled the foyer of the old home with the addition of a matching reception desk positioned to route guests away from the swinging door at the rear, which no doubt led to the kitchen. A wisp of a woman with a honey-blond topknot peeped from behind that door as if she expected her dentist, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Grim Reap
er together to descend on her at any moment—and considering Max Ribisi was on the loose, maybe that wasn’t too far from the truth.

  Barrett and I must’ve won her over, however, because she bustled out to greet us. She was adorable in a red apron tied smartly over a pink blouse, both dusty with flour. But it was her small smile that was truly engaging, guarded as it was.

  “Hello,” she said, flipping through a massive leather-bound registry book on the desk’s marble top. “You must be the Rezgurcheks. I’m Lacey Vernon. Welcome to my inn.”

  Lacey Vernon, a.k.a. Lucy Ribisi, offered an ostrich-feather plume pen to Barrett and invited him to sign the registry. But this was more for show than anything else. She riffled through an oak recipe box and withdrew a card with the Rezgurcheks’ particulars—and that card had clearly been created by a laser printer.

  “I wish I could say we’re the Rezgurcheks,” I told her, “but we’re not.”

  “Oh, then I’m terribly sorry. I don’t have any vacancies. I could call you if I have a cancellation.”

  Her blue eyes were just a shade lighter than the bluebonnets outside and as clear as a child’s. But I knew she’d witnessed dreadful things most adults had seen only in horror movies. And that made me regret what I intended to say to her.

  “No rooms at all?” I persisted. “Not even Ruby’s room?”

  The former Lucy Ribisi didn’t toss up her hands and faint dead away when this stranger said her daughter’s name. Instead, her spine turned to steel and her clenched fists hit her hips. “If you don’t leave this instant, I’ll call the police.”

  “Or you could call the U.S. Marshals Service. Maybe one marshal in particular?”

  This pronouncement shook Lucy to her core. She clasped her hands tightly in front of her apron and whispered, “What do you want?”

  “The same things you do,” I assured her, though I doubted she believed me.

  The older couple from the flagstone path breezed into the foyer, interrupting our conversation. With gracious Southern accents, they greeted the three of us before moving through the archway into the B&B’s parlor. A Victrola whirred to life, pumping out strains of George M. Cohan’s “Mary’s a Grand Old Name,” of all things.