“What kind of deal?”
But I suspected I knew.
Mrs. Barrett said, “The sergeant’s experienced, you know, and after Kayley, we feared for you, my dear.”
“In exchange for her help,” Elise admitted, “Adam gave his word he’d return with her to Fort Leeds as soon as you were safe.”
She clutched a chair’s back so hard, I thought it might splinter in her grip. Mrs. Barrett stood in the middle of the kitchen, oblivious to the long wooden spoon in her hand dripping broth onto her clean floor. And that’s when I knew they were keeping something from me.
“Tell me the rest of it,” I said.
“The man who attacked you,” Elise began, “was in the area twenty years ago. He’s still here today. He knew you were driving the special agent’s car. He attacked you and chased you and he would’ve killed you, except a deputy called him to say the car was discovered. He had to stop, Jamie. He had to pretend to search for you.”
“You’re talking about Rittenhaus.”
“You described him yourself in the hospital. Fit, smart, Luke’s size. And you mentioned the jealousy issue. Charlotte had a thing for Adam in high school. Luke has never liked that.”
Well, lately, Charlotte had been hanging on Barrett’s arm every time I saw them in the café—but she wasn’t involved in this mess the way Elise and Barrett thought.
“Charlotte stole a sexy nightgown,” Elise went on, “but Pamela ended up in it and Luke didn’t know. It’s him, Jamie. It has to be. So Adam made a deal with his sergeant. He’s going after Luke. Then he’ll face his punishment at Fort Leeds.”
That man was so right.
And he was so wrong.
“The sheriff’s dirty,” I said. “But not like that. Give me your keys.”
“Jamie—”
“Elise, give me your keys! Let me go after your brother before he makes a mistake that could get him killed.”
Trapped between my will and Barrett’s, indecision shut Elise down.
Until her grandmother spoke up.
“Since you’re going after Adam, my dear, you’d better take this.”
From the front of her apron, she withdrew a Colt 1908 Vest Pocket. The semiautomatic pistol was so small, it could fit in a man’s vest pocket back when fedoras were still in fashion, and at .25 caliber, it wasn’t mighty. But that was all right, because I needed all the help I could get.
I borrowed a faded blue corduroy barn coat from Elise, left her with orders to track down Marc Sandoval. I’d need some serious backup and I didn’t dare count on Rittenhaus’s deputies for that. But instead of speeding to the Sheriff’s Office to confront him, I drove to the Apple Blossom Café. Rittenhaus’s cruiser wasn’t parked out front when I got there. However, if I got my way, it would be, and soon.
Walking carefully to the restaurant’s entrance, I felt like my lungs were full of broken glass. Showing up for this showdown wasn’t the smartest thing I’d ever done. But it needed to happen before anyone else ended up dead.
The café’s swinging door, though, was locked.
I peered into the place as Snake had done. The diner looked as if it were closed for the season. Chairs had been upended on the tables and all the lights were out. Movement flickered in the kitchen, however. So I took a chance and moved to the alley.
The white minivan Calvin had driven to the orchard so Charlotte could haul bushels of apples to her café filled most of the laneway—and tucked behind it was the missing Mercury. The van’s rear doors were open. I approached the vehicle stealthily. At least two dozen identical white Styrofoam coolers were stacked floor to ceiling inside it. And that’s when the last piece of the puzzle clicked into place.
I reached for one of the containers.
“Jamie!”
I turned and looked and saw Charlotte Mead, apron and all, emerging from her kitchen with another cooler in her hands. She stowed her package in the vehicle. But she kept her eyes on me.
She said, “I can’t believe you’re out of the hospital. How’re you feeling?”
“I’ll be better in a little while.”
“Of course you will.”
Charlotte smiled strangely at me, cocked her head to the side.
“Mrs. Barrett must be missing you about now, Jamie. Or maybe Adam is?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Well, you don’t have to stand here in the street, in any case. Come into the kitchen. I’ll fix you a late lunch.”
“Gee,” I said. “Thanks.”
I followed her through the back door of the diner, though in my state, negotiating the step was a neat trick. The place seemed almost homey with the lights on. Bon Jovi’s high notes spilled from the radio, a tall glass of cola sparkled on the counter, and two more Styrofoam coolers sat opposite the stainless steel door of the café’s walk-in freezer.
“What’ll you have?” Charlotte asked. “Some chicken soup would do you good.”
“Oh, I don’t want to impose. You’re closed today.”
“Well, we were up all night looking for you.”
She smiled again, waved me to a metal stool alongside the chopping block. I moved toward it, but kept to my feet. The Styrofoam coolers were within easy reach.
Charlotte said, “To top it off, my freezer’s on the fritz.”
“I’m sorry. And you just got a large shipment of product, too, didn’t you?”
Charlotte slid me a sideways look. She dug in a drawer for her cigarettes. She put one between her lips and fired it up without a thought for the anti-smoking ordinance this time.
After she’d had a long, calming drag, I said, “I’ve got some good news about Eric. His toxicology report came back clean.”
“Oh? That’s great.”
“It is. But is that a surprise to you?”
Charlotte crossed her arms against her chest. “I’m not sure I follow.”
“Of course you do.”
Beside the swinging door to the dining room, an actual telephone clung to the wall. I lifted the handset from the base, heard the welcome buzz of a dial tone. I dialed 911 and, while Charlotte watched, I let the handset dangle on its long spiral cord and returned to my spot beside the coolers.
“You told me Eric was on drugs, but that was news to Rittenhaus. And Eric’s postmortem tox screen proves he wasn’t. You lied about him, Charlotte. And I know why.”
She shook her head and her red curls went crazy.
I said, “You lied to protect yourself. Not that lying kept that creep Snake Hennessey away.”
“I don’t know where you’re going with this, but I think you must’ve hit your head when you fell into that reservoir.”
Charlotte stubbed out her cigarette in a saucer, immediately lit another.
I ignored her remark, leaned a sore hip against the counter, and offered a comment of my own. “You know, when I walked into the diner the other day, I thought the confrontation between you two looked like a shakedown. That’s because it was. Snake was trying to shake you down for a guy named Llewellyn. What did he want? A cut of your cash? Or the opportunity to have his shipping fleet service your operation instead of the supplier you’d been relying on?”
“Jamie, really—”
“You know that man you saw me kissing in the motel parking lot?”
The change of topic threw her and she actually looked green around the gills.
“He’s a DEA agent, Charlotte. He’s here because some trafficker’s found a new way—a discreet way—to move heroin into the larger cities by moving it through Fallowfield. He thought it was Llewellyn, but it isn’t. It’s you.”
As fast as my sore body would allow, I snatched the lid off the nearest Styrofoam cooler. White Saran-Wrapped bricks of drugs that had traveled all the way from the poppy fields of Afghanistan were stacked to the rim. Like she could make me forget them, though, Charlotte ripped the lid from my hand.
She crammed it onto the carrier. “Vance and Eric met that Lou guy in the army, all
right? Lou was Special Forces or something. He still has contacts overseas. Anyway, Eric needed the cash to keep his mom, so Lou convinced him to start selling stuff here in town.”
“But you were selling here in town,” I said. “Just a little. Not a lot. Because the big money’s in supplying the big cities all around. That’s how Llewellyn noticed you. Your sideline meant he couldn’t get a foothold here, so he snooped and found out about the overnight shipments of heroin coming and going on your supply trucks.”
Her smile turned sharp.
“I know you killed Eric to make Llewellyn think twice, Charlotte. How did you get him into that bathroom? Did you promise that sad, lonely man sex in the shower? Don’t tell me. The main thing is you stood over your old friend Eric in that pathetic motel room and you blasted him with his own shotgun—twice. And your boyfriend, the sheriff, looked the other way because you’d started out small. Some possession. Some intent to distribute. Then the next thing Rittenhaus knew, he was sleeping with a drug baroness and you convinced him you could keep everything neat and tidy here in town, in your very own kill box.”
“Eric got what he deserved,” Charlotte said quietly, provoked to something besides denial at last. “You choose to run with the big dogs and you might get bit.”
“You can tell that to the deputies and Special Agent Sandoval. And I’m sure Rittenhaus will be sorry to hear you say it. He’ll be here any minute, I expect. In a town this small, I bet the sheriff’s instantly notified when a nine-one-one call comes in from his girlfriend’s business.”
But the phone, which I’d intentionally left off the hook, rang with the trill of an old-fashioned bell.
I whirled around to look at it and there was Calvin, his index finger on the tongue that closed the connection. Luke Rittenhaus, out of uniform in jeans and a sweatshirt, was at his shoulder. Cal gathered up the handset, lifted his finger, and answered the incoming call.
“Hi, Allison….No, Char must’ve accidentally dialed while she was wiping up in here….Sorry….No, no need to bother Luke….Hey, thanks….Yeah, you too.”
He hung up and grinned at me.
Chapter 37
“Well, look at you,” I said to Cal. “So well rested after being out all night.”
He shrugged, ran a hand through the wave in his auburn hair. There’d be no mistaking him for a local yokel in his moss tweed sports coat. And Calvin Mead, I’d come to realize, was a man who certainly wanted it that way.
He’d adorned his breast pocket with his superiority complex and his deep red, silky pocket square. And maybe that dashing bit of haberdashery was what had ultimately put it together for me. But I knew one thing more. After I’d configured Charlotte’s kill box—and figured Rittenhaus had to know about it—I realized Cal had been the one tooling around town in Eric’s car, taking care of business for his sister. I’d also come to the conclusion that Rittenhaus had realized who’d raped Pamela Wentz and Kayley Miller when I described my experience to him in the emergency room. That’s why he’d been in an all-fired hurry to leave the hospital. Though whether he’d wanted to make an arrest or have a chat with the perpetrator, I didn’t know until I found him with Cal here.
“Nice hanky,” I told Calvin. “You know, your sister stole a nightgown just like that once.”
He laughed like he didn’t believe me.
But then Charlotte said, “I told you you were an idiot to keep it. Pamela pinched it from me, but I’d shoplifted it. You could’ve got both of us in trouble.”
Cal’s hand drifted to the cloth. He stroked it between his long, strong fingers. There was something sensual in the act. Something disgusting. Revulsion swept over me like rushing floodwater.
“Did you kill Pamela, too?” Rittenhaus asked him.
It was the first thing he’d said since he’d darkened the doorway from the dining room.
“I went to see her again,” Cal said. “I climbed the downspout to her bedroom window. She started screaming when she saw me in her room. Her parents had driven into town, but Eric was asleep on the sofa downstairs. I couldn’t let her wake him.”
“So you strangled her,” I said, “to silence her.”
Cal closed his eyes and his fingers quickened on the souvenir he’d hacked from the clothing he’d stripped from her.
“All Pam could talk about was Adam. All she could think about was Adam.” He opened his eyes and glared at me. “You’re just as bad.”
“That’s because Adam Barrett’s a better man than you are.”
Calvin closed the distance between us in a blink. And despite my injuries, I braced myself for impact. But Charlotte got between us, elbowed him out of the way.
“Stop it!” she screamed. “I don’t have time to clean up after you today! Besides, no one would believe Jamie wanted to hang herself.”
And that’s how Pamela had come to swing by her neck from a rafter that had seemed impossibly high, and above farm equipment that made her death impossibly awkward. Together, the Mead siblings had staged her suicide, an event that had haunted Barrett for over twenty years.
“Don’t worry, Char.” Cal may’ve been speaking to her, but he smoothed stray wisps of my hair from my forehead and patted my head like a dog. “I’ll clean up after myself. I promise.”
He crossed to the phone, dialed a number. “Hey, Adam? It’s Cal Mead.”
I drew breath to yell.
And Charlotte clamped her palms to my face.
I shot the heel of my hand into her nose. She squealed with the impact. And came back with a roundhouse kick to my ribs.
Instantly doubled over on the floor, I tried to suck air into my lungs. Pain, as sharp as cactus needles, danced up and down my side. And all I could do was listen to Cal lie to the man I loved.
“Jamie’s here at the diner and she’s not looking too good….I don’t know. She wanted to talk to Charlotte….Okay, see you soon.”
When he hung up, I managed to look up and say, “Barrett’s too smart for that.”
“What are you going to do to him, anyway?” Charlotte asked, using the hem of her apron to dab at the blood that was now trickling from her nose.
Cal snorted. “Kill him, of course. After he watches Jamie suffer.”
“No.” Rittenhaus’s firm jaw was set. “Charlotte, I love you, but this has gone too far.”
He reached for the phone this time, and Cal whipped a handgun from beneath his coat. It was the .38 Special from under the cash register. He shoved the muzzle into the sheriff’s gut and fired.
Rittenhaus collapsed. His face went waxy before my eyes. I crawled toward him, thinking I could staunch the flow of blood oozing from his abdomen, but Calvin seized me by the arm.
He hauled me to my feet.
“Get in the dining room,” he snarled.
“You idiot,” his sister seethed. “How am I going to take care of this for you?”
She grabbed some bar towels as she zipped across the room. Dropping to her knees, she pressed the towels to Rittenhaus’s middle and began to purr in his ear. Cal nudged me with the gun, so I obeyed his command and stumbled out of the kitchen. But I didn’t take my eyes from Rittenhaus until the jamb got in my way. And all the while, I prayed he’d live, but it didn’t look like he could.
As I crossed the threshold, eye-watering fumes hit me in the face. Trails of greasy gasoline snaked along the lunch counter. It ran in rivulets on the linoleum. Red canisters of the stuff had been heaped in the booth where the lunching mommies usually met and tucked under tables left and right. This must’ve been Cal’s work. And having seen him shoot Rittenhaus, it wasn’t difficult for her to imagine him dousing Dawkins with the stuff—or setting him on fire.
I said, “Does Charlotte know you’re planning a weenie roast?”
“She’ll thank me for it later.”
I doubted it, but I didn’t bother to say so.
Cal kept me covered with the gun as he unlocked the diner’s door. With the overhead lights off, the café was as dark a
s it could be during daylight hours, and with the chairs on the tables, the coffeemakers unplugged, and even the wall clock at a standstill, it looked like the place wouldn’t reopen until spring. Barrett, with his soldier’s instincts and law enforcement training, would notice the abnormalities and smell a setup long before he noticed the scent of the gasoline—unless compassion pushed him to worry more for me than he did for himself.
“Move to that booth, Jamie. Sit down.”
The booth Cal had chosen was in the farthest corner. I sat like he’d said, wincing with the pain of it, and he crowded in beside me, gun in his grip. Anxiety hummed in my extremities and the fuel fumes made me dizzy.
When he had me boxed against the wall, he stroked my hair and said, “You’re a lovely woman. Do you know that?”
“It’s been mentioned once or twice.” But I was more than looks that passed for pretty in our popular culture. And the moment I got the chance, Calvin Mead was going to find that out.
Cal laid the .38 on the table in front of me. He kept a hand over the thing. And a finger within the trigger guard.
With his other hand, he caressed my cheek. His touch made my skin crawl. Especially when his mitt slipped to the nape of my neck and drew slow zigzags there.
“Last night,” he reminded me, steaming up my ear, “you never answered me. What’s Adam got that I don’t have?”
Scruples? Values? Morals?
“Nothing,” I said.
“That,” Cal said, turning so angry his teeth scraped the flesh from the shell of my ear, “can’t be true.”
But it was.
In essence.
“What you feel, Cal, isn’t about him. It’s about you.”
Calvin vibrated with fury. But before he could let it loose, we both saw Barrett walking past the café’s wide window. And when he swung through the diner’s door, Cal was ready for him.
“Adam, thanks for joining us. Come over here and have a seat.”
Barrett did as he was instructed. He sat on the opposite bench. He didn’t look at me. Not directly. And all I could see was darkness in the chocolate of his eyes.
“Keep your hands on the table,” Cal said.
The Kill Box Page 26
