The Kill Chain

by Nichole Christoff

  A green mist nibbled away at the edges of my vision.

  Matty…

  Maybe I only called out to him in my mind.

  I grabbed for my assailant’s wrists, but my fingers stopped responding. Still, I struggled. My feet felt so far away. My bones had turned to oil and my muscles to stinging salt water. I panicked as my lungs hitched—as they began to seize.

  You’re killing her!

  The words sounded like Fraley’s, but I couldn’t be sure they were. The voice reached me as if I were in the bottom of a barrel. And the last thing I knew, the inside of that barrel turned black.

  Chapter 11

  I was dead to the world until the droning of a fat bumblebee roused me.

  “Breaking news out of Fairfax at this hour,” the bee said, his voice whining like a jet engine. “Noted physicist and robotics engineer Robert Fraley has been found dead in his home on Whispering Way…”

  I turned my head on vertebrae that grated against one another like sandstone plinths and squinted up at the TV, too bright for my sensitive eyes. I had one hell of headache. And a sour taste in my mouth.

  “Police say Fraley’s death was the result of a dispute—and a home invasion gone wrong…”

  I forced myself to concentrate on the grainy images that floated across the flat screen. A 1960s-era ranch house, with a detached garage that had been converted into some kind of rental residence, swam into focus. The place looked familiar, but then again, it didn’t. For one thing, on TV, the house and garage were bathed in plenty of broad daylight. And I was pretty sure that, wherever I was, it was currently nighttime.

  “Neighbors noticed a disturbance earlier in the evening when this woman, identified as Jamie Sinclair, daughter of potential presidential candidate and New Jersey senator James Sinclair, accosted Fraley in his driveway…”

  I’d done no such thing. But my own face flashed before my eyes. The photograph on the television was a candid shot and probably a recent one, snapped in front of my office building with a long-distance lens.

  “According to the nine-one-one call, Sinclair accompanied Fraley into his home. There, the confrontation turned violent.”

  In a whoosh, the facts came back to me. Fraley at the door. A laptop screen’s gleam. Two beers on the coffee table. Matty on the move to the back of the house—and a man with a dank dish towel rushing me from the kitchen.

  Sick with sudden fear, I planted a hand on the laminate floor, shoved myself upright. My palm slid through blood, thick and sticky. It didn’t belong to me.

  The room over-rotated, tilted at a 45-degree angle. And for an endless second, I thought I might throw up. If I’d had to guess, I’d have blamed this reaction on the cloth Fraley’s buddy had shoved in my face—a cloth soused with something akin to chloroform.

  I swallowed hard to ease my nausea. Then, I straightened my glasses and clambered to my feet. Matty was nowhere to be seen, but the remnants of the coffee table lay around me like a trunk-load of chopsticks—and just beyond, a dead man lay in the prone position between the sofa and the chair.

  “Police discovered the body of Robert Fraley only moments ago…”

  The soles of his sneakers were hardly worn. His jeans were so blue, they were almost black. Except Fraley had worn brown corduroys and he’d kept his cellphone crammed in his pocket.

  “Fraley had been struck repeatedly on the head…”

  Carefully, I stepped past the recliner’s outstretched arm for a better look. Indeed, the back of the dead man’s head was nothing more than a broken bowl. With a trembling hand, I tried to pinpoint a pulse in his neck. I knew I wouldn’t find one. And I didn’t.

  More blood, sticky and sweet, soaked the shoulders of the man’s sweatshirt. Blood saturated the cheap area rug beneath him. And blood had splattered the buff-colored fabric of the Swedish-style sofa where the laptop had rested.

  The computer was gone now.

  Even more blood tracked away across the laminate floor. It slicked both of my hands, too. I wiped them on the rug, snatched a paper napkin from the mangled remains of the pizza lying on the floor, and used it to work the man’s wallet from his hip pocket—because I was sure about one thing.

  This guy wasn’t Fraley.

  And I needed to know his identity.

  “Investigators are treating this case as a homicide, and they have a warning for you, tonight…”

  I flipped the wallet open. The face of the man who’d gassed me glared from a photo on a green ID card. His name was Dylan Pruitt. And he was a soldier. An E-4, to be exact. That’s a specialist or a corporal. His ID card said so. And this ID card was the kind that only active-duty military personnel carry.

  Immediately, I felt sick all over again.

  But the newscaster I’d mistaken for a bumblebee kept right on talking.

  “The suspect, Jamie Sinclair, is considered armed and dangerous. If you see her, do not approach her. Call nine-one-one or Crimestoppers at—”

  I didn’t wait to hear the rest of the story.

  “Matty?” I called. “Matty!”

  I got no answer.

  “Matty!”

  I stumbled into the darkened hall, desperate to find my friend. I had to know he was all right. With at least one dead man in the house, I had to know Matty was alive.

  “Matty, where are you?”

  A breeze wafted down the corridor from an open door or maybe a window. It carried a low moan with it. With tripping steps, I found Matty in a heap on the floor. I dropped to my knees beside him. He sat up and held his head in his hands. In the half-light, I could just make out a dark gash above his rapidly swelling right eye and the matted mess more bleeding injuries had made of the crown of his head.

  “Oh, Matty, what happened to you?”

  “Heard a crash while I was sweepin’ the bedroom,” he mumbled. “Figured you was in trouble. I ran down the hall, but someone clocked me from behind. He musta been in the hall closet or else he came in through a window. Anyways, he kept on clockin’ me.”

  Matty collapsed against me, his entire frame shaking.

  “I let you down, girlie girl.”

  “Nonsense. But we need to get you to a hospital, pronto.”

  Matty didn’t argue—and that scared the hell out of me.

  But then I heard the sirens.

  “Police,” I told him, pushing away my own panic. “We’ve got to get going.”

  Matty tried to nod, but getting to his feet and walking took up every ounce of his concentration. He leaned on me heavily, all the way to the living room. When he caught sight of the dead man lying in a pool of his own blood, however, Matty stopped in his tracks.

  “You kill ’im, girlie girl?”

  “No.”

  Now Matty did nod. “Sounds like someone’s settin’ you up for it.”

  In the near distance, the sirens grew louder. The police would be in Fraley’s driveway in a matter of moments. And Matty and I would be trapped in Fraley’s house.

  “Leave me,” Matty mumbled.

  “Like hell!”

  Wrapping an arm around his waist, I drew Matty with me toward the door. I’d locked it before Fraley and I had had our little chat; I was absolutely certain of it. But it wasn’t locked now.

  Outside, the spring night had turned cold and clear. The stars shone like salt against the wound of the moon. The wail of the nearing patrol cars cut through me like a scythe.

  Across the street, at the far curb, Matty’s beaten-up Bronco still waited patiently. I wanted to weep with relief. But Fraley’s driveway was so long and Matty was so weak—and that made his Bronco so far away.

  The cops would reach us before we reached it.

  Yet the overgrown bushes that separated Fraley’s drive from the neighbor’s were just a few feet from where we stood.

&n
bsp; “New plan,” I told Matty, lugging most of his body weight as I nudged him toward the hedge. “You’re going walkabout.”

  Up close in the moonlight, the tangle of young trees and wild hedge were a wall of new spring leaves.

  “Jamie—”

  “You can do this,” I insisted, digging into his jeans pocket and seizing his keys. “It’s six feet deep at the most. That’s half a dozen steps. Use the branches to support you, take six steps, and I’ll see you on the far side.”

  Matty didn’t have the strength to disagree with me. He plunged a trembling hand into the greenery. And I took off at a sprint for his truck.

  Two doors down, a dog barked, warning me to stay far away. Happy to comply, I threw myself into the Bronco. I crammed the key into the ignition and fired up the engine.

  The sound of approaching police sirens threatened to split my skull. In the rearview mirror, I saw their red-and-blue lights dancing. They rounded the bend only a few blocks away. One driveway down, a resident who must’ve seen the news wandered from his house in his pajama bottoms and a cardigan. He craned his neck and stared up the street.

  I slammed the Bronco into reverse, ran roughshod into Fraley’s neighbor’s drive. Matty’s face peered from the edge of the hedge. I hopped from his truck, bundled him into the backseat.

  Four police units careened to a halt in front of Fraley’s. I counted to ten slowly, let the cops jump from their cruisers and move cautiously toward the converted garage. And when they advanced on the rental property, when I couldn’t see them through the overgrowth, I slipped the Bronco into gear, turned away from the crime scene, and drove without headlights into the night.

  Chapter 12

  For the second time in as many nights, I figured a snootful of cognac wouldn’t kill me. But considering all that had gone wrong that evening, I was fairly sure one drink wouldn’t do much to fix my situation, either. Still, in a corner of another hotel bar that was too slick for its own good, I nursed a snifter of the stuff and kept my eyes glued to the rehash of the Washington Nationals baseball game being broadcast on the flat-screen TV above the bartender’s head.

  With this being a Friday night, most of the hotel’s guests were out-of-towners who’d avoided the bar so far, probably preferring the nightclubs of Adams Morgan, National Harbor, and the District’s other hotspots. And I was completely fine with that. No one claimed to have met me at one of my father’s local fundraisers, no one wanted to watch the local news, and frankly, no was interested in what this local was up to. I was invisible. And I liked it that way.

  When I finished my drink, I left a few bills on the sparkly composite bar top, wandered out through a lobby full of chrome and ridiculous mirror-flecked lacquer, and walked down the curling staircase discreetly tucked alongside the elevators. My knees had quit knocking, thanks to the Hennessy, and my headache had lifted. But nothing had been able to get rid of the foul taste balancing on the back of my tongue. Whatever that creep with the cloth had hit me with, it was strong. And not for the first time, I wondered if I should’ve checked myself into the emergency room alongside Matty.

  On the building’s lower level, the hotel’s attempt at shiny, twenty-first-century relevance got left behind. Here, the original décor remained. The Eisenhower Era cream-and-moss-green terrazzo floor ran toward the parking garage. Brushed-aluminum-and-bubble-glass pendant lights that could’ve inspired Buick’s 1956 Centurion concept car lit the way. And to my right, clinging to a concave wall paved with miniature mosaic tiles, seven 1980s Bell Atlantic pay phones waited for callers who never came to use them anymore.

  Why the local Baby Bell hadn’t ripped out these relics twenty years ago, I had no idea. After all, every Tom, Dick, and Harry walked around with much better communications technology in their very own pockets these days. But I was grateful that these artifacts existed, especially since my own cellphone was history.

  Still sick and shaky, I’d called Laura as soon as I’d arrived at the hotel and pretended to be a political pollster—just in case the authorities had tapped her phone in order to track me down. Rightly or wrongly, I was a wanted woman. And the news broadcast that had prematurely announced Fraley’s murder convinced me that bigger forces than the judicial system might be at work here. Because somebody had provided that cock-and-bull story about my accosting Fraley in his driveway. Somebody had supplied footage of Fraley’s humble home before I’d ever arrived there. And somebody had paraphrased what the police had had to say about the crime scene before they’d even shown up to see it. That the press had run with the story told me that this somebody had layered all kinds of checks and balances into their tale. In short, I must be good and truly framed from a variety of angles—and the notion frightened me.

  But I didn’t let it stop me.

  In the guise of that pollster, I’d phrased fake questions about Fairfax Flatlands Hospital’s Level One Trauma Center, where I’d dropped Matty and his truck. Then I’d sketched a quick inquiry about injured colleagues. Laura got the message.

  She’d look out for Matty.

  In the meantime, I’d have to look out for myself.

  Still, I didn’t call Daniel. As my lawyer, he’d only advise me to turn myself in. I didn’t call my father, either. Some daughters might’ve. But given the circumstances, I knew he’d be extremely displeased to hear from me.

  The person I truly wanted to call, however, was Barrett. I wanted to hear his sage advice—and his soothing voice. I wanted him to understand I hadn’t murdered some young soldier, let alone a robotics expert.

  Most of all, I didn’t want him to think less of me.

  But calling Barrett was a risky business. Because he was a law enforcement officer. And though a killing in Fairfax, Virginia, was far from his jurisdiction as a military cop, he was duty-bound to report any knowledge about criminal activity to the proper authorities. He wouldn’t want to turn me in, but he’d have to. And in good conscience, I couldn’t put him in that position.

  Instead, I grabbed at straws. I selected the pay phone at the far end of the hall, picked up its heavy black receiver, dropped a chunk of change in its coin slot with a scrape and a clang, and punched in 411. The throaty buzz of the dial tone gave way to a mechanical monotone that answered my request for information—and, despite the late hour, connected me with my party.

  “This is Stellar Unlimited, where the sky is no longer the limit,” the silky-smooth voice of some far-off female said. “How may I direct your call?”

  “Dr. Madeline Donahue, please.”

  “We have no one here by that name.”

  But that was bunk. I’d seen her photo on their website’s PR page myself. Unless that had been a fabrication, too, just like the news broadcast that proclaimed my guilt.

  “In that case,” I said, “I’d like to speak with your public relations director.”

  “Who may I say is calling?”

  “Vivian Sternwood.” My preferred alias slid smoothly off my tongue.

  “One moment, please.”

  She put me on hold.

  The strains of Philip Glass’s Violin Concerto No. 1 pulsed down the line while I waited for her to connect me.

  “No one answers,” the receptionist said, interrupting the bouncing beat. “Would you care to leave a voicemail?”

  “No, thank you,” I replied.

  And I hung up.

  At a loss for what to do next, I stood staring at the pretty pattern the mosaic tiles made, all glossy green and reminding me of spring. I had no one else to call and nowhere to go where the police wouldn’t find me. Worst of all, I was no closer to knowing why Madeline Donahue had walked into my office in the first place—or why I’d ended up unconscious mere feet from a soldier who’d ended up dead.

  Nathan Rappaport’s number, with its accompanying note asserting that Madeline Donahue wasn’t who she’d claimed
to be, still burned a hole in my jacket pocket. Why he’d laid that info on me I had no idea, and I didn’t know how Rappaport would react if I called him about it. Did he even have any facts to back up his theory? Would he tell me the truth if he did? Or would he put me on hold and rat me out to the police?

  “There’s only one way to find out.”

  Shoving the remainder of my change into the pay phone, I punched *67 before dialing the digits Rappaport had jotted on the Patriot’s Cup cocktail napkin. The procedure had come in decades ago with touch-tone dialing and Caller ID, and to the delight of many of my high school classmates, it kept your phone number confidential. This, naturally, led to a rise in prank calls among my peer group.

  In this day and age, it still worked, but only when calling out from a landline.

  And it still came in handy when I needed to conceal my name or number for professional reasons.

  “Rappaport,” the man said, answering his phone on the first ring.

  Behind him, I heard muted office noises. People murmured. A laser printer whirred.

  I said, “You can’t work in communications. You answer your own phone on a Friday night.”

  Rappaport chuckled. “Maybe I was just hoping you’d call.”

  “Ah, apparently you don’t know who this is.”

  “Not true, Miss Jamie Sinclair.”

  Maybe my infamy hadn’t hit all the media outlets yet, but I pictured Rappaport’s office mates sitting up like scent hounds when he mentioned my name.

  “So,” he said. “What would you like to talk about?”

  “Let’s talk about the note you slipped me last night.”

  “We could do that. Or we could talk about Madeline Donahue’s true identity.”

  My mouth went dry. I hadn’t expected him to cut to the chase like that. But now, here we were.

  “What’s her real name?” I demanded.

  “That I don’t know. But,” Rappaport added, “if she told you she worked for a certain space interest, she wasn’t kidding.”