I rolled to a stop.
“Matty, the gate guards are on alert. They’re likely to search your truck.”
“And you’d rather not give away our tactical advantage, so play it cool. I get it. I saw the news, by the way. They got an Amber Alert on for the kid, you know.”
“Good.”
If I were a shooter, if I wanted to tag Tim Thorp, if I knew the Colonel drove this road every morning and every night, this is where I would wait for him: in the deep shade of these barren pines at this curve in the road.
“Jamie?” Matty cleared his throat. “This Brooke Thorp that’s missing? She any relation to someone else we know?”
“Yes.”
“You got a heart of gold, girlie girl.”
Not really, I thought. Oh, I had a heart, all right. And it had been broken. By Tim, sure. But a bigger reason behind our breakup had shattered it.
Matty said, “So what am I doin’ when I get up there?”
“You’re going to tail that lying ex-husband of mine. And you’re going to document everywhere he goes and everyone he sees until we can set up electronic surveillance. I want only you on this with me, so we’ll need electronic help to monitor twenty-four/seven.”
“We’re not gonna have to stay in one of those foofey bed-and-breakfast places, are we?”
I laughed for the first time all day. “Are you telling me a tough guy like you can’t handle lace curtains and lavender potpourri?”
Matty sighed loudly.
I sobered. “Matty, be careful. No one can know we’re doing this. It’s too important.”
“Roger that,” he said, serious again, and he hung up.
On my end, I checked the Beretta 9000S Barrett had returned to me. I looked over the rounds in the clip, snapped it into place, and holstered the weapon under my jacket. Grabbing my three-pound Maglite from the pocket behind the passenger seat, I got out of the car.
Night was fast approaching, but before it got here, I’d find myself a sniper stand and prove Tim a liar.
Or if I got really lucky, I’d find spent shell casings or other evidence that would lead me to a shooter, kidnapper, and Tim’s daughter.
Leaving my Jag behind, I walked through the crossroad in the middle of nowhere, my boots crunching sharply on the sandy soil. No cars came along to ask if I’d had engine trouble. And I’d have bet none had come by as Tim drove this road with Brooke.
Birds twittered nervously as I neared the black backdrop of trees. They grew silent when my shadow met that of the pines. The breeze that had blown through Foley’s front yard rippled through the woods. The Barrens’ shade made its chill even more sinister somehow. I shivered in spite of my leather jacket but didn’t zip it up. Instead, I swept the tail of it aside in case I had to reach my weapon.
In the ditch at my feet, powdered soil spoke of little rain in recent days—and no foot traffic. My eyes scanned the fringe of pine trees beyond, but I couldn’t see very far. Under their heavy canopy, darkness reigned.
I leapt the ditch, landing where grass had yet to grow green this spring. Rusty pine needles blurred the border between the roadside man had made and the forest he hadn’t been able to tame. They formed a carpet under my feet and deadened my footfalls. Branches reached past me from the closest trees, amber sap glistening at their tips. I ducked under one and, raising my flashlight high, walked into the woods.
Here, the scent of pine was fresh and sharp. Daylight had gone. In the dusk that preceded darkness, my light picked out stands of trees, growing in twos and threes. Crouching low, a shooter could hide within any one of them and still have a clear shot at the road. He’d never be seen.
And neither would anyone else.
The thought struck home as a man grabbed me from behind. A powerful arm banded my chest. A hand clamped over my mouth. His other hand covered mine on the grip of the Maglite. He twisted out and down, wrenching the light from my grasp.
Instinctively, my hand came down on the butt of my gun. To protect it. To control it.
To prevent him from using it against me.
But I couldn’t draw. His fingers wrapped around my wrist, holding my hand in place on the grip of my gun. So I went for his toes, slamming the heel of my foot onto his boot.
At the same time, a scream scrabbled up my throat, only it couldn’t find its way to the night. I clutched at the hand on my mouth. Seizing my attacker’s index finger, I wrenched it backward. He’d have to release me or his tendons would tear. Instead, his arms tightened around me.
Mouth pressed to my ear, he breathed, “We’re not alone out here.”
Barrett. My body knew it before my mind did. With effort, I stopped struggling.
His grip eased, but he didn’t let me go.
“I trailed someone through the woods,” he whispered. “Your flashlight spooked him.”
His words were warm in my ear and sparked all kinds of inappropriate feelings.
Still, I managed to nod to indicate I understood.
Slowly, Barrett released me. His fingertips, a light touch now, seemed to linger on my wrist and on my cheek. But maybe I was imagining things.
Barrett turned to scoop up my Maglite. Its beam bounced over the mat of pine needles, finding its way to the base of a tree. And that’s when Barrett’s suspect opened fire on us.
I threw myself to the ground. Barrett landed beside me. He’d killed the light. And his nine-millimeter had found its way to his hand. Mine, I realized, had done the same.
When Barrett reached for his radio, bullets slammed into the ground at his shoulder.
More whizzed over our heads.
Pop-pop.
Pop-pop.
The words semiautomatic handgun sailed through my head. That meant our shooter had at least fourteen rounds to send our way. How many had he already spent?
As I rose on all fours and scuttled behind the nearest tree, he fired again. But this time, the muzzle flash gave his position away. I fired into the darkness.
And heard nothing in return.
Barrett dropped behind me, shielding me with his body and crowding me close against the protection of the tree.
“The cavalry’s coming,” he assured me.
I nodded. I hoped they reached us soon. Because my hands were shaking with adrenaline and low blood sugar. Nervous sweat had made the stock of my Beretta slippery. But worst of all, the shooter could circle around behind us. In the dark, Barrett and I wouldn’t see him coming. I didn’t mention this. But from the way Barrett crouched with his shoulder to mine, his weapon at the ready, I’d have sworn he was thinking the exact same thing.
Chapter 9
The cavalry, in the form of four military police cars and three K-9 units, arrived within minutes.
But to me, crouched with Barrett behind a tree in the dark, waiting for an unknown assailant to finish us off, it seemed like time enough for a dozen ice ages to come and go.
The FBI showed up immediately after the MPs. And then the pissing match started. Kev, with a contingent of agents in tow, emerged from his fleet sedan shouting orders. Barrett wasn’t shy about informing him his cops had the situation under control, thank you very much.
They found no shell casings. And no shooter. Only a disturbance in the needles at the base of a pine indicated anyone had ever been there. Some of the overturned needles were faded, suggesting to me that this same anyone had waited for Tim to drive by recently. But I still couldn’t prove it.
As the night wore on, Kev’s reasoning got louder. Barrett’s voice grew harder. Finally, the two of them took their conversation to Barrett’s office in the Military Police building.
Unfortunately, both men agreed on one thing: I had to go with them. They parked me on a straight-backed guest chair in Barrett’s office. I had a front-row seat as the two of them battled it out.
“This kidnapping is my case,” Kev said for the tenth time, “and everything that goes with it. Like this shooting.”
“This is a military insta
llation,” Barrett insisted. “Weapons are fired here all the time—”
“Not at military cops and private investigators.”
“—and none of those exercises or accidents have had anything to do with the Thorp abduction.”
Well, I knew this incident did.
That’s the only way it made sense.
Tim had to be into something. Something big enough to involve ambush. And something dirty enough to provoke kidnapping. I tried to run through the possibilities in my mind, but fatigue kept getting the better of me. It had been nearly twenty-four hours since I’d arrived at Newswatch Nine to stop Charles Chapman Brown. And it had been eighteen hours since I’d received Tim’s panicked call. I was dead on my feet, desperate to find the diabetic Brooke, and too worried about whether she’d eaten to referee these two. I settled into my chair, stretched my legs before me, and closed my eyes—just for a second—to block out Kev’s yammering and to work out why someone had shot at Tim.
“Strawberry or s’more?” Barrett said.
I blinked awake, suddenly aware that I’d done more than think. I’d fallen asleep, hard and fast. Barrett and I were alone in his office. The door behind him was closed. Kev was nowhere to be seen.
“Pardon?”
“Strawberry? Or s’more?” He dumped an armful of packaged snacks onto his desktop. “Pop-Tarts.”
From a bottom drawer, he extracted a stack of paper napkins and two stoneware mugs. He set one of the mugs in front of me. It bore the logo of a college in upstate New York: Rochester Institute of Technology.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Feeding you.” He handed me one of the Mylar-wrapped pastries, reached for the carafe in the coffeemaker perched atop the credenza behind his desk. “You get decaf.”
As he topped up my mug, I mumbled my thanks.
With his own Pop-Tart in hand, Barrett dropped into his desk chair and propped his booted feet beside his computer monitor. His hot, brown eyes watched me as I peeled open my Pop-Tart. He’d given me the s’more—all chocolate, all marshmallow, pure heaven.
“Do you want to tell me what you were doing in the woods?” he asked. “And don’t say you got lost on your way off my post.”
My Pop-Tart, as good as it was, turned to sand in my throat. Without meeting Barrett’s eye, I reached for the coffee mug, took a delicate sip. “So you’re not merely feeding me. You’re interrogating me.”
“This?” Barrett shrugged as he bit into his strawberry pastry. But his anger was like a third person in the room. “This is dinner conversation. If it needed to become an interrogation—because you were withholding information pursuant to a federal crime like, I don’t know, kidnapping—your buddy the FBI agent would have to be in on it. In the meantime, you’d better start talking to me.”
“I’ve been talking to you. I told you about the Beemer’s fender. I told you I suspected ricochet.” I polished off my Pop-Tart, lobbed the wrapper into Barrett’s wastepaper bin. “The person you ought to talk to is that lying ex-husband of mine, Tim Thorp. Oh, but wait. Tim’s your commanding officer. You can’t talk to your boss about a little shooting business, can you?”
As calm as a morning in May, Barrett rose from his chair and made for the file cabinets lining the back wall of his office. They were fashioned of black, powder-coated metal that meshed with the gray walls and blue-gray tweedy carpet some Pentagon grunt had probably picked out without ever stepping foot in New Jersey. Books ranged across the top of them.
Most were volumes comprising the Uniform Code of Military Justice, but there was an atlas here, a dictionary there, and unless I was mistaken, a fat edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. An old baseball trophy had been shoved among the spines. Accolades and mementoes, the kind every military type displays, hung above them.
And mixed in with the accolades was a child’s finger painting, held to the wall with Scotch tape.
A yellow sun beamed down on a red house. Beside the house stood a green man. It wasn’t difficult to make out the hat on his head. Or the gun at his side. Or the smile on his face.
The green man was Barrett, no doubt about it.
Green Barrett held hands with two children, one on either side. The children were boys, they were blue, and they smiled like Green Barrett. And in that instant, I knew I was looking at a family.
So.
Barrett had a family.
It didn’t matter, really. At least, not to me. I was here to bring baby Brooke home alive.
Still, when the real Barrett unlocked the far cabinet, when he rolled open the top drawer, my eyes sought his hands. They were sure and strong as he sorted through items in the drawer. And just as I thought they’d been, they were bare of any wedding rings.
Not that that proved anything.
Barrett said, “I have talked to Thorp about this shooting business.”
He pulled an evidence bag, like a large Ziploc freezer bag, from the file cabinet, gave it a toss. It hit his desktop with a slap. I could see an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheet of paper inside. Something was printed on the reverse. I couldn’t make out what it was.
“You can remove it,” Barrett told me. “It’s clean.”
Meaning it didn’t have fingerprints on it. Well, it wasn’t going to acquire mine. I had no idea what this was or why Barrett was so furious with me, and until I did I wasn’t going to do something irrevocably stupid, like leave my prints on papers in evidence bags.
“You can do the honors.”
Barrett complied.
He slipped the paper from its plastic sheath. But it wasn’t an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheet. Barrett unfolded it again and again, laying it open for my inspection.
A bloodred bull’s-eye stared up at me. In fat black marker, someone had written a name through the center. The name belonged to Tim Thorp.
“Where did you get this?” I demanded.
“From your client.” His stonewall expression softened a little. “He didn’t tell you about this?”
“No.”
Barrett’s anger evaporated. But mine began to build all over again. Tim, once again, hadn’t been straight with me.
“That son of a bitch.” I sprang from my chair as Barrett dropped into his. I paced past the file cabinets, stopped, stared up at the smiling blue boys. “His daughter could be dead and he’s playing games.”
“I don’t think he’s playing. Someone left that love letter on his car the day before yesterday. When he found it, he called me directly.”
“Instead of phoning nine-one-one and dealing with a patrol unit.”
“Exactly.”
So Tim had taken the threat seriously. I returned to my seat, my anger spent. “Then someone shot at him—”
“—on his way to or from the Child Development Center—”
“—which you figured out. Which was why you were in the pine forest this evening.”
Barrett shrugged. “You found the strafe mark on his fender. I didn’t know anyone had made good on the target threat until then. I figured his drive to and from daycare is the only time he’s somewhat isolated. So he’s not playing games. He’s scared because things have escalated. But I didn’t figure any of this until you confronted him about the shooting.”
“Yeah.” I pressed a hand to my forehead. Thinking was starting to hurt. “You can always count on me for a one-on-one confrontation.”
“I’ll be sure to remember that.”
Somehow, his statement sounded like a promise, but I was too tired to judge.
I said, “Have you told Kev any of this?”
“Kev isn’t interested in speaking to me just now.”
I didn’t doubt it. “Well, when he is, are you going to ask him why the kidnapper didn’t put a bullet through Tim’s head while he was in the house?”
“I already did,” Barrett said, grinning.
No wonder Kev had cleared out. Without gunplay at the scene of the kidnapping, no one could say the shootings and Brooke’s d
isappearance were related. And if the shootings weren’t related to the kidnapping, Kev couldn’t investigate the shots fired at me and Barrett in the woods.
“But the incidents have to be related somehow,” I insisted. “We’re combing the post to turn up anything that points to Brooke and the shooter just happens to choose this evening to return to the woods?”
“I agree. He had to know a print in the pine needles from a size-eleven Saucony would tie him to the kidnapping, or that fingerprints on a shell casing or a dropped receipt could lead us to his doorstep.”
Barrett’s confirmation didn’t make me feel any better. If we were right, we’d come within five yards of Brooke’s abductor—but she was still so far away. The truth of it tied my heart in knots and forced a lump to my throat.
“Hey.” Barrett rounded his desk. He gathered my hands in his. “Hey, it’s okay. We’re not down and out yet. We’ll find her.”
His touch was warm and I was weary, and his nearness stirred up all kinds of amorous feelings in me. But from the artwork on his wall, the blue boys smiled down at me. So I pulled my hands from his, crossed my arms, and stuffed my mitts beneath my armpits.
“We’ve got to find Brooke,” I said, “for her sake. But also so you can go home to your kids.”
“Kids?” Barrett straightened like I’d poured ice water in his lap. “I don’t have kids, Jamie.”
It was the first time he’d called me by name.
And I liked the sound of it a little too much.
But I hated it when Barrett turned a bit bashful and added, “I’ll admit I’ve always wanted a couple of sons.”
My eye strayed to the blue boys. “Sons would be good.”
“Not that there’s anything wrong with daughters. I’ve always wanted at least one boy, though. I’ve always wanted to name him Edward.”
After his father, I bet. Who’d been killed in a hit-and-run accident. On an army post like this one.
Barrett pawed through the pile of snacks on his desk and I got the feeling he didn’t want to talk about children anymore. Which was fine with me. Because it troubled me to learn he wanted a flock of them.
I didn’t get time to dwell on this, though. Barrett handed me a bag of pretzels and a granola bar. “Come on. It’s late. Get off my post and get some sleep.”
The Kill List Page 7
