I felt the eyes of the two MPs following me as I walked to Tim’s front door. At the entry, well lit against the dusk, I rang the bell, tucked a thumb beneath the strap of the attaché case slung over my shoulder, and waited. I imagined one of Kev’s agents checking me out through the door’s peephole, expected him to open the door.
But he didn’t.
Brandy did.
She looked at me timidly, chewing delicately on her pink lower lip. “It’s Miss Sinclair, isn’t it?”
I nodded.
For the life of me, I couldn’t find my voice.
“My husband said you might drop by. Please come in.”
On autopilot, I did. “Where is…your husband?”
“Oh, Tim’s upstairs in the shower. He’ll be down in a few minutes.” She shut the door, smiled at me shyly. “I can keep you company while you wait.”
She ushered me into the living room. With its Modern décor, it should’ve looked cold and dark in the gloom of the evening. But Brandy had lit tapers all around the room. The light warmed the glass and chrome and made the whole place seem sophisticated. And inviting.
She was certainly welcoming. All smiles and peachy-pink loveliness, she looked like a co-ed tonight in low-rise jeans and a chunky lemon-yellow sweater. She’d forgone the formality of shoes, wearing thick, marled wool socks instead.
An FBI agent appeared in the corridor that led to the kitchen. His body language suggested he knew he shouldn’t have let the lady of the house answer the door on her own. A smear of mustard on his chin suggested why he’d done it, though.
To him, Brandy said, “It’s okay, Tom. It’s Miss Sinclair.”
Tom’s gaze wavered from Brandy to me, and back again.
“You can finish your sandwich,” she said.
Tom’s mouth bunched like he wanted to decline, but wasn’t sure how to do it without admitting he’d been in the wrong.
“It’s okay,” I told him. “Special Agent Jaeger has to eat once in a while. I won’t tell him you do, too.”
Blushing now, Tom escaped to the kitchen.
“What about you, Miss Sinclair? Can I offer you a sandwich or a soda pop?” Again, I heard the slight twang in her voice. Too light for West Virginia, I pegged it as West Texas.
“No thanks.” I sank onto the ugly sofa where she indicated.
Brandy sat on the other end.
“It’s time for Brooke’s bedtime snack. So her blood sugar won’t drop in the night. Graham crackers are her favorite…” Brandy’s fingers knotted together in her lap. “They looked in the woods for her today. With dogs…”
For one horrible moment, I thought she might cry.
But she drew a cleansing breath, offered a wobbly smile. “All this is new to me. The FBI, even the Military Police. I haven’t been married very long, Miss Sinclair.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Have you ever been married?”
Brandy’s question blew through me like a blast of arctic air.
She didn’t know I’d been the wife when she’d been the other woman.
“Once,” I heard myself say. “I was married once.”
She nodded. “So was my husband. In fact, he was married when we met. But I didn’t know it at the time.”
Her cheeks turned apple-blossom pink as she confessed it. She was ashamed. As for Tim and whether he’d deceived her, I could believe it. Strangely, I found myself wanting to shield this woman from the truth about her past. And mine.
Still on autopilot, I said, “Maybe he wasn’t happy in his first marriage. Maybe his wife wasn’t happy either. Maybe she just didn’t know it.”
“Maybe.” Brandy’s hands knitted together again like a child’s in prayer. “I like to think she’s happy now.”
I didn’t know if this was true or not.
I wanted to think so.
Before I could stop myself, I said, “Maybe his first wife couldn’t make him happy.”
Brandy shrugged a delicate shoulder. “I don’t know. Tim wanted kids real bad. I guess his first wife didn’t.”
Didn’t want kids?
The phrase crackled through me like ice before burning like fire.
“Brandy?” Tim’s voice sounded at the top of the stairs. He descended, saw me, the old wife, sitting with the new one. “Jamie.”
“Hello, Tim.” I rose to face him.
As if following pre-instructions, Brandy popped up from her seat. “I’ll let y’all talk business now.”
Her sunny, swinging ponytail followed her into the kitchen.
When she was safely gone, I said, “So. You told Brandy all about your fabulous first wife.”
Tim waved a hand at me as if at a buzzing mosquito. “Jamie, don’t start.”
I set my attaché case on the divan, snapped it open, and withdrew the stack of cash he’d handed me a mere thirty-six hours ago. “Don’t worry. This will finish it.”
Like a model on a TV game show, I splayed the sheaf of bills into a paper fan. I made sure Tim got a good look at them. And then I withdrew a cigarette lighter from my jacket pocket. I fired up the lighter—and touched its flame to the fifty-dollar bill on the end of my display.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Tim singed his fingers as he snatched the burning bill from my hand. He tossed it on the floor, stomped on it until the flame died.
“I’m terminating our verbal contract.”
“Is this about what happened in my office today?”
My anger threatened to get the better of me. “This is about what you’re keeping from me.”
He considered me for a long moment. The shimmer in his eye was as cool as a country club’s pool on a hot August day. And I got the feeling I was about to be thrown out of his house on my ear.
But then Tim said, “Let’s go into my study.”
As I bent to retrieve my attaché case, I stuck a listening device to the underside of the sofa.
In his office, I dropped the remaining cash on the miserable slab of glass he called a desk.
“Okay,” he said, sinking into his place behind it. The same old hooded sweatshirt he’d always worn jogging lay on one of two pleather-and-chrome guest chairs. “Someone’s been shooting at me.”
“Yeah, I got that.” I helped myself to a seat. “I want to know why.”
“Who knows? I cracked some guy’s windshield with a long drive on the seventeenth fairway last month. I complained to a mechanic’s boss when the guy slit a hose on Brandy’s Jeep during an oil change. And do you have any idea how many other guys would love to have this assignment?”
“Make a list.”
“What?”
“Make a list of all the officers who’d love to have your commander’s slot—”
“Well, I don’t know of anyone specifically. You’d have to talk to Personnel.”
“—include anyone you might’ve ticked off with your golf swing or your powers of persuasion—”
“This is ridiculous.”
“—and be sure to list everyone—and I mean everyone—who couldn’t care less if your diabetic daughter ends up dead.”
That shut Tim up. Whatever game he was playing, he wasn’t pretending to be worried about Brooke. He slipped a piece of paper from the shelf behind him and began scratching away on it.
“You’ll, uh, keep this list between us?”
“Why?” I said, angry beyond all reason. “Don’t you trust me, Tim?”
“Of course I do.” His face was as sincere as a priest’s.
I didn’t tell him the feeling wasn’t mutual. I simply accepted the list from his hand, opened my attaché case to file it. And to prime another bug.
“Jamie, are you going to keep the cash?”
When I didn’t respond, his cheekbones reddened.
“I know what you need,” he told me. He turned his back, opened his closet, and bent to his safe.
I reached for his sweatshirt, stuck a bug in its kangaroo pocket.
Tim returned to the
desk, slapped a second thick stack of bills beside the first. “You need another installment. Please, Jamie. Find my little girl. Keep the money.”
A family of four could’ve lived all winter long on what he was offering me. Any way I looked at it, it was a lot of cash. And I wasn’t the only one who thought so.
“Golly,” Brandy breathed. Framed in the doorway, she carried a pair of tall glasses on a serving tray. The glasses rattled to beat the band.
Tim looked up. “I thought I told you to stay out of the way while I talked to Miss Sinclair.”
“You did, baby, but I thought y’all might like some iced tea—”
And all the while, Brandy didn’t take her eyes off the stacks of greenbacks on the desk.
“Thanks for the tea,” I said, rising, “but I’ve got to go.”
“You’re quitting?” Tim and Brandy said in unison.
“No. I’m going to bring Brooke home. And I’m going to see her kidnapper is sentenced to prison.”
In my pocket, four more bugs waited to be planted. I just couldn’t stand to stay around to plant them. I bypassed Brandy, blew out of the room, and stopped short when I found Kev standing in the hall. The charred remains of the bill I’d burned were black between his fingertips. Apparently, the agent who hadn’t beaten Brandy to the front door hadn’t been content to return to his sandwich. He’d grabbed his phone and ratted me out to Kev.
Now Kev’s glare shot past me. It landed on the fat stacks of bills still intact on Tim’s glass-top desk. I pushed past him, knowing he’d jump to his own conclusions about the money and my motive for helping out my ex-husband.
Brandy, gnawing on her lush bottom lip, rushed to open the door for me. “Miss Sinclair?” I halted on the threshold.
“My husband…He can be tough to work for. If you quit, I’d understand.”
Her concern melted the frost that kept my feelings from getting hurt. I appreciated it and I tried to smile. My mood was so sour, though, I suspected I just looked like I was baring my teeth.
“It’s all right,” I told her. “I’m tough, too.”
My father had seen to that.
And for once, I was grateful for it.
I escaped Tim’s house at last. Outside, on the walkway, I gulped in the damp night air like a drowning man coming to the surface of the deep blue sea. A second Military Police car had joined the first one. The curly-headed sergeant I’d met that morning leaned against its side. She kept her arms folded across her chest, her eyeballs pinned on me.
I flipped her a scout’s salute and hoped her presence didn’t mean the MPs had taken a quick look through my car and found the GPS I’d tucked beneath my seat. Brooke didn’t have time for me to be arrested. Moreover, neither did I.
I had a date with my anonymous caller.
Chapter 16
I wasted no time hightailing it from my ex-husband’s house. As I turned onto the main road through the post, though, headlight beams popped up behind me. They bounced around the Jag’s interior and I asked myself if their sudden appearance was a coincidence.
I didn’t think so.
I flicked a look in my rearview mirror but couldn’t make out who followed me. I didn’t bother to shake my tail loose, however. Instead, I drove quickly and steadily. I wanted to reach the gate. Any gate. ASAP. And I figured it wouldn’t hurt if my shadow saw me leave Fort Leeds.
Turns out, I needn’t have worried. My tail drifted away before I left the post. I pretended this didn’t suggest I was more than a little paranoid, but it probably did.
Relatively certain I was now flying solo, I headed for the Last Stand. With the Jag’s GPS system, it didn’t take much time to find it. And it took even less to categorize it.
Stranded on a muddy lot as close to the county line as possible, the Last Stand was a run-down watering hole of pocked cinder block and burned-out beer lights. Splattered pickup trucks and battered minivans stocked the poorly lit parking lot. Few sported military registration decals on their windshields. And that made sense. This bar was too far from Fort Leeds to snag soldiers on their way home.
In fact, it was far from everything. Except the Barrens. Dense woods, rife with pines, ringed the place. Matty’s Bronco sat where a fast fade on foot into the woods would be possible if necessary. He wasn’t in it.
Slowly, I circled past his truck, bumping across potholes before backing the Jaguar into a spot across from the rutted exit. I cut my engine. And I waited.
One minute ticked by.
Then two.
No one left the Last Stand. More important, no one arrived. I hadn’t spotted anyone following me once I’d left the post, but before I went inside, I’d wanted to be sure.
Now, as sure as I could be, I got out of the Jag, sloshed across the puddled parking lot, and entered the bar.
The scent greeted me first. It was that unmistakable down-on-its-luck bar smell of watery beer, greasy fries, and BO. Tables crowded the floor and patrons crowded the tables. Men outnumbered women four to one. Both sexes seemed to favor faded flannel.
Eyes followed me as I headed for the bar that lined the left side of the room. It might’ve been varnished at one time. Miles of mirrored liquor bottles backed it.
At one end of the bar, a preseason baseball game played out on a TV mounted to the ceiling. The Stanley Cup playoffs rocked and rolled on the set above the other end. Matty held down a seat there, babysitting a beer and pretending to watch the Capitals pound the Flyers.
A fifty-something blonde showing black roots and too much middle-aged cleavage sat two stools down from him. She batted her lashes in his general direction as she toyed with a cigarette. Beside her, a pair of lovebirds conversed with their heads together over light beer and pretzels. Farther on, a trio of young men cheered the Flyers and booed the Capitals between tequila shots. They might’ve been from Fort Leeds or they could’ve been townies thinking they were slumming it.
I hiked a hip onto a bar stool. The bartender made his way down to me. He said, “What’ll you have?”
The smudged chalkboard propped against the wall advertised Ladies’ Nite drink specials: a Cosmopolitan, a Long Island Iced Tea, and a chocolate martini. Though chocolate anything would’ve hit the spot right about then, and chocolate alcohol would be better yet, I took another look at the mugs of suds all around the room and decided I’d better not risk it. I ordered a pint of draft.
As soon as the barkeep placed it in front of me, my anonymous caller emerged from the stockroom at the end of the counter. He ducked under the hinged section of hardwood that kept the patrons from the business side of the operation and hauled himself onto the stool beside mine. He wasn’t carrying his fat black portfolio for once.
He said, “I wasn’t sure you’d show. I thought you might not like the looks of the place.”
“I’m a general’s daughter. I spent my underage youth getting thrown out of worse places than this.”
My anonymous caller didn’t look convinced. Though Derrick Larkin hadn’t asked for it, the bartender poured him a beer, set the sweating mug on the cracked surface before us. Derrick didn’t touch it.
Instead, he slid a plain black jump drive onto the bar between us.
I palmed it before he could change his mind and take it back. “What’s on this?”
“Hate mail. To Colonel Thorp.”
“Email?”
“Yes, ma’am. A lot of email and a lot of snail mail. Some faxes. I even took notes during a nasty phone call or two. The Colonel gave me a standing order to destroy this stuff the second any of it came into the office. But I made copies and saved them on that drive.”
A bead of moisture slid down the outside of my glass. There was no paper coaster in place to catch it. “Who’s this hate mail from?”
“Wives. Well, widows. Brothers and sisters. Girlfriends, boyfriends, best friends. And a number of parents, too.”
“Parents?”
Everyone around us erupted in cheer. On one of the screens overhead
, one team or other had scored. Derrick picked up the conversation like he’d never left off.
“Sometimes,” he said, “when a soldier’s killed in action, the parents see it as the commander’s fault.”
This I knew. But Tim wasn’t commanding action overseas. I said, “Colonel Thorp’s stateside.”
“Yes, ma’am, he is.” Derrick’s eyes took a quick trip around the bar. “He’s sitting behind a desk right here at Fort Leeds, changing assignments. And sending soldiers overseas. At the last minute.”
At the last minute. The phrase echoed in my ears. But its implication lodged front and center in my brain. Derrick believed Tim’s actions had gotten soldiers killed. And if there really was hate mail on the jump drive now hidden in my hand, other people thought so, too.
I said, “Have you reported any of this to Lieutenant Colonel Barrett?”
“No, ma’am. Colonel Thorp ordered me not to.”
“And an order’s an order, right?”
“Yes, ma’am. Besides, MPs make me a little itchy.”
He wasn’t the only one. As my father’s daughter, I’d met a thousand guys like him. I knew his tale would go one of three ways. Some young men and women joined the military for the love of their country. Some, with bleak prospects, joined for the fair chance to earn a living and develop transferable skills. Some joined the military because it seemed like an easy out of the trouble they’d gotten themselves into. Derrick proved to be a combination of all three.
He said, “I signed up to serve my country the day I graduated high school. I figured it beat staying in my hometown, drinking and fighting, and mining coal.”
“Those are all good reasons to join.”
“Education’s another one. I got to go to OTS.”
Though many military officers come from four-year colleges, universities, and the military academies like West Point, OTS—or Officer Training School—takes the best and brightest of enlisted troops and equips them with the additional skills to become officers. Only exceptional soldiers get in. Derrick should’ve been proud to be one of them.
“That’s quite an accomplishment,” I said. “You did all right for yourself.”
The Kill List Page 11
