Such highway robbery was far from my mind, though, by the time the mechanic waved us on our way. It had been half a day since I’d come here hoping to make a connection to Tim’s shooter. It had been three nights since Charles Chapman Brown had drawn his switchblade across my neck—and it had been three days since a kidnapper had run off with Brooke like a thief in the night.
By now, little Brooke had to be dead.
That fear rode my back all the way to Leeds.
Along the way, Barrett said little. I said less. When we reached the town limit, however, I broke my silence to ask him to drop me at the Pines. Dawn had come early, and now, well past midnight, I was exhausted.
The Pines’ parking lot was practically deserted. Matty’s Bronco was the only vehicle on our side of the building. His curtains were still cinched shut against the dark.
The second Barrett pulled into the parking lot, I released my seat belt. He parked in the slot where my poor Jaguar should’ve been. I reached for the truck’s door handle.
Before I could bolt, Barrett said, “This morning, Jaeger said Thorp left you for Brandy the Blond Cocktail Waitress. Is that what really happened to your marriage, Jamie?”
I turned to him. The sliver of moon that had climbed high in the sky in Webster’s Trench had chased us all the way from Pennsylvania to shed a pale light that eased into the truck, trickled over the dashboard, and bathed the rough-hewn planes of Barrett’s face. A face that might as well have been made of granite. He’d assumed his cop’s face. I could read nothing in it. The question he’d asked me could’ve been professional. It could’ve been personal. In either case, it pushed too many of my buttons that were still too sore.
“If I refuse to answer,” I said, “what are you going do? Call the FBI for orders? Arrest me? Hold me overnight?”
“No need to bother the FBI.” Barrett’s eyes glittered darkly in the moonlight. “That last thought came to me on its own.”
I flushed from the roots of my hair to the toes of my handmade shoes.
Barrett shifted toward me on the black leather bench seat. “You take this case and you take extreme risks working it. You wouldn’t do that if you didn’t want to prove something to Tim Thorp.”
“You make it sound like my involvement in this investigation is all about me, Barrett, but it isn’t. It isn’t about showing you up, it isn’t about besting Special Agent Jaeger, and it isn’t about the bragging rights to a closed case, either. This is about a three-year-old child who should be safe in her own home.”
At the mention of Brooke, my throat threatened to squeeze shut.
I refused to let it.
“You know what, Barrett? You can pin any kind of motive to me you want. So can Kev. As long as you two don’t prevent me from finding Brooke, who’s probably already dead—”
“You have no reason to think that.”
“Don’t I?” Tears, hot and fat, welled up in my eyes. I blinked them back. “She has to be dead, Barrett. The diabetes or her abductor: one or the other killed her. Otherwise, we’d have found her or we’d have gotten a ransom demand.”
“You’re wrong,” he said. “And you’re wrong again if you think this isn’t about you. You won’t quit until you find her. You won’t quit until you find who took her.”
I shook my head as I looked out at the night. I couldn’t see anything past the shadowed woods pressing in on the Pines and its parking lot, but it was better than looking at Barrett. Because I knew what he was driving at: the bombshell Kev hadn’t hesitated to drop on me.
“Go ahead, Barrett. You can say it. Kev made no bones about throwing it in my face. I’m wrapped around Brooke’s disappearance because I’m a failure. I failed to keep my marriage after I failed to keep my man. It’s his kid that’s missing and I’m afraid I’ll fail her, too.”
“Did Thorp call you that? A failure?” Barrett’s voice rumbled like thunder.
“He didn’t have to.”
My father had said it for him.
Not that Barrett needed to know that.
I scrabbled for the door handle. “Anyway, you did good today, Barrett. You got us off that one-lane bridge when we were under fire. You just might find Brooke.”
I couldn’t find the stupid latch. And I had to get out of Barrett’s truck. Before I yelled at him. Or before I cried. “Good night.”
Barrett leaned close. He reached across me. I thought he meant to open the truck’s door for me, to let me go.
But the flat of his hand found the curve of my hip. In one smooth move, he drew me to him. My skirt rode high on my thigh as I slid across the truck’s leather seat and into Barrett’s arms. His mouth met mine. And he wasn’t shy about it.
All of a sudden, I wasn’t shy either.
My hands sought his broad boxer’s chest. One fisted around the maple-leaf-studded collar of his ACU jacket. The other slipped beneath it.
In spite of the crisp, cool finish of Barrett’s regulation T-shirt, I could feel the heat of the man beneath.
His kisses heated, too, turning dark and deep. He drew me closer, pressed me into the back of the seat. Through my pocket, my room key bit into my hip. A wild idea entered my head. It involved Barrett—and my hotel room.
This kind of crazy notion had come to me once before. When I was worn out with worry for the missing Delmonico boys, when I was weak. When I was with Kev.
But I didn’t feel weak when Barrett kissed me. I felt stronger with him than I felt on my own. And that scared the hell out of me. Because with a remote father and a hard-hearted ex-husband, on my own was the only way I knew how to be.
Without warning, I broke the kiss. Without a word, I pushed Barrett away. I reached for the door. I opened it, slid from the truck, and drew a deep, cooling breath. Without looking back, I walked toward my room.
And without wanting to, I left Lieutenant Colonel Adam Barrett alone in the dark.
The night was silent, the air chill and still. The pines, just beyond Matty’s room, loomed thick and black. I could smell their green scent in the air.
And the scent of something else.
The metallic smell of smoking circuits tickled my nose. It touched off some primitive instinct, some warning of danger. I stopped in my tracks.
I listened, but heard nothing but the scream of a train whistle in the distance. Looked, but saw only the dark outlines of the pines. Of my door, of Matty’s. That’s when it hit me. It was too dark. No lamps lit the walkway on this side of the hotel, though they should’ve.
I reached for my weapon. It wasn’t there. I’d left it behind when I’d gone to Brown’s arraignment.
Brown.
Frank had said he was headed my way.
Fear brushed icy fingertips along the nape of my neck.
I heard the click of a car door, pushed shut rather than slammed, and glanced back at the lot. Barrett eased around the front of his truck. In an instant he was beside me. His hand found the small of my back. His head bent close and I whispered in his ear.
“Matty’s room is on the end. Something’s wrong.”
Metal scraped leather as Barrett drew his weapon. He stepped forward, waved me back. But I didn’t obey. Matty was my employee, my responsibility. My friend.
Barrett flanked Matty’s door. It was slightly ajar; I hadn’t noticed this before. He crouched low, gun ready, and palmed it open.
I reached past him, flicked on the light. It was a stupid move. It left us open and exposed—a vulnerability that became all too clear when Matty’s nightstand came hurtling at my head.
I ducked, bumping into Barrett, just as that flying nightstand crashed into the floor lamp in the corner. In the sudden darkness, a shriek rose like the wail of a wounded dog. I’d heard that scream before. When Kev had his knee in the back of Charles Chapman Brown. When I’d clocked Brown in the head in a closet.
In my veins, my blood ran cold. I pressed flat to the wall as another heavy object flew past my right ear. I felt Barrett’s shoulder at mine.
/>
“Charles?” I called. “Charles, come out to the sidewalk. Come out to the light.”
The screaming jumped an octave. Deep in the room, glass shattered into a thousand pieces I couldn’t see. Barrett ratcheted a round into the chamber of his weapon.
“Military Police!” he shouted. “Come out and no one gets hurt!”
But no one heeded his warning.
The screaming died. Barrett grabbed his flashlight from his utility belt. He fired it up, advanced on the room with his nine-millimeter aiming at the spot of light his torch produced.
Everything the beam touched had been trashed. Linens had been torn from the bed and shredded. Furniture had been hacked into kindling. Our surveillance receiver was smashed and smoking. And in the middle of the room, in a pool of his own blood, lay Kev Jaeger.
Dark liquid, thick and sticky, bubbled from the upper left quadrant of his chest. That much I could see when I dropped to my knees beside him. I fumbled for a pulse at his wrist, couldn’t find one.
“Kev? Can you hear me? Kevin?”
I pressed shaking fingers to his carotid. Somehow I knew Barrett had swept the room, closet, and bathroom. And that he was on the phone to 9-1-1.
“Kev? Oh, please, Kev!”
Blood still flowed. He had to be alive. I turned, snatched a pillow from the bed, ripped off the pillowcase. I pressed the linen to his chest. Instantly, it turned red. A towel appeared in front of me, Barrett handing it to me. I grabbed it, pressed it to Kev’s wound.
I caressed his face with one hand. He was so pale he was nearly blue. His features were slack. I tried for his neck pulse again. This time, I found it. But it was weak and erratic.
Barrett knelt beside me. “The ambulance is on its way. The intruder squeezed through the bathroom window.”
I nodded. I had other things to worry about. “Matty?”
“Not here.”
“My room’s next door.”
“I’m not leaving you alone to check it.”
“I’ve got to find Matty!”
Barrett reached under my blazer, plucked my BlackBerry from the waistband of my skirt. He paged through the contact listings, selected a number, and hit send. “Matty, this is Adam Barrett from…She’s fine…No, she’s here with me…Where are you?”
Under my hands, Kev’s chest heaved. He tried to turn his head. His eyes crinkled in pain, then fluttered open. Only to shut again.
“Kev, who did this to you? Was it Charles Chapman Brown?”
His breath sawed in and out of his lungs. He didn’t answer me. In the distance, I could hear sirens. They seemed so far away, but their lights speared through the open door and striped the room. Hands closed over my shoulders and pulled me away.
I watched while the EMTs worked on Kev. They worked quickly and quietly. And that, in my experience, was always a bad sign.
Chapter 28
Pacing, I practically wore grooves in the linoleum tile of the Leeds Memorial Hospital Intensive Care Unit waiting room. The place stank of Pine-Sol and suppressed panic. Half the fluorescent lights buried in the ceiling had been dimmed, probably to encourage calm or imitate night.
In either case, the plan wasn’t working.
Kev had been rushed straight into surgery when we’d arrived. Four hours later, he was still there, closer to death than the Grim Reaper himself.
I allowed Matty, who’d missed the attack because he’d strolled to Bertie’s for a burger, to stay with me while we waited to hear of Kev’s condition. But I’d already ordered him to go home after sunrise. He’d tried to respectfully disagree.
“You need me, girlie girl. After this, Agent Jaeger wouldn’t want you on your own. You know he wouldn’t.”
“You go,” I’d told him, “or you’re fired.”
He drew back as though I’d slapped him across the chops.
But I knew Matty. He was tenacious. And dead serious about guarding my back.
He was also forty-eight.
Too old to risk his life and too young to die for me.
When I’d wrapped my arms around his beefy shoulders, I think he understood. He sniffled as I hugged him. And so did I.
The sheriff, a couple of State Troopers, and Kev’s superior at the FBI found us in the waiting room soon after. Anything they knew about Kev’s attacker they kept to themselves in favor of interrogating me. Once I’d figured that out, I made them wait. Matty and I looked on while a contingent of Kev’s fellow field agents ushered a quivering woman into a small, private waiting room.
“Who’s she?” I asked.
“Kev’s wife,” Matty said.
“Kev’s married?”
Matty watched me closely, nodded once.
I thought of Kev and how he’d sought my comfort in the middle of the Delmonico case. How he’d turned cold when I’d found the boys’ bodies. And how he’d gone home when the investigation was over without another word to me. I thought of him in the lamplight of my room at the Pines as he bent his head to kiss me after all these months apart. He was fearful for Brooke and frustrated with his inability to find her—or so he said.
Actually, though, he was looking for a roll in the sheets. Actually, he was married. So in actuality, what did that make me?
Just below my skin, humiliation warred with hatred. One or the other made me feel hot all over. And still I hoped Kev Jaeger lived a long and healthy life.
I just hoped he did it far away from me.
“Jamie,” Barrett said. His strong, sure hand folded over mine. “Sit down for a minute.”
He’d driven me to the hospital when the EMTs wouldn’t let me ride along with Kev. He hadn’t tried to tell me what to do once we got here. And he hadn’t left my side. His suggestion to sit was such a simple thing. After his kindness, it seemed rude to refuse.
Some hospital planning committee had laid out a vinyl-covered sofa crosswise between a collection of lumpy-looking armchairs. While Matty went off in search of bad coffee, I sank into one end of it.
On the other sat Barrett. “What was Kev Jaeger doing at your hotel tonight?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know if he was looking for Matty? Or you don’t know if he was looking for you?”
The linoleum tiles got real interesting real quick. I began to count the gold flecks in the square before my foot. Barrett blew out a sigh like he’d been kicked in the shin, started to rise from the sofa.
Instinctively, I caught his hand in both of mine.
“I don’t know why Kev came to my hotel, but,” I blurted, “I suspect he was looking for me.”
Barrett resumed his seat.
He listened closely as I ran through a brief history of what had happened between Kev and me during the Delmonico case. And how, the other night, I’d told Kev it was never going to happen again. Last but not least, I told Barrett I hadn’t known Kev was married.
“If I had…” I shook my head.
Barrett bumped into me with a sympathetic shoulder. “If cheaters told us they were cheating, Jamie, they wouldn’t have anyone to cheat with.”
“Us?”
Barrett opened his mouth. I could see an admission of his own balancing on the tip of his tongue. But Kev’s superior—a Special Agent in Charge Wolczek—chose that moment to join us.
I couldn’t put off the questions any longer.
“We found the smashed radio receiver beside Agent Jaeger,” Wolczek told me. “We know you had someone bugged. Who was it?”
I drew a deep breath and decided to give him the answer. “Colonel Tim Thorp.”
“You’ve got an ear in Thorp’s office?”
“Just his house. And one in his jogging gear.”
“What did Kev hear?”
“Nothing that I know of. There’ll be a recording, though.”
“Not anymore,” Barrett interposed. “The intruder trashed everything.”
I took off my glasses, rubbed my tired eyes.
“Any chance,” Wolczek asked
, “Thorp was on to you? And that you recorded something you weren’t supposed to?”
“No. In case you haven’t heard, Tim’s not exactly subtle. If he were angry, he’d get in my face about it, not leave a mess for me to walk into. And he’d never take out his anger with me on someone like Kev.”
“Someone who could hand him his ass, you mean?” Barrett said.
I wanted to answer. I wanted to explain. But my tongue got tied up in knots. Because Barrett knew Tim truly was a bully. And I was ashamed I’d married him.
“It’s okay, Jamie.” Barrett’s tone rumbled like a rock slide. “I doubt Tim Thorp had anything to do with the attack on Kev Jaeger.”
“Then who did?” Wolczek said.
Barrett and I exchanged glances. In that dark room, he’d heard the agonizing animal wail just as clearly as I had.
“Charles Chapman Brown,” he said.
—
Barrett’s suspicions meant both he and the FBI called the Philadelphia PD. Consequently, I got a call from Frank. His concern for me tugged at my heartstrings. But I didn’t let him keep me on the phone. Especially when Kev’s surgeon arrived.
Kev had been stabbed multiple times, the doctor said. The wound I’d compressed had been a nick in an artery. If the attacker had had better aim, Kev would be dead. If Barrett and I hadn’t walked in on him, he would’ve bled out on the hotel floor.
Close to dawn, I was allowed to see him. Tubes and wires tethered him to equipment around his bed—and probably to this world as well. His wife sat at his side, her fingers woven through his translucent ones. I wondered if she knew of his infidelity. I wondered if she could forgive him if she did. When my husband got caught with his hand in the cookie jar, I hadn’t been able to forgive him. Yet, here this woman was, pale and silent at her philandering husband’s bedside.
Barrett offered to drive me back to the Pines. I accepted. Along the way, I tried to put the pieces of this puzzle together any way they’d fit.
“Could there be an old connection,” I asked Barrett, “between Kev and Charles Chapman Brown?”
“Well, Philly PD are convinced Brown has someone helping him, so maybe.”
But I couldn’t see Kev assisting a delusional fugitive like Brown. “I was thinking more along the lines of an old grudge. What about a link between Kev and one of the people who sent Tim a threat?”
The Kill List Page 19
