Authors: Nichole Christoff
Still, I dozed off, sleeping into the afternoon and waking to murmurs in the hall.
“There she is,” Mrs. Barrett crooned when I opened my eyes. “My dear, there’s someone here to see you, if you’re up to receiving visitors.”
As she retreated, Marc swept into the sitting room bearing a bouquet of sunflowers. In his other hand, he carried a shopping bag. He laid both offerings across my knees.
“Today’s the second time you had me worried,” he said, and took a seat on the edge of the sofa.
I shoved myself higher on the cushions and regretted it immediately. Stan Liedecker was a pussycat compared to the guy who’d cornered me yesterday. But mentioning that to Marc would only make matters worse, so I thanked him for the flowers and for the bag.
“Go ahead and open it,” he said. “It’s stuff from your Jag. Rittenhaus had it towed at Fallowfield’s expense and the jarhead told me he’s having the windshield replaced.”
“His name’s Barrett,” I grumbled.
“Whatever.”
Marc grinned. And I forgave him for his impudence as I listened for Barrett’s low rumble coming from the kitchen, or for his footfall elsewhere in the house. I didn’t detect either one.
Marc said, “I did an end run around the sheriff while you were in the hospital, and got the autopsy results on Eric Wentz. His tox screen? Clean as a whistle.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. And since the sheriff’s had his hands full, I pulled some strings, got my hands on the crime scene snaps of the murdered deputy and of the Wentz girl, too. I sent them off to a forensic scientist I know. It’s not official, but my guy says the bruises match.”
“So my attacker throttled Dawkins before setting him on fire.” My hand drifted to my own throat. “And choked Pamela unconscious before hanging her two decades ago.”
“We’re damn lucky he didn’t do the same to you, babe.”
But something about all this didn’t sit right with me.
Why?
Marc said, “We turned up Vance’s stash hidden in the storage unit where he died, but the chemical composition doesn’t match the junk Llewellyn peddles, so I don’t have a link between Llewellyn’s drug trafficking and any of the residents here. Thanks to the tox screen, I don’t have a link between Eric Wentz’s suicide and drug trafficking, either. In short, I don’t have anything.”
“Maybe not yet,” I said. “But Eric Wentz didn’t kill himself. And I’m not going to automatically accept that Vance McCabe did, either.”
“Well, he’s looking good for it. Besides, the sheriff told that dentist who plays coroner they’re suicides. Slam dunk, Sinclair.”
I frowned, rested my head on the pillow tucked behind me. Marc took this as a hint that I was overtired and decamped. My body was certainly weary, but truth be told, my mind was restless—because no matter how I put the pieces together, they just didn’t fit.
Frustrated beyond measure, I pawed through the contents of the bag Marc had brought me. I found the XJ8’s owner’s manual in there, along with my vehicle registration, and the rest of the contents of my glove box. I found loose change, a tube of ChapStick, and a coupon for a dollar off dry cleaning, too. Last but not least, I found the phone book I’d lifted from Miranda Barrett’s kitchen and the mechanical pencil I’d used to mark McCabe addresses on the directory’s map. One by one, I erased every asterisk that marked the residence of a McCabe cousin.
Elise came to check on me when I was almost done.
“Take two of these,” she quipped, handing me a couple of capsules that could’ve choked a horse, “and call me in the morning.”
Speaking of morning, I hadn’t seen Barrett since he’d chauffeured me from the hospital shortly before noon. I swallowed the painkillers with a gulp of water and asked her, “Where’s your brother?”
“He’s out back. Over the garage.”
Elise tidied the table at my elbow even though it didn’t need it, picked up the flowers Marc had brought me, spoke to them instead of speaking to me.
“Jamie, Adam swore he’d find you if he had to search every stand of trees and every storm drain between here and Canada.”
But that didn’t mean he loved me.
Only that his compassion had driven him above and beyond the call of duty once again.
“I thought I saw Sergeant Shelby,” I said, trying to change the subject, “when they pulled me from the cistern.”
“You did. Adam phoned her,” Elise said, fading into the kitchen with my flowers. “He asked her to join the search for you.”
I didn’t like the sound of that at all. Barrett had dug himself deep by deciding to go AWOL. But I didn’t want him hauled off to a court-martial because he’d cared enough to recruit rescuers to save my skin.
The sharp ache in my side or the one in my soul had me blinking back tears. I glanced at the map on my lap. Without meaning to, I found the curving country road where the Barrett orchard stood—and I penciled a tiny heart in its place.
Once, poor Vance McCabe had proclaimed his love by doing something similar. And not for the first time, I wondered if Pamela had known of his affections. If she’d loved Vance instead of Barrett, would her jealous assailant have left her alone? I had no way of knowing. On the map, I pinpointed the approximate place where she’d lost her life and drew a question mark to commemorate her useless death.
Her brother had died as well, blasted in a bloody bathtub. Whether suicide or homicide, he was just as gone. Thinking of him, I picked out the location of the Starlite Motel and marked it with an X.
And when I looked at what I’d done, the sprockets of my brain whirred into high gear.
Vance had died at Hidden Hills Storage. The place felt rural, but it was just inside the town limit, and so was the rail yard where the two hikers had supposedly died of exposure. I added an X to the map for each of them.
That made four X’s in all—and Rittenhaus had had ready excuses for each of them. But the killings of Dawkins and Kayley? He’d been so angry about those, he’d made no attempt to explain them away.
Maybe losing his deputy and the abuse of an innocent teen had plucked at the lawman’s heartstrings. Or maybe, just maybe, those deaths were different. Because they’d occurred in a different location.
Hastily, I added exclamation points to the map where Dawkins and Kayley had each been killed. As the sheriff of a small town and surrounding county, Rittenhaus had these sites within his purview. They were inside his jurisdiction—even though they were outside Fallowfield’s town boundary.
Yet the killings inside the town limit hadn’t garnered the same kind of reaction from him. And I wasn’t the only one who’d noticed. Dawkins had observed it as well.
There was a pattern here, if only I could bring myself to recognize it. According to the map, between the outlines of town and countryside, Fallowfield was a box within a box. And that’s when the truth hit me with all the shock of a lightning strike.
In military parlance, Fallowfield was a kill box.
Chapter 36
I struggled out of my chair and into the kitchen. I had to show the phone book’s map to Barrett. He was a soldier; he’d understand what I needed to tell him. And he was a law enforcement officer. He could help me do what had to be done next.
Because Fallowfield was a kill box.
And everything that had happened in the last few days boiled down to that.
In the simplest terms, a kill box is a strike zone. To the soldier, sailor, airman, or marine, it’s his designated target area. The warfighter bore the responsibility for eliminating threats within his kill box.
But while the term might be a recent development, the concept wasn’t. In the late 1920s and through the 1930s, Al Capone and his cronies ran Chicago like a kill box, even slaughtering members of an opposing gang in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre when they dared to encroach on Capone’s plans for Chi-Town. Others knew they’d get the same treatment if they monkeyed around where the mobster said they didn’t belong, and despite the best efforts of Eliot Ness and his Untouchables, the city became a kind of kill box.
The trickiest kill boxes, though, are the ones where the authorities choose to turn a blind eye to the goings-on. At certain times and in certain places, the powerful have paid for this privilege. Some history books said that governments behind shadowy Cold War spies had done so in espionage hot spots like 1950s Istanbul. Others said 1980s drug cartels had paid out, too. In those instances, it could be said entire countries had been converted into kill boxes—and killers killed with impunity.
That, I was suddenly sure, was happening in Fallowfield.
“My dear!” Miranda Barrett exclaimed when I dragged my aching body into her kitchen. She was at the stove, stirring the contents of a tall stockpot. “What are you doing up?”
“Let me help you,” Elise said, and she rushed from washing vegetables at the sink.
But I brushed away her ministrations. “Is Adam still in the garage?”
Elise looked to her grandmother.
And Mrs. Barrett said, “He had to go.”
“Go?”
Elise sighed. “He made a deal. He asked his sergeant to help search for you.”
“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.