The Seven-Day Target (2 page)

Libby tugged at the hem of her skirt. If he wanted to hold on to his anger, that was his business. During the years they’d dated and the months of their engagement, she’d never been unfaithful to him. She’d gone to college and then law school, and she’d built her career, and she’d never excluded Nick from any of it. In contrast, he’d joined the FBI and demanded that she move to Pittsburgh with him. Give up her family, sell her house and leave her job—leave everything in New York and all that she’d worked so hard for and start over, all because that’s what Nick wanted. Even now resentment coiled in her belly.

She considered the markings on the table, edging her fingernail across a deep, dark groove as she remembered their last argument. The problem was that Nick put himself first, and the FBI was just one example. Nick pursued his goals even when that meant leaving a path of devastation behind him. Even if she’d left her home and her job to follow him to Pittsburgh, he would have eventually left her once he’d realized what an obstacle to his happiness she’d become.

She felt a pinch of guilt about keeping her biggest secret from him. She’d meant to tell him the truth, she really had. It’s just that the words had lodged in her chest. Instead, in that final, awful argument, she’d told him she didn’t love him. Maybe that was also the truth.

Libby chewed at her thumbnail, but then stopped. She was being better about that. She was quitting caffeine, which made her shaky and disrupted her sleep, and she was not chewing her nails. The past few years had been difficult ones, but she was working on pulling herself together. Seeing Nick again was a matter of taking her medicine. Toughen up and get it over with, and afterward she would feel better.

She shifted in her seat and studied him. He still looked the same. No, maybe he looked a little different. His golden-brown hair was longer than she remembered and slightly messy, and his cheeks held the beginning shadows of a beard. He definitely hadn’t shaved that morning. He looked broader in the shoulders, as if he’d been working out more. Had she expected him to be broken down and lost without her? To look gaunt and haunted? To the contrary, he’d never looked better. Something about that stung.

Nick returned to the table and sat down across from her. “You look well.”

“You, too.”

His dark eyes were as intense as ever but softened by an unfamiliar sadness. Even in the dim afternoon light streaming through the window beside their table, Libby could make out the flecks of gold around his pupils. She sat up straighter. “You called me.”

At the office, no less. He’d sounded frantic about something and scolded her for keeping her cell phone off. “What if someone needed to get in touch with you?” he’d asked.

She’d been
this
close to hanging up on him, except that she was so stunned that he was calling her after not talking to her for nearly three years. She’d clutched the phone with white knuckles, remaining on the line out of sheer curiosity, nothing more. “What do you want, Nick?”

She’d heard him sigh. When he’d spoken again, his voice had lost some of its edge. “To talk, Libby. Can we meet somewhere? Today?”

The morning was impossible. She had to be in court, and no matter how much Nick had tried to persuade her, she didn’t want anyone else covering her hearings. So they’d agreed to meet in front of the park on Main Street, and Libby had imagined a quick, cordial meeting followed by a rapid getaway in her car. She wasn’t interested in whatever Nick wanted to discuss.

She silently cursed the weather. Of course it had rained. Of course! And they’d had to move their meeting indoors, where awkwardness would be distilled to cups of tea and coffee and served piping hot. Curse her luck.

“I’m glad we’re meeting,” she said brightly. She wasn’t lying. She was trying to be pleasant, and that was different. “I have something I wanted to talk to you about, too.”

“You do?” He arched an eyebrow. “You’ve piqued my interest.”

“It’s nothing, really.” Libby reached into her coat pocket and wrapped her fingers around the black velvet jewelry case that held the engagement ring Nick had given her. After she’d broken off their engagement and he’d left, Libby had called and left a message on his cell phone, asking what she should do with the ring. He’d responded with a text message:
Keep it
.

What did he expect her to do, pawn it? He knew she wouldn’t. He knew that she would bury that ring at the bottom of a drawer, lest she see it and think of everything that had gone suddenly, terribly wrong in their lives. He was just being difficult. Besides, the modest diamond must have cost Nick over two months’ salary. Even if returning the ring hadn’t been a matter of burying the past, the gesture would have been a matter of clearing her conscience.

She’d intended to return it. She’d packed it in a padded envelope and brought it to work, where she’d stuck it at the back of a filing cabinet. She’d intended to get his address in Pittsburgh, but she’d realized that once she’d hidden the ring, she didn’t want to retrieve it, not even long enough to mail it away. Half of her prayed someone would just steal it and resolve the problem for her. She’d almost forgotten about it until he called that morning.

She clasped the small case in her fist. The feel of the velvet triggered an ache in her heart, and she wondered why she couldn’t have left well enough alone and pawned the ring, or sold it on the internet. Never thought about Nick again.

“I just...” Her voice trailed. She just had no courage. “You seem well.”

“Yes, I am.” He cleared his throat. “I was sorry to hear about your father. He was a good man.”

“Thank you.” Libby released the case and brought her hand to her lap, relieved for the moment to have something else to talk about, even if that something was her father’s death. Even if Nick was lying. He’d hated her father, and the feeling had been mutual, but she would set that aside. Today, the goal was civility.

“I heard it was pancreatic cancer. I heard it was sudden.”

“You heard correctly. He died eight weeks after the diagnosis.” She leaned forward then, bringing her elbows to rest on the table. “The funeral was Friday.”

The pointed tone of her voice betrayed a question that she hadn’t intended to ask, a sharpness that she hadn’t known she felt. She had no right to have expected him to attend services for her father, yet she’d been hurt that he hadn’t been there. They’d been engaged. He should have been there. Then again, Nick had always been selfish.

She clamped down on her lip, biting back her criticism.
Civility.
It was just that she’d been thinking lately that she couldn’t quite get used to all of the emptiness that had filled space in her life where loved ones used to be. Her father, for example. She imagined that one day she’d accept the fact of his death, but today and yesterday and every day since he’d died, she’d thought about calling him on the phone.

Nick looked down at the table. “You admired your father. He’s the reason you became a lawyer.”

Libby spun a tendril of her hair around her finger. “I keep thinking that he never saw me on trial. He was so busy all the time, and then he was sick.” She let the hair fall. “I know. It sounds minor.”

His mouth twitched. “It doesn’t sound minor.” He stiffened again and brought his hands together, looking as awkward as she was sure he felt.

Nick was another example of someone who used to be in her life. Someone she used to love...or so she thought. He looked out the window and Libby admired his profile. His nose was slightly crooked from the time he’d broken it in middle school, when an older kid had sucker punched him and Nick responded by giving him two black eyes and bringing him to the ground. By the end of it the kid who’d started the fight had been crying.

Libby had been near her locker when the brawl started, and she’d stood by and watched them rolling in the hallway: two boys rabid with hormones and rage about some cheerleader who’d been flirting with Nick. The older kid should have known better. Lots of girls flirted with Nick, and he flirted back, and none of it meant anything.

He turned to face Libby and her heart skipped. She hoped he hadn’t seen her staring at him. The barista walked over with their drinks and settled the steaming mugs in front of them. Libby gratefully wrapped her hands around her mug. Damn her icy fingers.

She was aware of a flailing in her chest as she weighed whether to give him the ring now, or later. “So. You asked me to meet you.” She sat forward expectantly. “What do you have on your mind?”

First things first. The ring could come later.

* * *

He shifted in the wooden seat. It was uncomfortable as hell. The chair. Libby. The small table that was too short for his knees and wobbled so badly his coffee had already splashed over the side of the mug. All of it felt like a colony of ants marching up his limbs.

Libby was ancient history as far as he was concerned. Been there, done that, and it hadn’t turned out well. He could still see her face the day she’d told him it was over, tight and unmoving. He’d seen her practicing her opening and closing statements in preparation for trial, and the face was the same.
I don’t love you.
Her lips had tightened and the pronouncement had upended his world.

Maybe she was a good actress because he could have sworn she loved him. People who don’t love each other don’t feel the things that he felt when they made love, and people don’t just fall out of love with each other overnight. Except...yes, they do. Because he was pretty sure that he’d fallen out of love with Libby that same night, when he’d realized that it was possible to know someone for nearly twenty years and to have no idea who they were.

That didn’t mean he wanted to hurt her, though. Telling her that she was the target of a stalker or possibly a serial killer? It ran ice through his veins.

He rubbed at his face with both hands. “I don’t know where to begin.”

Damn if he didn’t hate talking to victims. He’d rather get a root canal without anesthesia. Libby wasn’t helping. When she’d stepped out of the car and he’d seen her again, he’d almost forgotten to breathe. She’d always reminded him of a Siberian forest, with silky black hair falling like bare branches against the new-fallen-snow perfection of her skin. Now as her ice-blue eyes watched him with increasing concern, he realized that if he’d hoped that time and distance would mitigate the effect her beauty had always had on him, he was disappointed. Libby was as stunning as ever.

“You’re making me nervous,” she said, twisting her hands in her lap and peering around the café. “Just tell me.”

He inhaled deeply. “I saw Dom Vasquez this morning. There was a murder last night.”

Her hands flew to her face. “Someone I know?”

“What? No, no, I’m sorry.” He ran his fingers through his hair and shook his head. Damn, he was no good at this at all. “It was a young woman over on Peterborough. Rita something...I forget. She had a record. Prostitution and drug possession.”

She exhaled. “Oh. I’m sorry to hear about her. I just...I don’t understand.” She turned her gaze to him and he felt his heart squeeze. “The way you were talking, I thought it was someone I knew. I thought we were meeting about something serious.”

“We are. It’s serious. I just don’t know how to tell you.” If he could only get the words out the right way. He took another deep breath. “I think your life is in danger.”

She blanched. “What do you mean?”

“Whoever killed that woman last night left a letter threatening someone else, and beside that letter, he left a picture of you.”

Libby sat perfectly still for a few moments. Then she whispered, “There must be a mistake. What did the letter say?”

“I have a copy.” Nick pulled a photocopy from his jacket and handed it to Libby. “He promises to take revenge for some injustice, but he doesn’t say what.”

As she read the paper, he noticed her fingers trembling. “What is this? Six signs over six days? What does that even mean?”

“We don’t know. Dom is trying to figure that out now. It’s a priority.”

He reached over to grasp her hand in a gesture he’d intended to be reassuring, but was instead hopelessly clumsy. Her fingers felt cold, and she didn’t appear to register the contact at all. He watched as she untangled her hand from his, calmly folded the letter and handed it back to him. “I don’t want to see this again.”

They fell into an eerie silence as she looked past him and out the window. For a moment Nick was concerned that he’d mismanaged his responsibility, given her a violent shock. Then she took a sip of her tea and he realized that this was Libby’s characteristic stoicism, nothing more. She repressed emotion better than anyone he’d ever met.

“Dom’s planning to have a patrol car stationed outside your house. I don’t want you to be alone.”

She brushed her hair behind her ears, still looking out the window. “Where did you say the killer found the picture of me?”

“I didn’t. But he used one that ran on the front page of
The
Journal
last week.”

“In my ugly glasses?” She smiled. “I tore my contact lens. Must’ve gotten worked up while thinking about my closing argument.”

Good lord, was that a joke? “Libby. This is serious.”

“Is it?” Her eyes flashed. “Or is it some crazy who found a picture of a woman in the newspaper and wants to get attention?”

“We have to assume it’s serious. You know that.”

She set her jaw and stared straight out the window. “You know, I wish you hadn’t told me this. I preferred the awkward silence.”

* * *

He kept looking at her as if he were watching for some kind of reaction. What, was he waiting for her to dissolve into hysterics?

She was a prosecutor. Her job was to enforce the law, and that often required her to put people in jail for a long, long time. She didn’t worry about ruining political careers or dividing families because such concerns were irrelevant to the question of whether a person had committed a crime. But she wasn’t stupid. She knew that she’d made a lot of enemies.

“I’ve received threats before,” she said. “A few from jail, a few from the families of those I’ve prosecuted. I can usually tell them by the envelope. Handwritten, addressed to Attorney Andrews. I just hand them over to the police.” She shrugged. “The threats are all empty. They send the letters to the District Attorney’s Office, not my home. Besides, it makes sense I’d be targeted now since I’ve been involved in some high-profile litigation recently. You probably haven’t heard, living in Pittsburgh.”