B00NRQWAJI (3 page)

Silk gave way to the satin I wore against my skin, and Barrett’s palms cruised along my curves. I sighed with the sensation of his touch, slipped hungry hands beneath his sweatshirt, felt the flexing of his muscled back—until a muffled thump in another part of the house broke my concentration.

Barrett turned his head to look toward the hall. Past his strong shoulder, I saw the shadows shift. Mrs. Montgomery’s form darkened the doorway.

But Mrs. Montgomery had company.

A man I’d never seen before dragged her into the bedroom by her silver-laced hair. He forced her to kneel in front of him. And he shoved the long barrel of a shiny .357 Magnum into the soft tissue at her temple.

At that caliber, the gun was overkill. One pull of the trigger wouldn’t just murder Mrs. Montgomery. It would blast the contents of her cranium to the ceiling.

Barrett moved faster than I would’ve believed possible, rolling off of me and onto the edge of the bed. He could hardly stand, though. And without his crutches, he couldn’t walk. I jumped to my feet, automatically grabbed for the Beretta 9000S usually holstered at my side. But I’d left the weapon in my bedroom, in my gun safe, when I’d gone to meet Marc at the airport that morning.

As if I were armed and dangerous anyway, the intruder screamed at Barrett. “Tell your girlfriend not to come any closer! I’ll shoot this woman in the head! I’ll shoot her!”

“No!” The word was out of my mouth before I could stop it. I pointed an authoritative finger at the stranger in my home. “This is my house. You put the gun down.”

He didn’t obey me.

And Mrs. Montgomery whimpered like a lost little girl.

“We’re staying right here,” Barrett assured the man. “Let the lady go and we’ll talk.”

“No talking!” the stranger yelled. “Just doing!”

His face was as filthy as a coal miner’s after the night shift and his tattered desert-tan jacket had belonged to a soldier. It was as dirty as the rest of him, but I could make out the name tapes sewn above the chest pockets. One read
US ARMY
. The other read
MCCABE
. Whether the jacket was his and his name was McCabe, I couldn’t say. But his wide and wild eyes and the shaking of the hand that gripped his gun told me he was hopped up on illegal drugs. And I was certain that alone could make him deadly.

“What do you want us to do?” Barrett asked him.

In answer, the intruder did the most extraordinary thing.

He called Barrett by his first name.

“I want you to come with me, Adam.”

I blinked in disbelief. “Barrett, do you know this guy?”

Barrett didn’t reply.

“You’ve got to come home with me,” the gunman told him.

“He’s not going anywhere,” I snapped. “He has a broken leg.”

But the stranger kept talking like I wasn’t even in the room. “Don’t do it for me, Adam. Do it for Eric.”

“Eric?” Barrett whispered.

The intruder nodded. His arms dropped to his sides. The gun fell from his fingertips, clonked on the hardwood. I darted after it and snatched it up. Mrs. Montgomery collapsed like her bones had turned to jelly. And her assailant sagged against the doorjamb as if accosting us had taken all his strength.

“Barrett,” I demanded, “what’s going on here?”

“It’s all right,” he assured me. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

But I could see that was a lie.

And Barrett had never lied to me before.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t long until he lied to me again.

I left Barrett to tuck a weepy Mrs. Montgomery into a cab while she was still on this side of hysterical, and made a mental note to cut her the largest check my swollen bank account could afford. Luckily, she hadn’t been injured or worse. But luck only goes so far.

And her assailant was still inside my house.

Unarmed and seemingly under Barrett’s command, the guy had become as meek as a mouse the moment Barrett had heard him out. Such a mood swing suggested he was under the influence of any number of pharmaceuticals, however, and it would take professional help to sort him out. So when the cab pulled away from the curb, I raced upstairs. But Barrett had banished the man to the adjoining bathroom. I heard water running in the shower and wondered if I’d recognize the guy underneath all the dirt.

“Mrs. Montgomery’s on her way home,” I told Barrett. “I say we call the police while—”

And that’s when I noticed Barrett’s duffel bag yawning on the foot of the bed. He hobbled to the dresser with a single crutch under his arm. He extracted a wine-colored waffle-knit shirt from a drawer, rolled it into a long log, and returned to shove it into the bag.

Because Barrett was packing.

He said, “I appreciate everything you’ve done for me, Jamie.”

“Barrett, that sounds an awful lot like goodbye.” And in that moment, I felt as cold as if winter had taken up residence in my soul. “Can you at least tell me how you know this guy?”

“His name is Vance McCabe. We were friends in high school and he’s an Iraqi war vet.”

“And do you know
your friend
is pretty strung out right now?”

Barrett didn’t respond. He just stuffed a sweater into his duffel bag. In the bathroom, the shower went silent.

“Well, you can’t leave tonight,” I said, trying to be reasonable. “You’ve got an appointment tomorrow so your cast can come off.”

“It’s been six weeks. The cast can come off—with or without an appointment.”

Barrett made another round-trip to and from the dresser drawers.

“Yes, but we had plans. For the weekend.” For lovely days. And romantic nights.

Barrett zipped up the top of his duffel. “I’m sorry, Jamie. Vance!”

At Barrett’s shout, his so-called friend appeared in the en suite doorway. Barrett tossed his duffel at the guy. With quicker reflexes than I’d have thought he possessed, Vance McCabe caught the bag against his gut like a varsity athlete catches a football.

And while I stood there sputtering like a teakettle that had been pushed too far from the heat, Barrett gathered up his second crutch. Without another word, he lurched toward the door. And just like that, he was gone.

Chapter 3

Three days passed.

I heard nothing from Barrett.

I texted him as often as my pride would allow. He didn’t respond. In the meantime, his sister called me. Elise was a doctor in New Jersey. She had a husband and two small boys whom Barrett adored. Last spring, and in September, too, Elise had been pretty vocal about my getting together with her brother. She’d been heartily in favor of it—even when I wasn’t.

Now, considering the recent turn of events, I didn’t know what to say to her.

So I dodged her calls.

When Friday night rolled around—and Barrett still treated me to radio silence—I accepted Marc Sandoval’s renewed invitation to drinks. Drinks turned into a candlelight dinner at a cozy restaurant in Old Town. And dinner turned into a moonlit stroll along the Alexandria waterfront.

But the waterfront was as far as I could go.

Long before the witching hour, I thanked Marc for a nice time, turned my cheek when he moved in to kiss me good night, and beat it back to my empty, echoing house. It was after 11
P.M.
when I walked through the door. But in my home office, the phone was ringing off the hook.

I darted to my desk, snatched the thing from its cradle. “Hello?”

“Miss Sinclair? I’m sorry to bother you. I know it’s quite late.”

To be honest, I’ll admit the voice on the other end of the connection wasn’t the one I’d been dying to hear. But I told myself that didn’t matter. In my line of work, people with real problems called at night. Not grown women bothered because some guy had left them in their lingerie so he could go traipsing into the unknown with an old high school buddy. No, my caller was a little old lady, guessing by the warble in her voice. And the catch in her throat suggested she was out of options.

She said, “My granddaughter gave me your number. My grandson’s in a good deal of trouble.”

“Trouble,” I said, “is my specialty.”

So were referrals and repeat business. They were any entrepreneur’s bread and butter, but given my rarified field as a private-eye-turned-security-specialist who took on high-risk, high-profile clients allergic to bad press and the police, they were definitely mine. Besides, taking on a new job—and sorting through someone else’s dirty laundry—would give me something else to think about. Because in recent days, I’d been stuck on how much Barrett’s bailing on me stung. A new case would keep me too busy to think about it.

So I forced a smile I hoped the old woman could hear. “How can I help you…? I’m sorry. I didn’t catch your name.”

“It’s Miranda,” she said. “Miranda Barrett. And I need you to help my grandson, Adam.”

I’d never hung up on an old woman before and I wasn’t about to start now.

But I was sorely tempted.

Instead, I drew a deep, cooling breath and told myself to mind my manners. “Mrs. Barrett, I don’t think Adam wants help from the likes of me.”

“There’s a difference between want and need, Miss Sinclair. Adam needs help. He came home three days ago and has gone off with that McCabe boy every night since. Now Adam’s in jail. I can’t get the sheriff to tell me why.”

“Then you need a lawyer or a bail bondsman. You don’t need me.”

“A lawyer couldn’t help Adam the last time.”

The last time?
I didn’t like the sound of that and neither did my stomach. It spun sideways before shrinking into a cold, hard knot. I’d always known Barrett and his sister had spent their teen years raised by their grandparents. But this lawyer language was new to me.

“Please,” Barrett’s grandmother begged. “The old trouble is starting all over again.”

“What trouble?”

But she didn’t hear my question.

Or she didn’t want to answer it.

“I can’t offer you much, Miss Sinclair, but if you wouldn’t mind staying here on the farm, I can guarantee you a soft bed, good home-cooked meals, and all the money I have set aside. Please, please do what you can to help my Adam.”

I squirmed in my desk chair. Taking an old lady’s life savings wasn’t my style. And Barrett had made it crystal clear he wasn’t keen on having me anywhere near him and his old buddy Vance McCabe.

So I knew what I ought to say.

When I spoke, however, I heard myself saying something else altogether.

“I’ll pack a bag. I’ll be on the road in less than an hour.”

And I wasn’t sure, but I think I made Barrett’s grandmother cry.

Midnight found me true to my word. With a small suitcase in the trunk of my Jag and my Beretta 9000S hitched to my hip, I pointed my car north and headed for one of the addresses Mrs. Barrett had given me—in Fallowfield, New York. The Jaguar’s navigation system said it knew exactly where to find the place. And that was a good thing. Because I’d never heard of it.

I suspected, however, that Fallowfield was a far cry from that world-famous New York, the Big Apple itself. And as the night wore on and the bright lights of the big cities ranging up and down the Eastern Seaboard grew dim with distance, I became convinced of it. Fallowfield wasn’t any too near that other New York, either: the one snugged beneath the Great Lakes where mill towns by the names of Syracuse, Rochester, and Buffalo had made the most of the Industrial Revolution to become a latter-day high-tech corridor. No, Fallowfield belonged to the third New York.

That New York is the one most folks will never know. It’s a rural place, rich with the history of Iroquois nations and Dutch settlers who lived on this continent long before 1776. Vast national forests, bottomless lakes, and entire mountain ranges make it a wild place. Only parts of it have been tamed by struggling family farms. Agriculture is king of its economy. Or at least it used to be. But even today, its back roads are a world away from the concrete canyons of Manhattan. And the rising sun met me on one of them.

Under a red sky that would’ve given any sailor warning, the highway I’d followed from the interstate T-boned into a narrow county road. Weeds, brittle and blanched by autumn winds, waved at me from the ditch across the way. Behind a ragged barbed-wire fence, black-and-white dairy cows paid me no mind as they browsed among the remains of closely cropped cornstalks.

My navigation system spoke up, urged me to hang a right, so I did. The road wound between fields ridged from a farmer’s plow and forgotten copses where the trees’ tawny leaves were beginning to turn brown. Houses appeared. Some featured the clapboard and tall windows of the Victorian Age, but most were of a more recent vintage. All of them stood on wide lawns carved from the surrounding cornrows. When the yards got smaller and the posted speed limit dropped, I knew I was near town.

And then I spotted a blue-and-white sign mounted along the roadway and welcoming me to Barrett’s little burg. With heavy script and curlicues, it spelled out:
FALLOWFIELD. POPULATION: 9,718
.

But my GPS wasn’t routed for downtown. It wasn’t even set for Miranda Barrett’s house. So my first glimpse of Fallowfield itself would have to wait.

I had a pit stop to make.

Near a volunteer fire station and not far from the dog pound, I found Fallowfield’s jail exactly where my Jag said it would be. It was a narrow affair hitched to the Sheriff’s Office, though whether this was for logistical convenience or to cut down on construction costs, I couldn’t tell. In any case, I parked my XJ8 among the rusted pickup trucks and bumper-stickered SUVs in the gravel parking lot, stowed my sidearm in a special compartment built into the trunk, and made my way inside.

The place had been designed by the same minds that had built ugly concrete boxes in the 1960s and called them homes—and the effect was just as charming. Speckled terrazzo ran from the arching metal detector in the aluminum-and-glass entrance to a bulletproof booth at the back of the lobby. Its glass separated a deputy at a counter from the rest of the world.

The deputy had a single shaggy eyebrow where two of them should’ve been and a mustache on his upper lip to match. He’d tucked the desk phone’s receiver between his shoulder and his chin. And he scratched notes on a legal pad while someone on the other end of the line yammered in his ear.