Snapped (38 page)

“That I should be careful what I say to you.” She looked him over and sighed. He’d driven a long way just
to talk to her, so it must be important. So much for the legal advice.

“Come on in.” She led him into the kitchen, and he watched her impatiently as she took a few glasses down from a cabinet and filled them with water.

“Did you read my e-mail, at least?” he asked.

“What e-mail?”

“I sent you a drawing. We have a witness who may have seen Sharpe.”

“Sharpe?” She handed him a glass and he set it down on the bar.

“That’s his alias. He’s the man who hired your husband. We need an ID on him ASAP, and we finally got a suspect sketch from this witness who saw him on campus, parking Jim’s car.”

Gretchen stared at him, her pulse racing now. Thank God her children were in hiding with Marianne. They were at an out-of-the-way place no one could possibly know about.

“I didn’t get the picture. Maybe it went into my spam folder.” Gretchen walked into her sister’s bedroom, which doubled as an office. The bed was unmade, but she ignored it as she sat down in the chair and turned on the system.

“Something happened, didn’t it?” She turned to look at Sean and felt a wave of alarm.

“Why aren’t you with your kids?” he asked.

She didn’t answer.

“You shouldn’t be here, Gretchen. This location’s too obvious.”

“I figure, if someone wants to come looking for me or the money, they’ll find me but not the girls.”

“They may not want
money
,” Sean said. “We think Sharpe’s responsible for a hit on a reporter and the attempted murder of the witness who gave us the sketch.”

Gretchen looked at the computer and bit her lip. The screen came to life, and she entered Marianne’s password.

“Maybe I’ll join them,” she said. “I don’t know. I just thought it would be safer this way.”

“Gretchen, did either of your girls ever have a security blanket with a rabbit on it?”

She turned to look at him and felt the blood drain from her face. “Mr. Bunny?”

“Was it beige? A stuffed animal with a blanket attached?”

“What happened?” She jumped to her feet and darted across the room to snatch up the phone. She dialed Marianne’s cell number.

“Calm down. Nothing happened.”

“That’s Angela’s blanket! It’s been missing for weeks. How did you know about it?”

“Hello?” Marianne said on the other end.

“It’s me. Where’s Angie?” Gretchen held her breath.

“She’s right here, why?”

“What about Amy? Are you all okay?”

“We’re fine.” Pause. “Gretch, what’s wrong?”

She looked across the room at Sean.

“Gretchen?”

“Nothing. I was just checking in.” She didn’t want to terrify her. “Sorry. I’ll call you later, okay? Give the girls a hug for me.”

She hung up the phone and stared down at her hands. She was shaking now. She felt sick. She glanced up.

“Tell me what happened,” she said. “I need to know.”

He hesitated.

“Sean—”

“The blanket was recovered from Jim’s motel room—the place he stayed the night before the shooting.”

“I don’t understand. How would Jim have Angie’s blanket? He hadn’t seen her in a year.”

“Someone else might have taken it. To threaten him. To make sure he didn’t back out at the last minute.” Sean paused. “The rabbit’s ears were cut off.”

Gretchen felt the world falling out from under her.

“Whoa.” Sean lunged over and caught her as she slid to the floor. He helped her up onto the bed. “Head between your knees.” He pushed her head down, and Gretchen stared at her bare feet.

He was threatening the girls. Whoever this was knew about the twins and was threatening them
.

“You okay?”

She sat up, slowly. She felt dizzy. Terrified.

“Who
is
this?” She jumped up. “I want to know who this is! I’ll kill him myself!”

“Calm down.”

“Don’t you
dare
tell me to calm down! These are my
children
! What do you know about children? You don’t even have any!” Tears streamed down her cheeks and she looked helplessly at the phone. God, if anything happened to her daughters, she’d die. She’d just curl up and die.

She looked at the detective, who was eyeing her warily.

“Sorry.” She covered her face with her hands. “That wasn’t fair. I didn’t mean to attack you like that. I’m just—” She swiped the tears away. “I’m just terrified.”
She looked over at him. “What can I do? I need to do something.”

“You need to go be with your kids. Are they somewhere safe?”

She took a deep breath and tried to pull it together. “They’re in a state park in Georgia. My sister rented a cabin. They’re hours from anywhere. No one knows about them. I’m going to go there,” she said, making the decision right there on the spot. “I need to be with them.”

“That’s probably best.”

She returned to the computer. “Now, show me this picture you sent. I doubt I can help, though. I didn’t know that many of Jim’s army friends. Most of them were single. When did you send the photo?”

“This morning, around eleven.”

She sat down and opened her account. Sure enough, there was an e-mail from him in the spam folder. She opened the message and then the attachment.

A picture came up on the screen, and Gretchen’s blood ran cold. She brought her hand to her throat. “Oh my God.
This
is him? This is the man calling himself Sharpe?”

“What? Who is it?”

“Joe Shugart. He’s not some army buddy—they grew up together.” She looked at Sean. “This man was in our wedding.”

Sophie was a conversational pro, and she managed to keep the small talk going all the way through dinner. And afterward, just when Jonah was ready to bring up something serious, she distracted him again by taking off her clothes.

She lay beside him now, pretending to be asleep as Jonah stared at the ceiling and tried to map out a plan. She couldn’t stay here, not after tonight, anyway. Things were escalating, and he no longer felt safe with this ad hoc arrangement. He’d talked to Ric earlier about bringing in the FBI, and they’d hatched a plan to do it, even at the risk of going over Chief Noonan’s head. Some of what Maxwell had told Allison and Sean involved federal defense contracts, which meant federal charges—possibly even treason. No one on the task force would be thrilled to bring in the feds, but their involvement would mean help on the witness protection front. The possible sale of military secrets qualified as a Big Fucking Deal and made the whole investigation—literally—a federal case.

Jonah’s cell buzzed from the floor. He gently rolled Sophie onto her side and grabbed his jeans off the carpet. He fished the phone out.

“Yeah?”

“We got an ID,” Sean said.

“Hang on.” Jonah tossed the phone down and pulled his jeans on. He tucked his Glock in the back of his pants as he watched Sophie still pretending to be asleep while she eavesdropped. He knew she was pretending because she wasn’t making that faint sniffling noise she did when she was actually out. Jonah stepped outside of the camper and put the phone to his ear again.

“DNA came back?”

“No, based on the picture,” Sean said. “Himmel’s ex recognized him. Joe Shugart, aka John Sharpe. Guy was a Ranger, special-ops regiment, before he got dishonorably discharged back in ’05.”

“Why’d he get discharged?”

“Still working on the details there. Anyway, after that he went rogue, joined some private mercenary outfit where he worked under an alias.”

“Name doesn’t ring a bell,” Jonah said. “They go through any training together? I thought I checked everyone out.”

“Connection’s deeper than that. Turns out they went to high school together. This guy was in their wedding.”

“Damn.”

“And listen to this. I’ve spent the last three hours running down his background. He hasn’t filed a tax return in five years. No current address. No bank account. He’s living totally off the grid.”

Jonah paused. That wasn’t the sort of background check they had access to down at the station. “You brought in Ric’s brother, who was with the FBI.”

“We need some help on this thing,” Sean said. “These witnesses—”

“Hey, I’m with you. What did he say?”

“He’s working on it. Might have something by tomorrow. Then it’s going to be a matter of getting Sophie Barrett and Gretchen Parker on board. Neither one strikes me as the type to go quietly into hiding while a bunch of feds track down their man and prepare a trial. And what about afterwards? Not sure they’re going to want to just start their lives over somewhere.”

“There’s not going to be a trial for Sharpe,” Jonah said.

Silence as Sean absorbed his meaning.

“It may not be up to us.”

Jonah didn’t dispute that, but he knew what he knew.
If someone managed to track down Sharpe, only one person was walking away.

Jonah intended to be that person.

“I’ve been thinking about this technology,” Sean said now.

“So have I.”

“Some college student isn’t likely to find a buyer for information like that, no matter how smart he is.”

“No shit,” Jonah said. “I buy that Emrick was a hacker and stumbled into something important. I don’t believe he was trying to sell it, though. Maybe he figured out someone else was.”

“Maxwell,” Sean said.

“Exactly. He was probably looking for a buyer after the government pulled the plug on the project. He was using Sharpe to do the legwork for him because of his network. Sharpe probably cut himself into the deal, too.”

“So, your military connection—he know whether they actually started implementing this thing before the funding got yanked?”

“You mean do some of our operators actually have those chips implanted?” Jonah asked.

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know, but just the possibility makes this stuff all the more attractive on the black market. Every hostile government and radical terrorist org in the world will be chomping at the bit to get ahold of this technology. Maxwell could probably get a fortune for it.”

“This guy Sharpe wore a uniform once,” Sean said. “Hard to believe he’d do that to his own country.”

“His country fired him. Probably with good reason, but still. Could be he’s lashing back at the army here.
Or maybe this is about greed, plain and simple, and he uses his beef with the government to justify taking the money.”

“Either way,” Sean said, “sounds to me like Eric discovered what Maxwell was up to through his hacking and
that’s
why he was a ‘security problem.’ Maxwell’s a fucking liar.”

Jonah didn’t say anything. It was the only kind of suspect he’d ever interviewed. Why was Sean so surprised?

“Where is he, anyway?” Jonah asked. Last he’d heard, the man had clammed up and called an attorney.

“We got him in custody on some obstruction charges,” Sean said. “We’re going to try and make them stick until the feds pull together something better, but there’s a chance he’ll get out on bond. He’s got connections.”

“There probably
is
one thing he was telling the truth about,” Jonah said. “Sharpe getting paid up front. That sounds like his MO. Get paid, get the job done, get out.”

Silence on the other end of the phone.

“Is Himmel’s ex someplace safe? Until the feds come through?”

“I’m working on it,” Sean said. “How about Sophie?”

“I got it covered.” Jonah opened the door and stepped back inside the camper. She lay on her stomach now in the center of the bed, so he’d have to move her when he got back in. Which would lead to other stuff he’d have to do.

All before he could get around to the really fun conversation of how she needed to take an extended—and possibly permanent—vacation from her job while investigators tracked down a highly trained operator who’d been paid to kill her.

“Anyway, tell her thanks for me,” Sean said.

“What’s that?”

Sophie stirred in the bed.

“Her suspect sketch. It was the break we needed. We wouldn’t have an ID if it hadn’t been for her.”

“I’ll tell her,” Jonah said, and ended the call.

Sophie blinked her eyes open and looked up at him. A slow smile spread across her face, and Jonah’s pulse picked up. He recognized the look. That tough conversation was going to have to wait.

Half moon. Clear sky. Moderate breeze out of the southwest. He would have preferred a little more cloud cover, but overall, not bad conditions for a hunt.

Sharpe dragged out his pack. A quick check of his equipment and he was good to go. He crouched in the grass beside the SUV and used the nearby brush to conceal himself as he applied camo paint by the light of his flashlight. He checked the side mirror a couple of times until he was satisfied with the result, then tossed the paint back in his pack and moved on to more important matters.

He took out his Leupold spotting scope, which he kept in a camo zipper case, and looped the strap around his neck. Next decision, ammo. The mission called for .308 bullets, and he considered taking only two—one for each target.
One shot, one kill
. But although he could do this job with his eyes closed, he made a habit of being prepared for contingencies. He stuffed ten rounds in the zippered pocket of his tactical pants and grabbed an extra magazine for his sidearm.

Finally, his rifle. It was an M40A1, fitted with a Schmitt
& Bender telescopic sight. It was a nice gun, nicely tricked out, but still similar to the Remington 700 he’d used in the beginning. From the time he’d first touched it, he’d been in love with that gun. He’d wanted to be a sniper. He’d wanted to hunt something that could hunt him back.

And he had.

Now his missions were more mundane, and he missed the rush of a good challenge, the thrill of the hunt and not just the kill. But thrill or no, he had a job to do. He lived off his reputation, and he had a reputation for reliable execution.

Sharpe looked out into the darkness and let his eyes adjust. He slung the gun across his back and slipped into the woods.