Dark Sky (6 page)

“She took off for New York this morning. She took the train from Rutland—”

“Wendy?”

“Yes, damn it, Wendy,” he said with impatience, then reined in his frustration, proceeding more calmly, if a little icily. “She left a note saying she was spending a few days with you. Juliet, if you two planned this little scheme and didn't tell me—”

“I wasn't in on any plan.” Juliet suddenly realized what he was saying and felt a crawling sense of dread. “What time did the train get here?”

“Twelve-thirty.”

“Good God, Joshua, that was almost three hours ago!”

“I didn't find out she was gone until now. I stopped by the house—she left a note on the kitchen table. Sam's been in and out all day, but he thought she was here. I called her cell phone and left a message. I tried your apartment—” He paused, his emotions surfacing again. “I was hoping you two were off shopping.”

“When I was home a few weeks ago, Wendy said she wanted to come visit me, but we didn't set a date. I was open to the idea, but, Joshua, I'd have cleared it with you first.”

“I know. We argued about this vegan thing last night. I told her to eat a damn steak and put some color back in her cheeks. She looks so stressed out and unhappy all the time—I don't know what's going on. It wouldn't have mattered what I said. She was in a mood. She's been working on college applications—I offered to help, and she bit my head off.”

Juliet could envision the exchange between father and daughter. “Maybe the pressure's getting to her—all these strangers looking at her grades, judging her. I remember hating it. Plus, her mother's not here to give her moral support. She's used to that, even more so since she was homeschooled.” Juliet stopped herself. “Never mind. It's none of my business.”

“Find her, will you?”

“I'll call you as soon as I know anything.”

Juliet hung up and grabbed her jacket, quickly telling Tony Cipriani what was going on. He immediately offered to go with her, but she shook her head. They both were tackling paperwork of the dullest kind. She didn't blame him for looking for an excuse to get out of there, but her partner didn't need to be tracking down her errant niece with her.

She took the elevator down to the lobby of the nondescript federal building hoping she wouldn't have to fight traffic to get uptown. Out on the street, Ethan Brooker was just getting out of a cab.

Juliet thought she must have conjured him up and was losing her damn mind. She charged out to the street.

He was real. She hadn't made him up or mistaken someone else for him.

“Good,” he said. “You're here. Saves me from having to lure you out here.”

He had on a battered brown leather jacket, a denim shirt, jeans and cowboy boots, and he hadn't shaved in several days. His eyes were harder, blacker, more piercing even than Juliet remembered. They looked as if they could set fire to the building.

“Man, Brooker,” Juliet said. “Wherever they sent you, it wasn't a Club Med.”

“Where are you going in such a hurry?”

She gave him the basics, and his reaction—as if he, too, was worried that someone had harmed Wendy, or, God forbid, thought she was Juliet—scared the hell out of her. “You've seen her? My niece?”

“I saw a teenage girl get out of a cab and drag a backpack and tote bag up the steps to your building. Small, long dark hair?”

“That's her. When—”

“Over an hour ago. I've been sitting in traffic.”

Juliet frowned, trying to think. “We have a new doorman.” She didn't tell Ethan that letting him sneak up to her apartment in late August was the reason the old doorman was gone. “He should have called me—”

“Water over the dam. Let's go.”

She didn't budge. “Wait a minute. You were at my building—and now you're here?”

“We need to talk.” His tone held no hint that he was thinking about roses and sun-kissed cafés. “I didn't get your guy.”

Bobby Tatro. Juliet didn't want him in her thoughts at the same time as her niece. “I supposed I'd have heard if you had. All right. Come with me. We'll take my truck. We can talk on the way.”

 

Joshua Longstreet headed outside, Wendy's note still on the long, scarred pine table where she'd left it. Only by chance was he the first to see it. Everyone else was at landscaping jobs.

The late afternoon air was chilly, the sun low in the sky.

He debated getting into his truck and heading to New York himself. But what good would he do at this point? If Wendy had changed her mind and was on her way back to Vermont, he wanted to be here when she arrived, if only to—What? How did he punish a seventeen-year-old girl who barely acknowledged him as her father?

Matt Kelleher was stacking pumpkins on a wooden trailer that Joshua had pulled out to the edge of the driveway yesterday. Wendy had intended to decorate it with dried cornstalks. Her grandparents had said she could keep the money from whatever pumpkins she sold. But Joshua had said the wrong thing, a lame joke about whether the pumpkins felt pain when they were carved, and they'd argued, and apparently they hadn't patched things up as well as he thought they had, because first thing this morning, she'd lit out for New York.

“Thought I'd finish up these pumpkins,” Kelleher said, lifting a big one onto the trailer. “I didn't see you get here. I was up at my trailer.”

“Did you happen to see my daughter this morning?”

“Wendy? No, not this morning. I haven't seen her all day, in fact. I assumed she was with her grandparents.” His brow furrowed with concern. “Why? Has something happened?”

“She sneaked off to visit my sister in New York.”

“Oh, I get it. That's not good. She mentioned wanting to see her aunt's apartment—I guess she's moving?”

Joshua nodded. “It's a long story.”

Kelleher set the pumpkin on the trailer. “Wendy seems like a good kid. Levelheaded for seventeen. You worried about her?”

“My sister—Juliet—had no idea Wendy was coming.” Joshua didn't know why he was telling this man his troubles. “Need a hand with the pumpkins?”

“No, there aren't many left. I like the work.”

It'd only been a couple of days, but so far, Joshua hadn't heard any negative reports from his family about Kelleher—they all seemed to like him.

Sam's truck pulled into the driveway. Joshua filled him in on what was going on with Wendy. Sam's kids weren't angels, but they'd never gone traipsing off to New York without permission. They went to public school. They played soccer and field hockey, and they hated carob.

Normal kids, Joshua thought, hated carob.

His
daughter loved it.

But he was damn near in tears when he climbed back into his cruiser and headed for town. He glanced at himself in his rearview mirror. He had a hint of gray in his darkish blond hair, and he looked tired and cynical, even for forty. He'd been divorced for a decade and hadn't remarried. There was no woman currently in his life.

And his only daughter hated him.

It wasn't a pleasant thought, and Joshua had no idea what to do about it.

He pounced on his cell phone when it rang.

“She's fine,” Juliet said. “She was just back from the Museum of Natural History when I got here.”

“Put her on.”

“We're still in the lobby. Let me get her up to my apartment. Then I'll have her call you.”

Joshua gripped the phone. “Juliet—”

“Trust me, Joshua, okay?”

And he heard his daughter say cheerfully, as if she hadn't done a damn thing wrong, “I'm fine, Dad. Really!”

Relief and anger flooded over him, and he knew his sister was right; if he talked to Wendy now, in his current state, he'd just make matters worse. “All right,” he told Juliet. “I'm on my way home. Have her call me there.”

It was almost dark when he reached White River Junction. The temperature had fallen. He parked in the short driveway of the Victorian he'd bought after his divorce and had slowly renovated over the years. His downstairs tenant, Barry Small, a member of the Greatest Generation, was up on a stepladder, stringing pumpkin-shaped lights across the porch in his shorts.

Joshua got out of his truck. “You're going to freeze your nuts off.”

“Good. At least I'll know they're still there. Grab the other end of these lights, will you? I picked them up at Wal-Mart on sale.”

“Pumpkin lights?”

“For the trick-or-treaters.”

Joshua didn't point out Halloween wasn't for nearly a month.

Barry stretched a bony arm, hooking a length of wire over a thick staple. “You can never have enough light up here this time of year. Another few weeks and it'll be darker than the pits of hell at three-thirty in the afternoon.”

He wasn't exaggerating by much. Except for his years in the army during World War Two, Barry had lived in Vermont his entire life, but he hated the long, dark winters. From October through the middle of May, he'd bitch to Joshua and threaten to move to Key West. He was a widower with four adult kids, none of whom lived in Vermont.

“How's Wendy the Vegan?”

“She's with her New York aunt,” he said, outlining his daughter's adventures for the day.

Barry glanced down from his stepladder, his lined face picking up the orange glow of one of his plastic pumpkins. “You sound irritated, Trooper Longstreet. Cut the girl some slack. She took a train to New York. It's not the moon. You're just ticked off because she likes everyone else better than she does you.”

“Thanks, Barry.”

The old man shrugged. “Comes with the territory.”

Joshua walked behind him and caught the other end of the lights. “I think you're going to need another strand. You're about three feet short of the other end of the porch.”

“This is it. It'll have to do. I'm only spending so much on pumpkin lights.”

It wouldn't do. It'd look bizarre, but Joshua didn't care.

Here he was on a cool autumn night, stringing up pumpkin lights with his eighty-year-old tenant and neighbor.

“I have no life, Barry.”

The old man put one hand on Joshua's shoulder, balancing himself as he climbed down off his stepladder. “This is what I've been trying to tell you for how long? I made up a pitcher of margaritas. We can pretend we're in Acapulco.”

Joshua eyed the old man's lights. Pitiful. “Got salt for the margaritas?”

“And little umbrellas.”

Before he realized it, Joshua cracked a smile.

Barry gave him a victorious slap on the shoulder, and they headed inside.

E
than could tell that the bartender didn't like him. He had trim gray hair and looked as if bartending was his vocation, not the backup plan, and he'd had his eye on Ethan since he took a high stool at the bar and ordered a Belgian beer on tap. The restaurant was on Amsterdam Avenue, on a corner, with a lot of windows and a neighborhood feel. He had more to tell Juliet. They hadn't talked much on the tense ride uptown. She'd ordered him to meet her there after she got her wandering niece settled. Ethan almost told the bartender that he was there at the request of a deputy U.S. marshal, but doubted the man liked federal agents any better than whatever he thought Ethan was.

“Not from around here?”

“No, sir. Texas.”

“There's no smoking in here. It's the law.”

“I quit smoking.”

The guy rolled his eyes. “When?”

Ethan glanced at his watch. “About six hours ago.”

Muttering about how much he hated wiseacres, the bartender set a frosty glass in front of Ethan and moved to the opposite end of the bar to wait on another customer, presumably one who didn't smell like cigarettes.

Ethan had finished his beer and was resisting ordering another one when Juliet pushed past a trio of women examining the menu posted in the entry and sat next to him. “Saving me a seat?”

“It was easy. Nobody wants to sit next to me.”

“I wonder why.”

The restaurant was warm and pleasant, the plates passing by on waiters' trays piled high with comfort food. Mac and cheese, meat loaf, mashed potatoes. Ethan supposed he should have been hungry, but he wasn't.

“How's your niece?” he asked.

They'd found her skipping on the steps of Juliet's building. When she saw her aunt, she got a little weepy, which made Ethan more compliant when Juliet, tight-lipped, said to give her an hour.

“She's camped out in front of the television watching an episode of
The Vicar of Dibley.
” At his puzzled look, Juliet added, “British comedy. Wendy gave me the DVD set for Christmas.”

“Just as well you didn't invite me up.”

“Have you eaten?”

“I had a beer.”

“I had Thai food with Wendy before I left. She's a vegan.”

“Orthodox vegetarian, right? No animal products at all.”

“Correct. She thinks she might eat eggs. She's only been at it a few weeks. Her dog died—” Juliet caught herself. “Never mind.”

She ordered sparkling water with lime. Ethan resisted ordering another beer. The bartender obviously didn't recognize her nor seemed to notice that she was armed, which probably meant she wasn't one of the locals who frequented the place. She could have picked the joint for that reason, but Ethan suspected Deputy Longstreet wasn't a regular anywhere in her neighborhood.

When her water arrived, she stared at it a moment. Her cheeks were flushed. With her fair skin, she flushed easily. The warm restaurant, the upset with her niece. Him. She had reasons to get a little pink in the cheeks.

“I'm glad you weren't killed,” she said, still not looking at him.

“I never said that what I was doing was dangerous.”

She drank some of her water. “Did our mutual friend do anything illegal?”
Friend
didn't exactly describe Bobby Tatro.

Ethan didn't answer her. He didn't want to lie, and he didn't want to tell the truth.

“I want to know what's going on,” Juliet said. “I'm not playing your game anymore.”

Ethan smelled the cigarette smoke on himself and decided he at least could have shaved before he'd beelined for the marshals. For Juliet.

Something was freaking wrong with him.

“Tatro and a handful of other bad operators grabbed a guy I could identify. I can't go into who he is. It didn't happen in this country.” Ethan spoke quietly, but he wasn't concerned about anyone overhearing him. Who'd know what in hell he was talking about? They'd think he was describing a movie script or something. “Tatro cleared out before my team arrived. We never saw him.”

“Convenient. He was tipped off?”

“We weren't there for answers. We were there to get our man.”

He noticed her throat as she sipped more of her water, the frost on the glass melting onto her fingers. She had slender fingers with blunt nails—some nicked—no doubt from the physical, hectic life she led, the work she did. When she looked at him, her blue eyes were wide and clear. “It's odd, don't you think, that Tatro chose a ‘guy' you could identify?” She set the glass down hard but with control. “That's a hell of a coincidence, Major.”

“I agree.” Brooker's head hurt. He needed a shower, sleep. A pity the niece had turned up… He shut off that thought fast. “My guy's safe. Your guy's still on the loose.”

“If Tatro's responsible for a kidnapping—”

“What kidnapping?”

Juliet glowered at him. “You just said he grabbed a guy you could identify. That sounds like kidnapping to me. I could take you in and get answers that way. Rivera would love it. He hasn't liked you much since you took off on us in Tennessee.”

“I came back.”

“That's not the point.”

“I have a lot of questions of my own,” Ethan said in a steady voice, knowing he could only tell her certain things. “If Bobby Tatro blames you for putting me on to him—”

“I can handle whatever Tatro throws my way. Including himself.”

The bartender skewered them with a suspicious, unfriendly glare. Ethan figured he and Juliet looked intense, wired tight and far from upscale. Perhaps they even looked a bit dangerous.

“Is he still out of the country?” she asked.

“I don't know.”

“What about the hostage you rescued? Does he know?”

“There's your assumptions again. ‘Hostage.' I never said my guy was held hostage.”

“Okay, we won't go there. I told you I'd heard that Tatro got mixed up with vigilante mercenaries. That true?”

He shook his head. “Another place I can't go.”

That obviously didn't sit well with her. “No promises I'll be keeping any of what you tell me to myself this time.”

“There were no promises last time.”

“What else, Ethan? You aren't here unshaved and unwashed to tell me that Bobby Tatro might be mad at me. He's been mad at me for four years.”

“It's not important,” Ethan said, suddenly regretting the whole trip. “Forget it. Go eat vegan food with your niece.”

“Ethan—”

“I shouldn't have come here. Just watch your back for Tatro.”

Juliet sat back, studying him. “You didn't need to come to New York to tell me that. Where do you go from here? Back home to Texas to play rich rancher?”

“I'm a soldier. My father and brother are the ranchers.”

“Bet you're in the will.”

“I've never asked.”

Ethan eased off the stool and pulled out his wallet, laying a few bills on the counter to cover the beer and the water. He left a reasonable tip. If he lived in the neighborhood, he'd want a suspicious bartender.

Juliet touched his upper arm, but he couldn't feel her fingertips through the leather of his jacket and found himself wishing he could. Her eyes had softened. Not much, but enough for now. “Get some rest, Ethan. Don't worry about me.”

“I'm sorry we couldn't grab Tatro. It wasn't that other priorities prevented it. He just wasn't there.”

“I want to be able to reach you.”

He plucked a pen from a cup on the counter, jotted his cell-phone number on a paper cocktail napkin and handed it to her. “Call anytime. Day or night.”

The napkin disappeared into her jacket pocket. “I'd invite you up for leftover vegan Thai food—”

“Nice try, Longstreet. You're on your own with the weepy niece.”

“She's a great kid.”

“Looks it.”

“Your bosses—will they object to what little you've told me?”

He grinned at her. “I've never been much of an ass-kisser.”

“Much?”

“See you around, Deputy.” He resisted an urge to kiss her and totally spoil her chances of becoming a regular at the cute neighborhood restaurant. But as she started out the glass door, Ethan grabbed her arm, tucking an envelope into her pocket. “Don't open it in front of your niece.”

“What?”

“Or here.”

She thumped his chest. “Be where I can find you.”

He waited until he saw her walk past the restaurant windows on the corner, toward her apartment, before he headed outside.

Bobby Tatro had been a busy boy in the past few weeks. He'd gone from federal prison to snatching an American contractor—an unlikely covert agent—in Colombia. Tatro had left a photograph of Juliet behind in the bleak Colombian shack where he'd held Ham Carhill. Ethan had spotted the picture and grabbed it, as if it were a warning of some kind—an omen.

When Juliet opened the envelope and saw the photo, she'd understand why he hadn't taken the time for a decent shower and shave, never mind to decompress from his mission, before getting on a plane to New York and finding her.

The night air had turned downright cold, and the city lights obliterated any sign of the stars and moon. As Ethan stepped off the curb to hail a cab, he tried to remember when he'd last seen the big west Texas sky. A long time ago.

You should go home.

Instead, he was taking an evening shuttle to Washington, D.C.

It took Ethan several tries before he could get a cab. Halfway to LaGuardia, his cell phone rang.

“You didn't add the horns and the blood-dripping eyes yourself, did you, Brooker?” Juliet asked dryly.

She'd opened the envelope. She'd seen the photo, a digital shot of herself coming out of her apartment building. Bobby Tatro added his own sick, childish artwork.

“No, ma'am.”

“I didn't think so. Tatro. You want to tell me how a picture of me came into his possession?”

“If I knew, I'd tell you.”

“I'm not so sure about that.”

She hung up, and Ethan wished he could press some kind of rewind button that would take him back in time. He could arrive at Tatro's camp an hour earlier and capture him, shove his grotesque photo of Juliet down his throat—demand answers. Where did he get the photo? Had he taken the picture himself? If so, when—how? If not, who had?

He'd find out why Tatro was bugging out of his camp and leaving his hostage behind—he'd find out who'd tipped Mia O'Farrell off that Ham was being held by a blond female marshal.

Then, Ethan thought, he wouldn't have the painful feeling in his gut that he did right now, that he'd missed something—just as he'd missed something, everything, with Char when she'd told him she was going to Amsterdam on “holiday.”

A few days later, his wife had turned up in a Dutch morgue.

Ethan hadn't had a painful feeling in his gut then. He'd been totally oblivious that Char was on the trail of a dangerous and violent international fugitive, a man who'd ordered her murder. If anything, news of her Dutch vacation had been a relief. She was having a good time without him. They'd had separate careers, separate lives, for so long. In the two years before her death, they'd been together all of twenty-one days.

Guilt,
he thought. That was why he was overreacting to the cracked and dog-eared picture of Juliet Longstreet he'd found in Bobby Tatro's cinder-block Colombian hut.

When he arrived at LaGuardia, Ethan had just enough time to get through security and on to his flight to Washington. He had clothes waiting for him at his hotel.

He'd left no detail to chance—except the whereabouts of Bobby Tatro.

 

Mia O'Farrell collapsed onto her four-poster bed without so much as kicking off her shoes. She stared, unblinking, at the plaster ceiling, wishing for nothing more complicated than a hot bath and a tall glass of cold milk. But she didn't have the energy to move. It was after ten, the end of a very long, upsetting day—no matter how many times she reminded herself that Hamilton Carhill was home in Texas, recuperating from his ordeal after providing actionable intelligence that had saved innocent lives. His secrets were safe.
He
was safe.

That she'd taken risks to make it happen—that she didn't have all the answers she wanted—was a problem. But initially, when word had first reached her that Ham had been kidnapped, she hadn't believed he'd get out of Colombia alive. He was being held by brutal criminals on a remote Andean mountainside, and no one even knew what in blazes he looked like.

Mia lifted her head onto a pillow, to keep the stomach acid from crawling up her throat. She'd fought indigestion since she woke that day. Smarter, she thought, to wait and have her milk
after
her bath. Having it beforehand would only make her stomach worse.

Her ceiling fan whirred steadily in the quiet night. She wasn't a hardened Special Forces officer like Brooker or an eccentric genius like Carhill. She wasn't experienced in power plays and political machinations like President Poe. She was just a smart kid from South Boston.

“Not so smart.”

She didn't like the note of self-pity in her tone. But if she was so damn smart, why was she lying in bed at ten o'clock with indigestion? Why hadn't she realized she was being played?

Carhill hadn't provided many details of his kidnapping and incarceration. He'd said he was too traumatized and needed time. His kidnapping struck Mia and the experts—the very few who knew about it—as a reasonably well but not exactingly planned mission. A forty-eight-hour plan versus a one-month-in-the-making plan.

Her assumption had been that profit was the motive. Greed, not power and secrets. Except Mia wasn't so sure about that anymore, either.

A profit motive she could understand. As a Texas Carhill, Ham had to have been a prime target for kidnappers-for-ransom in the wild circles in which he operated. He didn't advertise his background, but if someone shady—someone like Bobby Tatro—did happen to find out about Carhill's extreme wealth, then it made sense; snatch him, demand a ransom, get paid a fortune and either let him go or kill him. It was straightforward.