His gaze locked on her. “I need your help.”
The drizzle glistened on his hair and jacket, but he didn’t seem to notice. Juliet licked her lips, tasting the gloss. “I hope you want me to help you move a sofa or something, because if it involves my work—”
“I need a name.”
Juliet pulled her hands out of her pockets and realized the steps were shiny with rain, that she and Ethan were the only ones on Wall Street not rushing for cars, cabs, restaurants and offices. “Sure you don’t want to go for coffee? We could get out of the rain.”
Brooker shook his head. “I have a flight that leaves in ninety minutes.”
“Ethan, what the hell—” She contained a sudden bite of impatience. “All right. Go ahead. Give me what you’ve got. If it makes sense and I can help you, I will.”
“I need the name of a man—an American in his midthirties. I don’t have a good description. Dark, curly hair. Good-looking.”
“That doesn’t give me much to go on. What else?”
“He’s an ex-con.”
“Ah. Now we’re in my world. But you still have to narrow down the possibilities—”
“He’s after a blond, female marshal.”
Juliet looked at her hands, saw that they were slick now with the rain. “There are other blond, female marshals.”
“I need a name, Juliet.”
She leveled her gaze on him. “Why?”
He shook his head. “I can’t say. If you take this up the food chain, I still won’t be able to say. But I’ll get my name, one way or the other.”
A year ago, Ethan Brooker was a respected, decorated career Special Forces officer. Then his wife, an army captain, was murdered in Amsterdam. When the official investigation stalled—Ethan went after answers on his own. His search took him to Night’s Landing, Tennessee, where he posed as a property manager for the Dunnemores, a prominent southern family whose friend and neighbor was John Wesley Poe, the newly elected U.S. president.
Ethan ended up helping to expose Nick Janssen, who’d schemed to capitalize on his connection to both the Dunnemores and President Poe and extort a presidential pardon for himself. Months earlier, Janssen had skipped the country to avoid federal tax fraud charges—but he wasn’t a simple tax evader. By the time his plot backfired, the world knew he was an international criminal with an extensive network of illegal arms traders, drug dealers, murderers and extortionists.
Janssen had deliberately ordered the murder of U.S. Army Captain Charlene Brooker, whose questions the previous fall had come too close to him and, ultimately, led to her death.
But it wasn’t until August that Nick Janssen, with Ethan hot on his tail, finally was taken into custody in the Netherlands. He was still in a Dutch prison, fighting extradition to the U.S. to face a jury for his crimes. In a last-ditch attempt to control his own fate, he’d hired an assassin—Ethan had been on her target list. But Libby Smith, too, was in prison, not far, Juliet thought, from where she, Ethan and George Washington stood.
“Ethan,” she said, pausing for a breath. “I can’t let you suck me into another of your semi-legitimate enterprises.”
“This one’s legit.”
“How? Who are you working for—”
“I need the name, Juliet. Everything you have on this guy.”
She squinted up at the gray sky amid the skyscrapers, a fat raindrop splatting hard on her forehead. Wiping it off, she looked down at the pedestrians enduring the tight Wall Street security with a nonchalance that was both inspiring and sad. There’d be no going back to pre-9/11 days.
And no going back, she thought, to the days before she’d met Ethan Brooker over two of Janssen’s dead henchmen, one of whom had pulled the trigger on the gun that had killed Ethan’s wife.
Char Brooker had died just a year ago. Ethan hadn’t even remotely begun to live a normal life again.
“Bobby Tatro,” Juliet said. “That’s the name you want.”
“Who is he?”
“An ex-con who doesn’t like me. He got out of federal prison in late August, about the time you were here.”
“Have you heard from him?”
She shook her head, feeling the rain dripping from the ends of her short curls now. Although her hair wasn’t saturated, it was getting there. “Not since he went to prison. I picked him up in Syracuse four years ago. He failed to deliver himself to serve his sentence—he was on the lam for about three months.”
“How’d you find him?”
She ran a toe over a tiny pool of freshly fallen rain and didn’t look at Brooker. “I was in the right place at the right time. A Wal-Mart parking lot, as it turns out.” She raised her gaze to the man next to her, realized she didn’t know him at all—and she shouldn’t fool herself into thinking she did. “You have access to his file, don’t you?”
He nodded. “I can get his file.”
“Everything I have is there—”