Blood on the Tracks (13 page)

“The whole
platoon
?” I gaped at him. “Did you tell her what would happen if the story came out?”

“’Course I did. Told her everybody’d been through enough and deserved a chance to put it behind them. She argued with me at first. But when I told her all that would happen is a whole lot of pain for a whole lot of people, she let it go. She understood.” He smoothed a hand over his scarred scalp. “I thought that was that.”

“What’s changed your mind?”

“I got a call from Jeezer.”

“Jeezer.”

“Jeremy Kane. Our fireteam leader. He and I joined the Marines at the same time. Signed up for the buddy program and deployed together. He called and told me Elise had dropped by.”

“To talk about the war.”

“She told him the same thing she’d told me. That he needed to come clean.”

“When was this?”

“Three, four days ago.”

“Shit.” I closed my eyes, gathered myself, finally looked at Rhodes again. “Elise talk to anyone else in your team? In your squad?”

“Honest to God, I don’t know. She didn’t say nothing to me. I thought we was done with that.” His jaw worked. “The last time we talked, she told me that she’d be done with everything in a week.”

“You know what she meant by that?”

“Figured it was one of her projects. She had a lot of those. Helping people with this or that. I never guessed it might be Habbaniyah.”

“So this Jeremy Kane. He lives in Denver?”

“Littleton.”

“Would he—?”

“No. Not Jeezer. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. And why tell me about her visit if he was gonna, you know, shut her up? Not any of the other guys in our squad, neither. He just wanted me to talk to her.”

“What about your platoon? Why did she think the entire platoon needed to confess?”

By now we’d leaned in so close to each other that our faces were inches apart.

“The platoon didn’t know any details,” Rhodes said. “But they knew we was all the sudden getting hit hard and that it had to do with our team, something we’d done. They were pissed at us, at least at first. But they were more pissed at the Iraqis. They backed us up—we all went a little crazy when it came time to clear streets and houses. We wasn’t exactly worried about hearts and minds.”

“Okay.” I considered this. “If your platoon didn’t know the story, then they’d have no reason to kill someone to keep it quiet. The fact that some of us weren’t saints over there isn’t breaking news. Every American in Iraq was pissed off at the insurgents.”

He nodded.

“So who, then?” I pressed.

“I’m thinking she found someone to talk to who has a lot more to lose even than me and Jeezer and the others. After we found Resenko in that house, it was Sarge who handled things. He’s the one called your CO. But we always figured there was someone higher up. Someone who’d, you know, be in a hell of a bad place if the truth came out about how Resenko and Haifa died and that, after, we’d been ordered to keep it on the QT. I asked Sarge about it. He just gave me a funny look and told me to shut up. Do my time, go home, and keep my pie hole closed. Then the IED happened.” Tucker cleared his throat. “I went home, all right.”

I’d believed the same thing. The Sir wouldn’t take orders from a sergeant. And he didn’t know anyone in Rhodes’s fireteam well enough to do them a personal favor of this magnitude. Someone else was involved. I’d just never understood why it mattered to any of the brass that Resenko’d had an affair, even if the woman involved was Iraqi.

I placed the flat of my hands against my neck. “How would Elise find that person?”

“I don’t know. But she was smart. She could’ve maybe talked to Sarge, gotten a name from him.”

The headache nudged its way deeper into my brain. I pushed back from the table and went to lean against the wall with my arms folded. The pain in my hands and face popped alive as if I’d hit a switch.

So who
would
the Sir have taken an order from? Or maybe not even an order. Maybe a request he felt honor-bound to answer. Maybe it wasn’t someone in his chain of command, but someone else he respected or trusted.

Was it possible that this unknown person figured hiding the truth was worth one more death?

A flicker of white-hot anger broke through my exhaustion. All of this for what? Because some corporal couldn’t keep his dick in his pants?

“Tell me one thing, Rhodes,” I said in a harsh whisper. “Did the Marine they killed—”

“Dave Resenko.”

“Did he love her? Did he love Haifa?”

He looked surprised. “You know her name?”

“I processed her body, Rhodes. Remember that? I might have lied about how she died, but I still handled her remains. I
altered
her remains and Resenko’s to cover up how they died.”

And I took her son.

“Hell yeah, he loved her,” Rhodes said. “Haifa was our ’terp. Rode with us everywhere, brave as a Marine. Braver, because she didn’t have a gun or armor or nothing. Resenko, man, he had it bad for her. His wife was sleeping with some guy she met at a fucking Home Depot, told Resenko she wanted a divorce. So Rinks was gonna bring Haifa back with him. The US State Department was offering special visas for people like her. Staties made a shitload of promises. But it was all lies.”

There’d been a lot of cases like Haifa’s. The Iraqis helped us, working as interpreters or mechanics or administrators. Then were killed for it by their own people when we mustered home.

“They were gonna bring Haifa’s son, too,” Rhodes said.

I looked down so Rhodes couldn’t see my face. “Malik. Yeah. I heard.”

Malik, the boy crying in the front room. Malik, whom I’d wrapped in a blanket and placed in the front seat of our van while the body of his mother bled into a body bag in the back. Malik, who’d crept into my heart and made a home there.

I’d tried with everything I had to bring him back with me. I’d worked with USAID, the State Department, Christian charities, the List Project.

But I’d failed. In the end, I’d had to choose between home and Iraq. Between Malik and Grams. Between having a life and giving one up.

I returned to the table. “So the insurgents killed Haifa and Resenko for sleeping together, or maybe just for loving each other. And then our own private war started, didn’t it? You and your buddies went after the men you thought killed Resenko. And their friends retaliated by going hard after every Marine in the area.”

He didn’t look at me.

“And now, if you don’t confess, you’re going to go to trial for Elise’s murder. And everyone in the world will learn what happened over there.”

“I didn’t kill her.”

“So you say.” I placed my wounded palms on the table and leaned in until I could see the blood vessels in his eyes. “Now you’ve asked for me, and here I am. What is it, exactly, you want me to do? Find the high-ranking officer you think is behind all this and beg him to confess? Not only to lying about Resenko’s death and covering it up, but to murdering Elise? That’s what you want from me?”

Rhodes’s face showed both defiance and regret. And something that was kissing cousins to anguish. “Yes.”

“Anything else?”

He shook his head.

“You do know that if I find this phantasm and arrest him,
he’ll
go to trial, and Habbaniyah will still come out.”

“Maybe it’s time,” Rhodes said. “Maybe Elise was right.”

I glared at him. Thoughts like that kept me up at night.

“Corporal Parnell, I don’t want to go down in history as Elise’s killer. I don’t want to have
this
face on everybody’s TV. I don’t want to sit in a courtroom and look at pictures of her—” He broke a little here, and I waited. “Of what was done to her. I don’t want the media swarming in front of my dad’s house or to have to watch my dad’s heart break in two. And I most especially don’t want Elise’s killer to walk free.”

His eyes followed me as I moved to the window. “You helped us before. I need your help again.”

At the window, I rested my forehead against the glass. “No.”

“Marine to Marine.”

“No.”

“Corporal—”

“Goddammit, Rhodes.” I whirled on him. “I still don’t know that you didn’t kill her. The knife. The blood. The timing with you riding into Denver when you did. Hell, it’s about as textbook as it gets. Maybe all this talk about some mysterious officer is just some crazy conspiracy theory you’ve cooked up to make yourself look innocent. Everything points to you, Rhodes. Everything.”

“If someone wanted to set me up, would you expect any different from whoever handled Resenko’s death?”

“This mystery man didn’t put blood on your uniform or a knife in your hand.”

“No. I probably—I probably picked her up. Held her. So this guy, this killer, he gets lucky because my head’s not straight.”

I ignored the thumping in my chest and waved my hand dismissively. “It’s too crazy. I don’t buy it.”

“Please. Just talk to Jeezer. Ask him if he’s heard anything. And the Sarge—Max Udell. See if they know anything. After you talk to them, you can think about what to do. If you do anything at all.”

“Shit.”

“Please.”

I stared at those lonely lights burning along the street two stories down. I remembered one of my favorite sayings, about how it’s better to light a single candle than to sit and curse the dark. I’d used that one a lot in Iraq.

Malik had been the candle I’d tried to light, and look where that got me.

“I’ll think about it,” I finally said, turning back to him. “That’s as much as I can give you right now.”

The desperation in his face flattened to despair. But he took it like a Marine.

“Thank you, Corporal. For whatever you can do.”

I grabbed my coat and scarf and recorder. “You want me to call your parents?”

“Not my mom. She’s busy with her own life.”

“Your dad, then.”

He looked out the window for a moment, finally shook his head. “He’s got cancer. He’s dying. He don’t need anything else on him.”

“I’m sorry, Rhodes.”

“Yeah.”

I hit the buzzer, waited for Cohen to let me out.

“Hope your life turns out okay, ma’am,” Rhodes said. “Whatever you decide. Jeezer and me and the rest, we’ll always owe you one from the war.”

Cohen opened the door and held it for me, told Rhodes he’d return in just a minute. The uniform went back into the room. Suicide watch.

I found myself turning back as the door fell shut. Rhodes had once again clasped his arm across his chest as if to hold in the pain. He didn’t look well. I wondered if maybe the docs had released him too soon.

I craned my neck for a last glimpse, some final insight. But Rhodes’s scarred face was a mask, showing nothing.

“Pretty smooth, Parnell,” Cohen said. “Covering the audio and visual.”

“Marine business.”

“Go okay?” he asked.

“Went like shit.”

C
HAPTER
12

Any Marine will tell you the hardest thing to live with once you’re home is the guilt. Guilt over what you did or didn’t do when the bombs exploded and the mortars shrieked into the road and enemy snipers picked off everyone standing.

Did you run? If you ran, did you go back for your buddies? Were any of your squad mates trapped in an Abrams or Humvee, screaming for help while flames raced toward the fuel tanks?

Worse, did you not go out of the wire that day at all? You were having a bad morning so someone went in your stead, and now they’re bringing him back in a body bag, and in your nightmares he keeps asking why you let him die.

It was your turn, he says as he sits in the tank night after night after night. Burning.

Your turn.

—Sydney Parnell. Personal journal.

Cohen led me back to Homicide.

Len Bandoni stood and watched our approach with furious eyes. When we were still ten feet away, he addressed me around an unlit cigarette tucked in the corner of his mouth.

“You two have a nice little chat?”

“Gone better with a couple of cocktails.”

“He gonna confess?”

“Says he didn’t do it.”

“Shit.” Bandoni plopped in his chair and stared at his gut like it was one more thing weighing on him. Like he wasn’t sure how all the beer and burgers had come to this. “Him and Ted Bundy. Innocent as the day they were born.”

Cohen resettled himself on Bandoni’s desk. “He give you anything?”

“Not really. He says he remembers standing in front of the door to her bedroom and having a bad feeling. But he can’t remember anything after that until he reached the 7-Eleven. Then he blacked out again until the train.”

“A bad feeling,” Bandoni scoffed. “Was it an I’m-gonna-butcher-my-girlfriend kind of bad feeling?”

“I don’t think so.”

“How’d he explain the blood?” Cohen asked.

“He thinks maybe he picked her up after he found her. Held her.”

Cohen chewed on that. “And the knife?”

“Says he has no idea.”

Bandoni moved the cigarette to the other side of his mouth. “You got all this on tape, of course.”

“No.” I pulled Cohen’s recorder out of my pocket and placed it on his desk.

Heat rose in his neck. “You gonna tell me why not?”

“That was as much as we talked about Elise’s death, Bandoni. He’s genuinely grieving, you ask me. But he’s scared, too, doesn’t want people thinking of him as her killer. He’s not going to confess.”

“Douche bag shoulda thought of that twenty-four hours ago.” He jiggled the recorder in his hand. “You know, Special Agent Parnell, you’re not making any friends here.”

“It’s not why I came.”

“Yeah, I know. Semper Fi and all that shit.”

A sudden tiredness washed over me, a wave so high and wide it nearly flattened me. I sank into the chair. “I don’t know if he’s guilty or not. But I’d swear he doesn’t remember. If it turns out he killed her, his lawyer will go for an insanity defense and probably get it.”

“Not gonna happen,” Bandoni snarled, his face purple. “I won’t
let
it happen. Trust me, I’ve seen the best goddamn liars the world has to offer. But you hit ’em with enough evidence, and eventually they cave.”

He held up a piece of paper where he’d jotted down a list and popped the paper with each word. “Knife. Bloody uniform. A long-standing relationship with the vic. Hobo sign. We got that picture frame missing from her house that he buried in his camp, and him carrying the photo. Witnesses at the house and in the camp. Known PTSD case.”

“You don’t worry much about being wrong, do you, Bandoni?” I asked.

“Because I’m never wrong.”

“Don’t lose much sleep, either, do you?”

“Only time I lose sleep is when I let the bad guy walk. So mark me on this. I need my beauty rest. Rhodes ain’t gonna walk.”

The man, I realized, was an avalanche. An entire mountain ready to roar down on you, prepared to entomb you with his lists and his gut and his thoughts about your eyes. The righteous cop.

He’d bury Rhodes.

Maybe that was exactly what made a good murder cop.

I glanced at Cohen, who looked like he had a year ago when we were standing by the jumper’s body. Like a gateway had opened up to somewhere he didn’t want to go. He took a drink of something out of a plastic cup and avoided my gaze.

“You’re white as a ghost, Parnell,” Bandoni said abruptly, giving me the eye. “Pastier coming out than you were going in. You were in there a long time, even without cocktails. How long does your Semper Fi crap take?”

“Well, you know. Railroad cops are notoriously slow. It’s not like we know what we’re doing.”

An eyebrow went up. “Finally. Something we can agree on.”

“Fuck you, Bandoni.”

He opened his hands. “Sure. Just don’t take an age to do it.”

I pushed my hands in my pockets so I wouldn’t wrap my hands around his throat. I hunched my shoulders against a sudden need for sleep, an excruciating desire to fall into unconsciousness. Almost twitching with guilt, I forced myself to my feet. “Can we trade insults later? I need to get some air. And a smoke.”

“Sure,” Bandoni said with a small, knowing smile. “Take your time. Think of something good.”

“I’m not a suspect,” I snapped at him.

“I read that interview you did in the
Denver Post
. All that stuff about ghosts and everything. You really believe that shit?”

I tried one last time. “You know, Bandoni, I like a good fight, same as you. But aren’t we on the same side here?”

“Are we?”

Cohen jumped in. “You can smoke outside. On the plaza.”

He was scrutinizing me, too. Like maybe our buddy-buddy days were over. Lesson for the day—it doesn’t pay to go against murder cops.

“When you’re done,” he went on, “why don’t you come back up and watch us chat with Rhodes? Maybe you’ll catch something we miss.”

“Okay. Sure.” I looked at the cigarette in Bandoni’s mouth. Thing about being a smoker fresh off the wagon—you can want to disembowel a guy and still hope to bum a cigarette from him. “Got an extra?”

With that same tight smile, Bandoni pulled a crushed pack of Salems and a plastic lighter from an inside pocket. “Keep ’em. I’m trying to quit.”

“I need an escort back out?”

Cohen stood. “I’ll walk you to the elevator.”

“And, Parnell,” said Bandoni. “Don’t go wandering off, right? Got a few more things to go over.”

I shrugged and moved away. Turned back. “One thing you guys should know. Rhodes says Elise always kept a key under her doormat. Wanted hobos to feel welcome, even when she wasn’t home.”

“A key,” Bandoni said. “Ain’t that convenient for our forgetful little killer?”

Outside, a pearl-gray line smeared the eastern horizon just visible between the glass and steel silhouettes of downtown Denver. I sat on a bench in the wide concrete plaza and shivered in my coat, staring at the fallen officer memorial as I smoked Bandoni’s cigarettes. Five of them. One after the other, like a junkie, until the nicotine gave me the shakes.

Dawn is a favorite time for ghosts. Perhaps because we mortals are at our most fragile then, sleep-wrecked, bleary-eyed, still lost in a world where only moonlight leads the way. But perhaps it is also because we are at our most hopeful in the morning, trailing Wordsworth’s intimations of immortality into a new day. We awaken with a full allotment of light stretching ahead of us before night closes in again.

This witch’s brew of vulnerability and fear and hope makes dawn the time when we can best hear whatever it is our ghosts are trying to tell us.

But not today, apparently. I sat alone in the courtyard, shivering, smoking, watching the pearl of sunrise spread to a gray swath without a whisper of gold in it, listening to the growl of traffic climb from the mewling of kittens to a lion’s roar. Today might devour me, and neither the Sir nor Elise nor my faithful private were there to offer any clarification.

Fair-weather friends.

I knocked ash on the ground.

If Rhodes was innocent—a big if—and if he were right that Elise’s death had something to do with Habbaniyah and Resenko and Haifa, then exposing the killer meant I’d be hunting for what amounted to my own suicide. If the entire truth came out—everything we’d done while we still wore the uniform—there’d be a court-martial and jail time. Loss of honor. Loss of my job and my benefits, which were my only means of supporting Grams and Clyde. I’d lose my education reimbursement and flush away the future I was trying to imagine for myself.

But if this mysterious officer had killed Elise and framed Rhodes for it—and if he’d done a good enough job of it that he’d buried Habbaniyah as well—then Rhodes would take the fall for all the world to see and judge. He would forever be the beast who slew Beauty.

Let him go down, some part of me urged. Let him go down and then shovel the dirt in after him
and
Habbaniyah. Close the hole and be done.

“Fucking suck,” I said to the baleful windows of DPD headquarters.

Who was it that said once you save a life, you must keep that life safe forever? How was I supposed to stand back and let Rhodes go down, watch him pay for the sins of others? Pay multiple times. Once by going off to war. Again by covering for Resenko. Then a third time by taking the rap for the death of the woman he loved.

Especially, I realized, when my heart could not believe Tucker was guilty. Maybe
needed
for him to not be guilty. Because if he could kill the woman he loved, what did that say about the rest of us wounded warriors? What were any of us capable of when the monster took hold?

I finished my final cigarette and crushed it beneath my foot just as Cohen came out bearing two Styrofoam cups. The sun found a break in the mercury denseness of the sky and lit his face with sudden warmth. The light should have made him look older, with his unshaven chin and his face like a rumpled sheet. Instead, he looked younger. Vulnerable. I noticed again that his suit, as worn and scruffy as his face, was expensive, his overcoat stylish, his shoes of good leather. Maybe that’s where he put all his money. He certainly hadn’t put it into a haircut.

“You didn’t come back.” He sat next to me and handed me one of the cups. “Coffee with lots of cream and sugar. I figured you could use both after doing my job for me yesterday and bringing in Rhodes.”

We exchanged small smiles. Cohen’s was the dry, cynical smile of a cop. Mine probably looked the same.

“Thanks for the coffee.”

Another smile, this one a little more real. “So did he appreciate your saving his life? Or did he want to kick your ass?”

“He isn’t happy with me.”

“He give up anything we can use? Anything at all?”

I slid into the lie like a seal into water. “Other than what I told you, we just talked about Iraq. You and Bandoni learn anything?”

His eyes narrowed, and I got the distinct feeling he’d seen right through me. That he’d taken note of my transgression and filed it away for later.

“He
is
pretty convincing,” Cohen said. “Whatever he did or didn’t do, I think he really believes he’s innocent. Bandoni’s not buying it, though. Figures he’s faking the memory loss.”

“Seems to me everything you’ve got is circumstantial.”

“Until we get the ME’s report.”

“Then it becomes evidence.”

“Evidence is pretty much what we hang our hats on.”

I took a big swallow of lukewarm coffee, frowned at the sweetness of it. “Give me something, Cohen. Some little piece of evidence that’ll give me a gap I can slide my foot into.”

“You want your Marine to be innocent.” He rolled his neck. His spine popped. “There is one possible ray of sunshine.”

“Yeah?”

“Remember the hobo beads? We showed them to Rhodes, told him they were found near his girlfriend’s body. He freaked out. We had to wait for him to settle. Then he says they look like his beads—one of them even has
Screw Iraq
carved on it. But he claims his were stolen in Wyoming. And also that a lot of hobos wear them, including vets. So they might or might not be his. That true?”

“It’s true.”

I dropped my elbows to my thighs, kept my face blank as I ran through the list of possibilities. Another tramp, one who’d served in Iraq. Tucker’s thief. Or our mysterious officer, planting evidence. “Does he know who stole them?”

Cohen sighed like it hurt. “Assuming we believe him?”

“Assuming that.”

“Says he was asleep. But he claims some skinhead jumped him in Wolf, and it was that night his beads went missing. I asked why the Nazi went after him. He says it just happens like that sometimes—he gets jumped because people don’t like his face. Doc backs up his story to the extent that Rhodes has a nice set of two- or three-day-old bruises and a pretty good scrape.”

“Who won the fight?”

“Rhodes says it was close, but he’d of won on points.”

“So it’s payback time? This guy, this random, angry asshole, gets to Denver first and takes out his hate on Elise?”

Cohen shrugged. “That’s one theory. Seems thin. How would the Nazi even know about her?”