Blood on the Tracks (Sydney Rose Parnell Series Book 1)

by Barbara Nickless

  Bandoni resumed his seat. The chair squealed.

  “What if he really has amnesia?”

  “You’re kidding me, right?”

  “By itself, amnesia doesn’t grant incompetence,” Cohen said. “But in combination with other factors, such as his war experiences, a judge could rule incompetency or take an insanity plea.”

  “So what would happen to him then?” I asked. “Same result, right? No trial, but an indictment.”

  Bandoni dropped the remains of the shredded coffee cup into the trash. “Judge rules incompetency, Rhodes won’t do a day of jail time. He’ll spend a couple of years in a cushy nut-job facility, then get released when some do-gooder psychiatrist decides he’s redeemed himself.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “It cross your mind that might be exactly what he needs?”

  “Please,” Bandoni drawled, extending the word to two syllables. Puh-leeze. “You saw the girl.”

  “I know what war can do.”

  He looked like he might throttle me. “She’s some relative of yours, right?”

  “Family friend.”

  Bandoni yanked a photo out of the file on his desk and slapped it on top of the other papers. A picture from the crime scene with a close-up of Elise’s ruined body.

  “Don’t,” I snapped. “Don’t pull that manipulative shit on me.”

  “I’m sure you can imagine what her last moments were like. The terror she felt. The pain. Trapped in that room with her killer. Him coming after her with the knife, and her with nothing to do but put her arms in front of her face and beg.”

  “Stop.”

  Bandoni leaned forward in his chair and got in my face, peering into my eyes like a priest seeking proof of remorse. When he spoke again, his voice was almost gentle. “Does having him get out in a couple of years seem like justice to you, Special Agent Parnell? You really okay with that?”

  “Okay, Len,” Cohen said. “Back off.”

  I dropped my forearms to my thighs and stared at the stained blue carpet, turning Elise’s brutal death over in my mind, like trying to polish a jagged stone. How do you decide between insanity and culpability when someone’s brain has been slammed around like a soccer ball? How different was Rhodes now from the man he’d been before Iraq? How responsible was he for his actions? When he took the knife to the woman he claimed to love, how much was Rhodes the man really present? And how much was he the beast that war makes?

  Can you let war split a man in two, then turn around and expect the pieces to fit back together?

  I sat up. The two detectives regarded me, Cohen with a distant concern, Bandoni with angry hopefulness. But I had something bigger to protect. Whatever happened, whatever Rhodes wanted to say to me, I couldn’t let them know about Habbaniyah.

  “I’ll talk to him,” I said. “But no camera or recorders.”

  Bandoni’s neck flushed. “Excuse me?”

  “Rhodes asked for me. Maybe what he wants to talk about’s got nothing to do with Elise. Maybe he wants to talk about Iraq. Or about his family and how they don’t get what he’s been through. Maybe he just wants to spit on me for bringing him back. None of that is relevant to your case. I want to talk to him privately first.”

  Bandoni’s face went red. “Fuck me.”

  “Turns out he does want to confess, then I’ll switch on the recorder. But not before then.”

  A vein pulsed in the middle of Bandoni’s forehead. “You’re a goddamned railroad cop, not a homicide investigator. You have no fucking idea what you’re doing. You could let a lot of important stuff go by, sail right past your ears. Jesus, please. Just turn on the fucking recorder. We promise not to listen to the part where he’s crying about not being understood.”

  “Or I could just go home.”

  “You smug little—” He whirled on Cohen. “Whose idea was this? Whose idea to bring in a fucking railroad cop?”

  “No. It’s okay.” Cohen kicked the drawer closed and slid off the desk, looking at me. “What you’re saying is reasonable. As long as you’re willing to turn on the recorder if he gives you anything about Elise’s death.”

  Bandoni’s eyes went to Cohen, and some signal passed between them. The older detective huffed once and returned to his file, giving us the immense expanse of his back, like closing the gates to the Wall of Jericho.

  “Knock yourself out,” he said without turning around.

  CHAPTER 11

  No one can understand war like those who have been in it with you. And no one is closer than those who have suffered with you and died next to you.

  Those who have protected you, and whom you have protected, are bonded more closely even than by blood.

  —Sydney Parnell, ENGL 0208, Psychology of Combat

  Cohen took a small digital recorder from another desk—presumably his—and showed me the basics. I dropped the recorder in my right pants pocket, then followed Cohen down another hall and past a series of closed doors. He stopped in front of a door with the number three on it.

  “Video and microphone are on,” he said. “I’ll turn them off from the observation room. When you’re ready to leave, or if you run into a problem, there’s a buzzer on the wall near your side of the table. Once I turn off the audio and visual, I’ll be right outside.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t wreck the case for us, Parnell.”

  “No,” I said.

  He unlocked and opened the door. A uniform stood and nodded at Cohen and me, then stepped out.

  The interview room was an eight-by-ten holding cell decorated in peeling plaster. A single window broke up the far wall, the glass reinforced with black wire. In the middle of the room was a metal table, bolted to the floor, and two metal and vinyl chairs.

  I paused in the doorway.

  Rhodes sat in the far chair, his left hand fisted against his cheek, staring off into a distance that went far beyond the confines of the interview room. His right wrist was handcuffed to a metal ring welded to the table. His fire-scarred face, yellow and pink in the pitiless lights, made me clutch for Dougie’s ring where it hung beneath my turtleneck.

  “Fucking suck of a war,” I whispered.

  At the sound of my voice, Rhodes startled and came back from wherever he’d been. Cohen warned him to behave himself and left, closing the door behind him.

  Rhodes watched in silence as I shrugged out of my coat, dragged a chair to the camera in the corner, climbed up and draped my coat over the lens. I took off my scarf and wrapped it around the microphone. I then removed my own digital recorder, which I’d brought from home. I set it on the floor near the muffled microphone and hit play. The buzz of a busy restaurant filled the room. The clatter of cutlery, the murmur of voices. Someone calling up orders. It was an old recording I’d made when I once inadvertently hit the power button at the diner where I was eating breakfast. I’d kept the recording because when I was in one of my dark moods, the innocuous sounds of people going about their day soothed me. A lonely person’s white noise.

  Satisfied that anything we said would be sufficiently distorted, I dragged the chair back to the table and took a seat across from Rhodes. I held up a finger to warn him to remain silent for a few minutes longer to see if there would be any reaction to my maneuverings. When three or four minutes went by with no response from Cohen, I gave Rhodes a nod.

  At first he said nothing, only continued to study me. The emerald eyes glittered in his ruined face. When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet. “It is you. I can tell even with those shiners. The woman in the yellow scarf. From Mortuary Affairs.”

  “Yes.”

  “All the way from one side of the world to the other, and here we are again.”

  “With another dead woman between us.”

  He didn’t flinch. But something in his eyes pulled away. “You remember me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even the way I am now?”

  “All I saw of you that night were your eyes.”

  “Yeah
. ’Course.” He ran the thumb of his free hand along the table. His skin came back gray. “My mom used to say I had girls’ eyes. Wasn’t fair, she said. Me having girls’ eyes.” He rubbed the grime onto his road-filthy jeans. “Miracle they didn’t blow all to hell, too.”

  He’d been a kid when that IED set his vehicle on fire and engulfed his life. Was still a kid. Right about now he should be deciding whether he wanted to go to school or find a job. Spending his days helping his dad on the ranch while he figured things out. Spending his Friday nights drinking beer with his friends, his Saturdays with a girl.

  “I’m truly sorry for what happened to you.”

  “Yeah?” He shrugged, Marine tough. “Not me sitting in that seat, would have been someone else.”

  “Is that what we could say about Elise? She’d been someone else’s girlfriend, maybe this wouldn’t have happened?”

  He held my gaze. A vein throbbed in his neck. “You shouldn’t have brought me back from out there. You should have left me in the storm. Elise and me, we’d be together now.”

  I waited.

  “I didn’t kill her.”

  I stayed silent.

  “I worried that I might. You go through that sometimes, right? Worry the pressure is gonna build and build until it screams out of you like a bomb going off?” He turned his manacled wrist back and forth. “Then you’ll just be some killing machine. A fucking terminator.”

  Bandoni would shit himself that I wasn’t recording this.

  “I know what you mean,” I said. And I did.

  In ancient times, soldiers called it going amok—a descent into the battle craziness that took you out of yourself and dropped you into the warrior’s world of blood and darkness. Going amok was a form of insanity prized by the Greeks and Spartans and Vikings—it made for great warriors. Thus did Achilles slay Hector, Beowulf defeat Grendel.

  But unless you bring your heroes back to themselves—with a ritual purification or with a journey of some sort, like Odysseus’s long struggle home or World War II vets taking weeks to sail back across the sea together—there is a price to pay when the bloodied warrior returns. These days, soldiers return from Iraq and Afghanistan alone and in a matter of hours. We drop them back into society as if they were widgets that have simply gone missing for a while. But a lot of the widgets are bent hopelessly out of shape.

  I put my hands in my pockets. “Is that what happened, Rhodes? You snapped? Elise said something, told you to leave maybe, and you went off on her?”

  The stink of oil and sweat lifted off his grease-stained flannel shirt and jeans as he shifted around.

  “I was so scared of that blackness,” he said, “that I up and left her a couple of months ago. Scared of myself. Scared for her. But then she called me, said she’d marry me. I knew then that she didn’t care about me being a monster. She loved me. We thought maybe that was enough to, you know, kill the beast. I’d get counseling. Finish up my surgeries. Get the pain under control with something other than drugs and booze. I heard they got some new computer program, some video game that you play and it helps.”

  I’d heard of it, too, but I hadn’t looked into it. Booze killed the pain, too, and it was a lot easier to find.

  “Elise and I—” His eyes grew red, and he sucked in wet, clotted air. “I thought maybe we could have something together. Something good and real. A family. A little girl. A little boy.”

  “Would you hit your kids like you hit her?”

  “I never hit her. No matter how mad I got.”

  “You’re lying to me, Rhodes.”

  His shoulders came up like walls. He let go a few ragged sobs then slowly exhaled, flattening his free hand on the table and breathing like he’d just outrun a locomotive.

  “I didn’t hurt her. I never hurt her. I couldn’t have killed her.”

  My fingers touched Cohen’s recorder, pushed it further down into my pocket. “Then what did happen?”

  “I don’t know. Honest to God, I can’t remember. I was standing outside the door to her bedroom, and I got a bad feeling. Then . . . nothing. Came to in a bathroom somewhere. Then I was gone again until I was on that train.”

  “You had a knife.”

  “That’s what they told me.” He ground the heel of one hand against his forehead. “I swear to God, I don’t remember.”

  “Last night you told me Elise understood what you’d done, like she was okay with it. Then you told me how fucked up you were.” I kept my face hard. “Losing your freedom bring a little clarity on what you were admitting to? Make you change your mind?”

  Beneath his rigid skin, his jaw bunched. “I don’t blame you for thinking the worst. But things have changed since last night.”

  “How’s that?”

  “She came to me. When they were bringing me here in the ambulance. And I don’t mean like in a dream. I mean like she was as real as you. I could feel her breath on my cheek, see her eyes looking into mine. She always—” He looked toward the window, the set of his jaw like a wall brooking no access. “She always loved my eyes. My stupid girls’ eyes.”

  I followed his gaze. Streetlamps burned along the street below, lonely, feeble glows.

  But Elise was with me last night, I wanted to say. In my car. But if our ghosts are our guilt, I guess there’s no reason we can’t share.

  “Nice of her to drop in,” I said. “I don’t suppose she told you who did kill her.”

  “She didn’t say nothing. But I know she was trying to tell me that we’re still together. Still a team. And she wouldn’t have felt that way if I’d just—if I’d hurt her, right? She was saying it wasn’t me who did that to her.”

  I thought about Bandoni’s need for details. For proof. “Did what, exactly?”

  His eyes came back to mine. “They said . . .” His voice turned thick again. “They said I sliced her to pieces. Like I was butchering a calf, is what they told me.”

  “That’s about right. Exactly what you learned to do on your dad’s ranch, right?”

  “Not like that.”

  I moved in for the kill. “Elise was a devout Christian?”

  “What?” He pinched the corners of his eyes. “Yeah.”

  “So maybe she came to see you last night just to let you know she forgives you.”

  His face went south suddenly, and what little fire had been in his eyes faded to dull embers.

  Feeling like an executioner, I went on. “Did you kill her, Rhodes? Do you think maybe you might have killed her? Marine to Marine. I need to know. It will affect everything else we say to each other in this room. It will affect everything that happens from here on out.”

  Rhodes jerked his bound hand, yanking the chain so hard that the table, still bolted into the floor, trembled. I leaned away from the agony in his face.

  “No,” he said. “No. That isn’t what she meant. That isn’t why she was there. She came to tell me she’s waiting for me. And that before me and her can be together again, I have to fix things.”

  “You sure that’s how you want to play it? Think carefully, Rhodes. If you confess, it will make things a lot easier on you. You won’t go to jail. They’ll put you in a facility. You’ll get the help you need. You’ll get your life back.”

  “You know what they used to call us? Beauty and the Beast. People would say to her, ‘Why don’t you kiss him, see if he turns into a prince?’ Elise wants me to make sure people don’t think they were right about me and her. That they don’t think this is how our love ended.”

  “That the Beast slew Beauty,” I said softly.

  He turned as far away from me as he could get, which wasn’t far with the cuff around his wrist. But when he buried his face with his free hand, we were a million miles apart.

  Even more softly, I said, “None of us came back from that war the same, Rhodes.”

  He just shook his head, and I waited him out. The only sound in the room was his ragged breathing. From beyond the heavy door came the faintest murmur of voices
and a high trill that might have been a phone ringing. A faint thump sounded against the wall. Cohen moving around, maybe.

  After a while, Rhodes wiped his eyes on his sleeve, straightened his body toward the table, and came back to me. I sensed he had found a place to put the pain.

  “Do you know why I asked to see you?”

  I jerked a thumb toward the door, reminding him of Cohen’s presence in the hallway. Quietly I said, “Habbaniyah.”

  He nodded. “Elise kept a key under the rug at her front door. So anyone could have come in and hurt her. But why? Everyone loved her. The hobos. The people at that diner where she worked. I been asking myself, who ever hurts a saint?”

  I didn’t point out that saints were usually martyrs. “What’s this got to do with Iraq?”

  “Just listen. I know the street, and the street’s got nothing to say about Elise. No one’s pissed off at her, no one has anything against her. So I get to wondering if it’s just some—some random thing that happened. But I can’t accept that. You know? Can’t bear that someone just got a few screws loose, wandered in, and—and did that to her. Don’t make any sense.”

  “Sometimes that’s the way it happens,” I said.

  “I can’t buy that. So I got to thinking. Maybe this is about Iraq.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Elise knew. About what happened over there. I’d been holding it all inside, but I was starting to unravel. So I told her. No secrets, right? Not between two people who love each other.”

  “Dammit, Rhodes, we all took an oath. Remember that? We all swore we’d never talk about Habbaniyah.”

  “I couldn’t do it anymore. Couldn’t hold it.”

  Anger popped through me and just as quickly faded. How many times had I wished for someone to share the story with? Someone to tell me it had all been for the best. “And now you think she talked and someone got scared?”

  “You gotta understand the kind of woman Elise is.” Breath. “Was. Elise said there ain’t none of us hasn’t done something we feel bad for. She said we should confess our sins and make amends. To save our souls. To save ourselves, she said. She wasn’t all self-righteous about it. She just really cared. A life’s no good, she said, if it’s a lie.”