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

by Barbara Nickless

  This time, Sherri didn’t tell him to stop.

  CHAPTER 14

  Ask most people in America what “normal” is, and they’ll tell you it’s a roof and three squares a day. It’s a decent job and good health and a marriage that’s going along just fine, thanks. It’s the middle-class version of the American Dream.

  What no one wants to admit is that this idea of normal isn’t really normal at all. It’s a fantasy.

  Normal is whatever we’ve gotten used to in our own private universe. It’s war or cancer or poverty. Hopelessness or pain or fear. It’s the cigarette burns on the coffee table and bone-deep exhaustion and the stink of booze and the black eye from—you tell everyone who asks—running into a door.

  Normal is the devil-ridden quiet of three a.m. when you’re eyeball-to-eyeball with God, and you know you won’t win because the deck is stacked.

  Best you can do is fold.

  —Sydney Parnell. Personal journal.

  Sarge and his on-again, off-again lady friend lived a few miles north in what could generously be called the un-gentrified part of town. As I followed Kane’s truck, the lower-middle-class residential area gave way to dispirited strip malls and fast-food joints, which, in turn, surrendered to a zone of apartment complexes designed with the lower ten percent in mind.

  Hartstone Village sat on the very outskirts of Littleton across the highway from a small, winter-brown field. Maybe the field had been intended as a park, but now all it held were weeds, a broken-down jungle gym, and a clutch of trash blown in from the fast-food places. I veered around a pothole the size of Delaware and pulled into Hartstone, parking next to Kane. He sat in his cab chatting on his cell phone; when I looked over, he held up his index finger, telling me to give him a minute.

  I killed the engine and stared out through the dirt-streaked windshield.

  Hartstone had never been the Taj Mahal, but it had seen better days. The chipped and peeling paint, cracked asphalt, and narrow balconies cluttered with cast-off furniture and rusting barbeque grills—all of it gave the place the feel of a refugee camp. A dreary stopover for people on their way up to something better. Or maybe on their way back down.

  I had a pretty good idea in which direction Sarge was headed.

  Despite the cold, the complex was Sunday stay-at-home busy. Cars pulled in and out of the parking lot in a steady stream. A man worked at repairing a motorcycle on a front sidewalk while, nearby, a pair of bored-looking women huddled together on a wooden bench, watching him. Kids underdressed for the cold played on a set of swings to the west of the L-shaped block of buildings. Two teens ran past my truck and darted across the road, horns blowing in their wake. They leapt over the curb, laughing, then stood in the weeds with their backs to the wind and smoked.

  Nothing but normal. So why was my gut sending up a five-alarm warning?

  Clyde, either feeling his own anxiety or picking up on mine, pressed next to me and gave a whine that sounded exactly like a dog’s version of what the hell?

  “I hear you,” I said.

  Kane had finished his phone call and was locking up his truck. I stepped out, and Clyde hopped down after me. A cold wind rattled the chains on the swing set and flapped a plastic US flag hanging next to a second-floor apartment. I snapped the leash onto Clyde’s collar, and we followed Kane, who was already heading up the stairs toward the second floor.

  On the drive over, I had called the Costco and verified that Kane had been on-shift the night Elise was killed. Each shift had two fifteen-minute breaks and half an hour in the middle for a late-night snack. Unless a witness said Kane had taken a long, unscheduled break, it looked like he was in the clear.

  One suspect down. A lot more to go, if Sherri was right.

  Unless Sarge told us something I really didn’t want to hear.

  Clyde and I caught up with Kane at the door next to the flag; he was searching through keys hanging from a tiny plastic replica of an AK-47.

  “I’ve been trying to call him all the way over here,” Kane said. “Nothing. He gets into a real bender, he doesn’t hear the alarm, the phone, not anything.”

  I cocked my head at the sound of voices and music coming faintly through the scuffed door. “You already knocked?”

  He gave me the eye. “I graduated salutatorian from Thomas Edison High School.”

  So yes.

  “What about the TV? You’re saying he’d sleep through that?”

  Kane sucked in a breath, huffed it out.

  “Sarge doesn’t watch TV. He bought it for Amy. But she’s supposed to be in Lubbock this weekend, visiting her mom.”

  He found the key and undid the deadbolt, then slid a different key into the main lock. Before he could turn the knob, I pulled him back.

  “Clyde and I’ll take the lead,” I said and drew my gun, holding it with the barrel down.

  Kane stared at the gun then cast an astonished glance at me. “It’s probably just Amy, changed her mind about the family thing. Passed out while she was watching TV.”

  “Maybe.”

  Kane’s face went stubborn.

  “It’s Amy,” he said. “What else could it be?”

  “Elise is dead,” I reminded him. “Someone made her that way while her landlady was sitting in the room right below.”

  “But here? Shit, there’s a million people around.”

  I waited.

  “Shit.” But Kane finally nodded his agreement, turned the knob to unlatch the door then stepped behind Clyde and me.

  I nudged the door open with my foot.

  “Max Udell? Amy?”

  The door swung open to a dumpy front room with a sagging sofa, a rickety-looking coffee table covered with beer cans, and a top-of-the-line television set. The TV was tuned to a show about land mines in Serbia; as we walked in, the tone lightened from somber to merely serious, and a celebrity appeared, urging anyone watching to get life insurance while there was still time.

  Not a flesh-and-blood person in sight. But there was something here. I could feel it like ice against my skin.

  Kane closed the front door behind us and turned off the TV. In the sudden silence, the wind smacked the building. Down in the parking lot a horn honked, and someone hollered for their kid.

  “Sarge?” Kane called. “You here, man?”

  Nothing.

  Kane opened a tiny closet next to the front door and glanced inside. “His rifle’s gone.”

  “He one to get trigger-happy?”

  “Never known him to.”

  We made our way through the living room to the kitchen, calling Udell’s name. The kitchenette was in a worse state of disarray than the front room, with overflowing trash and a counter covered with empty pizza boxes stained with grease. More beer cans rounded out the bachelor décor. The place stank like a Dumpster.

  “Is it always like this?”

  “Maybe not quite this bad.”

  A cockroach skittered across the floor and disappeared beneath a cabinet. “Has he ever talked about ending it all?”

  Kane had started stacking the empty pizza boxes as if he meant to tidy up out of sheer habit. Now he froze.

  “You mean kill himself?” He dropped his hands. “Do you know anyone who’s seen combat who hasn’t talked that way sometimes?”

  “Sure,” I said. “A lot of guys. Which side of the fence would you put Sarge on?”

  “On the never side.”

  “Okay.”

  But I watched him mentally hitch himself up. Preparing.

  We moved into the hallway. A bathroom on our right was empty. The hall was a scant ten feet long and ended in two closed doors.

  “Door on the left is his bedroom,” Kane said. “He uses the room on the right as a study.”

  “Doors usually closed?”

  “The study, yeah. He doesn’t let anyone in there. His bedroom, I don’t know. I think so.”

  I raised my voice. “Max Udell, this is Special Agent Parnell with the DPC railroad. I’m here
with Jeremy Kane. My dog and I are coming to talk to you. That sound okay?”

  The wind drew a breath, and in the sudden quiet we heard a creaking sound.

  I edged forward. “Udell?”

  Behind me, Kane said, “Sarge, it’s me, man. You there?”

  “Keep an eye on the door on the right,” I told Kane. “I’m going in the left.”

  At his nod, Clyde and I glided down the rest of the hallway. Just outside the door, Clyde’s ears came up and his tail lifted like a flag. We pressed against the wall to the left of the door, and I reached over, turned the knob, then kicked the door open, going in with my gun arm raised.

  A man, tall and tanned and bearded, stood at the window, staring out at the bleak February day. His white button-down shirt and black slacks were rumpled and dusty. In his hand he held a manila file.

  Winter light filtered softly through him.

  My gun hand trembled as he turned to look at me. The light glimmered in his blue eyes. He gave me a nod.

  “Udell?” I whispered.

  Clyde whimpered.

  I raised my voice. “Kane? What’s your sergeant look like?”

  Kane’s reply came from the second bedroom.

  “Shit, is he in there?” Panic in his voice and the creak of the floor as he moved.

  “No. It’s all clear.”

  Kane appeared in the doorway, glanced around, then gave me a bewildered look.

  “Why are you asking what he looks like?”

  “Humor me.”

  “Black man. Not too tall. Built like a tank. There are photos of him in the other room if you want to see.”

  The man at the window, fair-skinned and well over six foot, turned his back to me, stepped toward the window, and vanished.

  “Shit,” I whispered.

  “What is it?” Kane moved closer. “Geez, Parnell, you look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  I waved Kane away and holstered my gun. Where the hell had this guy come from? If I’d processed his body in Iraq, he must have been missing key parts. Like a face. So how had I conjured him out of incomplete memories?

  Maybe it was time to go back into counseling. Before I started building entire armies of the dead.

  While Kane started in on the study, I set Clyde to guard the front door then took my time searching Udell’s bedroom for any indication he’d been in touch with Elise or threatened by the mysterious Alpha. I looked in drawers, between the mattress and box springs, then under the bed frame. I wasn’t sure what, exactly, I was looking for, but I figured I’d know it if I saw it. A letter or a scrawled note. A token from Habbaniyah, something like the embroidered name tape from Resenko’s uniform or maybe a photo. With meticulous care I went through the clothes hanging in the closet—expensive-looking jackets and brand-name sweaters—and rifled through the piles of papers and books on the shelf. I played back the recorder on his phone, but any messages had been erased. I finished in his bedroom by looking for a place where the carpet might have been pulled up.

  Nothing.

  I checked out the kitchen, the bathroom and linen closet, the living room, and the tiny entry closet. I found a high-quality camera and a pair of binoculars that looked like they’d cost more than I earned in a year. But nothing else. I went back down the hallway to the second bedroom. Kane stood in front of a four-drawer metal filing cabinet, reading through the folders in the top drawer.

  “Anything?” I asked.

  “Sarge has got some weird shit in here. Studies on neurology and psychosis. Self-help articles. Articles about spies. Old National Geographics. And a ton of maps. But I’ve been through every file, and there’s nothing about Habbaniyah. I even pulled out every map Sarge has of Iraq, looking for writing or marks of some kind. Nothing.”

  “And nothing about whoever might have ordered the cover-up? Newspaper articles about senior officers, say?”

  “Nada.”

  “How about something weird like a bomb fragment or a war-trophy? Something someone might have mailed to him as a threat.”

  The corner of his mouth ticked. “Like an ear, you mean?”

  “Exactly like that.”

  “Those were confiscated when we mustered out,” he said, deadpan.

  Unsure whether I felt relieved or disappointed at the lack of any apparent links to Habbaniyah, I leaned against the doorjamb and took in the room.

  Max Udell’s study was a shrine to his time in the Marines and especially Iraq. In contrast to the rest of the apartment, this room was clean and organized. Floor-to-ceiling shelves on three walls held novels and nonfiction books about the Middle East, about Sunni and Shia cultures, about Islam and Mohammed. Neatly displayed around the books were Bedouin daggers and clay pots, alabaster cups and broken cuneiform tablets. A woolen prayer rug hung on the wall next to the window; beneath it, a stone cheetah snarled at me in eternal silence. A table covered in a red cloth held a filthy tactical vest, Udell’s helmet, and an NCO ceremonial sword in a black sheath.

  I gaped. “Do you know where he got all this stuff?”

  “Off eBay, mostly. Bought some shit from other guys. Stuff’s fake. You know, replicas. Or a lot of it is.”

  “You sure of that? It’s damn freaky.”

  Kane turned to look at the shelves as if seeing everything for the first time. But after a moment he shook his head. “Sarge doesn’t have the money to be a collector. And he isn’t a thief. The rug is real. Some of the pots and the dagger. But mostly it’s fakes. And it’s not freaky. It’s just Sarge. Most of us try not to think about Iraq. But for Sarge, it was the biggest part of his life.”

  Maybe it still is, I thought.

  Kane went back to the files. I started at the top of the left-most bookshelf and went through everything. I was especially attentive with the books, but they were all as pristine as the day they were printed. Maybe this really was a shrine. A place to hold memories, not examine them.

  When I finished with the shelves, I turned to the most personal thing in the room—an entire wall of photos thumbtacked directly into the drywall above Udell’s desk. Color photos, mostly, although there was the occasional black and white. The pictures seemed to be arranged in no particular pattern. Photos from boot camp were interwoven with scenes from Iraq and other shots I guessed to be from Udell’s childhood. Pictures of Rhodes taken before the bomb, cocky and handsome. Of Kane and Rhodes and the murdered Resenko along with two other men whom I took to be the missing Crowe and the recently deceased Tignor. These alternated with 1970s-ish wedding photos of a young black couple and even older photos of people I assumed were Udell’s grandparents.

  There was also a scattering of photos taken after the suicide bomber hit our forward operating base, our FOB. Looking at those photos, I felt a muscle jump below my left eye.

  Worst among all the photos were a handful of snapshots featuring dead Iraqi soldiers and insurgents, their bodies burned or riddled with bullets. A victory cry or a penance? Just owning them was probably a violation of half a dozen war crime laws.

  I crossed to the window and stared outside for a minute or two, waited until my breathing evened out. Then I returned to the wall.

  Given the orderliness of everything else in the room, the photos looked like a crazed mosaic created by a singularly bewildered man—one who made no distinction between the past and the present.

  In the very middle of the wall was a photo of Sarge with Haifa’s son, Malik. The boy I’d tried to save. Udell and Malik stood with the dead man I’d just seen in Sarge’s bedroom. In the photo, the then-living man wore traditional Iraqi dress rather than the suit I’d seen him in. His beard was longer. He looked confident, even arrogant. He and Udell were squinting into the desert sun, the boy standing between them and holding a soccer ball. All three were smiling like they’d just won the lottery.

  It didn’t surprise me to see Sarge with Malik. The boy had become something of a camp mascot, as wrong as it sounds to say that now. But who the hell was the other guy? And why had I i
magined him in the other room?

  I took down the photo and flipped it over, hoping for a clue on the back. Nothing.

  “Who’s the white guy?” I asked Kane, holding out the photo.

  Kane placed his finger in a file to hold his place and looked at the picture. “Not sure. Saw him around the FOB from time to time, a couple of times with Sarge. Usually wearing native garb. Rumor was that he was CIA, but that didn’t make any sense. Guys I knew in intelligence would never let anyone snap their photo. And no reason why Sarge would be hanging out with a spook.”

  “No,” I murmured, staring at Malik’s shining face. “No reason at all.”

  “You think that guy might have something to do with what’s going on?”

  “I don’t know. Mind if I keep this?”

  Kane shrugged. “Not my call. Keep it for now, and you can take it up with Sarge when he gets back from wherever he’s gone off to.”

  “You’ve tried the girlfriend?”

  He gave me the look I probably deserved.

  “Right,” I said. “Salutatorian.”

  When he went back to the files, I slid the photo into an inside coat pocket. I looked for other snapshots featuring either Malik or the spook. I found one more with the dead man in it. Still wearing native dress and standing in front of an Iraqi market.

  Behind him and to his right stood a second man, also dressed like an Iraqi. This man’s face was in shadow and hard to make out. At his side he wore a curved Kurdish dagger tucked in his belt. I knew that dagger. The carved hilt, the heavy silver sheath. I’d been with the man when he bought it off a Bedouin coming in from the wadis of the Syrian desert.

  The man standing in the shadowy background was Douglas Reynauld Ayers.

  Dougie.

  After Kane had finished searching the filing cabinet, and I’d finished with the desk, we traded places and went through everything once more. Kane tried calling Sarge and his girlfriend again and fielded a couple of calls from an irate Sherri. We then put everything back the way we’d found it and converged at the front door, where Clyde sat patiently guarding against any would-be intruders.