Dead Stop

by Barbara Nickless

  Or maybe he didn’t have any thoughts at all.

  Maybe that was the point of the beer.

  CHAPTER 12

  Aren’t we all looking to be heroes? Right up until we get our chance and realize the cost.

  —Sydney Parnell. Personal journal.

  My mood was even darker because of my visit to Zolner’s lonely house and my upcoming counseling session. But I was determined to get one more thing done before going to the VA. I drove fast through the city and caught the northbound interstate, heading toward the cement factory. My goal wasn’t the factory, but rather the overpass at Potters Road. The bridge was part of the area searched by the police and volunteers, but I wanted to see it for myself.

  As I drove, I eyeballed the dark, distant clouds out my left window, rolling in over the mountains with the regularity of bowling balls popping out at the ball return. With luck, we’d beat the next storm.

  I exited the highway and turned east. The overpass was just outside the extensive area cordoned off by the police. Beyond the bridge, a police cruiser’s blue-and-red lights strobed against the late-afternoon sky. I pulled in behind a battered olive-drab Jeep Wrangler and killed the engine. Except for the Jeep and the cruiser, the land lay open and empty; all traffic to the east of the bridge had been rerouted north. When Clyde and I got out of the truck, the soft cooing of doves floated toward us from across the fields.

  A woman sat in the Jeep’s passenger seat. She turned her head at the sound of our approach. She was young and thin, pretty in a starving-waif sort of way with chopped black hair, high cheekbones, and deep-set eyes. Her ears and nose were pierced, her pale skin tattooed on both arms with the vines and blooms of roses.

  We nodded to each other and Clyde and I kept walking. Even before we got close to the bridge, I made out candles flickering in glass votives and a pile of flowers and toys left in the shelter of the bridge between the road and the concrete abutment. A man was crouched next to the candles, his head bowed. As we drew near, he stood and faced us.

  He was in his midthirties, of average height with a lean build. He had a strikingly handsome face, green eyes, and bleached-blond hair pulled into a ponytail. I recognized him from Samantha Davenport’s website—Jack Hurley, Samantha’s assistant.

  In his left hand he held a small hardcover book. He offered his other hand to me.

  “Jack Hurley,” he said as we shook. “I saw you on television. You work for the railroad.”

  “Sydney Parnell. This is my partner, Clyde.”

  “I came to pay my respects,” Hurley said. Then he shrugged. “Or maybe . . . I don’t know. I guess I came thinking I might find answers. But of course there’s nothing here.”

  I gestured toward the book. “Is that for the shrine?”

  He flushed. His smile was nothing like the cocksure grin I’d seen on Samantha’s website. This one was tentative and it didn’t reach his eyes.

  “Yeah.” He turned the cover so I could read the title. It was a collection of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

  “You’re fond of Shakespeare?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I run more to Hunter S. Thompson. But Sam loved poetry. I thought—” His voice broke and he turned away.

  While he collected himself, I studied the makeshift shrine. People had brought teddy bears and dolls. Bouquets of wildflowers. Sparkling pinwheels. A picture of Lucy photocopied onto a sheet of paper and placed in plastic with the words, “We love you, Lucy! Come home!” There were Mardi Gras beads and paper hearts pinned to cardboard and a DVD of the Disney movie Mulan.

  Hurley cleared his throat. “I thought she’d like to have them. The poems.”

  “You worked with her every day,” I said. “Did you see any sign this was coming?”

  His faint smile turned wary. “Look, I told the police everything. The real police, I mean. I came out here to get some quiet. But since you asked, the answer is no. Other than Sam mentioning a stalker, there wasn’t anything unusual. And, no, I never saw a stalker. Sam just told me she sensed something. Like ESP, or something. Now if you’ll excuse me, I told Livvy I’d just be a moment.”

  “The girl in the Jeep, is she your girlfriend? She’s what . . . sixteen? Seventeen?”

  He narrowed his eyes. “Twenty-two. But she has an old soul. She’s my muse. She got me into photography, which got me the job with Sam. It’s a good job. Was a good job. I don’t know what I’m going to do now. I’ll keep running the business if Ben wants me to. But . . . I don’t know. If it were me, I wouldn’t want me around.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m just a reminder, right? Like the business. A reminder of everything he’s lost.”

  “You and Ben get along?”

  “Sure.” Then he shook his head. “Mostly. Ben is a serious dude. Like everything is kind of a drag. I think he thought I was too flippant, too . . .”

  “Frivolous?”

  He laughed, a sharp, brief sound. “Frivolous. Exactly. I made Sam laugh, and sometimes I think Ben resented that.”

  “Should he have?”

  “No. Man, the cops asked me that. There wasn’t anything between Sam and me except a good business relationship.”

  “Well.” I narrowed my eyes, studying him. “Maybe Ben will want a little frivolity now.”

  “You think?” Hurley’s smile turned into a grin, transforming his face from sullen to guileless. He seemed ten years younger than what I suspected was his real age. “You know, you’d make a great subject, Sydney. You ever thought of modeling?”

  This was the Jack I’d seen on Samantha’s website—charming, boyish, flirtatious.

  “Not a chance,” I told him.

  He sighed. “Well, call me if you change your mind. It’s a good way to earn a little side money.”

  We shook hands again, and he walked past me and plodded along the road toward the Jeep. I watched until he’d gotten into his car and was headed toward the highway. Only then did I realize he’d left without placing the book of sonnets with the other offerings.

  Clyde and I walked around the abutment so I could study the overpass. The bridge was nothing special. Concrete and iron rebar, a yellow sign indicating the bridge’s height as thirteen feet, eight inches. But even this simple construction would have cost in the tens of thousands.

  I tapped Clyde’s lead and we climbed the hill to the tracks. From up top, the land undulated softly in all directions. The rains had turned everything green and filled the fields with wildflowers. Potters Road vanished over the eastern curve of hills. The silos of the cement factory were mere exclamation points against a distant sky.

  From where we stood, the tracks curved to the north and south—Potters Road sat in the middle of a long, sweeping arc that resembled a single parenthesis. This was the curve that Deke had been coming out of when he spotted Samantha on the tracks. Thirty years ago, the curve would have meant that any drivers on Potters Road would lose sight of an oncoming train for a full minute before they reached the crossing.

  Almost unbelievable, then, that according to what Mags Ackerman could find, there hadn’t been any accidents.

  I snapped my fingers. “Tate didn’t report them.”

  Clyde stopped in his examination of rabbit spoor to give me a look.

  “It’s something he would have worried about,” I explained to my partner. “The Feds would have shouldered the cost of an upgrade. But more accidents would mean more oversight and tighter safety rules. And more expense to the railroad.”

  As Veronica Stern had noted so coldly, a railroad’s safety record is paramount.

  Unimpressed with my thoughts, Clyde went back to sniffing for rabbits. He wasn’t having much luck—I kept him on a short lead this near to the tracks.

  But a trickle of excitement seeped through my gloom. If Alfred Tate’s railroad really hadn’t reported accidents at Potters Lane, maybe Hiram Davenport had learned of it and used this information to blackmail Tate into agreeing to the merger. Destroying the grade crossi
ng and installing the overpass would have been an additional twist of the knife.

  The sun slid behind clouds and a few drops of rain struck the ground. I glanced at my watch. We had to leave now to make my appointment.

  We hurried back along the road toward the truck as the rain began to fall in earnest. A thick shard of lightning struck the ground nearby, and the world turned momentarily white. I blinked, bedazzled.

  Had Samantha talked to the killer as they drove under the bridge? Had she begged for her life and that of her daughter?

  What answer had the killer given?

  Had he said anything at all?

  CHAPTER 13

  “You feel sick about it. Your first kill. Every night for weeks—hell, months—after my first, I had nightmares. I’d be just about to fire, but then the raghead would shoot first. When I woke up, I’d think about how the dreams were just some part of my brain, telling me it could have gone down bad. Telling me I was right to fire first.

  Later though, I started thinking it was God telling me I was wrong. ’Cause I never knew if the guy really had a gun or if he was just some dumbass farmer with a hoe. I shot him, and we kept rolling.

  And now the nightmares won’t stop.”

  —Kuwait, Conversation with a Marine.

  “The debris of war,” someone said from behind me.

  Linoleum squeaked under my boots as I turned. A man stood in the VA’s hallway, the overhead fluorescents shining on his bald pate. He nodded toward the photograph I’d been studying. A blasted landscape of rubble-filled streets, downed power lines, and shattered buildings.

  “Iraq, 2006,” he said.

  “Fallujah.” I glanced at him. “Were you there?”

  “Oh, yeah. But long after the two battles of 2004.” He came to stand beside me and we both turned back to the photograph. “You?”

  I nodded toward Clyde. “We both were. Operation Phantom Fury.”

  “You guys saw the heavy stuff.”

  “Yes.”

  The man, dressed in jeans and a white oxford shirt, the sleeves rolled to his elbows, offered a hand. “Peter Hayes, army major, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry. The Garryowens.”

  “Corporal Sydney Parnell. Marine. Mortuary Affairs.”

  We shook. He introduced himself to Clyde, then turned back to me with a smile. “I believe you are my next patient.”

  I’d started therapy when I came home from Iraq. My mentor at the time, a man named Nik Lasko, had told me not to talk about the war or what I’d seen and done there. Talking was what made you come apart, what made people afraid of you. But I was desperate. Nightmares, flashbacks, visions of dead people—all of that had led first to alcohol and then to drugs as I tried to numb myself into detachment.

  The therapy hadn’t worked as well as the whiskey, and six weeks in, I quit. After that, I held myself together with liquor, pills, and a stubborn streak fifty miles wide.

  Then after the murder investigation and the shootings last winter, DPC insisted I resume therapy. The bosses got twitchy at the idea that someone protecting property worth billions might be a few cars short of a full train. So, resentfully, I’d volunteered for a VA program studying the effectiveness of combining antianxiety drugs with a form of psychotherapy known as prolonged exposure. To participate, I’d agreed to meet with a therapist twice a week for sixty minutes.

  I’d filled out a tower of paperwork—mostly surveys and consent forms—then sat down with a VA employee who administered a CAPS Interview—the Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale. Big surprise—the test confirmed that I did, indeed, suffer from post-traumatic stress. I was assigned a therapist and began the twice-weekly sessions.

  Everything went downhill from there.

  Prolonged exposure required that I relive a bad memory over and over with the idea that eventually it would lose its potency. I’d no longer flash to it, dream about it, dwell on it. But in my case, therapy had made everything worse. In the last few weeks, along with increased nightmares and flashbacks, I’d had headaches, muscle tremors, anger-management issues. You couldn’t call this progress no matter how loosely you defined it. But here I was, back for more because I’d promised. And while I have many faults, lack of commitment isn’t one of them. Plus there was the little matter of my job being on the line—Mauer was watching me like a hawk.

  “You don’t want to be here,” Hayes said as we walked to his office.

  Mind reader. “Does anyone?”

  “Not at first.” He unlocked the door to his office and ushered me in. “I saw the news. You’ve had quite the day.”

  Fear for Lucy rose like bile. “You’ve been following the story?”

  “As much as I can. Heartbreaking situation. I half expected you to cancel. I’m glad you didn’t. That bomb—”

  “I’m fine.”

  His eyes met mine, and I read something equivalent to all twenty volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary in his look. But all he said was, “All right.”

  Hayes had inherited my previous therapist’s office, so I took my usual place in a chair that let me see both the door and the window, while Clyde settled himself on the floor as close to me as possible. I looked around. Hayes had added a few touches of his own—photos, a frayed flag. Most interesting was a wall of papier-mâché masks made by people who clearly had issues. The masks were bloodied, haunted, wrapped in barbed wire, or squeezed by vices.

  “Cheery,” I said.

  “I know, right?” Hayes laughed. “They’re all made by vets. Sometimes it’s easier to make art than to talk about your feelings. It lets you express the invisible wounds.”

  Instead of retreating behind his desk, he dragged his chair out and placed it so it faced mine. I leaned back.

  “Tell me how therapy has been going,” he said.

  I gestured toward the clipboard in his hand. “It’s all there.”

  “I’d rather hear it from you.”

  “Is that therapist-speak for ‘I haven’t had time to read all this crap?”

  He laughed again. “No.” He reached over and dropped the clipboard on his desk. “I’ve read it all. And I see that your symptoms have worsened. Sometimes things have to get bad before they can get better, but I’d like to try something different.”

  A bumpy mix of relief and wariness went through me. “Like what?”

  “I’m going to be honest. The problem for a lot of vets is that prolonged exposure therapy flat-out doesn’t work. The VA adopted it because it’s the gold standard for people who’ve been raped or assaulted. But we’re starting to realize that the trauma suffered in war is profoundly different from what a civilian might experience. And sometimes prolonged exposure is exactly the wrong approach to take. It can make bad memories more potent, not less.”

  As if someone had just unsnapped the handcuffs, I rose half out of my chair. “I’m out.”

  “Hold on, Corporal.” Hayes rested his forearms on his thighs. “We’ll pull you out of the study, if you decide that’s what you want. But you can’t walk away from therapy. We’re just going to try a different approach. Not only because PE hasn’t been working for you, but because after reading your file, I suspect PTSD isn’t the worst thing on your plate. Have you heard of something called moral injury?”

  I sank back down. I could almost hear the handcuffs click into place. “So now I’m a sinner?”

  Hayes’s laugh was easy. “No more than the rest of us. Here’s the deal. What we know about post-traumatic stress is that it’s an involuntary, biological response to a threat or a perceived threat. Clinically, it’s described as fear-circuitry dysregulation. A person sees something that threatens them, experiences extreme fear and helplessness, and undergoes an automatic response to that fear. You with me?”

  I folded my arms so that I could see my watch. “I’ve read the manuals.”

  “But moral injury is something different. It’s a result of what the poet Peter Marin calls the terrible and demanding wisdom of war.”

  My gaze d
arted from the door to the window and back again. I’d read Marin’s work—his theory that innocence wasn’t so much lost in war as transformed into a heightened moral sensibility.

  But my guilt went too deep. I leaned over the arm of my chair and kneaded my fingers into Clyde’s fur, wanting his warmth. “Okay.”

  “The symptoms are similar to post-traumatic stress,” Hayes went on. “Insomnia, flashbacks, memory issues. A startle reflex. But the root cause is different. And so is the treatment.”

  I pulled out my cigarettes, remembered where I was, put them back.

  Hayes ran a thumb under his eye. A faint scar puckered the skin there.

  “Moral injury is less about fear and more about grief and guilt,” he said. “Maybe you feel bitter about your time in Iraq, fighting a war that no one at home seems to care about anymore. You might feel remorse for something you did or saw. Could even be simply the fact that you got to come home to the land of plenty while others stayed behind. So whereas PTS is about danger—‘I almost lost my life’—moral injury is, well, a lot of times it’s about seemingly immoral acts. Especially killing.”

  Killing. “Uh-huh.” I kept my face light. Pleasant to the point of blankness.

  Hayes leaned his elbows into his thighs and brought his hands together. “It’s a pretty new concept. I’m no ivory-tower theorist, but it makes a lot of sense to me. I served two tours in Iraq, Sydney. I’m a chaplain and I earned a Bronze Star with the grunts over there. I have my own moral injuries.”

  We stared at each other. Hayes had an agreeable, open face. A ready smile, the easy laugh. He didn’t look like a man who wrestled demons, even if he was a chaplain. But now, looking closer, I saw a flickering sadness in his eyes. And the scar under his eye had a twin at his temple.