Opposite the windows rose a wall where people of taste would have mounted art. Instead, Cohen and I had installed two corkboards. His board had originally been downstairs, in the study; after I moved in, he kept the door to the room closed so that I didn’t have to look at whatever case he was working. But there wasn’t enough wall space in there for him to tack up everything he needed to see when he was actively running an investigation. I’d encouraged him to move the board to the living room. Which meant that if you leaned back from your barstool at the kitchen counter, you’d be greeted with an array of crime-scene photos. No doubt, it was an unhealthy blending of our jobs and our off-duty hours. But it worked for us. Cohen was never really off duty anyway. And often the subconscious picks up what the conscious mind has missed. Having his board within sight had sparked ideas more than once.
Now his corkboard was covered with photos from his current case—a jogger slain in Commons Park.
I leaned back on the couch and narrowed my eyes to squint at my own board, which was a montage of thirty-some photographs. Some of these were images I’d taken in Iraq—shots of our Mortuary Affairs bunker or the mess tent or the rec center. Others were more personal. My cot, looking sterile and unlived in save for the books stacked on the floor. Pictures of my fellow MA Marines playing volleyball. Photos of Malik I’d taken when he lived on the FOB.
Pinned somewhere in the montage were the two photos I’d taken from Sergeant Udell’s apartment. In one of them, Sarge and Malik stood with Richard Dalton, the man Angelo’s torturer had questioned him about.
Almost two thousand miles away, and I still heard Angelo’s voice in my ear. Dalton. They wanted to know . . . about him. I . . . know nothing. Why . . . do they ask?
Dalton was the man whose ghost I’d seen six months ago when I’d gone to Sarge’s apartment. In this photo, Dalton looked confident, even arrogant. He and Udell squinted into the desert sun, Malik standing between them and holding a soccer ball. All three were smiling like they’d won the lottery.
Of course, the ghost I’d seen—imagined—hadn’t really been Dalton. According to two people who knew him, the man was alive and doing just fine, still on the job in Iraq. And if Dalton actually was alive, then he might be my Alpha. He was CIA, in-country at the right time, and had a relationship with both Malik and Sarge. I’d considered the theory many times, but had nowhere to run with it. The only person who might be able to feed me information about Dalton was Hal Beckett. And Hal, according to Zarif and the evidence of my own unanswered calls, was not available to mere mortals.
As for the ghost, my counselor had his own theory.
This man—this image—is an outward manifestation of your anger and fear, he told me during one of our sessions. At some point, your path crossed with his, and your brain internalized his image. These ghosts, as you call them, are parts of you that your core self doesn’t know how to process. Over time, we’ll integrate them. It’s how we heal.
Sounded like a plan to me. But so far, there hadn’t been any integration. I was the woman of a hundred ghosts.
Well, fifteen, give or take.
I rose and crossed the room to the board. I reached out with a finger and touched the second picture I’d taken from Sarge’s apartment. In this image, Dalton stood in front of an Iraqi market. Behind him and to his right was a second man, also dressed like an Iraqi. This man’s face was in shadow and hard to make out. The first time I saw the photo, I’d recognized him by the curved Kurdish dagger he wore in his belt. He’d bought it off a bedouin coming in from the wadis of the Syrian Desert.
This man was Douglas Reynauld Ayers. Dougie.
The man Clyde and I had both loved before he was killed in an ambush. The man I suspected we both still loved.
I let my finger trail over his image, then stepped back.
I tilted my head. The pictures had been moved slightly. It took me a few seconds to realize what was wrong. The pictures had been moved to cover a gap.
The photo of Malik, Sarge, and Richard Dalton was gone.
CHAPTER 9
Before the bomb hits, there comes a shriek that splits your soul.
—Sydney Parnell. ENGL 0208 Psychology of Combat.
I stood frozen in front of the corkboard.
“Cohen?” I called.
He leaned out of the kitchen.
“Did you move any of the photos on my corkboard?”
He understood immediately. “Something’s gone?”
Behind him, a kettle’s whistle blew.
“I’ll be right out,” he said.
I rubbed my upper arms, the goose bumps like sand on my skin. I understood the message they’d sent by killing the dog. But why would the Alpha steal a photo of Malik with Sarge and Dalton? Unless Dalton was the Alpha, and he was covering his tracks.
Then why not take the photo of him with Dougie?
I flipped quickly through the rest of the pinned photos, making sure the one I wanted hadn’t been concealed by the others. Then I checked the floor and behind the library table set against the wall.
Nothing.
The gentle sounds of Nina Simone wafted into the room. Cohen had queued up what I thought of as his deep-thinking playlist and piped it through the built-in sound system. I loved the great women of jazz. Simone, Holiday, Vaughan. But tonight I felt more Megadeth than “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood.”
Cohen joined me at the wall and handed me a mug of steaming liquid.
I scowled. “What is this?”
“Chamomile tea.” At my look he added, “You’ll sleep better on that than on booze.”
“You get your medical degree while I was gone?”
“Shut up and drink it.”
I held the mug at arm’s length. “Jazz and herbal tea. What’s next? Laxatives and long-term care insurance?”
“Pacifiers and a blanket.”
He sidestepped my jab. I held on to the grimace, took a sip of the tea, and let my frown deepen for Cohen’s benefit. But the flavor was only moderately awful.
“What do you think?” Cohen asked.
Never call me a pushover. “It’s dreadful.”
“You’ll get used to it.” He grinned. “I bought a case. It was on sale.”
“You sneak in anything else healthy while I was gone?”
“Veggie bones.”
“For us or for Clyde?”
Cohen’s expression stayed innocent. “Depends on whether Clyde likes them.”
“Well, that’s a relief. He likes everything. No sense of taste.” I sniffed the tea. “It’s contagious, apparently.”
We both glanced at Clyde, who lay sprawled on his side, lights out and snoring.
“He likes his new bed,” I said.
“Memory foam.”
“He liked his old one, too.”
And with that, the moment passed. We turned back to the corkboard.
“Which picture is missing?” Cohen asked.
“A photo of the boy I went to Mexico to find.” For the moment, I left out any mention of Dalton and Sarge. I would ease into them if I had to.
“So whoever broke in here and left the dog . . . it has something to do with this boy?”
A thought occurred to me then with a fierce and sudden burn, like the bite of a rattlesnake. I snatched up the pad of paper Cohen kept near the corkboards, jotted down a note, then turned the pad toward him.
YOU STILL HAVE THAT AUDIO JAMMER YOUR BROTHER GAVE YOU?
He cocked an eyebrow but then nodded. He went downstairs to his study and came back a moment later with a small black box. He placed it on a table nearby and turned the switch, slowly raising the volume until Ella Fitzgerald sounded like she was singing next to a waterfall.
Cohen leaned close to me. “That good?”
How can you not love a man who accepts your paranoia? I nodded.
He angled his shoulders so that he faced me, his eyes alert with that expression I loved. The one that reminded me painfully of Dougie. Cohen’s l
ook said, I need to know everything, and yesterday was too late.
I heard Dougie’s voice in my head. Tell me everything.
“Sydney,” Cohen said. “It’s time to share.”
I brushed the backs of my fingers against his cheek. He turned his head and kissed my hand.
The fear for this man that I’d been holding ever since Sarge broke into my home and threatened my life now wrapped its hands around my throat and tried to drag me to the floor. Along with the fear came a shame that went beyond guilt. Guilt was for when you forgot to call your mother on her birthday. This feeling was the kind that settled in your bones and set the marrow on fire.
All because, I finally admitted, I’d allowed myself to fall in love.
And now I was about to blow it out of the water.
I drew in a breath. “Mike . . .” Another breath. At this rate I’d need an oxygen tank just to get started. “I never meant for you to be a part of this.”
“Part of what?”
“It’s a long story.”
He took my hand and led me to the couch. And while Édith Piaf sang “La Vie en Rose” to the accompaniment of static hiss, I took a corner on the sofa and faced him, my mug cupped between my hands like an anchor that would keep me from flying apart.
“I don’t even know where to begin,” I said.
“Start anywhere,” he answered. “We’ve got all night.”
Deep in my chest, where no one could see, my heart began to bleed.
Too late we come to our realizations.
“It’s an ugly story,” I said. “And I will tell you most of it. But I can’t tell you everything. For your sake and for mine. You have to accept that.”
Cohen’s jaw went tight, which suggested he wasn’t 100 percent on board. But he said, “I can respect that.”
“Close enough.”
I pulled my knees up to my chest and went small. The adult version of hiding when you know you can’t. I took a few more breaths until a strange calm descended.
“I’ll start with the abridged version. The child I went to Mexico to find, his name is Malik. His mother was an interpreter for the Marines. His uncle also worked with the Americans. Malik was a small child at the start of the Iraq War, and he grew up around US troops. At some point, he saw something he shouldn’t have. Something that involved Americans and was quite possibly treasonous. These are bad people, Cohen. They’ve murdered to protect their secret. They’ve killed Americans and Iraqis to make sure they couldn’t talk. Now, these same people have figured out that Malik was a witness, and they want to silence him before he shares what he saw with the world.”
Cohen’s expression changed from curiosity to bewilderment as he processed my words. Now he shook his head.
“Sounds like Hollywood, right?” I said.
“Did you say treason?”
“Yes.”
His face cleared and a look of relief flooded his eyes. “There are people for this kind of thing, Sydney. Entire organizations. Interpol. The International Criminal Court. Truth and reconciliation committees. Hell, Congress. Let’s take it to them.”
I heard the plural and loved him for it. But I shook my head. “Right now I have nothing to offer them. I don’t even have enough to warrant opening an investigation.”
“But that’s the point. Let them determine if there’s a case. We can—”
I held up a hand to stop him. “Not yet.”
“Don’t try to protect these people, Sydney. They don’t deserve it.”
“I’m not!” I glanced at the audio jammer and sucked in a few breaths until I could talk without screaming or breaking things. “This isn’t just about me and this child. A lot of lives are caught up in this. People have died. Not just in Iraq, but here. If I try to go public, these men will double down.”
Faint flickering forms appeared in my mind’s eye. Angelo Garcia. Zarif’s man, Hamid. Jeremy Kane. The Alpha’s victims.
“And they’ll hurt this boy,” Cohen said. “Malik.”
“They’ll kill him.”
I stopped myself before I told him that I thought the boy was safe for the moment. Giving him that information was too risky. It implied we knew something of his whereabouts. And if they grabbed Cohen and forced him to talk . . .
I saw fingers chopped off. A face beaten to a pulp. Cigarette burns and cattle prods and waterboarding.
Even as I turned away from these things, a detached part of my brain ran busily in the cranial basement, coolly calculating what to share with Cohen and what to hide in the event that he was forced to talk. It was a gift from growing up in an unpredictable household—always make sure you have the right answer before you open your mouth.
I hated it, but there it was. What I didn’t tell him might save us both.
“I won’t put Malik at risk,” I said.
“That’s exactly why you need to get others involved.”
“Later.”
“Sydney . . .”
In my belly, something reached out a languorous paw and scratched.
Every Marine carries some form of the beast inside. We might soothe it with alcohol or numb it with drugs or teach it to play dead through counseling. And sometimes, after a few years as a civilian, the beast goes quiet.
But even when we’ve gone a little soft, the monster hasn’t gone away.
It just hasn’t been fed in a while.
I pushed myself off the couch. “There’s something else.”
“What?”
This was the part in a movie where the music swelled to a harsh crescendo, letting us know that things had changed and there was no going back. But here, in the wealthy enclave of Cherry Hills, the only sounds were jazz and static and the light jingle of Clyde’s collar as he went into the kitchen to see if anything interesting had shown up in his food dish.
I kept my eyes on Cohen while I delivered the coup de grâce.
“I played a part in that treason.”
Cohen’s expression went sideways, the look of a man who’d just gotten a vicious uppercut. “You?”
Fear and fury flooded my mouth like molten steel. “Yes. Me.”
Cohen didn’t move an inch. But I felt him withdraw nonetheless. As if he’d gotten up and walked into another room.
“Tell me,” he said in a faraway voice.
So I did. A few fumbling words into the story, Denver vanished, and Iraq rose up around me in a swirl of dust and heat. I smelled blood and shit while all around the cries of men shattered the air. And through it, I kept talking, trying to get Cohen to understand.
After I’d agreed to help, the Sir and I went to a residential area in the town of Habbaniyah, where we wouldn’t normally venture without an armored caravan. Four men with rifles stood outside a single-story mud house. The men wore street clothes; keffiyehs covered their mouths and noses. I thought they were Iraqis until I heard them whispering.
Americans. Tucker Rhodes. Lester Crowe. Jeremy Kane.
I followed the Sir and one of the Marines into the house.
There were two bodies, both in a back bedroom, both naked, dead a couple of hours. A male Marine, castrated and beheaded, his head propped next to the gaping wound near his crotch, his penis and testicles where his head should have been. Next to him lay a pregnant Iraqi female, her face destroyed, her body battered until the skin had split.
In the front room was a young Iraqi boy, rocking and weeping on the floor.
Nauseated, horrified, I clung to the wooden doorjamb for support. I couldn’t understand why the Sir had brought me to this place in the middle of the night. To these deaths and this weeping child. It wasn’t how we operated.
“Let’s get them out of here, Corporal,” the Sir said to me.
And because he was my CO, and because I trusted him, I did as he ordered. We lifted the corpses into body bags, placed them into the trunk of the interpreter’s car, and took them away.
“Sydney?” Cohen’s voice brought me back.
Cohen’s hom
e emerged from the darkness. I looked around. Blinked. I did not look at Cohen. I was afraid to.
Clyde padded over and rested his chin on my thighs. I set aside the cold tea and dropped my hand to his head.
“After we took them away,” I said, “we destroyed the bodies. Not only because it was an order, but because we believed it was the right thing to do. The man who issued the order told my CO that members of a Sunni militia had killed Haifa and Resenko, to punish them for falling in love. This came just as we were doing our best to win hearts and minds. If word had gotten out about the killing, the fallout on both sides would have been horrendous. The Sir and I were told that if we made these deaths look like a random IED attack instead of a targeted assault against a Marine, we’d keep our guys from going all Abu Ghraib and killing everything in a headcloth. And that would keep the insurgents from retaliating and killing more of our guys. Turns out, it didn’t work. Things got bad anyway.”
“I . . . see,” Cohen said.
There was a note in his voice I’d only heard him use with people he didn’t like. Drug dealers and murderers. Weak judges and lazy cops and the unrepentant.
I was so young, I wanted to say. Barely more than a child. In my mind, I heard that most heinous of excuses: I was only following orders.
“And Jeremy Kane was there,” Cohen went on.
“Yes.” I forced myself to again look him in the eye. “I thought we were saving American lives. Only years later did I learn that my actions played right into the hands of a man whose behavior was probably treasonous. He gave the order. He made me part of his sin.”
But Cohen was shaking his head. “Give me a hand here, Sydney. I’m trying to understand. What about their families? Didn’t they have a right to know the truth?”
I said nothing. He needed to work it out. If that was even possible.
He went on. “I’m trying to line up the woman I thought I knew with what you’re telling me.”
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