I scrubbed his head, roughed his ears, and gave him a treat from the stash in my pocket. We climbed into my truck and I started the engine and eased my way through the crowd of people and vehicles. All I wanted was to flee, to put this behind me, to pretend it was a normal day on the rails. That was all I’d ever wanted since I’d come home.
Just before I reached the road, I looked in my rearview mirror. Samantha walked along the tracks, a child on either side of her—eleven-year-old boys with wheat-blond hair and green eyes and knobby wrists. Her sons. She had an arm around the shoulders of each boy, her head bent toward one child, who rushed out a staccato string of words while his brother kicked a rock as if it were a soccer ball.
They walked through the throng of police, past the coroner and her assistants, and headed toward the cement factory where the Edison silos brooded against the brightening sky.
The dead are a load you can’t set down.
They weigh nothing. And everything.
CHAPTER 6
Today, in Habbaniyah, we found a little boy. An orphan, eight or nine years old. He was crying next to the body of his mother—she was one of our interpreters.
She’d been beaten to death by insurgents for helping the Americans. And for falling in love with one of them.
—Sydney Parnell. Private correspondence.
At Cohen’s house, I gave myself fifteen minutes to get over the flashbacks and the bomb. I sat halfway up the stairs leading to the front door, removed my duty belt, and stripped off my bloody blouse to let the sun bake into my aching muscles. I removed my boots and scraped off the dirt on the stair where I sat, then slid my fingers under the straps of my sports bra and rubbed away the indentations the straps had carved into my shoulders. When I rolled my head, trying to work out the kinks, the bones popped like an old woman’s.
In front of the house, Clyde nosed through a thicket of trees, hunting rabbits. Puffs of clouds drifted noiselessly overhead against the rain-washed sky. Far away, a lawn mower sputtered and died. Cohen’s swank neighborhood was quiet as a tomb.
When Clyde gave up his pursuit and flopped down beside me, I removed his gear and laid it out on the stairs to dry, then gave him a rough scratching all over, mussing his vest-flattened fur. He smelled of earth and fur and the perspiration coming off his paws and hair follicles. I breathed it in, then closed my eyes and let his nearness and the heat dissolve me.
After a time, I sat up and shook out a cigarette from the pack the lieutenant had given me. I eyeballed it for all of five seconds before I stuck it in my mouth and lit up. How easily we fall.
“What do we do with this case, Clyde?” I asked.
Clyde let loose a gentle snore.
Homeland Security, TSA, and my boss would handle the hazmat train. Denver and Thornton police had the bodies. McConnell’s CARD team was on Lucy. But now that I had time to think, my mind kept going back to the alphanumeric code written in the kiln. Why was it significant to the killer? And why did it seem familiar?
I blew a cloud of smoke into the clear sky. No doubt the Feds or Denver PD would figure it out. They had code breakers and analysts. The last thing they needed was a bomb-rattled, nutcase railway cop with post-traumatic stress, trust issues, and a strong penchant for whiskey.
But I couldn’t let it go.
The question every Marine asks herself is whether she’s got what it takes. Same with cops and EMTs and social workers. Hell, all of us. Every person on this planet. After my mother died, my grams taught me that God will give us only what we can handle. My twelve-year-old self pictured God with a notebook and a scale, measuring the strength of every heart and deciding whether we could cope with what was coming down the pike.
The question we each ask ourselves is, can I hack it?
From my back pocket, I pulled out the photo I carry everywhere like a talisman. I ran my thumb over its worn, silky softness. Malik. The orphan I’d left behind in Iraq two years earlier. We’d found him near the body of his murdered mother, Haifa, who had made the mistake of falling in love with a Marine; the Marine had returned the favor. Retribution by the insurgents against them both had been swift and brutal.
When we found their bodies and Haifa’s weeping, terrified son, I could not leave him alone, waiting for the insurgents to come back and finish the job. I’d bundled him in a blanket and brought him with me to the forward operating base.
In the photo, Malik is standing near my barracks on the FOB, grinning and holding a soccer ball one of the Marines had given him. I cupped my hands around the picture, shielding it from the sun, and marveled at the depths in Malik’s young eyes. God must have figured Malik could handle a lot.
I’d tried to bring him home with me when I redeployed, working to get his application through the State Department. But then he vanished from the base in Iraq. At the time, I’d hoped he’d found his family. But later I learned he’d been brought to America by men who wanted to train him and send him back to Iraq as a spy—the same men I feared would pay me another visit.
Malik had escaped. And that was as much as I knew.
I slid the picture back in my pocket, braced my elbows on my thighs, and smoked. I stared at the dirt I’d scraped off my shoes, noting how even that humble substance glittered in the sunlight. A metaphor for the potential goodness in all of us, if I were inclined to think that way.
After a few minutes, I pulled out my phone and punched in the number of a friend, a man named David Fuller. David ran an organization called the Hope Project, which aimed to reunite Iraqi refugees with their families, whether the families were here in the United States, living in Europe, or still in the Middle East. A lot of these men and women had worked for the US government and then been forced to flee their homes in response to death threats.
Three months earlier, I’d enlisted David’s help in finding Malik. He had a network of people working throughout the United States, Mexico, and Canada as well as overseas, some of whom were living in or watching the communities of exiled Muslims. He’d agreed to show Malik’s picture around—cautiously―because unfriendlies were looking for him.
David didn’t answer. I sent him a text.
Word?
A minute later he texted back. Nothing. Syd, can’t keep resources on this. Too stretched as is.
We’d had this conversation before. The last time, I’d begged for another month.
One more month, I typed.
You said that
Please
A long minute rolled by. During that time I imagined thousands of children as flickering lights, each carried off on a dark sea of indifference, war, carelessness, greed.
My phone chimed. One month
I closed my eyes in relief. Opened them and typed Thank you
Call me sucker
I typed Saint and slid my phone back into my pocket.
“This whole thing with Lucy Davenport,” I said to Clyde. “We have to help. Our boss won’t like it because he thinks I can’t handle it. But we don’t have a choice, right? She’s only a child.”