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 crossing 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-maché 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.”