One Was a Soldier (25 page)

Kevin hauled himself out of the water and wrapped up in the towel. Russ pointed him toward the garage. “Get yourself dried off and then take a break and go home for dry, uh, clothes. I want you and Knox both back on patrol while Eric and Lyle are working this scene.”

“I’ve g-g-got a complete change at the sh-sh-shop,” Kevin said.

“Go ahead, then.” Russ looked at Knox, who was peering at her watch. “Knox, do you have your kids covered? Or do you need to make arrangements?”

“No, sir. I’ll just call my granddad and let him know I’ll be home late.”

“Do it.” He turned back to Lyle. “The husband.” He held up one finger. “Quentan Nichols.” A second. “Work problems.” A third. “We clear those three, and if Dvorak’s autopsy doesn’t contradict it, we can close this case. Death from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.”

“Hell of a thing,” Lyle said. “Make it through two tours of duty in Iraq just to wind up capping it in your own backyard.”

Russ glanced at the pool again. A trio of sere yellow leaves tore away from a dipping, flailing birch and whirled through the air to touch down on the surface of the water. “Yeah,” he said. “Hell of a thing.”

*   *   *

Clare parked across the street from St. James and turned off the engine. She dropped her head back and simply sat for a moment, as gusting rain rocked her Jeep and rattled across the roof. She’d been going nonstop all day; morning Eucharist and visiting the hospital and dealing with her mother’s drama over the phone and counseling and the teen mothers group. Somewhere in there she had written Sunday’s sermon, which was probably three pages of
All work and no play makes Clare a dull girl
. The uppers she had popped that morning had long since worn off, and she was craving that kick right now like she craved a good night’s sleep. She felt it in the pressure behind her closed eyes and the hot ache of her muscles.

Around her, the world exploded. Clare hurtled out of the vehicle, flat on the hard, packed ground, shellburst and fireworks and her own terrified shout echoing around her, and there was the road, and the burning truck, and the blood-soaked body with its throat gaping wide and she heard the relentless hail of automatic weapon fire and the dogs barking and her heart pounding out of her chest and they must be everywhere and they were surrounded—

—and then the world tilted again and she was lying on a wet street in Lake George, hard needles of rain pelting her as a late-season thunderstorm roared and crashed overhead.

She staggered up off the road and got back into the Jeep. Her stomach lurched with nausea. She covered her face with her hands and breathed. Eventually, her pulse slowed to something close to normal.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay. Let’s try this again.” She left her umbrella in the car, figuring the damage had already been done, and crossed the street. Inside, she took the stairs two at a time to the office hallway.

Julie McPartlin’s door was open, but she was on the phone. She flashed Clare five fingers and pointed toward the parish hall. Okay. Her little whatever-it-had-been hadn’t made her late. Clare peeled off her coat and continued down to the large, wooden-floored room.

“Hey, darlin’.” Russ gave her an obvious double take. “What happened to you? You’re half soaked.”

She hesitated. “It’s really coming down out there.”

He frowned as he took her coat. “Here. You’re going to want this.” He handed her a tall cardboard cup of coffee.

“Ohhh, God.” She took a drink. The hot, sweet brew cut through her exhaustion and settled her tight, queasy stomach. “Thank you. You have no idea how much I needed this.”

He wrapped his arms loosely around her. “You look like hell.”

“Flatterer.” He kept on looking at her in that way he had, the way that wouldn’t let her evade or change the subject. “It’s been a long day,” she finally said. “I think this thing with Will Ellis has … shaken me up more than I’d like.” She didn’t want to leave it there. She wasn’t ready to talk to Russ about everything that was going on in her head. “Also, my mother’s driving me crazy about the wedding.”

Russ nodded. “How is the Ellis boy?”

“Better. It looks like he may have missed out on liver damage after all. The hematologist said that aside from his amputations, Will’s about the healthiest teen he’s ever seen.”

“Kids are hard to kill at that age.”

“Thank God for that.”

He smoothed a wet strand of hair away from her face. “What’s going on with your mother?”

She took another long drink of coffee. “You have to understand, she wanted a ballet-dancing, debutante-party-going, white-wedding sort of girl. Instead I fixed airplane engines, played basketball, and joined the army.
Grace
was the one who fulfilled all Mother’s fantasies.”

“Except for the part where she died.”

“Except for that, yeah. So now I’ve finally found someone willing to marry me—”

Russ snorted.

“—but I only gave her eight weeks to plan the party of her dreams.”

“It’s down to two and a half weeks now.” He smiled. “Anyway, isn’t it supposed to be the party of your dreams?”

“Clearly you do not understand southern women. So all day today I’ve been barraged with photos of mother-of-the-bride dresses, because she has to change her outfit to go with the dress
your
mother’s chosen, which she does not like. ‘Go with’ in this case means ‘blow out of the water.’ She also called me three times to listen to selections from the DJ she’s hired.”

“Why do we need a DJ?”

“Because there wasn’t enough time to hire a live band, which would have been much more tasteful.”

He stared at her. “But … there’s going to be dancing? Where? The Stuyvesant Inn doesn’t have enough space for that, not with all those Victorian knickknacks all over the place.”

“The dancing will be in a tent, with a dance floor, which she has rented. I’m supposed to drop in Friday after the morning Eucharist to personally agree to everything she’s already decided.”

He shook his head. “And she’s running the whole thing from Virginia. I’m beginning to suspect that if the southerners had put their women in charge, they would have won the Civil War.”

She put her cup on a long table scattered with flyers and brochures and leaned into Russ, laughing because she wanted to scream. “I’m sorry. This isn’t what either of us wanted.”

He hugged her hard and kissed her wet hair. “I don’t mind. As long as you’re there, and you say the right thing at the right time, I’m good with it. You’ve got more than enough on your plate. Your mom can do what she wants as long as it doesn’t add to your burden.”

She let herself rest against him, her cheek pressed into his name tag. She rubbed her hand over the departmental patch on his shoulder. “You didn’t have time to change?”

“I’ve got to go back after we’re done. You remember Tally McNabb? The woman at the center of that bar fight the night you got home?”

Something uneasy slithered through her gut. “Yes…”

“Her neighbor found her dead this afternoon. It looks like she killed herself. Her husband’s missing, so we have to find him and get his story before we can definitely close the case as a suicide, but—”

She opened her mouth, but she didn’t seem to have any air with which to speak. Russ broke off. “Clare? What is it?”

Her skin felt clammy. She shivered. “Tally McNabb.”

He chafed her upper arms. “Yeah.”

She found her voice. “She was in my veterans therapy group. She was in the hospital with me just two nights ago. When Will was admitted. They all came. We all came.”

“Wait. She was in your counseling group?”

Clare nodded.

“Jesus. And she was there the night the Ellis kid tried to off himself.” He rubbed his lips. “That certainly gives more weight to it being suicide.”

“She couldn’t have killed herself. She couldn’t have.”

“C’mon, let’s sit down. You look like you’re about to keel over.” He snagged her coffee and steered her across the high-ceilinged room to a more human-sized alcove furnished with several overstuffed armchairs. “Now.” He handed her the cup. “Tell me why you say she couldn’t have done it.”

She plopped into one of the chairs. “She didn’t have any warning signs. Not one. I think in many ways, she was the least troubled of us.”

Russ sat down opposite her. “Who else is in the group?”

“Russ! I can’t break their confidences. Why do you think I never mentioned Tally to you?”

“It’s not like they were confessing to you as a priest. You’re one of them.”

“Anyone who’s in therapy deserves privacy. It’s not my place to break that trust.”

He held up one hand. “Never mind. Telling me what McNabb said about herself won’t bruise your conscience, will it?”

She glared at him. “No.”

“Good. Did she ever talk about Quentan Nichols?”

“Sort of. She said she regretted what she had done in Iraq, and that she had never expected it to follow her home, but she never specifically mentioned Chief Nichols. I got the feeling she was ashamed of the whole episode.”

“Did she mention him coming to see her again? Or being in contact with her?”

“No.” Talking it over with Russ made her realize how little of herself Tally McNabb had revealed.

He nodded. “How about her husband?”

“I think things were bad with her husband. She was stressed. Plus, she was being sent back to Iraq with the BWI construction unit. She told me—she told us, on Monday, that she was going to quit instead.”

“Would that have left her with money problems?”

“Not that she mentioned.” She leaned back into the chair’s corduroy-covered embrace. “She said her husband was away gambling, and didn’t seem too happy about that. I thought it was because he had gone off without her, but maybe they couldn’t afford his losses.”

“Away gambling? Where?”

“She didn’t say.” She tilted her chin forward to look at him. “Is he really missing?”

“No one knows where he is. The scheduler at BWI Opperman said he hasn’t been working for the past week or so.”

She buried her nose in her coffee cup and breathed in the scent before taking a sip. “Maybe money problems, then—and she has to choose, Iraq or the unemployment office.”

“Not if she quits. No benefits. Maybe no recommendation.”

She thought about Tally in their last group session, frustrated and angry. At the hospital, cynical and resigned. “Her back was up against a wall. She’s alone and upset, with her life and with her husband. Then he finally gets home from a weekend of blowing their money at the casino, and everything she’s been feeling comes to a head. She lights into him, and in the heat of that moment, he kills her.”

“There’s zero evidence of that. The house was clean and orderly. We won’t have any autopsy info until tomorrow, but I can tell you right now, there weren’t any defensive wounds on her hands.”

“He could have restrained her, killed her, and then cleaned up afterward.”

“We’re investigating that possibility right now. That’s why I have to go back after our meeting with Reverend McPartlin.”

A possibility struck her. “Are you sure it wasn’t an accident?”

He shook his head. “She was shot in the head. Through her mouth.”

“Oh, God.”

He flipped his phone open and dialed. “Anything else? Drugs? Alcohol?”

“I never saw any sign she was using.” Her rapidly dwindling secret stash swelled in her conscience, filling her mouth with the words that would confess;
uppers, downers, pain pills.
She swallowed her own guilt. “There was very open access to sleeping pills and stimulants in Iraq. She may have brought some back with her.”

“Hmn.” His glance shifted toward his phone. “Lyle? Russ. How’s it going?”

Across the hall, the Reverend Julie McPartlin came through the door. She spread her hands.
What’s up?

Clare flashed her the same five-fingered signal Julie had given her earlier.
Five minutes.

“No, no, that’s fine. Look, evidently Wyler McNabb was away gambling as of Monday night.”

Julie shrugged and tapped her watch.

“I have no idea. Could be Las Vegas or Atlantic City, could be Akwesasne or Turning Stone. Find a picture and have Kevin pick it up. He can start faxing it around to the state casinos.”

Clare nodded. This might be a short session.

“Then call Ed in to cover for him. Yeah, I know he’s on overtime. Just do it.”

Julie disappeared back down the hallway.

“McNabb was in a veterans support group over at the community center.” He covered his phone with one hand. “You don’t mind if I tell them you were in the group with her, do you?”

She shook her head.

“Yeah, Clare’s taking part in it, too. She said McNabb never mentioned seeing Nichols but that she was stressed about work and her marriage.” He paused. “Yeah, it does. She might have been under treatment for depression or something.” He cupped his hand over the phone again. “Can your therapist prescribe?”

She shook her head.

“Clare says she would have had to get scrip somewhere else if that was the case. Have you found anything?” He paused. “Okay. Yeah. The husband’s the number one priority. I’ll see you when I’m finished up here. I know.” He let out a weary laugh. “I’m going to be the only guy not on overtime.”

Russ snapped his phone shut and pinched the bridge of his nose. “You know what I want for Christmas? Another officer.”

“She didn’t commit suicide, Russ. I know she didn’t.”

He stood up. Held out his hand to help her. “We’re not closing the door on the possibility someone else was involved, but I wouldn’t get your hopes up. Perps may try to hide evidence, but outside of movies, they don’t create elaborate scenarios making it look like the victim killed him or herself.”

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 6

“Tally McNabb, death by gunshot, probable suicide.” The chief flipped open a folder and draped it over his knee.

Hadley stifled a yawn and flipped her own notebook to a fresh page. She had gotten in last night at eleven, to discover Hudson half-asleep over an unfinished history project. She had sent him up to bed and stayed up until midnight gluing bark onto a cardboard longhouse.