Ambush (Michael Bennett #11)(33)

Clyde, at least, seemed to agree. After I removed his service vest, he gave the fabric a good sniff, then circled in place for a few seconds before plopping down. He unfurled a tongue long enough for a photo shoot at the Oscars and grinned at me.

My hands curled into fists. They could not have him. Not Clyde. And not Cohen.

Payback was going to be hell.

Cohen’s phone buzzed. He looked at the number, then excused himself and went into the kitchen area. I popped into the bathroom to use the promised ointment and bandages, then took a seat on the couch and tried to spend a few minutes enjoying the pleasure of home.

Not my home, I reminded myself. Cohen’s home.

The distinction was important. In a few minutes, everything might change.

The main floor of the carriage house consisted of a great room—a living room and a partially walled-off kitchen that filled the immense space. Floor-to-ceiling windows lined the front of the room. Exposed beams spanned the ceiling. Quietly tasteful furniture was arranged in elegant groupings. At one end of the room was a basketball hoop; at the other stood a fireplace that would comfortably fit a pair of roast pigs.

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.