Home Front

“I understand,” Michael said, and he did. He lived in a world of crime and victims; he’d seen time and again how terrible a grief came with the realization that a loved one had committed a heinous crime. Ed and his wife were the forgotten victims in a case like this.

“He won’t talk to me,” Ed said. “He just sits there, staring at the wall. ”

“To be blunt, Ed, that’s our real problem now. The only one doing the talking is the prosecuting attorney, and I don’t like what he’s saying. They’ve charged Keith with murder in the first degree, and they claim to have a witness who will testify that Keith confessed to the murder. ”

Ed looked miserable. The man slumped in his chair. “He was such a good kid. Popular. Friendly. The kind of kid who asks you if you need help carryin’ in the groceries and how your day was. He dated lots of girls, cheerleader types, and had fun in high school, but when he met Emily, he knew right away she was the one. ”

“When did it start going wrong?”

“What?”

“The marriage. ”

“Oh. It never did. ”

“Ed,” Michael said evenly. “Something went wrong. ”

Ed looked down at his own hands. “We’ve asked ourselves that question a million times. Did he seem depressed? Did you ever hear them arguin’? Did he ever say he was unhappy? Our family has looked at it six ways to Sunday. They had a happy marriage; that’s what we think. She couldn’t wait for him to get home from Iraq. She wrote him every day. ”

Michael looked up sharply. “Iraq? There’s no mention of him serving in Iraq in what I’ve got here. It just says he’s an honorably discharged marine. ”

“He did two tours. When he came home the second time, he wasn’t the same. ”

“What do you mean?”

“We all saw that he was changed. If you startled him—and that was easy to do—he could turn on you fast enough to take your breath away. I know he didn’t sleep much. Emily told me that he’d started keepin’ a loaded gun by the bed. God help me, I told her a man needed to protect his family. ”

Michael wrote down PTSD and underlined it. “Did he ever hit Emily, to your knowledge?”

“In the last few days, before the … you know, I wondered about that. Keith was so edgy and upset. At a family dinner, he blew up at his brother over nothing. And the look in his eyes scared us all. It wasn’t our Keith. When I asked him about it, he told me he’d had too much coffee, but I didn’t believe him. I think whatever happened to him in Iraq is why he killed Emily. ”

Michael added: What happened in Iraq? to his notes. Diminished capacity? “Did he get help?”

“He tried. The VA sent him away with a prescription for Prozac. ”

Michael tapped his pen on the desk, thinking. So his client had tried to get help from the military and been denied. That was good. And hardly surprising. “Okay, Ed. I’ll do some research based on what you’ve just told me, but I need to talk to Keith, and I need Keith to talk to a psychiatrist. And I need it to happen quickly. ”

“He won’t—”

“If he doesn’t, Ed, he’ll go to prison. Probably for life. ”

Ed looked stricken by that, as Michael had intended. In the silence that followed, Michael sighed. “I don’t want to scare you, but I can’t help your son if he won’t talk to me. There are two sides to every story. I need his. ”

“I’ll get him to talk,” Ed said.

Michael stared at him. “Do that, Ed, and fast. ”

Ten

The first week at Fort Hood passed in a blur of classes, assignments, paper pushing, and lectures. It had been so many years since her active army days that Jolene had forgotten how much bureaucracy there was in ordinary military life, how much of a day was spent “hurrying up to wait. ” She’d spent the last seven days standing in one line or another—or so it seemed. They stood in line for supplies, for lectures, for paperwork to be signed. There was the SRP—soldier readiness process—and more medical tests and examinations and shots, finance reviews, and updating of personnel records.

The day started early here at Fort Hood; breakfast was at 0430. Immediately afterward were classes on anything and everything they would need to know in Iraq: spiders and scorpions and IEDs—improvised explosive devices—sexual harassment, chemical warfare. The list went on and on. The worst of the lines were at the phones. Jolene had been advised to leave her cell phone at home, since it wouldn’t work in Iraq anyway. Following that advice had been a mistake. As it was, she spent much of her off-duty time standing in line to call home. More often than not, by the time it was her turn to use the phone, it was too late to talk to the girls. The few conversations she’d had with Michael had been short and stilted. Neither had said I love you before hanging up. Afterward, she felt more lonely than she had before the calls.

Now, Charlie Company was out beneath the blazing hot Texas sun, in full gear, walking along a dirt road the color of old blood. Jamie was in the lead. A lone hawk circled overhead curiously, no doubt wondering why these uniformed, helmeted adults, armed with M-16s and 9 mils, were running around in this heat. They kept pulling to the side of the road and looking for fictitious IEDs.

She knew it was important, lifesaving, even, but they were an aviation unit going in to provide support—backfill—for a combat aviation brigade. If she found herself on a road in Sadr City or Baghdad, in a Humvee, something had gone wrong enough that an IED would be only one of the worries.

And man it was hot.