Judas Horse_ An FBI Special Agent Ana Grey Mystery - April Smith [3]
For months after the shooting incident, I had headaches and malaise. I was on every type of med but still couldn’t make it through the night without sweating through at least one pair of pajamas. I’d get up and read in the living room—one light burning, a desert wind rattling the empty garbage cans, a storm of tiny flowers driven off the pittosporum trees—and like the homeowner who has iced an intruder, or a soldier who destroys a tank, I gained the special knowledge only righteous shooters share: Even the most selfless action, even the defense of your country, doesn’t mean a happy ending. They save the worst for the so-called hero.
I killed somebody.
Who am I?
Two
Galloway calls me into his office again. This time, it is just the two of us. I find him tilted all the way back in his chair, as if he is going to take a nap. His hands are clasped over his chest and his eyes are looking somewhere through the wall. He seems almost peaceful, snuggled up in his customary black turtleneck.
“Steve Crawford was murdered,” he says.
“No. How?”
“He was pretty much blown to bits.”
“In the woods?”
Galloway agrees it sounds improbable. “Figure the odds.”
When the molar in the jaw fragment married up to that of a missing federal agent, a crack team of investigators from the Portland police department and Oregon state police immediately returned to the site. SAC Galloway was there, along with the ASAC from the FBI’s Portland division. Galloway brought his green tactical parka and heavy boots; the locals wore windbreakers and jeans. As they tromped up the trail, two forensic anthropologists were arguing about whether or not the best way to clean bones is to boil them. You’d think science would have come up with the answer to that one by now.
The team had been formed in order to search for more remains. Cause of death was still unknown. It was a clear, cold day and the woods were dazzling under three inches of new snow. Conditions were judged to be good because the sun was out and the ground was already bare in spots. Might be a long shot, but you could get lucky. If you delayed until spring, the remains would migrate even farther. Besides, emotionally, nobody could wait.
When they reached the spot in the stream where the hiker had found the human jaw, they stopped and caught their breath. The thermos bottles and PowerBars came out. There were a lot of organized people trying to organize one another, so Galloway wandered off alone, climbed an outcrop, got up high, and wrapped an arm around a tree to steady himself on the slippery granite. He stared at the ice-colored water riding through the gorge.
His feet were cold and his thoughts morose. He was back in his childhood home in Brooklyn, New York. Cold linoleum, cold sheets, even the wall against his bed felt frigid. Seven years old, watching a blizzard whipping and wailing through the bars of the window guard, he was certain it would blow the brick apartment building away.
The sun was in his eyes now, reflecting off the placid snow that quilted the forest. Snow was different in the country. To his parents, “in the country” meant Westchester. He recalled a wooded place like this on a wintry day—Was it a Sunday? A botanical garden?—and him sledding on a found piece of cardboard. His parents had moved off behind a barren tree. There he saw his father open his mother’s coat, lift her sweater, and put his hand over her breast.
Galloway was lost in reverie about this particular image and why it was making him queasy, while a different part of his brain was seeking information about a depression it had noticed in the newly fallen snow: a space that resolved with more and more urgency as it began to melt away; a small, clearly