Wrongful Death: A Novel Read online

  “Could you see the rest of the convoy?” Kessler asked.

  “Couldn’t see anything, Captain.” Ferguson blew his nose into a handkerchief.

  Cassidy asked, “What if they continued on, Captain?”

  “Not likely, Butch.” Ford knew that Kessler was trying to sound like it was just another day at the beach, but none of them liked being stopped in the open. The best part of a convoy was getting back to the base. “We’ll roll when the storm passes.”

  “I don’t like being out here,” Cassidy said, expressing what Ford knew they were all thinking.

  “Thought you were the great white hunter?” DT smirked. “Sure your nickname ain’t Bitch instead of Butch?”

  “Enough, DT.” Kessler turned sideways and addressed the men in the backseat. “If we can’t see Hajji, then Hajji can’t see us. Man your sectors and keep it buttoned up.”

  Cassidy looked out his window but continued to bite and spit out pieces of his fingernails. Ford suspected from the coffee-stained color of the kid’s teeth and all his tics and jerks, that Cassidy had abused drugs at some point in his life. And despite the young’s man’s bravado, he doubted that Cassidy had ever shot anything in his life. The captain, who was on a second tour and had also served in Desert Storm, had expressed his concern to Ford about how Cassidy, and DT for that matter, would react when the shit hit the fan. He told Ford that you could train a soldier to fight, but nothing compared to having someone shooting at you. Some soldiers performed as they trained, others fed off the combat adrenaline and flat-out kicked ass, but a third group simply shut down, paralyzed by fear.

  Hoping to keep them occupied, Ford asked, “Why don’t you tell us again about that time you killed that wild boar, Butch?”

  Cassidy gave him a blank stare in the rearview mirror, further confirming his story had been bull. People didn’t easily forget real-life experiences. It was more difficult to remember the things you made up.

  Ford further prompted him. “You know? How you shot that boar with a compound bow while hunting with your father?”

  “Oh, that,” Cassidy said. “I wasn’t with my father that time. That time I was alone.” He adjusted in his seat. “Okay. Let me think. So I seen this boar, big fucker, like five, six hundred pounds rooting in the dirt and leaves and stuff—”

  The radio crackled and spit out a data burst of cryptographic information. Kessler raised a hand to quiet Cassidy and picked up the headset. “This is Charlie Tango Three. Say again. Over.” He waited a beat. “This is Charlie Tango Three. Say again. Over.”

  “You think it’s the convoy?” Cassidy asked.

  The initial response was more static, but what followed, intermittent and unclear, was definitely not the convoy.

  CHAPTER THREE

  MARYSVILLE, WASHINGTON

  I remember him saying they got ambushed. He said they were lucky they weren’t all killed,” Katherine Ferguson said.

  “And that’s when your husband lost his eyesight?” Sloane asked. “He said a building blew up and he got hit by the debris.”

  “Who blew up the building, the Iraqis?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know for sure. I think Phil said we did.”

  Again, Sloane found it unlikely five men fighting through an ambush would have the firepower to blow up a building, but he could also see by the way Katherine Ferguson’s shoulders had begun to slump that she was physically and emotionally shutting down. He looked about the room and spotted a photograph atop the piano.

  “How old are your children?”

  Ferguson smiled. “PJ, Phil junior, is eleven. Sophia is seven.” She looked back to Sloane. “Phil was a good dad. The kids miss him terribly.”

  “I’m sure he was.” Sloane had not meant to imply otherwise. “Was he depressed about his condition? It would be understandable given his circumstance.”

  “He was,” she said, though not with conviction. “But never around the kids. Phil was strong that way. He didn’t want the kids to be scared, so he made jokes, you know. He’d tell PJ, ‘You better duck from now on when we’re hunting.’ Things like that.” She smiled. “But when we were alone he worried about how we were going to get by. He wanted to be sure we were taken care of. I’m sure he thought our insurance would cover…” Her voice trailed.

  “That’s understandable.”

  “He leased his land to his brother. Joe lives on the other end of the farm. They signed the agreement just a couple days before…”

  Her voice caught. She looked as though she might cry again.

  “Has that helped?” Sloane asked, gently prodding.

  She nodded. “We’re okay. He also sold the land to the south, the field just as you drove in. We put the money in a trust to pay for the kids’ college. Education was important to Phil.”

  “Your husband sounds like he was a sharp businessman.”

  She smiled. “I guess you’d assume he was just a dumb farm boy, but Phil graduated from the U-Dub with degrees in agriculture and business. He was no dummy.” She looked at her watch.

  “I won’t keep you any longer.”

  “I have homework.” She sighed at the irony.

  Sloane stood. “Thank you again for talking with me. I’m sorry to have disturbed your day.”

  “Not at all.” She walked him back to the front porch. When she opened the door the dogs rose quickly, as if caught napping on the job. One padded over, a collie mix. Sloane scratched her behind the ears as he contemplated his final area of questioning. “I’m sorry about your husband. I’m sure his death was very traumatic for all of you.”

  She nodded. “When I got the call that day, my whole world crashed.”

  That was his opening. “You weren’t home?”

  “I was at work. I worked for a local Realtor part-time, just helping in the office.”

  “That must have been horrible to come home to.”

  “Joe handled it. He found him. Phil’s therapist had a flat tire that day and got here late. There were guns on the table and she couldn’t find Phil anywhere, so she called Joe.”

  “Guns as in more than one?”

  She nodded. “It looked like maybe he was cleaning them. That’s what Joe said.”

  Sloane looked at the staircase behind her leading to the second floor. It was steep. “How long had Phil been back from Iraq?” he asked, though he recalled her telling him it had been six months.

  She looked past him into the yard. “About six months, but he’d only been home from the VA hospital a couple weeks.”

  “So being blind was still relatively new to him.”

  “It was, but therapy was helping. He was learning to use a cane and organize things so he knew where they were. But his balance was off because his eyes couldn’t judge things for him. They said it was going to take time.”

  “How often did your husband have therapy?”

  “Every day. They called it an immersion. His therapist was starting with the basics, organizing his closet and drawers, getting dressed—things like that.” She shook her head, smiling. “But Phil was never one to take the easy way out. He was bugging her to teach him Braille so he could read again.”

  “I imagine your husband’s condition was an adjustment for all of you.”

  “It was hard,” she agreed. “We were like old dogs learning new tricks. Phil stayed mostly upstairs during the day when his therapist wasn’t here. Then I helped him down when I got home so he could sit with us at dinner or watch television.” She chuckled. “I guess that sounds strange, ‘watch television.’”

  “Not at all.” Sloane waited a beat. “So your husband didn’t go outside much?”

  “Not too much. He’d occasionally sit on the porch to get some fresh air.”

  Sloane noticed a wicker porch seat with a floral pad. “Did he keep his guns in the barn?”

  “Oh no, not with the kids around. He kept them locked in a cabinet in his office,” she said, gesturing vaguely inside the house.

&nbs
p; Sloane walked to the corner of the porch as if to look at the barn, but focused instead on the path leading to it. A good fifty yards, it was littered with farm equipment and scrap metal, and pocked with potholes filled with rain water.

  AS HE DROVE from Katherine Ferguson’s property, Sloane flipped open his cell phone and pressed the preprogrammed number. “You know what we always say about coincidences?”

  “Don’t believe in them,” Jenkins replied.

  “Phillip Ferguson is dead.”

  “My source said he made it home alive.”

  “He did, but blind. He took shrapnel in the head.”

  “I sense where this is going.”

  “He shot himself in a barn behind his house. I’m just leaving his wife. Another tragedy, two young kids. She says he shot himself because he thought the family could recover the insurance. Sounds like the perfect scenario, doesn’t it?”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “Depressed soldier comes home injured in the war, can no longer do all the things he once did, so he decides his family is better off with him dead and makes the ultimate sacrifice. Unfortunately, he miscalculates and doesn’t realize suicide is not a covered event under any insurance policy.”

  “You have reason to suspect otherwise?”

  “His therapist normally arrived about an hour after his wife went to work. That day she had a flat tire and was late.”

  “It happens.”

  “Before he died, Ferguson worked out an arrangement to lease his portion of the land to his brother. His wife says it’s enough to pay the bills with some left over at the end of each month. They also sold some land and put the proceeds in a trust for the kids’ education and their retirement.”

  “He was getting his affairs in order, making sure his wife and kids would be all right. That your point?”

  “My point is he doesn’t sound like an idiot—like the kind of guy who wouldn’t have known, or at least have checked to see if his life insurance policy excluded suicide.”

  Jenkins continued to play devil’s advocate. “He was blind and depressed. Depressed people don’t always act rationally and he couldn’t read the policy.”

  “He had two college degrees,” Sloane said.

  “One more than I have.”

  “And I’ll bet you know suicide is never covered by an insurance policy.”

  “I’d suspect as much.”

  “He wanted to learn Braille so he could start reading again.”

  “His mood swings could have been flip-flopping. Who knows what his mental state was?” Jenkins countered.

  “His wife also said he’d taken out all his guns and was cleaning them.”

  “All of them?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Do you know much about being blind?”

  “I’ve read some things.”

  “I had a case in San Francisco once. A guy tried to heat a can of air-conditioning fluid on a stove to get it to flow easier. The can exploded like a rocket, took out one eye and damaged the other. An expert I hired to fight the damages said that being born blind is one thing—your body doesn’t know any different. But to suddenly go blind creates a whole different set of problems, balance being one of them. Ferguson’s wife said it was her husband’s biggest adjustment. He generally stayed upstairs until she got home.”

  “So how did he get out to the barn?”

  “Good question. I asked it myself. Here’s the scenario. The wife is at work. The kids are in school. The brother is gone, and the therapist is late because she gets a flat tire. Just months after being blinded, and weeks after coming back to his own home, and still dealing with major balance issues, he navigates down a steep staircase, gets his shotgun from a locked cabinet in his office, finds his way out the front door, down the porch, around the side of the house, and walks fifty plus yards through what looks like a junkyard of scrap metal and potholes to blow his head off in a barn.”

  “Again, it could have happened that way.”

  “Could have, but in light of all the other things I just told you, is it plausible?”

  “We’d be speculating. We don’t really know.”

  “And if I’m wrong, it’s no big deal. But if I’m right…”

  “Okay, so how does this relate to James Ford?”

  “I don’t know, but my gut is bothering me. Have you found anyone else?”

  “For a guy who didn’t sound all that enthusiastic about taking this case this afternoon you’re awfully pushy.”

  “Yeah, well, things have changed.”

  “I have a bead on a guy in Tacoma, but I haven’t been able to reach him yet. His sister says he works nights.”

  TACOMA, WASHINGTON

  THE WAY DWAYNE Thomas figured it, there was a predetermined day and time for everyone to die, and there was no getting around it. To his way of thinking, heaven was a warehouse filled with billions of timers, all ticking at once, and every second another bell rings to indicate someone has died. That’s why people said things like “His time was up” and “The bell tolls for thee.”

  People did everything they could to avoid that bell. Thomas saw them every day at the health club, people damn near killing themselves trying to prolong their lives. They didn’t get it. They didn’t understand that they could work out for hours, take a long steam in the locker room, and walk out the door and get hit by a bus. That was how it happened to Brad Pitt in that movie Meet Joe Black. One minute, he’s sitting in a restaurant meeting a girl. The next minute he walks out the door and his bell rings.

  That was destiny. That was fate. And all the hours sweating on the damn StairMaster weren’t going to change that.

  Thomas knew about fate. He’d learned all he wanted to know about it waking up every morning in Iraq wondering if it was his day to die. He’d been sure his day had come in that ambush, but God had kept his clock ticking and stopped James Ford’s instead. Shitty deal for sure, but nothing to be done about it. After that, he figured if it was his time, then it was his time, so there was no reason to get all worked up about it. That was fate.

  When he got back to Tacoma, he learned a different lesson about fate, except they called it irony. The city rejected his employment application. So much for his grand plan to use the Guard to catch on as a city worker; he was no better off for humping his ass in 130-degree weather than if he’d never left Tacoma. Well, screw that. He was owed something for his trouble and not just some damn medal, either. Hell yeah, he was. So when the attorney called to tell him he was filing a claim for Fergie and wondering if DT was interested, he figured why the hell not? Why shouldn’t he get something for serving? He’d nearly died in that ambush and the doctors had said he lost 30 percent of his hearing in one ear when that building blew up. That had to be worth something, didn’t it?

  He tossed dirty towels into the laundry basket and replaced them with clean ones. The muscled guy on the treadmill had given up and left, leaving the old fart on the StairMaster to push on alone, red-faced and sweating buckets. Thomas half-expected the guy to suddenly clutch his chest and fall off the machine. If he saw the guy alive again, it would be a miracle.

  He wheeled the cart into the laundry room, left it, and retrieved his belongings from his employee locker. When he walked out the back of the building, the cold night air made his skin tingle like a slap across the cheek. God, it felt good to be cold again. If there was a hell, Iraq was the simulator for it. Thomas had never experienced that kind of heat before. Then the sand would start blowing and grains would stick to parts of your body you didn’t even know you had. The best part of coming back home was coming back to weather that rarely got above 80 degrees, and the only sand to be found was if you went looking for it at the beach.

  He pulled the knit Seahawks cap down low over his ears and started the walk down Market, crossing through the Republic parking lot as he did each night to cut the corner to his bus stop. The muscled guy who’d been running on t
he treadmill stood in the lot wearing a blue ball cap, his hands cupped to his mouth, flicking a lighter. It sparked three times without drawing a flame.

  He looked up as Thomas approached. “Can I get a light?”

  Thomas pulled his lighter from his pocket. Smoking was another bad habit he’d brought back from Iraq, two packs a day. Only cigarettes weren’t cheap like they’d been over there. They were expensive as hell. He flicked his lighter and cupped the flame.

  The man lit up and stepped back, blowing a patch of blue smoke into the night. “Thanks. You need one?”

  Thomas had a few minutes to catch his bus. “Yeah, why not? Keep me warm against this cold,” he said, making conversation.

  “Don’t I know it, brother.”

  The guy shook a butt from the pack. Thomas pulled the cigarette free and pressed it between his lips, about to flick his lighter when the man stepped forward and flicked his own—a gold-plated type with a flip-top that immediately produced a blue flame.

  The man shrugged and snapped shut the top, making a metallic ting. It sounded like a bell.

  THREE TREE POINT, WASHINGTON

  EARLY THE FOLLOWING morning, Jenkins appeared at Sloane’s home with two cups of coffee.

  “I’d thank you,” Sloane said, “except it’s too early to talk.”

  “Tell me about it,” Jenkins said. “I’ve been up for an hour and a half. Get dressed. We have an appointment.”

  “The guy in Tacoma?”

  “Haven’t heard back from him yet. This is better.”

  “It better be.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Sloane drove his Jeep south on I-5. He’d always considered the car roomy, but Jenkins looked like he’d been squeezed into the passenger seat. His head brushed the ceiling, his legs were uncomfortably bent, and despite the brisk morning temperature, he had the window down, elbow out.

  “This guy was their captain?” Sloane asked.

  Jenkins nodded. “Robert Kessler.”