“Noncombatants.”
“You don’t know what it was like.”
“Children, Chase.”
“You know nothing about me.”
“You killed children. What kind of animal are you, Chase?”
“Fuck you!” Chase had come to his feet as if something had exploded close behind him. “What would you know about it? Were you ever over there, did you ever have to serve in that stinking country?”
“Some patriotic paean to duty won’t change my mind, Chase. We all love this country, but most of us realize there are limits to-”
“Bullshit,” Chase said.
He could not remember having been this angry in all the time since his breakdown. Now and then he had been irritated by something or someone, but he had never allowed himself to feel extremes of emotion.
“Chase-”
“I bet you were all for the war. I’ll bet you’re one of the people that made it possible for me to be there in the first place. It’s easy to set standards of performance, select limits of right and wrong, when you never get closer than ten thousand miles to the place where it’s all coming down.”
Judge tried to speak, but Chase talked him down:
“I didn’t even want to be there. I didn’t believe in it, and I was scared shitless the whole time. All I thought about was staying alive. In that tunnel, I couldn’t think of anything else. I wasn’t me. I was a textbook case of paranoia, living in blind terror, just trying to get through.”
He had never spoken about the experience so directly or at such length to anyone, not even to Fauvel, who had pried his story from him in single words and sentence fragments.
“You’re eaten with guilt,” Judge said.
“That doesn’t matter.”
“I think it does. It proves you know you did wrong and you-”
“It doesn’t matter, because regardless of how guilty I feel, you haven’t the right to pass judgment on me. You’re sitting there with your little list of commandments, but you’ve never been anywhere that made a list seem pointless, anywhere that circumstances forced you to act in a way you loathed.”
Chase was amazed to realize that he was crying. He had not cried in a long time.
“You’re rationalizing,” Judge began, trying to regain control of the conversation. “You’re a despicable, murdering-”
Chase said, “You’ve not exactly followed that commandment yourself You killed Michael Karnes.”
“There was a difference,” Judge said. Some of the hoarseness had returned to his voice.
“Oh?”
“Yes,” Judge said defensively. “I studied his situation carefully, collected evidence against him, and only then passed judgment. You didn’t do any of that, Chase. You killed perfect strangers, and you very likely murdered innocents who had no black marks on their souls.”
Chase hung up.
When the phone rang at four different times during the following hour, he was able to ignore it completely. His anger remained sharp, the strongest emotion that he had experienced in long months of near catatonia.
He drank three more glasses of whiskey before be began to feel mellow again. The tremors in his hands gradually subsided.
At ten o’clock he dialed the number of police headquarters and asked for Detective Wallace, who at that moment was out.
He tried again at ten-forty. This time Wallace was in and willing to speak to him.
“Nothing’s going as well as we hoped,” Wallace said. “This guy doesn’t seem to have been printed. At least, he’s not among the most obvious profile group of felons. We still might find him in another group – military files or something.”
“What about the ring?”
“Turns out to be a cheap accessory that sells at under fifteen bucks retail in about every store in the state. Impossible to keep track of where and when and to whom a particular ring might have been sold.”
Chase committed himself reluctantly. “Then I have something for you,” he said. In a few short sentences, he told the detective about Judge’s calls.
Wallace was angry, though he made an effort not to shout. “Why in the hell didn’t you let us know about this before?”
“I thought, with the prints, you’d be sure to get him.”
“prints hardly ever make a difference in a situation like this,” Wallace said. There was still a bite in his voice, though it was softer now. He had evidently remembered that his informant was a war hero.