Free Dead or Alive by Michael McGarrity

the civilian support staff, knew what to make of the only male spouse in the crowd, not to mention one who was an ex-police chief to boot.
    He was beginning to doubt his ability to be a retired, stay-at-home parent in London over the next thirty-four months and counting, and he felt shitty about his deteriorating attitude. Sara and Patrick deserved better.
    After preschool in the afternoon, Kerney had promised Patrick a boat ride on the Regent’s Canal and then a visit to the London Zoo. Until then he would surf the Internet to see what he could learn about the investigation into Riley Burke’s murder. By now, there had to be news reports about it. He sat at the desk in a small upstairs bedroom that he’d outfitted as a home office and powered up the laptop.
    Among her many duties as the U.S. Army military attaché at the U.S. Embassy to the Court of St. James’s, Sara was responsible for overseeing the activities of forty-plus army personnel detached on special liaison duty with Royal Army units throughout the United Kingdom. For the past two days, she’d been touring bases in the southern part of the country, working her way back toward London. Last night, she’d stayed over at the Winchester Army Training Regiment base in order to make an early morning meeting with a U.S. Army intelligence captain who was briefing the Brits about the latest top-secret version of a battlefield imagery system.
    It was her first out-of-town trip since landing behind her desk at the embassy two months ago, and although she missed Patrick and Kerney, she was enjoying the break from being office-bound or scrambling from one meeting to the next with Ministry of Defence command staff and planners.
    The job demanded long hours to keep up with all that needed her attention. Fortunately, her boss, the senior military attaché, Rear Admiral Thomas Lincoln Foley, had been supportive and helpful.
    Her meeting with the captain went well, and after a tour of the training facilities and the campus, she went back to her quarters, packed, consulted her road map for the next leg of her tour, a briefing at a Royal Armored Corps garrison, and left the post.
    As she drove through the cathedral city of Winchester, she let her thoughts return to the murder of Riley Burke. Her first impulse after hearing the news from Kerney was to hunt down and shoot the murderer herself, and she’d all but told Kerney to do exactly that.
    Sara wondered if Iraq had turned her into one of the walking wounded who’d survived combat but lost their moral compass. Dead or alive. She’d both said it and meant it, especially the dead part.
    In Iraq, she had been shot at and wounded, and she had killed and wounded the enemy in return. She had watched young soldiers die in firefights, examined strewn bloody body parts of civilians blown up by suicide bombers, witnessed soldiers burned alive in Humvees, and seen women and children gunned down by errant fire in skirmishes, until she no longer reacted to the carnage.
    She had finished her tour in a cold rage about war, killing, politicians who sacrificed others at no risk to themselves, and the gutless generals who told the politicians whatever they wanted to hear. She came home emotionally numb, disinterested in most of what happened around her, and feeling estranged from a country that seemed untouched by the war. Only Patrick and Kerney truly mattered, and even with them she occasionally shut down.
    Until Iraq, she had always bounced back. Even after her Gulf War One tour, she’d returned home without suffering any long-lasting ill effects. She knew she had post-traumatic stress disorder, and after months of trying and failing to cope with it on her own, she’d finally made an appointment to see a shrink.
    Going into therapy put a stopper on any future advancement in the military. But she’d reached 0-6, bird colonel, before anyone else in her West Point class, had a job that rarely led to