“She knows where he is.”
“Maybe. Give her a chance to share. These people, it’s all about honey. They get enough shit from everyone else. You really want to find Rhodes, be smart about how you do it.”
He looked at my hand on his arm, and for a moment it was like he didn’t see me at all, just something standing in his way. I released him and gave him my own cop’s eyes. “Nik.”
It took him a moment, but he came back. “Right.” He moved back toward Jane and nodded at her. “Sorry.”
Jane lifted her chin and shoulders, pissed off and righteous. “There no call for him to be talking to me like that. I ain’t some trash he can shit on.”
“We just want to have a little chat with the Burned Man,” I said. “A bad thing went down this morning, and he might have seen something. You notice when he came and when he left?”
She kept her eyes on Nik, but relented. “Don’t know ’xactly when he come in the first time. Just heard people goin’ on about his face. But I was here when he come back. One, maybe two hours ago. Left on a freight after that.”
“Going which way?”
For the first time, she seemed uncertain. She lifted her hands, dropped them, then finally jerked a thumb over her shoulder, pointing north.
“You sure?” I asked.
“Yeah.” She didn’t meet my eyes. “I’m sure.”
“Powder River,” Nik said. “Bastard’s leaving the state.”
“What else, Jane?”
“What you mean?”
“Something’s got you nervous. What aren’t you telling us?”
“Nothing.” She kept her eyes on the ground. “Ain’t nothing else.”
“Jane. C’mon, help us out. If there’s something you know—”
“Ain’t nothing. I told you what I know.” She shot me a defiant look. “Believe whatever make you happy.”
“Okay.” I blew out a breath. “You happen to see what part of the train he caught?”
“Just that most the dragon done gone by.”
“He set up camp at all?”
She shrugged. “Spent time in his usual spot. Started a fire. It got quiet, so I up and took a look. He just sitting there. Thought he was drunk asleep, too tired even to lie down. Soon as that train come, though, he moving like the Devil after him.”
“Show us where he camped,” Nik said.
Some fire came back in her eyes. “Tell me why I should help, you talk to me like that.”
Nik spread his hands. “Bad day. Nothing personal.”
She sniffed. “Well, then.”
She squashed out her cigarette and hefted herself off the table. We followed as she pushed through the brush and shuffled down the slope toward the riverbank. She stopped under a cluster of cottonwoods and pointed toward a cleared space that held a fire pit in the middle of a twenty-by-twenty-foot patch of dirt. To one side of the cleared area was a heap of trash, neatly scraped into a pile and weighted down with rocks. Next to that, a small stack of canned food—hash and tuna and peaches. On the other side of the clearing, Rhodes or someone had dragged a fallen tree to a place where a man could sit and watch his food warming on the fire and think about what he’d done with his life, what he still might do.
I thanked Jane, gave her a twenty-dollar bill, and she turned back the way we’d come. I heard her crash through the underbrush, then silence.
I led Clyde to a patch of ground away from the camp and ordered him to stay. He watched me curiously, waiting for me to give him something to do.
Nik squatted on the edge of the cleared area and surveyed the camp. I stood over him.
“There was no need for that,” I said.
“We missed him by an hour.”
“I mean it. This isn’t a good idea. You shouldn’t be here.”
“Won’t happen again.”
“Good.” I tugged off the pins holding my braid and stuck them in my mouth while I tucked stray strands back into the plait and re-coiled it under my cap. “You want to hold this area while I call Cohen and lead him here?”
But Nik was staring at the pile of cans. “Why’d he leave all his food?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he wasn’t thinking clearly. Maybe he wanted to go light.”
“You got gloves in that bag? And a camera?”
“We have our lead, Nik. We’re done here.”
“We’re right on top of his camp.” He stood. “Let’s give the regulars a little more than a possible lead from a strung-out bum, okay? Let’s pretend we’re cops a few minutes more and give your detective something to work with.”
I glanced down the river, toward the snarl of cheatgrass and thistle where I’d seen the Sir that morning. I let Nik’s nastiness go. It was grief talking. And grief was why he needed to see things through. I got it.
The dead can be very compelling.
Plus I’d never been able to stand up to Nik. Going along with him now would cost me something with Cohen. But Nik was essentially family. And in Royer, family is always first.
I shrugged. “You’re pushing it,” I said, just to make my point.
He knew he had me. “Appreciate it, Sydney Rose.”
I opened the bag and handed him the box of latex gloves. I removed the camera and took shots of the camp and the surrounding area, stepping carefully around the periphery of Tucker Rhodes’s jungle as I photographed from all angles. The packed earth held few footprints, but I took shots of what was there. Snapped a lot of zooms of the fire pit and the trash.
When I was done, I hung the camera around my neck.
“You want the trash or the pit?” I asked.
“I’ll take the trash.”
We got to work. I found a broken branch and knelt on the ground, the cold pressing through my uniform. I began carefully sifting. Rhodes had shoveled dirt into the fire pit, but heat still rose from underneath. The warmth hit my face, welcome. I thought of Rhodes, crouched in a rear locomotive or maybe freezing in a gondola rattling open to the sky. I wondered if snow was falling on him, if he saw blue sky or gray.
I pulled out a tin can, cut neatly in half and still full. Pinto beans. So he’d eaten a little. Or started to eat. I hooked the stick into the can and set it aside.
“A note,” Nik said from the other side of the cleared space. “In Elise’s handwriting.”
I looked over. Nik held a piece of paper. It was worn and creased, as if Tucker had read it over and over.
“She’s asking him to come home,” Nik said.
“Bag it,” I told him, keeping my voice detached. I watched him for a moment then went back to work.
The cold crept up my spine. I flexed my frozen fingers and turned back to the fire. Underneath the can of beans was another layer of ash. As I pushed it aside, the air turned hot. Whatever was in there was still smoldering.
A piece of fabric emerged. A tan-and-brown pattern I recognized from Iraq. I dug faster. A couple more minutes, and I had enough fabric free of the pit to see that I was right. It was part of a Marine desert camouflage uniform.
From over by the trash pile, Nik made a noise. He was holding up a picture frame made of ceramic clowns. The glass was cracked, the frame empty. He stared at the frame as if he’d caught a rattler by the tail and was waiting for the thing to swing around and bite him.
I flashed to the dust-free spot on Elise’s bedside table.
“It’s Elise’s,” he said. He stood rigid, as if everything soft had gone out of his body. “She had a photo of her and Rhodes in it. Why would he kill her and then keep their picture?”
I shook my head, tilted my face up to the frigid air.
I did not want to look at that uniform, afraid of what it might reveal. For a moment, the Colorado cold disappeared, replaced by heat and flies and sand, and I was standing in our bunker, in the processing room, washing a body. Carefully I cleaned away the blood and dirt, the pieces of gray matter and spatters of internal organs that might or might not belong to the dead man. This particular bod
y had no feet. No left hand.
The back of his skull was gone.
What about the missing parts? I asked as I made a diagram of the body.
Color them in, said the Sir. Shade them black.
“Sydney Rose?”
I blinked. “His uniform blouse is here. In the pit. He tried to burn it.”
This time Nik held the camera. I grabbed another stick and used the two pieces like tongs to tug the fabric free. Rhodes’s entire uniform was in the pit. Blouse, trousers, and cover, folded tight. When I had the articles free of the pit, I used the sticks to unfurl them. They were tacky and gave way reluctantly. We saw why when I had the blouse and trousers open on the ground.
“Elise’s blood,” Nik said, looking at the red-black blooms on the desert camouflage. He wobbled on his feet and I caught his arm.
“Let me get the pictures, Nik. Take Clyde and go for a walk.”
But he shook me off. “I’ll do it.”
“I’m calling Cohen.”
He didn’t respond. I watched him for a moment as he held the Lumix up and began snapping pictures. When I was sure he was steady, I stripped off my gloves and went to stand next to Clyde. Clyde moved close and looked up into my face.
“Good boy, Clyde,” I said. “We’re almost done here.”
I dialed Cohen.
“It’s Parnell,” I said when the detective answered. “Elise Hensley’s uncle ID’d a possible suspect for her murder. Said she was engaged to a war vet, a homeless man. There were a couple of domestic violence incidents. We’re down at his camp now. Word is he came in this morning, early, then caught out maybe an hour ago.”
“You got a name?” Cohen asked.
“Tucker Rhodes. Marine Corps vet. Originally from Montana. His uniform is here. He tried to burn it. Looks like blood all over it.”
“Where are you?”
I gave him the cross streets.
“Hold on,” he said. I heard talking in the background, then he came back on.
“My partner and a couple of uniforms are on their way. What do you mean he ‘caught out’?”
“It’s a hobo term. It means that if our witness is right, Rhodes hopped an empty coal train heading north. He could be halfway to the Wyoming border by now, depending on whether the train hit any delays. I can find out exactly where.”
“I’ll run him. Can you stop the train?”
“If that’s what you want to do. Let me find out which train and where it is. I’ll call you back.”
I hung up and called NOC, the National Operations Center in Fort Worth. The Colorado chief dispatcher and I ran down a list of possible trains until we hit the one Rhodes had likely caught. Dispatch gave me the train symbol, the engine number, and a mile marker.
“You want me to stop it?” the dispatcher asked.
I heard the reluctance in her voice. Trains were only profitable when they had velocity—when they ran smoothly and stuck to their timetable. The crews, too, were on a strict schedule. Once they’d put in their twelve hours, they were dead on line, and you had to get them off the train. Didn’t matter where they were. Top of a mountain pass in the middle of a blizzard, you had to get them off that train and back to town.
“I’ll let you know,” I said.
I disconnected and studied Rhodes’s small jungle. The uniform, the uneaten beans, the clown picture frame, and the pile of canned food sitting in the open where any hobo could help himself to Rhodes’s trove. There was something final in his actions. Not just that he didn’t mean to come back here, to Denver. More like he was going someplace he wouldn’t ever come back from. Burning his uniform made sense if he was hiding evidence. But it also made sense if he was severing his last ties to the world.
Nik finished with the pictures and came to stand with me and Clyde.
“He’s going home, Nik. He’s going to kill himself.”
“You don’t know that.”
I gestured to the train tracks. “This line leads to Montana. He’s going home to die.”
Nik’s face went hard. “I won’t let him do that.”
My headset buzzed. Cohen. I put my phone on speaker so Nik could hear.
“I found a Lance Corporal Tucker Rhodes of Shelby, Montana,” Cohen said.
“That’s him.”
“No priors, no extraditable warrants. Dishonorably discharged after going AWOL from his treatments at a residence in Texas near Brooke Army Medical.”
Meaning he had no right to wear the uniform. But as badly as he’d been hurt in the service of his country, who could blame him for feeling the uniform was still his?
“You find the train?” Cohen asked.
“It’s outside Fort Collins, fifty miles south of the Wyoming border.”
“He could have hopped off in Fort Collins,” Cohen said.
“Have the police there put out an APB. But I think he’s going home. To Montana.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Call it a hunch.”
“Okay.” Cohen sucked in breath through his teeth; I heard the hiss. “He could also be trying to get as far north as he can. Canada won’t expedite arrest warrants against Americans who risk the death penalty. If Rhodes knows that, he might be trying to make a run for the border.”
“Could be.”
“But you don’t think so.”
“I think he plans to kill himself. And I think he wants to do it in Montana.”
“Based on what?”
“He shed his stuff. Food. Personal belongings. His uniform.”
“Classic. Okay. But if he’s going to kill himself, why wait until he gets to Montana?”
“You spend a lot of time on the other side of the world, watch your best friends get blown apart there?” My gaze traveled toward the river where I’d seen the Sir earlier. “You go through that, then you want to be home when you call it in.”
“You think that’s the way he’s working it, that’s what we’ll run with,” Cohen said. “We’ll set up an ambush. I’ll contact the Larimer County sheriff’s office. We need a place along the line where SWAT can hide.”
Nik identified himself. “There’s an abandoned fertilizer factory ten miles south of the Wyoming border. It’s a couple of miles west of the interstate, and the terrain is pretty flat, so even if he runs, he’ll find it hard to hide. There’s still a usable road leading directly to it, so SWAT won’t have any problem getting in.”
“How long before the train gets there?”
“Forty-five minutes, give or take,” I said.
“That’s tight.”
“We can buy you some time,” Nik said. “Have the crew stop on the tracks until the sheriff has his men in place.”
But I shook my head. “Too risky. By now he figures there’s a good chance we’re looking for him. Anything out of the ordinary, he’ll jump. We can slow the train down, buy another five minutes. Maybe ten. But I wouldn’t stop it.”
“Make it ten,” Cohen said.
Nik took a few steps away and I heard him on his phone, talking to dispatch.
Cohen told me to hang on. Muffled voices whispered unintelligibly through the phone connection. Then he came back. “We’re notifying the sheriff now. So this camp of his. Someone ID’d it as his personal camping spot?”
“Yes.”
“Wish you’d invited me to the party.”
I heard the anger in his voice and knew he was right. But I stuck by Nik. “You wouldn’t know about the guest of honor without us.”
“I’ll call for an arrest warrant. Give me five.” He hung up, called back in three.
“We’ve got the right judge handling warrants. Should go fast. You two want to be there when this goes down?”
“You want the victim’s uncle to be part of the ambush?”
“He’s a pro, isn’t he? It’s how we usually play things. And it’s railroad property. Your arrest, if you want it. I don’t believe in waltzing in on someone else’s territory.”
I ignored the
dig. “Doesn’t matter. There’s no way we can make it. Not even if we push it all the way north.”
“You gotta learn to think outside the box, Parnell,” Cohen said. “How you guys feel about helicopters?”
Nik watched me over the hood of the Explorer while we waited for Cohen and the chopper. Cohen’s partner, a dour-faced mountain of a man by the name of Len Bandoni, was already down at Rhodes’s camp. A pair of uniforms was stringing up crime scene tape. The snow had finally arrived, falling steadily.
“You don’t need to come, Sydney Rose,” Nik said. “You gave what I asked.”
“And you didn’t. The deal was to get a lead then hand things over to regular police.”
“We pulled Cohen into it.”
“That wasn’t what we agreed.”
He shook out a cigarette. “It’s Elise, for Christ’s sake.”
“I know.” I poured water in a bowl for Clyde and watched him drink. “I know, Nik. I understand. It’s the reason I’m not yelling at you. But you’re too close to this. You almost lost it with our witness.”
He lit the cigarette and flicked the match away. “I’m not going to shoot him.”
“So you say.”
He came around the hood of the Ford. Clyde was instantly up and standing between us.
“Out,” I said to Clyde, giving him the command to back down. Reluctantly he went to heel, but he kept his eyes on Nik.
“I need to do this,” Nik said. “And Cohen invited me personally. Once Rhodes is in custody, I’m good, okay? I’ll let the law do what it needs to do.”
I folded my arms.
Nik said, “But I was wrong earlier. What I said about you going back to the office. I want you to come.”
“No.”
“Clyde could use Rhodes’s uniform.”
“What?”
“To smell him out. If Rhodes slips out between the searchers, Clyde could track him from the scent of his uniform.”
“The sheriff has K9 teams.”
“You ever know an air scent dog good as Clyde? Or a dog as likely to stay the course?”
“Damn it, Nik.”
“You will make me beg, won’t you, Sydney Rose? Fine. I’m begging. We’re talking about Elise, for Christ’s sake. If Rhodes slips through this ambush, he could disappear forever into Canada. If he ends up killing himself, justice will never be served.”
Blood on the Tracks (Sydney Rose Parnell Series Book 1) Page 5