Blood on the Tracks (Sydney Rose Parnell Series Book 1)

by Barbara Nickless

  With that same tight smile, Bandoni pulled a crushed pack of Salems and a plastic lighter from an inside pocket. “Keep ’em. I’m trying to quit.”

  “I need an escort back out?”

  Cohen stood. “I’ll walk you to the elevator.”

  “And, Parnell,” said Bandoni. “Don’t go wandering off, right? Got a few more things to go over.”

  I shrugged and moved away. Turned back. “One thing you guys should know. Rhodes says Elise always kept a key under her doormat. Wanted hobos to feel welcome, even when she wasn’t home.”

  “A key,” Bandoni said. “Ain’t that convenient for our forgetful little killer?”

  Outside, a pearl-gray line smeared the eastern horizon just visible between the glass and steel silhouettes of downtown Denver. I sat on a bench in the wide concrete plaza and shivered in my coat, staring at the fallen officer memorial as I smoked Bandoni’s cigarettes. Five of them. One after the other, like a junkie, until the nicotine gave me the shakes.

  Dawn is a favorite time for ghosts. Perhaps because we mortals are at our most fragile then, sleep-wrecked, bleary-eyed, still lost in a world where only moonlight leads the way. But perhaps it is also because we are at our most hopeful in the morning, trailing Wordsworth’s intimations of immortality into a new day. We awaken with a full allotment of light stretching ahead of us before night closes in again.

  This witch’s brew of vulnerability and fear and hope makes dawn the time when we can best hear whatever it is our ghosts are trying to tell us.

  But not today, apparently. I sat alone in the courtyard, shivering, smoking, watching the pearl of sunrise spread to a gray swath without a whisper of gold in it, listening to the growl of traffic climb from the mewling of kittens to a lion’s roar. Today might devour me, and neither the Sir nor Elise nor my faithful private were there to offer any clarification.

  Fair-weather friends.

  I knocked ash on the ground.

  If Rhodes was innocent—a big if—and if he were right that Elise’s death had something to do with Habbaniyah and Resenko and Haifa, then exposing the killer meant I’d be hunting for what amounted to my own suicide. If the entire truth came out—everything we’d done while we still wore the uniform—there’d be a court-martial and jail time. Loss of honor. Loss of my job and my benefits, which were my only means of supporting Grams and Clyde. I’d lose my education reimbursement and flush away the future I was trying to imagine for myself.

  But if this mysterious officer had killed Elise and framed Rhodes for it—and if he’d done a good enough job of it that he’d buried Habbaniyah as well—then Rhodes would take the fall for all the world to see and judge. He would forever be the beast who slew Beauty.

  Let him go down, some part of me urged. Let him go down and then shovel the dirt in after him and Habbaniyah. Close the hole and be done.

  “Fucking suck,” I said to the baleful windows of DPD headquarters.

  Who was it that said once you save a life, you must keep that life safe forever? How was I supposed to stand back and let Rhodes go down, watch him pay for the sins of others? Pay multiple times. Once by going off to war. Again by covering for Resenko. Then a third time by taking the rap for the death of the woman he loved.

  Especially, I realized, when my heart could not believe Tucker was guilty. Maybe needed for him to not be guilty. Because if he could kill the woman he loved, what did that say about the rest of us wounded warriors? What were any of us capable of when the monster took hold?

  I finished my final cigarette and crushed it beneath my foot just as Cohen came out bearing two Styrofoam cups. The sun found a break in the mercury denseness of the sky and lit his face with sudden warmth. The light should have made him look older, with his unshaven chin and his face like a rumpled sheet. Instead, he looked younger. Vulnerable. I noticed again that his suit, as worn and scruffy as his face, was expensive, his overcoat stylish, his shoes of good leather. Maybe that’s where he put all his money. He certainly hadn’t put it into a haircut.

  “You didn’t come back.” He sat next to me and handed me one of the cups. “Coffee with lots of cream and sugar. I figured you could use both after doing my job for me yesterday and bringing in Rhodes.”

  We exchanged small smiles. Cohen’s was the dry, cynical smile of a cop. Mine probably looked the same.

  “Thanks for the coffee.”

  Another smile, this one a little more real. “So did he appreciate your saving his life? Or did he want to kick your ass?”

  “He isn’t happy with me.”

  “He give up anything we can use? Anything at all?”

  I slid into the lie like a seal into water. “Other than what I told you, we just talked about Iraq. You and Bandoni learn anything?”

  His eyes narrowed, and I got the distinct feeling he’d seen right through me. That he’d taken note of my transgression and filed it away for later.

  “He is pretty convincing,” Cohen said. “Whatever he did or didn’t do, I think he really believes he’s innocent. Bandoni’s not buying it, though. Figures he’s faking the memory loss.”

  “Seems to me everything you’ve got is circumstantial.”

  “Until we get the ME’s report.”

  “Then it becomes evidence.”

  “Evidence is pretty much what we hang our hats on.”

  I took a big swallow of lukewarm coffee, frowned at the sweetness of it. “Give me something, Cohen. Some little piece of evidence that’ll give me a gap I can slide my foot into.”

  “You want your Marine to be innocent.” He rolled his neck. His spine popped. “There is one possible ray of sunshine.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Remember the hobo beads? We showed them to Rhodes, told him they were found near his girlfriend’s body. He freaked out. We had to wait for him to settle. Then he says they look like his beads—one of them even has Screw Iraq carved on it. But he claims his were stolen in Wyoming. And also that a lot of hobos wear them, including vets. So they might or might not be his. That true?”

  “It’s true.”

  I dropped my elbows to my thighs, kept my face blank as I ran through the list of possibilities. Another tramp, one who’d served in Iraq. Tucker’s thief. Or our mysterious officer, planting evidence. “Does he know who stole them?”

  Cohen sighed like it hurt. “Assuming we believe him?”

  “Assuming that.”

  “Says he was asleep. But he claims some skinhead jumped him in Wolf, and it was that night his beads went missing. I asked why the Nazi went after him. He says it just happens like that sometimes—he gets jumped because people don’t like his face. Doc backs up his story to the extent that Rhodes has a nice set of two- or three-day-old bruises and a pretty good scrape.”

  “Who won the fight?”

  “Rhodes says it was close, but he’d of won on points.”

  “So it’s payback time? This guy, this random, angry asshole, gets to Denver first and takes out his hate on Elise?”

  Cohen shrugged. “That’s one theory. Seems thin. How would the Nazi even know about her?”

  “The word on the rails. Pretty easy to find out who’s connected. Can you get a sketch artist?”

  “Miles ahead of you, Parnell.”

  “There any witnesses? Hobos, I can run them down.”

  “No. But Rhodes has a fresh tat on his arm, a double lightning bolt. It’s—”

  “Used by the white-supremacist jail gangs. He spend any time in prison?”

  “No.” Cohen frowned. “Claims he’s not a racist, either. Says some old German, a railroad man who works on the lines, did it for him after Rhodes took a beating. The German told him no one would bother him with that tat.”

  “He’s probably right. There’re a lot of white power skinheads riding the rails. Rumor has them killing hobos as a form of initiation. With transients and miles of empty space, it can be months or even years before someone is reported missing. If they ever are.”

  So
mething small and distant switched on in my memory like a feeble light bulb. I tried to follow its faint glow, but nothing came.

  We sat in silence. The wind flicked a random backhand at us, flapping open Cohen’s overcoat and sending a swirl of dust around the courtyard.

  I straightened, pressing my palm against the small of my back where a muscle had locked. “So if what he says is true, if he’s innocent, how do we help him?”

  “Whoa, Parnell. You may live in a world of innocent until proven guilty. But I tend to take the long view. You want to play Fairy Godmother, be my guest. But my job is to find a killer.”

  “Who says those are mutually exclusive? We look for someone else who could have been at Elise’s Friday night. Verify Rhodes’s story about the key. See if it’s still there and—”

  “We checked. It’s not. If it ever was.”

  “—and find the guy who jumped him. Dig for motives. Talk to family and friends and coworkers to see if she was afraid of anyone or fighting with anyone.”

  He caught his errant coat, buttoned it. “Christ, Sydney. This may not matter worth a shit. The ME says what I think she’ll say, none of us can do a damn thing for him. My captain will hand Rhodes off to the DA and that’ll be that.”

  “How will that make you feel?”

  He set his cup on the ground. Another flutter of wind blew it over, and he grabbed it before it could roll. “You know, he’s probably good for it, no matter how sorry we feel for him. ME connects all the dots for me, I got no choice. I gotta move on.”

  “Bandoni’s already connected the dots.”

  Cohen shrugged. “Len can act like an ass sometimes, but he’s a good cop. Best partner I’ve had. He won’t shut this case down just because doing so would give us a win. But his instinct is usually dead-on, and right now his gut is sending up warnings like a five-alarm fire.”

  “And my gut says he’s innocent.”

  “We’ve got means, opportunity. Maybe a motive.”

  “PTSD isn’t a motive.”

  “So you don’t like it. That doesn’t make it go away.”

  “Do you really care about these people, Cohen? Or are they just stats on a spreadsheet?”

  He didn’t say anything for a while. Finally he smiled that cynical smile. “If you knew me, you wouldn’t need to ask me that.”

  I gave him a long, hard look. “You really think my life would be better if we were friends?”

  “Just saying.”

  “Jesus, let it go already. For your own sake. I make a shitty friend.”

  “That what you told Rhodes?”

  “He’s not looking for a friend. He needs a Marine.”

  Cohen tossed down the dregs of his coffee and flattened the cup. “Don’t overstep, okay, Parnell? You’re a cop, and I suspect you’re a good one. And we really want your help on this. But you aren’t a murder cop. Don’t lose sight of that.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say to that, so I downed my cold coffee. Between the nicotine and the caffeine and the sugar, I wondered if I’d ever come back to earth. I held myself still and listened to my heart complain at the extra work I’d ladled on.

  I said, “You going to run him by the doc again? He acts like he’s in pain.”

  “We’ll have the EMTs take a look at him. He was pretty tired. Why we cut the interview short. But he was against going back to the hospital.”

  A small, ugly voice inside me pointed out that if Rhodes were to die, the worry about Habbaniyah would die with him.

  I’d heard this ugly little voice a lot in Iraq. My survivor voice. What kind of shit excuse for a world is it when you have to choose between honor and survival?

  “You need to keep him on suicide watch,” I said.

  “We’ve made it official and arrested him. Now that he’s in the system, we can take his belt and anything else he might use. We’ll have someone watching him.”

  “I’ll find the German,” I said. “I’ll want that sketch as soon as you have it.”

  “Should be later this morning. Want me to text it to you?”

  “Sure.”

  I was already forming workarounds to avoid bringing Cohen into my piece of the investigation. But if the skinhead proved to be our perp, I wouldn’t have to worry about Habbaniyah or the mysterious man behind it, whom I was starting to think of as simply the Alpha. The skinhead offered all of us—Rhodes, me, his squad mates—a way out.

  A flutter of hope stirred in my chest. Or maybe it was the sugar.

  “I’ll ask around the camps, too,” I said. “And the homeless shelters. See if there’s any talk about someone carrying a hate for Elise.”

  “Or maybe unrequited passion. She was a beautiful girl.”

  “Yeah.” I stood. “I’ll bring whatever I learn to you.”

  “Including our German, right?”

  I rose and busied myself with an errant strand of hair so I wouldn’t have to meet his gaze. “Of course.”

  His expression was quizzical. “I’m not feeling the love, Parnell.”

  “It’s not about love. It’s about faith.”

  “Whatever,” he said, trailing me across the plaza toward my truck. “I’m not feeling it.”

  “You need to learn to trust, Detective Cohen.”

  “Give me a reason, Special Agent Parnell.”

  I turned and looked him straight in the eye. “I promise. I’ll tell you everything I know.”

  “Dante placed liars in the eighth circle, you know.”

  “An educated murder cop. Don’t forget he put traitors in the deepest pit of Hell.”

  One eyebrow shot up. “An educated railroad cop. You thinking of betraying someone, Parnell?”

  “Not you.” I stopped at the curb. “I’m thinking of someone else entirely.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Do not call us heroes. Not if you are calling us that in order to absolve yourself of guilt over sending us off to an unwinnable war. Some of us are heroes. But some of us never had the chance. And some of us got slammed face-first into the fact that when we looked inside, we found nothing heroic at all.

  —Corporal Sydney Rose Parnell. Denver Post.

  January 13, 2010.

  When I got home, Clyde greeted me at the door, light on his paws and ready to rumble. I pulled out the donut I’d lifted from a box at the police station.

  “Last one, buddy,” I said. “You’re going on a working-dog diet starting in about thirty seconds.”

  He ate the donut in one gulp and licked his chops.

  “Okay, ten seconds.”

  I started the coffeepot, took a few minutes to clear the driveway and steps, then called the personnel office at Denver Pacific Continental. Nik would probably know right away who the German was. But I didn’t want him to know I was working the case.

  “It’s Special Agent Parnell,” I said when Ted Rivers picked up.

  “Ah, our hero. Good job, bringing that perp in.”

  “This mean I’ll get a hero bonus in my next paycheck?”

  “Settle for a bag of M&M’s?”

  “Throw in some kibble for Clyde. Look, Rivers, I’m trying to track down a man on one of our repair crews.”

  “Sure thing. You got a name?”

  “A name is what I need. All I know is he’s German, probably over fifty, and he was working near Wolf, Wyoming, two nights ago.”

  “Roald Hoffreider,” Rivers said immediately. “Guy’s been with us for thirty-some years. You want his cell number?”

  “Rivers, I could kiss you,” I said after I’d jotted down the phone number.

  “Name the time and place. I’ll be there, lips puckered.”

  I laughed despite myself and hung up. I dialed Hoffreider’s number and left a message when he didn’t pick up, asking him to call me.

  I poured a cup of coffee then went into the tiny dining room, which I’d converted into a study of sorts, and sat at the computer. First I did a little digging to see if I could find Rhodes’s chain of comman
d. Nothing. Since 9/11, those sites have been locked down tighter than a maximum-security prison. I turned to pulling information on ex-Marine Jeremy “Jeezer” Winston Kane.

  Married and with a daughter, Kane worked as a night stocker for the Costco Warehouse in Littleton. From an adrenaline-charged soldier risking death every day to a man driving forklifts of Pampers—I wondered how well he was making the transition.

  Especially given that before the war, he’d been a premed student at the University of Colorado. Tough change in career plans. Why hadn’t he gone back to school on the GI Bill?

  I called the Costco, pretended to be a friend, and learned Jeremy had gotten off work at six a.m. I whistled to Clyde, and we headed to the door. If I moved quickly, I should be able to catch Jeremy before he went to bed.

  Littleton is a fourteen-square-mile municipality on Denver’s southwest side. It’s a surprisingly quiet place, given that it’s home to the gravesite of America’s only convicted cannibal and shares a zip code with the site of one of the deadliest mass shootings in US history. I drove south out of Denver’s downtown congestion—heavy even on a Sunday—and then west on 285. I kept the window cracked, trying to keep myself awake. A few miles away, the Rocky Mountains gleamed with silver indifference under clear, cold skies.

  The Kanes lived in a split-level set halfway down the block of a lower-middle-class neighborhood, where the homes looked mean and the yards amounted to postage stamps. I pulled over near the crumbling curb and studied the house.

  At just past eight o’clock, it was quiet, the drapes half drawn. The porch light still burned and a newspaper lay in the driveway, its plastic cover sparkling with frost. The snowy front yard held an abandoned wheelbarrow and shovel; it looked like someone had been scooping gravel into a border. An old Ford pickup sat in the driveway, filthy with mud from the recent storms. A Beware of Dog sign hung on the chain-link fence.

  I left Clyde in the heated dog crate and walked up the drive, picking up the paper as I went by. No dog barked from the yard. At the scuffed front door, I paused and listened for people moving or talking. A faint sound of singing came through the wood—a children’s television show. I caught the smoky aroma of bacon frying.