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

by Barbara Nickless

  “What if we just arrest them all?”

  Hoffreider laughed. “They’re mushrooms, Sydney. No matter how many you pick, there’s always more come the next rain.”

  “Thanks for the warning.”

  “Poisoned mushrooms,” he said as a final point and hung up.

  CHAPTER 16

  You lie awake at one a.m., surrounded by people who want you dead.

  As you stare unblinking into the dark and finally give up and go outside to have a smoke, they are half a klick away, thinking how they will find a way to shoot you or blow you up or cut off your head.

  As dawn fans into the sky and you stumble in flip-flops and sweats to the showers, they’re thinking what they’ll do with your body. Burn it. String it up. Videotape it so your mother back in Iowa doesn’t miss a single moment.

  And you thought you were the hunter.

  —Sydney Parnell, ANTH 2055, Cultural Studies

  Cohen came out of the Happy Java with two steaming cups of coffee, one of which he handed to me. We transferred the clothes he’d brought for the homeless from his car to mine. Then he leaned against his car, crossed his long legs, and hooked the thumb of his free hand into his belt. He stared at the afternoon traffic streaming by.

  “What are you thinking?” I asked.

  “I’m thinking”—he turned his eyes to me—“that you don’t look half bad when you smile.”

  His comment surprised a laugh out of me. Before I could stop myself, I said, “Ditto.”

  “Yeah?”

  No doubt I blushed. “Yeah.”

  He drank some coffee, looked around like he was taking in the day. “I’m sensing closure.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Cop’s instinct.”

  I stood across from him and leaned against my own car while I watched Clyde explore the dirt field behind the coffee shop. “You and Bandoni.”

  “My gut isn’t the sixth-sense machine Bandoni has,” he said. “But a friend in patrol told me three guys have been terrorizing the homeless on the south end of town, near the tracks. Flashing steel and threatening to cut them. The description they got is white guys with shaved heads, steel-toed boots, and tats. Means these guys are around and up to no good.”

  “Still thinking Tucker Rhodes is a shoo-in?”

  “I never liked that crime scene. Too . . .”

  “Convenient?”

  “Yeah. Maybe. I don’t know. We still got a lot of evidence on him.”

  Clyde had his nose low to the ground. A scent-fest. I returned my gaze to the detective. The wind tugged his short hair sideways, worried his tie. Some of the tiredness had eased from his eyes.

  “Is it just a job to you, Cohen?”

  An eyebrow went up. “Are you asking me if the reason I’m feeling good is the prospect of taking a case off the board?”

  “That’s what I’m asking.”

  “Then let me answer by asking you something. Did you enlist because you needed a job? Or because you wanted to go to Iraq and fight bad guys?”

  I debated not answering. This got too close to the things Nik had warned me never to talk about. But I sensed in Cohen a darkness that matched my own. “After what they did, I wanted to do a little whup-ass, same as a lot of people.”

  “It gave your life meaning.”

  “For a time.”

  “Then you’ll understand when I say that with murder cops it’s never just a job. I could give you some line about how we provide justice for the defenseless and restore balance in our society. And that’s all true. It’s why society pays us to do this job. But . . .” He swirled the coffee in his cup, staring down into the depths. “I’m not that noble. I do this job for my own sake. Because it gives my life meaning.”

  “God in his heaven.”

  He lifted his head. “Exactly.”

  “So I guess we’re both just a couple of self-important assholes.”

  He laughed. “Could be.” He tossed the dregs of his coffee into the dirt. “I like your Marine, Parnell. The guy’s been shaved down to his essence by what happened to him in Iraq. Or maybe he was one of those old souls even before the IED. Either way, I’m struggling with the idea that, at his core, he’s violent.”

  “He used to hunt. Before the war. Couldn’t do it after. Couldn’t hurt anything after the war.”

  “So war makes old souls.”

  “Or maybe just lost ones.”

  We stared at each other. I didn’t know what Cohen was thinking about, but I was thinking about ghosts.

  “He’s still our best suspect,” Cohen said after a moment.

  I glanced at the sky, gauging the time. Or maybe checking the heavens. “Then let’s go find a better one.”

  I took the wheel. While I drove, I filled Cohen in on what I’d learned from Roald Hoffreider.

  “He’s a line worker for DPC,” I told him. “Those guys are the ones who know the tramps. He and Rhodes got to talking, and Rhodes told him his beads had been stolen. Hoffreider also verified Rhodes’s story about being jumped.” As had Jeremy Kane and his wife, Sherri. But I couldn’t tell Cohen about that without revealing I’d talked to them.

  Cohen wrote in his notebook. “He see it happen?”

  “No. But he ID’d the guy in your sketch as the leader of a gang of skinheads. Rail name Whip, given name unknown. He says these guys are roughing up the tramps and even scaring Hoffreider and his crew. Rhodes was sporting some bruises when Hoffreider saw him. Could be part of that same group you heard about. Last time there was this much skinhead activity was ten years ago when—”

  “When Jazmine Brown disappeared, last seen walking near the rail yard with a gang of neo-Nazis.”

  “Exactly.”

  “A friend in the Missing and Exploited Persons Unit pulled the case book,” Cohen went on. “One Jazmine Anise Brown, age nine and a half, last known location the Colorado Front Range Trail, a half block south of Denver’s DPC yard. She delivered lunch to her brother, Daryl Brown, then never returned home.”

  “Who worked the case?”

  “Woman named Simpson in Missing Persons,” Cohen said. “After one railroad employee and a couple of hobos placed Jazmine with the skinheads, her file was passed to Homicide. I haven’t had time to do more than read the summary and skim some of the statements, but it looks like nothing linked her to the Nazis other than the eyewitness account by two men getting sloshed next to the South Platte River.”

  “And the railroad employee.”

  “Not much of a witness. He just got a glimpse. Wasn’t even a hundred percent sure he saw the girl before the skinheads closed ranks. He did pick three guys out of a mug book, but not with the kind of certainty that would stand up in court. And the punks’ alibis checked out. They were home for dinner within an hour of the time they were seen with Jazmine. Then the two tramps recanted their stories.”

  “They were threatened.”

  “Or they sobered up. And there went all of our witnesses. A five-mile radius search turned up nothing. When detectives on the case learned there had been trouble at home, Jazmine was deemed a likely runaway. She’d threatened that before.”

  “She was nine,” I protested.

  He rested his arm along the top of the door panel. “A very mature nine, according to the detective’s summary. Girl had been in some trouble already. The detective ruled her case INC and sent it back to Missing Persons. That was April of 2000. Jazmine Brown bounced around for a little while like a ping-pong ball that fell off the table. Nothing since.”

  INC, meaning Inactive, Not Cleared. Departmental PR people used the term “cold case,” as if to imply detectives were still finding time to work them. But in truth, nothing happened on inactives unless a surprise witness stepped forward or evidence appeared from out of the blue.

  “She was forgotten,” I said.

  “Cops don’t forget.” He drummed his fingers. “But we’re realists.”

  I pondered the sadness of the world swallowing a nine-y
ear-old girl whole, leaving behind nothing more than a vinyl binder that even the cold case detectives didn’t have time for.

  For the next two hours we made the rounds of the homeless shelters used by the hobos and showed everyone we could find the sketch of Whip. The response was universal. Everyone recognized the guy. And no one was willing to talk. Cohen made a quick call to his friend in patrol and got the same report from down south.

  “There’s nothing between them and the big bad world,” I said when Cohen filled me in. “Of course they’re afraid to say anything.”

  We stopped at Caring Hands, the shelter where I’d sent Melody Weber. When I’d fixed the cut on her face the previous morning, she’d seemed about to tell me why everyone in the camp was spooked. An opportunity interrupted by Cohen’s phone call and the news of Elise’s death.

  But at the shelter, my friend told us Melody had checked out that morning, taking Liz with her.

  “Said she was going home,” Trish told me. “Took the little girl and hurried out of here in such a god-awful rush she left her daughter’s backpack. I’m hoping they come back for it.”

  “You have an address?”

  “You have a court order? C’mon, Sydney, you know the rules.”

  “Right. We’ll go another way. Thanks for looking after them, Trish.”

  Trish puffed a strand of graying hair out of her eyes. “I didn’t feel good about letting that little girl go. Seen a lot of sadness, that one.”

  Back in the truck, Cohen called Bandoni to track down Melody’s address. I started the engine, wondering what made a woman like Melody go home so her asshole of a boyfriend could beat her some more. And so her daughter could watch. Was Melody afraid of him? Did she imagine she loved him? Or did she simply have nowhere else to go?

  It’s the ones who love us, hurt us the most, she’d said.

  It was dinnertime, the sun a dull glow just above the mountains, when I pulled off the street and parked on a patch of dirt at Darby Bay, a scratch of land further north along the South Platte River. There, I expected to find most of the Hogan’s Alley crew. I wasn’t disappointed. Darby Bay was packed with people huddled in blankets, sharing bottles or food or sitting by themselves. Some of them talked to people only they could see; maybe I wasn’t the only one with ghosts. Flames flickered in metal trashcans while the wind scratched through the skeletal cottonwoods. With afternoon pressing hard into evening, the light long and gray save for the sullen red eye of the sun, Darby Bay looked like a post-apocalyptic refugee encampment.

  I got out into the wind and opened the back door for Clyde. I put him on his lead.

  “You carry the clothes,” I said to Cohen.

  He snapped a two-finger salute. “Ma’am.”

  We made the rounds, Clyde serving as ambassador and Cohen dispensing coats and hats while I showed the sketch. Being around a dog drew people out, but a lot of them were beyond talking much, already sunk into a haze of drugs and alcohol. Those sharp enough to answer our questions were clearly reluctant. Just like at the homeless shelters, the most we got out of them were eyes widening in recognition and an agreement that the guy had been around here and there. Nothing concrete.

  Trash Can was the most forthcoming.

  “Saw him once, up near a camp in Powder River,” Trash Can said. “Spooky dude. I was with Wicked Pete. We saw that dude in your picture there drinking with his buddies. They was sharpening knives like a group of whacked-out Boy Scouts. Pete and me, we got out fast.”

  I flashed to Elise’s flayed skin. “How many of them were there?”

  “That dude and, let’s see, maybe five other assholes? Could’ve been six or seven. I didn’t stay to do no count.”

  “You ever see them with the Burned Man?”

  “Him? Nah. He keeps to himself.”

  “You catch any names?”

  “We wasn’t exactly introducing ourselves.”

  And that was that. Trash Can couldn’t or wouldn’t offer anything more. He took a scarf and a pair of gloves and we left him to his dinner of canned beans and Pink Lady.

  As we worked our way down the line, I kept an eye out for Melody in case she’d chosen to come back here rather than face her boyfriend. Nothing. No sign of Calamity Jane, either, who might have more cause than anyone to worry about what the skinheads were up to.

  Cohen and I looked at each other, mutually discouraged. Even Clyde had dropped his tail.

  “Let’s give it twenty more minutes,” I said. “By then anyone who’s coming in should have landed. We can call it a night after that.”

  We’d reached the southernmost end of the camp and were heading back north toward the truck when we found Calamity Jane. She’d come in after our initial walk-through and set up camp near the river. We found her sitting in a faded folding chair with her back to the water, swathed in an army blanket and smoking a cigarette. A small fire spit and hissed in a ring of stones.

  “Hey, Jane,” I said.

  She lifted her head and warily watched us approach. Her eyes held a dull unease, as if she was too tired to be fully afraid.

  I gave Clyde the command to lie down. He rested his head on his front legs and kept his eyes on Calamity Jane.

  “Rough day?” I asked her.

  She shrugged, let her gaze flick over Cohen. “He an asshole like the last cop?”

  “This guy’s all right,” I said and introduced him.

  “Murder cop?” Jane pushed herself forward and hawked into the fire. “What traffic I got with a murder cop?”

  I squatted next to her chair and proffered the best coat from Cohen’s stash. “He brought you this.”

  Her eyes fell to the coat, a beautiful gray parka with fake fur around the hood and a thick fleece lining. She stuck her cigarette in her mouth and stroked the fur with her thin hands.

  Then she pulled her hands back. “I don’t need the trouble that bring.” She looked up at Cohen, narrowed her eyes with challenge. “You here ’cause the kindhearted lady?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “We all done heard. Someone put a knife to her.”

  Cohen nodded. “I’d like to ask some questions about her. Mind if I sit down?”

  “Sure, honey. You feeling the love seat or the comfy chair?” Jane laughed then coughed.

  Cohen laughed too, a soft, rueful sound, and squatted on the ground near the fire, balancing on the balls of his feet with his hands dangling comfortably between his thighs. “I’ll take the comfy chair.”

  They shared a laugh this time.

  “So, Miss Jane,” Cohen said. “What have you heard about the kindhearted lady?”

  “Someone cut her all to pieces.”

  “How does that make you feel?”

  The detective as therapist.

  “How you think that be making me feel?” Jane spat. “She one of God’s people. Life all the harder, her gone.”

  “She took care of people.”

  “She tried. We didn’t none of us make it easy for her.”

  I watched and listened as Cohen picked his way through Jane’s fear and fury, getting to the place where he was ready to show her the sketch. I watched Jane, too, wondering about her way-back-when story and wondering what had happened since yesterday to drive her further into herself. She had fine features and a husky voice and a way of holding her cigarette, one hand cupping her elbow, that was both elegant and protective. In another life, on another stage, she could have been another Lauren Bacall.

  “Elise come here much?” Cohen asked.

  “Once a week or so. Like Special Agent Parnell. Brought us them food vouchers. Read the Bible.”

  “Anyone ever not happy to see her?”

  Jane thrust a hand out from the blanket and used a stick to push the dying embers into a heap. “Not so’s I heard. Anyway, why don’t you be asking that PI about her? He know a lot more than me, them working together and all.”

  Cohen glanced my way, one eyebrow raised, then returned his attention
to Jane. “A private investigator was working with Elise Hensley?”

  “Didn’t know till today he a PI. Seen him and the kindhearted lady talking to people the last few days. He come talking to me an hour ago.” She pointed with her chin across the street to the Globeville Landing Park, where the homeless often spent the day. “Over there. That’s when he told me he a PI.”

  “This PI give you his name?” Cohen asked.

  “He done give me this.”

  She reached inside her coat, pulled out a business card and handed it to Cohen. He looked at it then passed it to me.

  Thomas A. Brown. Brown Investigations.

  Brown was a common last name. But still.

  The only other item on the card was an email address. No street address. No phone number. Hard way to run a business. But maybe he didn’t want anyone tracking him down.

  “Black man?” Cohen asked, clearly thinking as I was.

  Jane nodded. “Said I was on their talk-to list. But with Elise gone, it just him.”

  “What did he want to talk to you about?” Cohen asked.

  “Some little girl died years ago. He all eaten up about it. Said he and Elise looking for people was around back then, people who might know something. He said time running out. But I couldn’t help him.” She studied the cigarette smoldering between her fingers. “Back then, I be in Louisiana with my little boy. Had a home with yellow curtains. And a garden.”

  I must have made some sound. She blinked up at me. “It’s hard losing all that.”

  “I know.” I was thinking of Malik. “Jane, why do you think he said time was running out?”

  Her eyes came back to the present. She sucked hard on the cigarette. Coughed. “He sick, that boy. I seen that kind of sick, and it mean either God or the Devil be waiting close. He said he didn’t have much time to find the men took that little girl. Made me sad for him. I told him how I’d heard the story, how it was skinheads done for her. And now them skinheads is back.”