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

by Barbara Nickless

  “You’ve seen them?” Cohen asked.

  Jane blinked as if remembering where she was. She looked away. “Nah. Just heard.”

  Cohen and I exchanged glances. Cohen pulled out the sketch. “This one of them?”

  “I told you. Haven’t seen ’em.”

  “Maybe you could just take a look.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Y’all should go now.”

  “You want to help find the men who killed that little girl, don’t you, Jane?” I asked gently. “The man who killed Elise?”

  “You think he killed the kindhearted lady?”

  “We’re looking into it.”

  With a snarl, Jane took the piece of paper from him and held it up to the dying light. After a moment, she balled up the sketch and threw it in the fire. Her hands were shaking.

  “Jane?” I placed my hand on her wrist. “Who is he, Jane?”

  She looked at me with a trapped wildness and shook off my hand.

  “That ain’t right. This ain’t him. This man an asshole, but he and Elise had an understanding. They went way back, those two. Her trying to bring him God and him listening. She said I ought not to judge. Said that maybe his daddy beat him or his mama didn’t want him and it turned him mean. Steer clear, she told me. But I ought not to hate him.”

  “Could be he and Elise didn’t have the understanding she thought they did,” Cohen said.

  I stood. “I know you’re afraid. But we can’t help if we can’t find him.”

  “Don’t talk to me about being afraid.” Jane clenched her fists. “You got no idea about what it means to be afraid, Mister and Missus Cop.”

  At the sudden rage in her voice, Clyde came to his feet.

  Jane was shaking. “Them white fuck-ups with their tattoos and their shaved heads, they been coming around. Beating people, scaring the shit outta people. And what is it I ask myself? I ask where you be when they’re here. You come ’round, asking our help. But where you be when we need you?”

  “We’ll find these guys,” Cohen said. “And they’ll be in prison a long time. They won’t be able to hurt you.”

  “You gonna be arresting them tonight? Huh? Are you? Next thing, you be telling me to believe in the tooth fairy. You think I want to end up like her? Like the kindhearted lady? You turn your white asses ’round and get out of my camp. Talking to the po-lice ain’t good for my health.”

  “Jane,” I pressed. “This man might have killed a little girl. He might have killed Elise. You want him to walk?”

  She snarled at me, her glare like a lash. It was all I could do not to take a step back.

  Clyde growled, and I lifted a hand to silence him.

  But Jane’s next words surprised me.

  “Ah, fuck. You always good to us,” she said. “You another kindhearted lady. For all I know, he go after you next. So—” She pushed herself upright. “What the fuck? The guy in your picture there, he ain’t that good-looking in real life. But, yeah, I know him.”

  “You have a name for him?”

  “He just go by Whip.”

  Cohen and I exchanged frustrated looks.

  “You know anything else about him?” I asked. “Where’s he from, maybe. Or when he might be back?”

  “Didn’t nobody share his travel plans with me.”

  “Okay. Thanks, Jane,” I said. “You’ve been a big help.”

  Cohen handed her his business card. “You think of anything else or if he shows up again, let me know. Call anytime. And call me if Mr. Brown comes back, okay? I’d like to talk to him.”

  “Well, sure. They show up, I give you a jingle on my eye-phone.”

  “The Quik-Mart still has a pay phone half a block away,” I said, giving her some quarters. I gave her a ten-dollar bill as well, which she slipped into her jacket. “There’s phones at the shelters, too.”

  “Ain’t going to no shelter.”

  “Yeah. I know. Thanks for your help, Jane.”

  I signaled to Clyde, and Cohen and Clyde and I moved away from the fire in the direction of my truck.

  “Goddammit,” Jane said. “Hold up.”

  We turned back.

  “Whip don’t tell me where he go,” she said. “But I know where he from.”

  “Where’s that?” Cohen asked.

  “West. Past that big stadium where they be playing football.”

  “Where the Broncos play?”

  She nodded.

  “How do you know he’s from there?” Cohen asked.

  “’Cause that where Melody lives.”

  Cohen and I looked at each other.

  “Whip,” Jane went on, “he Melody’s boo.”

  We must have looked blank, because she rolled her eyes. “Hook-up. BF. Her boyfriend.”

  “Whip and Melody?” I thought of the bruises and the cut I’d seen on Melody the morning before. How uneasy she’d seemed. “Melody Weber?”

  “The fat girl. The one got her own little girl. You done gave her a coat, too. She and Whip got a thing going.” Jane shook her head. “Ain’t a good thing. But it’s a thing. Melody said how Elise was gonna help her leave Whip. Maybe he found out what they was planning.”

  “I’ll see how Bandoni’s doing on her address,” Cohen said to me, reaching for his phone.

  “You might better put some heat on finding her house,” Jane said. “’Cause that PI said he knew ’xactly where she lived. Said he find her, he find that Nazi. Said he gonna do what needed doing. He didn’t care what it cost him. He a dead man already.”

  CHAPTER 17

  The American military has an acronym for everything from battle plans to report writing to taking a shit. Alphabet soup, we call it. But the acronym I keep going back to is the one that says it all: SNAFU.

  Situation normal, all fucked up.

  That’s what we’ve got here in Habbaniyah. A total snafu. And I can’t tell you the half of it.

  —September 13, 2004. Letter to Gentry Lasko.

  Cohen stalked the shoulder of the road as we waited to hear back from Bandoni. He prowled thirty yards down, about-faced, then stalked back, overcoat flapping, hands tapping at his sides, his face gathering darkness like a swelling storm.

  A uniform helped Calamity Jane into the backseat of his squad car before he gave me a nod and got behind the wheel. He backed the car around, headlights sweeping the hobo camp. Jane’s reproachful eyes met mine through the glass. But she couldn’t stay in camp. Not after what she’d shared. She turned in her seat to watch me until the twilight swallowed her and her eyes and the blue Crown Victoria.

  Promise me you come get me soon’s I can come back, she’d said. Stayin’ in the shelter make me feel caged, like an animal.

  I promise, I’d said. See the doc at the shelter, get some rest, and we’ll talk.

  Cohen’s phone rang, and he listened, said something at staccato speed, then listened again. He nodded at me—an assurance, I assumed, that we were getting the information we needed.

  I sucked in air thick with the smells of smoke and diesel and damp, savoring February’s icy burn. I stamped my half-frozen feet and rubbed my palms together, then bounced on my toes, surprised with how strong I felt. We might be within minutes of closing in on our killer. Soon—maybe in a matter of hours—I would be able to go to Tucker and tell him that he wouldn’t be remembered as the beast who slew Beauty. And then to Nik to assure him that not only had we caught Elise’s killer, we’d also cleared the man she’d loved. She’d still had Tucker in her heart when her heart beat its last.

  Maybe finding Whip also meant that my fear of an Alpha was nothing more than paranoia. Maybe Habbaniyah would be allowed to bleach into the desert until the sand polished it to nothing.

  Maybe some of the ghosts would go quiet.

  Clyde pressed against my legs and together we watched the last blush of scarlet disappear from the sky. Night came on hard and sharp, bringing a kick of wind. Down in the hobo camp, someone laughed and other voices took up the boozy cheer. A semi
truck roared by, heading north, brushing us with its wake. Then the five o’clock freight rattled past, its rumble swallowing every other sound before falling away.

  Whip. Given name still unknown, but at this point I didn’t care. I had enough names to walk him to the gates of hell. White power skinhead. Neo-Nazi punk. Gangbanger. Bonehead. Asshole. A racist little fuck filled with hatred and cunning and threats. He might have fooled Elise and even Calamity Jane. But not me.

  If he was our killer, he would pay for what he did. To Elise. Maybe to Jazmine.

  I don’t give a fuck about justice, a Marine had told me after the FOB was bombed. Don’t give a fuck about hearts and minds. What I care about is running down every one of those ragheads and blowing their brains out.

  Not politically correct. Not my way of dealing with the world. But I kind of got it.

  Picking up my mood, Clyde danced on his paws, looking in my hands for his Kong. The game was almost afoot, and he knew it. I gave him a predatory grin.

  “Soon, boy.”

  Cohen came striding back. “We found her.”

  I put Clyde in his carrier and drove while Cohen gave directions. The address from Bandoni placed Melody and Liz Weber in a broken-down neighborhood in Jefferson Park, west of I-25 and the football stadium. I remembered it as a place where front yards devoured the wrecks of cars while sun-faded statues of Saint Mary guarded door stoops, the pale virgins nailed down or chained up against marauders.

  Cohen’s phone rang. Bandoni’s voice boomed through the speaker.

  “We got a possible ID on this douche bag from a priest who works with the homeless. Says he’s seen the guy around with a woman and a little girl. Goes by Alfred Merkel.”

  The name rose with a dark and sudden push. “I know that name,” I said.

  “How?” Cohen asked.

  “Let me think.”

  My fingers tapped the steering wheel as I chased Alfred Merkel along murky childhood tunnels to a summer when a gang of older teens took to congregating in the alley behind Joe’s Tavern or sometimes hanging out on the picnic tables in the half-acre patch of grass known by locals as Royer’s Hole. The boy-men wore military camouflage and Doc Martens and went out on Friday and Saturday nights in their unmuffled Fords, cruising for trouble. They were known as the Royer Boys, although not all of them were from the neighborhood. They weren’t all bad, I remember Nik telling me. They escorted Royer girls to and from parties or sleepovers, playing chaperone, talking about how white girls weren’t safe anymore. And they took it upon themselves to be a sort of neighborhood watch, coming down like God’s fist on underage drinkers and smokers or the perpetrators of any sort of crime, petty or otherwise. People might not have agreed with their politics—a few of them sported swastikas. But as long as you were white and law-abiding, it was hard to argue that they were bad for the neighborhood.

  Bandoni’s voice cut through. “I ran Merkel. No wants or warrants. All I got were some hits on contact cards. Trespassing on railroad property, mainly. A detective grilled him on a missing persons case a decade ago. Nothing came of it. Squeaky clean outside of that. Maybe our boy’s too smart to get himself noticed. How do you want to play this?”

  “We’ll do a knock and talk.” Cohen’s eyes met mine when I glanced over, and I nodded my agreement. “See what he has to say, try to get a look inside. Could be a woman and child in there. And we may have Thomas Brown in the mix, if Parnell’s homeless lady was right. Let’s put a squad car on the street and have a uniform with us at the door. Anything spooks us, we walk away and call SWAT.”

  “Got it,” Bandoni said.

  Cohen touched my shoulder, indicated I should take a left turn.

  “Anything pop up on the PI?” he asked Bandoni.

  “One Thomas Aaron Brown, age twenty-two. Took out a private investigator’s license three months ago. Kid files his taxes, drives the speed limit, and donates to SPCA. He purchased a handgun two months ago and got a conceal carry permit. That’s all we got. No answer on his phone. Where are you? I’m five minutes out.”

  “Give us another five after that,” Cohen said and hung up.

  I told him what little I remembered about the Royer Boys. Their shaved heads and vigilante brand of law enforcement, and the fact that all of them had been cleared for Jazmine’s disappearance.

  “What happened to the group after that?”

  “Never heard anything more about them until now.”

  The radio squawked. “I’m Code Six,” Bandoni said. Cohen acknowledged.

  “These assholes are a virus,” Cohen said to me. “Just waiting for the ideal conditions to come back and destroy the organism.”

  Like Roald’s poisoned mushrooms.

  By the time we turned onto Melody Weber’s street the clouds had lowered, reflecting back the glow from downtown and casting an oppressive illumination. Except for the lights at Melody’s house and a handful of scattered porch bulbs shining further down the road, the neighborhood looked deserted.

  I drove around the block at a crawl looking to see who was home, checking for dog-walkers and porch-sitters. People you didn’t want caught in anything that might go down. But the entire area was dead. I pulled around front again, spotted a patrol car half a block down. Cohen pointed out Bandoni’s Honda where it was parked in a deep pool of shadow across the street from Melody’s. I pulled in behind the Honda so that my truck, with DPC Railway Police sprawled on the side, was hidden in the same inky darkness. Bandoni was nowhere to be seen.

  “Reconnaissance,” Cohen explained when I asked.

  I studied Melody’s house. Set far back on a corner lot and lit—in violation of city ordinance—with what looked like a two-hundred-watt porch light, the house squatted morosely amid the dirtied, hollowed drifts of the last snowstorm. A yellow two-level with a single-car garage, the house was a dreary dump of torn screens, packed-dirt yard, and flaking paint. The asphalt was so fissured that a knee-high forest of weeds had sprouted the length of the walkway. Weather-beaten trashcans looked like they’d been sitting at the curb since Christmas. I counted three cars in the driveway and four more in the street, all scabrous with road injuries and bad paint. Most of them looked to be halfway through some sort of repair work. Cohen called dispatch with the license plate numbers.

  A solitary toy sat in the front yard—a purple plastic trike designed for a child much younger than Liz. A dog’s rawhide chew toy dangled across the seat. From the house, the faint thump of bass music pulsed through the cold air.

  To the north and east—the sides with neighbors—the lot and house were shielded by a thick screen of pine trees. The house directly across the street appeared abandoned—a foreclosure sign had been thrust into the dirt next to the cracked driveway. Maybe that was why no one had complained about the high-wattage porch light.

  Suck of a place to raise a kid.

  A single soft light shone upstairs at Melody’s house, but the main level was well lit. Drawn curtains made it impossible to see what was happening inside.

  I shut off the engine. A light wind with an edge to it cut through the pines, and from somewhere down the street a dog gave a halfhearted bark.

  “We’ll get feedback on the plates soon,” Cohen said when he got off the phone. “Pretty quiet here.”

  “Not a good kind of quiet.”

  “Spooked?”

  “Not as long as there aren’t a hundred pissed-off Sunnis with bombs hiding in there.”

  “Right. A Marine.” Cohen pulled at his tie. “I can be an asshole sometimes.”

  “Know thyself.”

  Bandoni appeared from out of the dark and rapped on the passenger window. Behind him stood a uniform. Kid fresh out of the academy, looked like.

  Cohen rolled down the glass.

  “Fucking slobs,” Bandoni was saying as he swiped with a handkerchief at something on his knee-length overcoat.

  “The hell you wearing your go-to-church clothes for?” Cohen asked.

  “I have a date.
Or I did up until you decided to play home invasion.”

  “In that getup? They offering free shrimp at the old folks’ home?”

  The kid snickered.

  “Fuck you.” Bandoni straightened. “There’s another two-hundred-watt light in the rear yard. These guys really like to know when company is coming. Curtains mostly drawn. Two men and a woman in the kitchen in back. Maybe more out of sight. Beer bottles on the table. Couldn’t hear shit over the music and couldn’t see enough to tell if one of them is our perp. No sign of the kid.”

  “Layout of the back?” Cohen asked.

  “Back door is maybe a four-foot dogleg left from the front. A window on either side of the door. Single window in the basement. Light’s on down there, but I couldn’t see anything. Heavy shrubs on the back walk, and all those trees.” Bandoni rested his forearms on the door. “You’re thinking this guy might be good for Elise Hensley?”

  “Good chance of it,” Cohen said. “Elise and the PI were asking around about these guys, trying to solve a cold case. One of Parnell’s homeless confirmed the guy in our sketch has been around. She claims Merkel and the vic had an understanding. But she also says the vic was talking to Melody Weber about leaving Merkel.”

  Bandoni’s gaze flicked to me then back to Cohen. “We got seven cars in front. Who knows how many assholes inside.”

  Cohen’s phone rang. He listened for a couple of minutes, said thanks, and hung up.

  “Plates don’t match the cars,” he told us.

  The kid whistled. “They’re all stolen?”

  “Still want to go in nice and quiet?” Bandoni asked. “We got enough probable cause on our perp.”

  “The woman and child,” Cohen reminded him. “And Thomas Brown. We don’t want to spook these guys. And we don’t want hostages. So we stick with our knock and talk, take Parnell and”—he peered at the kid—“Patrolman Schumacher with us. And call in the precinct car. We can put them around the corner in the back where they’ve got a line on the door. Whip causes any trouble, or his pals want to slow us down, the uniforms move in. Tell them not to let anyone run out the back. And make sure they’ve got their vests on.”