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

by Barbara Nickless

  He was pale, eyes closed, bleeding from the back of his head. I touched my fingers to his neck. A strong pulse.

  I tapped the radio. “Officer down,” I said. “Request assistance. We’re in the basement. To the right of the staircase and around the corner. We have a second victim down. My K9 and I have cleared the area.”

  I checked Cohen for other injuries, found nothing save the bloody lump on the back of his head. The skinheads must have figured he was dead and hidden him behind the boxes with the dumber-than-shit idea that he wouldn’t be found. I took off my jacket and wadded it beneath him. Then Clyde and I sat with him in that chamber of horrors and waited.

  While we waited, I touched my hand to my heart. Made Thomas A. Brown, Private Investigator, whole again in my mind.

  Clyde and I stayed in the basement until the paramedics loaded Cohen onto a stretcher and carried him upstairs. By then he was starting to come around, glassy-eyed and pale but breathing. The EMTs carried him out to the front yard where Denver PD had set up a staging area beneath a canopy tent. The snow had turned to icy spitballs that rang against the trashcans, hissed on the ground, and pinged on the canvas. Beyond Melody’s house, the street gleamed.

  I followed Cohen’s stretcher underneath the canopy, shrugged back into my coat.

  He opened his eyes and looked at me blearily.

  “What the hell were you thinking?” I asked him.

  “The little girl,” he said. “Is she—”

  “We haven’t found her.”

  Cohen closed his eyes. “Head hurts.”

  “What happened?”

  “Went downstairs too fast, thinking maybe they had the little girl down there.” His eyes widened. “Where’s Bandoni?”

  I spotted the huge detective in the back of an ambulance getting his shoulder looked at. When he saw Cohen stirring, some color returned to the big man’s face. He blinked hard and then focused on whatever the EMT was telling him.

  “Took one in the shoulder,” I told Cohen. “He’s going to be okay.”

  “And the patrol guys?”

  “One down, I think. I don’t know his status, but he was alive half an hour ago.”

  “Fuck.” Cohen’s jaw worked. “I walked downstairs and heard a bunch of commotion. I was afraid that whoever’d made the man scream also had the little girl. Went too fast toward the window. Someone clocked me from behind as soon as I rounded the corner.”

  “Not your smartest move.”

  “The man?”

  “Thomas Brown. He’s dead.”

  Cohen winced as one of the EMTs began gently poking around his wound.

  “I’m going to check on Melody Weber,” I said. “Don’t do anything stupid while I’m gone.”

  Back in the house, I looked behind the sofa where I’d ordered Melody to wait for me. The space was empty.

  Officer Schumacher was sitting on the stairs leading up, elbows on thighs, hands fisted under his chin. He looked like something important had emptied out of him.

  “Schumacher?” I said. “You got anything?”

  He startled then shook his head when he saw it was me. “There’s a little girl’s room upstairs. But no kids. No one at all. But . . . shit.”

  I sat next to him. Clyde took a lower stair.

  “How can anyone live like this?” Schumacher went on. “That little girl’s room is filthy. Like it’s animals living here, not people. I have a little girl. Two months old. She’ll never have to go through what Melody Weber’s daughter lives with every day.”

  “If the world were fair, we wouldn’t have our jobs.”

  “I’d be fine with that.”

  “I know.” I stood. “We’ll find her. Social Services will make sure she gets a new home. A much better home.”

  In the coat closet, I found Melody’s ratty red sweatshirt balled up on the floor. Clyde picked up her scent, and together we trotted off, heading east down the street. Halfway down the block, he stopped and searched around, finally sitting down to indicate the trail had gone cold.

  She’d caught a ride.

  I stood in the dark with Clyde, and we stared across the highway at the lights of downtown Denver. At the amusement park, built on an old Superfund cleanup sight, the Ferris wheel was a silhouette against a sky the color of dirty steel.

  We’d been so close to both Melody and her daughter. And so close to finding Thomas Brown before he walked into the lion’s den. An hour earlier, everything might have gone down differently.

  The adrenaline finished coursing its way through my system, and suddenly I was bone-weary. I waited to see if something else would fill me up. Determination or energy or just stubbornness. But all I felt was empty.

  On top of everything else, we’d lost Whip and the others. A manhunt would already be under way, but it can be hard to find the rats once they’ve run to their holes.

  Clyde and I made our way back toward the flashing lights, back toward the spotlights and the ME’s van and the curious neighbors gathering outside the tape, despite the pelting sleet. When I flashed my badge and ducked back under the tape, I found Cohen sitting up, pale beneath his dark hair, purple bruises under his eyes. He looked as bad as I felt.

  “Give me a ride to my car?” he asked as I approached.

  “He refuses to go to the hospital,” the EMT said, putting the final touches on a gauze bandage. He followed that with an ACE bandage he wound around Cohen’s head. “As a city employee, that’s strictly against protocol.”

  “I’ll take responsibility,” I said.

  “He shouldn’t be alone. And he can’t drive.”

  “I’ll watch over him.”

  The EMT looked at me closely, trying to gauge if I was trustworthy. After a moment he nodded, so I guessed I passed muster.

  “He was knocked out, right?” the EMT said. “So keep him awake for eight hours. Watch for dizziness, slurred speech, pupils that don’t match. You see any of that, you take him to the hospital, stat. He clears all those, after eight hours he can get some shut-eye.”

  “Got it.” To Cohen I said, “We’ll pick up your car tomorrow. Right now let’s get you home.”

  “Watched over by Cujo and a railroad cop,” he whispered as I loaded him into the passenger seat of my truck. “My lucky day.”

  “Could be worse,” I said, thinking of Thomas Brown. “A lot worse.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Part of our job was to search the pockets of the dead.

  Marines carry all kinds of shit into combat besides the required Rules of Engagement card. Bible verses. Good luck charms. Cigarettes. Letters from home. Plastic coffee stirrers. Pain pills. Photographs. Sugar packets. Poems. Affirmations. Prayers to God.

  One night, in a nineteen-year-old lance corporal’s pocket, I found a sonogram of an unborn baby. I pulled the image out, studying it in the mottled light of the blood-smeared task lamp. On the back, the baby’s mother had written, “You can see he’s a boy!”

  She’d drawn a smiley face. And a heart.

  “We can’t wait till you’re home!!!”

  —Sydney Parnell, ENGL 0208, Psychology of Combat

  Sleet continued to fall in a soft scrape against the truck as I drove over icy streets, following Cohen’s muttered directions until we turned south on Monaco Parkway toward the heavily gated sanctuary of Cherry Hills.

  “How does a murder cop score a home in Cherry Hills?” I asked him once, trying to snap both of us out of the dark place we’d gone to. “You and Bandoni doing things I don’t want to know about?”

  “Luck,” he said. “Just dumb, fucking luck.”

  He’d been sitting bolt upright in the passenger seat since we left Melody’s house, staring out the windshield with a gaze so far away he might have been looking at something on the other side of the world. I’d tried to engage him in small talk, just to make sure he stayed awake and that he didn’t start slurring his words. But after a few feeble attempts, the talk died. The thought of the dead man and Melody’s litt
le girl sat like ghosts between us in the front seat—invisible, heartbreaking conundrums.

  I turned west on Hampden. Kept my speed down on a road luminous with black ice.

  Cohen made a sound in his throat.

  I glanced over. “What?”

  “I should have listened to Bandoni and waited for backup before going down those stairs.”

  “Every cop should have a crystal ball.”

  He met my gaze briefly, then looked out the window again. But I’d caught the anger and embarrassment in his eyes.

  “Things just go wrong sometimes,” I said. “Nobody’s fault.”

  “When the people in charge fuck up, who is it pays the price?”

  “When I was in Iraq, I used to ask myself that. I wanted to ask a colonel that question. Or a general. Hell, I wanted to ask the president. But I learned to shut up. Asking those kinds of questions was way above my pay grade.”

  “So then you know the answer,” he said. “It’s the innocent who pay.”

  I couldn’t speak.

  “You ever fuck up, Parnell?”

  Flashing lights appeared ahead. I slowed to a crawl and steered the truck around an icy corner. A patrolman directed traffic through a raft of cars guttered by the freezing drizzle. He saw DPC on my truck and waved us through.

  “Me fuck up?” I barked a laugh as I resumed our conversation. “Nah. I achieved perfection sometime between enlisting and throwing away a love letter I found on my first dead body.”

  “You threw away a love letter?”

  “It wasn’t written to her husband.”

  The lights of the patrolman flared on and off in the rearview mirror before falling away.

  “Anyone ever tell you sarcasm’s not the highest form of humor?” Cohen muttered darkly.

  “Low is what I’m good at.”

  “Some war hero you are.”

  I almost found a smile. “Some cop.”

  Following Cohen’s directions, I turned again, heading toward a gated community.

  Cherry Hills is an ultra-exclusive community in a semirural area of southern Denver where the neighborhood is divided into two- and three-acre lots. The homes start at five million. Most people residing there either built on inherited gold-mining wealth created in the 1800s, or they earned it in oil. Or so I’d been told. Most everything I knew about Cherry Hills was just hearsay; our trains don’t go anywhere near that rarified air.

  “Why do you work as a cop if you can live in a place like this?” I asked.

  “Fuck if I know.”

  I entered the code Cohen gave me at the first gate, then entered another code for the gate at the base of his drive. I drove for half a mile before a gray-brick, turreted mansion appeared on the hilltop, the drive and front yard lit by fifty or so globe lights, the house sprawling over probably twenty thousand square feet.

  I tried not to gape. “Home sweet home?”

  “Walker’s Whim,” he said.

  “You fucking named your house?”

  Although maybe anything with the bulk and heft of this house deserved a name. Plenty of large structures, like dams and mountains and the president’s home, have names.

  “It’s a family name. Drive around to the west. I live in the carriage house.”

  “Main house not big enough for you?”

  “Not until I have an army.”

  Which made me think of the food and water and ammo in Melody Weber’s basement, and suddenly the distraction of Cohen’s house was gone. I dove right back down to sorrow.

  He had me pull into the single-car garage of the carriage house, a two-story affair that would have comfortably fit three houses like mine inside with room to grow. I shut off the engine and came around to the passenger side where I placed one of his arms over my shoulders and helped him into the house and up the stairs.

  I flicked on lights. The main level consisted of a great room—living room and kitchen filling a single, immense space. Floor-to-ceiling windows lined the front of the room. Bare beams spanned the ceiling. Tasteful furniture was arranged in elegant groupings. Someone had mounted a basketball hoop at one end of the room. Probably in case the Nuggets dropped by.

  “The couch,” Cohen said in a whisper, indicating a leather sofa next to a coffee table the size of a door. The sofa was conveniently aimed toward a built-in television suitable for a drive-in.

  “Sure you’ll be comfortable here?” I asked. “TV’s maybe a little small?”

  “Sarcasm again,” he said. “You got the pills from the EMT?”

  “Hold on.”

  I deposited him on the couch with pillows and a throw blanket, then went back to the truck to get Clyde and his dishes and kibble along with the EMT’s bag of bandages and meds for Cohen. Clyde and I walked out to the yard so he could do his business. Probably the first time a dog had dared to defile the manicured lawn. I cleaned it up with a plastic bag from the truck and tossed it in the trash. Then I closed the garage door and went back in the house.

  In the kitchen—marble counters, custom cabinetry—I put down water and food for Clyde. I noticed that the trashcan was filled with empty Styrofoam containers and pizza boxes. Just like Sarge’s apartment, minus the roaches. Cohen might be wealthy. But he was still a guy.

  Next I opened the bag from the medic. Acetaminophen, I saw with disappointment. Four for him, three for me. I gave him water to wash his down with, then wrapped a towel around some ice and told him to put that on his head, near the wound.

  Clyde finished his kibble and wandered out into the living room, his claws clicking on the hardwood floor. Cohen pressed a button, igniting a gas fireplace. Clyde took one look at the rug in front of the fireplace, looked at me for approval, then curled up. Dog heaven.

  I returned to the kitchen. Since neither Cohen nor I would be allowed to sleep until Cohen made the eight-hour mark, I brewed coffee. I figured we both should eat, although I wasn’t hungry and I doubted if Cohen was, either. But it was another thing I’d learned in the Marine Corps—eat when you can, no matter how you feel. Grams would have said it hadn’t been working for me so far. But the Marines also taught me not to quit trying. Not until you’re dead.

  Maybe, if I didn’t find any hope or ambition on my own, I could hang my hat on that. Trying had to count for something.

  It took me a minute to locate the refrigerator, which looked exactly like the same dark wood as the surrounding cabinetry. I rummaged through the massive cold space, pushing aside beer bottles, lettuce and zucchini and peppers, jars of sundried tomatoes and artichokes and pesto. There was lots of fresh fruit and what looked like a nice bottle of French wine. Not that I could judge.

  “You have all this and you’re eating pizza?” I called.

  I jumped when his voice came from right behind me.

  “Expediency. But I also believe in the value of Maslow’s hierarchy.”

  I backed out of the fridge and straightened. “Meaning what?”

  He dropped the ice-laden towel into the sink and sank into a leather barstool. “You can’t meet needs that are higher up on the ladder if you don’t take care of those at the base.”

  “Pizza’s at the base of your hierarchy of needs?”

  “Quick nutrition, Parnell. It’s about speed.”

  “Clyde and I prefer McDonald’s.”

  We looked at each other across the gleaming span of the marble island. I read in the bleakness of his eyes that our attempt at humor wasn’t working for either of us. Sarcasm, as humor or armor, sometimes simply can’t do the job. Something in Cohen’s face gave way, and he slumped in his chair. The purple bruises beneath his eyes belonged to a death mask.

  “I called it wrong,” he said.

  “No. You didn’t.”

  “I rushed us in there. Then I ran down those stairs when I know better. I put everyone at risk. And the guy in the basement—what if he was still alive until I went racing down there and got myself knocked out?”

  I thought of the two screams we’d hea
rd. “He wasn’t alive.”

  “What if he was? If I’d been more cautious, waited for backup, maybe I could have stopped them.”

  “You could not have stopped them. And by then I doubt he would have wanted to be alive.”

  “What did they—?”

  “You can learn for yourself later. Not now.”

  I didn’t hold anything against Cohen for his decisions. My own, on the other hand, were giving me fits. If I hadn’t let myself get sidetracked by my fears over Habbaniyah, if I’d looked harder at what Elise was up to, maybe Thomas would still be alive.

  “Two injured cops,” Cohen went on. “One critically. Not to mention the skinheads.”

  “Please stop.” Driven by a trifecta of guilt and need and the desire to take away his burden, I moved toward him. The pain meds pulsed through my veins with a hard, rhythmic beat.

  Cohen was still talking. “They tortured him, Parnell. To death. I can still hear him—I will always hear him.”

  The hair on my neck lifted. Deep inside, the monster I’d brought back with me from Iraq uncoiled. We, too, still heard the man’s cry.

  Cohen swiveled the barstool away. But I grabbed the leather arms and turned him back around. Slid myself between his legs.

  He gripped my thighs but kept his eyes on the floor.

  I gingerly touched his head near the wound. “You feel sick?”

  “No. I just . . . Jesus, I can’t stop thinking about him.”

  I took his face between my hands and gently tilted his head up. Grief shone in his eyes.

  “Give me your sorrow,” I said. “Just for a little while.”

  I moved my hands down his cheeks, caught his jaw in my fingers. Felt the roughness of stubble under my thumbs. Heat rose up in me at his weight. The realness of him. Not a ghost. Not a memory. Flesh and blood.

  There’d been one man since Dougie. A fellow Marine I picked up in a bar for a one-night stand. When he came back the next day, I told him I’d shoot him if I ever saw him again.

  I shrugged out of my coat, now tacky with Cohen’s blood, and let it drop to the floor.

  Cohen let my name loose with a sigh.

  I undid the buttons on my uniform, my hands stiff and awkward. As if this were a performance I’d forgotten to practice for.