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

by Barbara Nickless

  “No pity fucks, Parnell,” he said, his voice ragged.

  “No. Not with you. But we need—”

  “In the bedroom. The nightstand.”

  I dropped my shirt on the floor, followed it with my bra. Shook my hair out. I leaned forward and kissed him again before pulling back.

  In the bedroom, I found a condom and brought it back, set the foil on the counter.

  He grabbed my wrists. My lips found his. His arms came up around me, yanking me against him, his mouth sucking the breath from me until I had to turn my head.

  He groaned, and I turned back to him, holding my breath as if I would dive and never surface.

  We undressed in a fury, molting our clothes as if they were on fire, shedding the guilt and grief and memory enmeshed in their folds. The air was warm, but I shivered. With sudden gentleness, he ran his hands along my hips and then up my ribs so slowly he might have been counting each one. My skin grew warm. I closed my eyes. His tongue found my breasts and then my throat. His fingers dove into my hair, twining there. He returned to the chair, pulling me with him. I placed my bare feet on the spindles and straddled him.

  Icy pellets struck the windows, and for a moment the familiar darkness tried to claw its way free. The monster wanting to be fed. Wanting to go out into the storm and hunt down the men who’d killed Thomas Brown and return the favor.

  I closed my eyes against the haunted faces at the window.

  I am here, I am here, I am here. Nothing can harm me.

  The monster fled, leaving only Cohen and me and Cohen’s hands and hips and chest and cock and his lips against my skin, saying my name in a hoarse whisper over and over and over so that, for a short time, for a sweet, blessed time, there wasn’t a thing wrong with the world.

  Not a damn thing.

  After, we dressed like two pros, quickly and in silence. Cohen looked pale, and I steered him to the couch with a twinge of conscience.

  For a moment we sat quietly, close but not touching. Then Cohen spoke as if our conversation had never been interrupted.

  “We have to find Liz.”

  “How?”

  “Where would Merkel go?”

  “Cohen, think. There’s an APB out on him. His face is on the news. Cops are checking out the homes of Melody’s mother and Merkel’s sister. My boss is sending the word up and down the line. We’ll find him. And when we do, we’ll find Liz.”

  “Promise?”

  “Sarcasm again?”

  “Hope.” He shook his head. Winced. “Need.”

  “Then yes. I promise.”

  I followed his directions to the Scotch. I poured one finger for him and two for me, both neat. Then I found peanut butter, toasted some bread, dug out some baked chips with sea salt and a couple of bananas.

  “Let’s get something in you,” I said. “Settle your stomach.”

  He said he would if I did.

  I sat next to him on the couch and we ate. Maybe we made an okay team.

  After I’d cleared away the plates, he said, “I’m going to think about things. Why don’t you catch some sleep?”

  “Where I come from, you get shot falling asleep at your post.”

  “So you are some fucking jarhead Marine warrior. Didn’t they teach you to sleep when you can?”

  “I’ll sleep when I die,” I said. “Same as you.”

  His smile offered both sympathy and commiseration.

  “Jesus, it’s a fuck awful job sometimes,” he said.

  “Yet here we are.”

  “Yeah.” He blew out his breath. “Here we are.”

  We listened to the wind. To the ice. To the hiss of the fireplace. Clyde groaned in his sleep.

  “Chasing rabbits?” Cohen asked.

  “Insurgents.”

  “That’s what he did in the war?”

  “Clyde was a combat tracker dog. His job was to pursue insurgents back to their hiding places after they planted an IED or fled the battlefield. Clyde did some covert ops stuff, too. Even I don’t know what that involved.”

  “So maybe I shouldn’t have called him a furball.”

  I shrugged. “He may be a Marine. But in his heart, he’s still a dog. I don’t think you offended him.”

  Clyde moaned again, his legs twitching.

  “Dogs get PTSD?”

  “This one did. His handler died. He was transferred briefly to a second handler, but it wasn’t working. Clyde had formed an unusually strong bond with his first handler. Then a bomb went off, and he took some shrapnel. It’s been a long road back.”

  “He must trust you.”

  “He does. He trusts me with his life. But he also—”

  I stopped at the sudden storm of emotion. Clyde trusted me. But there was also some part of him that held back, much as I did. Maybe he was afraid I would die on him as the others had. Trust is repairable. Faith maybe not so much.

  “There’s some part of him,” I said, “that always holds back.”

  “You ever think that if maybe you open up, he will too?”

  I let him see my eye roll. “Like I’m his role model or something?”

  Cohen swung toward me on the couch, his face gray but his eyes filled with blazing intensity. That need to know. “Tell me what it was like. In Iraq. And coming home.”

  My gaze stayed on Clyde. “That’s what passes for entertainment around here? Don’t you have a bunch of TV channels on that monstrosity?”

  “Parnell,” he said softly.

  “What?”

  “I’d like to know.”

  I picked up my nearly empty glass and turned it in my hands, watching the leaded facets and the shallow amber liquid within catch the light. “Hemingway said that it’s dangerous to write the truth in war. And that truth is very hard to come by.”

  “Somehow I think you’re strong enough to be okay with the truth.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not. I don’t have that luxury. And anyway, someone I trust told me not to talk about what happened in the war. Talking just churns things up.”

  “Let me guess. Nik Lasko.”

  I covered my surprise by finishing off my drink.

  “Don’t look so surprised. I’m a cop. And I’ve seen Lasko’s type before.”

  I bristled. “Meaning what?”

  “Sorry. Sore spot. It’s just that men like Lasko confuse stoicism with strength. They’re all about pretending we should be too tough for counseling. Fake it till you make it.”

  “You’re a therapist now?”

  He shrugged. “Got a problem with that?”

  “Lasko’s right. Some things are better left unsaid. Left behind. You let them out, and other things follow.”

  “Sitting on it isn’t healthy.”

  My turn to shrug. I looked out the window where the sleet had switched to snow and begun to pile on the sill outside. “Maybe. The thing is, Cohen—”

  “Mike. Haven’t I earned that?”

  I looked him full in the face. Something inside me tried to melt. To make its soft way through the marrow of my bones.

  Marine up, Parnell.

  “That was sex,” I said, though that wasn’t what it had been about. “It’s not like we’re engaged or anything.”

  He blinked as if I’d slapped him. I hurried on.

  “Anyway, people say they want to hear it. But they don’t. I mean there are a few sick fucks who ask you what it’s like to kill someone. You’ve probably gotten that, too. But the truth is, no one really wants to hear the messy stuff. The dirty stuff or the immoral stuff or the just plain wrong stuff. The stories that might make them wake up in the middle of the night and ask what in hell our country is doing over there. So, no I don’t talk about it.”

  Cohen stopped short of touching me. “But I do want to hear it. I want to know what’s going on behind that stoic face you always show. I want to know who you really are.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Cross my heart.”

  I let the temptation wash ove
r me, waited until it passed. “Wow. Is this like a first date?”

  “I think we went straight to the fifth date.”

  “Is that when you usually fuck someone? On the fifth date?”

  I waited for his anger. God knows, I deserved it.

  “You are a pain in the ass, Parnell,” he said. But his voice was mild. “I get that you have to put the wall back up. But maybe give it a rest for a few hours?”

  I said nothing.

  “The first time I met you,” he went on, “you quoted Shakespeare. I didn’t expect that.”

  “Next time I’ll try to drool and walk funny, like a real railroad cop.”

  He pressed gently on. “We’re standing there next to the pieces of a jumper. I’m pretending to drink my coffee so you won’t know how upset I am. And you’re trying not to cry. Remember that? And then you start in with King Lear.”

  “‘As flies to wanton boys—’”

  “‘Are we to the gods.’”

  I finished. “‘They kill us for their sport.’”

  “So what I’m saying is, I don’t know a single other cop talks like that. And definitely not a Marine.”

  I pulled the throw from the end of the couch and wrapped it around my legs, gave myself the momentary luxury of relaxing into the sofa’s embrace to think about what it would be like to bare my soul. I’d tried more than once to talk to Nik about what had happened on the other side of the world. To free those dark things from my heart so I could get on with living. As if, once spoken, the words would free the memories, and the memories would lose their hold. The ghosts would go back to wherever they came from, and I could just be me. A twenty-seven-year-old cop with a dog and a handful of college credits and a dream about something more.

  “Parnell?”

  I looked Cohen full in the face.

  “Talk to me.”

  I took a breath.

  But I see dead people was a conversation killer. So was all the other crap I could spew. Things like, I’m not over the war. I pretend I am. But I’m haunted. And I mean that literally. I have a dead private in my kitchen every morning, and only my dog and I can see him. Is he real? Or are Clyde and I both crazy? I did things in Iraq that no one—I mean no one—would forgive me for if they knew. I lost my lover over there. And the deeper truth? I was fucked up even before the war. My father walked out on us when I was ten and part of me hopes the only reason he never came back is because he’s dead. My mother killed a man and was sent away for what amounted to life. I was raised by my Grams, who is the epitome of Appalachian toughness, and by a Vietnam vet who thinks that emotions are a sign of weakness. And half the time I think they’re right. It’s easier to zip it all up inside where no one can see it. It’s safer. Because if they see it, if they figure out who you really are, they’ll know that you are seriously fucked up.

  “You don’t happen to have Jazmine’s file here, do you?” I asked.

  He didn’t move. But he went away all the same. “Okay. We’ll play it your way.” He picked up the Scotch I’d poured earlier and drank it down quickly. “It’s in the study downstairs.”

  I found the white vinyl binder in the center of a massive desk in a room lined with bookshelves. A murder investigation would have meant multiple binders. But because Jazmine’s case had been first handled by Missing Persons, then only briefly by Homicide before being relegated to the status of INC, there was only the one binder. I carried it upstairs and sat in a chair across from Cohen, opening the binder in my lap.

  “Read the summary report,” Cohen said. “And when you’re done, start reading the rest to me.”

  I did as he asked. Read the two-page summary, then started in on the details, beginning with the first case report written by Missing Persons and then going on to the interview with Jazmine’s mother and brothers. Her oldest brother had last seen her leaving the rail yard after bringing his dinner, heading south toward the bus stop around six o’clock on Wednesday, February 21, 2000. Her mother and the other brother hadn’t seen her since breakfast, but both swore she had no reason to run away.

  Cohen’s cell phone rang. “It’s Bandoni,” he said and answered. “What?” Silence. “So nothing?” Then, “Shit, you’re kidding me.”

  Cohen gave me an apologetic look then got up and disappeared into the bedroom, closing the door behind him. I frowned at that closed door, then continued thumbing through Jazmine’s file, scanning quickly through sections labeled Witness Statements, On-Scene Report, Continuation Reports, Vehicles, Medical, Neighborhood Surveys.

  I came to the list of persons of interest the police had interviewed. The list had only six names on it, given in alphabetical order. I recognized three of the names. Alfred Merkel and Peter Kettering. Both Royer Boys. Maybe the “Petes” Frankie had referred to had been Peter Kettering. There was a Frank Davis—the Frankie who pulled a gun on Bandoni and Cohen before Bandoni shot him?

  There was another name I knew. It came before Merkel’s name and after that of Frank Davis.

  Gentry Lasko.

  I made a small noise. Sweat popped out on my forehead. My mouth went dry. Across the room, Clyde lifted his head.

  Gentry. Elise’s cousin. Nik and Ellen Ann’s son. Their golden child.

  Gentry Lasko, at age seventeen a member of a skinhead gang, questioned in the disappearance of Jazmine Brown. Gentry, a neo-Nazi punk. I remembered Gentry hanging out with the Royer Boys sometimes, wearing the boots and the camouflage. But he’d been too much of a jock for them and maybe just too decent-hearted to be totally accepted. For him to be part of Jazmine’s disappearance? It didn’t seem possible.

  Whatever he might have wanted to be then, he was now a kind and gentle man. A defender of the weak who took pro bono cases because he could make a difference. A brilliant lawyer trusted and loved by everyone. Including Clyde, whose standards were higher than most.

  I stared at his name on the sheet in disbelief.

  Hastily, I flipped to the tab labeled Suspects. The same list of names appeared. So somewhere along the line, the investigating detective had moved Gentry and the Royer Boys from witnesses to suspects.

  Cohen’s voice rumbled in the other room. On and off. On and off. Rising in both tempo and volume. I moved to snap open the binder’s metal rings.

  Then froze, my thumbs against the metal tabs.

  I stared at the pages and, for a moment, the floor seemed to fall away, leaving me floating and rootless, wondering just who the hell I was. I am an honest person, I told myself. A cop. A Marine. That’s who I am.

  In the bedroom, Cohen’s voice went silent, followed by the sound of running water.

  But I was also family. Gentry was a brother to me. Nik a father. They had loved me and cared for me my whole life. They and Grams were all I had.

  The floor settled once more beneath me. Fumbling in my haste, I snapped open the binder’s metal rings and began lifting every page I could find with Gentry’s name on it. Witness sheet. Suspect sheet. The interview. Chances were good that if no one had gotten around to scanning these pages to make an electronic document, this file was the only record in existence. I folded the sheets and hurried into the kitchen, stuffing the pages into the pocket of my DPC coat where it hung on the stool. I wondered how long it would take Cohen to realize the pages were missing. And what he would do when he found out.

  At the sink, I poured myself a drink of water, trying to ease the nausea.

  Cohen came out of the back room.

  “It’s Tucker Rhodes,” he said. “He collapsed in his cell.”

  My hand shook on the glass. “What?”

  “Something the doc missed. He’s being transported to Denver General. I’m going in. You coming?”

  “I—I. No. I’m officially on duty,” I lied. “I need to check in.”

  “Okay.” He came to me where I stood, lowered his head to kiss me. I backed away. Behind me, heat seemed to rise from the stolen pages.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  H
is face went blank. “I’ll keep you notified.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I want to see you again, Parnell.”

  “We’re still working the investigation together.”

  “That’s not—” His patience finally snapped. “Right.”

  He began moving around the room, angry, shrugging into a coat, digging gloves and a hat out of a closet. I stared at him, blinking, until he stopped again in front of me.

  “But you’re hurt,” I said.

  “I’m fine.”

  I couldn’t move.

  His face softened. “I’m sorry about Rhodes, Parnell. The good news is, he’s stable for the moment. He couldn’t have been lying there more than fifteen minutes.”

  The world was spinning around like a carousel. “You’ll need a ride.”

  “A uniform is on the way.”

  The world didn’t settle, exactly. But it backed off. I put on my coat, picked up Clyde’s dishes, and Cohen and I said our good-byes, both of us brusque. He was still moving around the carriage house when I left. I passed the squad car coming in as I left Cherry Hills behind me.

  I blinked back the tears.

  Cohen had opened a window to friendship. Maybe to something more. And I’d considered it. I really had. I’d looked in his eyes and seen both understanding and forgiveness, something I’d not seen from anyone except Dougie and Nik.

  The tears found their way free, splashed onto my coat.

  But I knew in my heart that he would not care for me if he knew who I was. If he knew what I’d done in Iraq. If he knew about the pills and the drinking and the ghosts and the therapy and the nightmares.

  And now, Gentry.

  I’d done what I had to, stealing those pages. For all my high and mighty talk with Nik about choosing law and justice over what was personal, I’d apparently found my own point of no return with Gentry. We are defined by family before we are defined by anything else; they are our first and primal debt. But now I had to live with the fact that not only was I a thief, I might be protecting a child’s killer.

  And eventually Cohen would figure out my theft. Or at least he’d suspect it, which amounted to the same thing.