The storm had made a mess of everything. The tarps the forensics guys had erected to protect the scene billowed in the wind, straining at their ropes. People shouted to make themselves heard, their voices faint against the squall. The cops and detectives in their long rain jackets and snugged-up hoods, and the forensics team in their water-logged Tyvek suits, looked blocky and inhuman. With the eerie shadows cast by the rigged-up lights, the scene was otherworldly.
Usually there would be people standing around smoking or taking a coffee break. Not today. Partly it was the weather. Mostly it was the dreadfulness of the crime.
I spotted the operating personnel standing by a DPC truck, their clothes heavy with water and grease, work gloves tucked into the pockets of their rain jackets. They hadn’t bothered to zip their coats or seek the shelter of their truck. They were out-toughing the cops as they waited for the go-ahead to unhitch the coal cars.
A short distance from where the ME and forensics worked, Detective Gresino stood in the rain next to a woman holding a clipboard.
The detective’s hair was plastered to his head, his suit soaked. But he seemed oblivious to the wet. By now his lieutenant would have told him what had happened to his partner, and even from here I could tell something had gone from his eyes. The woman, partially concealed by her hooded trench, was probably a claim rep sent by the railroad. Unable to use a laptop due to the weather, she’d turned her back to the wind and flipped up the clipboard’s protective sheet of plastic in order to write. When she leaned over to ask Gresino a question her hood fell back, and I recognized Veronica Stern, one of DPC’s litigation lawyers.
Trains collided with cars and human flesh with depressing regularity. Lawsuits followed 90 percent of the time. With millions sometimes riding on the outcome, litigation was a high-pressure job, and Stern, only in her midthirties, was considered among the best in the business. In her time at DPC, Stern had earned a reputation as a coldly competent bulldog. The operating personnel hated her—in cases where they were hurt, she represented the railroad. And when those cases went to trial, she was known for destroying the plaintiff.
I’d read in the company paper that Hiram Davenport had hired her away from Alfred Tate’s SFCO railroad only six months ago. More bad blood between the two men.
My earpiece buzzed. Captain Mauer.
“I’ve been following the reports,” Mauer said, not bothering to be angry that I hadn’t called in sooner. “But I’d like to hear your side of things.”
I walked away from the crewmen and went through the morning again. Mauer asked a lot of questions when I got to the part about the bodies and the bomb. I finished by telling him that the police and the Feds needed a point of contact.
“It’ll have to be Fisher until Monday,” he said. “If I don’t want my wife and daughter to put a hit out on me. I’m heading to Estes Park first thing tomorrow.”
My heart sank. I’d forgotten. “Your daughter’s wedding.”
“Break Kimmy’s heart if I back out. And Dot would call my murder justifiable. I’ll get Fisher to come in. Starting tomorrow, whatever else they need, direct them his way. You can bring him up to speed in the morning.”
Heat rose in my face, despite the fact that this was what I wanted. Or at least, what I needed.
“Fisher,” I said. “Yes, sir.”
“Oh, that was convincing. Tell me you’re good with this, Parnell.”
“I am good with it, sir.”
“You don’t have some crazy white-knight thing going, right?”
“No, sir.”
“Okay. Good. Diane in HR is pulling the DPC employee records for the hazmat train. CP Eider and Falston Water Treatment are collecting data on their end. I’ll light a fire under them. In the meantime, I’ll keep working to pull up maps of the route and surrounding area. And obtaining files on everyone involved from the regulatory agencies. That piece alone is going to take hours. The cops need anything else?”
“I’ll let you know.”
“Okay, then. Come see me in my office once you’re done there.”
I signed in with the officer manning the inside cordon and made my way down the hill. Stern was now taking pictures and ignored my approach. But Gresino turned on me as soon as I got close enough to join them under the tarp.
“Tell me how bad Frank is,” he said, his eyes jittering like a pinball. “No bullshit. Straight up, how bad? No one will talk to me.”
I picked my words carefully. All I could offer Gresino was a careful version of the truth and a side of sympathy. And sympathy wouldn’t get up and go to work with him in the morning.
“He was conscious after the bomb,” I said. “Aware and talking.”
“They took him to K and G, right?”
“You bet.”
He thrust his head forward. “You’re holding out on me.”
“He got hit hard, Gresino. But he’s a fighter.”
“Three years to retirement.” His gaze went off to some middle distance. “Then he was going to be all done with fighting. Wants to take up gardening. Tulips and roses and fuck-all what else. Can you see a murder cop being happy with that?”
“Sure,” I whispered.
Gresino’s regard came back to me in the form of a hard stare. “How is it he’s hurt so bad and you—look at you. Barely a scratch.”
Veronica Stern lifted her head from her camera. I sensed her steady regard on me—Stern the human polygraph, watching for shades of untruth.
But I would not look away from the crazy in Gresino’s eyes. “The three of us were together. Clyde alerted on the bomb, and we all ran. I was behind one of the kilns with Clyde. Wilson was in the field. Maybe he was . . .” My voice trailed off—I’d been asking myself how it was that Clyde and I had zigged and Wilson had zagged. “I don’t know why he wasn’t with us.”
“He’s got bad knees. Did you know that? Maybe he needed help.”
I thought back. Shook my head. “No. He was good.”
“But you. You made it.”
I recognized the misplaced anger and kept my voice calm. “It’s not like running from a bear, Gresino. I wasn’t trying to outpace him. And he didn’t put himself between me and the bomb. Sometimes shit happens.”
“But not to you.”
“I suggest,” Stern interjected in a voice like an ice cube down the back, “the two of you finish your playground fight later. We have work to do.”
Gresino muttered something and looked away.
“You find anything else?” I asked him.
His jaw worked. “The keys to the Lexus, dropped or tossed a hundred yards from the vehicle. I’m thinking she and Lucy bolted, then she threw the keys away so their abductor couldn’t take them anywhere else.”
“Why didn’t she try circling back and driving away?”
“Maybe she couldn’t. Maybe he had Lucy.” His eyes met mine again. “Maybe she had bad knees.”
“Gresino—”
“I gotta talk to my lieutenant.” He strode off toward the cars at the top of the hill.
Stern let her camera dangle on its strap and turned her glacier-blue gaze on me. The gale had tugged her bright hair loose from the coil at her neck; the golden tumble softened features that carried all the beauty and warmth of alabaster.
“Murder or suicide?” she asked.
“I don’t have all the facts yet,” I said.
“Just your opinion, Special Agent Parnell. A consensus helps at the outset of a case. Murder or suicide?”
“Murder.”
She nodded, seemingly satisfied. “Good.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Good for a consensus, you mean?”
Her look suggested I was a little slow. “Good because if this is murder, it won’t score with the Federal Railroad Administration as a trespasser. Not the way a suicide would. Which means it won’t impact our safety numbers.”
I recoiled. “That’s what matters to you?”
“That’s my job. Where’s the TIR?”
> I bit down on what I wanted to say. “The hard drive is in my truck. I’ll get you a copy.”
“You’ve looked at it?”
“Not yet. For your record, the engineer says he was traveling at a safe speed and sounded the horn appropriately. It will be on the recorders.”
“I’ll take a look as soon as you send it. Don’t give it to any plaintiff lawyers that might show up. Where’s the crew? Deke Willsby and”—she flipped through her paperwork—“John Sethmeyer.”
“They’re with the Care Team. You can interview them upstairs at headquarters.”
“I prefer to conduct interviews in my office. They’ll need to come by before the end of the day. Make sure they know that.” She pulled out a sheaf of papers and tucked them into a plastic slipcover. “And I’ll need you to fill these out. Digital or hard copy, your choice. Have them back to me no later than close of business tomorrow.”
The ME, Dr. Emma Bell, had been steadfastly ignoring everything but her work. Now she stood and walked over to join us under the tarp. I’d worked with her on a few jumpers. She was pleasant but distant. Maybe it came from keeping company with the dead.
“Special Agent Parnell.” She stripped off her gloves and pushed back the hood on her mud-spattered Tyvek suit; her broad face was flushed despite the chill. “It would be nice to stop meeting like this.”
I resisted the obvious pun about a dead relationship and merely nodded.
“I’m ready to get the body out,” she said. “Then you can move the train and we’ll finish up.”
I looked at Stern. “All right with you?”
“I’m done for the moment.” She tapped the papers she’d handed me. “Tomorrow by five.” She spun on her boots and headed for the incline.
“You piss in her Wheaties this morning?” Bell asked me.
I watched Stern navigate the slick hillside. “I think she pisses in her own.”
Fifteen minutes later, the rain had slacked off to a soft drizzle. Emma Bell and her crew finished removing what they could of the body while the train was still in place. They took pieces of Samantha Davenport and placed them in a black body bag and carried them up the hill. Watching was too much like being back in Mortuary Affairs, and I found myself blinking up into the sky. To the west, the dark clouds thinned and streaks of blue glimmered in the gaps.
“Special Agent Parnell?”
I brought my gaze back to earth.
“We ready to break the train?” asked one of the conductors I’d spotted earlier.
“Let’s do it.”
The two men stepped through the gore and began the uncoupling process while I made sure everyone was clear of the tracks. When the men were done, they stepped back and one of the crew got on the walkie-talkie. I listened in while he informed the engineers at each end of the train that we were good to go.
A hum started as the coal cars quivered to life. The air in the brake hoses hissed and a sonorous clanking echoed as, far down the line, the locomotives on each end began moving. The slack disappeared and, with a groan that seemed to rise from the depths of the earth, the train broke apart.
I closed my eyes and pictured Samantha Davenport as she had looked on her driver’s license photo. The luminous dark hair falling behind her shoulders. The high curve of her brows. The knowing look in her eyes that spoke more of inborn wisdom than vast experience.
I pressed my hand to my heart and, in my mind, I made her whole. I gathered what the train had scattered and washed away the blood. I smoothed her hair, brought the life back to her eyes, and restored a pulse beneath her skin.
This habit of mine—morbid or life-affirming, I wasn’t sure which—had started in Iraq. The body of a young PFC had come in—Private First Class Hart. Hart had been at the epicenter of an explosion loosed by a suicide bomber. Among his belongings I’d found a photo of him with his girlfriend and taped it to the wall of the bunker where we worked. And then I couldn’t let it go—what he’d been, what he was now.
I opened my eyes. The rain stopped. Thunder rumbled in the distance as the storm washed past. Moments later, the sun came out, and steam rose from the damp ground. Far out in the meadow, a bird let loose a warbling song. The wind turned from violent to brisk, and everything sparkled, new and fresh.
I slogged back up the hill, ignoring Gresino’s eyes on me. Ignoring everyone. At the truck, I let Clyde out but kept him close. We stood on the hill together while Emma Bell and her crew returned to the tracks to finish their work.
We had a saying in Iraq. Embrace the suck. My beloved, Dougie, had used it every time the going got rough. Parnell, you’ve got to embrace the suck, he’d tell me with a wink. You gotta learn to be uncomfortable, and then you can conquer anything.
The last of the clouds scattered to reveal a bright blue sky. Yellow flowers nodded in the damp and bees reemerged, droning contentedly. But Clyde had eyes only for the body bag and the gore. He looked as unhappy as I felt. I rested a hand on his head.
“Embrace the suck, buddy,” I said. “You know the drill.”
I scrubbed his head, roughed his ears, and gave him a treat from the stash in my pocket. We climbed into my truck and I started the engine and eased my way through the crowd of people and vehicles. All I wanted was to flee, to put this behind me, to pretend it was a normal day on the rails. That was all I’d ever wanted since I’d come home.
Just before I reached the road, I looked in my rearview mirror. Samantha walked along the tracks, a child on either side of her—eleven-year-old boys with wheat-blond hair and green eyes and knobby wrists. Her sons. She had an arm around the shoulders of each boy, her head bent toward one child, who rushed out a staccato string of words while his brother kicked a rock as if it were a soccer ball.
They walked through the throng of police, past the coroner and her assistants, and headed toward the cement factory where the Edison silos brooded against the brightening sky.
The dead are a load you can’t set down.
They weigh nothing. And everything.
CHAPTER 6
Today, in Habbaniyah, we found a little boy. An orphan, eight or nine years old. He was crying next to the body of his mother—she was one of our interpreters.
She’d been beaten to death by insurgents for helping the Americans. And for falling in love with one of them.
—Sydney Parnell. Private correspondence.
At Cohen’s house, I gave myself fifteen minutes to get over the flashbacks and the bomb. I sat halfway up the stairs leading to the front door, removed my duty belt, and stripped off my bloody blouse to let the sun bake into my aching muscles. I removed my boots and scraped off the dirt on the stair where I sat, then slid my fingers under the straps of my sports bra and rubbed away the indentations the straps had carved into my shoulders. When I rolled my head, trying to work out the kinks, the bones popped like an old woman’s.
In front of the house, Clyde nosed through a thicket of trees, hunting rabbits. Puffs of clouds drifted noiselessly overhead against the rain-washed sky. Far away, a lawn mower sputtered and died. Cohen’s swank neighborhood was quiet as a tomb.
When Clyde gave up his pursuit and flopped down beside me, I removed his gear and laid it out on the stairs to dry, then gave him a rough scratching all over, mussing his vest-flattened fur. He smelled of earth and fur and the perspiration coming off his paws and hair follicles. I breathed it in, then closed my eyes and let his nearness and the heat dissolve me.
After a time, I sat up and shook out a cigarette from the pack the lieutenant had given me. I eyeballed it for all of five seconds before I stuck it in my mouth and lit up. How easily we fall.
“What do we do with this case, Clyde?” I asked.
Clyde let loose a gentle snore.
Homeland Security, TSA, and my boss would handle the hazmat train. Denver and Thornton police had the bodies. McConnell’s CARD team was on Lucy. But now that I had time to think, my mind kept going back to the alphanumeric code written in the kiln. Why was it
significant to the killer? And why did it seem familiar?
I blew a cloud of smoke into the clear sky. No doubt the Feds or Denver PD would figure it out. They had code breakers and analysts. The last thing they needed was a bomb-rattled, nutcase railway cop with post-traumatic stress, trust issues, and a strong penchant for whiskey.
But I couldn’t let it go.
The question every Marine asks herself is whether she’s got what it takes. Same with cops and EMTs and social workers. Hell, all of us. Every person on this planet. After my mother died, my grams taught me that God will give us only what we can handle. My twelve-year-old self pictured God with a notebook and a scale, measuring the strength of every heart and deciding whether we could cope with what was coming down the pike.
The question we each ask ourselves is, can I hack it?
From my back pocket, I pulled out the photo I carry everywhere like a talisman. I ran my thumb over its worn, silky softness. Malik. The orphan I’d left behind in Iraq two years earlier. We’d found him near the body of his murdered mother, Haifa, who had made the mistake of falling in love with a Marine; the Marine had returned the favor. Retribution by the insurgents against them both had been swift and brutal.
When we found their bodies and Haifa’s weeping, terrified son, I could not leave him alone, waiting for the insurgents to come back and finish the job. I’d bundled him in a blanket and brought him with me to the forward operating base.
In the photo, Malik is standing near my barracks on the FOB, grinning and holding a soccer ball one of the Marines had given him. I cupped my hands around the picture, shielding it from the sun, and marveled at the depths in Malik’s young eyes. God must have figured Malik could handle a lot.
I’d tried to bring him home with me when I redeployed, working to get his application through the State Department. But then he vanished from the base in Iraq. At the time, I’d hoped he’d found his family. But later I learned he’d been brought to America by men who wanted to train him and send him back to Iraq as a spy—the same men I feared would pay me another visit.
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