Malik had escaped. And that was as much as I knew.
I slid the picture back in my pocket, braced my elbows on my thighs, and smoked. I stared at the dirt I’d scraped off my shoes, noting how even that humble substance glittered in the sunlight. A metaphor for the potential goodness in all of us, if I were inclined to think that way.
After a few minutes, I pulled out my phone and punched in the number of a friend, a man named David Fuller. David ran an organization called the Hope Project, which aimed to reunite Iraqi refugees with their families, whether the families were here in the United States, living in Europe, or still in the Middle East. A lot of these men and women had worked for the US government and then been forced to flee their homes in response to death threats.
Three months earlier, I’d enlisted David’s help in finding Malik. He had a network of people working throughout the United States, Mexico, and Canada as well as overseas, some of whom were living in or watching the communities of exiled Muslims. He’d agreed to show Malik’s picture around—cautiously―because unfriendlies were looking for him.
David didn’t answer. I sent him a text.
Word?
A minute later he texted back. Nothing. Syd, can’t keep resources on this. Too stretched as is.
We’d had this conversation before. The last time, I’d begged for another month.
One more month, I typed.
You said that
Please
A long minute rolled by. During that time I imagined thousands of children as flickering lights, each carried off on a dark sea of indifference, war, carelessness, greed.
My phone chimed. One month
I closed my eyes in relief. Opened them and typed Thank you
Call me sucker
I typed Saint and slid my phone back into my pocket.
“This whole thing with Lucy Davenport,” I said to Clyde. “We have to help. Our boss won’t like it because he thinks I can’t handle it. But we don’t have a choice, right? She’s only a child.”
Clyde opened one eye.
“Yeah, I know. That bomb kinda blew my shit apart, too. Okay, it totally blew my shit apart. My therapist would tell me to spend a month binge-watching Netflix before I reengage.” I rubbed my palms on my pants to wipe away the sudden sweat. “But we can hold it together until she’s found.”
Clyde looked like he was having no trouble whatsoever holding it all together.
“Right,” I said. “I’m the weak link. Thanks for the reminder.”
I crushed out the cigarette, stood, and went inside to take a shower.
At work an hour later, I dropped my duffel at my desk and went hunting for my boss.
Clyde and I found Captain Mauer one floor up, staring forlornly at a coffee vending machine. The overhead fluorescents turned his gray hair yellow and carved canyons into his cheeks. He’d once had a gut you could rest a plate on. But lately his uniform was approaching baggy, draping over his six-foot-four frame and held in place with a belt and a prayer.
I’d asked him about the weight loss; he said that after his last visit to the doctor, his wife had put him on a diet. No processed foods. No sugar. Effing vegetables for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Said he figured it was for the best, not having so much dead weight to haul around. But with all those damned vegetables, he did wonder how rabbits found the energy to hop.
As I watched, he reached out and smacked a fist against the side of the vending machine. The machine rattled into compliance, dropping a paper cup into the chute. Nothing wrong with his right hook.
He looked up when he heard us coming and his expression went soft. I was Mauer’s youngest cop and the only female, and the paternalism he showed toward me was just a slightly weightier version of the one he extended to all his officers. After the pileup of bodies during the last murder investigation I’d been involved in, Mauer had accepted my side of things without reservation. He’d had my back in the follow-up investigation by the Colorado Bureau of Investigations and the DA’s office and had never once lost confidence in me or my story.
Now as I approached, I worked to summon an expression that conveyed both a reasonable level of concern over what had happened and a quiet confidence that I was handling things just fine, so he’d let me keep handling them. Chin up. Shoulders squared.
His eyes narrowed as I approached. “You’re doing it.”
“Doing what?”
“Putting on your Marine face.”
“Au contraire. This is my coolly competent face.”
“Well, it looks like crap. And you didn’t tell me you’d been hurt.”
I waved a dismissive hand. “I’ve been hurt worse shaving my legs.”
The machine stuttered and fell quiet. He stared at the empty cup, then grabbed the machine and shook it.
“People have died doing that,” I offered.
“They’re amateurs.” A sudden spurt of coffee poured into the cup. He nodded with satisfaction and raised an eyebrow at me. “You look like you stepped into a wasp’s nest and are mighty pissed off about it.”
“Day in the life, right?”
“It would be normal to be angry.”
Deep breath. Calm expression. “Might be I’m a little angry.”
“Hm.”
“The guy did try to blow us up.”
“You got that going. What else you hiding behind that Marine facade?”
The best way to lie was to stick as close to the truth as possible. “What happened today was nothing more than a regular day in Iraq. Been there, done that, got the medal. It’s not a problem for me. I want to stay on the case.”
Mauer folded his arms. “Parnell—”
“Beyond this weekend, I mean. If we haven’t found her by then.”
“Patrolling getting a little dull for you? Look, Sydney, you have to understand my position. My first duty is to DPC. My second duty is to you. I’m not sure keeping you on the case is good for either of those.”
“I’m already in. Let me help bring it home. Bring her home.”
He scratched at his cheek. “You’ve already done more for your country than ninety-nine percent of us. It’s okay to take a break and let others pick up some of the slack.”
“Fobbit,” I muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Didn’t your counselor say you’re supposed to avoid stressful situations and focus on healing?”
I folded my arms. “I’m a good dog for this fight.”
“Uh-huh. ’Cause the Feds and Denver PD and Thornton PD and the Adams County Sheriff and the Colorado bureau, not to mention TSA and Homeland Security—all those guys, they ain’t enough. They need a railroad cop, of all damn things.”
“It’s just for a few days. And if you sideline me and things go down badly, it will make me certifiable.”
He closed his eyes and heaved a sigh. “You’re already certifiable.”
I waited.
He turned back to the machine. “Coffee? Black, right?”
I forced my shoulders down. “Yes.”
He handed me the newly filled paper cup and fed more coins into the machine.
“What I wish,” he said, “is that you’d take some time for yourself. A vacation, or something. Give yourself a chance to heal. You told me you took this job so you could get some distance from things.”
“I am healed. And I don’t like vacations. I don’t know what to do with myself.”
“You thought of getting a hobby?”
“I have one. Marksmanship.”
He rolled his eyes at me. A cup dropped into place. The machine whirred. Apparently it had learned not to argue with John Mauer.
“Therapy has been good.” I resisted the urge to cross my fingers and hide them behind my back. “I’m not saying it’s all marshmallows and lite beer. But the therapist did tell me that I need to stay engaged. That I shouldn’t back down from what upsets me.” Now I did cross my fingers. “If you take me off this case, it coul
d actually be a bad thing.”
He handed me the coffee. “That sounds like a bunch of bullshit.”
“A lot of psychotherapy sounds like bullshit. Doesn’t make it wrong. And why insist I get counseling if you won’t let me follow their advice?”
“Because I might have a better idea even than your counselor what price you’ll pay if things go seriously south.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“I worked the railway bombing in Madrid,” he said. “Back in 2004. A hundred and ninety-two dead. Nearly two thousand injured.”
“That’s not going to happen here.”
“We hope it’s not,” he said. “But the point I want to make is that after I arrived, they were still cleaning up corpses. Still trying to figure out which heads went with which bodies. I was so shaken up those first days, I couldn’t sleep. Every time I ate, I threw it back up.”
“John,” I said softly. He looked at me, his eyes both wary and tender. “It’s not like this body was my first. Not the bomb, either.”
“I know.” He closed his eyes, opened them again. “I know that. Damn it, I know that. And I keep asking myself if that makes things better for you, or worse.”
“It makes them what they are.”
“Ah, hell.” He mustered up a frown, which was sort of like having a teddy bear give you the evil eye. “You can do this. But on my terms. You’re to tell your therapist exactly what is going on. You’ve got an appointment later today, right?”
I narrowed my eyes. “You know that how?”
“I pay attention. So you tell him every little thing. And if I see any sign you’re coming apart, I’ll yank you so fast you’ll feel your stomach come out your eyeballs.”
I resisted an urge to salute. Or hug him. “I appreciate it, sir.”
“Damn it, Parnell. You could talk the hind leg off a horse.”
I picked up Clyde’s lead and the three of us walked down the stairs to our department, two floors below the rail yard’s control tower in a suite of rooms on the north end. Our area was empty. I was the only one on duty, other than the captain, which was the norm. DPC police work solo. I was itching to start trying to track down the alphanumeric from the kiln. But for the moment, the TIR video was more important.
I stopped by my cubicle long enough to pick up the TIR hard drive from my bag and to down Clyde near the windows where he could sprawl out and snooze. I hurried after Mauer toward his enclosed office at the end of the suite.
“You looked at the video?” he asked as he ushered me through the doorway.
“Not yet.”
He set down his coffee, plugged in the drive, and pulled up the video on his computer. I used the software to search for the power cutout switch—the moment when Deke applied the emergency brake. I backtracked three minutes before that and we watched as the nighttime tracks unspooled in front of us.
The picture was surprisingly clear, nothing like the graininess of CCTV footage, and the audio was sharp. Over the thrum of the engine, Deke whistled softly to himself, unaware of what waited ahead. No sound came from Sethmeyer, which meant my suspicion he’d been asleep was probably correct. The video itself was unremarkable in those final quiet moments. The train was passing through a mostly rural area, and there was little to see in the dark beyond the tracks—just the occasional telephone lines, a few trees, and sometimes a storage unit or piece of railroad equipment. Mile markers slipped serenely by.
“There!” Mauer said, just as Deke sounded his horn.
A figure appeared on the tracks as the train came out of the curve. At this distance, it was impossible to make out any details—identity and gender were lost in the combination of middle-of-the-night darkness and the over-wash of a two-hundred-thousand-candela headlamp and ditch lights. But it was clear that someone stood on the tracks. Deke began chanting, “Move! Move! Move!” like a prayer as he blew the horn and went into emergency stop, and a few seconds after that, Sethmeyer started shouting. As the train approached the figure and details emerged, I saw what Deke had meant—Samantha looked as if she was struggling. An instant later, the light hit her horrified face, then Samantha was under the wheels and gone.
“Son of a bitch,” Mauer said.
I paused the recording. My heart had jumped into triple time as we watched. It wasn’t the first time I’d had to view the recording of an accident. But it never got easier.
I thought of Stern’s cold question from earlier and murmured, “Murder.”
We went through the video ten more times, taking the critical moments frame by frame, trying to make out more of Samantha in the white flare of the headlights. Her clothes were splotched with something dark, so Deke might be right that she was injured. As for whether she was trapped, there was no question. She’d worked frantically to free herself from what looked like some kind of wooden frame, right up until it was too late.
In the seconds immediately after the engine struck her, I caught movement on the right-hand side of the video—something stirring in the bushes. At the last second, whatever it was made a quick, sinewy leap away from the tracks and disappeared from the footage.
“You see that?” I asked.
“Yeah, but hell if I know what it was. Maybe a wolf?”
“Not in Colorado. And that close to a moving train?” Whatever it was, I thought of Lucy fleeing through the dark and shuddered.
Mauer copied the tape and edited it down to the fifteen minutes before the incident, right up to when the train came to a stop and Deke was talking to dispatch. He then pulled a stack of blank CDs from his desk and began burning copies for all the players involved.
“Print some stills, too,” I said. “I want that animal, as well. If you’ll distribute the CDs and stills to the team here, including Veronica Stern, then I’ll get copies to the cops and the feebs.”
“Yes’m.”
“Where are we with the information Detective Cohen asked for?”
Mauer kept removing and inserting disks, building a stack on his desk.
“Diane has pulled up the employee files for everyone connected with the hazmat train,” he said. “The assigned crews, dispatch, the schedulers. The linkers who were going to assemble the train in Macdona, Texas. That’s the pile you see on the chair over there. Vic Macky yanked the maps for the route. I’ll have copies made of everything for the cops and the Feds, including what we have on the vendors. In the meantime, the Homeland Security guys are trying to find the virtual fingerprints of anyone who might have hacked our database and gotten the schedule for that hazmat train.”
I nodded. “The police are getting a subpoena for the personnel files. I’ll run everything over to Cohen when the copies are ready.”
“Speaking of Cohen, how are you two doing?”
I flushed. “Anyone ever tell you you’re nosy?”
“My daughter. All the time. Here’s the last CD. You need more, let me know.” He pointed toward a stack of folders on the right side of his desk. “I’ve started going through the employee files, pulling out data from their personnel files and looking for any connections to either Ben Davenport or his father. Or any indication we have a disgruntled employee.” He pushed a piece of paper across the desk. “Here are the names of every DPC employee involved with that train. So far, the only connection any of them have with Hiram Davenport is that they work for his railroad.”
“And on the disgruntled angle?”
“If they’re unhappy, it hasn’t come to the attention of the folks in personnel. I’ll talk to them one-on-one, see if there’s been anything HR didn’t put in the file.” Mauer steepled his fingers and bounced the tips against his teeth. “I’ll talk to the union heads, too.”
“Good. And while you’re looking at the employee records, keep something in mind.”
“What’s that?”
“One theory is that either Ben or Samantha was having an affair. Given the train tie-in, seems like it might have been with someone who worked here.”
“Joy,” Mauer said. “Now get out of here and find the girl before I change my mind.”
Back at my desk, I gave Clyde a chew toy and sat down. I took a legal pad out of a drawer and wrote down the alphanumeric code I’d seen in the kiln and burned into my memory right before the explosion.
02XX56XX15XP.
I frowned. Was this a unique kind of manifest number? Phone numbers with letters substituted for some of the numbers? A secret code to the location of the Holy Grail and the whereabouts of Lucy Davenport?
I was pretty sure I’d seen it before, or at least something like it. I drank my coffee and stared at the page until the characters started to swim.
All those Xs.
In my mind, I heard the Sir’s voice: Shade it black.
In the parlance of Mortuary Affairs, that meant to add what was missing. But if there was something missing here, I had no way to know what it was. Still, there was something familiar about the number, and the knot in my stomach said the feeling was more than wishful thinking. Sometimes you had to clear away the debris before you could see what mattered. I removed the Xs and rewrote the number, then stared at the result while a chill needled its way down my spine.
025615P.
I was ashamed that it had taken me so long to see it. Maybe I could blame the bomb for rattling my brain. But when I finally realized what I was looking at, the number all but glowed with meaning.
The statistics varied, depending on where you got them. But every ninety minutes or so, a vehicle and a train collided in the United States. In order to track this data and determine where changes needed to be made, the US Department of Transportation assigned a number to every grade-level railroad crossing in the United States. More than 200,000 of them. Always six digits followed by a letter of the alphabet. The number could be cross-checked against a national database that contained the location, a description of the nearby road, all railroad and highway traffic data, and any traffic control devices in use at the crossing.
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