Dead Stop

by Barbara Nickless

  “And you think the accidents are why the crossing is significant to the killer?”

  “You have any better ideas?”

  “I’ll keep digging.”

  After we hung up, I finished my inspection of the house. Nothing more sinister than dirty laundry and a thick layer of dust.

  In the kitchen, I stripped off Clyde’s gear and gave him fresh food and water. I searched through the refrigerator and found last night’s shrimp scampi, one of Cohen’s favorite dishes. He made it every couple of weeks. I scooped half onto a plate and popped it in the microwave. Cohen would shoot me for treating his scampi so poorly. The least I could do was warm it up on the stove. But I didn’t have the energy. And me being me, I’d probably burn it.

  I poured myself a finger of Macallan and left it on the bar that separated the living room from the kitchen. I carried the scampi into the bedroom, eating as I walked. It was soggy. Mea culpa.

  In the bedroom, I took a couple of Advils for my knee, yanked off my work boots, then stripped out of my uniform and showered. I smeared some antibiotic ointment on the cut on my forehead, added a bandage and called it good. At last, clean and comfortable in a pair of sweats and a tattered Mortuary Affairs T-shirt, I returned to the kitchen and sat at the bar. I used the remote to click on the TV.

  “. . . historic rainfall up and down the Front Range,” a meteorologist was saying. “Creeks and rivers are swollen, and some dams—”

  I clicked it off. Clyde wandered over to check on me.

  “We’re still good,” I told him.

  But it was a lie. The investigation was now nudging out of the first day of Lucy’s disappearance and into the second, and we had precious little to show for it. Lucy’s chances were diminishing with each passing hour, in direct correlation to the dread rising through me like an extra heartbeat.

  Clyde kept watching me.

  “Okay,” I told him. “We’re not so good. I made a promise, and what we’ve got so far is a whole lot of nothing.”

  His ears came up. “Then get on it,” he was saying.

  “Right. Let’s see what we have. From the railroad perspective.”

  I opened up my laptop and started typing as a way to organize my thoughts.

  First, a hazardous materials train that would never actually exist. The cops and the Feds would run down everyone associated with that train, from the railroad employees to the vendors and their employees through everyone involved from the regulatory agencies. It was a huge goddammit, as my grams would say, and likely to lead nowhere. The killer had to know that by writing down that number in the Davenports’ home, he’d guaranteed the train would never exist. So what had he intended?

  I paused in my typing. Maybe his only goal had been to create chaos, especially if he was pushing for some ideology—he didn’t believe in drilling for oil, say.

  But the up-close and personal nature of his crime suggested it was something else.

  What, I typed, is personal about a hazmat train?

  I stared at the blinking cursor. You hated hazmat trains on principle. They were dangerous, they were vulnerable to terrorism. Or, more personally, you’d been hurt by one. I made a note to look into chemicals spills near Denver.

  Next, we had the crossing number. Maybe there weren’t any accidents listed because Alfred Tate’s railroad had never reported them. But then why go after the Davenports? Hiram had actually eliminated the possibility of any accidents occurring at that crossing.

  I needed to talk to the retired deputy, Rick Wolanski. He would be able to tell me definitively if there had been any accidents there. I typed, Hazmat train and crossing at Potters Road? Linked? Need accident reports.

  Finally, we had the quotes about betrayed lovers. Back to the personal angle. I typed, What does a hazmat train have to do with lovers?

  I stood and dug through the kitchen utility drawer until I found a box of thumbtacks, then picked up the whiskey on my way into the living room. On the far end of the vaulted space was an empty wall where normal people with time to think about normal things would have hung art. I stared at that blankness and thought about the hole that was left when a child went missing. About the emptiness created in a space where once a child breathed and laughed in a world that was a daily miracle to them—assuming they’d had a normal childhood.

  I thought about what hole Lucy might be in now. In the ground or in a basement or on a mattress somewhere. Then I shook off the fear and opened my duffel. I removed the photos, books, and everything else I’d collected during the day.

  Leaving the center of the wall open for the moment, I thumbtacked up the pictures of the Davenport family that I’d printed at my office—the ones of Lucy and the twins at the Edison Cement Works, the three of them standing like small ghosts in the falling snow. I placed a sticky note at the corner of one of the pictures: Killer first sees Davenports here?

  Next I pinned up the article announcing DPC’s takeover of Alfred Tate’s T&W short line and added two more notes: Hiram acquires Edison from Tate in 1982 and donates a portion of the property to MoMA in 2010. Questionable? Hiram turns 025615P into an overpass even though no accidents reported?

  And a third: Tate stops fighting the merger. Why?

  I moved on to the stills from the train video, the woman’s photo from Ben’s desk which I’d made a copy of at police headquarters, and a photocopy of the deed transfer of part of the Edison Cement Works factory to MoMA. The fact that the article, the photo, and the MoMA file had all been together in a locked drawer made me hope Ben had found a link between the three. Something that I, too, could ferret out.

  I added the photograph of Samantha and her assistant, Hurley. Back to the lover angle. It didn’t matter if they’d been having an affair or not. It mattered only what Ben believed.

  At the top of my collage, I placed the picture of Lucy on the swing. And in the very middle, I thumbtacked a piece of paper with the alphanumeric 02XX56XX15XP written on it, along with the hazmat train identification number, UNMACWAT21.

  Below those two alphanumeric strings I wrote in red, Find the killer, find Lucy.

  I picked up the Macallan and stepped back from the wall, wondering what, if anything, tied all of these together. My mind created imaginary lines from the land to the woman’s photo to the Davenport children and back. Ghostly links traced themselves in my mind, then broke apart each time I looked more closely.

  What had Ben found?

  Frustrated, I drank down half the scotch and stared at the number. Why had the killer added all the Xs?

  In railroad terminology, an X represented one of two things: It was the universal symbol for a crossing. Or it meant a crossbuck sign. The crossbuck was the most basic type of crossing alert. It consisted of two slats of wood or metal crossed at the middle, and was posted at all so-called passive intersections—those without gates, bells, or flashing lights. It had been designed to resemble a skull and crossbones so that when people saw it, they’d think immediately of danger.

  “You’re playing with us, aren’t you?” I said aloud to the killer. “Whoever you are, whyever you’re doing this, you want see if we’re smart enough to figure it out.”

  Maybe . . . an idea sparked. Maybe he’d played with the cops somewhere else, too. Killers like this one didn’t usually go from zero to ninety. There were signs along the way.

  I sat on the floor and opened my laptop again. Clyde wandered over and joined me, his weight a reassuring presence against my legs. I knew Cohen and the FBI would have checked their criminal databases for similar crimes. But I had access to something different.

  I logged on to the DPC server and pulled up the folder containing the terrorism briefings and incident reports we received, along with the daily news bulletins. The bulletins included general train news from all across the country, covering all railroad lines, passenger and freight alike. In addition, there was a list, put together by and for railway police, of all crimes committed on or against railroad property.

>   I started with the newest files and worked backward to 2001, which was as far as I could go without accessing off-site storage. My search on keywords like homicide, murder, unexplained deaths, and the letter X led me down a macabre trail of trespass and demise. I scrolled through the myriad reports of fouled tracks and stalled cars and derailings. People who’d stumbled onto the tracks and died there. Or been trapped in boxcars or gotten sucked into a train’s draft. College kids who goaded each other to jump a train and then lost a limb for their daring. Worst of all were the murders, many unsolved but likely perpetrated by members of the Freight Train Riders of America or one of the other gangs that preyed on their fellow rail riders.

  Then a report popped up detailing a homicide on railroad property that had occurred last March—four months ago. As I read, a cold hand seemed to come and rest against my neck, as if the killer had walked into the room.

  The incident had occurred in the city of Columbus, Ohio. A forty-year-old man had been found murdered in a boxcar, and the door of the boxcar had been spray-painted with a large black X. The bulletin offered little more, so I pulled up digital archives of the local newspaper, the Columbus Dispatch. The man had been beaten and tortured over a period of days. After death, his body had been wrapped in heavy plastic and left in the car. He’d been discovered by IPC railway agent Jim Norton.

  The ghostly hand tightened around my neck. Hiram Davenport was from Ohio. Could there be a connection? I stood and looked at the clock—it was the middle of the night in Ohio. No help for it. I called the IPC dispatch, identified myself, then asked for Norton’s phone number, assuming he still worked for the railroad.

  “He’s on call tonight,” the dispatcher said. “Want me to patch you through?”

  There was a God. “Please.”

  A minute later, a man came on the phone, his voice rough with sleep. “Special Agent Norton.”

  “Agent Norton, this is Agent Parnell with Denver Pacific Continental. Sorry to wake you. I’m calling about an incident that occurred on IPC property last March. You found the body of a man murdered in a boxcar. The death might be linked to a case I’m working in Denver. I’ve got the incident report, but I’m hoping to learn any additional details.”

  “Give me a sec.” There came a long enough pause that I thought he’d put down the phone and gone back to sleep. Then he said, “I’ve pulled up my reports on the computer. Give me a minute to find it.”

  I waited, the seconds ticking on an imaginary clock.

  Then, “Okay, I’ve got my report up. What do you want to know?”

  “Was the man identified?”

  “Yup. William King. He was an accountant in a previous life, but he’d been homeless for a couple of years. I’d seen him around, chased him off the property a few times. It was sad, him ending up like that. His mom used to work for your railroad. DPC.”

  I jumped to my feet, startling Clyde, and went to the counter for pen and paper. “You have a name and phone number for her?”

  “It’s here somewhere.” A pause. “Here it is. Betsy King.” He rattled off a phone number, and I wrote it down.

  “Was the case solved?”

  “Nah,” he drawled, then yawned. “Police investigated, but there weren’t any witnesses and there was nothing forensically useful on the body or at the crime scene. They finally decided it was gang related. I’ve been half waiting for something like it to show up again. You said you’re in Denver?”

  “That’s right. Was there anything about the case that wasn’t in the papers?”

  “Yup.” Another yawn. “There was one thing. Cops kept it quiet. I never did understand what it meant.”

  “What was it?”

  “Killer wrote a number on the side of the car, above the body. I’ll tell you what it was if you can hold on. I’m scrolling through the report now.”

  I paced the room with a sudden surge of energy. My mouth tasted of metal and the chill had spread from my neck across my shoulders.

  “Here it is,” Norton said. “02XX56XX15XP. You got something like that?”

  Adrenaline flooded through me like I’d just been hooked up to an IV of the stuff.

  “We do,” I said. “We’ve got something exactly like that.”

  CHAPTER 16

  Scientists say that when we recall something from our past, it isn’t as simple as taking out a photograph from an album. Because it isn’t the original memory we pull up. Rather, it’s a slightly different version of that memory—a memory of a memory. With each retrieval, the memory is altered.

  Our past is made up of unwitting deceits.

  —Sydney Parnell. Personal journal.

  Mac McConnell was wide awake when I called. She heard me out, then promised to alert the CARD team in Ohio and put three members of her own team on the next flight out to Columbus. I typed up my conversation with Jim Norton, attached it to the incident reports, and e-mailed everything to her and Cohen. I debated calling Betsy King but decided it would be too cruel to call a woman in the middle of the night about her dead son. It would have to wait until morning.

  I continued scrolling through the incident reports but didn’t find anything else with a connection to our case or the murder in Ohio. Then, assuming the FRA was wrong and that there had, in fact, been accidents at the crossing on Potters Road, I searched online for newspaper articles from the seventies and early eighties about Deadman’s Crossing. I especially wanted photographs of any victims, hoping to find a match to the woman in the photo in Ben’s desk.

  I came up empty-handed. Nothing had been digitized from that time. I decided that tomorrow, after my meeting with Hiram, I would head to Thornton. If I hadn’t heard from the retired sheriff’s deputy, Wolanski, I would check with someone at the Thornton Chronicle. Maybe they had an article morgue.

  Defeated, I was glad when, twenty minutes later, the floor vibrated as the garage door rattled open below. When Cohen didn’t appear after a couple of moments, Clyde and I went outside looking for him. We found him slouched on the top step, his head in his hands.

  He looked up as we approached. His clothes and face and manner were as rumpled as a bedsheet, and the frown between his eyes looked carved with a knife. He had that narrow gaze he got whenever he was working his way through a problem. Like he’d opened the door to a room hiding a trap and was wondering how to take the first step.

  He mustered up a smile. “Hey.”

  “Hey.” I sat down next to him. The stairs were damp.

  Clyde bumped his head against Cohen’s back, then stretched out on the decking behind us. I handed Cohen the scotch. He drank it down in a single swig, so I went back inside for the bottle.

  “I saw your report just before I left,” he said when I returned. “Mac said she’d already spoken to you about it. This could be our first break. Good work.”

  I told him that Hiram was originally from Ohio. And that the victim’s mother had worked for DPC.

  Cohen was silent a moment. “You talk to the mother?”

  “I’ll call her in the morning. We’ll find out then if she has any connection to Hiram.” I rubbed Clyde’s back; he let out a contented sigh. “What’s the word on Veronica Stern’s stalker?”

  Cohen turned the glass in his hands but didn’t drink.

  “We know Vander is back in town. He’s been living in his mother’s basement and going back and forth between here and Florida for the last two months. We’re looking now to see if he made a side trip to Ohio.”

  “Let me guess. He didn’t come home last night.”

  “Hasn’t come home the last two nights. And his boss at a comic book store in Aurora hasn’t seen him for two days. We’re working our way through a list of friends that his mother provided. Not that she’s exactly falling over herself to cooperate.”

  “Why do stalkers always live in their mother’s basements?”

  “Their fathers have had enough of their bullshit.” Cohen took a sip of the whiskey, then set the glass aside. “Carol Van
der wouldn’t let us in, so we got a warrant. Mama was right to try and keep us out. Vander’s a railfan, all right. But not the kind that likes to take pictures of shiny new locomotives or shoot video of his kids on the California Zephyr.”

  “Let me guess. Railroad accidents?”

  “His walls are plastered with pictures of smashed trains, smashed cars, smashed bodies. Most of the photos are in color. At least the ones of the bodies.”

  “Sounds like a great guy.”

  “No ties so far to the Davenports,” Cohen went on. “But we found photos of Stern on Vander’s bedside table. I can only imagine what he was thinking when he jerked himself off to sleep every night.”

  “What kind of photos?”

  “The stalking kind. Stern getting in and out of her car. Stern shopping for her groceries. Stern going in and out of her office building—”

  “Wait. Vander was near DPC headquarters?”

  “Telephoto lens. We’re working backward from the angle to figure out where he was when he took the shots. We’re also checking the CCTVs at the stores where she shopped.”

  “No bedroom shots?”

  “Lucky for Stern, she keeps her blinds drawn. The guys in the computer lab are chasing him on social media and working to get into his computer.”

  I stretched out my legs, rubbed my sore knee. “But no photos of the Davenports?”

  “Not so far. Could just mean he’s got a few brain cells rattling around in that ugly skull. Still . . .” Cohen shrugged out of his suit coat and laid it across his lap. “I’m not totally sold on this guy. Unless we can link him to Ohio, the only criminal charge we have against him is Stern’s restraining order. And usually these guys do a lot of small shit before they decide to try the big time.”

  “Son of Sam didn’t have a record before he killed six people,” I said. “Neither did the BTK Strangler when he murdered ten.”

  Cohen gave me a strange look, then drank his Scotch and held out his glass. I poured more.

  “The thing is,” Cohen said, “if he’s the killer, why risk making a false call against Stern? Even with a burner, he can’t be sure we won’t find him. What does he have to gain by trying to frame her?”