Dead Stop

by Barbara Nickless

  “But that isn’t why you took care of Raya Quinn. You did that for yourself.”

  Something dark and cold slithered into his eye. “What do you mean? Her death was an accident. You just said so yourself.”

  “No, Bull, it was definitely murder. At first we—the police and the FBI and I—we thought Raya’s killer was either Hiram or Alfred Tate. Hiram because of the affair and the child. He’s been paying Raya’s mother all this time. I figured it was blood money, but what if it was child support? Hiram’s way of absolving himself of any guilt over abandoning his son. He may not be able to pass through the eye of a needle, but he can certainly afford to buy off people here on earth. You with me so far, Bull?”

  Bull had gone very still while I spoke. But I sensed the fury building in him, like distant flares of lightning. Clyde sensed it, too. He kept his eyes on Bull.

  Bull sneered. “Okay, so maybe Hiram killed her. First and last time he did his own dirty work.”

  I went on. “We also wondered if it might have been Alfred who killed her because she stole something valuable from him. Something that cost him part of his railroad. That seemed likely, too. But then I got to thinking.”

  Bull folded his arms, rotated his head back and forth.

  “I asked myself who else was there that night. There was the sheriff. Raya’s friend, Jill. Hiram and Alfred. And you.”

  “I was a cop. I was supposed to be there.”

  “The little I know of Alfred Tate made me think he was too mild mannered to be a killer, so my money was on Hiram. I thought maybe he hired you. As you said, he doesn’t like to do his own dirty work.”

  Bull began tapping his knee with the nail file.

  “But I’ve been thinking while you and I have been having this little conversation.”

  “You think a lot, don’t you?”

  “My boss said something to me a couple of days ago. That people used to say you were such an asshole because some woman broke your heart.”

  He snorted.

  “Then I remembered how you used to raise pit bulls. I saw the stake and chain at your house. And tonight, before I came in, I walked around to the back of the bar. And what did I see?”

  “So what?”

  “A pit bull. There was dog hair on Raya’s clothes the night she died. But she didn’t own a dog.” I was going out on a limb with the hair. But Bull wouldn’t know. “Now, I agree that none of that makes you much of a suspect. But there are two things that do.”

  “Can’t wait to hear.”

  “One is a comment made by one of Raya’s friends. She said there was a man who’d taken a fancy to Raya. Used to send her love notes. They called this man Devil Eye. Not eyes, Bull. Eye. So I know, that’s a minor point, too. But then, while I was thinking about all of this, I got to the alcohol they found in her car. An empty bottle of Rebel Yell.”

  “A lot of people drink it,” Bull said.

  “Raya didn’t drink at all, so that made it odd. Where are you from, Bull?”

  “What?”

  “What state? I know you’re from the South. But what state are you from?”

  He spoke before he saw the trap. “Kentucky.”

  “Did you go home and visit your family that summer, Bull? Or maybe over Christmas? You would have brought back as much Rebel Yell as you could fit in your car, I imagine. Because you couldn’t buy that bourbon in Colorado. Not back then.”

  He threw the nail file at me. I dodged it, heard it clang on the concrete wall. Clyde growled.

  “That’s what I figured,” I said. “You must have gotten tired of driving a beautiful woman around at the beck and call of a man you knew would drop her like a used tissue as soon as he tired of her. What happened that night, Bull? Did you follow her from work? Could you just not take it anymore? Did you offer her love? Marriage? Security?”

  Fury swept across Bull’s face. He leapt to his feet. “You don’t know anything about it.”

  Clyde gave another growl and shot in front of me. Bull looked at him, then sank back onto the cot.

  “Did she laugh at you, Bull? Did she call you ugly, tell you she’d rather die? She would say something like that. Because Raya had big plans. Bigger than anything you could offer her. It’s why she named her son Roman. She wanted him to own an empire.”

  “She was a bitch!” Bull shouted. “A cold, icy bitch. She had it coming. Laughing at me when all I did . . .” He buried his face in his hands. “All I did was offer her everything I had.”

  “How’d you get her to drink, Bull? Did you tell her you’d hurt her if she refused? But even after the bourbon, she still said no. All the alcohol in the world couldn’t make her fall for a man like you. So you wrapped your hands around her neck and choked the life out of her.”

  Bull was sobbing now.

  “Then you took the papers she’d stolen from SFCO and gave them to Hiram. He was probably a little sad about Raya. But it was the papers that mattered. He forgave you.”

  The door into the storage room clicked open. Delia.

  “What’s going on in here?” she asked.

  Rain began to pound the roof.

  I stood, crossed over to Bull, and snapped a pair of handcuffs on him. Then I pulled out my phone and called the Aurora police, told them they’d find a killer handcuffed in the storage room at the Royal Tavern.

  “Enjoy that T-shirt,” I said to Delia as I walked by. “I think that’s all you’re ever going to get from Fred Zolner.”

  CHAPTER 30

  I’d been raised on excuses. But the Marine Corps taught me that excuses don’t matter. That excuses—even when prettied up as reasons—are just a way to avoid doing what needs doing.

  —Sydney Parnell. Personal journal.

  I sat in my truck with Clyde, thinking of greed and lust and murder while rain pounded the roof and the interior of the cab grew warm and moist with our breathing.

  To the west, lightning flashed. The storm, coming on hard.

  How could we have come so far, learned so much, and still not know where Roman had hidden Lucy? What were we missing? How had all of Hiram’s gold failed to protect him?

  “Gold,” I said aloud. All the gold in Roman’s room. The gold mining map pinned on his wall.

  He’s in the ground now. Where he belongs, Esta had said.

  I thought of Ennis Parker, the man who’d staked a mining claim on land now occupied by the cement factory. According to what Tom O’Hara had learned, Parker had never found much of anything—he’d been focused on panning for gold, not digging it up.

  Parker had died in a gunfight—what if the man who shot him had wanted his claim? What if, after Parker’s death, he’d mined that land for gold?

  Mines meant tunnels.

  With rising excitement, I started the truck. I turned on the defroster and the wipers. Outside, the branches of the ailing poplars flung about in the wind. The neon ROYAL TAVERN sign bled in the rain.

  Alfred’s family had owned that land long before Hiram bought it. Maybe—I sat up straight—maybe the land was riddled with tunnels, and Alfred Tate knew it. Once he realized Hiram planned to use part of the land as access for his bullet train, the news might have been enough—even after the stroke—for him to order the survey. It wasn’t uncommon in Colorado for undocumented mines to open up suddenly beneath structures—buckling roads and swallowing homes. No one could build high-speed tracks on land like that. The results of Alfred’s survey would be one more weapon to use against Hiram in their ongoing war.

  A gust caught the truck, rocking it. In the seat next to me, Clyde panted.

  Hiram would have also ordered a survey—a requirement before he could donate any land to MoMA. No doubt, that survey would have revealed the risk. But Hiram would have done what he always did—used gold. He would have bought off the engineering firm, donated part of the land to MoMA, and gotten a huge tax write-off. It must have seemed like a reasonable risk. The cement factory had remained stable for a century. Who would expect a fiv
e-hundred-year flood to occur in one’s lifetime?

  My hands were shaking as I opened my laptop and pulled up the status reports I’d been receiving on the Davenport case. I found the name and phone number of the specialist the Thornton detectives had brought in to run a GPR scan—a survey of the area using ground-penetrating radar. I dialed. After a few rings, a sleepy voice came on the line.

  “This is Special Agent Parnell with Denver Pacific Continental. I’m looking for Jeff Bittman.”

  A pause. “Speaking.”

  “Mr. Bittman, I have a couple of questions about when you used the GPR at the Edison Cement factory.”

  “Your name again?” More alert now.

  “Parnell. Sydney Parnell. I’m on the task force searching for Lucy Davenport.”

  “Okay.” There came the faint rustling of sheets. “What do you want to know?”

  “You didn’t find any anomalies, is that right? No evidence of structures or bodies underground.”

  “That’s right. It’s all in my report.”

  “It’s possible that the land was mined for gold many years ago. Wouldn’t that have shown up during your scan?”

  “It depends. Like I told the Thornton detectives, clay-laden soil is a poor conductor. Add all the rain we’ve been having, and I got very little ground penetration. In places, no more than a few centimeters. They eventually had me stop. I wasn’t hitting anything. But I only covered a small area.”

  “The area near the kilns, right?” Which were at the opposite end of the complex from the gate someone had cut into the fence. A gate seemingly next to nothing.

  “Right,” Bittman said. “I was led to believe the killer had been tracked to that location. I did fan out a few hundred feet from there, but the results I got weren’t any better. My understanding is they were relying on the K9s through most of the complex.”

  I thanked him and started to hang up.

  “If you really think there are tunnels,” he said, “don’t go looking for them now. The ground will be saturated from all this rain. If there really is a mine, the tunnels could collapse at any moment.”

  “Got it,” I said, and we disconnected.

  I whooped as I put the car in gear and sped out of the parking lot, the rear tires fishtailing as I turned hard onto the street. I refused to think about flooded tunnels and waterlogged earth. We’d come too far for that. “Hang on, Lucy. We’re coming.”

  Clyde’s eyes were bright on mine. He’d picked up on my excitement and now he gave a single joyous bark, his ears up and head lifted.

  “Game on, boy.”

  I punched Cohen’s number. “She’s at the cement factory,” I said when he picked up. “Lucy is. I’m on my way now.”

  Cohen didn’t ask me how I knew this. “I’ll call for backup and meet you there.”

  “She’s in a mine shaft underneath the factory. On the west side, I think. Remember that gate the killer cut? We need engineers in there. We need lights and equipment. The tunnels will be flooding. She doesn’t have much time.”

  “I’m on it,” he said. “Meet me at the front gate.”

  Outside, the night was dark as pitch. I glanced at the clock on the dash. Dawn was still a couple of hours away.

  I tried Mac next. When she picked up, the connection crackled with the coming storm, dropping our voices in and out as I tried to explain what I’d learned and where I was going. In the end, I wasn’t sure what I managed to communicate before the call dropped and I couldn’t raise her again.

  Talk to Cohen, I’d told her, hoping at least that much would get through.

  By the time I got off the highway and headed toward Potters Road, the rain was coming down hard enough that the wipers couldn’t keep up. I had to slow to a crawl to make sure we stayed on the road. Traffic on the highway, heavy no matter the day or time, had been reduced to twenty miles an hour, and most of the time I got through by hitting my lights and siren and driving on the shoulder, weaving in and out of the slowed cars.

  Now, on Potters Road, there was no traffic. But we were driving through an ocean.

  I imagined it had been this way two nights ago, when Samantha and Lucy Davenport had come this way with Roman Quinn. I pictured Samantha driving, Roman in the seat next to her with a gun, Lucy in the back clutching her sock monkey. Samantha knew where they were going. She had been there just that afternoon. She knew all about the empty, echoing silence of the cement factory, the many places where someone could be held and hurt. The fact that no one would be around to hear or see anything at all.

  And so she had driven hard off the road, slamming the Lexus to a stop, screaming at Lucy to run, throwing her keys into the field so that Roman couldn’t force them to drive anywhere else. Maybe she thought she could keep the killer busy while her daughter escaped into the darkness.

  The lights from the police barricade pulsed in the rain. I eased to a stop, rolled down the window, and showed my badge to the officer. I explained what I was doing, told him that more police were on their way, and asked him to direct them to the cement factory.

  “It’ll be flooding out there near the river,” he said, water dripping off the brim of his cap.

  “Why I’m in a hurry.”

  He nodded and pulled one of the sawhorses out of the way. A few minutes later, I went past the place where Samantha had driven off the road. The pullout was awash in mud, the crime scene tape snapping hard in the lashing wind. As I went by, a piece of tape broke free and slapped into the windshield, startling me and obscuring my vision before the wind lifted it free again.

  Clyde barked when the tape hit, a hard, savage sound.

  The gate into the factory was open when we got there, the chain and padlock hanging free. The gate swung in the wind, its metal bars banging repeatedly against the fence with a stiff clang. I braked and we eased through, the tires bouncing as the asphalt ended and the mud and weeds began. I skewed the steering wheel right, heading toward the gate Roman had cut into the fence. I drove fast, the rear tires fishtailing, weeds slapping into the headlights and disappearing under the wheels.

  For the first time, I allowed myself to wonder what the tunnels looked like. Was rainwater seeping in, turning the clay walls into a slick slime?

  The rain backed off a bit, and I thought I saw a light ahead. I slowed and tried to raise Cohen on my phone, but the storm must have knocked out a tower or maybe the base station—I had no service at all. I picked up speed again, the truck bouncing violently on the rough ground. There was no question of waiting for the police. Roman had brought Lucy here, I was sure of it. And probably Hiram, too, for whatever ugly thing Roman had planned for them.

  I turned between warehouses. There it was again, a faint light at the far end of the building on my left. I killed my own lights and rolled forward, confident that the roar of the storm would drown our approach should anyone be listening.

  A black Mercedes SUV was parked in the alley formed by the buildings, blocking any further progress. The headlights were off, and I could see no movement inside. I parked my vehicle at the mouth of the alley where it would be visible to the arriving cops and killed the engine. I went to try Cohen a final time but couldn’t get a signal. I dropped my phone into an inside pocket of my rain jacket.

  I climbed over my truck’s console and planted my knees in the back seat, reaching into the rear of the car where I kept a locked metal box filled with extra equipment. I opened it and selected a pair of night-vision goggles, a headlamp, a knife, and a can of Silly String. The knife, headlamp, and goggles were standard-issue for a railway cop. The Silly String was not.

  I hung the goggles and a headlamp around my neck and tucked them in my jacket, and put the knife and the Silly String in a cargo pocket of my uniform pants.

  Back in the front seat, I clipped Clyde’s lead onto his harness. A flare of lightning revealed him staring out the front window. He was as tense and eager as I was.

  “Let’s go find Lucy,” I said.

  I turned o
ff the Ford’s interior light and opened the door as a gust of wind rocked the truck.

  “And forget embracing the suck, Clyde. We’re going to kick its ass.”

  CHAPTER 31

  —Listen up, recruits. Some of you are hardwired to be heroes. Dump that. In Iraq, trying to play hero will get you killed so fast you’ll pass your coffin going out almost before you’re in-country.

  —Sir, this recruit would like to know what to do if he’s the only thing standing between his platoon and the bad guys.

  —In that case, you put yourself forward. That’s not being a hero. That’s being a Marine.

  —Classroom, USMC Leadership, Parris Island.

  Hail mixed with the rain. It hammered the cars and stung my exposed skin like a thousand tiny whips. The heart of the storm seemed to be right above us. Lightning flashed and sizzled all around, each bolt followed almost instantly by the deafening crack of thunder.

  I held tight to Clyde’s lead as he and I darted between the buildings and came to a stop by the Mercedes SUV. I recognized the plate number—the vehicle belonged to Hiram. A BOLO had gone out hours earlier when Hiram’s guard had been found shot dead. Clyde and I crouched next to the Mercedes and I turned a careful eye on my partner, worried about his reaction to the noise of the storm. He glanced at me, then leaned forward again—ears up, head erect, focused on the mission.

  “What are we waiting on?” he seemed to ask.

  Good boy.

  A faint light shone through the windows set high on the building on our left. I strained to hear anything above the storm, but the roar of the hail drowned out everything else. I rose high enough to shine my headlamp into the vehicle. The front seat was empty save for a litter of fast-food wrappers on the floor. The rear driver’s side door was slightly ajar, and my light picked out the slackened features of another one of Hiram’s bodyguards. Jeff, I remembered. He sat as if napping, his shoulders relaxed, his head tilted back against the seat. A small round hole showed darkly between his blank eyes. I touched my hand briefly to my heart, as I did for all the dead, and was about to turn away when I spotted a man’s necktie on the seat next to him. Hoping it belonged to Hiram, and that Jeff’s presence meant Roman had brought Hiram here, I eased open the door and grabbed it, tucking it inside my jacket to keep it dry. Clyde would be able to catch Hiram’s scent from it.