Far away, another train blew its whistle. Lucy paused in the hall, one hand pressed flat against the cool texture of the wall, one foot lifted as if afraid to touch down.
The doorbell rang again.
“Lucy!” called her mom. “It’s Carla. She needs to borrow the mixer. Can you let her in?”
The hallway grew longer. Darker. The door loomed, its brass handle gleaming in the dying light.
Lucy glanced back into the library where her book and Bobo lay in the chair.
Whoever had rung the bell began to knock.
“It’s like the wardrobe,” Lucy whispered. “Don’t be afraid. It’s Aslan waiting.”
Or the white witch, said a voice from somewhere.
Lucy’s hand found the door handle.
Don’t open it, said the same voice.
“Lucy!” called her mom.
Her thumb squeezed down on the latch and she pulled open the door.
DAY ONE
CHAPTER 1
Every chance you get, remember: hang on to the living.
Don’t take up with the dead.
—Sydney Parnell. Personal journal.
Death did not become her.
Standing near the tracks in the cool of predawn, I ran my flashlight along the dark spaces between the wheels of the coal car and carried out as much of an assessment as I could, given the condition of the body. The jumper—railroad slang for a suicide—was an adult white female, probably in her late thirties. She had a lovely face, arresting despite her age and the blood spatter and bruising.
There wasn’t anything beautiful about the rest of her.
I flicked off the flashlight, dropped it through the ring in my duty belt, and shoved my hands in the pockets of my railway police uniform, letting the velvety gray predawn air wrap around me. Sitting beside me and pressed against me, my K9 partner, Clyde, looked up into my face. His faint shivering traveled up my leg.
The death fear.
It was a gift from the war, like the ghosts.
I untucked my hands and squatted so Clyde and I were eye to eye. I tilted his muzzle up gently with my fingers.
“We’re still good,” I told him.
He studied my face, and after a moment his shivering stopped. I released him, and we pressed our heads together.
Somewhere on the other side of the train, a meadowlark spilled its morning song into the darkness. Something small rustled through the grasses. A couple hundred yards away, just visible between the cars, the water of the South Platte River lapped at its banks. So early in the morning, the city seemed far away, more promise than substance, the headlights on the highway like stars burning in another galaxy. For Clyde and me, this was the time when the membrane between the possible and the impossible was at a gossamer thinness.
Dawn was the time for ghosts. For we can least bear our guilt in the long, low hours of near dark, when the sun is a rumor that might never blossom.
I’d been haunted since my return from the war. My therapist talked about referential delusions and post-traumatic stress and a refusal to let go of the past. But I put my faith in a fellow Marine who told me that our ghosts are our guilt. A lot of soldiers and Marines are haunted. Eventually, my friend promised, we move on.
Now, I warily brought my gaze back to the tracks where a slick, shadowy mess of shattered bones and destroyed flesh were all that remained of a once-beautiful woman. Nothing stirred but a stray strand of her dark hair.
“No ghosts, Clyde. See?”
Clyde huffed.
I wondered if the jumper had left a note for her family. Then I wondered if she had a family. And if they would have been able to save her if they’d known what she intended.
In metropolitan Denver, an area covering forty-five hundred square miles and holding more than three million souls, how had she found this lonely place? Was it luck or planning that sent her here where there wasn’t a chance in hell that someone would wander by in the middle of the night and stop her? Luck or planning that made her choose a place where the tracks curved just enough to hide her, right up until the locomotive cleared the overpass and came around the bend?
“You wanted death so badly?” I asked the corpse.
Clyde gave a small whine.
I scrubbed behind his ears. “Yeah, I know.”
Clyde and I had reached the tracks half an hour earlier. I’d spotted the body—in pieces—and taken a single step toward the tracks. In an instant, I was halfway around the world, in the dust and heat of Iraq, loading parts of dead Marines into the back of a refrigerated truck.
It was Clyde’s persistent nudging that had brought me back—crouched to the ground and hyperventilating—near this quiet stretch of track.
I’d been in work-mandated counseling for five months, ever since Clyde and I had helped the Denver police hunt for a killer in an investigation that led to a horrifying pileup of bodies—victims and perpetrators alike. If the therapy hadn’t helped with the flashbacks and the nightmares and the ghosts, at least I’d weaned myself off the pain meds and the Ativan, off the cigarettes and the self-reproach, working hard to find my way back to a clear head and a clean conscience. Back to who I’d been before first the war and then the investigation had undermined everything I believed in.
But the past, of course, never goes away.
Clyde was doing even better. He was the most agile and fit he’d been since Iraq, his black-and-tan Belgian Malinois coat glossy, his eyes bright. The injuries he’d sustained during the manhunt were just a bad memory.
He nudged me again. Get to work, Marine.
“By all means,” I told him, “don’t let me slow you down.”
Red-and-blue lights pulsed through the dark behind me, and a car pulled to the side of the road at the top of a small rise. A door opened and closed, and the voices of two men came softly through the gloom. The cop who’d answered my call-in, presumably, and the engineer who’d been driving this train. I’d sent the engineer up to the road to flag down the patrolman. And to get him away from the death he’d unintentionally caused.
I turned at the sound of footsteps coming down the hill. A flashlight bobbed and weaved, the beam flickering over Clyde and me, then to the ground before it came to rest on the side of the train looming against the fading stars.
“You the rent-a-cop that called it in?” asked a young male voice.
“I’m Special Agent Parnell.”
I didn’t take offense at his choice of words. Often, even other cops didn’t understand what my job entailed. A railroad cop worked for a private company but was also a Level 1 POST-certified peace officer, just like any cop employed by the government. We had state and federal mandates to patrol, investigate, and make arrests, on and off railroad property.
I waited while Thornton PD’s first responder made his way toward me. In the back glow from his flashlight, he looked no more than twenty-two or twenty-three; this was probably his first jumper. I felt a flash of pity.
His light came to settle on my face a beat too long before he lowered it. I blinked away the afterimage.
“I’m Officer Ketz,” he said. “You found it?”
“Her. Yes.” We shook hands. He ignored Clyde, who returned the favor.
“Detectives are on their way,” he said. “Why don’t we take a look-see?”
“I were you, I’d leave that to the others.”
As we spoke, the sun nudged up toward the horizon and a thin glow seeped into the gray. I could make out more of his features. Ruddy skin and blue eyes. Blond hair beneath his uniform cap. I caught the faintest whiff of cologne. Officer Ketz was handsome, athletic. Confident.
He frowned at my words.
“Your first body?” he asked.
“Well, I—”
He almost patted me on the head. “First one’s always the worst.”
“True,” I said. “Just treat it as a crime scene. And watch out for her leg. It’s ten yards to your right.”
He paused at that but th
en climbed the slight rise toward the tracks, his boots crunching on the ballast. He squatted on his haunches and panned the flashlight beneath the coal car and along the tracks.
“What the—” he started. Then, “Fuck.”
I lifted my face to the cool, moist air. The stars had disappeared. From the other side of the train, the rising sun sent stabs of light in our direction, a bold promise that this July day would come on hard. Denver was suffering a record heat wave along with torrential nightly thunderstorms that had soaked the ground, overloaded the storm drains, and turned the city into a swamp. People remarked that between the weather and the uptick in crime, Denver might as well be the Congo.
Behind me came the sweep of headlights as another car pulled to a stop. More doors, then voices. Men, chatty and grumpy. The detectives.
Another sound disturbed the morning quiet. The patrol officer had managed to make it thirty feet from the tracks before he heaved his breakfast into the weeds.
“First one’s always the worst,” I said.
The detectives were bleary-eyed old-timers. Frank Wilson—five-eleven, overweight, and balding, his face as off-color and wrinkled as crumpled newsprint. And Al Gresino—a few years younger, six-four, red-faced and beefy, with a puffiness that hinted at heart problems. They flashed their badges, shook my hand, and Wilson asked if Clyde would offer a paw. Clyde obliged.
“Aren’t you gorgeous,” Wilson said to him. “Malinois, right? Smart buggers.”
Clyde preened.
“What’s with the rookie?” Gresino jerked a thumb toward Ketz, who still stood bent at the waist in the weeds. He raised his voice. “Hey, this jumper pop your cherry?”
Ketz didn’t turn around. But he lifted his middle finger.
“Something he ate,” I said. I liked his moxie.
Gresino snorted.
I filled them in on what I knew. My engineer had observed the woman standing on the tracks while heading south at 0358. He’d been driving a legal fifty miles an hour and had seen her in the glare of his ditch lights. He was approximately two hundred yards out from her as he came out of the curve. He blew the whistle and put the engine into an emergency stop, but the woman hadn’t moved and he had no hope of avoiding a collision. Nearly a mile further on, the train finally squealed to a halt. He called dispatch, who notified me as the duty officer.
I then picked up the engineer where he was stopped and ran a quick sobriety test even as I phoned in the accident to Thornton PD and alerted an ambulance. I’d removed the train image-recorder and event-recorder hard drives, then left the conductor with the train. The engineer and I had come here. I’d found the woman, then walked up and down the towpath a hundred feet in both directions, making sure there weren’t any other bodies. Standard procedure.
I left out the part about the flashback.
Wilson nodded up the hill toward the vehicles. “You run the Lexus?”
“It’s registered to Samantha Davenport, over in Washington Park. Age thirty-eight. No wants or violations. The description I received fits with what I can see of the body.”
“What can you make out of that mess?” Gresino asked.
“Her face,” I said gently.
He turned to look.
“Wash Park?” Wilson raised an eyebrow.
Washington Park was one of the tonier neighborhoods of Denver and a forty-minute drive away in zero traffic. Wash Park citizens didn’t usually end up under the wheels of trains. When the wealthy chose to die, they did it discreetly, behind closed doors.
“The Lexus’s doors are locked,” I said. “Interior’s clean. My flashlight showed nothing inside other than a pair of sunglasses, a woman’s rain jacket, and a sock monkey.”
“A what?”
“A stuffed animal. It’s a child’s toy.” Clyde had one, too, which I didn’t mention. Clyde and I kept our secrets.
Gresino turned to me. “Why drive forty minutes to throw yourself under a train?”
“If that’s how you mean to go,” I said, “this place is as good as it gets. No one to talk you down.”
Wilson nodded as though some part of him understood. “It is kinda peaceful here. Nice place for a picnic. Down by the river, there.”
“Are you shitting me?” Gresino glared at his partner. “You some kind of nature Buddhist granola nut? It’s a goddamn awful way to go. Here or anywhere.”
Goddamn awful, indeed.
“Let me know when you guys are ready to break the train and get her out of there,” I said. “I’ll call a crew in.”
The train’s engineer, Deke Willsby, stood by my railway-issued Ford Explorer, one foot propped on the running board. A cigarette dangled from his mouth, the ash long and soft, forgotten. His brown Denver Pacific Continental jacket hung from his shoulders like loose skin.
“Gonna be another hot one,” I said as Clyde and I approached. Trying for normal.
Deke startled. His fingers found the cigarette, pulled it from his mouth. He tapped the ash free and cleared his throat.
“What’s that, you say?” he asked.
I gave up on normal. “Suck of a day.”
He raised his cigarette and dragged in a lungful of smoke.
“And it’s just getting started,” he said. His eyes were hollow.
Deke was tall and balding, his arms ropy coils of muscle from working the trains. The creases of his hands were permanently black with oil, his knuckles knotty, the skin around his eyes webbed with wrinkles from forty years staring out the windows of a locomotive. I’d seen Deke laugh until he cried, seen him red in the face with anger. Found him drunk once at a retirement party. And caught him bone weary after a long haul.
But I’d never seen him like this, as raw as the dismembered woman on the tracks.
“I’m sorry, Deke,” I said.
“Oh, God, the sound.” Deke swiped his arm across his eyes. “You can’t never forget the sound. Like a meat grinder.”
I’d heard this from other engineers. And it had surprised me—that one frail human body could make any protest at all against a locomotive.
“The care team is assembling back at headquarters,” I said. “They’ll help.”
“Sure. I . . .” His lips found the cigarette again.
“What is it?”
He shook his head, blew smoke. But there was a lot going on behind his eyes.
“Your shift,” I said. “How many hours in?”
He snapped into himself, pulled up a look that could have drilled pavement. “I wasn’t asleep. Wasn’t even tired.”
“I have to ask, Deke.”
That was partially a lie—neither the railroad industry nor the federal government tracked fatigue-related crashes, so there was no requirement as such. But having a potentially exhausted crew at the controls of a ten-thousand-ton train wasn’t something I could ignore. And if anyone decided to sue Denver Pacific Continental over Samantha’s death—a likely event—the soundness of the crew was one of the first things the lawyers would look at.
“I was ten hours in,” Deke admitted. “Supposed to come off before the joint line, but that didn’t happen.”
“How many days on?”
“Six. Today’s my Friday, then I got four off.” His eyes met mine. “I’m not new at this. I was a little tired. What do you think Red Bull is for? But I wasn’t asleep at the wheel. Watch the LocoCAM. You’ll see.”
Most DPC locomotives were equipped with a train image recorder—a small camera mounted on the inside window that recorded the engineer’s eye-view of the track. It also tracked sound—conversation in the cab as well as horns and brakes. I’d look at it as soon as I was back in the office.
“What about Sethmeyer?” I asked. The conductor.
“He might have been a bit tired.”
Meaning lights out and probably snoring.
“We run solo all the time, you know,” Deke said softly, the frown still in his eyes. “No other way to manage the shifts with the railroad cutting crews.”
&
nbsp; He took another drag, then let smoke billow out like an embrace. I grabbed the chance to enjoy the nicotine secondhand and said nothing. Sympathy could be interpreted as approval.
When he fell silent, I switched tactics. “You called Betsy yet?” Betsy and Deke had been married since Christ was a corporal. This would be her third call-out.
He finished the cigarette, ground it under his boot heel. “She’s on her way. Just getting off her shift at the diner.”
Below us, Wilson was jotting notes while Gresino took photographs. They looked accustomed to the routine.
Jumpers weren’t as rare as you might wish. Five Marines from my platoon had succumbed to the siren call of suicide. I’d stared down that monster myself. But those who used the trains to make it happen either forgot, or didn’t care, that they were forcing another man or woman to kill them.
Gresino’s voice floated up. “That is not her other leg. Is it?”
Deke looked at the ground. “I didn’t . . . I couldn’t . . .”
“I know, Deke.”
Better to keep him busy. The Thornton cops would want the details, as would the Federal Railroad Administration. It was my job to get them. The local detectives would process the scene and determine if there was reason to believe a crime had occurred. If the coroner ruled the death accidental or a suicide, the detectives’ work would be complete. Once forensics had what they needed, I’d clear the tracks and everyone would get on with their day.
Everyone except Samantha Davenport. And whoever she’d left behind.
Reluctantly, I reached in the Explorer and pulled out a clipboard with the Death and Dismemberment form.
“You ready to talk about it?” I asked.
“It’s my third.”
“I know.”
“But—” His haunted face turned animated; the shock was wearing off. “This one was different.”
“How so?”
“I been going over it in my mind. Figured maybe I wasn’t thinking straight. But I’m sure. This wasn’t right.”
I started shaking my head. As if I’d already guessed where he was headed and didn’t want to follow. “Tell me.”
Dead Stop (Sydney Rose Parnell Series Book 2) Page 2