“It was dark. I’d just hit the overpass and come out of that curve. But, I’d swear”—his eyes found mine—“I’d swear she was hurt before I hit her. You tell those cops. I saw her in my lights before I—before it happened. She was hurt.”
The nausea that had come with the flashback tried to crawl up my throat. “What did you see exactly?”
“I—” Now he was shaking, the protection of shock completely gone. “She was bloody. Eyes wide, looking right at me. Standing straight up and, I don’t know, squirming like she wanted to get away, but she”—he was crying now—“I don’t think she could move. Her mouth was open. Probably she was screaming, but I couldn’t hear her over the engine. And then—and then I—”
I laid a hand on his shoulder. “Okay. Let’s get the detectives up here.”
He sucked in air.
“Just give me a moment,” I told him.
As Clyde and I headed toward the edge of the rise so I could flag the detectives, my headset buzzed. I glanced at the number. Detective Michael Walker Cohen. A murder cop for Denver PD. Last night we’d been in his bed—our bed, he insisted, since I’d all but moved in with him five months ago—our bodies curled together, skin to skin, warm in the summer night. He’d told me he loved me. I’d told him that was crazy shit.
It had gone downhill from there.
We’d still been awake when, in the early hours of the morning, he’d gotten a call, thirty minutes before my own call came in. “It’s bad,” he’d told me after he hung up. He had rolled out of bed, splashed water on his face, stepped into his suit, grabbed a tie, and been out the door before I had time to pour coffee. He hadn’t said good-bye. I hadn’t expected him to. He was already with the dead.
Now I figured he was just checking in after our fight and I let it go to voice mail. I’d call him back when I was done here.
Then he sent a text.
Multiple homicide. Vics are two kids. Father also shot. Railroad link. Call me.
Kids. I lowered my phone. Closed my eyes. Planted my feet and started the slow breathing my VA counselor had taught me.
One . . . I’d been doing well. Exercising. Eating healthy. Two . . . maybe drinking too much. Okay, definitely drinking too much. But . . . three . . . nothing worse. Not even cigarettes. Going to every brutal therapy session and doing as I was told . . . four . . . with the faith that eventually it would make things better instead of worse.
Five. I opened my eyes.
“We’re still good,” I whispered.
Say it till it’s true.
Down by the tracks, Wilson was on his haunches. He had his head cocked sideways as he peered under the train. He scratched at his chin with his knuckles, as if puzzled by something.
I thought of the electrical wire I’d noticed when I first approached the body. I’d figured it had dropped off one of the maintenance-of-way trucks.
She was bloody. She wanted to get away.
I punched Cohen’s number.
CHAPTER 2
Mortality check.
In war, one of the first things you learn is that you don’t get over finding someone who died violently. You can’t spend the day in combat, then waltz through the evening swapping jokes and telling stories like any other day. Instead, the moments leading up to finding the body—and the body itself—replay in your mind like a movie. You are hung up by the suddenness of it, the senselessness. Your relief that it wasn’t you, then the survivor’s guilt that follows. And the horror of that what-if line that separates each corpse you recover from those you love.
Mortality? Check.
—Sydney Parnell. Personal journal.
Cohen answered on the second ring. Without preamble he said, “I need you to check something for me.”
My mouth was so dry I had to gather spit to speak. “Go ahead.”
“I’ve got an alphanumeric code I have to identify. I’m thinking it’s a train classification number.”
Shack up with a railroad cop, you learn a few things. “Okay. Read it to me.”
“U-N-M-A-C-W-A-T,” he spelled out. “Then the numbers 2-1. Am I right? Is it a train ID?”
As distinctly as if someone stood behind me with a pistol, I felt a cold jab at the nape of my neck.
“Read it again,” I said. Stalling.
“UNMACWAT21,” Cohen said. “What is it?”
Down by the tracks, Wilson was waving Gresino over to look at whatever had caught his attention. I could read Gresino’s lips. You’re shitting me.
“It’s one of ours,” I said to Cohen. “But it’s not a normal run. It’s a regulated tanker train carrying hazardous materials. Chlorine gas.”
“Damn,” Cohen said. “When?”
“Give me a sec.”
I ran through a mental list of the train consists I’d viewed on my laptop the day before—recalling the type and number of cars on each train along with schedules and manifests. I had a photographic memory for some things. Numbers. Maps. Anything spatial. When I joined the Marines and volunteered for Mortuary Affairs, the skill had endeared me to my CO because I could effortlessly recall serial numbers, locations, and other details for the casualty reports. I kept a catalogue of the dead more efficiently than any computer.
Now I locked onto the listing for UNMACWAT21.
“That consist doesn’t actually exist yet,” I said. “But once the train is assembled, it will leave the CP Eider chemical company in Macdona, Texas, on Monday at 1640,” I said. “If there aren’t any delays or mechanical problems, she’s scheduled to come through Denver thirty hours later.”
“What happens then?”
“She’ll undergo a safety check then continue on her way. Fifty hours after that, she’ll arrive at a waste treatment facility in Watertown, South Dakota. Denver isn’t her only stop. There will be a fuel stop, seven crew changes, and nine safety and security checks along the route with a dozen regulatory agencies involved.”
“What happens in Watertown?”
“Once she drops her load, she’ll turn around and make the journey back, hauling the empty tankers back to Texas, along with anything else the linker needs to add along the way. She’ll be back in play within twelve hours. But she’ll be a junk train then. With a different designation.”
“Meaning it will be a different train.”
“Right.”
“Okay. Hold on.”
Cohen’s voice was a flat line, the result of an astonishing ability to focus combined with the compartmentalization common to homicide cops. I pictured him in his expensive suit and his cheap haircut, his face tight as he jotted down everything I’d said in his spiral-bound notebook.
Sensing we were in for a wait, Clyde stretched out on the dusty ground, tongue lolling as a warm wind lifted with the rising day. Wilson and Gresino conferred near the tracks, their voices tight.
Cops are trained to never assume a call-out is a suicide—treat every unattended death as if you have no idea what happened so you don’t get careless with the scene. But in a case like this one, you figure you’re going through the motions. The deliberateness of the locale, the presence of the victim’s car, and the fact that Samantha Davenport had been facing the train when it struck made suicide likely.
Now, though, my thoughts went down a dozen paths as I tried to understand what a hazardous materials train had to do with murdered children. “Cohen—” I began.
“Hold on.”
I closed my fists.
Sometimes, in the middle of the night, while Cohen slept and I did my best not to, I studied the notebooks he used, a new one for each case. I’d take the latest book into the kitchen where I’d pour myself a finger of whiskey, then sit at the table and use the flashlight app on my phone to read his notes about whatever case he was working. It wasn’t the investigation I was scrutinizing, but what he chose to say about it. I read everything in the hope that I could understand the man who’d coaxed me into his life and who now claimed to love me.
Love, I’d told him, hadn’t been pa
rt of the deal. Which sounded suitably honest. Even pious. But what I’d really meant was that I didn’t know if I could ever love anyone or anything other than the man I’d fallen in love with in Iraq before he died there. And his dog, who’d come home with me.
I shook myself and bounced on my toes. Clyde’s sides rose and fell gently as he snored. A true Marine, grabbing any opportunity between missions to doze. Gresino had lowered himself to a squat and was peering under the train. Wilson called Ketz over. They talked, and Wilson pointed up the hill.
Cohen came back on the line. “I need the names of the crews for that train. The names of the people who arranged the transport, and the companies and regulatory agencies involved. I also need a detailed map of the run. The tracks and everything around them. And any stops the train makes for a crew change or for those security checks or refueling. Throw in anything else you can think of. The more detail, the better. Can you get that for me?”
“Of course. Now can you tell me why you’re asking about a hazmat run?”
“Also, we need to notify the Feds, and I need you to stop that train.”
“You think?” I snapped, my nerves getting the better of me.
Ketz reached the top of the rise and ignored me as he headed toward his black-and-white.
“This morning’s call-out,” Cohen said. “The killer left us a couple of messages. Wrote one in the master bedroom, the other in the living room. That train ID and—” He stopped. His voice turned dark, pooling with anger like blood filling a sudden wound, compartmentalization gone. “In the living room, he wrote the train ID and below it the words ‘If you must break the law, do it to seize power.’”
I opened my mouth to speak, then found myself speechless.
Hazmat trains were vulnerable to extremists. They were most exposed when schedules and track sharing left the cars unattended. If a terrorist managed to hack into a database of shipment types and schedules, he or she would know exactly where a hazmat train would be at any given time. He could place a bomb on a train while it sat in the windswept wilds of Wyoming, then detonate it as soon as the train reached a densely populated area.
“Then,” Cohen went on, “in the bedroom he wrote something about how he’d keep killing until he’s paid everyone back. The exact words were—hold on.” There came the sound of pages turning. “He wrote, ‘There will be killing till the score is paid.’”
“Homer,” I said.
“Simpson?”
I rolled my eyes. “The Odyssey. ‘Nor would I yet stay my hands from slaughter that way, until the suitors pay for every transgression.’ After returning from Greece, Odysseus promises to murder all of Penelope’s suitors. Which he then proceeds to do. I wrote a paper about it. Your killer used a translation by Robert Fitzgerald. Not quite as poetic.”
“The hell,” Cohen said. “I keep forgetting you’re an educated railroad cop. So what about the first line, the one about power?”
“If you’re asking who wrote it, my education hasn’t gone that far. But jealousy and power and explosive materials—that’s a dangerous cocktail.”
We fell silent, thinking on that.
“Suitors?” Cohen said after a moment. “So this might be about infidelity instead of terrorism?”
“If the killer actually knows the context of the quote.”
“Given that he wrote it in the master bedroom, maybe he does. The attack was personal. The father and sons shot, the mother and daughter taken. Could be the wife has a lover. Maybe she broke it off and this is his way of feeling powerful again.”
“But what would a love affair have to do with a train carrying hazardous materials? Unless—”
“Unless it wasn’t enough for him to kill the family,” Cohen said, knowing where I was going. “Maybe he wants everyone to suffer. That whole ‘killing till the score is paid.’”
Ketz opened the trunk of his unit and leaned in. Beyond him, the day lay heavy and still as the sun climbed. The river had turned from gray to green, the water an unfurled bolt of faded velvet.
“So our educated suspect killed two of the kids,” Cohen said. “Father’s heading to surgery. Doubtful he’ll pull through. And now I find out the mother and daughter are missing. So if—” He sucked in air. “If the mother isn’t the guilty party, what are the chances we’ll find them alive?”
My face went hot. “A child is missing?”
“An eight-year-old girl.”
Ketz emerged with a roll of crime-scene tape, a hammer, and a bag of wooden stakes.
Sweat popped on my skin. “Who are they, Cohen? The family. What is their name?”
“Davenport. Parents are Benjamin and Samantha. The missing girl is Lucy. Why?”
“I . . . fuck.”
A flare of wind swooped across the nearby road and flattened the field grass. Wilson’s comb-over lifted in a white salute and Gresino’s maroon tie fluttered sideways. A haze of dust filled the air, and Clyde startled awake, coming to his feet as if on a premonition. I looked down the hill again to where Samantha Davenport’s crushed body lay pinned beneath an incomprehensible weight.
“Parnell?” Cohen said. “What’s going on? You got something?”
I thought of the sock monkey shoved halfway under the back seat. Inevitability closed like a fist around my heart.
“I don’t know where the little girl is,” I said. “Somewhere close, maybe.”
“The hell—?”
“But he killed her mother.”
CHAPTER 3
Iraq. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, the age of camaraderie and the age of loathing, the epoch of belief, and the epoch of cynicism. The season of light, and the season of the darkest things you hope to never see. It was the spring of our patriotism, and the winter of our disillusionment. We were all going to heaven.
Or so they said.
We just had to pass through hell first.
—Sydney Parnell. Personal journal.
Cohen and I talked quickly through our next steps, both knowing how critical the following few hours were. We outlined what I would do at this crime scene while I waited for him to arrive from the first one.
If Lucy had been abducted by a stranger, then hers would be the rarest form of child kidnapping. Of the eight hundred thousand child abductions reported each year by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, only a hundred of those children were taken by strangers.
But stranger abduction was the kind most likely to end in tragedy. Some of these children were held in exchange for ransom, or kidnapped by someone who wanted to raise them as their own. Many of the children were stolen for trafficking purposes—to work in fields or sweat shops or as sex slaves.
What Cohen and I both knew was that, given what someone had done to Lucy’s family, she seemed likely to belong to the smallest subset of abduction victims. A child taken for the express purpose of being tortured and killed.
Most kids taken like that die within the first hour. After three hours, we could start assuming the worst. After three days, we’d almost certainly locate her body in a shallow grave. Or a dumpster. Or not at all.
Judging by when Samantha Davenport died, the first two windows had already closed.
I’d never heard of a case like this, a child taken during a home invasion while the rest of the family was slaughtered. And I didn’t need so much as a single finger to count the times that an abducted child had been linked to a hazmat run. Or that the child’s mother had been killed by a train.
After Cohen and I hung up, Clyde and I hurried down the hill toward the detectives, my bad knee complaining at the haste. Tendons shredded five months ago had still not completely healed. Two surgeries and hours of physical therapy had made things better. But the doctor cautioned it might never be what it was. Kind of like me.
Wilson and Gresino straightened and watched us approach with narrowed eyes. Ketz, hard at work hammering stakes into the ground, noticed the detectives’ stillness, followed their gaze toward
me and stopped.
The flies had found Samantha’s body, and in the silence that fell after Ketz laid off his work, their whine hit like a buzz saw. The odor of death, little more than a promise when I’d arrived, had worsened, rising with the warmth seeping into the day. Why did death have to offer the parallel wound of indignity?
I stopped a safe distance away and kept a firm grip on Clyde’s lead.
Wilson and Gresino watched me. There wasn’t any surprise in their eyes. Whatever they’d noticed under the tracks had set them up for anything I had to tell them.
Up above, gravel crunched as a car arrived. I heard Deke’s wife telling him to get in the car, that everything would be fine.
“She isn’t a suicide,” Wilson said. “Am I right?”
“Her name is Samantha Davenport. Her husband was critically injured and two of her children were shot dead last night in their home. A third child, eight-year-old Lucy Davenport, is missing.”
I left out the part about the hazmat train due to run in two days. I didn’t know where to slot that information.
“Fuck me,” Gresino said. He hitched up his pant legs one at a time, like he was preparing for a sprint.
Wilson’s gaze went far away. He patted his shirt pocket beneath his sports coat.
“When I woke up this morning,” he said, “I thought it was going to be a beautiful day. That’s what my wife said. A beautiful day.” He pulled out his hand, stared at the pack of cigarettes he’d retrieved then stuffed them back in his pocket. He met my eyes. “She was tied up, looks like. Electrical wire. There’s the remains of what looks like a hefty chunk of wood.”
“Like the crossbar on a crucifix,” Gresino put in.
Wilson glared at him. “We don’t know that.”
“She was cru—”
“Stop. For God’s sake, stop. We don’t know anything yet.”
I looked away from the darkness in the detectives’ eyes, put aside how their words made me feel. “Denver and Thornton’s crime scene units and the lead detective from the Denver crime scene unit are en route. Right now, our focus is on the little girl.”
Ketz had joined us, restlessly swinging the hammer between his second and third fingers, its steel head cupped in his palm. “They think the girl’s around here?”
Dead Stop (Sydney Rose Parnell Series Book 2) Page 3