There were books about the railroad industry along with trade magazines and business journals, many of them dating back to the 1960s and 70s. A 1980 US railroad map showed a sprawl of railroad networks—small railroads in green, short lines in red, and the giants spanning the continent in bright orange. I skimmed a recent piece in Fortune magazine with the headline FASTEST MAN IN THE WEST? The article discussed Hiram’s effort to develop a bullet train, which he had already dubbed the Gold Line Express. With the potential influx of billions in federal funding, some people were calling the project the Gold Mine Express, at least for whoever got the go-ahead. Flipping through the stacks, I saw that other magazines had followed Fortune’s lead. There were a dozen articles covering the battle between Hiram’s empire and that of his biggest rival, Tate Enterprises.
I’d met Alfred Tate only once. He’d been a speaker at a joint training session between Denver PD and the railway cops from both DPC and Tate’s company, SFCO. We ended up standing at the dessert table together. I reached for the cheesecake, but he recommended the chocolate mousse. He’d been wrong about the mousse. But his kindly manner and the slightly lost look in his eyes had won me over.
The only other thing on Ben’s desk was a stack of yellow legal pads. The top three were filled with notes written in small, tight handwriting, mostly bulleted dates and brief headlines—a history of DPC. The rest were blank.
There was no computer, although a power cord was plugged in at an outlet situated directly under the desk.
In the desk’s center drawer I found notepads, more pens, and old railroad maps, along with a bunch of historical articles about the start of railroads in Colorado and their vital role in the gold rush.
The next three drawers contained office supplies, a bag of cookies, a plastic pouch of beef jerky, a folder labeled REIMBURSEMENTS filled with gas and restaurant receipts, and a carefully rolled child’s drawing of a house with five people standing in front—Mommy, Daddy, the twins, and Lucy. At the bottom of the picture, written in red crayon, were the words I love you, Daddy. Love, Your Lucy Goose. Ben had attached a yellow sticky note with the name and address of a local frame company.
I blinked, closed my eyes.
Outside in the hall, the elevator pinged. My eyes shot open. Clyde lifted his head as footsteps approached the door. Clyde glanced at me, and I signaled him to stay silent while I waited for a knock or a key in the lock. A minute ticked by, then two. Outside, a flock of starlings screeched. After a moment, whoever was at the door went on down the hall.
I let out my breath.
Faster, Parnell.
The last drawer was locked. Railroad cops are good at a lot of things, but certain job requirements make us demigods when it comes to picking locks. I pulled a small kit from my duffel and had the drawer open almost immediately.
Inside were seven things. A manila folder bristling with papers. Two plain white envelopes. A bottle of whiskey. Ben’s medals from the war. A color photograph. And a handgun.
I ignored the gun, the whiskey, and the medals for the moment and placed everything else on the desk. I started with the photograph.
It showed Samantha Davenport standing in front of the Denver Art Museum. Her assistant, Jack Hurley, stood beside her, his hands deep in his pockets, a boyish grin on his face. Both were squinting into the sun, Samantha’s hand cupped over her eyes. She wore a sundress; he had on cargo shorts and a U2 T-shirt. There was nothing inappropriate in their posture or their attitudes. The sunny sidewalk where they posed was completely innocuous. But the picture made the hair rise on my neck for the simple reason that Ben had chosen to lock it away.
There will be killing till the score is paid.
I studied the picture a moment more, then, finding no answers, turned to the manila folder, which was labeled MOMA in thick black marker.
Most of the papers inside pertained to the donation of the Edison Cement factory land to the recently formed art museum. There was also information about the creation of a board of directors and the hiring of an architectural firm to convert the existing factory buildings into a unique space. At the back of the file were letters of petition from artists worldwide who wanted their work displayed when the museum opened, and letters from someone at MoMA-Denver requesting funding from potential donors—the funding requests had gone to everyone from local arts supporters to people in Paris, London, Madrid, and Frankfurt. MoMA was nothing if not ambitious.
In the very back of the folder was an article from the Denver Business Journal. The reporter talked about the valuable land that Hiram Davenport had donated to the museum and said that the remaining acreage would serve as a thruway for a bullet train, should the train actually come to be. The title of the article was ART RIDES INTO THE FUTURE.
A business card was paper clipped to the folder’s inside flap. Tom O’Hara, the Denver Post.
I knew Tom—he’d interviewed me for an article about my work in Iraq. I still regretted giving that interview. But that wasn’t Tom’s fault. We’re all a lot smarter in hindsight.
I went back to the papers detailing the donation. I didn’t know anything about finance beyond balancing my checkbook. But there were clearly different numbers floating around on the estimated value of the land. And someone had hired a site investigator from a firm called Clinefeld Engineering to do a subsurface investigation. I figured that was normal during a deed transfer. But the form dated to after the transfer of the deed.
Maybe someone was asking questions. Maybe DPC had tried to deduct more on their taxes than the land was worth. If Ben’s job was to write articles and a book praising his father and DPC, I wondered what his interest was in a possible fraud.
I closed the file and opened the first envelope.
Inside was a copy of an article dated August 1982. It was a feature piece describing the on-going war between the two big western railroads and highlighting the recent decision by the Interstate Commerce Commission to approve DPC’s attempt to take over one of the lines belonging to Alfred Tate’s SFCO railroad, including the land occupied by the Edison Cement factory. The article questioned whether this decision would be the beginning of the end for SFCO.
“These two have been fighting since 1982,” I said to Clyde.
His ears pricked, but he stayed where I’d downed him.
The ICC had reviewed the merger for four years, with Tate protesting that the proposed deal violated antitrust laws. The commission had seemed poised to reject the proposal. Then Alfred Tate had abruptly reversed his stand and spoken out in favor of the takeover. He’d convinced his stockholders that it was more financially sound to let the short line go. The reporter went on to say that the new owner, Hiram Davenport, planned to immediately upgrade the track and all grade crossings. “Safety,” according to Hiram, “was paramount.” The reporter lavished praise on Hiram’s determination to put safety above profits, implying that Tate’s railroad, the SFCO, had done the inverse by refusing to upgrade the crossings or by not maintaining them properly. A sidebar mentioned that the first crossing Hiram would upgrade was in the middle of a lonely sprawl of wheat fields, on Potters Road. Locals had nicknamed it Deadman’s Crossing. There had been multiple fatalities there, including a couple of teenagers who had died while racing a train to the crossing. The upgrade would happen within months, Hiram promised.
The reporter’s source was DPC employee and railroad cop Fred “Bull” Zolner.
I lifted my head. Clyde’s eyes were on me, sensing my sudden excitement.
Potters Road. Deadman’s Crossing. The missing Zolner.
“We got something, Clyde,” I said.
The location listed for the upgrade wasn’t far from where Samantha had died. While there was no longer a crossing at Potters Road, the tracks went above the street on an overpass a quarter mile away from where she’d been struck. It was inside the area the Feds, the cops, and a crowd of volunteers had searched and were still searching. Maybe that overpass had once been a grade-level crossing. Maybe it
had been 025615P.
I looked again at the date. Almost thirty years ago. Could there really be a connection? Had the current feud between the Tates and the Davenports over the bullet train raised the specter of the past? And was that reason enough for murder?
One thing I knew—what Hiram Davenport had told the journalist about the crossings was a lie. Money to upgrade a crossing came from the Feds, and it was the states, not the railroads, who decided which crossings got active warning systems or if any got converted to nongrade crossings. Hiram might have applied some pressure to get that crossing changed. And no doubt he had political pull. But neither he nor Tate could have signed on the line to make it happen.
Still, his public push for an overpass at Deadman’s Crossing was a stroke of genius. By eliminating the crossing altogether, he’d managed to persuade the public to his side in the battle between DPC and SFCO.
I refolded the article and placed it back in the envelope. I added it to the stack of books and magazines I planned to take with me. Then I opened the second envelope. Inside was a sun-faded photograph of a young woman; I removed it and set it on the desk.
The picture had been taken outdoors during either early morning or late afternoon—sunlight slanted past the woman and into a thick grove of pines. The woman looked to be in her late teens or early twenties, tall and slender, with long, dark hair caught in a single loose braid, and eyes the deep blue of sapphires. She wore a pink-flowered dress that looked like it had gone out of style a couple of decades earlier and her feet were bare. In her arms she held a black-and-white kitten. Spread out on the blanket at her feet were the remains of a picnic—sandwiches and fruit and a bottle of wine.
The picture looked years old, but there was something unsettling about it that I couldn’t put my finger on. Maybe just that the kitten looked unhappy, in the way kittens do when held against their will.
I slid the photo back into the envelope and looked at the whiskey and the medals. Their proximity suggested an anger that I could all too well understand: Good job, sorry your life is fucked, have a medal.
I made a small sound in my throat, and Clyde stood, his tail wagging tentatively at my sudden anger.
“You’re right,” I told him. “Gotta keep going.”
I picked up the gun with my gloved hands. A Ruger P-Series pistol. It was clean and unloaded. I wasn’t surprised to see it. Most former military guys like to keep a weapon close by. But again, its proximity to the whiskey and the medals suggested a relationship that made me uneasy. I’d thought at first that Samantha was a suicide. Had her husband ever stared into that abyss?
I slid the Ruger and everything else from the drawer into evidence bags and placed them in my bag along with the books and magazines. So far, nothing I’d found suggested a reason for Hiram to forbid the police to search.
I glanced at my watch. I’d been in the office for almost thirty minutes. Lawyers from DPC could arrive at any time. I went hastily through the rest of the room and was finishing up my search of the bookshelves when Mags Ackerman called.
“I drink Dom Pérignon,” she said when I answered. “I want you to know that.”
“You found the crossing.”
“I sort of found the crossing. Mostly I found nothing.”
“Mags,” I growled.
“Okay, okay. You were right about 025615P being a crossing number. No question. I went down into the dungeon and located the original inventory forms. They’re filed numerically. Or at least they’re mostly filed that way. Some people’s idea of how to count from one to ten is a little scary.”
“Mags!”
“Don’t bite my head off. Your form was missing. I went through a lot of forms—almost a hundred numbers forward and back from yours. All of them were there. Except yours. But—before you have a fit, I did find something.”
I realized I was holding my breath.
“There was a piece of notebook paper stuck in the box with your crossing number written on it. And under that, someone wrote ‘Potters Road, Adams County, Colorado.’ So there you go. Your crossing. Voila! You ready to take down my shipping address? A case of the bubbly should be sufficient.”
025615P. Deadman’s Crossing.
I abandoned the bookshelf and crossed to the window. Sunlight filtered through the leaves, scattering diamonds in soft wedges on the wooden floor. I could just make out clouds massing over the distant peaks—another storm headed our way.
“You have any idea why that form would be missing?” I asked.
“A hundred reasons, starting with the fact it might have never gotten filed. Or someone could have pulled it to cross-check something and then forgot to put it back. Or maybe whoever pulled it ended up losing it and put in that placeholder. I’ll ask the other old-timers. But here’s the bad news. Or the good news, depending on your perspective.”
I waited.
“Once I got the confirmation on the ID and the location,” Mags said, “I started going through the 6180s.”
“And?”
“And nothing. There weren’t any accidents at that crossing. So if that’s what you were hoping to find, you are SOL.”
I shook my head. “I just found an article written in 1982, Mags, before that crossing was converted. It said there had been multiple accidents at Potters Road.”
“Well, someone screwed up somewhere, then. I’ll see if I can find anything at all. You can wait on the bubbly for now.” She hung up.
I frowned. There was only one railroad crossing on Potters Road. Had the accidents occurred somewhere else in the county? Maybe the reporter had gotten his facts wrong.
I stared out the window. On the other side of the glass, the world lay flat and hard, like something overcooked in the oven.
Directly across the street from Ben’s office, just visible through the trees, a daycare center sat quietly in the early afternoon heat, sun bleached into a lifelessness that gave me pause. Blinds were drawn, the front door closed, the playground desolate. I leaned forward and pressed my forehead against the glass, and that’s when I saw her—a little girl sitting alone on a swing, her back to me, her long, brown hair riffling in the breeze.
The hair rose on the back of my neck.
“Lucy,” I whispered.
The swing rocked, a trail of dust swirled. The little girl’s head was down. Her pink-and-white sneaker drew a line back and forth in the dirt.
Was she real?
My fingers went to my pocket, to the photograph of Malik.
Children have no choice but to pay whatever price the world demands. But not this child, please God. Not this one.
The door to the center opened and a woman rushed out, her expression frantic. She spotted the girl and ran across the playground to lift her into her arms. When she turned and headed back to the door, the girl looked up, and our eyes met over the woman’s shoulder.
Not Lucy. I pressed my palms to the glass. Not Lucy.
I jumped when my earpiece buzzed. Cohen.
“We’ve got something,” he said. “A child’s bloodied clothing.”
CHAPTER 9
When your job is cataloging the dead, you focus on the injuries. How they were caused, which was the mortal blow. The person behind the wound becomes an abstraction—work laid out on the table.
At some point, when you realize what you’ve lost, you know you have to step away. Go listen to the voices of the living. Walk outside and look up at the stars. Listen to music or read something that breaks your heart.
You cannot carry the dead. But you must honor them.
—Sydney Parnell. Personal journal.
“It started with a tip on the hotline,” Cohen said. “Several hours after Samantha’s death, a caller spotted a woman and a little girl standing near a red Audi sedan at Ridge Park.”
A buzz built behind my eyes as I locked up Ben’s office and Clyde and I headed toward the elevator. Ridge Park was ten minutes from where Samantha had been killed.
The elevator door opened
and we got on.
“Caller said he was walking his dog when he noticed them,” Cohen said, unspooling the story in his methodical way. “The woman was trying to get the girl in the car, and the girl was crying. Caller figured it was just a kid being a kid. But then he heard the news about Lucy. He told us the little girl he saw matches the description for Lucy Davenport.”
“Damn,” I said.
“Yeah.”
When we reached the lobby, the elevator doors slid open. Two grim-faced men in expensive suits stood waiting to get on, the receptionist with them. I forced a smile at all three and dropped the keys into the receptionist’s open palm.
“I kept watch,” I told the suits. “No one came by.”
I slipped past them before they could get over their surprise and Clyde and I pushed through the front door and into the heat of the cloud-dappled day.
“What was that?” Cohen asked.
“Nothing. Did the caller get a license plate?”
“That’s why we’re talking right now.”
I unlocked my truck and opened the passenger door for Clyde. “Spill it.”
“The Audi,” Cohen said, “belongs to Veronica Stern. And the description the caller provided of the woman matches Stern’s DMV photo.”
A frisson of shock rippled through me. “Stern was at the site this morning.”
“One reason we jumped on it.”
The first drops of rain hit my skin as I walked to the driver’s side. “You going to get to the bloodied clothing?”
“A uniform found Stern at home, asked if he could look in her car. First she said no, said it violated her civil rights. But the officer must have been convincing. She finally agreed. She also agreed to let him look around her house.”
“And?”
“Nothing in the home. But he found girl’s clothing under a box in the Audi’s trunk. Pink shorts and a T-shirt.”
His voice held a combination of misery and excitement that made my pulse leap.
“Bloodied,” I said.
“Soaked. They’re running a precipitin test now to confirm it’s human before we wait nine hours or more for a DNA test. We’re bringing Stern in. She denies any knowledge of how the clothes got into her trunk, but she’s pretty damn calm.”
Dead Stop (Sydney Rose Parnell Series Book 2) Page 13