“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?”
“She scorned him, and payback’s a bitch?” But I knew that wasn’t right. Our killer was deranged, not stupid. “His way of letting her know he’s back in town?”
“Yeah, maybe.” Cohen shook the glass as if there were ice cubes in there to rattle. “No fun doing bad things if no one knows you’re doing it.”
“BTK got caught because he bragged to the press about what he’d done.”
“You know, Parnell, you sure keep a lot of garbage in your head.”
“Mind like a sewer,” I agreed. “You talk to Stern about a possible pregnancy?”
Cohen nodded. “She swears she’s not. And she says if it will get us off her back, she’s willing to pee on a stick.”
I pulled my feet back in, hugged my knees. “You believe her?”
“I don’t believe anybody. Present company excluded.”
I pulled out my cigarettes. I apologized to Cohen just as I had earlier to Clyde and blew the smoke away from my two partners. The dark pressed in with suffocating closeness.
“You get anything else on that number?” Cohen asked.
“Not really. But I’m looking into the 1982 merger. Tate fought it hard for five years, then suddenly gave in.”
“And you have a theory about that.”
I pursed my lower lip and exhaled smoke. “If there were accidents at the crossing, Tate wasn’t reporting them. Maybe Hiram found out and blackmailed him. Enmity could have been smoldering for years, then erupted when Stern jumped ship. I’ll see what I can learn from Hiram in the morning.” Assuming he didn’t, as Mac put it, fire my ass.
“Some agency would have had to approve the merger, right? Wouldn’t there be records?”
“The Interstate Commerce Commission approved the deal. But they don’t exist anymore. They were replaced by the Surface Transportation Board in the midnineties, and I doubt if so much as a paper cup survived the transition. It wasn’t a happy occasion.” I tapped ash on the stair. “Still hate all the garbage in my head?”
Cohen leaned into me until our shoulders touched. “You seem angry.”
“I’m always angry.”
“There is that. But I mean about this case.”
I sucked on the cigarette until it crackled, then held the smoke in my lungs while I thought. Finally, I spewed out smoke. “I am angry. Someone used my train, my tracks, to commit murder and to take away a child. That was my territory and my watch. It shouldn’t have happened.”
“Because your super railroad-cop powers let you be everywhere at once.”
I glared at him.
“Sydney.” He pressed his head to mine. “People like the man or woman who did this—they’re not like us. They’re a force of nature. Like . . .” He searched for words. “Like a natural disaster. We can’t prevent them or even prepare for them. We can’t know who they might go after or who they’ll reach. The one thing we can do is not let them inside our heads.”
“The other thing we can do is track them down and kill them.”
“Always an option.”
“She might already be dead, Mike.”
If he was surprised by my use of his first name, he didn’t show it. He leaned harder against me. “She might.”
I smoked in silence for a time, calculating how much moral injury you would have to carry if you failed to find a stolen child. The memory of Malik burned a path down my spine.
Cohen leaned back on his elbows, stared up into the sky. Then suddenly he leaned over and kissed me.
But I pushed him away. “There’s got to be something else we can do for Lucy tonight.”
“What we can do is relax enough to let our subconscious minds work.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“It’s science. Try it.”
I held my cigarette far away and kissed him back. “How long do you have?”
“Three hours. Then I’m heading back in.”
I put out the cigarette and kissed him again. After a moment, he pulled away, a bemused look on his face.
“How was the shrimp scampi?”
“It was . . . soggy.”
“You nuked it.”
“I was hungry.”
“Okay.” He pulled me close. “Just so you know, that’s a crime.”
“Are you going to arrest me for crustacean abuse?”
“Crustacean? Who says crustacean?”
“Mind like a sewer,” I told him.
“All I know, Parnell, is that I love you. And don’t”—he touched a finger to my lips—“don’t say anything back at all.”
So I didn’t, unsure what words I would offer him anyway.
Sometime later, I came awake with my heart in my throat.
Beside me, Cohen snored lightly. But next to our bed, Clyde was on his feet.
I slid out of bed and into the sweats and T-shirt I’d worn earlier, then grabbed my phone and gun from the nightstand. Clyde and I glided out of the bedroom and into the living area. In the milky light of the moon—filtered through the blinds—the photographs I’d thumbtacked to the wall stared down at us. I stood in the middle of the room, listening intently.
Clyde looked past me and whimpered, and I turned.
The Six stood against the far wall, watching me with eyes as deep and dark as graves. Clyde and I backed away from them until we came up against the windows.
My phone vibrated in my pocket. I pulled it out and glanced at the screen. The hospital.
“No.” I started shaking my head. “Please, no.”
I turned my back on the Six and—half-angry, half-fearful—I raised the phone to my ear.
“Special Agent Parnell, this is Amy Derose with Denver Health Medical Center. I have a note here to call you. I’m sorry to inform you that Frank Wilson passed away half an hour ago.”
I slipped on my jacket, then picked up the bottle of Macallan and carried it outside to the second-floor deck. Clyde followed me, and we sat together beneath the awning, our backs against the wall, safe from the soft drizzle of rain and the faraway flicker of lightning. I swigged the Scotch then sucked the cool night air into lungs that seemed to have forgotten how to breathe.
The air in Cherry Hills was rarified. Rich people’s air that smelled of freshly mown lawns and waxed Bentleys and just a whiff of corruption. I lit one of my last five cigarettes, giving the clean air the metaphorical finger, and stared out at the darkness. Then I pulled Malik’s photo out of my coat pocket and held it between my fingers.
Photographs, like ghosts, are the persistence of memory. Over time, people fade from our recollection, or change. Their faces become kinder or more cruel, their hair less gray or more so.
But photographs carry the truth, if only one small piece of it.
Maybe the photos Samantha had taken were her way of holding back the inevitable tide of loss that sweeps down on us all. In the same way, I’d clung to the handful of photos I had of Malik, worried he was already fading from my mind. Now I worked to pull up a memory of one of my favorite images of him—a picture I’d taken on his birthday, only a couple of months after his mother was murdered. He looked stunned in the photo, the candles from the cake lighting his bewildered face. I hated the pain there, the loss in his eyes. But what I loved was how he had his arms wrapped around my waist. He’d counted on me to take care of him in a way no one ever had. And I had taken care of him, right up until I’d been redeployed and had to leave him behind. Then I’d failed him completely.
Moral injury. It was where I was at. I wondered if there was a limit to how much moral injury one person could suffer before they broke.
I slid the photo back into my pocket.
A breeze lifted and the trees murmured back and forth, their tops laced with stars.
Where were they? Malik and Lucy. Lying awake as I was? I h
oped. Hoped with a vast, yawning need that felt like it would eat at me until I was nothing but a casing packed to the brim with rage and grief, ready to explode.
I startled when the door slid open. Cohen, carrying a sleeping bag.
“News?” I asked as he stepped outside.
“Nothing yet.”
He settled next to me and spread the sleeping bag over the two of us, then pulled me close. I pressed my face into his shoulder, glad for the weight of his arm against my back.
“Frank Wilson died,” I said.
He pulled me closer. His lips brushed my hair. “I’m sorry.”
He laced his fingers through mine, and I squeezed back.
Eventually, I slid into sleep and dreamed that Lucy had fallen into a deep crevasse. I knelt at the edge of the abyss, holding tight to her hand, my fingers slick with sweat. But try as I might, I couldn’t pull her up. My grip grew weak, and she slipped out of my grasp, crying out as she disappeared into the darkness.
Standing next to me, Hiram Davenport shook his head.
“You can’t hack it,” he said. “You can’t do the job. You’re fired.”
I jerked awake, my face shined with sweat.
Five months ago, before I’d killed the Six, I’d had a choice to make between playing it safe and risking everything. I’d decided then that my lieutenant was right—sometimes the ends justified the means. Sometimes you had to let the monster out and damn the consequences.
If Hiram fired me, I’d keep working to solve this case and find Lucy. Outside the law, if need be. This was no time to worry about right and wrong, to worry about moral injury or whether working on this case would make my PTS worse.
It was time to monster up.
DAY TWO
CHAPTER 17
The hardest thing about having something to lose is that—inevitably—you do.
—Sydney Parnell. Personal journal.
When I awoke again, Clyde and I were alone on the deck.
An early morning rain had washed through and cleared out, leaving the world hazy and languid. To the east, the sun smeared a pearl line along the horizon. Birdsong and the sweet scent of damp grass filled the air.
I checked my watch. It was 5:40 a.m. Lucy had been missing for more than twenty-four hours. I dialed the number for Betsy King, the mother of the dead man in Ohio. An electronic voice message invited me to leave my name and to have a blessed day. I identified myself, told her it was urgent, and left my number.
In the kitchen, I fed Clyde and poured a cup of the coffee Cohen had made before he left. I leaned against the counter and flipped on the TV to see what the news stations were saying about Lucy and the Davenport case.
On Channel Nine, a reporter interviewed Lancing Tate. Tate was in his early fifties, handsome in a way that suggested health spas and golfing vacations, and was perfectly at ease in front of the camera. He wore his dark hair severely parted on one side, a style that—with the three-piece suit and bow tie—made him look like a railroader from the Vanderbilt days. According to the ticker running at the bottom, the station was running a playback of a studio interview done the day before.
“It’s a terrible, terrible tragedy,” Tate was saying. “Hard to understand this level of vindictiveness.”
I set down my mug. Vindictiveness?
The reporter jumped on it. “That’s an interesting choice of words, Mr. Tate. Do you think the murders and Lucy’s kidnapping is about revenge against the Davenports?”
Tate fidgeted with his bow tie. Was he uneasy? Or did he just want people to think he was?
He forced his hand down, pressed his palm against his thigh. “Of course we have no idea what is in the mind of the person or persons who did this. I just know that in a business as competitive as the railroad industry, it’s inevitable that you step on a few toes. Hiram Davenport is a hard-driving businessman. I imagine he’s stepped on more toes than most. Some have called his business dealings . . . questionable.”
“You’re in direct competition with Hiram Davenport for the bullet train, is that right?”
Tate’s hand strayed back to his tie, tugged on it. “That’s true. Railroaders are notoriously competitive with each other.”
“I understand he proposes running the train through land that was once owned by your company, Tate Enterprises.”
“Many years ago, Hiram Davenport persuaded my father to sell him the short line that ran through that property, yes, along with the surrounding land.”
“Persuaded?”
“Convinced him.” Tate shifted in his chair. “That was a long time ago.”
“Did Hiram Davenport step on your father’s toes, Mr. Tate?”
I approached the television, inwardly applauding the reporter.
Tate’s neck flushed red above the collar of his button-down shirt. “That merger is water under the bridge, Julie. These days, Tate Enterprises shares track and resources with Davenport’s company. We are competitors, yes. But we are also allies. And we all want what’s best for Denver. At the moment, that means one thing—getting Lucy Davenport home safe and sound.”
The screen cut back to the morning show and the anchor moved on to other news.
I poured more coffee. I doubted Lancing Tate had created a trap for himself then stepped into it. I suspected he was too shrewd for that. He was opening up the possibility that Hiram’s business practices were unethical, and that the murders and Lucy’s abduction were in response to that. True or not, it was another shot fired in the ongoing battle between the titans.
After a quick shower, I forced down some toast while I checked in with dispatch. Outside of the Davenport case, there was nothing unusual going on at DPC. No jumpers. No train IDs painted on walls. The hazardous materials train had been indefinitely delayed. I called Fisher, who told me that even this early in the day, headquarters was swarming with every letter of the alphabet—JTTF, TSA, DHS, DPD, and probably anything else I could think of. He said he’d hold down the fort and be available for whatever I needed.
I tried Bull Zolner again—no answer—and my call to Margaret Ackerman confirmed only that she was still looking for any accidents related to our crossing.
I strapped Clyde’s vest on him, poured coffee into a travel mug, and made sure the alarm was set when I went out the front door. Tom O’Hara from the Denver Post called as Clyde and I were heading down the stairs.
“You have made me cross-eyed,” Tom said when I answered.
“You want violins?”
“Try a cello. You ready for a rundown of what I’ve learned?”
I threw my duffel in the back seat and gave Clyde permission to roam while I talked to Tom. “Give it to me.”
“I went to the public library’s western history department yesterday,” O’Hara said. “Then last night I took a look in the Denver Post’s archives.”
Clyde disappeared around the corner of the house. I headed after him to see what had caught his attention.
“Go ahead,” I said to Tom.
“The land now owned by Hiram Davenport and MoMA was originally Arapahoe territory. In 1867, a man named Ennis Parker spotted a bit of gold near the riverbed and staked a claim.”
Clyde was sniffing intently at something he’d found in a copse of trees on Cohen’s property. I walked toward him through the damp grass.
Tom went on. “According to what I can find, he never turned over so much as a single spade of dirt. He panned for gold on the river, then died in a gunfight in a Denver saloon.”
Whatever Clyde had found, he didn’t like. His hackles were up. I gestured him away and leaned over to see what he’d discovered. In the muddy ground beneath the pines was a single paw print. Canine. But huge. It was the biggest paw print I’d ever seen.
Tom’s voice boomed in my ear. “Sydney? You still there?”
“Yeah. A gunfight.”
I snapped a picture of the print, then glanced around. The homes of Cohen’s neighbors were hidden behind strands of trees—the sound
of people leaving for work echoed faintly. But nearer the Walker estate, nothing stirred. Even the greenway was empty of early-morning joggers. I thought of Clyde’s unease at Zolner’s house. And of the chain in Zolner’s backyard.
“With six shooters,” O’Hara was saying. “Those were some crazy times.”
“You’re making this up.”
“You wound my journalistic soul.”
I turned and looked back at the carriage house. Someone standing in the trees would have a view of the kitchen and bedroom windows. But Cohen kept the blinds drawn at night. It was a terrible surveillance spot.
The print simply belonged to someone’s very large pet. It was that and nothing more.
I gestured to Clyde and we walked back to the truck.
“After Parker’s death,” Tom was saying, “a farmer named Wallace Walton claimed the land under the Homestead Act. He farmed it for a few years before he, too, met a bad end—got caught out in a blizzard and froze to death. The pioneering life, eh? His family pulled up stakes and returned east, and the land reverted back to the federal government. The government sold it to the T&W railroad a few years later.”
I let Clyde in on the driver’s side and followed him into the cab. “Alfred Tate’s railroad.”
“Well, it wasn’t Alfred’s then. It was his great-great-grandfather’s, who leased the land to the Edison brothers so that they could take advantage of the local clay and limestone and try the cement business. But after a run of a few years, they went under, and the lease was never renewed—the land was too far out for anything but farming. There’s nothing else in the news about it until the land transferred to Hiram Davenport with his acquisition of T&W. Back then, that acreage wouldn’t have been worth a lot. It’s a different story, now.”
“What about any fraud regarding the land’s value?”
“I can’t find any evidence. The value claimed by DPC is inflated, but it’s not beyond bounds. Property values are going up in Thornton, just like everywhere else in metro Denver.”
“What else you got?”
“What makes you think I got anything?”
Dead Stop (Sydney Rose Parnell Series Book 2) Page 21