Ambush

by Barbara Nickless

  “I’d never ask. I just want you to look at the undercarriage, see if you spot anything unusual.”

  His eyes finally met mine. “You mean like, is there a leprechaun hiding behind the muffler?”

  I’d never heard him string together so many words, and I wasn’t sure if he was serious or not. “Or something. Do you mind?”

  Another shrug, slightly more elaborate than the first two. He told me to wait. He disappeared into the bowels of the garage, then returned with an inspection mirror. This one came with a light, which he switched on. He began moving along the vehicle, making a tsking noise with his tongue. He clearly thought I was one sandwich short of a picnic. But he was the one who’d brought up leprechauns. He went around the rear of the Cruiser to the far side, then stopped, squinted, and went back a step.

  “Hmm,” he said. Mason-speak for, Wow, there’s something really strange and unusual here.

  I joined him on the far side, and we both bent low. Mason pointed to a small black box. “Tracking device.”

  He yanked the thing free, and we stood up to inspect it.

  “Magnetic case,” he explained. He slid the device free of its housing. “They can track you anywhere on their phone or computer.”

  Mason was positively gushing, but it was as I had suspected.

  He held it up. “Put it back?”

  “Um, no.” I pondered my options, then held out my hand. “I’ll take care of it. Where’s my new truck?”

  “Out near the gate.”

  “Would you mind driving it over here? I don’t want to be seen getting in.”

  “You said your boss approved it.”

  I hefted the tracking device. “It’s not my boss I’m worried about.”

  Mason scratched his head. “But whoever’s tracking you on their computer can’t see who’s in the cab.”

  “Maybe he isn’t just tracking me on his computer. Maybe he’s parked out on the street, and he plans to follow me. I don’t think he means good things, Mason.”

  Mason grunted. Then shrugged. “Okay.”

  After he left, I walked out to the tracks. I slapped the tracker in its magnetic housing underneath a coal car that would be leaving in an hour for the US-Mexico border. The Alpha’s men wouldn’t be fooled for long. But if I got lucky, it might take them an hour or two to figure it out. By then, I’d be buried in the city.

  I wedged the Land Cruiser between some utility vehicles so that it was out of sight on the north side of the garage, then grabbed a few personal belongings—the contents of the glove box, the polar fleece jacket I’d appropriated from Cohen, Clyde’s and my Kevlar, my toolbox and backup pistol—then locked up. When Mason pulled up in a dark-blue Ford Expedition, I nodded my approval. This was the first brand-new vehicle I’d ever driven, and as I circled it and kicked the tires, I felt like a grown-up.

  “Check it out, Clyde.”

  Mason left the engine running.

  “Tank’s full,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t let ’em get you,” he added and stalked off.

  I opened the rear hatch to show Clyde his designated area. It was roomier than the old Ford, with a removable padded bed, built-in food and water dishes, and some pretty sophisticated environmental controls.

  “All you need is a screen and a Wi-Fi connection,” I told him. “You could catch up on The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin.”

  Picking up on my excitement, Clyde barked. He was a big fan of the crime-fighting German shepherd. In Iraq, Dougie had found the old episodes online. He and Clyde and I used to watch them together.

  “I’m kidding, pal. You should be catching up on training videos. Let’s check out the cab.”

  I opened the front passenger door and was delighted to see that someone had installed a dog harness in place of a regular seat belt. I wondered if that bonus had come from my boss or Mason.

  I signaled Clyde to hop up and buckled him in. “Try not to shed too much.” I walked around and got in behind the steering wheel. I opened my duffel and took out my work laptop, popped it into the swivel mount near the dash, and powered it up. The internet came up along with an application to link to dispatch and another program that would run searches on a slew of databases.

  “Welcome to the twenty-first century,” I told Clyde. “You think this will make it easier to catch bad guys?”

  Clyde cocked his head at the screen, unsure. He was more of a traditionalist, I think. Teeth and claws.

  I fist-bumped his paw.

  CHAPTER 12

  A war in five senses. Blood, sweat, tears, dust, pain.

  —Sydney Parnell. ENGL 0208 Psychology of Combat.

  Union Station, where Kane had been murdered, was overseen by the Regional Transportation District. Their cameras would have caught Kane’s death from different angles. I planned to force myself to watch the recordings as many times as it took to get something to shake out.

  The Transit Watch Command Center served as the RTD’s headquarters, and that’s where Clyde and I headed next. We’d been there a few times before. Denver Pacific Continental and the RTD share information and data, and we have a Memorandum of Understanding to help each other out. DPC was especially interested in using some of the RTD’s camera technology to monitor critical areas on our own lines.

  I’d called on the drive over and offered my help to Transit Police Chief Ryan Taft. I told him I knew a lot of the homeless, and maybe I would recognize our killer if I saw him in motion. It turned out I didn’t need to sell myself. Taft muttered something about me being a celebrity and said he was happy for the help.

  He met us at the door to the single-story, bland brick building situated in a quiet neighborhood of small businesses. In his early sixties, tall and well built, with a thick head of gray hair and kind eyes, Ryan had a way of leaning in when he talked that made you feel like his coconspirator. Today his expression hovered between harried and pissed, but he waved us in warmly, bent and shook Clyde’s paw, and—good man that he was—said absolutely nothing about my black eye. He led us through the warren of offices to the center of operations.

  “Anything specific on this case caught your eye?” he asked as we walked.

  “I haven’t seen anything yet but newspaper articles.”

  “Let’s fix that.”

  The control room was a high-ceilinged space, dimly lit, with workstations and a bank of monitors showing all of Denver’s railway stations, the interiors of buses and trains, and key points along the commuter tracks. The RTD—Denver’s mass transit system—was a network of commuter lines, light rail, and buses that served much of metro Denver and the airport.

  All five of the workstations were manned. Normally, this time of day would only require a couple of people on task. But Kane’s death had everyone on high alert. Taft introduced Clyde and me to the men and women watching the monitors, who barely looked away from their screens, then led me to a door in the back and ushered me into their computer room.

  “You want to see the recordings from that night, I assume,” he said.

  “That’s right. If we’re lucky, I’ll have seen this guy before.”

  Taft waved me toward a chair, then took a seat in front of a monitor. Clyde sat next to me, but kept his eyes on the chief, as if he understood that the game was afoot and he might have a chance to nail a bad guy in the near future. Taft punched a few buttons, images appeared on the screen, and soon he had the recordings up from that night.

  “It’s damn difficult to watch.” Taft’s voice sounded like cement hardening.

  Kane came into view. I recognized his red hair and the faint limp from our encounter last winter.

  I watched as he moved into the range of one camera, then out, then into another. The RTD had cameras mounted at every station, giving 360 degrees of coverage. Two thirds of the trains were also outfitted with internal cameras.

  Through the camera’s eyes, I spied over Kane’s shoulder as he spotted the homeless guy and headed in that
direction.

  “How long was the transient there before Kane went to him?” I asked. “Can you back up and show me when he got into that space?”

  “You bet.” Taft pushed some buttons. “It was just under four minutes between the time the killer showed up and Jeremy went to roust him.”

  “And Kane had just come on duty. Was it normal for him to get outside that fast?”

  “It’s SOP. He’d be rotating locations with the rest of the security team. Kane always liked to establish a baseline. A leftover from his time in the military, I guess. Whenever he came on duty, he’d take a walk through the station, then head out to the platforms and give them a good visual. Here it is.”

  We watched as the killer hobbled into view, entering the platform from the northeast, in the direction of the tracks. He was hunched over and favoring his right leg, muttering to himself as he moved. Periodically he would stop and stare at something that caught his eye, then mutter some more and shuffle on. He carried a dirt-stained backpack, and, even in the heat, he had on a zippered sweatshirt with the hood pulled up and a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. He wore gray sweatpants torn at the knee and laceless sneakers. Both knees looked red and scraped. Immense sunglasses covered half his face, making me think of the famous sketch of the Unabomber from the mideighties.

  The man on the video looked very much like the drawing that had been in the Denver Post. Other than the dirty clothes and scabby skin sported by a lot of homeless people, nothing about him looked familiar.

  “The media is calling him the Pushman.” Taft rubbed the back of his neck. “A pun on the old Pullman railcars. It’s as good as anything, I guess. But I hate it. I just keep thinking of how Kane must have felt in his last moments.”

  We watched as the Pushman settled into his spot.

  “Stop it there for a sec,” I said. “How many security officers were on duty with Kane?”

  “We had our usual seven guys. Three were down below, at the bus terminals. Two were inside Union Station. Sadler was outside with Kane. But he was around at the front of the building, answering a complaint about panhandling.”

  “Anything suspicious about the complaint?”

  “You mean as a diversionary tactic? Sadler doesn’t think so. It was the kind of standard grievance you get when vagrants brush up against the well-to-do. LoDo is famous for it.”

  LoDo was short for Denver’s Lower Downtown, a hip part of the city that drew tourists, locals, and cool people from all up and down the Front Range. It also attracted the homeless, the desperate, and opportunists of all stripes. In a typical year, LoDo had a crime density of almost four thousand offenses per square mile.

  “Let’s keep going,” I said.

  Taft hit play again and slowed the speed. We moved forward in slo-mo, watching in painful increments as Kane approached his killer.

  “He followed protocol,” Taft said. “Gave the guy a warning for lying on the floor in the station. If anything, Jeremy erred on the side of leniency. He hated arresting these guys.”

  “Maybe because he knew some of them are vets.”

  “Probably. Anyway, he gives this asshole a warning, then a second warning. If he’d had the chance, the third time would have been a charm. Kane would have issued a final warning. Then if the guy still refused to move, he would have arrested him for trespassing.”

  “Sometimes,” I murmured, “that’s what they want. Three hots and a cot.”

  We watched as something caught Kane’s attention and drew his gaze away from the Pushman. Taft hit pause and swiveled his chair to face another monitor.

  “Another possible diversionary tactic?” I asked.

  “Doesn’t seem like it.” He pulled up the recording from a different camera, and we were looking at a panorama of the people standing on the far side of the tracks. “In a case like this, it’s standard procedure for an officer to periodically check his surroundings. Make sure no one is getting too close. Or that the homeless man isn’t himself a diversion.”

  I studied the faces of the Saturday-night crowd, looking for anyone familiar or anything unusual. Maybe I was hoping a man would be standing there in a ball cap that read ALPHA.

  No such luck.

  Most people were engrossed in their phones. A few looked in Kane’s direction; watching a cop roust a homeless guy probably served as entertainment while you waited for your train. It looked to me like a typical weekend crowd—a lot of young people on their way in or out of the clubs and a few middle-aged couples probably just done with dinner in one of the nearby restaurants.

  Of course, if the Alpha had sent someone to tail Kane, it would be someone who could blend in, just like Rooftop Thomas in Mexico. But why bother with a tail? Assuming Kane wasn’t leading a nefarious double life, he would be traveling to and from work and home and going to visit friends or run errands.

  Whoever it was, they’d definitely caught Kane’s attention. His gaze was focused.

  “We ran the faces of everyone on the platform,” Taft said. “Sixty-seven people. I’ve got our boy genius trying to triangulate and narrow it down. Ah, speak of the devil.”

  A man with a beard, his bare arms sheathed in tattoos, stuck his head in the door. He looked all of nineteen as he waved a piece of paper at us. “I got it down to five names.”

  Taft took the paper. “Give me a rundown of your process. The condensed version.”

  “Sure.” He shrugged. “It’s straightforward trig. From where Kane stood, I extrapolated his line of sight across the platform. That told me which cameras covered the zone where he was looking. Lines of sight from those cameras gave me the three sides of a triangle—the two lines extending from the cameras and a baseline I calculated by walking between them. Then I just determined the angles and extended the lines until they crossed. That narrowed Kane’s view to the five people who appear on both cameras.”

  “Remind me not to ask about the math next time,” Taft said. “But I think I followed enough to say you’ve earned your Superman cape.”

  “A raise will do.” He winked and disappeared back out the door.

  Taft flattened the paper and we looked at the list of names.

  Laura Almasi. Sonia Lopez Martinez. Kenneth Riley Napierkowski. Leroy Parker. Thomas Wilson.

  “Any of the names mean anything to you?” Taft asked.

  “No.” Dammit.

  “Not to me, either. I’ll run them and send you photos and profiles if you wish.”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  “I’ll get them to Detective Gorman as well.”

  We went back to the other monitor, and Taft played Kane’s final moments. The man surging up from the ground, the flash of the knife. Kane turning in what must have been stunned surprise.

  Then the final act, which had earned the Pushman his moniker from the press.

  I forced myself to keep my eyes open.

  “Play the clip again where the guy first gets up,” I said. “Did you see that tattoo?”

  “We saw it.” Taft rewound, then froze the image.

  What we could see of the Pushman’s face was a rictus of rage. Lips drawn back to expose white teeth, the barely visible forehead wrinkled with his snarl. He had his right arm up, the knife clearly visible in his hand. On the inside of his arm was a tattoo of a star and crescent and below that, Arabic writing.

  “The crescent and star. That’s a symbol of Islam,” I said.

  “Right. The script is Arabic—the words mean Five Pillars. This sent us off chasing rabbits, thinking this might be a terrorist act. But the theory doesn’t hold. Not so far, anyway. No one has stepped forward to claim the death. And those assholes always step forward. That’s not to say the guy didn’t see himself as the Lone Hassan. But that makes it a hate crime, not an act of terror. Hard to imagine this guy having political or social objectives.”

  I studied the tattoos. “The five pillars.”

  “You know what it means?”

  “They’re the basic tenets of Islam
. Faith, prayer, charity, fasting, and pilgrimage.”

  Taft folded his arms. “Looks like this dipshit lost out on all of them.”

  A woman poked her head through the open doorway. “Chief, you got a call on your landline.”

  Taft stood. “Excuse me a minute? Feel free to play with the buttons while I’m gone.”

  I took Taft’s seat and replayed the scene over and over. But if I’d been hoping to recognize the guy, to maybe prove to myself that he was just what he appeared to be, I had to admit defeat. I was certain I’d never seen him before.

  He could still be a mentally disturbed vagrant.

  And I could be a nun.

  Aside from the tattoo, the most striking thing about him were his teeth, which were visible when he went after Kane.

  They were straight. And perfectly white.

  Maybe Dentists Without Borders had come to Denver.

  When Taft returned, I vacated his seat and asked if he could give me stills. “Two of the killer, close-up and full body. And another one of the crowd.”

  “Sure thing.” More button pushing. The printer on the desk began to whir.

  “What do we know from gait analysis?” I asked.

  The ability to watch for criminal activity in public places had gotten a huge leg up when someone realized that humans can be identified on surveillance cameras by how they move. A person’s walk was as unique as a fingerprint, and one of several biometric markers used by law enforcement to track suspicious activity. The RTD had sophisticated gait-analysis software built into every camera—a total of ten thousand cameras placed on the RTD’s trains, platforms, and buses.

  The system worked by building computer images—avatars—of every person recorded by its cameras. The computer could then use that avatar to find all the locations a person had traveled to within the RTD system.

  It was one of the coolest gee-whiz high-tech things to come along. But it was still just software.

  “Gait analysis hasn’t given us anything,” Taft said. “We found no matches to Pushman’s avatar. This is the first time he’s been on RTD property.”

  “What are the weaknesses of the software?”

  “Not many.” Taft tilted back in his chair and folded his arms. “Simply feigning a limp won’t fool it. Neither will slowing down or speeding up. This guy’s heavy clothes are a deterrent—especially that blanket. But we still have a high level of accuracy.”