Blood on the Tracks (2 page)

C
HAPTER
1

Our job, the duty of the Marines of Mortuary Affairs, was to go in after the fact.

Once the grunts and the gunners and the insurgents had done their job or died trying, we went in to pick up the HR—the human remains. We cleaned up after the IEDs and the armor-piercing ammo and the 81-millimeter mortar rounds. We used gloves and tarps and scrapers. Sometimes just our hands, scooping up flesh and pouring it into body bags that sloshed as we carried them to the reefer.

—Corporal Sydney Rose Parnell.
Denver Post
.

January 13, 2010.

Clyde and I left the house early, forced out by the dead private who was sitting, as he did most mornings, at my kitchen table. My grandmother, who could neither see nor hear the dead man, finished washing the dishes under the private’s watchful eyes and placed the bowls in the side sink.

“I gotta go, Grams,” I said.

Ghosts are the guilt we carry, a fellow Marine once told me. For what we did. For what we didn’t do. For making it out alive. They’re not real. Most of us get over it.

Grams wiped her hands then kissed my cheek with her paper-dry lips.

“Love you, Sydney Rose,” she whispered. Then, as she said every day, “You be tough out there, girl.”

I kept my eyes on the private as I picked up the paper bags on the counter and backed out of the kitchen, my K9 partner, Clyde, pressing hard against my thighs. Grams followed us into the hallway and held out my coat. As I pulled it on over my railway police uniform, she pretended to point to something out the front window. I pretended to look while she sneaked last night’s leftover hamburger to Clyde.

“You’ll get fat,” I told Clyde as we stepped out onto the porch.

He ignored me, his black-and-gold face stoic, his Malinois ears swiveling as he took in the morning.

The air was crystalline, poised to snap, the temperature just below freezing. The wind had died, and our breath hung in the stillness. I yanked on my duty belt, pulling the strap to the last notch. It still sagged low on my hips, even with the leather keepers snapped to my uniform belt. Grams would slip me cold hamburgers if I’d take them. But I hadn’t eaten much of anything for eighteen months. Not since the war.

Not since the ghosts.

“Survivor’s guilt,” I said to Clyde. “Remember that.”

He yawned and licked his chops.

I loaded the paper bags into the back of my railway-issued Ford Explorer and tossed my college textbooks into the backseat before whistling Clyde into the front. I started the engine, flipped on the defroster, and Clyde watched while I scraped ice off the windows. By the time I got back into the cab, the interior smelled like anxious dog.

“Bath tonight,” I told him.

He huffed, his breath a fog in the still-cold cab.

Backlit against the rising sun, Denver shrugged into the morning. Buildings and parks and bridges shambled into familiar forms. Neon signs still buzzed from the night before, their light anemic in the rising sun. To the east, the gold dome of the capitol building hung in the morning air, a glittering reminder of Denver’s gold rush days. The city ran over and through me; its smog filled my lungs, its February chill pressed cold fingers to my face. For his part, Clyde watched out the window with an intentness only a former military dog can muster.

“Easy, boy,” I said. “Just a regular Saturday.”

Clyde’s war had been hard, too.

At Hogan’s Alley near the intersection of Denargo Street and Arkins, I parked the Explorer in a patch of dirt twenty feet off the road and surveyed the transient camp through the windshield. There was Trash Can’s blue tarp and, a few paces beyond it, an unfamiliar military-green pup tent. The cottonwoods along the South Platte River—their branches glittering with frost—obscured the rest of the camp.

“Fucking suck of a time to be homeless,” I said to Clyde.

I pinned up my braid and tucked it inside my ball cap, then stepped out into the morning. I strapped on the thigh holster with my backup sidearm and retrieved the bags from the back. Clyde hopped out of the cab after me. He sniffed at the bags in my hand and gave me his best look.

“You had yours, Clyde. And a hamburger to boot.”

He looked away.

“Eating isn’t how you solve your problems.” I locked the car. “Let’s go, boy.”

The camp was silent as we approached, everyone still rolled in their blankets, sleeping off the night’s drunk or trying to find the last slender shred of warmth. The fire in the middle of the camp had gone to ashes.

I stopped outside Trash Can’s tarp roof and looked at the army blanket he’d hung over a low branch and duct-taped to the tarp for privacy.

“What are you doing back, Trash Can?”

A rustle from the other side of the blanket and a string of curses.

“You know I’m supposed to roust you guys,” I went on. “Why you still here? You got a hate on me?”

“Agent Parnell,” Trash Can said, relief in his voice.

“Your pancakes are getting cold.”

The camp stirred to life, tent flaps lifting as worn, ragged forms emerged, blinking in the light and scuffing toward me across the dirt and weeds like extras in a zombie movie. I set the bags on the picnic table and laid out Styrofoam plates and plastic forks. The other police—those who knew about my weekly visits, anyway, Nik and the captain—thought I was crazy. But I had taken on debt in the war and had very little coin with which to pay it back.

Most everyone nodded in my direction, and all of them gave Clyde a respectful clearance. Everyone seemed twitchy today, eating fast and keeping their heads up. I saw Melody Weber, thought
shit
, and searched for her daughter, found the eight-year-old huddled under a blanket nearby. Melody had a three-inch cut across her chin.

I settled on a tree stump and waited. When Melody finished eating, I waved her over and studied the cut with a clinical eye.

“Again?” I asked.

She shrugged, her plump shoulders shivering under a dirty red sweatshirt. She held out her fingers toward Clyde, who sniffed them and allowed her to scratch behind his ears. Clyde didn’t care for strangers, but he’d gotten used to our weekly visit to the camps, and he tolerated the touch of Melody and a few others.

“The world does enough to you without you staying with him,” I said. “What about Liz?”

“He wouldn’t never hurt her.” Melody stared me down, defiant. “He loves that girl like she was his own.”

“She’ll grow up thinking it’s normal for a man to beat the shit out of his girlfriend. You want that for her?”

“I teach her better than that. She knows.” She was shivering hard enough her teeth chattered.

“Where’s your coat?” I asked.

“I got it. Don’t worry. I didn’t lose it.”

“Can’t keep you warm, you don’t wear it.”

She glared, daring me to question her. “It’s in the tent. Liz got cold.”

I held my sigh. “I’m going to call a friend at Human Services. She’ll pick you up, take both of you to the women’s shelter.”

“It’s the ones who love us, hurt us the most, you know.”

“What he does to you isn’t love.”

Melody shrugged. “You don’t know everything.”

“Dammit, Melody, you aren’t helpless.”

“Easy for you to say, being a cop and all.” She dug a wad of fast-food napkins out of her jeans pocket and blew her nose. “What do you know about being trapped someplace and you can’t get out?”

I flashed to our base in Iraq—the mortars, the gunfire. “Not much, I guess.”

After I’d phoned and made arrangements with my contact at Human Services, I gestured for Melody to sit on the stump.

“You want me to fix up that cut?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Wait here.”

Clyde followed me to the Explorer. As I came up the hill, I saw a short, skinny man standing near my truck, leaning over the hood and peering through the glass.

“Help you with something?” I asked.

He startled and glanced my way. Blue eyes gleamed within the shadow of his hoodie amid a tracing of tattoos. Chronologically, he was a teenager, just getting started down the road of his life. But the flat expression in those blue eyes was miles older. He must have hit some pretty deep ruts already.

He flipped me the bird.

“There’s food down at the table if you’re hungry,” I told him. “But I need you to move away from the car. Dog’s pretty possessive.”

His gaze flicked to Clyde. Wordlessly, he spun on his heel and headed toward the road. I watched him until he was well away before unlocking the truck. Hard world sometimes, turning kids into jerks before they had time to do the job themselves.

Back at the camp with my first aid kit, I knelt on the frozen ground and donned a pair of latex gloves. Everyone had finished eating and most were heading out, moving fast and with glances all around.

“It just me, or is everyone skittish today?” I asked.

“Some, maybe.”

Melody gathered her dishwater-blond hair in a fist and pulled it back while I worked. Her daughter watched blankly from the picnic table. Usually the little girl was all over Clyde, but today she had drawn into herself, knees pulled to her chest, chin tucked, a tight ball of heartbreak.

I poured hydrogen peroxide onto a cotton ball. “What’s got everyone spooked?”

“The Burned Man’s back,” she said.

“He here now?”

“Not so’s I know. Saw him early this morning when the train come through, but he didn’t stay.”

The Burned Man. A former Marine I’d seen once before. Never got a chance to talk to him. When I saw him, I thought,
Poor bastard
. I’d seen enough of his kind of injuries to wonder if he would have been better off dying.

Then again, I’d spent enough sleepless nights with the dead to be sure I had no right to ask.

I cleaned the cut, then applied antibiotic ointment, gauze, and finally white tape. Melody bore it all without complaint, her gaze somewhere I couldn’t follow.

I sat back on my haunches, surveying my work and looking for other injuries. “The Burned Man hasn’t caused any trouble, has he?”

She freed her hair. “He’s like one of them monsters from the movies. Like the incredible melting man. He makes Liz cry.”

“He ever threaten you?”

“Nah.” She lit a cigarette, inhaled it like it was the Second Coming.

“Go freak on you, run around without his clothes?”

“Nah. Keeps to himself, mostly. Heard he got a mean temper.”

“You ever see him get angry?”

“Nah.” She shook her head. “Never seen him do much of anything.”

“So, why so jumpy? Someone else roll in?”

She seemed to be deciding whether or not to answer when my headset buzzed. I excused myself, stripped off the gloves, and turned away to answer. My day shift had started more than four hours ago, at 3 a.m., and this was my work phone.

“Senior Special Agent Parnell,” I said.

“Agent Parnell, this is Detective Cohen. Mike. Your captain told me you were on duty.”

“I am, sir. What can I do for you?”

“You don’t remember me. We worked a jumper together a year ago.”

“I remember.” I pulled his face up in my mind. Michael Walker Cohen, Denver PD, Major Crimes Division. Nice enough guy, but . . . weighted. Like he’d seen too damn much and didn’t expect the world to show him anything different. He didn’t blink when I led him over to the jumper’s corpse. Body parts everywhere, and he didn’t even put down his coffee. He just looked tired.

“You got another jumper?” I asked.

“We got a deceased white female cut to pieces in her own home. There are weird symbols all over the place, inside and out. We’re thinking it might be hobo code. The crime scene guys are about finished, and the ME has already called the body snatchers. I was hoping you’d take a look first, though. Tell me what you see. I’m not exactly up on the code of the road.”

“Hold on.”

Clyde and I moved up the slope, away from the camp. The wind kicked a whorl of dirt into the air and flapped the makeshift tents. Indifferent flakes of snow swirled by. A watery sun found a path through the clouds and flattened long shadows across the ground.

We got a deceased white female.

I curled my fists, feeling that panicked scramble between when you see the flash of a tracer round, dive for cover, and then—despite all your efforts—feel the bullet bury itself in your astounded belly. Down by the river the Sir, who’d been my commanding officer during the war, gave me a nod with his ghostly head. I could imagine what he would say to me if he had a tongue with which to speak:
There’s no escaping death, Corporal Parnell. Not for any of us. Not even when you’re young.

Not even when you come home.

I squeezed my eyes closed.
Survivor’s guilt.
When I opened them again, the Sir was gone.

“Parnell?”

“I’m here, Detective.” I glanced over at Clyde, whose ears were pricked as he, too, looked toward the river. I brought my hands together and pressed until my knuckles went white. “Give me the address.”

C
HAPTER
2

In Iraq, the dead stay with you. You can’t walk outside your tent or drive into the desert without feeling them all around. Americans will think I’m lying about this. Or I’m crazy. But it’s true. In America, we don’t know how to listen to our ghosts.

But they’re here, too. They’re everywhere.

[Pause] I shouldn’t have said that.

—Corporal Sydney Rose Parnell.
Denver Post
.

January 13, 2010.

The victim’s house was on a quiet, shabby street with root-cracked sidewalks and a scrim of dirty snow clinging to the curb from last week’s storm. The bare oaks were twice my girth, the packed dirt beneath littered with a mat of decaying leaves. I’d patrolled here before; our track runs five hundred yards behind the east-side row of houses. Not a terrible neighborhood. But not one where I’d want kids playing after dark, either.

The house, a sprawling Victorian, listed gently. Scratched next to an upper-floor window was the stick figure of a cat.

Four police units were parked at the curb in front of the house, along with half a dozen unmarked cars. In a squad car with the engine running against the cold, a plainclothes cop interviewed an elderly woman. The woman wore a white knit hat and smoked furiously, the gray cloud rising like a smoke signal through a lowered window. Her face was red and knotted, wet with tears.

I parked on the other side of the street, popped a couple of Xanax from the bottle I kept in the glove box, and ordered Clyde into the heated crate in the back. He settled quickly, his head on his forelegs, watching me. Unhappy.

“You hate cadavers.” I touched his head, and he thumped his tail. “I won’t be long.”

I grabbed my bag and crossed the street. On the sidewalk, the death fear hit me like a sucker punch. I bent over, waiting for the nausea to pass, glad that I hadn’t brought Clyde with me; my fear would have traveled right down the leash to him.

The door opened and Detective Cohen stepped out. “Special Agent Parnell?”

I straightened fast and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “Shitty breakfast.”

“Hear that,” he said.

Our gazes met. Cohen, a tall, thirty-something man with too much experience in his eyes, was built like a junkyard dog—lean and hungry and ready to run with it. He wore a nice suit, but his hair looked like he’d cut it with manicure scissors. He needed a shave and his eyes were shot with red.

He struck me as a man who didn’t much care what tried to get in his way. He’d keep moving forward until something gave.

“Need a minute?” he asked.

“I’m good.”

I sucked in air and followed him up the steps.

“I saw your interview in the
Denver Post
,” he said, making conversation as we walked through the house. “I had no idea about Mortuary Affairs.”

“Most people don’t.” It was why I’d agreed to the interview. But as soon as I saw my name in print, I’d regretted it. People still didn’t understand. And I’d said too much.

In the hallway outside the apartment, I signed the log offered up by a patrolman and reached for a pair of cloth booties to pull over my shoes.

“She’s in the back bedroom,” Cohen said.

“Got an ID on her?” I asked.

“Driver’s license found in a purse in the kitchen is for Elise Hensley, age twenty.”

Holding a bootie and balancing on one leg, I looked up at him. “Well, fuck.”

“Know her?”

“Yeah. We weren’t close, but yeah. She’s niece to one of the men in my department. Senior Special Agent Nik Lasko. Elise was a good girl. Did well in school, never caused trouble. Did some modeling for a while. Works at Al’s Diner on 36th.” I snugged the bootie in place. “Worked.”

Cohen looked away, the bones of his face shifting toward something heavy. Hard week, I figured.

Hard weeks pile up in his line of work.

“I’m sorry, Parnell,” he said.

“You do a next-of-kin notification?”

“Not yet.”

“Mind if I do it?” This would kill Nik. He loved Elise like a daughter, much as he had always loved me. His two orphans. Better the news came from me.

Cohen finally nodded. “Give me fifteen minutes inside first. Then the body crew can move her. You let Special Agent Lasko know, and we’ll follow up with him later.”

“Thanks.”

The first thing I noticed was that the apartment was cold. The front room was full of people, none of whom I knew. Plainclothes Denver PD and detectives from the crime lab, probably. I might have been in training with some of these people but, if so, their faces hadn’t registered. They nodded and went back to their work.

“There’s a lot I want you to see in her bedroom,” Cohen said. “First, though, take a look at some of these photos, see if you know any of these people.”

There were framed photographs arranged throughout the living room and more covering the refrigerator door in clear, magnetized frames. I began a circuit, studying each picture. I noticed a Bible open on the dining room table, passages highlighted. A cross hung on the wall next to the largest collection of photos.

“Take your time,” Cohen said.

I shot him a glance to see if he was being sarcastic, but he was writing something in an oversize spiral notebook.

I came to a stop in front of the refrigerator.

“Anything?” Cohen finally asked.

“They’re hobos. All of them. Nik never shared this, but my guess is Elise was what is known as a kindhearted lady, someone who feeds the rail riders. That’s what the drawing of a cat outside the window means. She probably helped them in other ways, too. Clothing. Jobs. Medical care if they needed it, rehab if they’d take it. Sometimes these women try to save them, in the Christian sense of the word. They’re soul catchers.”

“Soul catchers? You mean like some sort of voodoo thing?”

“Only if you consider the mysticism of the Holy Trinity a black art. Elise probably preached to them, tried to get them to accept Jesus in their hearts and return to their families.”

“These guys have real homes?”

“Some of them. But often the families don’t want them back. People who ride the rails usually have problems of one kind or another. A lot of them are pretty antisocial.” Something I understood. I shoved my hands in my pockets. “I’m ready to see the bedroom.”

“One more room, first.”

He led the way down the hallway. Our feet whispered on the plastic runner laid by the crime scene guys.

“This room,” he said. “See anything in here?”

I took in the neatly made bed with its feminine quilt. A battered oak nightstand. On the bed was a bright-yellow Tweety Bird. I pointed it out.

“From one of the traveling carnies,” I said. “Maybe Elise liked to go to those.”

“We’ll look into that. Last carny, though, would have been back in, what, August?”

“September. They came in on our trains.” I raised an eyebrow at him. “Something here I’m supposed to notice?”

He shook his head. “Just wanted you to see everything.”

I was turning away to leave when I noticed a disruption on the nightstand’s thin veneer of dust. I turned back and crouched so I was eye level with the surface.

Within the fine dust was a clear patch about eleven inches long and two inches deep. “Someone took something,” I said.

Cohen squatted next to me. “Framed photo, maybe.” He went out and came back with a detective to take a photograph.

“Why take this photo and leave all the others?” I asked. “If a tramp killed Elise, he’d likely be in some of those pictures, too.”

“This picture being right next to the bed,” Cohen said. “It was probably someone special.”

The detective placed a yellow marker on the nightstand, shot his photos, and left.

“I’m ready to see the body,” I said.

Cohen stood, suddenly awkward. He glanced toward the door, as if making sure no one was there, then back at me. “Look, Agent Parnell, I want to thank you for your service.”

I rose as well, shoulders stiff. “Where you going with this, Cohen?”

“It’s a fucking mess in there. Whoever did this had a lot of rage. I’m sorry to spring this kind of body on you. Especially someone you knew, for Christ’s sake. I know what you did in Iraq and—”

“Don’t be an asshole, Detective.” I held up a hand and mentally counted to five. “Look, I’m sure you mean well. But I’m a cop, okay? I’m not going to jump when someone says boo. That stuff you read about vets and PTSD and flashbacks and all? Mostly it’s not true.”

“No.” He looked down at his shoes. “I see that.”

But I’d caught the expression in his eyes before he looked away. No doubt he knew damn well how my nights went. I might as well get the fucking T-shirt.

While Cohen asked the three people squeezed in the back bedroom to give us a moment, I did a quick meditation, the way the VA counselor had taught me.

I am not here. I am far away. Nothing can touch me.

“Parnell?”

The others had cleared out. Cohen was looking at me again.

I took a breath; the Xanax unfurled in my blood like a roll of velvet. I stepped to the doorway.

The killing had been savage, leaving the victim no dignity even in death. Elise Hensley had been sliced and diced, her stomach opened, her bare arms flayed. The walls of the room were sprayed with arterial blood, her hair matted with it. From the wreck of her face, her eyes stared at the ceiling.

Everywhere along the walls, written over the blood and smearing it, were symbols drawn in what looked like black Sharpie. Circles and arrows, hatch marks. A stick figure of a cat.

The work of a madman.

“Damn,” I said, thinking that this had to have been done by one of my homeless guys. By someone I
knew
.

“When we first saw these, we thought it was some sort of cult thing,” Cohen said.

I shook my head. “You were right about it being hobo sign. Like the cat outside.”

“What do they mean?”

“The circle with two arrows across it means to get out fast—hobos aren’t wanted here. The circle next to the square means a bad man lives here. Elise have a roommate?”

“Not according to the landlady. An on-and-off boyfriend. Maybe the guy in the missing photo. What about the next sign, the one that looks like a snowman holding a ball?”

“It means sucker. Someone who is easy to catch.”

“The killer describing himself in all of these?”

“Could be. But the cat means this is the home of a kindhearted woman. So why kill the kindhearted woman?”

“Beats the fuck out of me,” he said. “Maybe because you’re a bad-hearted man.” A tic started in his jaw and his eyes went hollow. Could be murder cops get PTSD, too.

We put on masks and entered the room. Air coming in through the half-open window chilled my face.

“Left open to hide the odor?” I asked.

“Might buy the killer a day or two. But someone phoned it in.”

“Who?”

“Anonymous call. A kid, sounded like. Teenager, maybe.”

I bent down and looked under the bed.

“Your guys look under here?”

“Yeah. A couple of beads, right? They’ll bag ’em when we’re done.”

I pulled the Maglite from my duty belt and played the beam beneath the bed. A cluster of dust bunnies shivered in the far corner. Three carved wooden beads had rolled against the baseboard, their colors bright. “Hobo beads. In case we weren’t sure about Elise’s connections. Your crime scene guys reach under the bed?”

“Only photos so far. Why?”

“The dust has been disturbed. Maybe the necklace broke in a struggle, and the killer tried to collect the beads and got scared off.” I straightened, returned the flashlight to my belt. “You find any other beads?”

“One. Against the wall there.”

He waited while I snapped my own pictures. I didn’t ask permission, and he didn’t ask what I was doing.

“Anything else you want me to look at?” I said. “I need to call Nik.”

“That’s it. Thanks, Parnell. Appreciate it.”

Following Cohen out of the room, I stopped and made myself turn back. Elise had been a beautiful woman, with bright-blond hair and porcelain skin. The sweetest smile this side of the Mississippi, Nik always said.

Automatically, because cleaning up the dead had been my job for fourteen months, I made her beautiful once more. In my mind, I closed her wounds, washed away her blood. I shampooed her hair and combed it, arranged her slashed hands upon her breast. Then I did what no mortician could. I rebuilt her shattered face and restored the flush to her cheeks, the pulse to her throat. I made her smile.

In my mind, I made her whole.

“I’ll hold you here,” I whispered, touching my hand to my heart. It was what I said to all the dead.

Maybe that was why they crowded me so.