Blood on the Tracks (26 page)

“I owe you one, buddy. I owe you big.”

I wrapped my arms around him and wept.

C
HAPTER
21

The body of a Marine who dies in Iraq arrives at Mortuary Affairs in a black human remains pouch. The Marine’s body is placed on the concrete floor, and then one of our crew uses a metal detector to check for shrapnel.

We take turns using the metal detector. Because it isn’t just shrapnel we’re looking for.

It’s unexploded bombs.

—Sydney Parnell. Personal journal.

Cohen called before I was ready for the world again. I let it go to voicemail, but waited only a few minutes before I picked up my phone and listened to the message. I wanted to hear his voice.

“Call me soon as you can,” he said quietly. “It’s about Rhodes. You’ll want to know.”

I stared out the window to the gentle fall of snow glimmering in the back porch light. Beyond the halo of yellow, the trees shivered in a quick flick of wind, a nervous gathering of ghosts.

I tossed back the last of the whiskey and punched
Talk
.

“Parnell,” Cohen said.

At the concern in his voice, I had to shove down the words
I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to betray your trust. I didn’t mean to betray
you.

“Is he okay?” I asked.

“He confessed. An hour ago. I typed up his statement, and he’s signed it. The DA’s office offered him a plea bargain—life in prison without the possibility of parole. With the death penalty on the table if his case went to trial, he took it.”

My mouth worked, but I could not find air.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know you didn’t want this.”

“He’s lying.”

“Parnell, let it go.”

“Who came to see him?”

“Nobody.” A pause. “If you think someone out there has the power to make our boy confess to something he didn’t do, you’d better tell me what the hell is going on.”

A movement beyond the doorway startled me into dropping the phone. Elise, shimmering in the kitchen.

Then gone.

“Parnell? You there?”

I picked up the phone, the movement making my chest explode all over again. “I don’t believe it. He just—he’s not a killer. Not like that.”

“You’re a good cop,” Cohen said. “Don’t confuse what you want with the facts on the table.”

“A good cop doesn’t make assumptions.”

“I wouldn’t call a confession an assumption. The ME has connected all the dots. The blood on his uniform is hers. The wounds were likely inflicted by a KA-BAR combat knife. The kind—”

“Issued to every Marine. You can buy them online, too. So the knife you found at the 7-Eleven wasn’t the murder weapon?”

“No,” Cohen admitted.

I roused a little. “This is bullshit. You were the one who said you didn’t like the crime scene. That it was too convenient.”

“That was before he confessed. Bandoni’s list, Parnell. The blood on his uniform. The video of him at the convenience store. Multiple witnesses place him at or near her home around the time of her death. No sign of a struggle and no evidence of a break-in, meaning she let her killer into her apartment in the middle of the night. That says to me it was someone she trusted.”

“Or that the killer used the key under her mat.”

“The
alleged
key under her mat.”

“Rhodes never denied being there. That doesn’t make him her killer. What about his stolen hobo beads? What about Alfred Merkel?”

“Merkel will have his own day in court,” Cohen said. “But not for Elise’s death. Rhodes now says he made up the story about his beads being stolen.”

“He made up this story before he got to Denver? All the way back when he talked to Roald Hoffreider?”

“It just makes it—”

“I know.” Weight settled. “Premeditated. I still don’t believe it.”

“And we have the confession.” Cohen talked as if he had Weight, too. “We’re still waiting on trace, and if that comes back with something different, I’ll have another go at it. But right now we don’t have anything that points to anyone
but
Rhodes. You were going to find me something else, remember?”

“What about fingerprints? You checked those glasses of milk?”

“No hits on any of the prints. The only ones we could match were Elise’s.”

I gave that some thought.

“It gets worse,” Cohen said.

I waited.

“She was drugged. Enough oxycodone in her system to turn her into Sleeping Beauty. We found an empty bottle in Rhodes’s rucksack. Tests show positive for oxycodone. So that, along with his story to Hoffreider, moves it from a crime of passion to premeditated.”

“Rhodes is in constant pain. Of course he’d have something.” I looked through the doorway to the pill bottle on the counter. “Everyone has something.”

“Short of capturing it on video,” Cohen went on, “things are about as clear-cut as they get. Unless trace puts someone else there at the time of her death.” He paused as if waiting. When I said nothing, he went on. “Or unless you know some reason why Rhodes would give up his life for Merkel. What he said to me was, and I quote, ‘Elise told me I need to come clean. So I am.’”

The weight in my chest grew until I felt my heart would plummet to my feet. I still did not believe Tucker had killed his Beauty. But a grand jury would look at the evidence and indict him. If he persisted in his claim of guilt and entered a guilty plea to the court, the judge would decide his sentence—minus the death penalty—and there would be no trial. No trial, no Habbaniyah.

Maybe he’d decided to sacrifice his life and honor for his fellow Marines.

Isn’t that what you want, Parnell?
said my survivor voice.
With Tucker guilty, you can walk away. You and Gentry.

“Fuck all,” I said.

We were silent for a moment, listening to each other breathe. I wanted to get up and find some cigarettes, but it hurt too much to move. I kept thinking of the photos I’d taken. Something continued to nag at me, just as it had at the Black Egg. But every time I tried to chase it down, whatever I sought vanished like smoke.

“And nothing on Melody or Liz?”

“We’re looking. Nothing so far.”

“Fuck all,” I said again.

“Yeah.” Cohen cleared his throat. “About last night. About us, I mean.”

I closed my eyes against the tears, but they spilled out anyway. “Don’t read anything into last night, okay? One cop helping another.”

“Don’t do that, Parnell. It was more than that.”

It had been. But there was nothing I could do with that. “We wouldn’t be any good together.”

Another long silence. I gripped the phone like a lifeline.

“Fuck all. You’re probably right,” Cohen said and hung up.

I sat in the chair, staring at nothing, the phone dead in my hand.

Some part of me warned,
Get out of here. Sarge’ll come back. And this time he’ll kill you.

But still I sat.

After a while, Clyde stood and nudged me until he—and the thought of Liz Weber out there somewhere—got me to my feet. I hobbled into the kitchen and grabbed the pain pills from the Laramie EMTs. I downed three and stuffed the bottle in my pants pocket.

Moving like a ninety-year-old, I tossed clothes and toiletries in a bag along with my camera. I placed Clyde’s bowls and food into another bag. I watered Grams’s plants, put a hold on the newspaper, and set the living room light on a timer. Just as if I were a normal person with a normal life, going away for a few days.

In the kitchen, I mopped up Sarge’s blood and the worst of the mess that had spilled out of the refrigerator, tossing the dirty water in the backyard.

I strapped on my belt and added Sarge’s Colt to my bag. Finally, I pulled my DPC coat on over my filthy clothing. Cohen’s blood still spattered the front of the jacket, a weeping of red tears across the DPC logo.

At the front door, I paused. I looked around the worn-out living room. At the ancient furniture, the faded walls, the hardwood floor rubbed to dullness by passing feet. I took in Grams’s sampler on the wall and the framed picture of my parents that Grams hadn’t let me shove in a drawer. I stared at my textbooks piled on the coffee table, my spiral notebook still open where I’d been jotting notes next to a stack of books.
The Iliad
,
In Search of the Trojan War
, and
The Art of the Essay.

I took it all in as if I’d never see it again.

Then I tugged on gloves, and Clyde and I walked out the door into the icy dawn.

At Nik’s, I parked on the street. The snow had stopped, and I stared out the window. It had been less than forty-eight hours since I’d come to give Nik the news about Elise.

The house looked deserted. Curtains drawn, lights off. Harvey quiet somewhere—in the yard or maybe the house. The porch light still burned, and a couple of newspapers lay in the snow on the uncleared driveway. No one had shoveled the path or the stairs.

Just beyond the feeble reach of the porch light, a tiny amber flare came and went like a warning signal. Someone smoking.

I slid painfully out of the truck. Clyde hopped out beside me and we made our slow, limping way up the drive then up the porch steps toward the cigarette’s glow. A low growl came from the porch. Harvey.

Clyde stiffened but made no sound.

“Sydney Rose,” Nik said from the darkness. “Come sit with me.”

I held my groan as I reached the last stair and stepped from the promise of dawn into the gloom. I eased my weight onto the plastic lawn chair next to Nik’s and took the blanket he offered me, wrapped it around my legs. Harvey snarled again from his place beside Nik and Nik ordered him quiet. Clyde ignored Harvey and sat regally by my side. Score one for the Belgian Malinois.

“What are you doing out here, Nik?”

“There’s so much pain in the house it’s like being wrapped in plastic.” He sucked the cigarette. “Man’s gotta breathe.”

I eyeballed Nik in the crackling light from his cigarette. His face was gray and sunken, red eyes heavily lidded. He looked half frozen in his jeans and railway jacket.

“You’ll die of the cold out here,” I said.

“No. I’ll suffer a little. Seems like I should. Just so long as I can breathe.” He nodded toward a box of donuts on the wrought-iron table. “Neighbor brought them. They’re half frozen. Help yourself.”

I was too nauseous. But I gave Clyde a glazed donut. He ate it politely, came back for more. Gently I pushed his head away.

Beyond the houses to the east, tentative sunlight infused the sky with opal. A splash of light splayed across the snow-filled yards. The air burned with cold.

Nik handed me a bottle of whiskey. I drank. Handed it back. The warmth crept into my stomach like an animal curling up in its burrow.

“You’re hurt,” Nik said.

“Some.”

After a few times back and forth with the bottle, Nik said, “You want to tell me what’s going on?”

I talked as the sun rose in a dead-white sky. I told him about the skinheads and the shootout at Melody’s house and the missing little girl and Cohen getting hurt and Tucker’s confession. I told him that despite those words, Tucker almost certainly hadn’t killed Elise. Nik looked at me for a long time, then looked away, out toward a neighbor’s yard where a pair of squirrels chased each other among the poplars, their crazy leaps dumping clots of snow to the ground.

“You sure?” he asked. “That he didn’t kill her?”

“Pretty sure. Yes.”

A pause. “Chief called me before you got here. I already knew he confessed.”

“He confessed because he’s a Marine who wants to protect other Marines.”

“You’re saying another Marine killed her?”

“It’s more complicated than that.”

“I got time.”

“Forget complicated. It’s irrelevant. And you said it yourself, Nik. What happens in Iraq—”

“Stays there. Okay. Who killed our Elise?”

“I don’t know yet.”

He kept his face toward the street and the yard. Seeing. Maybe not seeing. “But you got some idea, I can tell. So go on.”

“It’s about a man named Alfred Merkel.”

Nik’s face shifted. Went under, like the face of a drowning man. “Tell me.”

So I did. I told him about the cops being shot and about Thomas Brown, although I didn’t provide a name that would link him to his sister. When I got to the part about what the skinheads had done to Brown, I had trouble going on for a while. After I found my voice again, I told Nik about Cohen’s home, a place the size of a small village, and even though it had nothing to do with the investigation, I wondered aloud what drove a man to have so much and yet turn around to risk his life for so little.

I ended by bringing it back to Alfred Merkel and the news that he had once been one of the Royer Boys. I didn’t mention Jazmine Brown, or the fact of Gentry’s name in her file. But I tossed out the Royer Boys like a piece of bait, wanting to see if Nik would grab on. When he remained silent, I ended my story with Cohen heading back into work and me needing some time and space to clear my head.

I didn’t mention Sarge.

“You get hurt like that with the skinheads?”

“Partly.”

“What’s the rest?”

“Nothing to do with Elise.”

The sun lifted over the houses, sent light like an ice pick stabbing across the porch. Nik squinted, took another sip, passed the bottle. His breath was a ghost in the morning air.