Blood on the Tracks (5 page)

I shook my head, tilted my face up to the frigid air.

I did not want to look at that uniform, afraid of what it might reveal. For a moment, the Colorado cold disappeared, replaced by heat and flies and sand, and I was standing in our bunker, in the processing room, washing a body. Carefully I cleaned away the blood and dirt, the pieces of gray matter and spatters of internal organs that might or might not belong to the dead man. This particular body had no feet. No left hand.

The back of his skull was gone.

What about the missing parts?
I asked as I made a diagram of the body.

Color them in
, said the Sir.
Shade them black.

“Sydney Rose?”

I blinked. “His uniform blouse is here. In the pit. He tried to burn it.”

This time Nik held the camera. I grabbed another stick and used the two pieces like tongs to tug the fabric free. Rhodes’s entire uniform was in the pit. Blouse, trousers, and cover, folded tight. When I had the articles free of the pit, I used the sticks to unfurl them. They were tacky and gave way reluctantly. We saw why when I had the blouse and trousers open on the ground.

“Elise’s blood,” Nik said, looking at the red-black blooms on the desert camouflage. He wobbled on his feet and I caught his arm.

“Let me get the pictures, Nik. Take Clyde and go for a walk.”

But he shook me off. “I’ll do it.”

“I’m calling Cohen.”

He didn’t respond. I watched him for a moment as he held the Lumix up and began snapping pictures. When I was sure he was steady, I stripped off my gloves and went to stand next to Clyde. Clyde moved close and looked up into my face.

“Good boy, Clyde,” I said. “We’re almost done here.”

I dialed Cohen.

“It’s Parnell,” I said when the detective answered. “Elise Hensley’s uncle ID’d a possible suspect for her murder. Said she was engaged to a war vet, a homeless man. There were a couple of domestic violence incidents. We’re down at his camp now. Word is he came in this morning, early, then caught out maybe an hour ago.”

“You got a name?” Cohen asked.

“Tucker Rhodes. Marine Corps vet. Originally from Montana. His uniform is here. He tried to burn it. Looks like blood all over it.”

“Where are you?”

I gave him the cross streets.

“Hold on,” he said. I heard talking in the background, then he came back on.

“My partner and a couple of uniforms are on their way. What do you mean he ‘caught out’?”

“It’s a hobo term. It means that if our witness is right, Rhodes hopped an empty coal train heading north. He could be halfway to the Wyoming border by now, depending on whether the train hit any delays. I can find out exactly where.”

“I’ll run him. Can you stop the train?”

“If that’s what you want to do. Let me find out which train and where it is. I’ll call you back.”

I hung up and called NOC, the National Operations Center in Fort Worth. The Colorado chief dispatcher and I ran down a list of possible trains until we hit the one Rhodes had likely caught. Dispatch gave me the train symbol, the engine number, and a mile marker.

“You want me to stop it?” the dispatcher asked.

I heard the reluctance in her voice. Trains were only profitable when they had velocity—when they ran smoothly and stuck to their timetable. The crews, too, were on a strict schedule. Once they’d put in their twelve hours, they were dead on line, and you had to get them off the train. Didn’t matter where they were. Top of a mountain pass in the middle of a blizzard, you had to get them off that train and back to town.

“I’ll let you know,” I said.

I disconnected and studied Rhodes’s small jungle. The uniform, the uneaten beans, the clown picture frame, and the pile of canned food sitting in the open where any hobo could help himself to Rhodes’s trove. There was something final in his actions. Not just that he didn’t mean to come back here, to Denver. More like he was going someplace he wouldn’t ever come back from. Burning his uniform made sense if he was hiding evidence. But it also made sense if he was severing his last ties to the world.

Nik finished with the pictures and came to stand with me and Clyde.

“He’s going home, Nik. He’s going to kill himself.”

“You don’t know that.”

I gestured to the train tracks. “This line leads to Montana. He’s going home to die.”

Nik’s face went hard. “I won’t let him do that.”

My headset buzzed. Cohen. I put my phone on speaker so Nik could hear.

“I found a Lance Corporal Tucker Rhodes of Shelby, Montana,” Cohen said.

“That’s him.”

“No priors, no extraditable warrants. Dishonorably discharged after going AWOL from his treatments at a residence in Texas near Brooke Army Medical.”

Meaning he had no right to wear the uniform. But as badly as he’d been hurt in the service of his country, who could blame him for feeling the uniform was still his?

“You find the train?” Cohen asked.

“It’s outside Fort Collins, fifty miles south of the Wyoming border.”

“He could have hopped off in Fort Collins,” Cohen said.

“Have the police there put out an APB. But I think he’s going home. To Montana.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Call it a hunch.”

“Okay.” Cohen sucked in breath through his teeth; I heard the hiss. “He could also be trying to get as far north as he can. Canada won’t expedite arrest warrants against Americans who risk the death penalty. If Rhodes knows that, he might be trying to make a run for the border.”

“Could be.”

“But you don’t think so.”

“I think he plans to kill himself. And I think he wants to do it in Montana.”

“Based on what?”

“He shed his stuff. Food. Personal belongings. His uniform.”

“Classic. Okay. But if he’s going to kill himself, why wait until he gets to Montana?”

“You spend a lot of time on the other side of the world, watch your best friends get blown apart there?” My gaze traveled toward the river where I’d seen the Sir earlier. “You go through that, then you want to be home when you call it in.”

“You think that’s the way he’s working it, that’s what we’ll run with,” Cohen said. “We’ll set up an ambush. I’ll contact the Larimer County sheriff’s office. We need a place along the line where SWAT can hide.”

Nik identified himself. “There’s an abandoned fertilizer factory ten miles south of the Wyoming border. It’s a couple of miles west of the interstate, and the terrain is pretty flat, so even if he runs, he’ll find it hard to hide. There’s still a usable road leading directly to it, so SWAT won’t have any problem getting in.”

“How long before the train gets there?”

“Forty-five minutes, give or take,” I said.

“That’s tight.”

“We can buy you some time,” Nik said. “Have the crew stop on the tracks until the sheriff has his men in place.”

But I shook my head. “Too risky. By now he figures there’s a good chance we’re looking for him. Anything out of the ordinary, he’ll jump. We can slow the train down, buy another five minutes. Maybe ten. But I wouldn’t stop it.”

“Make it ten,” Cohen said.

Nik took a few steps away and I heard him on his phone, talking to dispatch.

Cohen told me to hang on. Muffled voices whispered unintelligibly through the phone connection. Then he came back. “We’re notifying the sheriff now. So this camp of his. Someone ID’d it as his personal camping spot?”

“Yes.”

“Wish you’d invited me to the party.”

I heard the anger in his voice and knew he was right. But I stuck by Nik. “You wouldn’t know about the guest of honor without us.”

“I’ll call for an arrest warrant. Give me five.” He hung up, called back in three.

“We’ve got the right judge handling warrants. Should go fast. You two want to be there when this goes down?”

“You want the victim’s uncle to be part of the ambush?”

“He’s a pro, isn’t he? It’s how we usually play things. And it’s railroad property. Your arrest, if you want it. I don’t believe in waltzing in on someone else’s territory.”

I ignored the dig. “Doesn’t matter. There’s no way we can make it. Not even if we push it all the way north.”

“You gotta learn to think outside the box, Parnell,” Cohen said. “How you guys feel about helicopters?”

Nik watched me over the hood of the Explorer while we waited for Cohen and the chopper. Cohen’s partner, a dour-faced mountain of a man by the name of Len Bandoni, was already down at Rhodes’s camp. A pair of uniforms was stringing up crime scene tape. The snow had finally arrived, falling steadily.

“You don’t need to come, Sydney Rose,” Nik said. “You gave what I asked.”

“And you didn’t. The deal was to get a lead then hand things over to regular police.”

“We pulled Cohen into it.”

“That wasn’t what we agreed.”

He shook out a cigarette. “It’s Elise, for Christ’s sake.”

“I know.” I poured water in a bowl for Clyde and watched him drink. “I know, Nik. I understand. It’s the reason I’m not yelling at you. But you’re too close to this. You almost lost it with our witness.”

He lit the cigarette and flicked the match away. “I’m not going to shoot him.”

“So you say.”

He came around the hood of the Ford. Clyde was instantly up and standing between us.

“Out,” I said to Clyde, giving him the command to back down. Reluctantly he went to heel, but he kept his eyes on Nik.

“I need to do this,” Nik said. “And Cohen invited me personally. Once Rhodes is in custody, I’m good, okay? I’ll let the law do what it needs to do.”

I folded my arms.

Nik said, “But I was wrong earlier. What I said about you going back to the office. I want you to come.”

“No.”

“Clyde could use Rhodes’s uniform.”

“What?”

“To smell him out. If Rhodes slips out between the searchers, Clyde could track him from the scent of his uniform.”

“The sheriff has K9 teams.”

“You ever know an air scent dog good as Clyde? Or a dog as likely to stay the course?”

“Damn it, Nik.”

“You will make me beg, won’t you, Sydney Rose? Fine. I’m begging. We’re talking about
Elise
, for Christ’s sake. If Rhodes slips through this ambush, he could disappear forever into Canada. If he ends up killing himself, justice will never be served.”

“Not our justice, maybe.”

He inhaled, blew smoke. “There isn’t any other kind.”

I heard a steady
whop-whop
high above us. I glanced up to see the police bird approaching.

“I’m asking,” Nik said.

“Damn it.”

His face was made of stone. “Please.”

A shadow moved in the trees near Rhodes’s camp. At first I thought it was Len Bandoni. Or maybe Calamity Jane going after Rhodes’s discarded food. But then I caught a flash of fair skin and the gleam of blond hair matted with blood.

Elise.

When you acknowledge the dead, you call them to you. I hadn’t yet figured out how to send them away.
Most of us get over it
,
the Marine had told me.

I kept reminding myself of that.

“Ah, shit.” I pushed my face into Nik’s. Clyde gave a low growl, but this time I didn’t call him off. “You have no idea what this is costing me.”

“I think I do.”

“No. You don’t. You have no
fucking
idea because you never want to hear about it. I will do this because I love you, Nik. But you have used up every single karma point you had with me. You understand?”

“I’ll never ask you for anything else,” Nik said.

Heat rose in my face. “Damn straight, Nikolas George Lasko. You will never ask again.”

He blinked. “I got it, Sydney Rose.”

I turned away so he wouldn’t see the tears burning my eyes. Something had broken between us that I wasn’t sure we could fix. The worst kind of Weight.

I picked up Clyde’s empty water dish, locked up the Ford, and shouldered my bag.

The chopper came straight down, dropping a path through the snow, throwing a dim gray shadow over us and the truck.

Down by the river, Elise moved from tree to tree, drawn steadily toward her lover’s lingering aura. She looked toward me, blue eyes meeting mine beneath a veil of blood, and I turned my back on her and Nik and the whole damn world. I fisted my hands in Clyde’s leash.

The chopper landed.

C
HAPTER
5

In modern warfare, people disappear. Not because they run off, or go native, or get taken prisoner. I don’t even mean that they’re gone because they’re dead. I mean they vanish. One second they’re right there, standing next to you, as bright and alive as they will always remain in the eyes of their parents, wives, children. Maybe they’re talking about how the Broncos just put some whup-ass on the Raiders or how they’re going to start a computer repair business when they get home or maybe just about how sweet that first post-dawn cigarette tastes and would you like one, too?

And then they take a few steps and the bomb goes off, and when the pink mist is done soaking into the dust, all you’re left with is a single boot and the guy’s hand. Or maybe just his rucksack spewing his med pack and his lucky rabbit’s foot and his last clean pair of underwear across the field.

And there you stand, scared all to shit and grieving like you’ve never grieved.

But fuck if you aren’t happy, too. Because part of you is like, sweet Jesus, that could have been me.

—Sydney Parnell. Personal journal.

Cohen waited, arms folded and jaw tight, while I ducked against the downdraft and hoisted Clyde into the helicopter before Nik and I scrambled aboard, dropping into the forward-facing seats across from the detective.

Cohen shook our hands briefly in turn then closed the chopper door.

He donned headphones and gestured for Nik and me to do the same so that we could talk over the sound of the rotors.

“Be just a minute,” he said. “Checking our clearance with Denver Approach.”

“That train’s chewing up iron,” Nik said.

“Won’t be long.”

Cohen dropped back into his seat and busied himself writing notes in his large spiral book. Up front, the pilots shared a laugh on their private channel. The smell of hydraulic fluid rose from the floorboards, and the chill air held the stink of jet fuel. In an instant, my skin grew hot, my pulse jumped, and sweat beaded at my temples as memories from Iraq burst like mortar fire across my brain.

The Sir. The bomb. Gurneys full of the dead.

I pressed my hands to my face. PTSD. The gift that keeps on giving. I’d been furious with Nik because of Elise’s ghost. But it looked like the helicopter ride was going to be a bonus.

Clyde pushed up against me. He’d been trained for helicopters, but he didn’t look happy, either. He laid back his ears and furrowed his face.

“Easy, boy,” I said.

I held out some kibble from the bag in my pocket and stroked his head, leaning over to whisper into his ear.

“We’re still good.”

He ignored the kibble and watched my face. Dogs sniff out fear and anxiety the way a street thief finds a mark—quickly and without effort. I had to convince myself we were okay before I could convince Clyde.

Still holding out the treat, I relaxed my shoulders and drew in deep, regular breaths the way the VA counselor had taught me. I looked into Clyde’s anxious eyes and envisioned sitting with him in a mountain glen somewhere far away, the two of us basking in the sunlight, watching clouds drift overhead.

We are here, we are here, we are here. Nothing can harm us.

After a minute or two of silent interrogation, Clyde’s ears came forward and his brow smoothed out. He took the kibble from my hand then settled himself on the floor near my feet.

I scrubbed behind his ears. “Good boy.”

One small victory.

I straightened and looked over at Cohen. “Detective?”

He kept jotting notes. “Yeah, Parnell?”

“We were just doing our job. Down at the camp.”

Cohen lifted his head; his eyes met mine like a fist to the face. “That how it seemed to you? Because it seems to me that was my scene. My case, my scene.”

Nik broke in. “We couldn’t be sure we had anything,” he said calmly. “Time was wasting. I made the call.”

“My sympathy for your loss, Lasko. But it was a bad call.”

“Could be we pushed the line a little. But if we’d waited for you to drag your ass down there, we wouldn’t be after Rhodes now.”

Cohen ignored the jibe. “You think how it will look if this goes to trial? You think about what the judge is going to say, you digging around the camp of the man who—”

“Look,” Nik said, “we weren’t trying to piss on your hydrant. But we’ve got to catch the guy before we can try him. We were there. You weren’t.”

Cohen’s face went harder. “Why bring a perp in if you can’t keep him?”

“You sound like a DA.”

“And you’re what, the Lone Ranger? Or did I just miss the memo? When did you become a murder cop?”

“Around the time you decided to sit on your ass while a killer got away.”

“Stop,” I said.

Nik looked at me. Cohen kept his eyes on Nik.

I glared at both of them. “Can we quit with the territory crap and focus on Tucker Rhodes?”

“Right,” Nik said softly.

“Right,” said Cohen. Still pissed.

The pilot’s voice came over the line. “We’re cleared to go.”

The sound of the rotors deepened as they bit the air. Clyde gave a soft whine, and I pulled him close. Together we stared out the window as the chopper got light on her skids then lifted into the snow-dappled air.

Denver dropped beneath us. Distance swallowed first Cohen’s partner in his dark overcoat and then the bright gleam of Elise’s hair. The tents and tarps of the hobo camp disappeared behind the cottonwoods as we swung north.

For the next few minutes we flew in and out of pockets of a halfhearted storm; blue-gray sky whipped by, mottled with pale sunlight. The pilots chatted privately. In his corner, Nik sat like a man braced against a hard wind. Across from me, Cohen kept writing in his notebook.

“Detective?”

He didn’t look up. “What?”

Ground glass in his voice.

“You invited us along. How can we help?”

He tapped a finger on the metal spiral then put aside his anger like a man shrugging off a heavy coat. “Tell me about the train.”

“Engine 158346. It’s a mixed string of a hundred and thirty-eight cars. That translates into a lot of length.”

“How much length?”

“Almost a mile and a half.”

His eyebrows shot up. “There a way to narrow that down?”

“Our witness at the camp said he caught out somewhere on the back half of the train. Chances are good he’s in a rear DPU—”

“Which is?”

“Distributed power unit. Otherwise known as the rear locomotive. Hobos like it because it’s warm and it has a bathroom. This train has two rear units.”

“Okay. We’ll put men in place along the tracks so they’re close to those units when we stop the train. Where else could he be?”

“Can I borrow your notebook and pen?”

When he passed them over, I flipped to a blank page. Then I called up the train consist—the string of cars—from my 3:00 a.m. memory when I’d checked into work from the computer at home. My laptop was still in the shop. A replacement hadn’t materialized.

I started sketching.

“Mostly we’ve got empty coal hoppers,” I said. “They’re too deep to climb out of, and the bottoms are angled into a chute. Hobos don’t ride them because they’re death traps. We won’t find Rhodes there.”

“What else?”

I kept scribbling as I ran down my mental list. “Sixteen or seventeen closed hoppers strung together two-thirds of the way down the train. Rhodes could be riding a hopper platform or tucked into the cubby. If that’s where he is, it will be easy for him to make a fast getaway when the train stops. You’ll have to get men on those quickly.”

“And hoppers are what exactly?”

The edge in his voice made me lift my head. Cohen’s face held a hungry, open-ended curiosity. A need to know everything I knew, and yesterday was too late. I’d seen the look on Doug Ayers’s face a thousand times. Usually when he met with someone involved in whatever covert ops he was working.

The resemblance between the men was so startling that for a second I couldn’t breathe.

Tell me everything
,
Dougie would say to his source.

The memory shot through me with the kick of a sniper’s bullet. Dougie, sitting at a metal folding table in a grove of gum arabic trees, his long legs stretched in front of him, his left hand waving away the droning flies as he chatted with an old tribesman while Clyde and I kept watch twenty yards away. Dust rose languidly into the air and hung there, white as talcum in the desert light. Dougie’s face carried its habitual expression of curiosity and impatience as he twirled the old lion’s head ring he wore on braided leather around his neck.

“Tell me everything,” he said in Arabic.

“Na’am,”
said his source, the Iraqi elder, and poured more tea.

Dougie lifted his cup, saluted the old man.

“Salâmati!”

The old man raised his own cup.
“Salâmati!”

Ten days later, Dougie’s broken body lay on my table in Mortuary Affairs, his eyes and face powdered with that same fine, white dust. The day after that, someone left the old man’s head outside our gates.

Tell me everything, Dougie
, I’d whispered to his body
. I need to know.

“Sydney Rose?” Nik’s voice came from the far end of a long tunnel. “You okay?”

I shook myself, my hand going to Dougie’s ring where it now hung around my neck. Through my coat, I touched the heavy gold. “I’m fine.”

Nik eyeballed me.

I flushed. “I
am
, Nik. I’m fine.”

His eyes narrowed at the lie, but he nodded and went back to his window.

“Hoppers and cubbies.” Cohen’s expression had softened. “You know that I have no clue what the hell you’re talking about.”

“Right. Sorry. A hopper is a car used for carrying bulk items like corn or wheat—products that have to be protected from the weather. The front and rear walls angle in from the top to the bottom, leaving room at each end of the car for a metal platform that sits directly over the wheels. Like this.” I drew a quick sketch. “One platform is taken up with the brake system. But the other platform is open. Perfect for hobos.”

“And the cubby?”

“It’s a hole cut into the end-wall of the car, here”—I pointed—“above the platform. Not roomy, but a great place to hide.”

“Okay. I got the hoppers. Go on.”

“A few flatcars. No worries there—they’re filled with loads that make riding them too risky. But we’ve got twenty-three gondolas spread out along the train.” I made another sketch. “A gondola is essentially a roofless boxcar sliced in half horizontally so it’s only about six feet higher than the wheels. On our train, thirteen of the gondolas are empty, which means he could easily be inside. The only way for us to know is to climb up inside each car and take a look.”

“What about a flyover? Could we see him that way?”

“Depends. If he’s in one of the gondolas, sure. But if he’s on a platform or in a cubby, he’ll be impossible to see from the air. And we run the risk of alerting him if we do a flyover in a police chopper.”

Cohen nodded. “Sounds like the work will have to be done from the ground.”

“How many men do you have?”

“Larimer County is putting their SWAT team in with twenty-one men plus a commander. We’ve got ten deputies, the sheriff, and two K9 teams. State’s giving us another twenty-five men. So sixty plus us.” Cohen rubbed his eyes as if only now realizing how tired he was. “You got suggestions on how we should use everybody once the train stops? Your witness placed him near the rear of the train?”

“Right.”

“Your witness is a drug addict, right?”

“Doesn’t matter. Rhodes has enough experience catching out to know that the back half of a train makes for a better ride. I’d recommend focusing your manpower on the cluster of closed hoppers and empty gondolas in the last third of the train.”

I showed him the consist I’d sketched. “Here,” I pointed. “And here. Plus the rear DPUs. If you stop so that the forward third of the train is across the bridge north of the fertilizer plant, you’ll be able to place men on the roof of the building to look into the open hoppers and the gondolas and to watch for him if he makes a run for it. Put some men on perimeter near the front of the train and at the bridge. Just in case. And tell the guys on perimeter that if Rhodes gets wind of what we’re doing, he might jump as soon as the train slows.”

“We need to tell the sheriff exactly where he should place his men along the track.”

“Mark off the track in hundred-yard segments. So you’ll have men in these places.” I drew tiny markers on the paper.

While Cohen passed the distance indicators onto the sheriff’s dispatcher, I asked the copilot to patch me in with the Fort Worth operations center so I could talk to Engine 158346. The engineer was Dan Albers, a brute of a man with the temper of a cornered badger. When on duty, he kept a Bowie knife strapped to his calf and a sawed-off shotgun next to his chair. He once single-handedly took down a trio of purported members of an FTRA gang who tried to hop his train. The Freight Train Riders of America are violent thugs with a take-no-prisoners mentality. Albers coldcocked two of them before they knew he was there, and he had the third cowering in a boxcar at gunpoint by the time police arrived.

Something to be said for taking care of your own problems. But with his temper, Albers wasn’t who I would have chosen to be driving this particular train.

“Bastard’s on my train,” he said when dispatch put me through.

“Albers, don’t get in the middle of this,” I warned him. “Stay in the cab.”

“Bastard’s got no business being there.”

“Albers.”

“Shit, Parnell.”

I waited.

“Long as he don’t cross me,” he said finally.

“Keep the air up on the brakes,” I said. “We want him to think you’ve just stopped for something on the track.”

“I got it. Don’t get yourself hurt, okay?”

“Thanks.” I hung up.

Cohen glanced at his watch. He looked gray with exhaustion.

“Long day?” I asked.

“Not long enough to fix anything.”

I said nothing. I was unfairly angry at him for making me think of Dougie. Plus, I had no patience for complaints of exhaustion or lack of time. I’d set my standard by the Sir, who was years older than Cohen. The Sir would take seventy-two-hour shifts dodging IEDs and terrorists, spend the next forty-eight up to his elbows in gore, and top it off with back-to-back meetings with grieving Iraqi families. After all that, he would muster up a smile for his crew and a murmured “We’re still good.”