Blood on the Tracks (Sydney Rose Parnell Series Book 1)

by Barbara Nickless

  I toweled off, combed out my hair, pulled on the sweats, then eyeballed Clyde. He lowered his ears with perhaps the first warning of what was coming.

  “Bath,” I said.

  I filled the tub with a few inches of water and poured in baby shampoo. I brought out towels from the linen closet and set them in a heap on the floor.

  I pointed to the tub. “Get in, boy.”

  He hauled himself to his feet like an old dog. I helped him scrabble into the tub and began rubbing soapy water into his fur. I took my time, scratching him in his favorite places. He wasn’t too big on baths, but he seemed to be enjoying this one. He stood in the water with his eyes closed and fairly purred as I ran his brush through his wet fur.

  When I finished, I rinsed him off with the shower nozzle, then ordered him still while I toweled off as much water as I could before the inevitable full-body shake. I helped him out of the tub, and he curled up on the bath mat. I sat on the floor next to him.

  The bathroom was warm, small, safe. The furnace clanked comfortingly through the vents, the mirrors were foggy and moist and opaque—they didn’t make me look at anything I didn’t want to see.

  And outside in the hallway . . .

  I grabbed my whiskey glass from the sink, drank. Then, gently, I laid my hand on Clyde’s head and began scratching him with the brush behind his ears, talking to him in the high-pitched singsong voice dogs love. I knew we were thinking about the same thing—about Dougie and his last day and whatever mission he’d gone on that had required him to leave Clyde with me. Clyde, who loved me because Dougie loved me. And who couldn’t forgive me when Dougie didn’t come back.

  “I am sorry I didn’t trust you today, Clyde.”

  His ears came up.

  “I promise, from here on out, you are my go-to guy. Okay? Partners through thick and thin.”

  He placed his chin on my thigh. As my fingers found the tender spots, he curled into me. He looked almost happy.

  “But we’re going to get serious about our training. And the whole PTSD thing. We’ll have to figure that one out together.”

  He yawned. Closed his eyes.

  “Good boy,” I told him. His tail thumped on the tile.

  I cleaned up the bathroom, then used the hydrogen peroxide on my face and hands and calf, put a butterfly bandage on my cheek, and smeared a light coating of petroleum jelly on my hands, followed by more bandages.

  At the door, I braced myself. But the hallway lay empty.

  Clyde followed me on my rounds as I checked doors and windows and turned out the lights, then went with me to the room at the end of the hall—my childhood bedroom, which Grams had kept exactly the same since I’d been a teenager. When I returned home from Iraq, a decorated Marine, it was to this girl’s room with its painted white furniture and polka-dot comforter, the turquoise-blue walls covered with the peeling posters of indie bands. Other than bringing in my Marine stuff and a couple of mementos from Iraq, I hadn’t changed anything. Maybe because I needed to hang on to the girl I’d been. Or because I didn’t know how to move on.

  I touched the photo of Dougie propped on the nightstand then turned on the bedside lamp and slid under the sheets.

  “Goodnight, Clyde.”

  I waited for him to take up his usual post outside my bedroom door. But for the first time since he’d come back with me from Iraq, Clyde settled himself on the faux zebra rug next to my bed. A minute later, he was snoring.

  I smiled even though it hurt. “Goodnight, Clyde.”

  I read a few pages of Homer’s Iliad for my upcoming class then turned out the light and fell into a tortured sleep.

  In my dream, I stood in the desert at night, under the glittering band of the Milky Way, watching Doug Ayers as the wind riffled his blond hair. The alarm on his watch beeped over and over, and I kept telling him we needed to be quiet. That insurgents were nearby. He finally turned around and looked at me. He nodded his head as if making up his mind about something.

  “Go on, Rosie,” he said. “It’s okay.”

  “Go where, Dougie? And it’s not okay. Don’t tell me it’s okay. What were you thinking?”

  “Take care of Clyde. Someday he’ll save your life.”

  “Why didn’t you take him with you that night? He might have saved your life.”

  “Couldn’t. You know that. But you can. Take him with you. And keep him trained, Rosie. You keep working it, too. And I don’t mean just what you’re doing in the reserves. That’s not enough. You guys are only as good as your training. I need to know the two of you are okay here.”

  “They’ll send me to jail, Dougie. Because of Rhodes. Then what will happen to Clyde?”

  He tilted his head back, looked up at the stars. “You know what you need to do, Rosie. Now’s the time to be strong.”

  His alarm kept pinging over and over until I woke up enough to realize it was my cell phone as someone rang, hung up, tried again.

  Still half in the dream, my heart leaping in panic, I scrabbled across the nightstand for the phone.

  “Dougie?”

  “Um, this is Detective Cohen. May I speak with Special Agent Parnell?”

  I closed my eyes against the fresh wash of grief.

  “Speaking,” I said after a moment.

  “It’s Mike. Sorry. Did I wake you?”

  I turned toward the red glow of the clock face. 1:27 a.m. “No. I was reading.”

  “Insomnia?”

  “Guilt.”

  Silence.

  “Sorry, Detective. Sometimes I don’t think before I speak.”

  “S’kay. I have a lot of those nights.”

  We were both silent for a moment. Then he said, “Thanks for doing my job for me while I sat on my ass in Fort Collins. Everyone says you’re a hero.”

  I wasn’t going to play that gig. “I’m guessing you didn’t call me at one thirty in the morning to sing my praises.”

  “No. It’s Rhodes. He’s asking for you.”

  I sat up, fumbled on the nightstand for a cigarette. A pounding ache began behind my eyes. “You’re at the hospital?”

  “Headquarters. The ER doc released him, and we brought him here.”

  “He’s okay?”

  “He’s got some old bruising and other injuries. Says someone jumped him in Wyoming. But the hypothermia wasn’t too bad, I guess. His heart’s good, he’s clearheaded. All tests come back normal. Doc says if he’d stayed out there, though, it would have tipped the other way. You saved his life.”

  I brought the cigarette up, found some matches, swung my feet to the floor. My body protested, and I sucked in my breath at the pain. “Don’t tell Nik that.”

  “Yeah. Rough spot, that one. Hold on.” A pause while Cohen covered the mouthpiece and said something to someone. He came back on. “Look, if you’re not sleeping anyway, think you could come down to headquarters? Rhodes says he’ll talk to us, but only if he can talk to you first.”

  “He ask for me by name?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He say why?”

  “Probably some jarhead Marine shit.”

  I lit the cigarette, inhaled. Clyde got to his feet and padded over to the window.

  “Can’t this wait until morning?”

  “Rhodes is ready to talk. We don’t want to give him time to change his mind or think too much about his story or call in a lawyer. Look, I know it’s a lot, but we’d appreciate it, Bandoni and me.”

  I bent down and shook out my boots, a standard routine in Iraq when you had to make sure scorpions hadn’t crawled into your clothing while you slept. I stopped with the left boot cradled in my injured palm. The dream must still have had its hold on me.

  “All right,” I said finally, thinking, And so it begins. “Give me a half hour or so to get there.”

  “Thanks, Parnell.”

  I hung up and rose painfully to my feet, the whiskey a whisper in my veins. I crossed to the window next to Clyde and pushed aside the curtain, looking out on the
blue-white landscape. The storm had gone through and the night sky was clear. Moonlight irradiated the yard. I looked for the Sir, the man who’d brought me into this. But the yard lay empty.

  I smoked. Touched Dougie’s ring beneath my T-shirt.

  It is true that life gives us the very thing we fear the most. After the war and after losing Dougie and after everything else that happened, life was handing me Rhodes and our deadly, mutual past in Habbaniyah. Lest I forget my debts. Lest I try to put them behind me.

  The ravens of war always come home to roost.

  Clyde put his front paws on the windowsill, maybe wondering what had caught my attention. His breath left a fog on the glass.

  “We’re in it now, Marine,” I said.

  He dropped back to the floor and trotted out of the room. A moment later I heard him in the kitchen, rifling through the empty McDonald’s bag.

  CHAPTER 10

  In war, your fellow soldiers become everything to you. Brother, sister, father, son. These are the women and men who have your back. Who hold your life. Whose lives you hold.

  Loyalty rises above everything else. Above compassion for civilians, above right cause, above command orders. Loyalty rises even over self-preservation. It’s why men throw themselves on grenades to save their buddies.

  In war, loyalty is the one thing you can count on. This is what the Marine motto, Semper Fidelis, is all about: Always Faithful.

  —Sydney Parnell, ENGL 0208, Psychology of Combat

  The Denver PD Major Crimes unit is located in the headquarters building in the Capitol Hill area of Denver, ten blocks from where Elise was murdered. I parked in a police slot on 14th Avenue, entered the lobby, and showed my badge to the officer at the bank of windows.

  “Detective Cohen is expecting me.”

  “I’ll buzz him.” The officer pushed a clipboard in my direction. “Sign here.”

  Five minutes later, an elevator pinged, doors whooshed open, and Cohen appeared on the other side of the walk-through metal detector wearing the same button-down shirt and rumpled charcoal suit I’d last seen him in. The previous twenty-four hours sat on him with the kind of weight that could bend bones. He looked two inches shorter.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hey.”

  He waved me through the detector, then took in my injured face. His eyes went narrow.

  “Rhodes do that?”

  “No.”

  “Then what?”

  I heard a familiar tone in his voice—affronted manhood. I’d heard it a lot in Iraq. No Marine wants to see a buddy hurt. But when a female is involved, the male Marines get proprietary about it. It used to piss me off. But coming from Cohen, it seemed okay. Less knee-jerk and more personal.

  I tried a smile. “You can’t worry about me, you know.”

  “Not what friends are for?”

  “So we’re friends now?”

  “Just feel like slumming is all,” he said.

  “Thought you’d get enough of that working here.”

  Even his laugh was tired.

  I followed him through the door, up the elevator to the second floor, and then down a hall past conference rooms and through multiple doorways. Even a police station gets quiet in the middle of the night. Or some parts of it. Our footsteps scratched on the carpet, rapped back at us off the scuffed white walls. Somewhere, water was dripping.

  “Clyde doesn’t like police stations?” Cohen asked over his shoulder.

  “He doesn’t like cops.”

  I’d left Clyde sprawled out and snoring on the kitchen floor, sated with bath and burgers. Alone with my thoughts as I’d driven over, I’d stared into the white-frosted night, the gamut of my emotions ping-ponging around like a checklist for the mentally disturbed.

  First, I had anger. A lot of it.

  Then sorrow, running through the anger like a black thread. Mostly for Elise, whose brutalized body had taken residence in my mind even as her ghost haunted my home. And there was grief for the living, too. For Nik and Ellen Ann. For Gentry. And even for Rhodes, who had lost everything.

  Third came pity. Rhodes might have signed up for the war. But he hadn’t signed up for what happened to him there. I’m sure he would have hated my pity if he’d known about it. Probably hated it every time he saw it in someone’s face. But there it was.

  And finally, a jagged, icy fear. A fear that reached through all the meds the docs had prescribed for me—the antianxiety tablets, the antidepressants, the pills for anger and insomnia and hypervigilance and for the long string of days when I just didn’t give a shit. The fear that pressed against my throat like a blade.

  Fear of the rage that had almost made me shoot a man.

  And fear of Iraq. Of Habbaniyah.

  Cohen waved me through a door marked Homicide Division where at last some life showed. A handful of detectives were on third watch or still working on something they’d started earlier. Cohen’s partner, Len Bandoni, waited for us at a desk near the windows, shredding an empty Styrofoam cup while his eyes skimmed a file lying open in front of him. He’d hung his XXL suit jacket over the back of his chair and rolled up the cuffs of his gray button-down. He looked as tired and rumpled as Cohen, his shirt creased and stained, his tie wadded up and stuffed between a couple of framed family photos.

  At the sound of our approach, he rose, brushed the Styrofoam remnants off his pants, and offered a massive hand. His walrus mustache bristled as he said my name. His grip was a dime’s edge from bone-crushing. Even tired, he looked like he could tear down a mountain without breaking a sweat.

  “Those’ll be shiners in a couple more hours,” he said, releasing my hand. He reeked of cigarettes.

  I resisted the urge to massage my fingers. “Saves on eyeliner.”

  “Thanks for working the crime scene for us. Saved us hours of work we would have spent doing it right.”

  I worked not to flinch.

  “You’re right,” I said. “Our bad.”

  “You sometimes forget you’re a railway cop? Maybe forget forensics and due process and all those other unimportant formalities that we in the Denver PD like to consider part of the job?”

  “Look, I—”

  “So busy cleaning up graffiti you think it’s your job to clean up a crime scene, too?”

  Cohen said, “Bandoni.”

  My face flamed. “You ever forget what it’s like to lose someone you love?”

  From a desk ten feet away, a detective talking on the phone covered the mouthpiece and glared at us. “It the Mutt and Jeff show over there? Keep it down to a dull roar, maybe?”

  Bandoni gave him the finger.

  Cohen pulled out a chair for me then perched on the corner of the desk. He toed open one of the drawers and rested his feet on it.

  I ignored the chair. “Where’s Rhodes?”

  Bandoni leaned against his desk, arms folded. “Cooling his heels in an interview room.”

  “You read him his rights?”

  “We’ve taken him into custody,” Cohen said. “But we haven’t arrested him.”

  “I thought you got a warrant.”

  “We don’t want him to lawyer up.” This from Bandoni. “But he won’t talk.”

  “Really? Two of Denver’s finest can’t get a grieving boy to admit he went a little crazy?”

  “He just keeps saying he can’t remember anything.” Bandoni’s voice rumbled like a subway. “Keeps saying he wants to talk to you.”

  “How sure are you that he’s good for Elise’s death?”

  “About like Brutus with Caesar,” Bandoni said. “We got his bloodied uniform. We got a bloodied knife found in the bathroom of a 7-Eleven a block from the vic’s home. We got a video of Rhodes going in and out of said bathroom in said uniform. The landlady tells us a man wearing military camouflage came in early this morning and went upstairs. Rhodes tried to burn his uniform, and then he fled the area. Most incriminating, we got what my gut’s saying.”

  I bit. “What’s th
at?”

  “That there’s a reason our boy has nervous eyes.”

  “Everyone who’s come back from Iraq has nervous eyes.”

  He gazed at me speculatively. “We don’t need the eyes.”

  “Sounds like everything’s cut-and-dried then. So why am I here?”

  “You mean other than as a favor to a fellow Marine?” Cohen asked.

  “I figure you guys aren’t in the habit of dispensing favors to murder suspects.”

  “We’re hoping he’ll open up to you.”

  “Get a guy with amnesia to confess to a crime he can’t remember?”

  Bandoni shook his head in disgust. “He doesn’t have fucking amnesia. He fucked up big time, and now he wants to weasel out of it. We need you to get him to tell you what happened. One Marine to another.”

  “Just like that.”

  “And get it on tape,” he added.

  “Makes everyone’s job easier,” Cohen said. “He confesses, and the physical evidence backs him up, the DA will probably offer him a plea bargain and we won’t have to go to trial.”

  “I thought you guys liked to go to trial. The reward for all your hard work.”

  “That’s after we’ve done a lot of hard work.”

  I reached behind me for the chair and sat down. My heart gave an eager little flutter that shamed me. If Rhodes confessed, Elise would get her justice, but there would be no need for a trial. There would be no media circus, no eager journalists or determined prosecutors digging into Rhodes’s past. No news personalities looking for what had turned a man into a butcher.

  No Habbaniyah.

  “I’ll talk to him,” I said.

  “I want more than a confession,” Bandoni said. “It can’t be something the defense can throw out as speculation or a false confession. We can’t have Rhodes saying later that he was taking you for a monkey ride. I need him to show enough awareness of his crime that the best public defender in the world can’t turn it into an insanity plea. I want details. I want him to say he took that knife into the apartment. I want proof that he remembers every single goddamn thing he did to that girl.”