“She hasn’t shown up yet with any friends or neighbors,” I said. “They’re operating under the assumption she left the house with her mother, who initially was the top suspect. Our discovery puts a different spin on things. An Amber Alert has gone out. The FBI is putting together a rapid-response team and the media’s been put on notice. In an hour, the entire world will be looking for her. But right now we’re all she’s got.”
“Goddammit,” Wilson said. “She could be anywhere.”
As if suddenly aware of how big “anywhere” was, the four of us took in the fields and the road, the warehouses and suburbs and the distant ruins of a former industrial site. We ended up looking between the train cars toward the river.
Ketz said, “We’ll need divers.”
“There’s a child’s toy in the Lexus,” I said. “The lead detective wants us to do a quick process of the vehicle then break a window and grab that toy, see if my dog can pick up a scent trail.”
“Your dog any good?” Gresino asked.
I gave him a cool stare. “Former Marine.”
“Let’s do it then.” Wilson turned to the other men. “Al, stay on the body. Keep doing the dance. Ketz, call in additional units and have them set up a roadblock in both directions and reroute traffic off Potters. Get someone to block the bike path by the river before a bunch of exercise nuts wander in.”
He rubbed his right eye with the heel of his hand and looked at the river again.
“A missing kid,” he said. “Goddammit.”
Wilson went by the book as he did an exterior examination of the Lexus. No doubt he shared my gut-churning need to hurry. But if Clyde couldn’t pick up a trail for Lucy, the SUV might be the only link we had to her. He had to do it right.
While he snapped photos of the vehicle and the surrounding area, I dialed my boss. Captain Mauer had transferred to Denver from Chicago two years ago and proved himself as worthy as any of the home-grown brass. When he picked up, I gave him a quick rundown of what I knew. The murders. The child. And the tanker train, UNMACWAT21. A train he now needed to cancel.
“I’ll be damned,” he said softly. “I’ll jump on that data the detective asked for. And I’ll cover the train. You and Clyde find that little girl.”
“Yes, sir.”
From the back of my Ford, I removed the tools I’d need to get inside the Lexus. I gave Clyde some water and downed him in the shade, then shucked off my jacket and pulled on sunglasses. I swung the strap of my small duffel over my shoulder and made a wide circle of my own around the Lexus, careful not to disturb the immediate area.
Samantha Davenport’s car was a late-model mint-condition black SUV with tan leather interior. Vanity plates showed a stretch of green prairie with a mountain range in the distance and the word Madonna. An impressive ego. Or maybe a business name. I walked around to the front of the car. Grass blades and thistle stems bristled from the front grill, shoved through the grate by the speed of her passage through the field. A spatter of mud clung to the wheel wells and along the running boards.
Samantha Davenport—or whoever had been driving—had come off the road in a hurry. And, judging by the mud, she’d arrived here during or shortly after the late-night thunderstorm. With luck, the crime scene guys would manage to pull some footprints. In the thick tangle of weeds, all I could make out were a few broken stalks.
I walked to the road and looked north, the direction she’d come from. There were no rubber burns on the asphalt. If she’d hit the brakes before veering off, she hadn’t braked hard. A quarter mile beyond the railroad overpass, she’d swerved, plowed through the brush by the road, and come to a stop a few feet short of the embankment that dropped steeply toward the railroad tracks.
“What were you looking for?” I asked softly. “Or was this simply your only chance? Did you run off the road hoping your daughter could escape?”
Or—an even uglier thought—had the engineer been wrong about what he thought he’d seen? Had Samantha shot her family then killed her daughter somewhere else before climbing onto the tracks? Maybe the blood hadn’t been hers.
That was a path I didn’t want to go down.
Assuming the killer had taken Lucy somewhere nearby, I did a three-sixty. Half a mile to the north lay a two-acre sprawl of warehouses and industrial buildings. Two miles southeast, a new housing development. Directly east, a pair of silos were just visible behind the ridgeline of a hill—an abandoned cement factory that sat slowly decaying on DPC property from the days when trains had hauled material to and from the plant on a T&W short line.
I glanced at my watch. Ten minutes had gone by. Wilson was now talking into a small voice recorder. I used my forearm to wipe sweat from my face and fumbled in my pocket for cigarettes I didn’t have. Agitation burned in my stomach with the delicate touch of a welding torch.
“Day’s wasting,” I said to Wilson.
“Yeah, I know.” He dropped his recorder in the pocket of his suit jacket. “Let’s do it.”
I pulled on latex gloves then walked around to the rear driver’s-side door. I wedged a strip of hard plastic into the narrow gap between the top of the door and the frame, then used my fist to pound it in until the gap was wide enough to allow me to squeeze an air bladder into the opening. I inflated the bladder until the gap widened, then slid a metal rod inside and hit the unlock button. I opened the door and got out of Wilson’s way.
The detective took photos of the car’s interior, then leaned in with gloved hands and dislodged the stuffed animal.
“One brown stuffed animal, a monkey,” he noted into his recorder. He looked around the back seat area. “The only other items visible in the car are an adult’s blue rain jacket, also in the back seat. And a pair of sunglasses hanging from a clip on the driver’s sun visor. We are not touching the glove box or the console between the front seats.”
He emerged from the car and backed away to where I waited.
There was no way of knowing if the monkey belonged to Lucy. It could be hers or belong to one of her siblings or even the family dog. But it had a pink lace ribbon pinned to the top of its head. And a single long, light-brown hair caught around one of the shiny black buttons.
Wilson used tweezers to remove and bag the hair. Then he dropped the toy in a paper bag and handed it to me. I turned my attention to Clyde, who came to his feet, tail swishing.
“Ready to get to work, boy?”
I showed him his Kong, a bright-red chew toy that he adored. His ears came up and his tail wagged faster. For Clyde, like other military working dogs and K9s, work was play. More than that—work was joy.
I opened the bag to give him a good whiff of the sock monkey, then waited until his eyes returned to mine.
“Seek!” I said, giving him the search command.
Clyde made a beeline for the Lexus and thrust his head through the open doorway. I called him back, then gave the command again, indicating he needed to look for the scent elsewhere. He circled the SUV, found Lucy’s scent on the far side and trotted down the embankment toward the train. I followed him, my heart in my throat.
“Dear God,” Wilson said.
Deke was sure that only Samantha Davenport had been on the tracks. But if Deke had struck an eight-year-old child with a four-hundred-ton locomotive churning out more than ninety-seven thousand pounds of force, a glancing blow wouldn’t make a sound or cause a ripple.
Then, fifteen feet from the tracks, Clyde did a ninety-degree turn and headed away from the tracks and the silent train. I found my breath again. He trotted briskly, tail straight out, hips swaying with confidence.
Where would a terrified eight-year-old go in the darkness? Storm clouds. No moon. She would have run anywhere that was away, I figured, her mother’s voice in her ears. Maybe the train tracks—empty then—had given her a faint path in the dark.
Clyde stayed steady.
“It’s a good scent,” I told Wilson, who was jogging behind me.
“How will we know we’r
e getting close?”
“Clyde will tell us.”
Up above, a car drove past going the opposite direction. I glimpsed the gawking face of a woman through the driver’s window and the flash of brake lights as the driver slowed before resuming speed.
“Ketz, get that roadblock up, now,” Wilson snapped into the radio.
Clyde and I fell into the familiar rhythm we’d developed when we came back from Iraq and joined the railway police, our emotions moving back and forth along the lead as if it were an umbilical cord. Although Clyde and I hadn’t been a team during the war, we’d since created a cadence born of trust, a rhythm we’d been improving the last two months through rigorous instruction and hours of practice with a man who’d trained canines for the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, before moving to the United States. In many ways, Clyde knew me better than anyone. Likewise, I understood his needs and moods more intimately than my own.
Now my partner confidently struck due east, heading in the direction of the cement factory. Morning sun settled our shadows behind us. Larks sang in the meadow and swallows swirled up from the trees along the river, darting like arrows into the brightening sky. Beneath thistles and tuft grass, water pooled in tiny hollows, evidence of the rare Colorado monsoon. On our right, falling further behind as we walked, the train sat quietly, waiting for velocity with the patient heft of iron. The smell of oil and coal and creosote wafted in the air, a discordant note against the dusty burn of sage and the faint, sweet notes of wild primrose.
“Were you a Marine?” Wilson asked as we walked. “Like Clyde?”
“First Expeditionary Force.”
“Iraq, then.”
“Yes.”
“You and Clyde worked together there?”
“I wasn’t a handler then. Just a—” I stopped and started again. “When I was over there, Clyde’s handler and I were close. After he died, someone arranged for me to take his dog.”
“Your friend die in combat?”
“He was kidnapped and tortured.”
“Dear God. I’m sorry.”
For a moment, I had no words. Not a day went by that I didn’t miss Doug Ayers. Dougie, with his wit and his booming laugh and his seemingly indefatigable optimism. Clyde, I was certain, missed him just as much.
“Sometimes,” I said, “I speak before I think.”
Wilson waved a forget-about-it hand. “I have a son in Afghanistan. Kandahar. He’s on his third tour.”
Why did you let him go? I wanted to ask. “He like it okay?”
“He must. When he’s home between deployments and comes for a visit, he stays in his room playing video games. Comes out to eat. Says pretty much nothing. Grunts if we ask him questions. Then goes back to his room. Only time he seems happy is when he’s heading back.”
“You ever serve?” I asked.
“No.”
Which meant he didn’t understand that being in a war zone with your buddies was easier than trying to fit in at home. A friend of mine, a fellow Marine named Gonzo, once said that while the Marines went off to war, Americans went to the mall. Some Marines found that willful ignorance hard to forgive. And even harder to fit back into.
A lone hill now loomed above us, high enough that the tops of the silos vanished behind it as we approached. Clyde led us straight up the rise, through the last of the morning’s coolness still clinging to the shadows on this western slope. My bad knee popped and creaked, and Wilson’s breathing turned raspy; it would have been a steep scramble even for an eight-year-old.
And with that thought, my hope that Lucy had fled on her own dropped away like a fall from a cliff. In its place came a cold, certain fear. The killer had—for whatever reason—abandoned the Lexus and taken her to the cement factory. A grim ruin filled with broken machinery and empty windows and floors that yawned into darkness. A haunt used by tweakers and junkies and boozers. Sometimes by the insane.
The kidnapper could not mean any good from this. An abandoned factory wasn’t where you stashed someone while you waited for a ransom payment.
It was where you did much worse things.
We crested the rise and emerged back into sunlight. I snugged my ball cap lower to shield my eyes as I halted Clyde and stared down at the decaying complex. Wilson straggled up alongside me. He bent at the waist and placed his hands on his thighs, sucking air. His radio buzzed with static, a back-and-forth chatter between dispatch and Thornton police.
“You got kids?” he asked when he could talk.
“No.”
He straightened and stared down the hill. “Cripes. The hell is that place?”
“Edison Cement Works,” I said. “Went under in the early nineteen hundreds.”
But I knew that wasn’t what he was asking. What he wanted to know was what kind of wasteland we had stumbled on.
The sprawl of buildings covered probably twenty acres. The morning light picked out every blemish and defect in a place filled with them. Unknowable structures thrust skyward, scaly with age and black with soot from long-gone furnaces. Vegetation, rarely running wild in a place as dry as Colorado, was rampant here, the roots sucking water from the South Platte to create snarled thickets of bramble and low, scraggly trees. Cacti clustered in places where the sun pooled. A deep silence hung about the landscape, as if the tweakers had fled and even the animals avoided trespassing. Above all of it, the three silos glared like baleful sentries.
“She’s down there somewhere,” Wilson said.
“I think so, yes.”
I’d been here five or six times, sent to roust trespassers. A Sisyphean task during which I handed out protein bars and water bottles and directions to the local shelter. The last time was three months earlier, when there’d still been snow on the ground, and I’d been hobbling around with a cane and a heart monitor. So I knew the factory’s baseline—the bleak melancholy of a place where humans came to hide from other humans. But now I imagined something had shifted toward venomous—as if a snake had coiled.
“It just me,” Wilson said, “or does that look like a place where the devil would go to ground?”
“Let’s just hope he hasn’t gone too deep.”
I raised my hand to motion us forward, then froze as six silent figures emerged from the ruins far below and scowled up at me. Six dead men, made that way by my hand months ago. Never mind that they had been men who practiced the worst kind of brutality—torture and murder and rape. Because however much cops and Marines don’t talk about it, killing someone destroys who you thought you were. Our ghosts are our guilt, and these six had hounded me for five months, a howling chorus of retribution.
I dropped my hand. Seeing them now turned me cold.
“You okay?” Wilson asked.
The dead men turned and disappeared into the shattered stones of a warehouse, morphing into nothing more than a trick of light and shadow.
“Parnell?”
I blinked. Lucy. “Let’s go.”
I gave Clyde the seek command again and we headed down the hill, watching for cacti and prairie-dog holes. Silence descended as Wilson lowered the volume on his radio. I followed suit, adjusting my earpiece so I couldn’t hear the railroad chatter.
When we were halfway down, Wilson said, “You feel like we’re being watched?”
“No.” Only by the dead.
But in truth, my skin crawled with the worry that somewhere down there, a killer observed us coming. It was just like my days rolling into some hellhole to collect the dead after a battle or an IED. Heart in your throat and eyes everywhere.
At the bottom of the hill, we closed a fifty-yard gap to reach an eight-foot-high chain-link fence angled out at the top to make scaling it difficult. The fence hadn’t been here on my last visit. Along its length, signs were bolted on at regular intervals.
FUTURE HOME OF MOMA-D
MUSEUM OF MODERN ART—DENVER
“Moma Dee,” Wilson said. “That some kind of art humor? Sounds like a jazz player.”
&nbs
p; Whatever it was, the sign was news to me. If DPC’s board had decided to sell this stretch of land, they hadn’t bothered to tell the grunts. I was scheduled to do a walk-through here next week.
Clyde turned and trotted alongside the fence. Just as Lucy or her kidnapper must have done. A dozen yards down, he stopped and pressed his nose to the fence. He gave a low whine, waiting for me to solve the puzzle of how to get him to the other side.
“They crossed here?” Wilson asked.
“Must have.”
“How the hell did they do that?”
I pulled back the weeds and studied the fence, spotting a place where the links didn’t quite line up. Someone had cut the metal to create a flap, which they’d then snugged back into place and fastened with wire. This kind of opening wasn’t something you created in the dark of night with a hostage on your hands. Nor was it the work of casual trespassers. The killer had made the opening before the events of this morning. And he’d been calm enough in the dead of night—and had Lucy enough in his control—to take the time to open and close the gap, rewiring it shut.
The location of the gap bothered me. It was nowhere near the road that led into the cement factory; if someone came here by car, they’d have to walk half a mile in to reach this improvised gate.
Another puzzle in a day filled with them.
I dropped Clyde’s lead and untwisted the wire without bothering with gloves—it was too thin to hold a print. Then Wilson and I grabbed the edge of the flap, yanking it open enough for Clyde to squeeze through. I ordered him to wait. He stopped, his eyes on mine, ready for the next command.
“You’re next,” I said to Wilson.
“You’re kidding. I’m twice his size.”
“Optimist,” I said. “You can walk around to the gate, if you’d rather. Assuming you can get in there.”
“I’ve been dieting, you know. Doesn’t do a damn thing.”
I tugged the fence open as far as it would go and waited.
“I’m wearing my best suit,” he muttered. But he lowered himself to his belly and wriggled through. While he gripped the flap from the other side, I crawled in after him.
Dead Stop (Sydney Rose Parnell Series Book 2) Page 4
