My first official homicide investigation began without a corpse.
An actual body is what triggers a murder case. It’s straightforward—in order to prove that a murder occurred, you must have a dead person. Corpus delicti, the courts call it. Latin for body of the crime.
All I had on that foggy, still-dark morning as my K9 partner and I drove through the outskirts of Denver was a message on my phone from a railroad cop named Heinrich. And a bad feeling—after our brief conversation, Heinrich had stopped answering his phone.
Next to me in the console, a cup of 7-Eleven coffee steamed into the air. Ray Wylie Hubbard sang on the radio about righteous killing. I drove with both hands on the wheel, as patches of the highway were slick with black ice. When I test-tapped the brakes, the Chevy Tahoe skated sideways.
Beside me, Clyde made a noise in his throat.
I dropped my speed.
“Easy, pal,” I said.
Oncoming headlights flared against the windshield, skirted off the side windows, then vanished behind us, taillights aglow like baleful eyes.
The date was March 15.
The Ides of March. When assassins bare their knives.
My first exchange with Special Agent Heinrich that day had been at 3:14 a.m.
This was after I discovered he’d pilfered my blue-and-silver detective’s shield. A group of us from the railroad had gone out the night before to celebrate my promotion from patrol to homicide. Heinrich was there. My former boss, Deputy Chief Mauer, too. And about twenty railroaders I’d worked with during my two years as a cop with Denver Pacific Continental. It was a damn weird party—half celebration for my success and half mourning that my promotion meant I’d likely never return to the railroads. I think a few of us cried. Or maybe it was just me, three drinks in and still hung up on whether I’d made the right choice to put the railroads in my past.
In Denver PD, I was the golden girl on the fast track. Six months in patrol and now three weeks into my on-the-job training as a homicide detective with the Denver Major Crimes Unit. My serendipitous rise had coincided with a nasty series of sexual harassment charges inside the department. The chief needed to show the good citizens of Denver that their police had a zero-tolerance policy toward caveman behaviors.
And that they enthusiastically promoted women.
Which was where I came in. Sydney Rose Parnell. Poster child.
I test-tapped the brakes again, felt the tires grip, and rewarded myself with a one-handed sip of coffee. I was officially on probation for three more months. Screw up, and I’d be back in patrol, the promotion of women be damned.
The night before, I’d given my wallet to Heinrich to spot him a twenty, and he’d filched my shield as a joke, the son of a bitch. I hadn’t noticed until oh-dark-thirty, after a case of nerves had gotten me up hours before the alarm and I’d spotted the voice mail from Heinrich: So sorry, it was a joke, didn’t mean to leave the bar with your badge. I’m sure my counselor would say that my carelessness with my badge was indicative of my ambivalence toward my new career. When I phoned Heinrich to arrange a meet, he was already on his way east, answering a call from dispatch. An engineer running a train through the area had spotted a trespasser standing near the tracks, a woman.
Maybe the woman was just a poor insomniac, night-haunted like so many of us. But the nearest homes and businesses were miles away. So it was possible she was a jumper. Maybe even a terrorist with derailment in mind.
Heinrich—along with my shield—had gone to investigate.
Now I was also on my way east to get it back before anyone found out I’d lost it. With Denver PD in the crosshairs of local politicians, the new lieutenant was a take-no-prisoners commander who operated on the broken-window theory—any mistake, however minor, was an indication the entire department was going to the dogs. If Lobowitz learned I’d lost my badge, she’d make a note in my file. Two more infractions, and she’d drop me from the detectives’ room to the dreary dullness of midnight patrols in Green Valley Ranch.
I could hear the chatter already. A woman. A railroad cop. Couldn’t hold on to her badge.
Not figuratively.
Not literally.
On the radio, Hubbard moved on from death to dying. The windshield wipers scraped against the glass. Something else scraped the inside of my skull.
“Blue Train cocktails,” I muttered to Clyde, who was comfortably buckled shotgun. “Whoever got the numbskull idea to ruin champagne with fruit syrup should be shot.”
My partner tipped his velvet-soft ears at me and managed an expression that looked like the K9 equivalent of an eye roll. Belgian Malinois are good at that. You don’t need a guilty conscience when you have a maligator. Someone might put pineapple juice in Clyde’s bowl, but that didn’t mean he’d drink it.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I went on.
His brow furrowed.
“No one held a gun to my head, right? That’s what you’d say if you could. But I got you there, pal. Gift of gab.”
Clyde yawned and returned his gaze out the window, putting me in my place. Mals are good at that, too.
There wasn’t much to see outside the cab. Dawn was still a couple of hours away, and springtime in the Rockies had pinned a thick, cottony fog to the bounds of earth. The beams of my headlights looked like underwater ectoplasm.
From the highway I drove north and east along a series of increasingly smaller roads until eventually I hit a dirt track. I buzzed Heinrich again to tell him that I was probably fifteen minutes out. Just in case he was playing choke the chicken and needed to hurry and finish.
But he didn’t pick up.
A herd of pronghorn zipped out of the night, their slender bodies darting through the swirling mist as they sprinted by. I hit the brakes; the antiskid light glowed. We watched the antelope
