“I want to confirm it,” I said.
“Sydney—” Mauer began.
“If I’m going down, I’m going down swinging.”
“One of them did stink,” one of the men volunteered. A big-boned guy with a Santa Claus beard. “Like chicken left out to spoil.”
My heart, still somewhere in my throat, gave a little kick. I gestured down the length of the train. “Show me.”
“I didn’t smell nothing,” said Red Bandanna.
“That’s ’cause you need to give up the smokes. You can’t smell shit when you’re in the bathroom.”
We caught the stench before the car came into view. A putrid smell like what you got if you tossed chicken scraps in the trash. Only much worse.
Santa Claus grinned. “Smell it now?”
“Damn eyes are watering,” Red Bandanna said.
At the car, we stopped to take in the scene.
The importance of first impressions was drilled into detectives during training. You only got your first view of a crime scene once. After that, your brain started sorting everything, deciding what was important and what wasn’t. This subconscious process could give you tunnel vision. So I took a moment to study the boxcar. It was typical for its kind—white with a horizontal sliding plug door set in the middle. A logo on the car’s side indicated the unit was owned by ColdShip Distributors, a hub-to-hub refrigerated-boxcar service that provided warehouse-to-train cargo transfer across the US. ColdShip had a hub in North Platte, Nebraska, which meant the frozen chickens had probably originated from a poultry-processing facility nearby.
Vandals had hit the car somewhere along the route. Recently, judging by the brightness of the paint. The graffiti was to the left of the door, a stylized design of uncertain meaning, spray-painted in black, blue, and yellow.
“I hate taggers,” Mauer said.
I nodded. While taggers consider themselves artists and daredevils, to the railroad companies they are a hazard and an expense.
I thought of the woman spotted by the engineer. A tagger equipped with spray paint who just happened to be in the middle of nowhere when a train came to a halt? Not impossible—taggers went to great lengths to find a place where they could practice their art undisturbed. Some even listened to railroad communications on a scanner so they would know when and where trains would be stopped on their routes.
But it was a long shot. And it didn’t explain everything else I’d found.
Even so, I took a picture of the car along with a close-up of the graffiti. Then I turned to Red Bandanna. His name was embroidered over a pocket of his coveralls.
“Tabor,” I said. “Can you request a door buster please?”
He looked at Mauer, who nodded.
Tabor shrugged. “Sure, if that’s what you want.”
Ten minutes later, one of the track laborers drove up in a forklift, a door buster mounted on the forks.
Tabor raised his voice. “Everyone stand back. If that door’s been damaged, the whole thing could come off.”
We moved away and watched while the driver used the portable bully plug and wench to turn the handle and then pull the door open along its track. The door didn’t fall or buckle. But as it opened, a tide of stench washed over us.
“That is some bad shit,” Tabor said.
Clyde wagged his tail.
The driver backed the forklift away and turned off the engine but left the cable in place, holding the door open. An incessant hum filled the air; after a moment, I realized it was the sound of flies. Confirming that the two I’d seen earlier were escapees.
My phone buzzed. Bandoni. I refused the call, then ordered Clyde to stay while I approached the open door.
The sun hung in the morning sky, and since we were on the west side of the train, the door yawned into shadows. I yanked on my headlamp and stepped closer, peering inside.
Fiberboard cartons filled the interior. All of them were wet and dripping slime, testament to Nebraska’s unusual heat wave. The boxes were soggy, the cardboard disintegrating, and the stacks had begun to collapse. There was enough space in the car that some of the boxes had fallen and smashed open on the floor, scattering shrink-wrapped chickens that continued to seep slime.
A strange mix of relief and disappointment hit me along with the odor.
No body. No murder.
I stepped away from the car.
“Nothing but chickens?” Mauer asked.
I nodded. The adrenaline I’d felt at the discovery subsided to a dull wash of agitation that popped and sizzled in my blood.
“You had to check,” Mauer said without conviction.
I nodded. Equally without conviction. I pulled out my phone to return Bandoni’s call, let him know I’d been wrong, wondering if I should just go ahead and resign.
I hesitated with my finger poised.
If the door had been closed the entire time, then the refrigeration unit must have failed. But how had the flies escaped?
I glanced at my partner. He’d stopped wagging his tail. His ears were back.
Cohen’s voice rose in my mind. I’d been struggling with a murder case I was reviewing in a textbook. No matter how many times I looked at the photographs, I couldn’t see anything but a woman who’d been snatched by the bad guys, stripped naked, mutilated for fun, then dumped outside of town. She was sprawled on her back, her legs spread apart. Her clothes were scattered along a dirt road, as if the bad guys had tossed them out the window as they drove away.
You’re making assumptions, Cohen had told me. Look at the injuries again. Widen the scene. Look at the surroundings. Keep your mind as open as your eyes.
He’d been right. Which I’d realized once I noticed the prints in the snow and reexamined the woman’s throat. She’d fallen victim, not to human predators, but to a pair of wolf dogs.
I removed a sealed package of gloves and a packet of booties from my new leather satchel—a farewell gift from my railroad friends.
“What are you doing?” Mauer asked.
“Just going to take a closer look.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Sure you don’t want an oxygen mask?”
I studied the door track for a moment. Scratch marks—faint
