Interesting.
I used the grip bar to pull myself into the train. Once inside, I stared around at the disintegrating boxes. The car had been poorly loaded, and the cargo had shifted as the train went through the normal motions of braking and acceleration. Not only had the cargo been poorly stacked, the boxes hadn’t been placed in receptacles or strapped to the locking rings on the wall that were designed to hold cargo in position. I made a mental note to check who at ColdShip had loaded the cargo.
I made a second mental note to tell Mauer about it instead. Not my job anymore.
I closed my eyes, focusing. I caught the faintest whiff of something beneath the reek of thawing chickens.
Excrement. Coupled with the vinegary stink of urine. And the ancient, iron-dark smell of blood.
I opened my eyes and flicked on the headlamp.
Shadows jumped and swayed as I picked my way across the slime-slick floor and along the corridor formed by the slumping walls of boxes. The place looked like it had been raided by the proverbial fox in the henhouse, with thawed chickens tossed left and right.
Except in this case, the fox hadn’t taken something away. The fox had perhaps left something.
My pulse thumping in my neck, I shoved a box out of my way and moved to the far end of the car. The light caught on a shape half-hidden by the boxes and chickens. It took a second for me to realize what I was looking at.
A pair of naked human feet.
My heart did a backflip off the diving board of my breastbone.
I took two more steps and moved the beam of light up a pair of pale, hairy legs—a man’s legs. Then came swirls of pale chiffon fabric, bloodied and torn, twisted around the legs and torso. A pair of large-knuckled hands. A hint of solid chest near the neckline of the ruined dress.
And finally, the head.
Or what was left of it. The skull was crushed, the face destroyed.
A horde of flies swarmed the corpse.
I jumped back, slipped in the ooze, went down on one knee.
My nostrils filled with grains of desert sand, my ears with the thump of helicopter rotors. I heard my commanding officer, the Sir, shouting orders. A shaft of moonlight dropped through a break in the clouds and illuminated a row of body bags. I reached to grab the end of one of the bags, to lift it onto the gurney as I squinted against the backwash from the rotors.
Far away, Clyde barked. Once. Twice. I blinked and returned to the boxcar with its piles of thawing chickens.
And a dead man.
“Damn it,” I whispered.
I got to my feet and stumbled back through the boxes to the door. I jumped down from the train.
“Parnell?” Mauer’s voice broke through my dismay. “You okay?”
I held my filthy gloved hands out to my sides as I bent at the waist and sucked in air. Clyde broke his stay and came to my side.
When I was sure the world wasn’t going to go black, I straightened.
Tabor was watching me closely. “Guess there’s something in there ’sides chickens.”
Mauer set a hand on my shoulder. “What is it?”
“Your rail yard is about to turn into a circus.” I stripped off the gloves and let them drop to the ground, then pulled out my phone and hit redial.
Bandoni answered with, “You must just love patrol. I’m thinking Green Valley Ranch again.”
“Corpus delicti,” I said and hung up.
CHAPTER 5
Peter: You do know that working in homicide means viewing corpses.
Sydney: This is me, rolling my eyes.
Peter: What I mean is, you’ve been making real progress. Dealing with death on a daily basis could be . . . counterproductive. And I’m not talking just any death. This is the worst kind.
Sydney: I’ve already seen the worst kind.
Peter: You said you wanted that behind you.
Sydney: In Iraq, I handled our dead with profound respect. But—there’s a difference.
Peter: Tell me.
Sydney: Back then, I couldn’t get the motherfuckers who killed them.
—Conversation with Peter Hayes, Clinical Therapist, VA Hospital.
Within an hour, the crime scene detectives, the medical examiner and her crew, and the great Detective Leonard Bandoni himself had descended on Denver Pacific Continental’s rail yard. Bandoni took lead while I watched and learned. My partner could be less than pleasant, but when he was working a crime scene he turned into a man of thrilling grace. Pointing here, directing there. Assessing, guiding, questioning, analyzing.
Bandoni conducted our somber band like a maestro.
Once the ME, Emma Bell, had removed the body, Bandoni gave Mauer permission to disconnect the car and relocate it to the shelter of the roundhouse so that the rest of the train could get underway. I broke free to get additional information from Sergei about the train—points of origin for the various commodities and a timeline for the refrigerator cars. Then I stripped off the coveralls, cleaned my filthy shoes with paper towels in the women’s restroom, and washed up in the sink.
A cautious sniff suggested I wasn’t entirely free of odeur de poulet. Clyde found my shoes particularly entrancing. But at last, semiclean and somewhat composed, I told Clyde to act like a Malinois instead of a pointer, and we went to find the man who’d been driving the train, Deke Willsby.
Deke sat at a folding table in the basement-level employee lounge, nursing a cup of coffee in the otherwise deserted room. A career engineer in his sixties, Deke sat hunched in his chair like he was braced for bad news and halfway on his knees in preparation. He’d looked that way the last time I’d seen him—after his train had struck and killed the victim of a kidnapping.
Ah, damn, I thought. No one told him.
He straightened and released the cup as I dropped into a chair across from him. I leaned over the table and took his cold fingers in my own.
“You didn’t hit anyone,” I said.
He lifted his gaze. “Say again?”
“Someone either climbed
