He raised a brow. “Keeping yours close to the vest?”
I dug my fork into the pie again. “Not much to tell. We’re waiting for the autopsy and an ID.”
“I hope you aren’t going to play hard to get. I need my murder fix.” He pushed away his now-empty plate, and my glance caught the scars on the fingers of his left hand. The nails had grown back, but raised red lines still marred the surrounding skin.
A reminder that six months earlier he had been tortured on my account during my hunt for a killer responsible for monstrous war crimes.
Cohen swore he’d moved on, and I’d done my best to do the same. But with this morning’s victim weighing on my mind, I found myself in a melancholic mood.
Too much pain in the world.
I forced lightness into my voice. “Your murder fix? You know how sick that sounds?”
“Pot calling the kettle. Don’t make me go begging to Bandoni for the details.”
I hesitated before reminding myself that this was about a dead man, not my ego. I should be willing to take whatever help I could get. So I told Cohen what we knew so far. He listened intently, but didn’t comment other than to acknowledge that Bandoni could be a pain in the ass and I’d done well to stand up to him. He then told me about his case, a woman who’d been raped and beaten and dumped in an apartment parking lot in University Hills, where a resident found her and called the police. The woman had initially told the police her boss had assaulted her. She agreed to a rape kit. But halfway through the exam, she’d retracted her accusation and refused to press charges. It was just a misunderstanding, she said.
“She’s scared,” I said, then fell silent when the waitress came by and refilled our coffees.
After she left, Cohen dumped sugar and cream in his cup and stirred the now-noxious brew. “My guess is she’s undocumented and terrified she’ll lose her job.”
“Even though her boss is a rapist. Dear God. Where does she work?”
Wrinkles folded around Cohen’s eyes as he sighed. “No idea. But she smelled like pine cleaner.” A soft shake. “Fucking pine cleaner. I didn’t know if it was from her job or if she’d tried to purge the assault.”
I stroked the back of his hand. “Keep your chin up, Warrior Detective. This is why we do what we do. Maybe her advocate will convince her to press charges.”
We were quiet for a few minutes. Then, beneath the table, Cohen nudged me gently. “I have a surprise for you.”
“A Caribbean vacation?”
“Better. My cousin is coming to town. From my mother’s side. He’ll be here for a linguistics conference.”
My coffee curdled in my gut. “Okay.”
“I want you to meet him.”
Family. I set down my coffee. “I don’t know if I’m ready for that, Mr. Michael Walker Cohen of the fabulously wealthy Walkers. I’m not exactly Walker material. The idea of meeting your family gives me hives.”
He shot me a grin. “Evan’s a Wilding, not a Walker. And he’s used to troglodytes. He consults on the FBI’s worst cases.”
“Which makes me look what—almost normal?”
“If he squints. Anyway, Evan is very nonjudgmental. You’ll love him. Plus, he’s going to stay at Grandma Walker’s mansion, so he’ll be right next door to us. You can’t avoid him.”
“That’s . . . fabulous.”
“I thought you’d see it that way. Shall I arrange dinner for two nights from now? The Barolo Grill?”
“Let’s go Ethiopian. That way he won’t be shocked when I eat with my fingers.”
CHAPTER 7
All I got is my life, and it ain’t worth much.
Can’t get more free than that.
—Kevin “Rotten” Russell. Conversation with Sydney Parnell.
Gutter punks weren’t hobos.
They were a hobo’s evil twin.
Young, rebellious, carrying a grudge with the explosive power of an atomic bomb, these street kids and runaways caught out on trains because it was free. They couldn’t give a shit about the hobo tradition. Their idols were drugs, concerts, and anarchy. Everything else came in a distant second.
If it came in at all.
A railroad bull could spot these so-called crusties or traveler kids in a New York minute. Filthy T-shirts and camo pants, ratty dreadlocks and a general aura of viciousness. And some serious body art. A crustie had enough homemade tattoos to qualify as a walking skin infection. Stoner eyes, too. Half the time I encountered these kids, they were so high it was a wonder their brain stems remembered to ask for air.
I had one contact in the crustie community—a traumatized seventeen-year-old runaway who went by the moniker Rotten. A little digging on my part filled in Rotten’s past. His birth name was Kevin Russell, and throughout his childhood there had been so many domestic-violence charges brought against his parents that social workers finally plucked nine-year-old Kevin from their loving arms and dropped him into the foster system. He ran away from every home until he turned fifteen, and then he ran away for good. Rotten had vowed that if he was ever forced home, he would kill himself.
But first he would slit his parents’ throats.
Rotten’s miserable past and his determined defiance were why I alternated between wanting to give traveler kids a good spanking and wanting to take them home for milk and cookies.
The kids were on my radar now for two reasons. A crustie was more likely than a traditional hobo to hit a railroad cop. And a lot of them wore Doc Marten boots with waffle soles—something like the print Gabel had found at our first crime scene.
Of course, around thirty thousand pairs of Doc Martens had been sold in Colorado the previous year, so the boots didn’t exactly whittle down the suspect pool. But it was something.
Denver’s collection of gutter punks mostly hung out at the 16th Street Mall in Lower Downtown because of its proximity to Union Station and the generally solid panhandling opportunities in
