I grabbed a pad of paper from the junk drawer and drew the inverted triangle with the shepherd’s staff inside that had been tattooed on John Doe’s arm. “You ever see this?”
Cohen looked disappointed for just a second before he turned his attention to the drawing. After a moment he shook his head. “You look in the tat book?”
“Bandoni’s got Gorman on it.” I took the paper back and drew the other odd symbol that had also been on John Doe’s arm, the traditional symbols for male and female, with a line in between. “There was this, too. Probably placed on our victim by his killer. You think maybe it suggests a person with both male and female characteristics?”
“It’s close to one of the symbols used by an intersex person.” Cohen made another drawing and pushed the pad back to me. The image showed a single circle with both the female cross and the male arrow emanating from it.
“You’re the sex guy now,” I said. “What’s an intersex person?”
“It means someone who has physical aspects of both male and female. It can be as obvious as female breasts and a penis or as subtle as contradictory sex hormones.”
“But the tattoo on our victim keeps male and female separated. Divided by the line.”
We studied the drawing. Cohen said, “Maybe it’s part of a hate-crime pattern. That man is rightfully over woman.”
That sounded right. “And our victim, by being gay or by cross-dressing or whatever was going on here, maybe telling people he was intersex . . .”
Cohen waited.
I plowed on. “Maybe his actions made the killer decide to assert male dominance and punish someone who didn’t follow the so-called natural order.”
“Wasn’t there a woman at the crime scene?”
“Sometimes women buy into the male-superiority thing.”
The corners of Cohen’s mouth tipped up. “Wise of them.”
I tossed the notepad at him. “That’s the last time I let you be on top.”
He leaned across the table. The candlelight glinted in his gray eyes.
“Prove it,” he said.
In the middle of the night, while both my men were snoring, I came wide awake.
I tossed and turned for a time before I gave up on sleep and eased out of bed, phone in hand. Clyde lifted his head as I stirred, but I signaled for him to stay and went out of the room.
A soft glow from the outdoor lights on Grandma Walker’s mansion next door filtered through the windows, brushing silver strokes onto a gray world. I grabbed a throw blanket from the couch and went out onto the deck.
An owl loosed its lonely call, and the boughs of nearby firs whooshed in the wind. Frost sparkled on the planks of the deck, burning against my bare feet. But I didn’t step away. It was one of a hundred small punishments I pressed upon myself. For surviving.
For other things.
I sucked in cold air. The world was caught between winter and spring, and at night, winter still held sway. I sat on one of the deck chairs and checked my phone. Mauer had gotten the recordings from the Bailey Yard and forwarded them to me. I played through the footage from the time the refrigerator cars arrived in the yard through their transfer to Deke’s train, and the departure.
No hobos. No gutter punks. At least none caught by the cameras.
I looked at my voice mail. Nothing from ColdShip.
I slipped the phone into the pocket of my sweats and leaned back in the chair. Overhead, stars blazed. The night was deep and dark, and I was alone inside it.
Or perhaps not. Nearby, a car door slammed, followed by the grumble of an engine. I waited for the sound of a vehicle pulling away, but the night stayed quiet. And weighted. As if someone else was awake with me in the darkness.
I closed my eyes. Unbidden, an image of the dark-colored van pulling under a streetlight rose in my mind.
There’d been a similar van two months earlier, I now recalled. In a grocery store parking lot. I’d left Clyde at his trainer’s and decided to pick up a few things at the store. It was the middle of winter, bitterly cold, and dark had arrived with the suddenness of a hammer blow. I was loading groceries into the back of the Tahoe when a man approached.
“Help you with those?” he asked.
I straightened and gave the man my full gaze, trying to gauge if he was a threat. Cops aren’t always popular, and I was still in uniform from the day’s shift.
“Evening,” he said.
He was tall and muscular. White. Dressed in jeans and a parka. His age was indeterminate—he’d wrapped a scarf around his lower face, and his eyes were invisible in the gloom. He stood with his legs planted wide and his shoulders up and back, his head tipped ever so slightly to one side in a gesture that inexplicably suggested menace. As if I were nothing but a curiosity, a bug under glass. Beyond him, at the outer reaches of the lights from the store, a dark-colored van idled, exhaust blooming into the night.
The rest of the parking lot was all but empty. Only an elderly man twenty spaces over, easing his thin body into a truck.
“I’m good,” I said firmly. My hand went to the butt of my gun.
“Just trying to be helpful, Officer.” Then: “You aren’t wearing a wedding ring.”
“Why don’t you move along, sir.”
“Thought maybe you’d let a gentleman take you for a drink.” His voice was low and heavy. Like silt from an ancient riverbed.
“You need to leave,” I said.
His eyes flashed. Maybe it was nothing more than lights from the store catching his irises, but the sudden gleam made the hair rise on the back of my neck.
Behind us, laughter rose as a group of teenagers spilled from the store, shouting at each other as they made their way out into the parking lot.
The man kept his eerie, sidelong gaze on
