A shiver slipped down my spine. “What is it, boy?”
But he was staring past me. I pivoted. There was only the fog. It swirled and eddied around us, pushed by nothing that I could detect.
After hundreds of patrols in hostile territory, my partner had returned from Iraq with a direct channel to a world I couldn’t see. A brilliant canine intuition built on smells and sounds and God knew what else. All of it hidden to humans.
This was Clyde’s gift from the war. Much like my own gift, which was visitations from the dead. Ghosts from Iraq, and from the more recently deceased.
Clyde’s behavior now—the shivering, the tucked tail—struck me as the death fear. As if he’d caught a scent of something once terrible that was no longer here.
I stood, and the headlamp tossed shadows across the grass. A fly rose into the air, a dance of iridescent blue moving in and out of the light. On the ground below lay a ripped piece of peach chiffon fabric ornamented with lace and pearls. Another fly crawled along the edge, sluggish in the cold.
The cloth glimmered with fresh blood.
Clyde leaned into me while I played the light back and forth between the cross and the cloth. Taken together, the items formed an eerie tableau—as if someone was trying to send a message.
A cry for help, mute and unnoticed.
Save for the passage of a train.
CHAPTER 2
Inside me is a monster. It allows me to see the monster in others. The drunk at the end of the bar with the scraped knuckles. A hot-eyed man sliding into an alley. Combat veterans with one too many tours. Random people passing on the street.
When our eyes meet, I see the startle of recognition on their faces.
It is never a happy acknowledgment.
—Sydney Parnell. Personal journal.
I spun slowly, taking in the surrounding field.
The beam from the headlamp danced over the grasses, lighting on the ruined fence, where a crow perched. He cocked his head and held one eye on me, then lifted weightily from the post and flapped into the dark with the rustle of wings.
Clyde shivered against my legs.
“Damn,” I said.
I looked at the cross, the gold necklace, and the length of fabric. Mentally, I measured the distance from the cloth to the train tracks.
Now I said, “Shit.”
I approached the tracks, expecting to find blood and broken bone, a ruin of flesh that had been hidden by the darkness and the fog. An added reason for Clyde’s unease.
But the tracks were clean.
I walked east and then west along the rails for a few hundred yards but found nothing more than the desiccated carcass of an antelope. I circled back to the cross and the fabric.
A woman, the engineer had said. Standing near the tracks. There and gone as the train whipped by.
Suicide or homicide? Victim or predator?
Heinrich was six feet three. It would take a hell of a tall woman to land a blow on his skull, big a target as it was.
So where was she?
“We’ve got ourselves a mystery,” I said to Clyde.
He looked as unhappy as I felt.
We returned to Heinrich, shouting to let him know of our approach. He’d managed to wrestle up to a sitting position, and his face had regained its color. I checked his pulse and pupils again, then went to my truck to get him some water. When I returned, I crouched and passed him the bottle.
“Sip it slowly. You still nauseous?”
“Not bad.” He licked his lips, uncapped the bottle. “Did you find anything?”
“A cross. A broken necklace. And a piece of bloody fabric with two bottle flies that ought to be dead in this cold.”
He narrowed his eyes at me. “What does all that mean?”
“Beats the hell out of me.” I kept going back to Clyde’s behavior before we found the fabric. “I don’t like it.”
Heinrich took a long drink. “Think it’s a jumper?”
“Not unless she jumped right onto the train. I checked the tracks. You remember seeing any vehicles when you approached?”
“I—no. I mean, it’s pretty fuzzy. But I would have looked around when I drove up. ’Course with the fog, there could have been a damn T. rex on the road.” He frowned. “Everything after I turned onto the dirt road is a blank.”
“You remember the phone call from dispatch?”
“Most of that’s come back.” He sipped the water. “Deke Willsby was running the southbound out of Nebraska. Said he saw a series of flashing lights, then spotted a woman standing near the tracks. I think it was a little before three a.m. when he put in the call. You know that with all the Homeland Security stuff they have to report any trespassers.”
“He find the source of the lights?”
“Not that I know.”
“How long was his string?”
“Information’s on my phone.” He tapped the screen, brought up Denver Pacific’s tracking software. “A hundred and twenty-three cars. A mixed string but mainly commodities.”
“Any empties?”
“A few, looks like.”
I was running scenarios in my mind. “The train make a stop near here?”
Heinrich nodded, then groaned at the motion. “About ten minutes after he saw the woman, Willsby made a planned stop for a crew while they finished installing a joint bar to repair a bad piece of track. So if you’re wondering, the last third of the train would have been stopped in this area for around twenty minutes. He would have pulled out just before I got here.”
“So you didn’t see the train?”
“I can’t—” He balled his fists. A flash of panic showed in his eyes. “It’s all a blank.”
“That’s normal, Heinrich. Blow like that. It’ll come back to you.” I looked at the display on his screen. The train was now at the rail yard in Denver and scheduled to move out in thirty minutes.
I handed back his phone and stood. I checked in with dispatch. The ambulance was ten minutes out. There had been a lot of accidents that morning, with the ice. Nonpriority cases were lagging.
“What are you going
