“Call out the dogs. Then I’m going to head back to where I saw the cross. See if I spot anything else.”
He made an effort to get his legs under him. “I’m coming, too.”
“Not today, cowboy. The ambulance is almost here. And we have to call a tow for your vehicle.”
He glared up at me. “Now who’s being the Lone Ranger?”
I laughed. “You really do care.”
Heinrich flushed. “Fine.” He tossed my coat to me. “You’re shivering.”
“Thanks.” I shrugged into the warmth. “I find anything else, I’ll let you know.”
As Clyde and I headed back toward where I’d found the cross, I glanced at the time on my phone’s display; the night-shift unit wouldn’t officially hand over responsibility for two more hours. But there was no point in getting them involved this close to the end of their shift.
“You sure about this, Clyde?”
Clyde stared into the fog, his ears now up and tipped forward.
I pushed aside any lingering doubts and made a quick series of calls.
First, I dialed Denver PD Crime Scene to ask the on-call detective to come to my location. Detective Ron Gabel’s voice was thick with exhaustion when he picked up, but he promised to arrive within the hour.
Next, I woke my old boss, Deputy Chief Mauer. I told him about Heinrich and asked him to delay the train. Mauer’s sleep-addled voice expressed concern about Heinrich. But he was also beside himself at what the delay would cost, all because of a cross made out of paper clips and a piece of fabric. When I pointed out that Heinrich’s assailant—or a clue to her whereabouts—might be on the train, Mauer groused another minute, then ended the call with, “Consider it done. But, Parnell?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t be wrong.”
With the two easiest calls out of the way, I stopped walking and stood at the line I’d mentally drawn around the crime scene, the line where crime scene tape would go. Clyde stopped next to me and took in the air. Still on guard.
I hesitated, my index finger poised over the number for my trainer-slash-partner in the Major Crimes Unit.
The faint trace of a breeze sighed past, cooling the sweat on my face.
Detective Len Bandoni had carried a hate for me for over a year. We’d met when he was my lover’s partner and I was a railroad cop pulled into their murder case. Bandoni saw me as nothing more than an uppity security cop. The fact that he neither liked nor trusted women merely strengthened his animosity. In my dark moments, I figured Lieutenant Lobowitz’s decision to pair us up was meant to test me and punish the antifeminist Bandoni. In even darker moods, I was certain that Lobowitz wanted to drive out the previous lieutenant’s golden girl and Bandoni was the perfect man for the job.
I lifted my chin and tapped my partner’s number on the screen.
He answered with a growl. “The fuck?”
I wondered if he’d bothered to check caller ID before answering. “It’s Parnell.”
“I got eyes,” he said. “You’ve decided to quit?”
“Only after you’re a broken man.”
There was a long enough pause that I wondered if he’d set down the phone and wandered away. But then I heard him breathing.
“Bandoni, we’ve got something.”
“What?”
I filled him in on what had happened—the woman seen by the engineer, Heinrich’s assault, the cross, the necklace, and the bloody fabric. The fact that the train had been stopped in the area for half an hour.
“Those flies,” I said. “They had to come off the train. They’d be dead otherwise. As soon as the crime scene detective gets here, I’m heading to DPC’s rail yard to look over the train.”
“Look it over for what?”
I blinked.
He said, “You think whoever nailed your railroad cop will be sitting on the caboose, painting her nails and waiting for you to show up?”
“There aren’t cabooses anymore.”
“Screw the caboose. What’s your point?”
“My point is that maybe we’re looking for another victim, in addition to Heinrich,” I said. “Maybe someone hurt or killed the woman and placed her on the train.”
“Murder? How do you get murder out of a couple of paper clips and a piece of, what did you call it, peach chiffon?”
“And blood.”
“And maybe blood.”
I kicked at a clump of grass. I hadn’t expected Bandoni to pat me on the back. But I hadn’t expected him to fight me, either.
“We can’t just ignore this,” I pressed. “This woman could be—”
“Stop.” Bandoni gusted a sigh that would have rattled oaks. “I ain’t faulting your enthusiasm. You’re young. You’re new. You’ve got a lot to prove. I get that. But it’s not our job to find people. Not dead people and not live people. The way it works is, someone finds a body. Or someone sees someone get whacked. And they pick up the phone, and they call us. Then we go and check it out. You get what I’m saying? So if there’s a body on that train, someone will find it. And then they’ll call us.”
“If we don’t search the train while it’s stopped in Denver, days could go by before someone finds the body.”
“If there’s a body. What you’ve got, Parnell, is peach chiffon. We want to stop and search a train? Then we need probable cause to get a warrant. Or permission from the railroad. I’m sure they told you about that in cop school.”
I watched the mist thin to the weight of spider silk while Bandoni launched into a lecture about reasonable suspicion versus probable cause. He was being an asshole, hammering home things I already knew.
“And,” he went on, “if there is a body, by then it will be in someone else’s jurisdiction.”
Now he was testing me. If someone had been killed in Denver, it was Denver’s case. And no self-respecting murder cop would try to pass the buck. For detectives, finding a killer was a moral obligation.
I kept kicking at the grass while my pulse jackhammered under my jaw. I wanted to tell Bandoni about my sixth sense, my war-given superpower. And
