I downed Clyde near the door then set down my duffel, snapped on latex gloves, and removed a camera. I started with the desk. It was wide and plain, its surface almost entirely obscured by papers, books, file folders, a stack of notepads, and a scattering of pens. Family photos marched across the back of the desktop; I recognized Ben and Samantha and their children from the pictures I’d seen online. One frame held a photograph of Hiram and Ben beaming into the camera—Ben was maybe nine or ten, lifting up a string of fish. Another shot showed Lucy in a sports uniform, holding a soccer ball. With a lurch of my heart, I thought of Malik.
There was one shot of Ben in Iraq. Armored up and standing in front of a Humvee, he appeared confident and serene. A man who knew exactly what his mission was and how to accomplish it. Looking at this, I would have thought he’d come home unscathed. Except that sitting on the desk in front of the photo was a jagged piece of metal. I picked it up—shrapnel from an IED. A trophy of sorts, I supposed, of how close things had come. Or a reminder of how quickly things could go south.
I set it down in haste.
I started on the left side of the desk and worked my way to the right, sorting quickly through the books and papers. Cohen would follow up with a warrant if he could find a more amenable judge. Right now I was looking for business cards, phone numbers, hate mail, or a calendar with appointments listed. I hoped for anything about that crossing number.
Or anything that DPC might want to hide.
There were books about the railroad industry along with trade magazines and business journals, many of them dating back to the 1960s and 70s. A 1980 US railroad map showed a sprawl of railroad networks—small railroads in green, short lines in red, and the giants spanning the continent in bright orange. I skimmed a recent piece in Fortune magazine with the headline FASTEST MAN IN THE WEST? The article discussed Hiram’s effort to develop a bullet train, which he had already dubbed the Gold Line Express. With the potential influx of billions in federal funding, some people were calling the project the Gold Mine Express, at least for whoever got the go-ahead. Flipping through the stacks, I saw that other magazines had followed Fortune’s lead. There were a dozen articles covering the battle between Hiram’s empire and that of his biggest rival, Tate Enterprises.
I’d met Alfred Tate only once. He’d been a speaker at a joint training session between Denver PD and the railway cops from both DPC and Tate’s company, SFCO. We ended up standing at the dessert table together. I reached for the cheesecake, but he recommended the chocolate mousse. He’d been wrong about the mousse. But his kindly manner and the slightly lost look in his eyes had won me over.
The only other thing on Ben’s desk was a stack of yellow legal pads. The top three were filled with notes written in small, tight handwriting, mostly bulleted dates and brief headlines—a history of DPC. The rest were blank.
There was no computer, although a power cord was plugged in at an outlet situated directly under the desk.
In the desk’s center drawer I found notepads, more pens, and old railroad maps, along with a bunch of historical articles about the start of railroads in Colorado and their vital role in the gold rush.
The next three drawers contained office supplies, a bag of cookies, a plastic pouch of beef jerky, a folder labeled REIMBURSEMENTS filled with gas and restaurant receipts, and a carefully rolled child’s drawing of a house with five people standing in front—Mommy, Daddy, the twins, and Lucy. At the bottom of the picture, written in red crayon, were the words I love you, Daddy. Love, Your Lucy Goose. Ben had attached a yellow sticky note with the name and address of a local frame company.
I blinked, closed my eyes.
Outside in the hall, the elevator pinged. My eyes shot open. Clyde lifted his head as footsteps approached the door. Clyde glanced at me, and I signaled him to stay silent while I waited for a knock or a key in the lock. A minute ticked by, then two. Outside, a flock of starlings screeched. After a moment, whoever was at the door went on down the hall.
I let out my breath.
Faster, Parnell.
The last drawer was locked. Railroad cops are good at a lot of things, but certain job requirements make us demigods when it comes to picking locks. I pulled a small kit from my duffel and had the drawer open almost immediately.
Inside were seven things. A manila folder bristling with papers. Two plain white envelopes. A bottle of whiskey. Ben’s medals from the war. A color photograph. And a handgun.
I ignored the gun, the whiskey, and the medals for the moment and placed everything else on the desk. I started with the photograph.
It showed Samantha Davenport standing in front of the Denver Art Museum. Her assistant, Jack Hurley, stood beside her, his hands deep in his pockets, a boyish grin on his face. Both were squinting into the sun, Samantha’s hand cupped over her eyes. She wore a sundress; he had on cargo shorts and a U2 T-shirt. There was nothing inappropriate in their posture or their attitudes. The sunny sidewalk where they posed was completely innocuous. But the picture made the hair rise on my neck for the simple reason that Ben had chosen to lock it away.
There will be killing till the score is paid.
I studied the picture a moment more, then, finding no answers, turned to the manila folder, which was labeled MOMA in thick black marker.
Most of the papers inside pertained to the donation of the Edison Cement factory land to the recently formed art museum. There was also information about the creation of a board of directors and the hiring of an architectural firm to convert the existing factory buildings into a unique space. At the back of the file were letters of petition from artists worldwide who wanted their work displayed when the museum opened, and letters from someone at MoMA-Denver requesting funding from potential donors—the funding requests had gone to everyone from local arts supporters to people in Paris, London, Madrid, and Frankfurt. MoMA was nothing if not ambitious.
In the very back of the folder was an article from the Denver Business Journal. The reporter talked about the valuable land that Hiram Davenport had donated to the museum and said that the remaining acreage would serve as a thruway for a bullet train, should the train actually come to be. The title of the article was ART RIDES INTO THE FUTURE.
A business card was paper clipped to the folder’s inside flap. Tom O’Hara, the Denver Post.
I knew Tom—he’d interviewed me for an article about my work in Iraq. I still regretted giving that interview. But that wasn’t Tom’s fault. We’re all a lot smarter in hindsight.
I went back to the papers detailing the donation. I didn’t know anything about finance beyond balancing my checkbook. But there were clearly different numbers floating around on the estimated value of the land. And someone had hired a site investigator from a firm called Clinefeld Engineering to do a subsurface investigation. I figured that was normal during a deed transfer. But the form dated to after the transfer of the deed.
Maybe someone was asking questions. Maybe DPC had tried to deduct more on their taxes than the land was worth. If Ben’s job was to write articles and a book praising his father and DPC, I wondered what his interest was in a possible fraud.