“You have any idea why that form would be missing?” I asked.
“A hundred reasons, starting with the fact it might have never gotten filed. Or someone could have pulled it to cross-check something and then forgot to put it back. Or maybe whoever pulled it ended up losing it and put in that placeholder. I’ll ask the other old-timers. But here’s the bad news. Or the good news, depending on your perspective.”
I waited.
“Once I got the confirmation on the ID and the location,” Mags said, “I started going through the 6180s.”
“And?”
“And nothing. There weren’t any accidents at that crossing. So if that’s what you were hoping to find, you are SOL.”
I shook my head. “I just found an article written in 1982, Mags, before that crossing was converted. It said there had been multiple accidents at Potters Road.”
“Well, someone screwed up somewhere, then. I’ll see if I can find anything at all. You can wait on the bubbly for now.” She hung up.
I frowned. There was only one railroad crossing on Potters Road. Had the accidents occurred somewhere else in the county? Maybe the reporter had gotten his facts wrong.
I stared out the window. On the other side of the glass, the world lay flat and hard, like something overcooked in the oven.
Directly across the street from Ben’s office, just visible through the trees, a daycare center sat quietly in the early afternoon heat, sun bleached into a lifelessness that gave me pause. Blinds were drawn, the front door closed, the playground desolate. I leaned forward and pressed my forehead against the glass, and that’s when I saw her—a little girl sitting alone on a swing, her back to me, her long, brown hair riffling in the breeze.
The hair rose on the back of my neck.
“Lucy,” I whispered.
The swing rocked, a trail of dust swirled. The little girl’s head was down. Her pink-and-white sneaker drew a line back and forth in the dirt.
Was she real?
My fingers went to my pocket, to the photograph of Malik.
Children have no choice but to pay whatever price the world demands. But not this child, please God. Not this one.
The door to the center opened and a woman rushed out, her expression frantic. She spotted the girl and ran across the playground to lift her into her arms. When she turned and headed back to the door, the girl looked up, and our eyes met over the woman’s shoulder.
Not Lucy. I pressed my palms to the glass. Not Lucy.
I jumped when my earpiece buzzed. Cohen.
“We’ve got something,” he said. “A child’s bloodied clothing.”
CHAPTER 9
When your job is cataloging the dead, you focus on the injuries. How they were caused, which was the mortal blow. The person behind the wound becomes an abstraction—work laid out on the table.
At some point, when you realize what you’ve lost, you know you have to step away. Go listen to the voices of the living. Walk outside and look up at the stars. Listen to music or read something that breaks your heart.
You cannot carry the dead. But you must honor them.
—Sydney Parnell. Personal journal.
“It started with a tip on the hotline,” Cohen said. “Several hours after Samantha’s death, a caller spotted a woman and a little girl standing near a red Audi sedan at Ridge Park.”
A buzz built behind my eyes as I locked up Ben’s office and Clyde and I headed toward the elevator. Ridge Park was ten minutes from where Samantha had been killed.
The elevator door opened and we got on.
“Caller said he was walking his dog when he noticed them,” Cohen said, unspooling the story in his methodical way. “The woman was trying to get the girl in the car, and the girl was crying. Caller figured it was just a kid being a kid. But then he heard the news about Lucy. He told us the little girl he saw matches the description for Lucy Davenport.”
“Damn,” I said.
“Yeah.”
When we reached the lobby, the elevator doors slid open. Two grim-faced men in expensive suits stood waiting to get on, the receptionist with them. I forced a smile at all three and dropped the keys into the receptionist’s open palm.
“I kept watch,” I told the suits. “No one came by.”
I slipped past them before they could get over their surprise and Clyde and I pushed through the front door and into the heat of the cloud-dappled day.
“What was that?” Cohen asked.
“Nothing. Did the caller get a license plate?”
“That’s why we’re talking right now.”
I unlocked my truck and opened the passenger door for Clyde. “Spill it.”
“The Audi,” Cohen said, “belongs to Veronica Stern. And the description the caller provided of the woman matches Stern’s DMV photo.”
A frisson of shock rippled through me. “Stern was at the site this morning.”
“One reason we jumped on it.”
The first drops of rain hit my skin as I walked to the driver’s side. “You going to get to the bloodied clothing?”
“A uniform found Stern at home, asked if he could look in her car. First she said no, said it violated her civil rights. But the officer must have been convincing. She finally agreed. She also agreed to let him look around her house.”
“And?”
“Nothing in the home. But he found girl’s clothing under a box in the Audi’s trunk. Pink shorts and a T-shirt.”
His voice held a combination of misery and excitement that made my pulse leap.
“Bloodied,” I said.
“Soaked. They’re running a precipitin test now to confirm it’s human before we wait nine hours or more for a DNA test. We’re bringing Stern in. She denies any knowledge of how the clothes got into her trunk, but she’s pretty damn calm.”
I opened my door. The rain came down heavier.
“The Ice Queen,” I said when I found my voice. “That’s her rep.”
“Since you’ve worked with her, it might be good to have you observe the interview.”
Stern the litigation lawyer, who had left SFCO for DPC only six months earlier, just as the battle for the bullet train was heating up. I thought of her coldness that morning—it no longer seemed mildly humorous or even annoying.
Now it felt ominous.
The rain turned into a downpour as I drove. Traffic snarled, and pedestrians darted around the vehicles on their way toward shelter. Clyde watched warily out the window. To the east, dark clouds towered on the horizon like piles of dirty laundry, the gray shot through with a sickly yellow.
I’d learned a trick or two living with Cohen and now I channeled his ability to compartmentalize. I put aside all thought of Stern and the child’s clothing and dialed Tom O’Hara, the journalist whose business card had been paper clipped to the MoMA file in Ben’s office. Tom had moved from features to crime six months ago, but we’d stayed casually in touch. Meaning every couple of weeks he called and bugged me about doing a follow-up to my earlier interview with him. Especially, he said, since I was now a big hotshot investigator, having worked with Denver PD to solve a homicide.
“Tell me about Denver’s Museum of Modern Art,” I said when he answered.
“What, no foreplay?”
“I’m not that kind of girl.”