I filled them in on what I knew. My engineer had observed the woman standing on the tracks while heading south at 0358. He’d been driving a legal fifty miles an hour and had seen her in the glare of his ditch lights. He was approximately two hundred yards out from her as he came out of the curve. He blew the whistle and put the engine into an emergency stop, but the woman hadn’t moved and he had no hope of avoiding a collision. Nearly a mile further on, the train finally squealed to a halt. He called dispatch, who notified me as the duty officer.
I then picked up the engineer where he was stopped and ran a quick sobriety test even as I phoned in the accident to Thornton PD and alerted an ambulance. I’d removed the train image-recorder and event-recorder hard drives, then left the conductor with the train. The engineer and I had come here. I’d found the woman, then walked up and down the towpath a hundred feet in both directions, making sure there weren’t any other bodies. Standard procedure.
I left out the part about the flashback.
Wilson nodded up the hill toward the vehicles. “You run the Lexus?”
“It’s registered to Samantha Davenport, over in Washington Park. Age thirty-eight. No wants or violations. The description I received fits with what I can see of the body.”
“What can you make out of that mess?” Gresino asked.
“Her face,” I said gently.
He turned to look.
“Wash Park?” Wilson raised an eyebrow.
Washington Park was one of the tonier neighborhoods of Denver and a forty-minute drive away in zero traffic. Wash Park citizens didn’t usually end up under the wheels of trains. When the wealthy chose to die, they did it discreetly, behind closed doors.
“The Lexus’s doors are locked,” I said. “Interior’s clean. My flashlight showed nothing inside other than a pair of sunglasses, a woman’s rain jacket, and a sock monkey.”
“A what?”
“A stuffed animal. It’s a child’s toy.” Clyde had one, too, which I didn’t mention. Clyde and I kept our secrets.
Gresino turned to me. “Why drive forty minutes to throw yourself under a train?”
“If that’s how you mean to go,” I said, “this place is as good as it gets. No one to talk you down.”
Wilson nodded as though some part of him understood. “It is kinda peaceful here. Nice place for a picnic. Down by the river, there.”
“Are you shitting me?” Gresino glared at his partner. “You some kind of nature Buddhist granola nut? It’s a goddamn awful way to go. Here or anywhere.”
Goddamn awful, indeed.
“Let me know when you guys are ready to break the train and get her out of there,” I said. “I’ll call a crew in.”
The train’s engineer, Deke Willsby, stood by my railway-issued Ford Explorer, one foot propped on the running board. A cigarette dangled from his mouth, the ash long and soft, forgotten. His brown Denver Pacific Continental jacket hung from his shoulders like loose skin.
“Gonna be another hot one,” I said as Clyde and I approached. Trying for normal.
Deke startled. His fingers found the cigarette, pulled it from his mouth. He tapped the ash free and cleared his throat.
“What’s that, you say?” he asked.
I gave up on normal. “Suck of a day.”
He raised his cigarette and dragged in a lungful of smoke.
“And it’s just getting started,” he said. His eyes were hollow.
Deke was tall and balding, his arms ropy coils of muscle from working the trains. The creases of his hands were permanently black with oil, his knuckles knotty, the skin around his eyes webbed with wrinkles from forty years staring out the windows of a locomotive. I’d seen Deke laugh until he cried, seen him red in the face with anger. Found him drunk once at a retirement party. And caught him bone weary after a long haul.
But I’d never seen him like this, as raw as the dismembered woman on the tracks.
“I’m sorry, Deke,” I said.
“Oh, God, the sound.” Deke swiped his arm across his eyes. “You can’t never forget the sound. Like a meat grinder.”
I’d heard this from other engineers. And it had surprised me—that one frail human body could make any protest at all against a locomotive.
“The care team is assembling back at headquarters,” I said. “They’ll help.”
“Sure. I . . .” His lips found the cigarette again.
“What is it?”
He shook his head, blew smoke. But there was a lot going on behind his eyes.
“Your shift,” I said. “How many hours in?”
He snapped into himself, pulled up a look that could have drilled pavement. “I wasn’t asleep. Wasn’t even tired.”
“I have to ask, Deke.”
That was partially a lie—neither the railroad industry nor the federal government tracked fatigue-related crashes, so there was no requirement as such. But having a potentially exhausted crew at the controls of a ten-thousand-ton train wasn’t something I could ignore. And if anyone decided to sue Denver Pacific Continental over Samantha’s death—a likely event—the soundness of the crew was one of the first things the lawyers would look at.
“I was ten hours in,” Deke admitted. “Supposed to come off before the joint line, but that didn’t happen.”
“How many days on?”
“Six. Today’s my Friday, then I got four off.” His eyes met mine. “I’m not new at this. I was a little tired. What do you think Red Bull is for? But I wasn’t asleep at the wheel. Watch the LocoCAM. You’ll see.”
Most DPC locomotives were equipped with a train image recorder—a small camera mounted on the inside window that recorded the engineer’s eye-view of the track. It also tracked sound—conversation in the cab as well as horns and brakes. I’d look at it as soon as I was back in the office.
“What about Sethmeyer?” I asked. The conductor.
“He might have been a bit tired.”
Meaning lights out and probably snoring.
“We run solo all the time, you know,” Deke said softly, the frown still in his eyes. “No other way to manage the shifts with the railroad cutting crews.”
He took another drag, then let smoke billow out like an embrace. I grabbed the chance to enjoy the nicotine secondhand and said nothing. Sympathy could be interpreted as approval.
When he fell silent, I switched tactics. “You called Betsy yet?” Betsy and Deke had been married since Christ was a corporal. This would be her third call-out.
He finished the cigarette, ground it under his boot heel. “She’s on her way. Just getting off her shift at the diner.”
Below us, Wilson was jotting notes while Gresino took photographs. They looked accustomed to the routine.
Jumpers weren’t as rare as you might wish. Five Marines from my platoon had succumbed to the siren call of suicide. I’d stared down that monster myself. But those who used the trains to make it happen either forgot, or didn’t care, that they were forcing another man or woman to kill them.
Gresino’s voice floated up. “That is not her other leg. Is it?”
Deke looked at the ground. “I didn’t . . . I couldn’t . . .”
“I know, Deke.”
Better to keep him busy. The Thornton cops would want the details, as would the Federal Railroad Administration. It was my job to get them. The local detectives would process the scene and determine if there was reason to believe a crime had occurred. If the coroner ruled the death accidental or a suicide, the detectives’ work would be complete. Once forensics had what they needed, I’d clear the tracks and everyone would get on with their day.
Everyone except Samantha Davenport. And whoever she’d left behind.