For a moment, Stern looked so miserable that even I felt bad about it.
“In the meantime,” Cohen went on, “we will have an officer escort you home and stay with you while we locate Zach Vander.”
Stern’s hands flattened across her stomach. She suddenly looked very young. “You think he might have done this?”
“If you can wait here for a few more minutes, I’ll arrange for that officer.”
With the interview over, Mac said good-bye and left quickly. She and her team had something to run with now. I wasn’t sure how the Feds and Denver PD were splitting the work, but I figured everyone would be after Zach Vander. They’d put out a BOLO, check whether he was still in Florida, and talk to any family or friends in Denver. I found myself crossing my fingers. If it was Vander who’d set up Stern, the police and the feebs should make short work of finding him. And if he was the killer, then they would find Lucy as well.
I stayed behind in the room while everyone else filed out, gearing myself up to visit Hiram Davenport and mentally running through a list of questions I’d squeeze in before he sent me packing. But when I pulled out my phone, there was a text message from someone named Jeff, advising me that Hiram had suffered a minor medical setback and would see me the next morning at eight.
Relieved and disappointed both, I considered my options, then looked up the number for the Adams County sheriff. When a woman answered, I identified myself and asked to speak to anyone who could answer questions concerning railroad crossing accidents that had occurred in the county twenty-eight years ago.
“You want Rick Wolanski,” the receptionist said. “He retired five years ago, but came back last month to start digitizing our old investigation reports.”
“Perfect. Can you transfer me?”
“Not until tomorrow. Rick’s at the end of a fishing trip in the middle of nowhere in Alaska. He flies home tomorrow morning. I can have him call you as soon as he’s back.”
“He have a cell?”
She laughed. “Rick’s afraid of technology. I think the sheriff only asked him to digitize those files because Rick was always hanging out here anyway, distracting the deputies.”
I bit down on the frustration. “Can I drive up there and go through the files myself?”
“I’m sorry, but they aren’t here. Rick took them home to do an initial sorting.”
“Is there someone at his house who can let me see them?”
“Rick’s an old bachelor.” She sounded impatient. “I’ll have him call you just as soon as he gets in tomorrow.”
I thanked her and hung up. For just a moment I debated breaking into Wolanski’s house and helping myself to the files. But that wouldn’t help us locate Lucy, and would render anything I found inadmissible in court. So with few options and fewer leads, I decided to check on Zolner again. A call to the Royal Tavern confirmed him as a no-show, and he still wasn’t answering his phone. But my mind kept going back to the man the neighbor had seen. And Bull’s truck. You don’t leave a $100,000 vehicle in your driveway unless you’ve got no choice.
I didn’t care about whatever hole Bull might have dug for himself. All I wanted was any information he had about that crossing—information that might explain the killer’s interest in it. I decided on a drive-by. Maybe it had all been a miscommunication, and I’d find Bull supervising the installation of shiny new aluminum siding.
Cohen caught me as Clyde and I were coming out of the observation room. Clyde did his best impression of the Leaning Tower of Pisa against Cohen’s leg, and Cohen buried his fingers in Clyde’s fur. Therapy dog.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“I think that either she knows that guy . . .”
People jostled by us, and we stepped back against the wall.
“Yeah?” Cohen said.
“Or she’s pregnant.”
Cohen’s mouth opened. Closed. I watched while he connected the dots. Another detective came down the hallway. “Meeting in five,” he told Cohen.
Cohen nodded that he’d heard. “The suit jacket. It bells out. Isn’t that the fashion?”
“Not for decades, I don’t think, although I’m the wrong person to ask. But it was more her reaction to the photo. That’s Stern’s job. She sees people in far worse shape than that, and in person. Why would a photo of a dead man make her sick?”
Cohen palmed his forehead. “Okay. That’s good. We’ll let her recover, then have another go at her. Anything else?”
“I think she’s lonely.”
“I saw that, too.” He tapped his notebook against his thigh. “It was something on her face when she talked about Ben. It was only there for a second. But if I had to give it a name, I’d be tempted to call it love.”
CHAPTER 11
I was twelve when my grandmother brought the news about my mother. That she’d been diagnosed with cancer while serving a twenty-year sentence for murdering a drunken lowlife named Wallace Cooper, who’d assaulted her. And that by the time the doctors knew of the cancer, she already had one foot in the grave and was getting ready to step in with the other.
When my grandmother finally found the courage to break the news to me, there was nothing left to do but go to the funeral.
I was angrier than I’d ever been with my grams for telling me too late.
But I was even angrier with my mother. For landing herself in prison. And then for dying.
—Sydney Parnell. Personal journal.
A single light burned at the back of Zolner’s house.
At four in the afternoon, a brand-new batch of storm clouds were bunched over the distant mountains, rushing the day toward dusk. The road still gleamed from the recent rain. Headlights swept shadows along the pavement, and the wind shook raindrops from leaves and telephone wires.
I pulled to the curb across the street from Bull’s house. The place was even less appealing in the dying light. That morning it had been washed up and resigned. In the cloud-shot evening, it had jumped camp into malevolent. The upstairs windows brooded sightlessly out onto the street, while the red front door gave off a wet sheen, like a bloody mouth.
There wasn’t a siding salesman anywhere around.
I raised my binoculars. A trace of light shone around the edges of the drapes covering the front window. I didn’t think there’d been a light shining in Zolner’s house earlier, but the day had been brighter then. The same red pickup sat in the driveway from that morning, still blocking the garage. Maybe I just hadn’t noticed the light.
Or maybe Bull had lied to his neighbor, hidden his Dodge in the garage, and was now inside the house, keeping a low profile. In the neighborhood I grew up in, people got creative at hiding, whether they were avoiding a sheriff’s deputy serving child-support papers or a bail bondsman looking to collect a debt.
Or siding salesmen who might be something else.
Clyde, sensing something important was going on, moved his gaze from the house to me and back again. I left my duty belt in the truck but removed the flashlight and clipped it to my belt loop.