Cohen, I remembered. He’d come home to change.
Still, just because you were paranoid didn’t mean they weren’t out to get you. I punched in the code for the alarm, then rearmed it once Clyde and I were inside. I dropped my bag in the living room, dialed Mauer, then started a walk through of the house, pulling blinds and checking to see if someone had stashed a corpse anywhere.
“I’m working my way back from the most recent accident files,” Mauer said. “Nothing yet. A couple of the Death and Dismemberment forms are either missing or misfiled, so it’s possible we’ll never find anything.”
I paused in my survey of the master bedroom. “The crossing form for 025615P was missing from the Federal Railroad Administration files.”
“Could be a coincidence.”
“I don’t believe in coincidences. But the good news is, someone put in a placeholder. Our crossing is the one at Potters Road, near where Samantha died. It’s an overpass now. Margaret Ackerman at the FRA hasn’t been able to find a record of any accidents there. But an article written in 1982 says there were several. Locals called it Deadman’s Crossing.”
“And you think the accidents are why the crossing is significant to the killer?”
“You have any better ideas?”
“I’ll keep digging.”
After we hung up, I finished my inspection of the house. Nothing more sinister than dirty laundry and a thick layer of dust.
In the kitchen, I stripped off Clyde’s gear and gave him fresh food and water. I searched through the refrigerator and found last night’s shrimp scampi, one of Cohen’s favorite dishes. He made it every couple of weeks. I scooped half onto a plate and popped it in the microwave. Cohen would shoot me for treating his scampi so poorly. The least I could do was warm it up on the stove. But I didn’t have the energy. And me being me, I’d probably burn it.
I poured myself a finger of Macallan and left it on the bar that separated the living room from the kitchen. I carried the scampi into the bedroom, eating as I walked. It was soggy. Mea culpa.
In the bedroom, I took a couple of Advils for my knee, yanked off my work boots, then stripped out of my uniform and showered. I smeared some antibiotic ointment on the cut on my forehead, added a bandage and called it good. At last, clean and comfortable in a pair of sweats and a tattered Mortuary Affairs T-shirt, I returned to the kitchen and sat at the bar. I used the remote to click on the TV.
“. . . historic rainfall up and down the Front Range,” a meteorologist was saying. “Creeks and rivers are swollen, and some dams—”
I clicked it off. Clyde wandered over to check on me.
“We’re still good,” I told him.
But it was a lie. The investigation was now nudging out of the first day of Lucy’s disappearance and into the second, and we had precious little to show for it. Lucy’s chances were diminishing with each passing hour, in direct correlation to the dread rising through me like an extra heartbeat.
Clyde kept watching me.
“Okay,” I told him. “We’re not so good. I made a promise, and what we’ve got so far is a whole lot of nothing.”
His ears came up. “Then get on it,” he was saying.
“Right. Let’s see what we have. From the railroad perspective.”
I opened up my laptop and started typing as a way to organize my thoughts.
First, a hazardous materials train that would never actually exist. The cops and the Feds would run down everyone associated with that train, from the railroad employees to the vendors and their employees through everyone involved from the regulatory agencies. It was a huge goddammit, as my grams would say, and likely to lead nowhere. The killer had to know that by writing down that number in the Davenports’ home, he’d guaranteed the train would never exist. So what had he intended?
I paused in my typing. Maybe his only goal had been to create chaos, especially if he was pushing for some ideology—he didn’t believe in drilling for oil, say.
But the up-close and personal nature of his crime suggested it was something else.
What, I typed, is personal about a hazmat train?
I stared at the blinking cursor. You hated hazmat trains on principle. They were dangerous, they were vulnerable to terrorism. Or, more personally, you’d been hurt by one. I made a note to look into chemicals spills near Denver.
Next, we had the crossing number. Maybe there weren’t any accidents listed because Alfred Tate’s railroad had never reported them. But then why go after the Davenports? Hiram had actually eliminated the possibility of any accidents occurring at that crossing.
I needed to talk to the retired deputy, Rick Wolanski. He would be able to tell me definitively if there had been any accidents there. I typed, Hazmat train and crossing at Potters Road? Linked? Need accident reports.
Finally, we had the quotes about betrayed lovers. Back to the personal angle. I typed, What does a hazmat train have to do with lovers?
I stood and dug through the kitchen utility drawer until I found a box of thumbtacks, then picked up the whiskey on my way into the living room. On the far end of the vaulted space was an empty wall where normal people with time to think about normal things would have hung art. I stared at that blankness and thought about the hole that was left when a child went missing. About the emptiness created in a space where once a child breathed and laughed in a world that was a daily miracle to them—assuming they’d had a normal childhood.
I thought about what hole Lucy might be in now. In the ground or in a basement or on a mattress somewhere. Then I shook off the fear and opened my duffel. I removed the photos, books, and everything else I’d collected during the day.
Leaving the center of the wall open for the moment, I thumbtacked up the pictures of the Davenport family that I’d printed at my office—the ones of Lucy and the twins at the Edison Cement Works, the three of them standing like small ghosts in the falling snow. I placed a sticky note at the corner of one of the pictures: Killer first sees Davenports here?
Next I pinned up the article announcing DPC’s takeover of Alfred Tate’s T&W short line and added two more notes: Hiram acquires Edison from Tate in 1982 and donates a portion of the property to MoMA in 2010. Questionable? Hiram turns 025615P into an overpass even though no accidents reported?
And a third: Tate stops fighting the merger. Why?
I moved on to the stills from the train video, the woman’s photo from Ben’s desk which I’d made a copy of at police headquarters, and a photocopy of the deed transfer of part of the Edison Cement Works factory to MoMA. The fact that the article, the photo, and the MoMA file had all been together in a locked drawer made me hope Ben had found a link between the three. Something that I, too, could ferret out.