—Sydney Parnell. Personal journal.
Mac McConnell was wide awake when I called. She heard me out, then promised to alert the CARD team in Ohio and put three members of her own team on the next flight out to Columbus. I typed up my conversation with Jim Norton, attached it to the incident reports, and e-mailed everything to her and Cohen. I debated calling Betsy King but decided it would be too cruel to call a woman in the middle of the night about her dead son. It would have to wait until morning.
I continued scrolling through the incident reports but didn’t find anything else with a connection to our case or the murder in Ohio. Then, assuming the FRA was wrong and that there had, in fact, been accidents at the crossing on Potters Road, I searched online for newspaper articles from the seventies and early eighties about Deadman’s Crossing. I especially wanted photographs of any victims, hoping to find a match to the woman in the photo in Ben’s desk.
I came up empty-handed. Nothing had been digitized from that time. I decided that tomorrow, after my meeting with Hiram, I would head to Thornton. If I hadn’t heard from the retired sheriff’s deputy, Wolanski, I would check with someone at the Thornton Chronicle. Maybe they had an article morgue.
Defeated, I was glad when, twenty minutes later, the floor vibrated as the garage door rattled open below. When Cohen didn’t appear after a couple of moments, Clyde and I went outside looking for him. We found him slouched on the top step, his head in his hands.
He looked up as we approached. His clothes and face and manner were as rumpled as a bedsheet, and the frown between his eyes looked carved with a knife. He had that narrow gaze he got whenever he was working his way through a problem. Like he’d opened the door to a room hiding a trap and was wondering how to take the first step.
He mustered up a smile. “Hey.”
“Hey.” I sat down next to him. The stairs were damp.
Clyde bumped his head against Cohen’s back, then stretched out on the decking behind us. I handed Cohen the scotch. He drank it down in a single swig, so I went back inside for the bottle.
“I saw your report just before I left,” he said when I returned. “Mac said she’d already spoken to you about it. This could be our first break. Good work.”
I told him that Hiram was originally from Ohio. And that the victim’s mother had worked for DPC.
Cohen was silent a moment. “You talk to the mother?”
“I’ll call her in the morning. We’ll find out then if she has any connection to Hiram.” I rubbed Clyde’s back; he let out a contented sigh. “What’s the word on Veronica Stern’s stalker?”
Cohen turned the glass in his hands but didn’t drink.
“We know Vander is back in town. He’s been living in his mother’s basement and going back and forth between here and Florida for the last two months. We’re looking now to see if he made a side trip to Ohio.”
“Let me guess. He didn’t come home last night.”
“Hasn’t come home the last two nights. And his boss at a comic book store in Aurora hasn’t seen him for two days. We’re working our way through a list of friends that his mother provided. Not that she’s exactly falling over herself to cooperate.”
“Why do stalkers always live in their mother’s basements?”
“Their fathers have had enough of their bullshit.” Cohen took a sip of the whiskey, then set the glass aside. “Carol Vander wouldn’t let us in, so we got a warrant. Mama was right to try and keep us out. Vander’s a railfan, all right. But not the kind that likes to take pictures of shiny new locomotives or shoot video of his kids on the California Zephyr.”
“Let me guess. Railroad accidents?”
“His walls are plastered with pictures of smashed trains, smashed cars, smashed bodies. Most of the photos are in color. At least the ones of the bodies.”
“Sounds like a great guy.”
“No ties so far to the Davenports,” Cohen went on. “But we found photos of Stern on Vander’s bedside table. I can only imagine what he was thinking when he jerked himself off to sleep every night.”
“What kind of photos?”
“The stalking kind. Stern getting in and out of her car. Stern shopping for her groceries. Stern going in and out of her office building—”
“Wait. Vander was near DPC headquarters?”
“Telephoto lens. We’re working backward from the angle to figure out where he was when he took the shots. We’re also checking the CCTVs at the stores where she shopped.”
“No bedroom shots?”
“Lucky for Stern, she keeps her blinds drawn. The guys in the computer lab are chasing him on social media and working to get into his computer.”
I stretched out my legs, rubbed my sore knee. “But no photos of the Davenports?”
“Not so far. Could just mean he’s got a few brain cells rattling around in that ugly skull. Still . . .” Cohen shrugged out of his suit coat and laid it across his lap. “I’m not totally sold on this guy. Unless we can link him to Ohio, the only criminal charge we have against him is Stern’s restraining order. And usually these guys do a lot of small shit before they decide to try the big time.”
“Son of Sam didn’t have a record before he killed six people,” I said. “Neither did the BTK Strangler when he murdered ten.”
Cohen gave me a strange look, then drank his Scotch and held out his glass. I poured more.
“The thing is,” Cohen said, “if he’s the killer, why risk making a false call against Stern? Even with a burner, he can’t be sure we won’t find him. What does he have to gain by trying to frame her?”
“She scorned him, and payback’s a bitch?” But I knew that wasn’t right. Our killer was deranged, not stupid. “His way of letting her know he’s back in town?”
“Yeah, maybe.” Cohen shook the glass as if there were ice cubes in there to rattle. “No fun doing bad things if no one knows you’re doing it.”
“BTK got caught because he bragged to the press about what he’d done.”
“You know, Parnell, you sure keep a lot of garbage in your head.”
“Mind like a sewer,” I agreed. “You talk to Stern about a possible pregnancy?”
Cohen nodded. “She swears she’s not. And she says if it will get us off her back, she’s willing to pee on a stick.”
I pulled my feet back in, hugged my knees. “You believe her?”
“I don’t believe anybody. Present company excluded.”
I pulled out my cigarettes. I apologized to Cohen just as I had earlier to Clyde and blew the smoke away from my two partners. The dark pressed in with suffocating closeness.
“You get anything else on that number?” Cohen asked.
“Not really. But I’m looking into the 1982 merger. Tate fought it hard for five years, then suddenly gave in.”
“And you have a theory about that.”