I pursed my lower lip and exhaled smoke. “If there were accidents at the crossing, Tate wasn’t reporting them. Maybe Hiram found out and blackmailed him. Enmity could have been smoldering for years, then erupted when Stern jumped ship. I’ll see what I can learn from Hiram in the morning.” Assuming he didn’t, as Mac put it, fire my ass.
“Some agency would have had to approve the merger, right? Wouldn’t there be records?”
“The Interstate Commerce Commission approved the deal. But they don’t exist anymore. They were replaced by the Surface Transportation Board in the midnineties, and I doubt if so much as a paper cup survived the transition. It wasn’t a happy occasion.” I tapped ash on the stair. “Still hate all the garbage in my head?”
Cohen leaned into me until our shoulders touched. “You seem angry.”
“I’m always angry.”
“There is that. But I mean about this case.”
I sucked on the cigarette until it crackled, then held the smoke in my lungs while I thought. Finally, I spewed out smoke. “I am angry. Someone used my train, my tracks, to commit murder and to take away a child. That was my territory and my watch. It shouldn’t have happened.”
“Because your super railroad-cop powers let you be everywhere at once.”
I glared at him.
“Sydney.” He pressed his head to mine. “People like the man or woman who did this—they’re not like us. They’re a force of nature. Like . . .” He searched for words. “Like a natural disaster. We can’t prevent them or even prepare for them. We can’t know who they might go after or who they’ll reach. The one thing we can do is not let them inside our heads.”
“The other thing we can do is track them down and kill them.”
“Always an option.”
“She might already be dead, Mike.”
If he was surprised by my use of his first name, he didn’t show it. He leaned harder against me. “She might.”
I smoked in silence for a time, calculating how much moral injury you would have to carry if you failed to find a stolen child. The memory of Malik burned a path down my spine.
Cohen leaned back on his elbows, stared up into the sky. Then suddenly he leaned over and kissed me.
But I pushed him away. “There’s got to be something else we can do for Lucy tonight.”
“What we can do is relax enough to let our subconscious minds work.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“It’s science. Try it.”
I held my cigarette far away and kissed him back. “How long do you have?”
“Three hours. Then I’m heading back in.”
I put out the cigarette and kissed him again. After a moment, he pulled away, a bemused look on his face.
“How was the shrimp scampi?”
“It was . . . soggy.”
“You nuked it.”
“I was hungry.”
“Okay.” He pulled me close. “Just so you know, that’s a crime.”
“Are you going to arrest me for crustacean abuse?”
“Crustacean? Who says crustacean?”
“Mind like a sewer,” I told him.
“All I know, Parnell, is that I love you. And don’t”—he touched a finger to my lips—“don’t say anything back at all.”
So I didn’t, unsure what words I would offer him anyway.
Sometime later, I came awake with my heart in my throat.
Beside me, Cohen snored lightly. But next to our bed, Clyde was on his feet.
I slid out of bed and into the sweats and T-shirt I’d worn earlier, then grabbed my phone and gun from the nightstand. Clyde and I glided out of the bedroom and into the living area. In the milky light of the moon—filtered through the blinds—the photographs I’d thumbtacked to the wall stared down at us. I stood in the middle of the room, listening intently.
Clyde looked past me and whimpered, and I turned.
The Six stood against the far wall, watching me with eyes as deep and dark as graves. Clyde and I backed away from them until we came up against the windows.
My phone vibrated in my pocket. I pulled it out and glanced at the screen. The hospital.
“No.” I started shaking my head. “Please, no.”
I turned my back on the Six and—half-angry, half-fearful—I raised the phone to my ear.
“Special Agent Parnell, this is Amy Derose with Denver Health Medical Center. I have a note here to call you. I’m sorry to inform you that Frank Wilson passed away half an hour ago.”
I slipped on my jacket, then picked up the bottle of Macallan and carried it outside to the second-floor deck. Clyde followed me, and we sat together beneath the awning, our backs against the wall, safe from the soft drizzle of rain and the faraway flicker of lightning. I swigged the Scotch then sucked the cool night air into lungs that seemed to have forgotten how to breathe.
The air in Cherry Hills was rarified. Rich people’s air that smelled of freshly mown lawns and waxed Bentleys and just a whiff of corruption. I lit one of my last five cigarettes, giving the clean air the metaphorical finger, and stared out at the darkness. Then I pulled Malik’s photo out of my coat pocket and held it between my fingers.
Photographs, like ghosts, are the persistence of memory. Over time, people fade from our recollection, or change. Their faces become kinder or more cruel, their hair less gray or more so.
But photographs carry the truth, if only one small piece of it.
Maybe the photos Samantha had taken were her way of holding back the inevitable tide of loss that sweeps down on us all. In the same way, I’d clung to the handful of photos I had of Malik, worried he was already fading from my mind. Now I worked to pull up a memory of one of my favorite images of him—a picture I’d taken on his birthday, only a couple of months after his mother was murdered. He looked stunned in the photo, the candles from the cake lighting his bewildered face. I hated the pain there, the loss in his eyes. But what I loved was how he had his arms wrapped around my waist. He’d counted on me to take care of him in a way no one ever had. And I had taken care of him, right up until I’d been redeployed and had to leave him behind. Then I’d failed him completely.
Moral injury. It was where I was at. I wondered if there was a limit to how much moral injury one person could suffer before they broke.
I slid the photo back into my pocket.
A breeze lifted and the trees murmured back and forth, their tops laced with stars.
Where were they? Malik and Lucy. Lying awake as I was? I hoped. Hoped with a vast, yawning need that felt like it would eat at me until I was nothing but a casing packed to the brim with rage and grief, ready to explode.
I startled when the door slid open. Cohen, carrying a sleeping bag.
“News?” I asked as he stepped outside.
“Nothing yet.”
He settled next to me and spread the sleeping bag over the two of us, then pulled me close. I pressed my face into his shoulder, glad for the weight of his arm against my back.
“Frank Wilson died,” I said.
He pulled me closer. His lips brushed my hair. “I’m sorry.”
He laced his fingers through mine, and I squeezed back.
Eventually, I slid into sleep and dreamed that Lucy had fallen into a deep crevasse. I knelt at the edge of the abyss, holding tight to her hand, my fingers slick with sweat. But try as I might, I couldn’t pull her up. My grip grew weak, and she slipped out of my grasp, crying out as she disappeared into the darkness.