I wondered if the jumper had left a note for her family. Then I wondered if she had a family. And if they would have been able to save her if they’d known what she intended.
In metropolitan Denver, an area covering forty-five hundred square miles and holding more than three million souls, how had she found this lonely place? Was it luck or planning that sent her here where there wasn’t a chance in hell that someone would wander by in the middle of the night and stop her? Luck or planning that made her choose a place where the tracks curved just enough to hide her, right up until the locomotive cleared the overpass and came around the bend?
“You wanted death so badly?” I asked the corpse.
Clyde gave a small whine.
I scrubbed behind his ears. “Yeah, I know.”
Clyde and I had reached the tracks half an hour earlier. I’d spotted the body—in pieces—and taken a single step toward the tracks. In an instant, I was halfway around the world, in the dust and heat of Iraq, loading parts of dead Marines into the back of a refrigerated truck.
It was Clyde’s persistent nudging that had brought me back—crouched to the ground and hyperventilating—near this quiet stretch of track.
I’d been in work-mandated counseling for five months, ever since Clyde and I had helped the Denver police hunt for a killer in an investigation that led to a horrifying pileup of bodies—victims and perpetrators alike. If the therapy hadn’t helped with the flashbacks and the nightmares and the ghosts, at least I’d weaned myself off the pain meds and the Ativan, off the cigarettes and the self-reproach, working hard to find my way back to a clear head and a clean conscience. Back to who I’d been before first the war and then the investigation had undermined everything I believed in.
But the past, of course, never goes away.
Clyde was doing even better. He was the most agile and fit he’d been since Iraq, his black-and-tan Belgian Malinois coat glossy, his eyes bright. The injuries he’d sustained during the manhunt were just a bad memory.
He nudged me again. Get to work, Marine.
“By all means,” I told him, “don’t let me slow you down.”
Red-and-blue lights pulsed through the dark behind me, and a car pulled to the side of the road at the top of a small rise. A door opened and closed, and the voices of two men came softly through the gloom. The cop who’d answered my call-in, presumably, and the engineer who’d been driving this train. I’d sent the engineer up to the road to flag down the patrolman. And to get him away from the death he’d unintentionally caused.
I turned at the sound of footsteps coming down the hill. A flashlight bobbed and weaved, the beam flickering over Clyde and me, then to the ground before it came to rest on the side of the train looming against the fading stars.
“You the rent-a-cop that called it in?” asked a young male voice.
“I’m Special Agent Parnell.”
I didn’t take offense at his choice of words. Often, even other cops didn’t understand what my job entailed. A railroad cop worked for a private company but was also a Level 1 POST-certified peace officer, just like any cop employed by the government. We had state and federal mandates to patrol, investigate, and make arrests, on and off railroad property.
I waited while Thornton PD’s first responder made his way toward me. In the back glow from his flashlight, he looked no more than twenty-two or twenty-three; this was probably his first jumper. I felt a flash of pity.
His light came to settle on my face a beat too long before he lowered it. I blinked away the afterimage.
“I’m Officer Ketz,” he said. “You found it?”
“Her. Yes.” We shook hands. He ignored Clyde, who returned the favor.
“Detectives are on their way,” he said. “Why don’t we take a look-see?”
“I were you, I’d leave that to the others.”
As we spoke, the sun nudged up toward the horizon and a thin glow seeped into the gray. I could make out more of his features. Ruddy skin and blue eyes. Blond hair beneath his uniform cap. I caught the faintest whiff of cologne. Officer Ketz was handsome, athletic. Confident.
He frowned at my words.
“Your first body?” he asked.
“Well, I—”
He almost patted me on the head. “First one’s always the worst.”
“True,” I said. “Just treat it as a crime scene. And watch out for her leg. It’s ten yards to your right.”
He paused at that but then climbed the slight rise toward the tracks, his boots crunching on the ballast. He squatted on his haunches and panned the flashlight beneath the coal car and along the tracks.
“What the—” he started. Then, “Fuck.”
I lifted my face to the cool, moist air. The stars had disappeared. From the other side of the train, the rising sun sent stabs of light in our direction, a bold promise that this July day would come on hard. Denver was suffering a record heat wave along with torrential nightly thunderstorms that had soaked the ground, overloaded the storm drains, and turned the city into a swamp. People remarked that between the weather and the uptick in crime, Denver might as well be the Congo.
Behind me came the sweep of headlights as another car pulled to a stop. More doors, then voices. Men, chatty and grumpy. The detectives.
Another sound disturbed the morning quiet. The patrol officer had managed to make it thirty feet from the tracks before he heaved his breakfast into the weeds.
“First one’s always the worst,” I said.
The detectives were bleary-eyed old-timers. Frank Wilson—five-eleven, overweight, and balding, his face as off-color and wrinkled as crumpled newsprint. And Al Gresino—a few years younger, six-four, red-faced and beefy, with a puffiness that hinted at heart problems. They flashed their badges, shook my hand, and Wilson asked if Clyde would offer a paw. Clyde obliged.
“Aren’t you gorgeous,” Wilson said to him. “Malinois, right? Smart buggers.”
Clyde preened.
“What’s with the rookie?” Gresino jerked a thumb toward Ketz, who still stood bent at the waist in the weeds. He raised his voice. “Hey, this jumper pop your cherry?”
Ketz didn’t turn around. But he lifted his middle finger.
“Something he ate,” I said. I liked his moxie.
Gresino snorted.