One Way Ticket Page 2

  Cooper tugs at the leash, heading toward the nature reserve that’s only steps from the mobile home park. The dappled sunshine from the swaying trees shifts over the path in front of them. Cooper ignores the sunnier road leading up the hill, taking them into the shadows. Naomi shivers as she descends into the thick, humid forest. Cold rolls over her shoulders like the fog filling the valley. It’s too chilly to wear nothing but a thin cardigan, but Naomi thinks of that little girl sitting with her arms wrapped over her legs, shivering, and keeps walking.

  Suddenly, Cooper launches forward. She stumbles and tugs back. "Heel!"

  He’s yanking so hard the collar tightens like a noose around his neck, and his tongue lolls out.

  "Idiot dog. Stop pulling—heel! I swear to God, hundreds of dollars in doggy training classes, and what do I have to show for it?"

  There’s a rustle beneath the leaves of a vine curling over a thick oak, and a small, dark shape shoots up the tree. Dumb dog must have seen a squirrel, but he leads her away from it and down a steep gorge leading to a stream. Cooper’s paws sink into the grey mud as he stops to watch her.

  "No, Coop. There’s a dry path—argh!"

  Another violent tug sends her flying forward, and she lets out a panicked shriek as the world tilts. Naomi throws out her hands and catches fistfuls of freezing slop. It squelches between her fingers.

  "Ugh. Great!"

  She regains her footing, groaning at the brown patches staining her knees. Her dog vanishes into the brush with a swish of a golden tail. So much for a dog’s loyalty.

  "Stupid dog!"

  This was such a bad idea. Now her jeans are soaked and she’s chilled to the bone, and Cooper is nowhere in sight. Naomi crashes around the forest, branches clinging to her clothes. She thinks she sees a patch of gold behind a tree and calls out after him.

  Lusty barks answer back—they’re high-pitched, almost frantic. The sound reverberates through the forest. She brushes a leafy branch aside and there he is, his head buried in a bush. He’s still barking, tail wagging madly.

  "What the hell is wrong with you? Shut up!"

  He turns around with something in his mouth. Naomi recoils. Cooper growls with the flesh-colored object between his teeth.

  Oh great, a dead animal. Now she’ll have to wrestle the thing out of his jaws and scrub her hands with bleach. Blood stains Cooper’s muzzle, the golden fur darkened with deep red. A shiver of disgust runs through her.

  "Let it go."

  It’s the one command he obeys. He drops it before her, proud, and then she realizes what it is: a big, hairy, human foot.

  Chapter 3

  9:20 AM – LA Express

  The body is gone.

  Fifteen minutes ago he was sitting on the toilet. His mouth gaping open. A giant gash across his throat. No pulse in his wrists. Dead people don’t move on their own. Suddenly, it’s hide and seek with a corpse.

  He’s missing—is missing the right word? Stolen?

  Jules steps inside, scanning the floor, the blank walls, and the space behind the door just to rule out the absurd possibility that he fell off the seat and rolled into a tight ball in the corner. Nope. He’s definitely gone. It’s as though there was never a body.

  This can’t be happening.

  Behind her, Vinny awkwardly coughs. "Um… I don’t see anything."

  Heat rises up her neck to burn in the middle of her cheeks like two intense, small suns. Stunned into silence. It’s not the first time it’s happened to her, but without a domestic disturbance call, a hoarder’s house full of cannibalistic cats, or an arsonist’s accidental injection of lighter fluid, the silence only makes her look idiotic.

  Swallowing down the acid, she reaches for a thin foil packet. The foil crinkles as the pills rip out of the packaging. Too loud, but not like it’ll wake the dead with no bodies around. Jules stares straight ahead as her hand lifts to her mouth. The cherry dust has barely touched her lips when Vinny makes another impatient noise.

  "Detective?" His voice lowers. "She having a hot flash or something?"

  The throbbing pain in the back of her head rotates to the space between her eyes. "There’s nothing here because the body was moved."

  "Okay."

  The doubt stiffens her back because she knows how crazy that sounds. Corpses don’t stand up and walk out of their crime scenes, which means someone hauled him out in the time she’d spent walking toward the conductor’s car and talking with the employees. Fifteen minutes, tops. Maybe the cover of darkness was enough for him to slip in and out of the bathroom unseen, but that’s so damn unlikely.

  Vinny coughs again, louder.

  The door slams shut as she whirls around to face a smirking Vinny. "What?"

  He holds up his hands. "Look, no one’s pointing any fingers, but you look a little tired."

  She hasn’t slept in days. That probably has to do with the sharp pain in her gut. "Meaning what?"

  "I’m just saying, the mind plays tricks sometimes. Maybe you thought you saw something."

  Is he serious? He is. She'd love to smack the fake concern off his face. "There was a dead body."

  "Okay, fine."

  Ignoring Vinny, she looks over his shoulder at the darkened sleeper car, but nothing jumps out at her. She doesn’t know what she expected—a grinning man? The killer must have grabbed the victim after she left. Makes no sense. Why leave the body here for someone to discover and then move it as soon as it was found? Jules can only speculate. He could be toying with her. He might be watching her right now.

  A chill spider crawls down her spine.

  "Someone carried a corpse out of the women’s bathroom?" Herb says. "In front of all these passengers?"

  "Obviously he had some way of concealing the body." She glances at the ceiling, searching for black domes. "Please tell me this train has cameras."

  "Nope," Vinny says. "The only ones we have are outside to watch engineers. We were supposed to get them in this year, but I guess the FRA didn’t consider it a high priority."

  Another employee pipes up. "There was this study a while back that said most of the cameras you notice on trains are fake or don’t work."

  "Fantastic." A train post-9/11 in this country without surveillance? This has to be a joke. "Then I’ll need the passenger manifest."

  Vinny blinks. "What?"

  "A list of everyone on board and their seating arrangements."

  "There are no assigned seats." He shifts his gigantic bulk out of the way as a young girl moves through. "People sit wherever they want."

  Even worse. "Okay. Then I’ll have to search it car by car. You need to wake everybody up so I can start with the first one." Jules squeezes past Herb and Vinny, heading toward the car.

  "I’m not waking up these people. I’ll never hear the end of it from my manager."

  She can hardly believe someone could be so dense. "Either you do it, or I will. And my way won’t be as nice as yours."

  "Can’t we wait?" he says, wheezing behind her. "We have to think about this. Hold on, dammit!"

  "You don't get it, do you? There’s a murder victim on this train. This is a crime scene. I don’t give a rat’s ass about your passengers’ comfort."

  That shuts him up, but not before he mouths an almost silent bitch. It would’ve stung if she were ten years younger. With a loud sigh, she walks into the black space of the sleeper car and thinks of what to do next.

  The facts roll through her head. The train has no stops until Los Angeles, and she already knows the victim died during the trip. There’s no chance the killer disembarked. A brazen murder like this has the hallmarks of an experienced killer who’s done this before. He was cocky enough to swipe the victim right from under her nose, so that meant he was in car one twenty minutes ago. To know to move the body, he must’ve seen her get up, go to the bathroom, and walk away.

  The lights flicker on overhead when Jules finds the switches and flips them. She walks through the aisle as people wince at the su
dden brightness. Then she claps her hands together and bellows.

  "Attention, everyone! My name is Detective Julia Sawyer, and I will need your full cooperation for the next few hours. There’s been an incident on the train, and we’ll be coming to a stop shortly—"

  Groans erupt from the crowd. Jules looks at the sea of angry faces, debating whether to tell them the truth. She might get answers faster, but she’d rather not send the entire car into a panic. "There have been reports of suspicious activity on board, and I will have to search the train. Please remain seated."

  A woman wearing a sundress rises from her seat. "Is it terrorists?"

  "I have no reason to believe that."

  The woman sinks back into the cushions, her face ashen. "Oh my God."

  "There’s nothing to worry about, but the women’s bathroom in this car is off-limits for the duration of the ride. I’ll need everyone’s cooperation. Please remain calm and stay seated. Thank you."

  Everyone is passively nodding until she tells them to remain calm. It’s as though a bomb goes off. The car explodes with questions Jules doesn’t want to answer.

  "What the hell happened?"

  "Yeah," another man agrees. "We deserve a little more information."

  "I need to search the car," she says, shouting over the noise. "It’ll only be a few seconds. The more you argue, the longer this will take."

  She knows from experience it’s better to be vague with a group of anxious people, and she's right. The crowd settles down, somewhat mollified. People throw her dirty looks she pretends not to see. Somewhere on this train is a rapidly decaying body, a killer, and a murder weapon. Jules heads toward the row of backward-facing seats closest to the bathroom. There’s only one passenger: a surly teenager who crosses his arms as she approaches.

  "Sir, I need to ask you some questions."

  "Fine," he says, shrugging.

  "Did you notice a man entering or leaving the women’s bathroom?"

  He lifts an eyebrow. "That’s what this is about? A dude using the wrong toilet?"

  "Answer the question."

  "No, I didn’t. I was asleep."

  "Did you see anyone moving a large suitcase into the bathroom?"

  He sighs. "I dunno. Like I said, I was knocked out."

  “Do you mind if I search your backpack?”

  “Yes.”

  Sighing, she moves on to the next possible witness, an elderly woman with Coke-bottle eyeglasses who may have seen "a tall, dark shape" but could not tell her anything more. The following set of people she interviews, a fair-skinned man in a pinstripe business suit and a girl dressed in a skirt and blouse, saw nothing either.

  Most people consent to the searches. Reaching into the overhead compartment, she pulls a bulky suitcase from the rack and unzips it. As soon as she completes a cursory search, Jules moves on to another. It’s slow and cumbersome. One of the crewmembers, Herb, helps her move aside the luggage and check behind the racks, but she finds nothing suspicious.

  This is taking longer than she thought, and she doesn’t have enough manpower. A complete search of the train will take hours. Jules resigns herself to the inevitable smart-ass comments that’ll come in as soon as this gets out. You lost the body? She imagines her partner standing in front of her, an incredulous grin playing on his lips. How the hell did you do that? Hey, Johansen! Did you hear? Sawyer lost her murder vic!

  She’s embarrassed, but it’s nothing compared to the skin-crawling knowledge that someone took the body away. He watched her, and then he moved his victim. Premeditated murder and disposal. That’s a big deal.

  Jules walks through the sleeper car and heads toward the employees-only area. She glares back at the crewmembers staring at her with open hostility, and then enters the corded-off, restricted space. The glass door vibrates when she pounds her fist. Vinny happily ignores her.

  She opens the door and squeezes inside. "I need you to stop the train!"

  "Why?"

  Insolent bastard. "For starters, there’s a killer running amok."

  "It’s just hard to believe—there was no blood in that bathroom."

  "I know it happened, and that should be enough for you. Stop. The. Train."

  He hesitates. White-hot anger pulses in her chest. Lives are at stake, and this idiot is worried about customer satisfaction surveys. What the hell does he think they’ll say when they find out he refused to stop the train when there was a murderer on board?

  Seconds before Jules throttles the man, someone pokes her shoulder. She turns around with a snarl. "What?"

  It’s Herb, looking white-faced and scared. "One of the passenger’s might’ve found something. You should come."

  "Fine." She glances at Vinny, who is watching her through narrowed eyes. "I’m coming straight back."

  "Whatever," he says.

  Desperate to get away from him, she follows Herb out of the control room and lets the door slam. Vinny gives her an uncertain look behind the glass that sends her blood pressure flying. Focusing on him isn’t helpful. She pushes the irritating conductor out of her mind as they walk through the first car. The passengers have quieted down somewhat, but there’s a roar coming from down the aisle. It’s attracting attention. Several people turn their heads to peek through the window.

  "Did a passenger report something?"

  "They found a strange note in car two."

  She picks up her pace. "No one touched it, right?"

  "Um, the woman who discovered it might’ve."

  Damn. Whatever it is, it sounds important. She follows Herb, eyes fixed on his dark-blue uniform. They reach the door separating the cars, and the air hisses as he shoves it open.

  There’s noisy chatter in the second car. She looks at the group of people standing around a seat, making quick profiles of everyone there. A forty-year-old man is the closest to it, and he seems to be a barricade against the others clamoring to get near the chair.

  Jules pushes her way through the aisle. "Step aside!"

  The man’s red-rimmed gaze focuses on her as Herb introduces the guy performing crowd control, who is a federal marshal.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you had one on board?”

  Herb flushes. “Honestly, I just remembered. This is Hicks.”

  The man shows her his badge, and it checks out. "Charles Hicks," he says, shaking her hand. "There it is." He points toward a piece of paper haphazardly attached to the head of the seat with a sewing needle.

  Is it a note? Jules leans closer, studying its rectangular shape. It’s identical to the one-way ticket she bought this morning. Except there’s a strange doodle scrawled under the man’s name printed on the rough paper. A round bloodstain sits right in the center.

  "It looks like a skull," the marshal says.

  She plucks the pen sticking out from Herb’s shirt pocket, ignoring his protest as she uses it to flip the ticket over. A thrill hits her chest when the needle slips out. Something falls and smacks the cushion of the seat. It bounces off and lands right side up next to Jules’ sneakers with a mundane finality.

  One bystander screams. "I’m going to throw up!"

  It takes several seconds for Jules to process that yes, the flesh-colored object is an ear and no, it’s not fake. The thing has hair growing out of it, and there’s a bloodless hole where the needle pierced through the cartilage.

  Could it belong to her John Doe?

  "Does anyone have a pair of latex gloves?" she says. "And if you'll be sick, please do it somewhere else."

  The passengers scatter like cockroaches, repeating the same phrase over and over, "It’s an ear!"

  Only Charles remains behind. He adjusts his glasses. "What the hell is it?"

  "Looks like a severed ear."

  "Not that! The note."

  She flips it back over to read the name printed on the ticket: MARK NILSEN.

  This might be the victim’s identity. "The killer’s calling card."

  Chapter 4

  10:26 AM
– Fremont Police Department

  What does she want now?

  Detective Pete Landry fights a groan as a familiar face looms behind the fogged window. She rubs a clear circle on the glass and waves at him, gesturing toward a shoebox clutched in her hands.

  Good Lord, she brought her dog, too. White clouds billow from his snout as he barks. Landry was never a huge fan of dogs before he joined the force, and his indifference grew into outright dislike after chasing perps through backyards and getting assaulted by all kinds of animals. Whoever said that pit bulls are the only vicious dogs was an idiot. There’s a four-inch scar on his forearm from a golden retriever that says different.

  It looked just like that one. The dumb dog walks round and round, trapping Naomi’s legs together with the leash. She looks like a crazed maniac standing behind that glass. An officer opens the door for her. Mud cakes her jeans. Her hands are filthy, too.

  "Ma’am, animals aren’t allowed in the station," he says.

  "I know— Quit it, Coop! Sorry, Officer." The woman who’s been haranguing him for weeks untangles the leash and points at the sidewalk. "Stay!"

  The dog half-sits, eyes trained on the box. She ignores him, making a beeline straight for the detective. Fruitlessly, he glances around his desk and wishes he had a cast-iron excuse to ignore Naomi. God, he hates her. It’s not just that she’s annoying as hell. She’s a daily reminder of the missing persons case he has no leads on, and how badly he let down the Parkers.

  The sides of his Styrofoam coffee cup buckle as she huffs her way in front of his desk and slams the shoebox down.

  "Good morning, Naomi. You still need to make an appointment."

  "There’s nothing good about this morning, Detective. This is for you."

  Such a bundle of joy. "What is that?"

  "Evidence," she says before opening the lid.

  He looks inside, and the sight turns his stomach. Inside the box is a human foot severed at the ankle. It’s rubbery in appearance, and there’s a mass of dark-red meat clinging to exposed bone. A line of nausea crawls up his throat. "Is this some sort of sick joke?"