ONCE BOUND

by Blake Pierce

  Before Cullen could reply, his own cell phone buzzed and he scowled.

  He said, “I already know who that is. It’s the railroad administrator, wanting to know if he can get the trains moving again. The line has got three freight trains piled up and a passenger train running late. There’s a fresh crew ready to drive away the train that’s still sitting on the tracks. Can we move the body yet?”

  Riley nodded and said to the coroner, “Go ahead, get her into your van.”

  Cullen turned away and took the call, while the coroner called his people together and got to work with the body.

  When Cullen got off the phone, he seemed to be in a genuinely sour mood.

  He said to Riley and her colleagues, “So I guess you folks are going to make yourselves at home for a while.”

  Riley thought she was starting to understand what was bothering him. Cullen was positively looking forward to solving a sensational case, and he hadn’t expected the FBI to rob him of his thunder.

  Riley said, “Look, we’re here at your request. But I think you’ll be needing us—for a while longer anyway.”

  Cullen shook his head and shuffled his feet.

  Then he said, “Well, we’d all better head on into the Barnwell police station. We’ve got something pretty unpleasant to deal with there.”

  Without another word, he turned and headed away.

  Riley glanced at the body, which was now being loaded onto a gurney.

  She wondered …

  More unpleasant than this?

  Her mind boggled as she and her colleagues followed Cullen back the way they’d come.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Jenn Roston was seething as she turned to follow her colleagues away from the crime scene. She trudged through the trees behind Riley and Agent Jeffreys as Deputy Chief Jude Cullen led the way toward the parked vehicles.

  “Bull” Cullen, he calls himself, she remembered with contempt.

  She was glad to have two people between her and that man.

  She kept thinking …

  He tried to demonstrate a blood choke on me!

  She doubted that he’d been looking for an excuse to grope her—not exactly, anyway. But he sure was looking for a chance to show physical control over her. It was bad enough that he felt the need to mansplain the blood choke hold and its effects to her—as if she didn’t know all about it already.

  She thought they were both lucky that Cullen hadn’t actually gotten his arm around her neck. She might not have been able to control herself. Although the man was ridiculously muscular, she would most likely have made short work of him. Of course, that would have been pretty unseemly at a murder scene and would have done nothing to promote good relations among investigators. So Jenn knew it was just as well things hadn’t gotten out of hand.

  On top of everything else, now Cullen seemed to be pissed off that Jenn and her colleagues weren’t going away just yet, and that he wasn’t going to hog all the glory of solving the case.

  Tough luck, asshole, Jenn thought.

  The group emerged from the trees and got into the police van with Cullen. The man said nothing as he drove to the police station and her FBI companions were quiet too. She figured that they, like her, were thinking about the grisly crime scene and Cullen’s comment about having “something pretty unpleasant to deal with” at the station.

  Jenn hated riddles, maybe because Aunt Cora was so often cryptic and threatening in her attempts at manipulation. And she also hated living with the sense that something in her past could destroy her present dream-come-true of being an FBI agent.

  When Cullen parked the van in front of the police station, Jenn and her colleagues got out and followed him inside. There, Cullen introduced them to Barnwell’s Chief of Police, Lucas Powell, a middle-aged man with a sagging chin.

  “Come with me,” Powell said. “I’ve got the guys right in here. My people and I just don’t know how to deal with this kind of thing.”

  Guys? Jenn wondered.

  And what kind of “thing” did he mean?

  Chief Lucas Powell led Jenn, her colleagues, and Cullen straight to the station’s interview room. Inside, they found two men seated at the table, both wearing neon yellow vests. One was lean and tall, an older but vigorous-looking man. The other was about Jenn’s own shorter height, and probably not much older than she was.

  They were drinking cups of coffee and just staring at the table.

  Powell introduced the older man first, the younger man second.

  “This is Arlo Stine, the freight conductor. And this is Everett Boynton, his assistant conductor. When the train stopped, they’re the ones who had to walk back and find the body.”

  The two men barely looked up at the group.

  Jenn gulped. Surely they must be terribly traumatized.

  There definitely was “something pretty unpleasant” to deal with here.

  Interviewing these men wasn’t going to be easy. To make matters worse, they weren’t likely to know anything that would help lead to the killer.

  Jenn stood back as Riley sat down at the table with the men and spoke in a soft voice.

  “I’m awfully sorry you’ve had to deal with this. How are you guys holding up?”

  The older man, the conductor, shrugged slightly.

  “I’ll be all right,” he said. “Believe it or not, I’ve seen this kind of thing before. People killed on the tracks, I mean. I’ve seen bodies mangled up a lot worse. Not that anyone ever gets used to it, but …”

  Stine nodded toward his assistant and added, “But Everett here has never been through this before.”

  The younger man looked up from the table at the people in the room.

  “I’ll be OK,” he said with a shaky nod, obviously trying to sound like he meant it.

  Riley said, “I’m sorry to ask this—but did you see the victim just before …?”

  Boynton winced sharply and said nothing.

  Stine said, “Just a glimpse, that’s all. We were both in the cab. But I was on the radio making a routine call to the next station, and Everett was making calculations for the curve we were taking just then. When the engineer started braking and sounded the whistle, we looked up and saw … something, we weren’t sure what it was really.”

  Stine paused, then added, “But we sure knew what happened when we walked back to the spot for a look.”

  Jenn was mentally reviewing some of the research she’d done on the plane flight. She knew that freight train crews were small. Even so, there seemed to be one person missing.

  “Where’s the engineer?” she asked.

  “The hogger?” Bull Cullen said. “He’s in the custody suite.”

  Jenn’s mouth dropped slightly.

  She knew that “hogger” was railroad slang for an engineer.

  But what the hell was going on here?

  “You put him in a jail cell?” she asked.

  Powell said, “We didn’t have much choice.”

  The older conductor added, “The poor guy—he won’t talk to anybody. The only words he’s said since it happened are, ‘Lock me up.’ He just kept saying that again and again.”

  The local police chief said, “So that’s what we wound up doing. It seemed the best thing for now.”

  Jenn felt a flash of anger.

  She asked, “Haven’t you brought in a therapist to talk to him?”

  The railroad deputy chief said, “We’ve asked for a company psychologist to come in from Chicago. It’s union rules. We don’t know when he’s going to show up.”

  Riley looked truly startled now.

  “Surely the engineer doesn’t blame himself for what happened,” she said.

  The older conductor looked surprised at the question.

  “Of course he does,” he said. “It wasn’t his fault, but he can’t help it. He was the man at the controls. He’s the one who felt the most helpless. It’s eating him up inside. I hate it that he’s shut himself off like this. I really tried to t
alk to him, but he won’t even look me in the eye. We shouldn’t be waiting around for some damned railroad shrink to show up. Rules or not, somebody ought to do something right now. A good hogger like him deserves better.”

  Jenn’s anger sharpened.

  She said to Cullen, “Well, you can’t just leave him in that cell by himself. I don’t care if he insists on being alone. It can’t be good for him. Somebody needs to reach out to him.”

  Everyone in the room looked at her.

  Jenn hesitated, then said, “Take me to the custody suite. I want to see him.”

  Riley looked up at her and said, “Jenn, I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.”

  But Jenn ignored her.

  “What’s his name?” Jenn asked the conductors.

  Boynton said, “Brock Putnam.”

  “Take me to him,” Jenn insisted. “Right now.”

  Chief Powell led Jenn out of the interview room and down the hall. As they walked along, Jenn wondered whether Riley might be right.

  Maybe this isn’t such a good idea.

  After all, she knew that empathy was hardly her strong suit as an agent. She tended to be blunt and outspoken, even when a softer touch was needed. She certainly didn’t have Riley’s ability to turn on the compassion at appropriate moments. And if Riley herself didn’t feel up to this task, why did Jenn feel like she ought to take it on?

  But she couldn’t help thinking …

  Somebody’s got to talk to him.

  Powell led her into the row of cells, all with solid doors and tiny windows.

  He asked, “Do you want me to come in with you?”

  “No,” Jenn said. “I’d better do this one-on-one.”

  Powell opened a door to one of the cells, and Jenn stepped inside. Powell left the door open but stepped away.

  A man in his early thirties sat on the end of the cot, staring directly at the wall. He was wearing an ordinary T-shirt and backward baseball cap.

  Standing just inside the doorway, Jenn said in a soft voice …

  “Mr. Putnam? Brock? My name is Jenn Roston, and with the FBI. I’m so terribly sorry about what happened. I just wondered if you wanted to … talk.”

  Putnam showed no indication of even hearing her.

  He seemed especially determined not to make eye contact with her—or with anybody else, Jenn felt sure.

  And from her research flying out here, Jenn knew exactly why he felt that way.

  She swallowed hard as a knot of anxiety filled her throat.

  This was going to be a lot harder than she’d even imagined.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Riley uneasily kept her eye on the door after Jenn left the room. As Bill kept asking the conductor and his assistant questions, she worried about how Jenn was going to deal with the engineer.

  She was sure that the engineer was probably having a terrible time of it. She didn’t like the idea of waiting a lot longer for a railroad psychologist—possibly some official flunky who might be more concerned about the company’s well-being than the engineer’s. But what else were they supposed to do?

  And might the young agent only make things worse for the man? Riley had never seen any sign that Jenn was especially skillful at dealing with people.

  If Jenn did just upset the man further, how might that affect her own morale? She had already been contemplating leaving the FBI because of pressures from a criminal former foster mother.

  Despite her concerns, Riley managed to listen to what was being said in the room.

  Bill said to Stine, “You said you’ve seen this kind of thing before. Do you mean murders on railroad tracks?”

  “Oh, no,” Stine said. “Actual murders like that are really rare. But people getting killed on the tracks—that’s a lot more common than you might think. There are several hundred victims a year, some of them just stupid thrill-seekers, but a lot of them suicides. In the business, we call them ‘trespassers.’”

  The younger man twisted in his chair uncomfortably and said, “I sure don’t want to see anything like that again. But from what Arlo tells me … well, I guess it’s part of the job.”

  Bill said to the conductor, “Are you sure there wasn’t anything the engineer could have done?”

  Arlo Stine shook his head.

  “Damned sure. He’d already slowed the train down to thirty-five miles per hour for the curve we were on. Even so, there was no way to stop a diesel locomotive with ten freight cars behind it anywhere near fast enough to save that woman. You can’t break the laws of physics and stop several thousand tons of moving steel on a dime. Let me explain it to you …”

  The conductor started talking about the mechanics of braking. It was highly technical talk, and of no real interest or use to Riley or Bill. But Riley knew that it was best to let Stine just keep talking—for his own sake, if for no one else’s.

  Meanwhile, Riley still found herself looking toward the door, wondering how Jenn was doing with the engineer.

  *

  Jenn stood next to the bed looking anxiously at Brock Putnam’s back as he stared silently at the wall.

  Now that she was actually with the man, she found that she had no idea what to do or say next.

  But from her research on the plane, she understood why he was incapable of looking at her or anyone else right now. He was traumatized by a single detail that often haunted “hoggers” who’d been through what he had just been through.

  A few moments ago, the conductor had said that he and his assistant had only gotten a glimpse of the victim before she died.

  But this man had gotten much more than a glimpse.

  He’d seen something uniquely horrifying from his window in that cab—something that no innocent human being deserved to see.

  Would it help for him to say it aloud?

  I’m not a shrink, she reminded herself.

  Even so, she felt more and more anxious to reach out to him.

  Slowly and cautiously, Jenn said …

  “I think I know what you saw,” she said. “You can talk to me about it if you like.”

  After a pause, she added …

  “But not if you don’t want to.”

  A silence fell.

  I guess he doesn’t want to, Jenn thought.

  She almost got up to leave, but then the man said in a nearly inaudible whisper …

  “I died back there.”

  The words chilled Jenn to the bone.

  Again, she wondered whether she had any business trying to do this.

  She said nothing. She figured it was best to wait and see if he wanted to say more. She waited for many seconds, more than half-hoping the man would stay silent and she could leave quietly.

  Then he said …

  “I saw it happen. I was looking … in a mirror.”

  He paused for a moment, then added …

  “I saw myself die. So why … why am I here?”

  Jenn gulped hard.

  Yes, what had happened to him was exactly the sort of thing she’d read about on the plane. Hundreds of people died on railroad tracks every year. And all too often, the engineers endured an unimaginably horrifying moment.

  They made eye contact with the person who was about to die.

  The exact same thing had happened to Brock Putman. The reason he couldn’t make eye contact with anyone else was that it made him relive that moment all over again. And his identification with the poor woman was eating him up inside. He was trying to cope by denying that anyone else had been killed. Guiltily, he was trying to convince himself that he—and only he—was dead.

  Jenn spoke even more cautiously than before.

  “You didn’t die. You weren’t looking in a mirror. Someone else died. And it wasn’t your fault. There was no way on earth you could stop it from happening. You know that—even if you have trouble accepting it. It wasn’t your fault.”

  The man still faced away from her. But a sob escaped from his throat.

  Jenn was momentarily alarm
ed. Had she just pushed him over some kind of edge?

  No, she thought.

  She had a gut feeling that this was good, that it was necessary.

  The man’s shoulders shook slightly as his quiet sobbing continued.

  Jenn touched him on the shoulder.

  She said, “Brock, could you do something for me? I just want you to look at me.”

  His shoulders stopped shaking, and his sobbing ebbed away.

  Then, very slowly, he turned around on his bed and looked at Jenn.

  His bright blue eyes were wide and pleading and brimming with tears—and they were gazing straight into Jenn’s own eyes.

  Jenn had to fight back her own tears.

  As blunt, brusque, and sometimes even tactless as she normally was, it dawned on her that she’d never had this kind of interaction with anybody before, at least not professionally.

  She swallowed hard, then said, “You’re not looking into a mirror right now. You’re looking at me. You’re looking into my eyes. And you’re alive. You’ve got every right to be alive.”

  Brock Putnam opened his mouth to speak, but no words came.

  Instead, he nodded.

  Jenn almost gasped with relief.

  I did it, she thought. I drew him out.

  Then she said, “But you deserve something more. You deserve to find out who did this terrible thing—not just to that poor woman, but to you. And you deserve justice. You deserve to know that he’ll never do anything like this again. I promise—you’ll get justice. I’ll make sure of it.”

  He nodded again, with just a trace of a smile.

  She smiled and said, “Now let’s get out of here. You’ve got two pals out there who are worried about you. Let’s go see them.”

  She got up from the cot, and so did Brock. They walked outside the cell, where Chief Powell was still waiting. Powell looked astonished at the change in Putnam’s demeanor and behavior. They all walked back to the interview room and headed on inside. Riley, Bill, and Cullen were still there, and so were the two conductors.

  Stine and Boynton sat gaping for a moment, then got up and exchanged emotional hugs with Brock Putnam. They all sat down at the table together and started talking quietly.