Parallel Lies

by Ridley Pearson

  “We can go together from here,” she encouraged, “or meet you there.”

  She handed him the name and address of a club. “We stop serving here at midnight, which means we’re usually out by one, one-thirty. We’ll be there around two.” She pulled out a twenty-dollar bill from her bank and folded the president in on himself. She turned the folded edge to face Alvarez. “The guy at the door …hand him a twenty folded in half, the fold facing him. Just like this, or he won’t let you in.” She added, “We’ll be inside.”

  Alvarez pocketed the address. The blonde came through the door. Again, Alvarez adjusted his chair, this time, away from the door. He felt trapped. He couldn’t afford to be seen by this woman—there was a possibility she might know his face. He reached out, took Jillian by the hips, and moved her into the line of sight, blocking him.

  “Another wine?” she asked. She clearly liked the contact.

  He wasn’t sure what to do. He glanced around Jillian, the blonde’s back to him. She was shown to a table and was seated partially facing the restaurant’s door.

  “Another wine,” he said.

  The blonde pulled a cell phone out of her enormous shoulder bag and immediately began complaining to someone on the other end. Her whole body conveyed anger. A coffee drink was served to her.

  Alvarez caught eyes with Jillian, who now stood at the bar awaiting his wine. He cocked his head in the direction of the restaurant’s rear exit.

  The couple sitting next to him continued to take this all in like a pair of theater patrons.

  Jillian negotiated her way past several tables. She looked over at him and nodded. Alvarez understood then: she was providing another screen for him.

  He carefully watched the huge mirror behind the bar, knowing that if the blonde happened to look in that direction, their images would meet. He stood and walked slowly, not wanting to attract attention. Jillian’s eyes met his in the mirror—she was smiling, proud of herself. He allowed his eyes to smile back, and then he carefully made for the rear exit.

  CHAPTER 9

  “They’ve found a body,” Tyler said, pounding on Nell Priest’s motel room door. They had taken rooms in a cheap roadside motel a few minutes’ drive from the center of the small town. Bone weary and cold, Tyler had gone to bed in a foul mood. He was using up one perfectly good night of expense account living on a hole-in-the-wall. Two beers into the six-pack, he’d gotten an even better description of the lumberjack who’d put a hatchet through the rider’s foot—this time, added to the man’s broad shoulders was the color of his hair, “sandy,” and the sound of his voice, “southern cracker.” The Latino whom this man believed had passed through the camp was never described beyond his heritage, “Spanish, maybe a little Italian.” But Tyler reveled in this information. It amounted to the first solid leads in what now, with the discovery of a body, appeared a likely murder case.

  He had not slept well, wondering if he might have done something different in order to keep his relationship with Katrina. For some reason, Nell Priest made him think about Kat, and he warned himself not to mix pleasure with business. Priest had her own agenda. Northern Union’s interests were not necessarily those of the NTSB. On the practical side, the shower water had been tepid and with no water pressure to speak of. He’d left a layer of soap on his skin that had dried to a persistent itch.

  “Do you have hot water?” she called through her motel room door.

  “No.”

  “Yeah? Well, I can’t live without a shower! I’m waiting until the water heats back up!”

  “Don’t count on it.” He didn’t want to waste time, but he also didn’t want to leave ahead of her and renew their competition. A truce had settled between them, and the raid on the camp had united them. He didn’t want to mess with that. “We’ve got to go. Right now. We’re closer to where they found this body than anybody else. We could get a jump on this.”

  “How’d you hear about it?”

  He sensed she was dressing on the other side of that door. It provoked distracting images in his head. “State troopers,” he answered. “Believe it or not, that desk sergeant actually wrote down my cell phone number.”

  “A double skinny latté,” she said. “I’ll be ready by the time you’re back.”

  “In this town? Don’t count on it,” he answered. “Dunkin Donuts, maybe. High-test?”

  She cracked the door, standing back so he couldn’t see the rest of her. Again, his imagination ran away with him, and he filled in the blanks. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Cream-filled, or jelly?” he asked.

  “You are kidding?”

  “High-test with Coffee-mate,” he repeated, altering her order, “no sugar, no pastry.”

  She caved in. “One of those braided things. With almonds, if they have them.”

  “We’re going to get along fine,” he said. “You have exactly ten minutes. After that, I go without you.” He headed down the sorry excuse of a hallway toward the sorry excuse of a lobby.

  She called after him, “Why didn’t you?”

  Tyler turned. She was leaning a little farther around the door, and he could see an expanse of smooth, dark amber skin. Maybe more than she would have wanted him to see.

  She completed her thought, “Leave without me?”

  He fought back the smirk, but it crept onto his face in spite of his efforts. “Ten minutes,” he repeated.

  Less than an hour later, the empty coffees in their respective cars, Tyler and Priest parked alongside a perfectly straight two-lane road, surrounded by fields and distant woods. There was an ambulance and a couple of state police vehicles pulled off the road. They followed the trail of many boots in the snow as it paralleled a lone set of cross-country ski tracks.

  The crystal clear air smelled only of the snow, so pure, so fresh, that in fact it held no smell whatsoever, the way clean water has no taste. The only sounds were those of the woods—the clicking call of squirrels, the lonely, plaintive song of wintering birds, the gentle rattle of a few determined leaves that had stayed behind.

  They approached the nightmare, and for an instant Tyler wished he could turn back: from this point forward there would be no return. As a former homicide investigator he knew this. A body. A bloody boxcar. An outsider intruding into the hobo camps with an angry hatchet. Homicide cases always reminded him of his own mortality, his vulnerability, the fragility of life. A few breaths. A blade here. A bullet there. The snap of a neck. Nothing romantic about it, no matter what the writers of films and books had to say. He felt sorry for Nell; she was about to learn a hard lesson.

  The various tracks led through a stand of trees that took them ten minutes to walk. These trees led to a rising, snow-covered railbed that held the twin tracks. The snow was disturbed in a curving arc that led from the tracks to the frozen body. It was face down.

  The state troopers had run enough yellow tape around tree trunks to contain a herd of wild horses. They probably didn’t get the chance that often to play with their toys. A man and woman in plain clothes—detectives—poured coffee from a steel thermos for a young woman in her early twenties whose cross-country skis were leaned up against the tree, snow melting off them in silver lines. Her ski tracks cut through the area now cordoned off by the yellow tape—she must have come very close to the corpse. Tyler could see that she had stopped there in the snow and shuffled a little closer—perhaps not believing her eyes—moving her skis to the right and tamping down the snow in the process. Then she had pushed hard and fast and had skied away in a hurry. If he had it right, she had vomited only a few yards later. Had fallen over, gotten back up, and fallen over again.

  “She skis with a cell phone in her pocket,” Tyler told Priest as the two stood studying the area, still too far away to see the corpse. “We’ll need to know who else she called about this. And if she won’t tell us, then we’ll need to check her phone records.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we don’t know why she was out h
ere,” he explained. “She’ll tell us it was morning exercise. But look where we are! It could have been us on those skis, right? You. Me. Out here looking. So who knows why she was out here, or who she is? And we need to know. It’s our job to know. We don’t need any media leaks on this—it’ll only send our boy deeper under.”

  “Are you always this paranoid?”

  “Most of the time.” He added, “And impatient, too. One of my better qualities.”

  “Maybe the hatchet guy did this,” she stated, suddenly very solemn. “When do we get a look at the body?”

  “We get their permission,” Tyler said, indicating the detectives. “Even though we don’t need it, it’s how we do it.” He asked, “Are you scared?”

  She answered, “Should I be?”

  “Yes,” he told her. “Hatchets are no fun at all.”

  Tyler and Priest followed the route through the snow and stopped several feet short of the frozen corpse. It wasn’t a hatchet—not unless the blunt end had been used. Tyler spotted the problem immediately. He called back to the detectives, “I need to look a little closer.”

  Priest looked at him like he had to be out of his mind—closer to that! her eyes said. “Oh …shit,” she moaned.

  “Don’t touch anything!” the male detective hollered back.

  Tyler stepped toward the corpse and squatted. Lacerations covered the man’s bloodied face, but it wasn’t like any knife fight Tyler had ever seen. The skin above his eye had been ripped open a good inch or two so that the eyeball hung partly out of its socket, and though the wound was frozen shut now, it appeared to have been the primary source of all that blood. A bunch of loose ends came together for Tyler: so much so that he cautioned himself not to jump to any conclusions. The dead man was big—real big—and seemed to fit the lumberjack description provided by the wounded rider in the hospital bed. The dead man’s hair had been cut by a professional—albeit, a while ago—not by gardening shears. No rider, this man. He’d lost enough blood through the various tears in his skin to drain him of all color. Enough blood loss to account for the boxcar they’d found. But his face had been burned as well, the frozen skin bubbled and raw. He thought back to the frozen chili. Tyler studied more closely what had drawn him to his knees in the first place. He asked Priest, “What do you want to bet this comes back as canned chili?”

  “As in the boxcar?”

  Tyler called back to the detectives, “Will your photographer bring a Polaroid with him?”

  “With her,” the woman detective answered. “As in me. Yes, she will. The gear’s in the trunk. Give us a minute.”

  No local law enforcement ever welcomed the feds’ involvement.

  Priest looked shaken. It didn’t surprise him. The dead man was a mess. He had a broken neck and shoulder—probably from the fall from the train—so that he lay in an awkward, impossible way that one saw only in broken dolls or crashtest dummies.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “No,” she answered.

  “Your first body?”

  “First, in person,” she corrected. “Listen, Tyler …,” she said, looking past him at the corpse.

  “Yeah?”

  She seemed to snap out of it. “Nothing.” But she had wanted to tell him something.

  “I’m listening.” “Another time,” she said.

  “Sure,” he answered. “Whatever.” He wanted to roll the body and search it for ID. He wanted fingerprints, any body markings or piercings. He wanted a name. A history. A story to follow.

  He wanted whoever had done this, even though he found himself already leaning toward self-defense as an explanation. This was no longer about expense accounts or trying to win a better job—the crime scene made it real to him. It was about a death now, a murder. A manhunt.

  “This is our hatchet man,” Tyler announced, a bit prematurely, but confidently.

  “You think?” she asked.

  Tyler nodded. “And that begs an even bigger question,” he said.

  She raised her eyebrows, awaiting his explanation.

  “If this is what happened to the one wielding a hatchet, then what the hell does the other guy look like?”

  A state trooper the size of a Sasquatch approached Tyler and Priest, who sat on a frozen log awaiting the evidence report from the technicians. Their interview with the cross-country skier had confirmed that she was nothing more than an innocent outdoorswoman who had happened upon a frozen horror.

  “You Tyler?” the statie asked.

  “Frozen and accounted for,” Tyler answered.

  “You got some ID?”

  Tyler showed him the credentials provided by Loren Rucker, the NTSB deputy director who had hired him. The trooper studied the creds and handed them back to Tyler.

  “You want to talk in private?” he asked Tyler, eyeing Priest.

  “She’s with railroad security,” Tyler said.

  “Word is,” the officer told him, “that our guys came across a report they thought might interest you.”

  Tyler had requested a statewide Be On Lookout for reports of thefts and break-ins, knowing that a killer on the run might steal a vehicle, or cash, or even provisions. He nodded. “I’d be all ears, if mine hadn’t frozen off,” he said.

  “An individual reported a possible break-in with clothes stolen.”

  “Men’s clothes?” he inquired.

  “Don’t know, sir. Can’t answer that. My commander—I guess you’ve already spoken with him—radioed that I was supposed to tell you ‘bout it, and that if you needed more, you should be in touch directly. Much as I know.”

  “Same number I called last night? State police headquarters?”

  “Commander Marshall,” the man answered.

  Tyler thanked the man, who then walked away without another word. Tyler asked Priest, “If this is something that bears looking into, are you willing to work with me on it? Are you willing to share it?” She looked inquisitively at him. “Because I don’t dare let this body out of my sight—as attractive as it is—for fear these guys’ll mishandle it. Not that I don’t trust Iowa farmers in blue uniforms.”

  “Illinois,” she corrected.

  “My point exactly,” he said. “Whoever did this to our frozen friend left behind hair and fiber evidence. Count on it. Maybe prints on the clothing. That body is our ticket to close this case.”

  “Would we still be sitting here if I didn’t already know that?”

  “But these stolen clothes,” he said. “That could be just as good, even better.”

  She encouraged, “I’ll share anything I find.”

  “Everything,” he corrected, emphasizing the word. “You don’t trust me?”

  “A private security officer with her company’s reputation and market image to protect. Should I?”

  She grinned. “Probably not.”

  He said, “You’ve been itching to tell me something since we showed up here.”

  “I’m cold is all.”

  “I don’t think that’s all,” he contradicted her. “You’re agitated. Restless. What gives?”

  “I’m cold,” she repeated. “I didn’t dress right for this.” She indicated her pair of city slacks, wool, but thin.

  He nodded, though he didn’t believe her. Her body language indicated an impatience. She wanted to be rid of him but didn’t want to make a scene. He felt this most of all: she was worried about something. “Officer!” Tyler called out, stopping the state trooper. “The location of this break-in? Anywhere near here? Anywhere near the railroad tracks?” He was thinking that the killer would have jumped the next time the train slowed enough. He might have made a few miles before daylight but not much farther. Not in this cold, not looking the way Tyler imagined he must look. They might pick up a trail. How far could he have gotten?

  “Town of Jewett,” the state trooper shouted back. “Ten, twelve miles west of here.”

  They were outside a small town called Casey.

  “Near the tracks?” Tyler
shouted.

  “Forty and I-seventy both parallel the tracks from Terre Haute to St. Louis. Jewett’s right on the rail line.”

  The big man waited for another question but then turned and went on.

  “You want me to visit Jewett?” Priest inquired.

  “I have to stay with this body. If you feel like it, why don’t you call this Commander Marshall. Interview the individual who reported the theft. Check the place out. Protect the scene and ask for a forensics unit.” He nodded toward the crowd around the corpse. “Probably these guys will handle it. You know what we’re looking for. Tracks in the snow. Blood. Discarded clothing. Do not follow those tracks, if and when you find them. Keep me posted. Are we in agreement here?”

  “I don’t work for you,” she clarified. “If I want to follow the tracks, I’ll follow the tracks.”

  “Not alone you won’t,” he corrected. “A uniform or detective accompanies you at every step. If not, we can lose the chain of custody for any evidence you find, and that’ll make it useless.”

  “Understood.” She didn’t sound convinced.

  “We need every scrap of evidence if we’re going to have any hope of finding whoever did this.”

  “Understood.”

  “Something’s still bothering you,” he said.

  “You are,” she answered. “Who put you in charge?”

  “I did,” he answered. “The feds did,” he added.

  Priest didn’t say a thing, but her eyes hardened. Then she glanced over at the frozen body, and that same, penetrating sadness he’d felt before seemed to overcome her again.

  “We need to do this by the book,” Tyler encouraged her. “We don’t need any more bodies.”

  Priest shook her head. She seemed ready to cry.

  Tyler informed Priest, “They’ve moved him to Paris—Illinois, not France.” He smirked, thinking himself funny. “The victim remains unidentified, but that may change. Currently he’s thawing out in a morgue there. Paris lays claim to the nearest pathologist.”

  “Change how?” Priest inquired.