“Riders,” he stated, shaking his head at Tyler’s ignorance. “Not me, no, sir. A man fool enough to ride a car in these temperatures, who am I to stop him? You gotta be some kind of desperate. ‘Round here we see riders more in the warm months, but it wouldn’t make no difference to me, no how. Not my job to police these cars. I just push ‘em and pull ‘em, and the pay ain’t great at that.”
“And if someone was on one of these cars—in them, whatever—at what point could he get off? When does the nine-ninety stop again?”
“For most of the Northern Union trains it’s Terre Haute.”
“Somewhere before there,” Tyler encouraged.
The man looked a little confused.
“Someplace a person could jump on or off?”
The big man looked at Tyler strangely. “What you got in mind, anyway?”
“I’m running an investigation into the derailment,” Tyler reminded him, impatient now.
“Plenty of places to jump from the N-nine-ninety, if you got a mind to do it. It ain’t no high-speed train, you know? The N-nine-ninety runs once a week, Tennessee to Michigan. She carries brake hubs, mostly…from the Street Brothers foundry in Chattanooga. Been making this run for fifty years.”
Tyler felt trapped under a weight of frustration. The suspect was a planner. He had known where to hit the 990 and he would know how to flee the area. If the man’s encounter with Harry Wells had been a dry run, then he’d already jumped another train bound for St. Louis. O’Malley was certain to cover that possibility. Tyler’s hope was that the suspect either had delayed leaving the area to get a look at the wreck in daylight or changed his escape route due to the attention Harry Wells had brought him. If so, he would have had to improvise or rethink his getting away. If he’d stayed, he could still be close by, or just on his way out. Tyler felt discouraged but not beaten. “Plenty of places to jump, eh?” he said, echoing the big man.
“Yes, sir. I figure that’s about right.”
Tyler asked the next logical question. “If a person doesn’t have his own car, how does he get out of these towns? Bus? Train?”
“Sure thing. There’s both, but nothing from here that’ll help you. Closest Gray-dog is down to Cloverdale.” He glanced over at Tyler’s rental car. “Amwreck is up to Crawfordsville,” he said, self-amused. “Right here, you’re kinda in no-man’s land. This here is freight-hauling track. This is the real railroad.”
“Other tracks, other trains someone could jump—riders, I mean,” he said, using the proper terminology.
“Plenty.” He rolled out his thick fingers from his cold fist as he counted. “Amwreck, CSX, NUR, Indiana, Indiana Southern, Louisville-and-Nashville. Take your pick. They all work these same rails.”
“But the wreck of the nine-ninety has closed the tracks,” Tyler reminded him. “Right?”
“Not Amwreck, it hasn’t.” He addressed Tyler like a teacher to a student. “Amwreck runs on the northern tracks, not these. Fact is, every damn freight line out of Indianapolis is going to have to be rerouted to those northern tracks. Me? Unless they call me down to that wreck to lend a hand, I’m out of a job for the better part of the next week. Mark my word.”
Tyler tried putting himself in the mind of the suspect and considered his options. The man had about a six-hour jump on them—much less if he’d stayed to admire his work, as Tyler believed he would. If the derailment had been set up four or five days earlier, just prior to the boxcar assault, then all was for naught, but Tyler doubted it. According to O’Malley, the derailments resulted from bad bearings. It seemed likely, if sabotage, it would have been carried out just prior to the derailment.
North or south? Train or bus? Tyler doubted the man would steal a car or charter a plane. Either option could be too quickly chased down. He could feel his time running out, feel the man escaping as he stood there in the cold talking to this yard hand. “Which runs more often, Greyhound or Amtrak?”
“The Graydog only runs twice a week anymore,” the big man replied, “Tuesdays and Thursdays, I believe it is. Time was when it ran every day.”
“And the Amtrak?” Tyler asked, more hopeful.
“On through to Chicago once a day. From Indianapolis, more often than that.”
“Once a day,” Tyler said, breathlessly.
“Afternoon,” the man said.
Tyler felt awash with relief. It was not yet noon. He saw a flicker of possibility: the Amtrak to Chicago could be their suspect’s backup escape route. Glimpse the wreck, get to Crawfordsville. He’d used O’Hare in Chicago once; would he use it again?
Tyler thanked the yard hand, already at a full run back toward his rental.
From the front seat, his cell phone pressed to his ear, Tyler attempted to navigate not only the streets of Greencastle but Amtrak’s automated phone system. By the time he reached state highway 231, he learned that Crawfordsville, an unmanned Amtrak station, offered two choices, not one, as he’d just been told: a “motor coach” to Bloomington, Illinois, and then an Amtrak to St. Louis, or an express Amtrak to Chicago. Both departed Crawfordsville within the hour.
Tyler’s choice was the express, because it departed first. A long shot, he made the drive anyway, believing it worth the try.
He brought the car up to eighty-five. He had a twenty-five-mile drive to make in seventeen minutes.
The flat Indiana farmland streamed past, broken only by intersections with smaller roads so straight they reminded Tyler of railroad tracks. Everything reminded him of railroad tracks. His cell phone rang. With the top down, Tyler had to slow to hear. It was Rucker.
“Since when do you have a crystal ball?” the NTSB man asked him.
Tyler felt a little dance in the center of his chest. He’d put Rucker on cross-checking passenger manifests. He had thought it might take a day or two. A week. He hadn’t been sure. “Did we kick a name?” he asked incredulously.
“You’ll appreciate the irony,” Rucker said. “The guy actually has a—”
“Please, cut to the chase.”
“A sense of humor.”
“I’m all laughs.”
“Kevin Christopher Jones is listed both on the United flight from Chicago to JFK, and again last night on a ComAir flight from Cincinnati to Indianapolis. His ticket originated in Newark.”
“I’m missing the humor,” Tyler said, his blood pumping so quickly that he felt light-headed. A name! Alias or not, it was a start.
“Kevin Christopher Jones. Initials, K. C.” Rucker paused. Tyler still didn’t get it, and said so. “K. C. Jones. Casey Jones! Now do you get it?”
The car swerved and lost its rear tires, briefly fishtailing. Tyler regained control. “You’re kidding me. The guy’s making a joke out of this?”
“We should have a gate photo shortly. We may get a good look at his face.”
A photograph! “Do you have it in your power to delay an Amtrak express at a station stop?” The thought had only then occurred to Tyler—he worked for the government now.
“What do you need done?” Rucker asked.
Tyler grinned. Government work wasn’t so bad after all.
CHAPTER 16
When the Amtrak bound for Chicago failed to leave Crawfordsville on time, Alvarez’s stomach turned. If the train had arrived late, it would have been one thing, but to his surprise it had clocked in right on time. Instead, it was late leaving the tiny station, and he began to second-guess his backup plan. Having aborted his original freight route because of the boxcar incident, and fearing Northern Union would be crawling all over the various freight lines, he had killed the last six hours in a crummy motel room in Brazil, using the down time on the Internet.
His backup escape, an Amtrak from Crawfordsville to Chicago, avoided St. Louis.
He had two credit cards and two driver’s licenses under matching names that had been both expensive and hard to get some months earlier. He had never used either—he used yet a third driver’s license for air travel: Kevin Jones. He saved the two altern
ates, reserving them for only the most dire circumstances, knowing they could safely be used only once.
This, he believed, qualified as a dire circumstance.
Northern Union knew they were dealing with a saboteur, though that had never reached the press (each derailment had been attributed in public to a different cause). Their security people would believe that he was in a hurry, desperate even, to get away from here. His confidence in this had allowed him to delay by a few hours, thus doing the unexpected. Any car rental made in the area would be, or already had been, examined by NUS. So his current plan called for riding the Amtrak to Chicago and then renting a car from there. Distancing himself from southern Indiana meant everything.
Alvarez had trained himself to contain his anxieties. And yet, as the seconds ticked off, he debated abandoning and getting off the train. But what if that, he wondered, was expected of him? What if the train was being watched, waiting for someone to make a run for it? He had no idea if a company like Northern Union had the power to delay an Amtrak, but it did seem possible. The derailment would allow all sorts of exceptions.
He felt boxed in. There were precious few ways out of southern Indiana, discounting freight trains and buses. He started second-guessing himself, wondering if he should have stolen a car or found an abandoned farmhouse in which to lie low. Then he chastised himself for getting distracted. He had to make some decisions, and quickly.
Settling his nerves, he elected to stay on board, all the while keeping his attention focused on the station platform, waiting to see if anyone would board or if the delay was simply Amtrak-oriented. He sorted through possibilities about what to do if someone did board. Conductors would be coming around to collect tickets of the recently boarded passengers—three, including himself. That ticket collection would identify him. Sweating now, he checked his watch: eleven minutes late. It felt like an eternity.
He craned to get a look out of the opposite windows, alert for activity. Then back to the platform. Then out the other side again.
The woman next to him studied him closely, growing as uncomfortable as he was.
“Do you think there’s something wrong?” she asked.
“Yes,” Alvarez answered. “I think quite possibly there is.”
“God bless the Internet,” Loren Rucker said.
His cell phone once again held to his ear, Tyler pulled the rental car to a stop, the Amtrak’s dull aluminum siding wet with a cold winter rain that turned the snow to white cement. The long train snaked back down the track intersecting with the horizon, an ominous presence of steel and glass and power. He’d never had a train held for him before.
A uniformed conductor stood on the platform thumping his gloved hands against his legs to fight off the cold. Tyler wished there might be some way to board anonymously, but it was too late for such tricks. He felt lucky just to have the train, never mind that most of the passengers on the platform side would see his face. He carried an overnight bag that held his laptop and some paperwork and what was to have been three days of clean clothes, all of which were soiled and needed laundering. He wished he had a baseball cap or something to pull down over his face, but his baseball caps all hung on pegs back in a house that had been foreclosed upon.
“I’m kinda in a hurry, here. There’s a train waiting for me,” Tyler said. He climbed out of the car and opened the door to the backseat to grab his bag.
“We have a gate photo of our suspect as he arrived in Indianapolis,” Loren Rucker announced proudly. “It’s not the best quality, nor the best angle. He’s wearing a black leather jacket and carrying a black duffel. No decent look at his face.”
Tyler found this interesting but not groundbreaking—they already had the jacket and duffel from the O’Hare security videos. He asked Rucker to e-mail him the photo. He could dial up from the laptop, once he was on the train. He added, “Okay? Can I call you back?”
“There’s more,” Rucker said. “The airline recovered his boarding pass in Cincinnati. The local lab there fumed it for prints and developed five latents of various sizes.”
“Boarding passes move through a lot of hands,” Tyler cautioned.
“They scanned the five prints and beamed them out to every goddamn print database out there. That’s why I mentioned the Internet—this is moving at light speed. Literally. All this in the last two hours. It’s a prioritized request, so we move to the front of the line. By now those prints are being checked against national and state felony arrests as well as Northern Union’s own database, so we may be able to eliminate airline employees and narrow the search. Within hours, they’ll run through databases for the military, state and federal employees, medical workers, teachers, day care workers—you name it.” Rucker paused for a breath. Tyler caught his heart racing, and it had little to do with his running toward that train. Rucker added, “We’re going to ID this son of a bitch.” He paused, “Tyler? You hear me?”
“Send me that e-mail,” Tyler repeated, reaching the conductor, who was already signaling for the train to roll.
Alvarez looked on as a man climbed out of a two-door convertible and approached the conductor, who then ushered him aboard. A moment later the train was rolling and Alvarez’s eyes were briefly pinched shut committing that face to memory. The enemy had just boarded; he felt certain of it. His mind reeled. What now? Was it possible O’Malley’s people had tracked him to this train? Had he somehow left crumbs to follow, all the while working so hard to avoid making any? Or was this blind, random luck—O’Malley playing every hunch? It was at that moment his eyes landed on various multicolored paper stubs snugged into the seats in front of each passenger—the conductors’ means of keeping track of who had paid and who had boarded where. The conductors would make their rounds any minute. What he had to do was pilfer one of these, and then he wouldn’t be asked for his ticket. Two things could work in his favor: the train was crowded, and he had chosen a seat in the middle cars, allowing him movement in either direction.
The train rattled and lurched as it started down the tracks. Alvarez excused himself and sneaked his legs past the older woman sitting on the aisle. He left his duffel in the overhead rack; he didn’t want it to look like he was changing seats, didn’t want to attract attention. He tried to quiet the alarm that sounded in his brain, ringing there, out of control. He would try to buy himself a few minutes; then, at the first opportunity, he would jump. Hopefully, with no one the wiser.
Tyler reached out for balance as the train began to move, wondering if this wild-goose chase was worth it. He had no idea how one would calculate the odds that his suspect might be riding this same train, but he couldn’t see letting it get away without him. Why hang around the crash site with a dozen other investigators all vying for control? He knew law enforcement well enough: talk now, act later.
He pushed through a heavy door and into a quiet, but crowded, train car. A Latino, he reminded himself, walking forward, one row at a time, as he searched the car, face by face.
The new arrival had boarded behind him, and so Alvarez moved toward the front, quickly, not looking back but feeling the presence of the man behind him like a sharp pain. He shoved the car’s door open and stepped through to the loud, mechanical roar of that familiar rhythm that now seemed part of his bones. Cha-cha-hmmmm, cha-cha-hmmmm. Down the tracks it raced, a hundred tons of steel and human beings. He needed a seat stub. He punched through to the next car and spotted a possible: a man—a boy, really—in his late teens or early twenties. He wore a green baseball cap and was slumped against the left wall of the car fast asleep. Alvarez spotted the dull green stub. Perhaps green meant the kid had boarded in Indianapolis, or someplace further east. It didn’t matter; he needed that stub. He picked the boy in part because he seemed so typical. The train was crowded with such kids—probably heading home for Christmas break. He picked him in part because he imagined that college-aged kids tried to duck tickets all the time. Would the conductor remember this one in particular? He hoped not. Would t
he kid have kept his receipt? Possibly, but it was also possible he’d tossed it and would have no proof he was a legitimate passenger. No matter what, the resulting confusion had to occupy the conductor’s attention for a few minutes.
He didn’t want the conductors figuring out that a seat stub had been stolen until he, Alvarez, had already jumped.
Alvarez walked up the center aisle, purposely unsteady, alternately placing his hands on the back of the seats to steady himself, his fingers only inches from those stubs. As he closed in on the kid, he took in his surroundings. His eye caught movement up ahead. He glanced up to see through the distant window of the car’s end door, and through it beyond and into the next car and a conductor just finishing up looking for new passengers. The man was heading toward him. A quick check over his shoulder revealed a second conductor. He was sandwiched!
Demanding of himself that he stay calm, Alvarez focused on the task at hand. He needed that stub—and he needed it before either of the conductors reached him.
He staggered again, slipped, and fell to one knee. As he did so, he captured the green stub. He owned it. He looked quickly in both directions attempting to judge his situation. The conductor ahead seemed likely to enter first. He slipped into the first empty row of seats, tucked his stub into the space for it on the seat ahead and slouched into a napping position, his eyes open but dazed with fatigue—a passenger ready for a quiet trip to Chicago.
The forward conductor entered and began inspecting stubs and looking for unstubbed passengers to ticket. Alvarez felt a bead of sweat trickle from his forehead. His ears whined. He doubted that on close inspection he would pass for a passenger intent on napping. The conductor stepped another row closer. And another. His heart began to swell painfully in his chest, its drumming ferocious.
Behind him, he heard the car’s rear door open: cha-cha-hmmm, said the train. This would be the other conductor, quite possibly accompanying the stranger who had boarded late.
Parallel Lies Page 15
