At nineteen, Miguel still had not graduated past Elmer Fudd or the Road Runner. He could keep up with most of Sesame Street though tired of it quickly. It had been explained to Alvarez that the alcohol in their mother’s blood had poisoned his brother’s brain to the point of scarring, to where transmitted signals became lost and wandered inside their chemical confines until dissipating. The blessing was that he seemed so happy in his limited world. He laughed, and smiled, and, on a good day, was able to carry on a conversation at the level of a ten-year-old. Despite the continuing efforts of Mrs. Dundell and her staff, Miguel had never crossed this ceiling. But his unusual ability in mathematics allowed him to conceptualize the Dewey decimal system of card-catalog filing and made him the perfect reshelfer. His lungs were a constant worry. He’d suffered five bouts of pneumonia while under the state’s care. Once he’d been moved, through Juanita’s arrangements, he’d vastly improved. At the age of eighteen, the insurance funding had been cut in half, with Alvarez paying the balance. In his mind, the private care at Bennett House had saved his brother’s life, and it was worth every cent.
Ironically, he had Northern Union to thank indirectly for the money. Having cashed in a modest amount of retirement funds, he now played the market. If he ended up in jail or dead, he wanted the boy taken care of for life. He’d built up a sizable trust to that aim, though he was counting on the derailment of the bullet train to put him over the top. He desperately needed to stay out of trouble until the bullet train was yesterday’s news—Miguel’s future counted on it.
Miguel continued watching the cartoon as his older brother entered the room, though he had clearly sneaked a look at the door. “Bert!” he said, a grin widening across chapped lips. His nose was runny, his eyes watery.
“Who’s winning?” Alvarez asked, his throat tightening with the sight. It always took him a few minutes to adjust to his blood relation in this condition.
“The wabbit,” Miguel said, inflecting an Elmer Fudd accent. “Twicky wabbit.”
“You’ve got a cold.”
Miguel shrugged it off. “This is where the wabbit goes down the hole.”
Not a good day, Alvarez realized immediately. There wasn’t going to be much of a conversation. But he had felt required to come here, to pay this visit; if anything went wrong with his plans for the bullet train, this might be his last visit.
Umberto Alvarez pulled up the room’s only chair, rested his elbow on the bed, and held his hand in the air, as was their custom. He sat back, facing the television and the mindless drivel that so entertained his little brother. A moment after holding this pose another, weaker hand came up to join it. Their fingers entwined, the two hands sank back to the cotton sheets. “Miguel,” Alvarez said softly, “your hand is so cold.” And he held on, all the more tightly.
CHAPTER 18
Their date turned into a working dinner and consisted of pizza delivered to Priest’s hotel room while their two cell phones as well as the line into the room rang constantly. Together, they monitored and attempted to orchestrate a multiple-state manhunt that had begun within minutes of the man jumping from the Amtrak train. The manhunt grew by the hour.
O’Malley had left on the private jet, preferring to brief William Goheen in person. Rucker had obtained a poor printout of the suspect’s face—in profile, gleaned from the Indianapolis airport gate area. They anxiously awaited word that the prints had produced a name.
“This guy’s slippery,” Tyler said, working the laptop, e-faxing the airport photo to a string of truck stops along I-70 and I-74. The work was slow and frustrating.
“We’re making headway,” she said. “Don’t lose sight of that.”
Tyler had not seen the man’s face during his Amtrak pursuit—the guy had been quick to jump to prevent that. Tyler said, “He’s long gone. We’re not going to catch him so fast.”
“You were close, Peter. Very close. Closer than we’ve been.” She added, “How’d the NASDAQ do today?”
Tyler checked the laptop. “Up fifty. Dow transports are off, following the derailment. Surprise!”
“There go my options.”
“I’m in debt,” he said. “And trouble. Mostly trouble.”
Truckers were on alert via CB radio to be on the lookout for male hitchhikers. News radio listed Kevin Jones as an escaped convict believed loose in the area of the border between Indiana and Illinois. Every resource was being tapped. Checked. Rechecked. And checked again.
Tyler had a plastic bag filled with hotel ice cupped under his chin. He was bruised, but the swelling was down. Pizza had not been the best choice; his jaw hurt with the chewing. Priest was some kind of vegan.
“No meat, no cheese,” she had requested as Tyler placed the pizza order.
He had the phone and said, “A pizza without cheese? That’s a Bloody Mary without vodka.”
“Then call it a virgin pizza, I don’t care. Just don’t put any meat or cheese on half of it. Or if you do, it’s okay, but I won’t eat it.”
“Then it’s not okay,” he told her.
She shrugged, indifferent.
Tyler had printed out the gate shot of the suspect by faxing it to himself at the front desk, and he’d taped it to the hotel mirror. He looked up to it from time to time and even talked to the man. Priest didn’t comment, though she raised her head a couple times as if to interrupt.
CNN ran from the television, the volume low but discernible. When mention of the manhunt caught their attention, she turned up the volume. The photo ran, but it looked even worse on TV—as if this manhunt had been launched to arrest an ear, part of a forehead, and some dark hair. Only that black leather jacket—European, smooth, and void of stitching lines—and the carry-on, a hybrid backpack/duffel that met airline carry-on requirements, seemed to offer any ray of hope.
She turned the television sound back down when the story shifted to a sick panda in the San Diego Zoo.
“I should have jumped,” he said.
“Yeah,” she snapped sarcastically, “two broken legs would have helped a lot.”
“Come on,” he pleaded. “I had him. I lost him. How long before CNN has my identity? I might remind you, there may be some law against jumping from a train, but at this point, this suspect cannot be connected in any way, shape, or manner to this or any other derailment. It’s all speculative.”
“So, you should have jumped,” she acknowledged. “But I’m glad you didn’t. And here we are.”
“Here we are,” he echoed.
She turned her head to face him, and they were practically kissing. The thing of it was, Tyler wanted to kiss her. She didn’t even seem to notice him.
A look transpired between them. Then her face changed, and she, too, finally realized how physically close they were.
Tyler had never kissed a black woman. Fearing she might reject him, he nonetheless found himself leaning to kiss her. He paused a moment to allow her to object, but her huge eyes simply stared back in wonder. It began softly and mostly all his doing, but then she caught up and kissed him back. She stared into his eyes with an enticing combination of playful mischief and an intensity that to him seemed to be asking a question. “Yes,” Tyler answered, “I’m sure.”
An enormous smile filled her soft face and she chuckled. “Me, too,” she told him, her fingers working down the buttons of her own blouse.
Tyler freed an arm and they slipped off the chair and onto the floor. As he untucked his own shirt, her blouse fell open, her bra some kind of shiny stretch fabric nearly the same translucent amber tone as her skin.
He kissed her breasts through the fabric and she raked his shirt off his back, her nails ringing through him.
He went dizzy with warmth and wet and scent. They stopped short of a full union, but neither went wanting.
Sweating, and smiling at the ceiling, they lay side by side, he with only his socks left on, she, with her underwear still around one ankle.
“Oh, my,” she said.
“S
hould I apologize?”
“You had better not! I’d say you should take a bow. I don’t usually…that doesn’t usually happen to me without—” She reconsidered. “I think I’ll stop there.”
He nodded. “Good idea.”
She giggled. “Oh, my God,” she said, laughing harder and covering her face. She pulled some clothing over her, and Tyler pulled it back off and drank her in with his eyes. She blushed and pushed him away, and he rolled over then and was quiet for a while. She said softly, “No comments about brown sugar, please.” Tyler said nothing. “Is it a first for you?” she asked.
“Not my first woman, no,” he answered truthfully. After a long pause, he said, “Yes.” He added, “Can we leave it at that?”
“Are you okay with it?”
“I could ask the same thing,” he said.
“No pretending.” She rolled and reached over him and took his hand. They lay on the carpet like two spoons. “One day at a time?” It was a suggestion, not a question.
“For now,” he said. “Then a week. Then maybe a month.”
“That makes me feel some pressure,” she said.
“Good,” he told her, squeezing her hand, not letting her off the hook. “I want you to feel something. We’ll start there.” He kissed her hand and held it to his face. Several minutes passed in silence, the only sound the whine of the laptop’s hard drive. They spoke with their eyes.
“Tell me about it. About him. Please,” she said. “How can I know you, if I don’t know your side of it?”
There was no need of an explanation. Tyler knew exactly what she was asking. “All I remember of that day was his huge hands. First, holding that little girl and driving her head against the wall. Later, it was my own throat, and for a minute I thought maybe my last breath. But always those hands. When I busted into the room, those hands let go and he just dropped her. Discarded her, you know? Like a picture he’d been hanging on the wall, and he just let go. He was a big man. Huge, really. Intimidating. And when he turned on me …I froze.”
Tyler propped himself up on an elbow. “I’ve been in dozens of similar situations, never had a problem. Maybe it was the baby on the floor. Maybe it was her crying. Maybe I was just afraid of him. But when he hit me, he knocked me sideways. He clocked me. I must have dropped my weapon. Crime Scene Unit found it under a chair. Unfired, of course. His second blow missed, or I probably wouldn’t be here right now. And if he’d been a little more sober, or I’d been any slower, then my first punch wouldn’t have landed, and maybe everything would be different. But it landed all right, and so did my second and my third. He got me in the ribs and the gut, and then those hands on my throat. Those damn eyes of his. Dead, as any dead I’ve seen. Something came over me. Maybe it wasn’t my time to check out. I don’t know what it was. But after that, it was all me. I found this rhythm. Some shrink called it rage, but it wasn’t that. Not for me. It wasn’t so much anger as it was this rhythm. One-two to the face, one to the gut; over and over. Over and over,” he whispered. “That little girl lying there on the floor like that. And there was nothing in this world to break that rhythm, like when you get a jingle stuck in your head, only for me it was my fists—this rhythm. I don’t remember him, or his face… nothing. Only that rhythm. It felt so damn good. So damn right. And I just never stopped. Never could stop. I was too damn scared to stop. Of him. Of what he’d do to me and the little girl if he came back. And so I didn’t stop until they pulled me off.”
She had glassy eyes. He said, “It’s not that I was enjoying it, though that’s how the prosecutor painted it. The papers. The media. They fed on that idea: white cop beating a black man to a pulp. It fit something they believed. But it wasn’t that. Had nothing to do with that.”
“But you had a trial,” Priest said. “If it was self-defense—”
“My attorney wouldn’t have any of that. Said it would hurt us, maybe really badly, to go that route. And who am I to complain? He got me acquitted. He focused the defense on the child abuse. Said a jury can handle only one concept. That if we put that image of the child into their heads, that it would be enough to justify what I did. And it was.”
Now she seemed mad. “But it was at the expense of your reputation, your career!”
“He got me acquitted,” Tyler repeated. “That’s what he was hired to do. It wasn’t a popularity contest; it was a criminal trial. And we won. We still have the civil trial to go but—”
“It was self-defense!” she complained harshly.
He nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, it was. And maybe it was self-defense in that boxcar as well. And if so: who’s guilty, and who’s innocent?”
Tyler’s cell phone rang. The pagers and phones had been ringing all evening, but this time the phone surprised them and caused Priest to quickly redress. “Wait a second,” Tyler spoke into the phone, attempting to pull some clothes on. To make matters worse, his pen had run out of ink. He signaled Nell for the hotel’s freebie. The thing wrote dashes instead of lines, but Tyler scribbled out a name while Priest zipped and buttoned. “We’re sure? Absolutely sure?” He listened, thanked the caller, and hung up. He felt the wind knocked out of him.
“Peter?”
“That was Rucker.”
“The prints kicked?” she guessed.
“Running those latents through the FAA database identified four of them as belonging to airline personnel—probably whoever collected the tickets at the gate. We can rule them out. The one remaining print just kicked from an Illinois state employee database.”
“We’ve got an ID?” Priest said, leaning forward, straining to see what he’d written.
“Up until a couple years ago, the guy we’re calling K. C. Jones taught computer science at a school in Genoa, Illinois. A science teacher! Can you imagine?”
“The name, Peter?”
“Umberto Alvarez.” He met eyes with her. “Get it?”
“Get what?”
“The name’s Latino.”
“So it fits,” she declared. “What’s the problem here?”
Tyler maintained his eye contact with her. He said, “If Harry Wells came looking for a Latino, then someone—probably O’Malley—either already had a description of the suspect, or—”
“A name!” she answered for herself, bewildered by the implication. She mumbled, “O’Malley has known this guy’s identity all along.”
Tyler nodded gravely.
She moaned, “They lied to me.”
Tyler whispered back, “They lied to all of us.”
“We’ve got more problems,” Tyler said, pointing to the screen of his laptop and the Internet search site Northern Light. The unspoken problem was that over the last several hours they had leaned against each other, rubbed up next to each other, laughed, and broken bread together. He tapped the screen, where the search engine had produced dozens of hits—newspaper articles and Internet news pieces—for the text string “Alvarez+railroad.”
“Go ahead,” Priest said, hanging up the phone by the bed.
“Two and a half years ago, a Juanita Alvarez and her two children, four-year-old twins, were killed in their car at a railroad crossing in…guess where?”
“Genoa, Illinois,” she answered knowingly.
He nodded, “The town where Umberto Alvarez taught science.” He returned her attention to the screen. “A freight train crushed the family car and moved it a quarter mile down the track before dumping it into a ditch. Any guesses who owned the freight train?”
“Oh, God. Northern Union,” she whispered. Her cheek now was nearly to his as she read over his shoulder.
“One of the papers has the nine-one-one call placed by an unidentified male who, close to hysterics, claims the crossing’s barrier arm did not lower, that the lights didn’t work.” He scrolled down and pointed. “But get this, the same story says that law enforcement found both barrier arms in place, suggesting the car had gotten stuck—mechanical problems—out there on the track, putting the blame, the respon
sibility, squarely with the driver. The ‘alleged’ nine-one-one call should have been taped, but the tape was never recovered. The story doesn’t mention the husband by name.”
“Doesn’t have to,” Priest said. “We have his prints on a boarding pass.” She placed her hand on Tyler’s shoulder, and for him, the contact seemed to burn. His heart raced. His eyes and throat felt dry. She instructed, “Click on the next ten searches.”
Surprising himself, he obeyed.
She scanned the titles faster than he. “Second to last.”
Tyler clicked on the title. It would cost him three bucks to view the article. He clicked “OK.”
“Bingo,” she said. Umberto Alvarez’s name appeared in the first paragraph. She must have taken speed reading at some point in her youth. She summarized the first few paragraphs well before Tyler had the first few sentences read. “He sued, claiming Northern Union negligent. But without that nine-one-one tape—” She moved around the chair and hip-checked him, stealing half of it as she sat. This contact put Tyler over the top. He found it difficult to read, difficult to breathe. She, on the other hand, seemed absorbed by what she read. Their hands brushed as she took over the laptop’s roller ball. She scrolled, effectively taking Tyler out of the picture as he lost two paragraphs. “You know what this means?” she said.
He had his own ideas. “I don’t even know what it says,” he commented.
“O’Malley has been orchestrating a cover-up.”
“Has he?” He needed to find his focus. He sat perfectly still for several minutes while she clicked through articles.
She maintained a running monologue, like a play-by-play announcer. “Alvarez sues NUR for negligence, and apparently the attorneys drag it out for nearly a year. Probably were trying to settle out of court.” She’d found an article in the Chicago Sun. She scrolled faster than he could read, her dark eyes racing back and forth. “Not possible!”
“What?” He nearly slipped off the chair.
Parallel Lies Page 17
