“Peter?”
He’d left the line open; he wasn’t sure for how long. He stood on the fifth-floor landing of the fire stairs debating whether to call Homicide.
“Peter?” she repeated, her voice warm with concern.
He told her, “Stuckey’s dead. My rookie nightstick’s lying under him. It’s my M.O.—it’s Chester Washington all over again. They probably knew I’d called him from New York. They certainly knew I came down here. So now it’s made to look as if I lose my temper and pound the guy clear to heaven. Maybe they meant to kill him, maybe not. Doesn’t matter now. All they needed to do was steal my stick. The rest was timing.”
“You’ve got to get out of there,” she said.
“Run from a crime scene?” asked the former homicide cop. “With this kind of evidence stacked up? Are you kidding me?” He mumbled, “That’s the final nail in the coffin. That’s what they want me to do.” He tried to settle himself, for he knew intuitively that the next few decisions he made would dictate the next few weeks, months, maybe years of his life. He said, “Either way, I’m screwed. If I call it in and stay, they win: I’m out of the picture, which is what they want. If I run, and this thing’s connected to me, which it’s going to be, I’m a fugitive. I’ll tell you one thing: they must have a lot to hide, Nell.”
“Get that nightstick and get the hell out of there,” she encouraged. “You must still have friends on the department. Call them. Explain it—” He heard her talk to the driver. “I’m here. Where are you?”
“Stairwell. But the entrance is locked.” He could barely see straight.
“Get back to the apartment. Get the nightstick. Buzz me through.” He cracked open the door to the hallway. His bloody shoe prints formed a slowly fading route toward the fire stairs. Then he looked down at his hand on the door pull: more prints to worry about. Evidential quicksand: the more he moved, the deeper he sank.
The cell phone still to his ear, he heard the doorbell buzzing from Stuckey’s apartment. In the phone he heard, “I’m here. I’m buzzing you. Peter? Get me in. I can help you.”
“Don’t touch anything,” he said. “Wipe down the buzzer. Get well away from here and give me a minute. I’ll find you. Must be someplace to wait for me. I’ll call you.”
“Let me in!”
“No. One of us is enough. You have to be clean, Nell, or they take both of us out. I’ll meet you in a minute.”
“Peter!”
“No arguments.” He disconnected, reconsidering his options. Could he trick them? Get out of the city, leave some crumbs for them to follow, and then return to clear this up? On the surface, taking the nightstick seemed the thing to do—it would no doubt be carrying prints of his, and latent prints could not be dated. He could smear the handprint on the doorjamb, the shoe prints in the hall, and dispose of the nightstick forever. But he had made the long distance call to Stuckey only hours earlier; he’d ridden in a city cab arriving close to here. He could hear a detective like himself making hay over the fact he’d asked the cab to stop a block away. If O’Malley’s people made a few anonymous calls, the evidence would stack up no matter how Tyler compromised the scene.
Detective Eddie Vale answered on the second ring. “Vale.”
“It’s me: Tyler.”
“Pete? God damn!”
Tyler cut right through old home week. “There’s a body going cold on a floor of apartment five B, fourteen-twenty-seven R, Northwest. Guy has been beaten to shit. Latents matching my prints are no doubt going to be found on what turns out to be my rookie nightstick, and on the doorjamb, too. Shoe prints, in the dead guy’s blood, outside the front door will match my size. I stick around, I’m looking at a couple months in and out of court, and probably some serious time in lockup because it’ll be viewed as a second offense. And that’s if I’m lucky.”
Vale repeated the address and said, “Where are you now?”
“On the scene.”
“Stay there.”
“No can do, though I wish I could. It’s supposed to mirror Chester Washington so you guys can fit the square peg in the square hole. It’s supposed to take me off the case I’m working for Rucker over at NTSB. I’m going to flee the scene, Eddie, but I’m making this call first to try and set things straight.”
“Do not flee the scene,” Vale protested. “Let me get there. Just me. Alone. Let’s look at it, Pete. Use your head here. You run and what’s it going to look like?”
Tyler theorized, “If a friendly face arrived here first, maybe he’d think I’m too smart to leave my own nightstick under the body, too smart not to wipe down the doorjamb and smear the footprints. I’d have to explain how so much blood got on the outside mat when there’s only splatter on and around the doorjamb. How’d all that blood walk itself outside onto the mat? I’ll tell you how: it was transferred there to make sure I left shoe prints for you guys.” He added, “Never mind that I don’t have a drop of blood on my clothing. If I stuck around, it would be to show you that. I rode the Metroliner from New York tonight—you can check on that—and chances are someone on that train or the cabbie who picked me up at Union Station and dropped me here might remember these same clothes I’m wearing.” He paused a moment, giving Vale time to take the notes that Tyler knew he was taking. “But all that’s a little thin, you know, Eddie? That’s not exactly ice I want to skate on. And no matter what, if I pause a moment—even to make this phone call—whoever did this wins, because the object is to tie me up so badly that I bail on the case I’m working.”
The connection hung between them, neither man speaking.
“I ain’t your attorney, Pete, but it’s damn stupid to flee the scene, and you know it.”
“I’m going to flee the scene, only to pull these guys off. They have the power to arrest. They could move me away from my friends like you, Eddie. I made this call first, and I want that in the jacket.”
“The nightstick? Your place broken into?”
“I haven’t been there in a week. It must have been hit. Is there evidence of that? I would doubt it. That would make the case against me pretty thin, and that’s not the intention here.”
“Who are these guys?”
“Northern Union Railroad’s security guys.”
“That’s a joke, right?”
Tyler answered, “I wish.”
“Apartment five B. Fourteen-twenty-seven R, Northwest,” Vale repeated.
“I owe you, Eddie.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” said Eddie Vale.
Tyler walked briskly for a dozen blocks, trying to second-guess what means either his former colleagues or Northern Union would use to track him down. Eddie Vale or not, they would want him in for questioning. He hit an ATM and withdrew the maximum four hundred on three cards. A credit trace would be initiated. The withdrawal of this money within a short walking distance of the murder might be later used against him, but he saw little choice. If they locked out his cards, he wouldn’t have access to any money. He played a bird in the hand and took his chances.
Twelve hundred dollars, plus the sixty he was carrying. He reached a pay phone and placed a landline call to Nell, not wanting his own cell phone record to show this call, not wanting to suggest she might have been an accessory. A plan was already forming in his head: Nell could distance herself from him, reestablish herself within. If there were any answers, they most likely lay within the corporate headquarters. Above all, they needed access.
With luck, Eddie Vale’s involvement might buy Tyler some time, but the lieutenant in charge, Bridlesman, would never allow a good friend of Tyler’s to lead the investigation once Tyler had been identified through his prints and nightstick. Tyler’s cellular phone records would already link Tyler to both Priest and to Vale’s home—mistakes he’d made in haste and wished he could take back. Nell would be sought for questioning. Vale might be asked about why he was the first cop to arrive on the scene. Tyler was making trouble for everyone, and he had put barely twenty minutes between
himself and that bloodied apartment.
O’Malley’s tactics enraged Tyler. No matter what Stuckey’s involvement had been in the Genoa tragedy, he didn’t deserve death at the end of a nightstick. That O’Malley would go to such extremes served to reinforce Tyler’s sense of the stakes involved. Whatever the company’s culpability in the Genoa accident, it had to be enough to bring down at least Keith O’Malley, if not William Goheen and the board of directors along with it.
His no longer using credit cards and his cellular phone would frustrate investigators. But what else? Tyler wondered, using the quiet time of the walk to see this from the side of his former job. Communication, expenditures, transportation: the three axioms of a manhunt. He’d taken care of two of these. Transportation would be far more difficult. How to remain invisible? Having pointed to Priest by calling her cell phone from his, Tyler realized that if they fled together, she could not use her credit cards, either. That meant no rental car. Planes were out because they required picture ID. That left stealing a car, hitchhiking, trains, and buses. Both bus stations and train stations had security cameras—Tyler had used them to track Alvarez. How far would they go to find him? he wondered. How much of this could O’Malley get his hands on? Whom should he fear more, O’Malley or the cops?
Finally, the thought came to him. The Potomac. The docks: a place where he had a couple of contacts, a place that lived on cash, a place where people knew how to keep their mouths shut.
His plan continued to take shape, but all the while he found himself thinking that beating Stuckey to death did not come lightly. Perhaps the idea had been to put him into the hospital, O’Malley sending a message of silence. This, in turn, led him to wonder again about the stakes at play. And then—and only then—did it dawn on him that three employees had left NUR with unusual compensation. The other two—Milrose, if alive, and Markowitz—might be as valuable to the investigation as he’d believed Stuckey had been. The obvious question remained: Had O’Malley already beaten him to them?
CHAPTER 22
“Nice view,” Nell Priest said from the starboard walkway of the two-hundred-foot-long container freighter The Nannuck.
Tyler wasn’t thinking about the view. He’d been reading the names off the chart, marking their progress: Goose Island, Fox Ferry Point, Fort Fotte Park, Mount Vernon, Gunston Cove, Hallowing Point. Now a rose-colored horizon bled a bruised orange hue onto Craney Island. As a fugitive, Tyler found nothing to celebrate.
“Are you sure you’re okay with this?” he asked.
“Would you remain loyal to O’Malley?”
“It’s no small thing,” he reminded her.
“The man had a former employee’s head bashed in. Regardless of whatever’s proved, that’s what happened. And I’m an employee, soon to be former employee, don’t forget. Am I madly in love with you? Swept away? I’m sorry, Peter, but that’s not what’s behind this decision. I happen to have taken sides, that’s all. I won’t work for him. I still feel loyalty to the company, but not O’Malley.”
Tyler considered some way to get back at O’Malley, some way to turn the tables, but he had little reason for optimism. “Don’t quit. If you continue to work for him, we can use it to our advantage.”
“If there’s something I can do to help you, I’ll do it. Absolutely. If that’s what you’re saying, Peter, I’m okay with that.”
He touched her cheek gently with cold fingers, attempting to convey both his appreciation and the fondness he felt for her. The last five days had begun as part-time work and had gone on to abruptly alter his life, quite possibly forever. A manslaughter charge tacked on to his previous assault would mean definite time behind bars. And a former cop behind bars was a dead man, which made it a life sentence no matter how many years were given.
Tyler’s standing on a cold walkway at sunrise had nothing to do with navigation charts but instead was a contrivance for him and Nell to get out of earshot of the captain and crew. The raw wind stung his face despite the two-day beard. Tyler disconnected a call he’d placed using Nell’s cell phone. Again, he churned over O’Malley’s tossing away Stuckey’s life. How badly the man must have wanted him off the Alvarez manhunt! He’d obviously gotten far closer to the truth than O’Malley believed possible. And this in turn thrilled him because it indicated a vulnerability in O’Malley that Tyler might yet exploit.
Handing Nell’s mobile back to her, he wondered how thorough their manhunt of him would be. Would O’Malley or his former colleagues on Metro think to monitor Nell’s mobile? Did they know already that her phone had just placed a call overseas? Tyler had avoided public transportation, had avoided use of his credit cards. As a cop, he knew the traps to avoid. But again he questioned his use of Nell’s phone. Maybe he’d come to regret that as well.
“I woke him up,” he told Nell. “Markowitz,” he added, naming the NUR accountant who had unexpectedly retired overseas.
“Did he volunteer anything about Genoa? Would he talk?” She remained on edge. He understood the agonizing that must have gone on in making her decision to join him. Regrets? he wondered, despite her proclamations made only moments earlier.
The peaceful, slow grinding of the ship through the dark water belied the tension between them.
He said, “Markowitz kept his options open, let me do most of the talking. I stepped him through what we currently knew about the crossing accident, and that we suspected a cover-up. I told him that Stuckey was dead, that Milrose had probably left a widow behind, and that I believed O’Malley was involved in at least Stuckey. I cautioned that O’Malley might be cleaning house. I reminded him that lying to a federal agent was a federal offense. He proved a good listener.”
She wore a dark green oilskin jacket that the captain had loaned her. Oilskin had never looked so good.
“He negotiated some limited immunity, actually believing I had anything to do with that, and finally opened up some. His retirement was not his idea. Surprise! It was handed to him along with a golden parachute. To his knowledge no one, including Goheen, if that’s who’s ultimately found responsible, is guilty of an actual crime. Negligence, maybe, as legally defined. But not a crime.”
“Meaning?”
He wanted to reach out and stroke her cheek again—yearned for some kind of physical contact with her—but felt foolish about taking her hand. He’d quit smoking twelve years earlier but suddenly longed for a cigarette between his fingers.
“He claimed ignorance but went on to say that he thinks that a number of people probably saw a piece of the puzzle. Maybe that puzzle could be reconstructed, maybe not. When they volunteered his retirement for him, he collected as much information as he could as quickly as possible. There apparently was plenty of creative bookkeeping. He has copies of some of it.”
She crossed her arms, visibly upset. “You’re telling me we’re not going to get anywhere with this?”
Misunderstanding her tone as all-out regret, Tyler said, “Listen, when we dock, you can walk away from this. You can play it however you want—”
“Shut up, Peter. It’s not that at all. Stop taking things so damned personally. I made my decision. I’m not going back on that.”
“But if you wanted to—”
“Just drop it!”
Tyler grinned out of nervousness. He and Kat had settled into a lovers’ routine. He wasn’t used to this early stage of a relationship in which the boundaries were continually tested. “It will apparently require a full audit. Court orders. Subpoenas. Even then, Markowitz repeated that he doubted there was any criminal offense. Cooking the books will cost them a hand slap from the SEC and maybe a fine. That’s all, folks.”
“How does crooked accounting dovetail with the crossing accident? Did someone try to pay off Alvarez under the table? That doesn’t make sense, given an attempt at a settlement.”
“Unless Alvarez’s attorney was paid off for convincing his client to settle.”
“But the case didn’t settle!” she protested.
“And the attorney didn’t live,” Tyler reminded her.
That won a moment of silence. He hadn’t wanted a cigarette this badly in years. “Markowitz used NASA as his analogy—the space shuttle program. He said that every so often the space shuttle program hits these major hiccups, un-anticipated problems that require huge infusions of cash. They can’t go running to Congress because even if Congress responded it would take months to see the actual cash.”
“So,” she said, interrupting him, “they borrow from other programs. Mars landers—that kind of thing.”
“Mars landers. Exactly. He said the same thing.”
“And we were doing that? Budget-dipping?”
“Markowitz says so. Furthermore, he believes the decision to borrow internally like that would have been made by either Goheen personally or the board collectively.”
“And this connects to Genoa how?”
“Goheen is apparently maniacal about this bullet train technology.”
“F-A-S-T Track. I can confirm that,” she said.
“Sees it as the future of public transportation.”
She nodded. “It’s basically all anyone talks about. It’s as if the company has only the one project.”
“Markowitz says the program has been a financial black hole from its inception.”
“It’s the track.”
“Meaning?”
She explained, “Europe rides on welded track. Much of our track in this country is still not welded. Worse, our tracks are not banked enough for high speed. There was no way we could bank existing track without spending billions. So Goheen had the vision to have the Metroliner route relaid with welded track and then imagined a guidance program engineered to bank the individual train cars in advance of turns. That’s where the money has gone. Without the technology, the unbanked track would throw the cars off at high speed. The train then flattens out again on the straightaways. It’s all satellite-guided, GPS technology that needed special military rating to be pinpoint accurate. How much of this do you know already?”
Parallel Lies Page 21
