“F-A-S-T Track?” Rucker placed down his cup of coffee, suddenly interested.
“I’m sketchy on all of this,” Tyler confessed. “Publicity? Money? I don’t know. But they couldn’t afford what happened at Genoa to be blamed on their negligence. They’d been shorting maintenance funds, that’s what Stuckey had for us before they got to him.”
“You can prove this?”
“An accountant inside the company says their monkeying with the budgets won’t get us to anything illegal. I’m not so sure about that. To me, it gets us to three guys who were each given way too nice a retirement package following Genoa.”
Rucker looked dumbstruck.
“What is it?” Tyler asked.
Rucker mumbled, “I set you up for Stuckey.” He sounded ashamed.
Tyler attempted to digest this.
“Keith suggested you for the boxcar investigation. I played right into it.”
Tyler recalled Banner, the St. Louis detective, questioning the timing of his and Priest’s arrival at the boxcar—how it was that two people from East Coast cities could arrive only an hour behind the local police. O’Malley had orchestrated everything to give his team the best shot at protecting the identity of Harry Wells, alive or dead. O’Malley had manipulated him from the start. Struggling against his rage, Tyler said, “Suggested me how?”
“He thought it a good idea that someone with homicide experience take lead on that bloody boxcar. We discussed the possibility of a Railroad Killer copycat. How no one needed that. He’d read about your misfortune and went on about how half his men were formerly policemen and how they make for good employees, especially investigators. I called and got you on that flight.”
This fit. Tyler wanted to break something. Anger grated his voice. “O’Malley liked me for the job because Chester Washington left him an easy pattern to copy if he ever caught up to Alvarez. His guys beat him to death; I take the fall.” He repeated what he’d discussed with Nell. “Stuckey wasn’t supposed to die. They wanted to put him in the hospital, to keep his mouth shut, leaving me to take the heat. Ten to one, the cause of death comes back a heart attack, not trauma.”
“You’ve got to get out of here,” Rucker said, perspiration breaking out on his brow. It wasn’t the coffee making him sweat. Before Tyler had a chance to speak, Rucker pulled out his cell phone. “I called nine-one-one as I was making the coffee.”
Tyler recalled hearing the beeps and mistaking them for the coffee machine.
Realizing Rucker was giving him a chance to get away, Tyler said, “You believe me.”
Rucker nodded. “When Alvarez’s prints kicked off that airline ticket, and we found out who he was, I wasn’t feeling too good. It was obvious that Keith had kept this from me and from the Bureau for months. He had to suspect who was rolling his trains. So the question was why he wouldn’t have wanted our help bringing this guy in? Why hide it? Interestingly, he hasn’t returned my calls. My guess is that we could build obstruction charges at the very least.”
Tyler saw there was no love lost between these two. O’Malley had violated their friendship, and Rucker wasn’t forgiving.
Rucker repeated, “You’ve got to go.”
“Can NTSB stop that test run?”
“Is it possible? Yes. Will they do it on such short notice? I doubt it,” Rucker admitted. “It’s too political. Way over our heads.”
A patrol car’s blue flashing lights splashed onto the hallway walls.
The doorbell rang. A loud knock followed with the announcement of the police. They weren’t going to kick a door in this neighborhood until they had played out their options.
“Coming!” Rucker shouted.
Tyler elected to stay. “O’Malley knew you would have to suspend me. He wants this. He wants me on the run.” He’d been on the run for twenty-four hours. It felt to him like a week.
Rucker nodded earnestly, “So we don’t give him what he wants. Believe me, that feels good.”
Tyler felt like a marionette. Then he reached into his jacket and withdrew his weapon, reversed the knurled handle, and handed the gun to Rucker. It felt like a surrender. It terrified him. “This had better work,” he said.
“Amen,” said Rucker, already moving toward the front door.
Detective Eddie Vale was too handsome, too well dressed, for police work. A year earlier he had traded in two weeks pay for a pewter gray Armani suit. Wore the thing damn near every day. The right sleeve was going threadbare, but Eddie chose not to notice. He spent another fifty every other month on a Hollywood haircut, wore it wet-shiny and slicked back. At night he left his red and black tie knotted, slipping it over his head to preserve the perfect length, the two pointed tips of fabric meeting exactly. Civilians who passed by him in the hallways nearly always mistook him for a famous pro basketball coach. Vale wore the lime cologne a little too thick, especially for the confined space of an interrogation room. He rapped a knuckle against the edge of the Formica tabletop, beating out the rhythm to a melody that only he heard.
They were into their second hour of questioning, Tyler holding firmly to the order of events of that night. He had glimpsed Rucker just outside the room’s door several times as people came and went. He knew that things looked good, because Vale had not officially charged him with any crime, although a few had been mentioned in passing, among them, leaving the scene of a crime.
Tyler finally challenged, “Did anyone bother to check my house?”
“Of course we did.”
“And there was, or was not, any sign of a break-in?”
“Why do you think you haven’t been processed?” “You tell me, Eddie.”
Vale pursed his lips. “Your home security system reported a violation at seven forty-four P.M.”
“I was still on the train,” Tyler protested.
“So you say. We don’t know that for sure.”
Tyler could produce Nell Priest to corroborate but decided to hold off on that. Priest’s fleeing with him could produce problems for both of them, and he didn’t want her talking to these guys. “And?”
“Secor security guards responded, found the home secure, and put it in the books as a false alarm. Ninety-five percent of all such responses—”
“Are false alarms,” Tyler interrupted. “I know the stats, Eddie. Come on!”
“So there you go. It could have been you entering your own house and leaving it locked for the sake of the false alarm.”
“Except I was on the train.”
“So you say.”
“I’m probably on video arriving at Union Station. I gave you my receipt.”
“You can pick a receipt up off the floor. Besides, the train stopped in Baltimore. You coulda done this assault, driven to Baltimore, ridden the train into town, all to look clean. There was time for that. ME has a three-hour window on this.” Vale added, “And don’t tell me you’re not smart enough to think of that, because that’s exactly the kind of thing you woulda done if you’d done this, and we both know it.”
“And we both know I didn’t do it.”
“So you say.”
“Put me under the light, Eddie. For the blood splatter.”
“There are ways to beat that, and you know it.” Vale smirked. “You being a cop? That’s working against you right now.” He said, “You ditched the shoes, didn’t you? How stupid was that?”
“Don’t know what you’re talking about.” On this, Tyler was clear. They couldn’t link him to his earlier pair of shoes, even though changing the shoes might make him look guilty. He’d sat in that other chair before. He took a deep breath and said, “You can’t hold me, Eddie. Even if you want to, you can’t.”
“You fled a crime scene.”
“It’s a twenty-five-dollar fine.”
“You’re pissing me off here,” Vale complained.
Tyler lowered his voice and placed his thumb over the tiny microphone hole in the tape recorder. He whispered, “Why did I call you, Eddie? What was the poi
nt of that?”
“Can’t go there, Pete,” Vale whispered back. Up close, the cologne was just this side of sickening.
Tyler leaned back and gasped for air.
Vale said, “Take me through it again.”
“For the fourth time? No thanks. I’m about to lawyer-up, Eddie. Is that what you want?”
“You’re putting this off to suspects, unnamed, with no descriptions. Some kind of conspiracy that you’re not willing to discuss—”
“Not at the moment,” Tyler corrected.
“And we re, of course, supposed to trust you on this.”
“My boss is behind me,” Tyler reminded him. “As in the federal government. As in, we’re supposed to all be working together. Isn’t that right, Eddie? What, you think I’m a risk for flight? They’ve foreclosed on my house, but I’m fighting it. I’m not going anywhere. My boss, Loren Rucker, will know where I am at all times.” Addressing the room’s mirror, for the benefit of Vale’s superiors, Tyler said, “You want me, you tug on the leash.”
Vale said, “You should have come in last night.”
“I used to work here, remember? Would you have spoken with Secor Security last night? Would the ME have given you a window of time? Would the blood guys have already gone over the scene and spelled it out for you?” Tyler added, “And don’t forget, I did come back of my own volition.”
“Says here it was a response to a nine-eleven call. How does that end up in your column?”
“A technicality. Loren Rucker will back me up on that.”
“You’re lucky he’s on your side.”
“I know that,” Tyler admitted. He now felt foolish for not trusting Rucker. Vale. He’d been up all night and all day. The suit needed a press. And fumigation.
Still facing the one-way glass, Tyler said bluntly, “If you hold me, we never get any answers.” He raised his voice, “The NTSB wants me out there working this, and so do you. Do you think you’re going to clear Stuckey by holding me? That’s what you have to ask yourself.”
There came a light tapping on the glass. It drew Vale from his chair. The man brushed down the length of his suit coat and touched the knot of his tie.
“You’re looking good,” Tyler allowed.
“Screw off!” Eddie Vale smiled widely.
Tyler took that as a good sign.
CHAPTER 25
40 Hours
With forty hours to go until the bullet train trial run, Alvarez faced himself in Jillian’s mirror, wondering at the age and fatigue he saw in and around his eyes, the slight scowl to the forehead that had not been there eighteen months earlier. Jillian reluctantly had headed to work, leaving Alvarez briefly with a sense of home, of a relationship, and he found it subtly disruptive. Whole worlds could come and go in a matter of minutes—as a science teacher he knew his astronomy—and his world, too, seemed now on the verge of finality as he moved himself toward a final confrontation with William Goheen. I am no better for what I’ve done, he thought disappointedly. No fuller, no more complete. Nor will I be for what I’m about to do. Nonetheless, he felt compelled, driven, to see this through. Somewhere between the delicate beauty of justice and bloodthirst was something his wife and children cried out to him for. And for them, he would do anything.
He understood that the next forty hours were to comprise one of the longest days of his life (though nothing compared with that first day after the accident) and that he was likely to go without sleep, eating only energy bars and drinking water from a plastic bottle.
His first task was to get his duffel inside Newark’s Meadows rail yard without detection.
The Internet had provided him with freight train schedules for the East Coast, including arrivals and departures for the Meadows, where, according to internal NUR documents, the bullet train was presently sidetracked.
Alvarez checked through the duffel one last time, leaving nothing to chance. With each item, he checked its name off a handwritten list. He was not new to this—he considered himself a veteran—but failure came with slipshod planning, and he had taught himself to maximize his own resources and never to underestimate his enemy. Twenty-seven items in all: some as small as a flexible-neck penlight, a computer card, or a pair of tweezers; others large and bulky, like a customized window shade or a pair of electromagnetic “clamps” invented to hold Navy undersea welders to the hulls of ships as they worked. For the third time that day, Alvarez placed all these into the duffel. One forgotten item could spell disaster.
He was dressed in heavy, sand-colored coveralls, a fleece vest for warmth, and work boots. He wore a blue knit cap pulled down over his ears as he rode the subway to the Bronx and a small rail yard where, bearing his duffel over his shoulder, he set out to find freight line #717, a line of five empty flatbeds headed tomorrow into the Meadows yard. Once there, #717 was scheduled to be sidetracked.
He clipped on his New York Central Railroad laminated ID tag, courtesy of an Internet site that displayed images of all such tags. It was thirty-some degrees with a steady wind out of the north, but still he could have walked for hours, not minding the bitter cold. He was completely focused. He snuck through the yard’s flimsy chain-link, taking advantage of one of its many gaping holes. The Bronx was not a place of high security. He passed dozens of abandoned subway cars, some cannibalized for parts. There were six sidetracks, each several hundred yards long: flatbeds, freights, and tankers. Some looked as if they’d never roll again. Others stood with their doors wide open, having only recently been emptied.
A dark winter night, the moon struggled to emerge behind high wintry clouds like a dim bulb. Alvarez could faintly see before him without his flashlight.
It took him a while to locate the #717 line. Walking alongside it, he marked the car he wanted: the thirteenth from the back of the train. Unlucky or not, he felt elation at locating it.
Dragging the duffel, he crawled beneath the car, a CB scanning radio playing into an earpiece in his left ear.
The scanner paused five seconds on any frequency containing radio traffic then continued on to the next active frequency. Alvarez endured channel after channel of Arab-accented limousine and taxi dispatch, for at this time of night the frequencies were almost entirely devoted to such traffic. But when an incredibly clear voice (indicating close proximity) asked,”… anybody see a guy just now over on track fourteen?” Alvarez tripped the radio to remain on that frequency, wondering if the 717 was on track 14, and if he was the subject.
A lower voice came back, “You want to check it out?” “Roger, that.”
“I’ll take the north side of fourteen,” returned the lower voice.
“Billy, you take the south side.”
A smoker’s voice responded he would indeed take the south side of track 14.
The following day Alvarez could not simply walk into the Newark Meadows yard carrying this duffel. He had to attach it to a car on line 717 so it would be carried inside for him, hidden like a suckerfish, no one the wiser.
But the possibility of security already being on to him made him wish there were some other way.
He reached the center of the car, where overhead there was a spot well hidden from inspection angles. Without surveillance mirrors or someone actually crawling beneath the car and looking up into the space, the duffel would not be spotted. He stuffed it up there, attaching nylon straps to hold it.
Ominous orbs of light from flashlights washed over the ground on each side of the train. The guards approached from opposite ends, squeezing him in and negating any chance for him to escape. To run now, even if he got away, would attract attention to this particular car, and the duffel would be found. He watched those flashlights carefully and realized both guards were stopping at each car and shining the light beneath the car.
He glanced up at the duffel, reached up to test the strength of the nylon strapping, and pulled himself up between the twin I beams and into the dark space there. His face pressed against the nylon, his arms trembled as his
muscles fatigued. He awaited the telltale sweep of a light. The pain grew. His biceps and back cramped.
Faint twinges of light. He pulled himself up higher.
The light drew closer, brighter.
He held absolutely still—it would be movement more than anything that would give him away.
The flashlight’s yellow beam passed just below him, shadows dancing. Sweat ran into his eyes, blurring his vision. He held his breath.
The footsteps faded. The light moved on. Alvarez started to lower himself, his muscles grateful, when he heard their voices nearby. He sucked himself back up, arms quivering.
“Nothing!” one of the voices said.
“Same here,” came the other.
The men spoke to each other across the coupling, between cars, less than ten feet away.
“We should continue on—down both sides—and check that all the cars are still locked.”
“It’s cold as a witch’s tit out here.”
“You want to check the rest of the cars or not?”
“Yeah, what the hell? Why not?”
“Okay, then.”
Still on opposite sides of the train, the guards continued their respective routes, this time with footfalls coming to Alvarez’s right. Again a beam of light swept below him, slowly moving forward. Footfalls grew more faint. He lowered himself down to the chipped-rock railbed and lay motionless, noting the locations of both guards. He remained absolutely still for several minutes, until the guards were nowhere to be seen. He then rolled over, came to his knees, and rechecked the duffel one last time.
He slipped out from under the train, stayed in shadow, and hurried along the side of line 717, searching and finding a hole in the fencing. He checked behind himself one last time, ducked through the fence, and took off at a run.
CHAPTER 26
Affecting an Asian accent, Tyler left a message on Priest’s answering machine that her dry cleaning was ready and could be picked up. Included was an invoice number and the amount she owed. With most pay phones in New York blocked from receiving incoming phone calls, Tyler sat at the end of Murphy’s Bar on 23rd Street, only a few blocks from the Flatiron Building in lower Manhattan.
Parallel Lies Page 24
