Parallel Lies (19 page)

He told Happle to put his 1953 Norton Model 7 on the auction block, something he had steadfastly refused to do, for to him it represented his last chance at freedom. If the house and all its contents
did
go, then his backup plan was to escape
reality for a while on the back of the Norton. Some gas money was all it would take, and not much of that.

Little by little, the Chester Washington assault claimed all he held dear. The importance of this boxcar investigation increased daily. He grabbed onto it for dear life. It represented not only his sole chance at some income but also, by his way of thinking, the only real possibility for future employment, whether with the government or with the likes of a Northern Union. (A horrible thought, but not one he could completely rule out.) No one was exactly beating a path to his door to offer work. The headhunters had yet to call.

He worried about updating Rucker on the meeting with O’Malley. Given O’Malley’s disclaimers, he wondered if Rucker would now pull him from the assignment? The investigation was not over, but it might take a strong argument to win that point. Furthermore, if what he had was passed along to the FBI, then he had little doubt it
was
over. And what then? Take a job with O’Malley? Work side by side with Nell Priest? None of this sounded too bad.

What was the sense of returning home to a foreclosed house and a woman who wouldn’t return his phone calls? He had little, if anything, to go home to, and he found the prospect of this more than a little terrifying.

He took breakfast in the hotel’s dining room at 8
A.M.,
wondering why he hadn’t heard back from the security group out at JFK and hoping they hadn’t bypassed him or, worse, neglected his request outright. He’d had a great success working the security videos, and he clung to his belief that the suspect was in the city and had not simply boarded another flight. He leafed through a copy of the
New York Times
but couldn’t focus, worrying more and more about O’Malley’s suggestion that in a city this large the case was essentially closed: they weren’t going to find him.

By 9:00 he was back in his room watching
Headline News
and wondering if he should call Nell Priest. At 9:20 his cell
phone rang, and he answered it hungrily, like a lover awaiting a call.

“It’s me.”
Nell Priest.

“What’s up?” He tried to sound casual. In fact, his chest felt tight, and he found it hard to breathe.

“We lost another one. A derailment.”

At that same moment,
Headline News
broke away to a helicopter shot of freight cars lying on their sides, the cars jacked up against one another, a fire burning. Tyler had muted the sound, but the caption read,
LIVE BREAKING NEWS, TERRE HAUTE, INDIANA.

“Oh, God,” he heard himself say. Indiana—less than a hundred miles from where the frozen corpse of Harry Wells had been found. “CNN has it live,” he told her.

“Driver and engineer are both fine, same as the others. There’s some kind of gas leaking from one of the cars that’s requiring we evacuate the area. It’s a mess, Peter. I’m going out there with O’Malley—on the company jet this time—and he offered you a seat, if you want to come. We can land right in Terre Haute. It’ll be much faster than commercial.” He could hear in her voice that she wanted him to come.

“You know how it is: I can’t accept gifts from the private sector.”

“You took that flight with me up to Chicago.”

“That was a favor from you and one made at my request, not the other way around. I trusted you not to make it an issue. O’Malley knows better than to even offer.”

“Call your boss. I’ll bet he’ll make an exception. Maybe he can bend the rules a little.”

“Give me the particulars, in case it works out,” he said.

“We leave from Teterboro,” she said.

Tyler started writing.

Riding on the company jet with O’Malley was making Tyler anxious, despite Loren Rucker’s okay. It wasn’t exactly sleeping with the enemy, though that thought also distracted him—Nell Priest occupied one of the cushy leather seats directly across from him. He doubted the invitation to ride along had come from O’Malley’s generosity—that concept didn’t fit with the man Tyler had met in the hotel bar—and if not generosity, then it was a calculated effort on his part. O’Malley either wanted Tyler within arm’s reach or wanted him out of New York. Both possibilities troubled him. So Tyler had booked his own rental car before leaving New York and therefore politely refused the offer of a ride in either of the Suburbans that O’Malley had rented for himself and Priest. Tyler drove a two-door Oldsmobile—a convertible—that made a joke out of him with its sporty lines and neon crimson purple paint. Within a few minutes, though, he’d have the top down.

“What’s the plan?” Priest called him on his cell phone as the three cars drove away from the airport.

“This is my first derailment.” He meant it as a joke, but she took it seriously.

“You don’t like O’Malley,” she concluded. “But I’m telling you, Tyler—”

“It’s not a matter of liking. It’s a matter of trust.”

“And me?” she questioned.

How did he answer that? he wondered. “I need information. Inside information. And O’Malley isn’t giving it to me.”

“You’re testing me? Tyler, I work for the man.”

“No test,” he said. “How many agents is he putting on this?”

“Buckets. Six guys we had out in the field are all on their way.”

“I think our Latino is going to want to see the wreck,” Tyler said, nervous to share this thought.

“Based upon?”

“A few shots on
Headline News
aren’t going to cut it for him. He’ll want a front-row seat.” “Suddenly you’re a profiler, too?” “An opinion is all. If he’s gone, he’s gone.” “You’re talking in circles.”

“Listen, we know that twenty-some hours ago he landed in New York. So we have to make a judgment call. Did he rig this derailment before Wells got to him, or did he come back? Both scenarios offer completely different tactics, in terms of how we investigate.”

“I like your pronouns,” she said. “Keep talking like that.”

“I don’t know what O’Malley has planned, but my instincts say to investigate it as if he returned, because if not, he’s so far gone by now we’re chasing a trail, not a person.”

“What’s the information you need? How many agents we’re using?”

“We need to know where this train stopped in the last twenty hours. Where, why, and for how long? We need to know if this stretch of track was inspected by your people recently. Same with the individual cars. Where were they? When were they last inspected? It’s all stuff O’Malley will cover, I think. But if not—”

“I can do this,” she offered.

“I’ll need comparison photographs of this scene, as well as shots of the other derailments. Aerials, if you can get them. Rucker can put those shots in front of a forensics engineer and plot similarities, if any.”

“I can handle that as well.”

“I’d just as soon O’Malley not know what I’m requesting, though I understand if that’s impossible.”

“Nothing’s impossible,” she declared. “Some things are just trickier than others.”

“Why help me?” he asked. “Did O’Malley put you up to this?”

“I’ll pretend I never heard that,” she said. Returning to
their earlier discussion, she asked, “What about our guy wanting a closer look?”

“You brought video gear?”

“Of course.”

“Whoever’s shooting the video should shoot the crowds as well. Watch the crowds, Nell. You’ll never spot him just standing there. The trick we always used on homicide was to
approach
the crowds—making it nice and obvious—and look for the ones attempting to quietly slip away. One of those is our guy,” he stated.

“You’ve just given me goose bumps,” she said.

She gave him more than goose bumps, as he recalled from the night before. He wondered what a relationship with her would be like. He’d never been with a black woman. How far apart were their worlds?

He said, “Hold any and all of those guys for questioning and let me know about them, if you can.”

“And you? What are you up to?”

“I’m going to gamble that our boy’s human. And if I’m right,” he added, “it’ll be me calling you, not the other way around.”

Tyler used logic to play a simple hunch: anonymous airline travel was no longer possible, every passenger had to show a picture ID. Granted, every detail of a driver’s license was rarely examined by the airline employee, but they did match the picture with the face and the name on the license with the name on the ticket. The suspect had flown from Chicago to New York, presumably on a fake ID. But how many fake IDs did he possess, and how many was he willing to use? Typically, IDs were hoarded, saved for use when all else failed. A perp stuck with an ID as long as possible. Would their guy run through his IDs needlessly by using them freely? Tyler thought not. The
smart money said to run with that one ID until its use became risky and then move on to another, if available. To test his theory required only a single call to Rucker’s office.

“I have some homework for your minions,” Tyler began the call.

Rucker countered, “I have an official request from the FBI on my desk. They’re wondering if we’re investigating a criminal activity, and if so, why?”

Tyler stayed true to his needs. “Compare the flight manifest for the United flight our suspect flew to JFK with the manifests for every flight flown in the last thirty hours into Indianapolis. I’m betting a name will kick. When it does,” he said confidently, “pull the security videos at baggage claim, taxi stands, buses, rental car counters, and the appropriate arrival gate in Indianapolis. Then back up and do the same for the gate and check-in counters at the originating airport. The computers time-stamp check-ins. Those time stamps can help—”

Rucker interrupted, “—determine which security video to check. And maybe we get a face to frame on our walls.” He hesitated and then allowed, “Impressive.”

“Airports are not on twenty-four-hour security tape loops. They hold theirs for thirty days before recording over them. But just in case, we’d better hurry,” Tyler pressed. “Some of those may get recorded over.” He added, “How much should I worry about the FBI pulling me?”

“The boxcar could be related to this derailment. We’re in charge of the derailment. I’d say not to worry. Ironically, the derailment just saved you your assignment. I’ll monitor the situation.”

“Work those flight manifests,” Tyler encouraged.

“Consider it done.”

Wearing an NTSB windbreaker over his winter coat, his teeth biting down on the mouthpiece of a special gas mask that had been provided, Tyler stood off from the other investigators and rescue workers. It was not an easy site to reach; he’d had to park the rental out on a road and walk nearly half a mile through slush to reach the derailment. He couldn’t take his eyes off the twisted and torn metal of the derailed train, a curving
S
of rolled freight cars. The derailed cars had been thrown up an embankment, some fifteen yards or more from the broken tracks, rails and ties scattered in all directions, bent and twisted and broken in an ungainly display. The sight made him sick to his stomach, or perhaps the gas mask and his claustrophobia had something to do with his nausea. He couldn’t take his mind off the fact that had this been a passenger train, dozens, perhaps hundreds, might have been injured or killed. Certainly this was the greater concern of William Goheen and Northern Union:
what if he targeted passenger trains?
Interestingly, the public barely paid attention to a few thousand tons of freight train jumping track. Within a day or two there would be no mention of it in the news.