Parallel Lies (28 page)

They entered Human Resources, arriving at an office occupied by a coffee-skinned woman named Selma Long. She had the bright face and booming voice of a southern Baptist, the body of a sumo wrestler, and looked to be somewhere between forty and sixty.

Tyler took a chair. Priest slid an in-box out of the way and perched herself on the corner of Selma’s desk, her legs facing, and distracting, Tyler. Priest handed the woman a piece of paper on which he’d written the date of the Genoa, Illinois, crossing accident. Priest said, “Selma, this is Peter Tyler of the National Transportation Safety Board.” Tyler
half stood and shook the woman’s meaty hand across the desk. “Northern Union Security prides itself in cooperating with both local police and federal agencies, and Mr. Tyler had a few questions that I couldn’t answer and that I hoped maybe you could.”

To Tyler, the deep-voiced woman said, “Little Nell and I attend the same church. She tell you that, Mr. Tyler?”

“No ma’am, she did not.”

“She tell you she a choir girl? Voice like an angel, this one.”

“I can believe that,” Tyler replied, watching as Priest’s neck flushed below her ears.

“Selma—” Priest teasingly scolded.

Tyler said, “My agency is interested in which, if any, NUR employees may have received bonuses, added benefits, early retirement, or promotion in the month period that follows that date.”

Selma Long considered him thoughtfully. “Uh-huh,” she replied.

Tyler held his breath, every nerve alive and tingling. He believed this information key to the investigation, and there was no way he’d ever win a court order to obtain it. His future on this case, and the case itself, rested with Selma Long.

She started typing.

Tyler exhaled audibly.

For the first time since they had come into the office, Priest turned her head and made eye contact with Tyler, hers filled with the excitement of their success.

Selma Long caught this exchange, stopped typing, and said to Priest, “What are you two up to here?” To Tyler, she said suddenly, “I believe I should have asked for your credentials, sir.” She offered Nell Priest a disapproving expression.

Tyler produced his creds and passed them across.

“This is in regards to—?” she asked Priest. She reached for the phone. “On whose request?”

Nell Priest stared at the phone. She looked down at the woman. She lowered her voice and said, “This is something that needs to be done, Selma. It’s best left at that. It’s best that you don’t know any more. For your sake.”

“But I could get in trouble here? Is that what you’re saying, girl?”

Tyler said, “We’re trying to keep this low profile, Ms. Long. To avoid the subpoenas and court orders that, by necessity, attract the press.”

Priest interrupted. “To keep our stock options worth something.”

This seemed to hit Selma Long where she lived. She looked back and forth between the two and settled on Priest. “Are you taking advantage of our friendship, girl? And don’t you lie to me!”

Priest hesitated and then answered, “Yes.”

Selma Long nodded gravely. She looked again to Tyler, then back to Priest. “Well, okay then. At least the cards are on the table.” Collectively, Priest and Tyler sat perfectly still, hanging on the woman’s every breath, her every twitch.

She began typing again. After a minute or so she began mumbling to herself and stabbing at the keyboard. She cocked her head at the screen and said to Priest, “I’ve got three that fit what you’re looking for. All three, men. Left the company within a month of this date. Two white. The driver’s a black man.”

“A driver?” Tyler inquired anxiously. “As in locomotives?”

She looked at him as if he knew nothing. “A driver, a man from engineering, and a bean counter—an accountant. Milrose, Stuckey, and…,” her finger ran across the screen, “Markowitz.”

Tyler and Priest both took notes, asking for spellings.

“Nice packages. Made out okay, all three of ‘em,” the woman said. “Maybe a little too okay, if you know what I’m saying. Milrose and Stuckey are pulling their full salaries.” She eyed Tyler, “That’s not unusual for the linemen; it’s unheard of. Markowitz, too. He’s not only drawing his salary, he took home an option package that’s going to make him a rich man.” She smiled up at Priest, “F-A-S-T Track’s going to make us all rich, right, Nell?”

Tyler scribbled down:
F-A-S-T Track?
Both the
Time
cover and the
60 Minutes
piece had mentioned Goheen’s high-tech gamble. Selma Long’s reference to this in the same breath with the unusual retirement packages aroused Tyler to the possibility of the bullet train being Alvarez’s ultimate target. What greater revenge than to derail Goheen’s dream? Still, the answers—if there were any—seemed to lie with these three men who had received golden parachutes immediately following the crossing accident.

“Addresses?” Priest asked, pen ready.

Selma Long scowled. “You people going to tell me what’s going on here?” She directed this to Tyler.

“No,” he answered her bluntly, their staring contest continuing.

She nodded. “Yeah? Well, I didn’t think so.” Directing herself to Priest, she said, “Mr. Markowitz has relocated overseas, to Israel. Mr. Milrose…all his information is now under a woman’s name—Louise—same last name. You could go asking accounting, but when we see that here in HR we’re thinking widow.”

“And Stuckey?” Tyler asked intensely.

“Following his early retirement, his mailing address changed from Pittsburgh to Washington, D.C.”

“Washington,” Tyler mumbled. Not his favorite town right now. “Wouldn’t you know?” He glanced over at Priest.

Priest asked the woman, “You said he was an engineer,
right? But then why Pittsburgh? That’s a
maintenance
facility. Can you check his title again?”

Selma Long didn’t appreciate repeating her work. She met eyes first with Priest, then with Tyler. Hers were not smiling. She typed, checked the screen, ran a finger along it, and said, “My mistake. Not that kind of engineer. It’s
electrical
engineering. Pittsburgh maintenance facility. That’s right.”

Priest slid off the edge of the desk and pulled the in-box back in place. To Tyler she said, “Electrical.” She questioned, “As in crossing guards?”

Tyler jumped up and shook hands with Selma Long. “If we can keep this in confidence, we’d be grateful.”

Nell Priest was already out the door.

Tyler’s return to Washington, D.C., was under the cover of darkness and made him feel like a criminal. He wanted to visit his house, to see what was left of his friends. But there was no time for that. After only a few days away from the city, it no longer felt like home, and he found that both puzzling and troubling. His face had been in the papers for months, off and on, making him into a celebrity of sorts, a person that others stared at but could rarely place. More often than not, these strangers believed they knew him and would invent the wildest places where they thought they had met. Ironically—it seemed to him—his return here came courtesy of the Metroliner, a direct competitor to Northern Union. After having seen the wreckage outside Terre Haute, he wasn’t sure he’d ever view trains quite the same way again.

His goal was twofold: to find out what the recently retired Sam Stuckey knew about the Genoa crossing accident, and if possible to review with Rucker the NTSB file for the same accident. The more he learned about that accident the greater he believed his chances were of not only finding Alvarez but also unearthing NUR’s role in all of this and their guilt, if any.

The train trip took two beers for him to overcome a mild bout of claustrophobia. Nell Priest slept in the seat beside him, a few minutes into which she settled her head against Tyler’s shoulder, nestled in for the long ride. He felt a bit like a schoolkid in that he tried not to move, to the point of
being uncomfortable himself, not even getting up to relieve his beer-bloated bladder.

Having been surprised by her at Penn Station, Tyler had asked how she could simply pack up and leave on such short notice.

“A half hour after you left, I got called up to O’Malley’s office,” she answered. “Before I went, I called Selma, and she told me that O’Malley had called her personally and asked about our visit.”

“And Selma told him?” Tyler did not like the sound of this.

“She wanted to save her job. Yes.”

“And?”

“I ignored him and headed here, my pager and cell phone turned off.”

“You’ll have to check in,” he said.

“Sure. And when I do, I tell him that at the very last minute I found out you were heading to Washington, D.C., to question Stuckey about an accident in Genoa, Illinois, and that I thought it better to keep an eye on you than to run upstairs to a meeting. They’ll praise me.”

“Playing both sides is a lot of risk, Nell,” he cautioned.

“It’s worth it.” After a brief hesitation she admitted, “The Genoa accident is not on file, just as you said. I want to hear what Stuckey says when a federal agent challenges him for the truth. You need me there, just as I needed you with Selma Long. Your creds got her to talk. Listen, if an NUS employee tells Stuckey that it’s all right to talk to you, he just may buy it, he just may talk. And if he does, we may have ourselves a witness. But if you’re alone—a federal agent asking questions—he’s going to clam up and call either O’Malley or an attorney. That’s guaranteed. And that’s the end of it.”

Washington’s Union Station had undergone a multimillion-dollar remodel in the late 1980s, converting it into a “multiuse retail facility,” part rail station, part urban shopping mall, complete with upscale restaurants. So the enormous stone structure held far more people than just travelers. It was teeming with shoppers and restaurantgoers even as late as 8:00
P.M
., as Tyler and Priest disembarked and climbed the broken escalator into the central lobby, which was a vast expanse of marble and granite with a forty-foot ceiling.

As a result of their discussion, Tyler arrived nervous, even a little paranoid, and that held on as the two of them followed a huge parade of full-length winter coats, down jackets, back-packs, and Coach overnight bags. The details of their meeting with Selma Long had long since reached O’Malley. If the man had anything to fear from a former electrical engineer talking with him, then O’Malley would have tried to prevent the meeting, either by moving Stuckey or somehow impeding Tyler.

Tyler took a cursory look around the station, wondering if O’Malley had thought to place agents here, to try to keep tabs on him, and perhaps on Priest, too. Was Reagan Airport being watched as well? To what lengths would O’Malley go to intercept him? It depended on how much was at stake.

He and Priest were both scouting the terminal, and she was the first to sound a warning.

“On your right,” she said, turning her head left and giving nothing away. “I’m pretty sure I spotted a woman named Sumner. One of ours.”

“The Unit?”

“I told you before: I don’t know who’s in the Unit. I don’t even know if there
is
a Unit.” They walked slowly, looking like a couple in casual conversation. She added, “I bet I’ve never formally met half of our people. You see them around the coffee machine, but that’s about it.”

“So we split up,” he said softly.

The crowd shoved outside into the cold as people jockeyed for position in the taxi line. It was damp and slippery underfoot. Tyler saw his breath as he said, “You stay behind and confront the woman. Stall her. It’ll buy me time to get in a cab.”

“But you need me with Stuckey. Believe it.”

“Warn me as soon as you can if you think there are more than her—if they’re following me. I’ll take precautions in any event.” He added, “When you can manage it, we rendezvous at Stuckey’s. But take care to make sure they’re not following you. Don’t lose your job over this.”

“I don’t like it,” she protested.

“Suggestions?”

Nell said nothing.

Tyler said, “The Sumner woman is going to tell you it’s a coincidence to meet like this in a train station. She was waiting for someone else. That’s when you play dumb and ask to bum a ride downtown to the Jefferson. At some point she’ll have to cave in because no one else is going to show up. She’ll use her mobile. That’ll be to tell whoever else is here that I got away. It’ll happen fast, and it’ll be a little edgy, but if you play it right, you sink her with her own story.”

“And you’ll wait for me,” she encouraged.

“I’ll play that as it comes. Maybe they’ve warned him already. Maybe they weren’t going to warn him until they knew I was here.”

“You need me, Peter.”

“I’d rather do it with you than without you.” He paused. “I’ll wait as long as I can.”

Nell Priest turned around and walked with long, determined strides back toward the terminal.