Parallel Lies (30 page)

“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?

“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?”

“None,” he said.

“Rumors is all I’ve heard,” she said, “so I shouldn’t pass it off as fact. We talk about the technology as if we know, but no one but a few insiders does for sure. They’ve kept it secret to avoid patent infringements.” She added, “That much I
do
know, because a big part of our job in security has been to police possible leaks.”

He said, “Markowitz’s NASA analogy is that when the space shuttle needed the funds the Mars lander program lost
out. In NUR’s case, the pension funding couldn’t be touched because of union supervision, so they raided maintenance.”

She turned her face directly into the wind and closed her eyes. “It might explain the derailments. Maintenance is constant. Twenty-four, seven, coast to coast. They have an enormous department. Huge budget. They’re responsible for everything from track wear and bed maintenance to—” She gasped.

“Yes?”

“Crossing guards.”

Tyler felt the wind as particularly cold on his face. The landing lights of a plane shone brightly on the horizon.

“Oh, God,” she moaned, “it makes so much sense.”

“Does it?”

She said, “Stuckey was an
electrical
engineer.”