Parallel Lies (34 page)

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 point 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.

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.