Sarah Armstrong - 01 - Singularity (22 page)

“Hell, you know where that is from last time,” he said, a certain resolution in his voice. “Come on. Let’s get this over with.”

Moments later, we’d left his office and walked into the dispatching center, where the railroad’s traffic controllers watched computer monitors tracking the progress of trains throughout Texas and Louisiana. On the screen, red lines indicated track down for repairs. Yellow signaled occupied track. Green represented open track, available for passage.

“They communicate with the engineers through a radio system and signal lights on the tracks,” James explained to David, a first-timer in the inner-workings of the railroads.

Just then a red light flashed on a pole above one of the cubicles. The corridor manager ran from his office and peered over the shoulder of that booth’s controller, deep in thought with sweat coating his square forehead.

“Got a problem,” James said, nervously. “Just a minute.”

We all watched as the manager, portly and fifty-something, shouted orders to the controller: “Tell the southbound to slow down and pull the northbound into the siding, two miles ahead,” he barked. “Get that train outta there.”

For five tense minutes, no one spoke. Finally, just as the southbound train hurled toward it, the northbound, indicated by a second arrow on the screen, swerved onto a siding. Relieved, the manager demanded, “Damn, George, why didn’t you tell me sooner you had a situation developing here? How’d that happen?”

George, a wiry man with a thick white pompadour, shrugged. “I didn’t realize they were that close. Shouldn’t have happened, but the northbound was delayed. Someone mudded a signal outside Corpus again. Cut the time between the trains too close.”

“We’ve got more problems these days.” The corridor manager sighed. “Swear I’ve got to get out of this business. Like to give me a heart attack, I keep this up for another ten years.”

“That happens often?” David asked James.

“Lately, yeah,” he whispered. “The lieutenant here knows most of this from the last go-around. The illegals will do about anything to stop a train and get on board. They cross the Rio Grande and hop the nearest train, not particularly caring where they end up. They fan out across the country that way. To get a train to stop, they cover up a signal lens—packing it with mud or old clothes. Without a signal indicating the track ahead is clear, the engineer is forced to stop. While the crew’s investigating, the illegals cut the seal on a boxcar and get inside or hide at the ends of hopper cars.”

“Is that how you transport plastic resin? In hopper cars?” I asked.

“Yeah. And the slag is dumped in open gondola cars. The illegals climb on top of the rock and sit on it.”

“You know, James, this could be just like the Resendiz situation—our guy’s a rider. There’s no reason, at least not at this point, for anyone to assume he’s an employee,” said David.

“Maybe that makes the most sense,” I admitted. “As active as this guy has been, as unbalanced as he is, he’d have a tough time holding down a job.”

“That’s a good thought. Let’s hope you’re right,” said James, leading us to a large, highly detailed map of Texas, framed and hung against a back wall. Black lines hatched with slashes represented train track.

“Okay, here we go,” I said, dialing my cell phone. I’d already alerted the captain, and he’d pulled out our map pinpointing the murder locations. One by one I relayed the addresses to James. On the map, the first, Louise Fontenot’s home in Bardwell, fell within half a mile of a train track. Mary Gonzales’s San Antonio rental house, another match, with a track just behind her dead-end street.

Next I read off Dr. Neal’s Fort Worth address. The nearest track was miles away.

“Looks like you’ve struck out.” James shrugged, looking relieved.

“Find the address of Neal’s office,” I asked the captain.

A match: the office was situated within a five-minute walk from one of Fort Worth’s busiest railroad lines. Finally, I repeated the address of Edward Lucas’s extravagant beach house, but even before James plotted the exact location, we knew we’d hit a snag.

“Doesn’t work,” said David, pointing at the map. “Not a single track extending that far down the island.”

Pausing for a moment, I recalled the afternoon I’d been called to the scene. It seemed like a lifetime ago, not less than two weeks. Something nagged at me, something I’d noticed that first day. Where was it?

“Give me the address for Knowles’s apartment,” I told the captain.

“Bingo,” said James, when he’d located it on the map. “Can’t be half-a-dozen blocks from the main Galveston freight yard.”

“So, he originally targeted her, not Lucas,” David said.

“This answers a lot of questions,” I said. “Especially, why no one at any of the scenes has reported a strange car.”

Yet suspecting that the killer circulated via the railroad brought up as many questions as it answered. Who was he? And there were still those fifteen months between the murders in Bardwell and Galveston. Where was he then?

“What kind of records have you got on your employees?” David asked. “We need to at least explore that possibility.”

“Regular employment histories including fingerprints,” said James. “But we’ve got more than six thousand employees, and none of the prints are on computer.”

“What if we just checked your employees in South Texas?”

“That’s doable,” he said. “That cuts it down to twenty-six hundred. We bring in enough help, we could have something for you by day after tomorrow.”

“No,” I snapped. Both men looked at me, perplexed. “That’s too late. By then we’ll have another body. This guy’s pace is building, and we don’t have long before he kills again.”

For all we knew, while we stood speculating with Roger James, our guy was targeting his next victim. “Let’s assume that our earlier ideas are right and that our guy would have a hard time holding down a job,” I reasoned. “What if we concentrate on former employees, anyone who worked for South Central and left in the last two years?”

“You bring in some extra help for me, and with my people we can scan them into the computer,” said James. “We’re talking a few hundred at most. We can have that by morning.”

“Okay, and at the same time we need to investigate our other possibility, that this guy’s not an employee at all, that he’s jumping trains, like Resendiz.”

“Our guy’s not Hispanic,” said David. “He’d stand out like a sore thumb.”

“We’ve got an agent who specializes in keeping track of what’s going on in that population,” said James. “In fact, he’s infiltrated a white gang we’ve been tracking.”

“A white gang?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “People have the wrong idea about who’s riding the trains. We don’t have hobos anymore. There are really only two populations. The illegals you got an education in last time around, Lieutenant. They’ve got their bad apples. Hell, Resendiz is proof of that. But for the most part they’re folks looking for work, migrant workers, sometimes whole families looking to start a new life. The other group, they’re white and dangerous. The core is made up of a
gang, maybe five-hundred members, who call themselves the Freedom Fighters,” said James. “Like the illegals, they circulate throughout the country riding the trains. But they’re not riding to get anywhere. They see the rails as their territory.”

“What do they do?” David asked.

“Steal mostly, shipments of anything they can sell, especially electronics,” he said. “You know, this could be something. We’ve never been able to prove it, but we’ve speculated for the past five years that they’re behind many of the dead bodies found along the tracks. The victims are usually poor illegals, mostly men, but even some women and children, murdered, their bodies thrown off a train. At least, that’s what we’ve always assumed.”

“How many bodies are we talking about?” David asked.

James shrugged. “Riding the trains is a risky business these days. Seems like there are more all the time, maybe twenty last year. But we don’t know if we’re hearing about all of them. Since the trains cross city, county, and state lines, there’s no way to tell if the local agencies are tying the deaths to the trains and contacting our office.”

“How are they killed?”

“All different ways. Some shot, some beaten to death. We’ve had a rash in the past couple of years, bodies thrown off trains with their throats slashed.”

I felt David’s eyes on me.

“How soon can you get your guy here?” I asked.

James looked at his watch. “I’ll have to track him down. Give me a few hours. Say nine
P.M.
, here in my office. I’ll tell him to bring along his file. He’s put together a notebook. It’s sketchy, but it has all the information they’ve collected on the individual gang members.”

“We’ll be back here at eight-thirty. In the meantime, I’ll get my
office to fax you the Fort Worth fingerprint,” I said. “I’ll also ask the captain and Houston P.D. for staff to help compare our print with those in your former employees’ files.”

“Yeah,” said James. “Send me help, and I’ll get it done.”

“Come on,” I said to David. “There’s someplace I need to be.”

S
cience Fair always brought out the masses, and this night the gym at Maggie’s middle school bustled with murmuring parents and teachers. I searched until I spotted Mom’s bright white mane in the crowd, near the center of the gym, standing next to Strings’s mom and dad. Alba had her youngest, Teesha, in her arms, and six-year-old Keneesha held on to the billowing sleeves of her mother’s flowing turquoise dress. Strings once told me that his mother planned to name him Kantigi, which means a faithful person. Fred Sr. objected, wanting his son to share his name. Of course, now no one ever calls the kid anything but Strings.

To get to Mom, David and I inched our way through a particularly dense circle of parents, kids, and teachers. As I nudged in beside her, I saw Maggie and Strings standing side-by-side in front of their science projects. Preoccupied, Maggie didn’t notice my arrival. An older student was asking her questions, while another was taking photos for
The Armadillo
, the middle school’s student newspaper. I figured Maggie had probably placed again, no great surprise since she always did well in math and science contests. Still, I couldn’t
understand why there was so much excitement, until I saw there were two ribbons. Maggie had a second-place ribbon, but Strings had won first place.

“Both of them?”

“Uh, huh,” Mom said.

I’d been gone so much, I hadn’t seen Maggie’s completed project. Now it glittered behind her. A computer-generated mock-up of a black hole, with a whirling vortex at the center: marked SINGULARITY in bright red. Every few seconds a wayward star got within sucking distance, and it exploded and vanished. On the compulsory three-panel display behind the computer, Maggie had dissected such complex issues as worm holes, tunnels through space that led to, well, no one knew, but maybe a parallel universe. Real celestial mysteries.

Eager to see Strings’s project, I slipped in behind Maggie to get a better look. Usually not as inclined toward academics as guitar practice, he’d done an outstanding job. On his laptop computer screen, an animated dinosaur trudged through a tropical setting. No T-Rex, as he’d originally described, the dinosaur in question was smaller, its presence more easily concealed. A birdlike raptor with jagged awful-looking teeth, it stalked through a tropical rain forest, at the right of the computer screen, stopping to rear back on its haunches and emit a screeching howl. For some reason, the dinosaur’s surroundings reminded me of the honeymoon trip Bill and I had taken to Hawaii.

“Is that…?”

“Yup, your old video. I don’t know how they did it, but Maggie and Strings fed it into the computer and then inserted that dinosaur,” Mom whispered. “Remarkable, isn’t it?”

“Remarkable,” I agreed. “Bill would have loved this.”

“Yes. He really would have,” Mom said. Then she whispered, “Look at the examples Strings found to make his argument.”

On the poster board behind his computerized dinosaur, Strings had drawn a map of the earth, with unexplored territories, mainly
tropical islands and dense rain forests, colored a bright red.
Where could they be hiding?
he’d written above it.

The two side panels backed up his theory that somewhere on the earth dinosaurs might still roam without necessarily being encountered by man.
REDISCOVERED: PYGMY MADTOM AND PHASMID DRYOCOCELUS AUSTRALIS
, read the panel to the left. According to Strings’s research, the Pygmy Madtom, a diminutive catfish, was thought to have disappeared from Tennessee’s Clinch and Duck Rivers in the mid-nineties, a victim of erosion and fertilizer pollution. The other reference was to a type of prehistoric walking stick with long hooked legs that hadn’t been seen on its native Lord Howe Island, off Australia’s east coast, in nearly a hundred years. The insects were preyed on by rats that arrived on the island after a shipwreck. Strings illustrated the walking stick’s apparent demise in a comic book drawing, the hungry rats, saliva dripping from their mouths, devouring the fleeing insects. Yet despite the presumption that both species were extinct, specimens of each had recently been found alive.
If they can be mistakenly declared extinct, why not the dinosaurs?
his project asked.

Just then, Strings, grinning wider than I’d have imagined possible, stared up at me.

“Pretty cool, Mrs. A?”

“Very cool.”

“Mom, we both won,” Maggie, who’d finally noticed me standing next to her, called out above the noise in the gym.

“I know, Magpie,” I said, leaning down to give her a hug. “Congratulations. You and Strings should be very proud.”

I felt someone tap me on the shoulder and turned to find Mrs. Hansen at my side.

“Did you get my message?” she asked.

“Yes, I did. Thank you,” I said.

“I think Maggie just needs reassurance that you’re there for her,”
she whispered. “I feel better about her these last few days, but I’ll keep you posted.”

“Thank you,” I said. “More than I can say.”