Part 28 (2/2)

The clacking of the wheels grew in volume. ”Theresa,” Edward Corliss said, ”are you near a train?”

”Yes. I'll tell you about it later.”

”Just be careful,” he said emphatically, and hung up. She had to grin. No doubt he thought letting nontrain people in a train yard sharply akin to allowing children to play in traffic. But she had no intention of wandering onto the tracks.

Cleveland to New Castle. Trains. She straightened, cautiously, and watched this new row of cars appear from the west. She knew she should get back inside before her hovering spooked the killer, but she found herself lost in the physics of the sight. Trains were large and heavy, unable to operate without their tracks. Very heavy. The phrase ”stopping in its tracks” was not accurate; a train couldn't just stop. They acc.u.mulated too much force behind them.

Momentum. Ma.s.s times velocity. Trains had a great deal of ma.s.s, and the velocity could get impressive.

A rapid transit car, basically a hollow aluminum tube, had much more stopping power because it had less weight. A shorter train could stop faster than a longer one. That train that had just pa.s.sed, the one with four cars, would be able to throw on its brakes much more effectively than this longer one now approaching.

So if you wanted to get away, pick a long train. Even if the cops flagged down the engineer or got the dispatch center to call him, even if he threw on every stopping mechanism he had, the train would still be a mile away before it came to a halt, before the police could swarm it. By which time you would have jumped off at any point in the stopping process, preferably by a main road where you could catch a cab or a bus, or, if you appreciate irony, the rapid transit. Though a rapid transit station could have cameras. For real irony, how about another train?

But how to murder the victim there at the scene? Forgo that detail? Or jump off the train from the front, decapitate the (presumably incapacitated) victim, then hop back on one of the rear cars? Difficult, but possible. a.s.suming the train moves slowly enough. And is really long. Like this one.

Obeying an instinct she did not truly understand, she burst into a run and sprinted across two sets of tracks with at least four seconds to spare. It only felt like less. The driver let out an annoyed blast from the horn, not caring to cut it close any more than she did. The earsplitting sound proved so startling that it shoved into her with physical force until she stumbled over the third set of tracks and wound up stretched across them like the hapless heroine of a silent movie.

Scrambling to her feet, she moved to a tiny strip of gra.s.s and scanned the other tracks for oncoming cars. Nothing. The rain pelted, let up, and pelted again, its dynamics affected by the push and suctioning of the pa.s.sing cars and the gaps in between each one as they rushed by her. The large boxes alternately blocked and allowed the bright lighting of the RTA station to pa.s.s through, and some cars had lights. This inconsistency ruined any night vision, effectively blinding her. She turned away, looking up and down the ten-foot-wide sliver of dirt and spa.r.s.e weeds that ran along the tracks under the bridge.

She thought the killer should leave the corpse near the bridge, but that seemed too risky. If the cops were present-and, unless completely insane, he would a.s.sume they were present-that's where they would hide. He would pick a new spot, farther east or west of the bridge, where he could do his grisly work and be gone before they discovered it.

Theresa moved under the bridge, better hidden by its deep shadow. Frank would be poised on the other side of the next pylon. She knew she shouldn't move around, yet they had too much ground to cover and too much of it became hidden as trains pa.s.sed by.

Under the bridge, to the west, stood a low structure, probably an abandoned platform. She crept closer to it. The train continued to rumble by.

The original killer had not only murdered this victim at the scene, but he had left the head and the body in two different places-only a thousand feet apart, but far enough that the body had not been discovered until the following day. What would today's killer do about that? Ignore it? Jump off, decapitate, leave the body, and jump back on the train with the head, then toss that out farther up the line?

That would work, actually. The body had been found near the bridge, with the head found between the bridge and Kinsman Road to the east. Her thighs ached but she moved a few more feet along the platform in a low crouch, keeping her head below its surface. The rain had penetrated her cloth jacket and reached her skin, and this, she told herself, caused her trembling.

Movement.

At the west end of the abandoned platform, a flicker of darker against dark. An animal? A bush blasted with violent air from the pa.s.sing train? A cop, wondering who the h.e.l.l she was? Maybe lining up his sights right now?

Another step. Definitely movement.

She crept forward, feeling, curiously, no fear. The killer would not harm her; she was not male and killing her would ruin the authenticity of the scene.

But then, Peggy Hall should have been a heavyset sometime prost.i.tute over forty. Perhaps authenticity was not his top priority.

She moved faster. She thought she could hear the rustling of his movements now, but that could not be possible, not over the roar of the train. It was probably Frank, and they'd scare the bejeebers out of each other like they did as kids playing Spotlight in Uncle Glenn's bas.e.m.e.nt.

He appeared. A tall bundle of raincoat and hat and nothing where a face should be. He was not Frank, nor any other cop. Some sort of black mesh hid his features and he held a bundle in his arms. She knew exactly what that had to be.

He stood completely still for a moment, watching the train pa.s.s. She did not move-she couldn't-and yet his head snapped to her direction as if she'd jumped up and down.

Now she felt fear. Paralyzing, gut-twisting fear that squeezed every molecule of air out of her lungs.

He leapt toward the tracks and neatly caught the rungs protruding from one side of a boxcar, pulling his body up with much more feline grace than either she or Edward Corliss would be able to command. He melded with the train car as if he were part of it, mercury joining back into mercury with one hand, the other still clutching the bundle.

Her legs carried her forward before she knew it, as he pa.s.sed on her left, until she reached the end of the platform. A body lay splayed across the dirt and weeds, with no clothing, and no head.

She turned and launched herself toward the train. He had done it.

She could, too.

Another car rushed by her in a dizzying blur. This next one-see the rungs? The weak streetlights shone down from the bridge and glinted off each metal protrusion. Grab, pull. Just make sure your feet come up and don't swing into the wheels, to be chopped off at the ankles and pulverized.

She reached out a hand.

It collided with a rung hard enough to break bone, and she stumbled, landing on the gravel shoulder only inches from the clacking metal wheels.

She looked ahead. The killer watched her from only three cars up, hanging easily off the side and facing back toward her, so the train could not be moving that fast. It was just the momentum. Ma.s.s times volume.

”Frank!” she shrieked, in a presumably hopeless attempt to alert the officers, and bounded up and along the side of the cars. That's how they did it in the movies, lessen the difference between the train's speed and yours.

It still outpaced her. She would have to grab the rungs of the next car.

It did occur to her to wonder what she would do if she caught it. She had no way of moving forward on the train toward the killer-unlike a pa.s.senger train, this one would have no pa.s.s-throughs between cars-but at least she could see where he jumped off. She could jump as well, pursue him, though once out of the crime scene he need have no qualms about ruining the effect by tacking on an extra murder.

But she had to catch the d.a.m.n thing first.

She vaguely registered a sound that might have been Frank calling her name and hoped it was. The end of this car, the coupling between them, reach out and- The killer pitched his bundle, tossing it underhand as one might abandon a basketball once the game ended. It landed in the narrowing strip of gra.s.s, directly in her path. If she didn't stop running she might step on it.

Her right hand connected with the rung. It hurt slightly less than the other one had. Then her right foot slid in the loose gravel and she went down, instinctively curling into a ball to keep all fingers and toes and arms and extremities off the tracks and out of the blender of moving parts underneath the train cars.

Her body came to a stop with her face in the gravel and her knees only an inch or so from the rails, but without losing any bits of itself.

She opened her eyes to find someone else returning her look, but with the unwavering, unseeing gaze of the dead. The killer had thrown the head, wrapped loosely in a pair of pants, just as she had expected him to do, just as the original Torso killer had prescribed.

He still watched her from up the tracks, receding farther into the east with every split second, the train picking up speed as it moved out of the more populated downtown area. Could he see her reaction from there, or did he simply enjoy letting his gaze linger on the tableau he'd created?

Frank caught up with her. ”Tess. I saw you fall, are you hurt? What the h.e.l.l were you doing?”

”He did it. Surrounded by cops, he still did it.”

Frank clicked on his flashlight to see the head, though it was clearly visible in the parking lot lights strobing through the pa.s.sing cars. He opened his mouth but apparently couldn't think of a profanity bad enough to express his thoughts and pulled out the radio instead. He'd arranged for a link to the downtown train yard dispatch center and now asked them to tell the driver to stop the train, though they both knew that when he did, the killer would be long gone.

”He did it,” Theresa repeated.

”d.a.m.n,” Frank said.

CHAPTER 37.

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