Parallel Lies (3 page)

Alvarez flattened himself to the wall. Dead still.

“Mommy?”

He rocked his head to see, with great relief, that he was partially screened from the kitchen by the open pantry door. Through the crack he saw a small six- or seven-year-old boy with red hair, freckles, and a blue stuffed dog tucked tightly under his arm. The boy crossed to the fridge and pulled out a carton of orange juice. He moved around the kitchen comfortably, reaching for a glass on tiptoes and then filling it with the juice.

The plumbing pipes to Alvarez’s left rumbled and went silent. The shower had ended. He stood there with his bundle of clothes and cans of tuna not knowing what to do next.

She’d be drying herself off now. Just from having observed her, Alvarez knew she’d already decided what clothes to wear, if in fact she hadn’t already laid them out.

The boy gulped the orange juice. Alvarez felt himself tighten, not over his predicament, but at the sight of the boy—a living, breathing boy, in a joyful moment of drinking orange juice. A child. Innocent. Loving. Waiting for his mother. Alvarez’s vision blurred. Nothing would bring his twins back. He’d revisited their loss countless times. He pushed his anger deeper inside and locked it away, though only temporarily.
It owned him. Possessed him. But he could not work with it in the forefront of his thought, he could barely move. He had learned to tame it but feared he would never be rid of it.

What to do? he wondered, silently urging the boy to seek out his mother. The Cream of Wheat would burn in another minute or so. Mom had to be just about fully dressed by now. His worlds were colliding. He had to get out.

The boy seemed to be debating whether to leave the kitchen, but Alvarez needed to take action, now.

The window
…

There appeared to be some home-fix-it caulking plugging its edges. Could he get out it with his arms full? Slip off this far end of the porch? He could taste his freedom.

The boy remained in limbo, hugging his blue dog and staring off into space, but he faced the laundry room, preventing Alvarez from crossing the pantry’s open door and making for the window.

“Nate, honey?” called Mom, sounding close, though not yet into the kitchen.

“Yeah?” the boy called in response.

“Stir the cereal for me, would you? Turn it off first! Use a pot holder! And watch out for the bubbles. They’re hot! I’m going to get your sister up.”

A second child!

The boy crossed to the stove.

Alvarez moved back to the ironing board. He set down his loot on the dryer and gently moved the ironing board out of his way. Would she remember how it had been sitting? If he could get out without setting off any alarms in her, he might buy himself more time—
freedom.

He unlocked the window, the washer’s motor and churning water providing cover. One firm bang with an open palm jarred the window loose. The weather stripping, long strings of soft caulk, pulled from the jamb. He was in a full sweat
now—hands, armpits, brow, the back of his neck. He tossed his haul out into the snow, slipped his legs out, and reached to pull the ironing board back into place, dragging it.

His mistake was attempting to stand the iron itself back up as he had found it. He stood it up fine, but in his final effort to get out, he once again nudged the ironing board. This time, he took no notice. As he ducked his head out the window, he heard the iron strike the floor.

He pulled the window shut and scooped up his stolen possessions.

The woman heard the noise. Sounded like something falling. With Samantha cradled in her arms and Nathan standing on a chair stirring his hot cereal, she stepped into the confined space. She thought it felt cold, but this laundry room never heated well in the morning. Northwest side of the house and all.

The iron lay on the floor. She stared at it, puzzled. Then the washing machine shook, going off-center, as it was prone to do with sheets and towels, and the room vibrated so much she was surprised every shelf hadn’t fallen down along with the iron. Just another thing that needed fixing. Like most everything in this place.

His name was Peter Tyler, and he drove a beige, front-wheel-drive Ford convertible that smelled of spray can deodorant, courtesy of Avis. The rental agent could not understand his insisting on a convertible in the middle of winter. Tyler gripped the warm plastic steering wheel a little too tightly, thinking that if the snow didn’t let up, he would never make it to the rail yard on time. Not the best message to send back to Washington on the first day of a new job.

He adjusted the mirror and briefly caught sight of his own dark eyes and knitted brow, his worry overriding what was normally his more lighthearted expression. He needed this job, both financially and emotionally, even if it was only freelance work. He knew that rebuilding his life would not be accomplished in leaps and bounds but in small, determined steps. And as hard as it was for him to adjust to this, adjust he must. For the past decade, he had formed his identity around his work as a homicide detective. With that now behind him—stolen from him, by his way of thinking—he needed something to hold on to. Anything. This job, however temporary, seemed a place to start. A beginning. An opportunity he could not squander. That it also felt a little like the first day of school was simply something he would have to overcome. Change never came easily.

The snowstorm had left St. Louis in slop—wet, thick, and sticky. Tyler rolled down his window and reached outside, snagging the wiper just long enough to dislodge some of the
ice from the blade. A three-inch clear arc appeared through the muck on the windshield, about chin height, requiring Tyler to either sink in his seat or meet his chin to his neck and try to look out through the steering wheel. He sank. For a moment, he could actually see outside.

Cars and trucks had spilled off the road to both sides. Flashers flashed. So did tempers. He saw two different lame attempts at fistfights, comical for the winter apparel. A tow truck, also off the highway, convinced him road conditions were serious. He slowed and tried the wiper again. A truck horn sounded behind him. Tyler cursed a blue streak inside the fogged rental and then, unable to take it any longer, unfastened the two clasps, hit the button, and put down the convertible top while under way. Surprisingly, even with the top down, not much snow hit him; it was being carried back by an airfoil created by the windshield, but this required a certain speed to be effective, so he sped up and threw caution to the wind.

He hadn’t explained his acute claustrophobia to the rental clerk, doubting the man would have wanted to hear that the car’s interior was going to be exposed to winter conditions. Peter Tyler had been driving ragtops for over a year.

With the lid down, people waved at him from cars and the side of the road. This was a country that celebrated personal expression. There would no doubt be talk around the suburban dinner tables that night of the crazy man in the beige convertible doing forty on I-70 in freezing weather with the top down.

Tyler stopped the car outside the rail yard, put the top back up—first impressions were important to him—and took another moment to brush the snow off the wet shoulders of his trench coat. Homicide cops wore trench coats—lined in the
winter months, but still trench coats—and Tyler had been a homicide cop for eleven years prior to the six or seven minutes that had changed his life. Now he felt like a cheap imitation. He wasn’t sure he even deserved the trench coat. Life was a bitch.

With the car’s lid up, his heart beat fast and his palms sweated. He took a deep breath and calmed himself. This affliction was relatively new, and growing worse: perhaps it came from a fear of jail time—a real possibility for a while there. The so-called assault, and the resulting charges, had changed everything. Now he felt lucky just to have a job, any job, and he was not going to screw it up. He certainly wasn’t going to let some stranger’s first impression of him be in a snowstorm, in a convertible, with the top down. He still hoped that a strong performance on this investigation—his first assignment for the National Transportation Safety Board, or NTSB—might lead to a more permanent position. He needed the work, the income, the stability. He needed this.

At a few minutes past three in the afternoon, with the storm still raging, Tyler parked and climbed out. The rail yard smelled of petroleum—grease, fuel, and cleansers—even in a snowstorm, a rusty bitterness in the back of the throat that reminded him of overheated electrical sockets.

A ruddy-cheeked man approached and introduced himself as Hardy Madders, rolling his eyes at the joke of his own name. An overweight man with loose jowls and a jovial disposition, Madders shook Tyler’s hand vigorously, introducing himself as the yard’s superintendent. He led Tyler across railroad tracks buried in six inches of wet snow, pointing out where to step to avoid tripping on the buried rails. The yard held freight cars, tankers, and flatbeds. Red, black, gray. Dozens of tracks, perhaps thousands of cars. According to Madders, a man who plainly liked to hear himself talk, the yard hands sorted the arriving trains, redirecting groups of cars to
various tracks and to trains on other routes. An interline train from the east or south would carry one “package” of several cars headed to the northwest, another package intended for the southwest, and several more bound for the West Coast or Canada. Here, at the St. Louis switching yard, these cars were separated out and rerouted—“repackaged”—connected to engines and sent on their way. “Twenty-four, seven. No holidays here,” Madders added.

“And the car I’m supposedly interested in?” Tyler asked.

“Oh, you’re interested all right,” Madders assured him. “Why would the NTSB send an investigator all the way from Washington if there wasn’t something to be interested in? Don’t you boys have regional offices?”

“I’m new,” Tyler answered, not wanting to give this guy too much information. He carried NTSB credentials but did not feel like a federal employee, a federal agent. For the last eleven years he’d distrusted the feds. Now he was one.

Madders replied, “Which means you’re some kind of expert, right?”

“I wouldn’t exactly say that.”

“Homicide,” Madders said. “You gotta be some kind of expert in homicide. Am I right?” They walked a few more feet—it was treacherous going—when Madders said under his breath, “You’d better be.”

Lit by a number of battery-powered fluorescent lights, the boxcar in question held crated dishwashers. A St. Louis Police Department uniformed patrolman stomping his cold feet together was at a stepladder leading up into the car. Tyler showed the man his credentials.

“Feds are here!” the cop announced.

Inside the car were two crime scene technicians busy with stainless steel tools and plastic bags. They had attached little
flags of various colors around the car. Supervising the two was a detective by the name of Banner, or Bantock—the man was so cold his jaw didn’t move properly and Tyler missed the name. The detective was short and stocky and wore a gray wool overcoat. His street shoes looked wet all through, and his face was a florid pink, from either temperament or the cold. Clearly he didn’t want to be here—it was written all over him, from his hunched shoulders to the squinting eyes that conveyed resentment.