When Dreams Cross (18 page)

“You’re not the engineer, Wes. There’s nothing you could have done.”

“It just doesn’t make sense. It ran so smoothly.”

Justin moved his thumb along the bare spot of his chest, a frown working at his brows as he looked at the bent rails. “Do you think someone could have deliberately done this? We’ve established that the fire was arson. Maybe somebody was trying to finish the job of sabotaging the park. This would be a terrific way to do it. It worked.”

Wes brought tired, troubled eyes to Justin’s. He opened his mouth to speak, then glanced around him to make certain no one could hear. “I can’t prove a thing,” he muttered.

A new sense of purpose fell over Justin as suspicion filled his heart. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? Forgetting Wes, Justin stood up and walked the length of the trestle until it sloped to the ground enough for him to climb up on it. Then he walked back up the tracks, studying each cross tie for any clue, until he stood above Wes. Kneeling down, he ran his hand along the rails, praying he would find something, anything. A state engineer ran up the tracks behind him, holding his clipboard under his arm as he glared down at Justin. “May I ask what you’re doing, sir?”

“Examining the rails,” Justin clipped without ceasing his work.

The man stepped closer to hinder Justin’s progress. “For what?”

“For anything,” Justin said.

“I’ve already examined them and made my report,” he said. “There’s no need—”

“Get out of my way!” Justin bellowed as he ran his fingers over the holes of the tie plates where the spikes had come loose.

The man became more ruffled. “If you don’t stop right this minute, I’ll have you forcefully removed from the premises. You’re getting in the way of an investigation.”

“Fine,” Justin mumbled, glancing up at the man with imposing, daggerlike eyes. “You just try it.”

Catching an exasperated, agitated breath, the man hurried away, presumably to get help. But Justin still wasn’t daunted. “There’s not a bolt left in place here, Wes. Not on either rail for about twenty feet.” He leaned forward to an almost hanging position until he could see the end of the twisted piece of rail. “Did you notice that one of the joint bars is missing?”

Wes shook his head sadly. “We checked every bolt. I walked these tracks myself, just the other day.”

As if he hadn’t heard, Justin studied the twist of the rails, battered on the ends and bent, as if some outside force had pried the ends up enough to ensure their instability. He got up and walked back up the tracks, racking his brain for an answer. He looked around for a camera from which the security guards could monitor the rails. If someone had sneaked in, as they’d done the other night to start the fire, and had deliberately damaged the tracks, wouldn’t it be recorded? Wouldn’t they be able to replay the tapes and see if someone was there?

He leapt down and headed to the security guards’ station. “I need to see the tapes monitoring the damaged section of the FanTran rails,” he told the guards sitting at the closed circuit televisions. “All the tapes just prior to the accident.”

One of the guards, an elderly man who looked like someone’s grandpa, got up and went to the tape room at the back of the small building. “Let’s see,” he said as they found the tapes of that edge of the park. “Here are the cameras monitoring the Noah’s Ark ride, and part of that track is visible from that camera. But now that I think about it, it’s not the part that was damaged. It’s just the part before it curves around …”

Justin took the tape and popped it in the VCR at the corner of the room. “Sure is. It just misses the section I need to see. What else you got?”

“Well … there’s the Jacob’s Ladder section. It might show some of that track, but from a distance.” He took the tape out and popped the new one in. The track was too far above the picture. “Nope. That doesn’t show it.”

Justin couldn’t believe it. “Do you mean to tell me that we don’t have cameras monitoring every part of the FanTran track?”

“No, sir. You see, the cameras are to monitor people. And it isn’t likely that people will be on those tracks. So the cameras aren’t on them … not specifically.”

“So there’s no way to see if someone walked those tracks and damaged them?”

“No, sir. But we can do like you did the other day, when you checked the tapes of those who came in and out.”

“That’ll never work this time,” Justin said. “Too many people were here yesterday.”

Frustrated, he thanked the man, then went back outside. He sat on one of the painted benches under a tree and stared across the grounds to the broken tracks. Someone had done it deliberately. They had known that part of the track wasn’t monitored. They had known that they wouldn’t be caught.

An insider
, he thought.
Someone who could walk across it without being suspect. Someone who had inside information about the security setup.

He rushed back into the office building and hurried down the hall to the personnel office. No one was there today. Andi had given the office staff the day off, for she’d been too despondent to think of any work that could be done when she didn’t even plan to open the park now. He went to the file cabinets lining the walls and found the one marked, “Engineers.” He flipped through, until he found all of those who worked on the FanTran. One by one, he slipped them out into a sloppy stack on the floor. Then he went to the cabinet marked, “Security.” All of those assigned to that area of the park were added to the stack. He moved to the “Maintenance” drawer, and did the same.

By the time he’d pulled the file of everyone who’d had anything to do with the FanTran, he had a stack at least a yard tall. He sat down on the floor and began to read through the files for anything that might clue him. There was quite possibly someone within this stack who had a background or a former job or a skill or an association that might clue him. Anything. There had to be.

You’ve got to help me, Lord. Don’t let them win.

He began to go through each file, reading every word. Night fell, and grew old, and then dawn came, before he’d gone through all of them.

By morning, he had five employees that he considered suspects. One had a two-year inexplicable unemployment on his
something that often indicated that he either had a job he didn’t want to report for whatever reason, had been in jail, had been ill, or had encountered an incredible run of bad fortune. He doubted it was the latter, but intended to find out which of the others explained it.

Another had once been employed by one of the businesses that Givens owned. In fact, he’d held a position much higher than he held here. That, he thought, was a little suspicious.

The other three files had inconsistencies regarding overlapping dates of employments, educational backgrounds, etc., things that could have been typographical errors. But Justin intended to take no chances.

Bone-tired, he made a call to Henry Baxter, a retired police officer and one of his father’s former partners.

The man’s raspy voice reminded Justin of the early hour. He’d awakened him.

“Y-ello.”

“Henry? This is Justin Pierce. Robert’s boy?”

“Justin!” the man said. “Well, I’ll be. Sure didn’t expect to hear from you so early in the morning.”

“I’m sorry I woke you, Henry. But it’s an emergency. I need for you to pull some strings at the police station to get me some information. Do you still have any clout there?”

“I should. I was on the force for forty-two years. What do you need?”

“I’m working for Promised Land, Henry. You probably heard about the accident here.”

“Yeah. Good thing no one was killed.”

“Sure is. The thing is, I think it was sabotage, maybe an inside job, and I’ve narrowed it down to five employees who might have something to do with it. I need any information you can get me on them.”

“I can do that,” he said. “Tell you what. Give me an hour to get down to the station, and meet me there with whatever you already have. It shouldn’t be a problem. I still know everybody there. Used to be boss to most of them.”

“I knew you could do it, Henry. I’ll see you in an hour.”

He met his father’s old friend at the station, and was startled by how much the man had aged. But he still seemed to command a great deal of respect at the police station. They quickly gave him a desk at which to work, and he began to peck information into the computer that would call up rap sheets, credit reports, phone records, and other information on the men Justin suspected.

When all the information had been printed out, he slipped the old man a hundred dollar bill and thanked him profusely. Henry, who seemed to miss his police work, asked him to let him know if there was anything else he could do. Justin promised him he would.

Activity was just resuming around the accident scene as Justin made it back to the park. It didn’t occur to him that he hadn’t showered since yesterday or that he was wearing these clothes for the second day in a row. He was too anxious to study the information he’d compiled on these men. He went up to his office, locked himself in, and studied the records more intently than he’d ever studied anything in his life.

One by one, he eliminated men, as explanations became apparent and inconsistencies were cleared up. Finally, he was down to one man. The one who had worked for one of Givens’s companies—a man named Allen Jenkins.

He pulled out the phone record and studied the numbers. They meant nothing to him unless he had the names that went with them. Frustrated, he called Henry back. “I’m sorry to bother you again, Henry, but do you have any way of getting the names that go with these phone numbers?”

“Give me a few minutes,” Henry said. “I’ll get back to you.”

A few minutes later, the phone rang, and Justin snatched it up. It was Henry on a three-way call with a friend of his from the phone company. “This call never happened, Justin. But tell my friend here the numbers you’re interested in, and he’ll tell you who they belong to.”

Justin began reading the numbers off, and the unidentified voice gave him the names. The moment he got to Givens’s name, he knew he’d hit pay dirt. There were at least fifteen calls to or from Givens to this particular security guard in the last three weeks. Funny thing, since the man had allegedly been fired from his job with one of Givens’s companies.

He tried to think clearly, in spite of his fatigue. If Givens was behind this, was he behind the arson, too? He closed his eyes, rubbed them roughly, then had an idea. “I need one more thing, guys. I need the phone record of a man named Charles Butler. Can you get that for me?”

“How about it?” Henry asked his friend.

“Sure,” the man said. “What’s your fax number?”

He gave it to him, and in seconds, the printout was coming through his machine. He jerked it out before the machine could cut it, and searched for Givens’s number. There it was—at least a dozen times in the two weeks prior to the arson.

“Thank you so much, both of you,” he said. “If this works out, you’ll both get lifelong tickets to Promised Land.”

He hung up and raced to the elevator, got off on Andi and Wes’s floor, and ran to Andi’s office. She wasn’t there. He turned and hurried down to Wes’s, and found them both sitting wearily at his conference table. “I’ve figured it out!” he said, bursting into the room. “Givens is behind it. Charles Butler—the arsonist—was working for him, and so is one of our security guards. I’ve got their phone records, and they were both in touch with him over a dozen times each right before the sabotage.”

Andi stood up, stricken, and Wes followed. “Justin, are you sure?” Wes asked. “Can you prove this?”

“Not yet,” he said. “Not quite. But Charlie Butler is already in jail, and we can get a confession out of him. Givens is letting him take the fall, and by now, I’ll bet he’s busting to get even. The other guy will spill his guts, too, as soon as I get my hands around his throat. I thought you two might want to come be witnesses to this grand event.”

He turned and headed back to the elevators.

“Justin!” he heard Andi shout as the doors closed behind him. But he didn’t intend to be stopped until he’d gotten the truth out where everyone could see it.

Justin’s first stop was to the security house, where he found Allen Jenkins, the man in question, and feigning friendship and respect, asked him to come help him with something. Putting his arm around him, he escorted him to the accident scene, where two inspectors were videotaping and photographing the scene. The parish engineer who had ordered him off of the track yesterday looked up at him as he approached with the guard, and Andi and Wes were fast approaching from across the grounds.

When Justin turned to face the engineer, his arm still thrown across the shoulders of the guard, the man’s steps faltered.

“I want to know something,” said Justin. “Who did this investigation and filled out the initial report on the crash?”

The man cleared his voice and glanced around him. “Well … I did.”

“Then tell me,” Justin bit out in a murderously quiet voice, as he took slow, menacing steps toward him, still holding onto the guard. “Are you blind … or are you in B.W. Givens’s pocket, too?”