Maria Hudgins - Lacy Glass 02 - The Man on the Istanbul Train Read Online Free Page A

heads out, shouting, and opening doors.
    Lacy took off toward the head of the train, hampered by having one bootless foot. She considered climbing back aboard and retrieving the boot, probably still lying in shattered glass, but decided to retrieve it later. It wasn’t far to the head of the train.
    “A man fell off!” She yelled and pointed. “Back there.” As she reached the uniformed men, now being joined by more men, she added, “I pulled the alarm.”
    One man, possibly the engineer, nudged a taller man toward her, probably the one who understood and spoke English best.
    “Are you certain?” the tall man asked. “How far back?”
    “Yes, I’m certain, but how far back, I can’t say exactly. Not too far.” To Lacy, the interval between seeing the body fly out and pulling the emergency handle seemed to  have taken an hour, but in retrospect, she realized she must’ve moved very quickly.
    Shouts flew up from beyond the tail end of the train.
    Turning, Lacy saw several men waving their arms, shouting, and pointing down the slope. The men took off in that direction, but the English-speaking man caught Lacy by the arm and told her to go back to her car. “You have lost a shoe.”
    “It’s okay. I’m okay.”
    “No. Go find your shoe. Briars here.” He pointed to the scrub vegetation along the slope, then ran past her. Lacy plodded on a few more yards until a barb the size of Excalibur jabbed her in the arch of her socked foot. Balancing on her other foot, she pulled out the barb and looked around. Hundreds, maybe thousands more clumps brandishing similar weapons lay between her and the rear of the train. She located her own car, climbed aboard, and found her boot.

Chapter Three
    Paul Hannah trained his binoculars on the trees along the river valley east of the dig site. Standing on the hill he often climbed to watch the sun rise, this morning he aimed to find out what had made the strange noises that awakened him at three a.m. It wasn’t the first time, and the noises, he thought, came from the valley.
    A shout.
    Startled, he turned toward the tents scattered around the excavation to his west.
    “My God! Paul! Bob!” A man’s voice. Down below Todd Majewski, their photographer, stood in a bare spot amid the tents. Arms waving, he turned in a circle, seemingly searching for someone, anyone, in the still-slumbering encampment who could come to his aid. “Paul! Bob! I need help!”
    Paul flew down the slope, skirted the corner of an open trench, and nearly flattened Bob Mueller who was crouching to pass through the flap door of his tent. A throng of groggy campers converged on the source of the noise.
     

Chapter Four
     
    Some one hundred yards past the end of the train, a body lay on the slope, crumpled, eyes open, neck twisted at an unnatural angle. Lacy approached the men gathered around the body and drew close enough to assure herself it was the same unfortunate fellow who had boarded without a ticket. In death, his face seemed more peaceful now. Lacy felt tears rising and wondered if the man had a family or anyone at all who would miss him. Her nose stung with pent-up tears.
    The men—and they were all men—crowded around the body, a couple of them checking pulse points. They yanked out cell phones and jabbered in Turkish to each other or to unseen listeners elsewhere. The man she had pegged as probable engineer kept a wary eye on the circle of onlookers as he talked on his phone, a finger in one ear.
    Lacy spotted the pink shirt of the New York policeman she’d shaken hands with earlier. Sidling up to him she said, “What the hell happened?”
    “The poor guy must have fallen off the train. How you can manage to do that accidentally, I don’t know.”
    “I saw him. I saw him, but he wasn’t falling off. He was flying by the window .”
    The policeman’s head jerked toward her. “You saw him? What do you mean, flying ?” His black brows knitted into a squint that formed a deep crease