Nights of Awe Read Online Free Page A

needle marks are very fresh, in other words he may have been under the influence when he died. We’ll know once the forensic chemist finishes her tests.”
     
    Repo, the head of security for the State Railways, was waiting outside, looking cold. The weather was chilly, and he was blowing his runny nose. Usually the heads of security at large corporations were former cops or ex-military. Repo didn’t look like either.
    “The driver is still in a state of shock because of what happened. I hope you’ll take that into consideration.”
    Before stepping inside, I looked around.
    “Where’s the train that was involved in the accident?”
    “Behind the building, on the maintenance track.”
    “Has it been examined?”
    “It’s being examined as we speak.”
    “Our CSIs will take a look at it… Something may have fallen from the man who was hit…”
    “If we find anything, we’ll let you know.”
    The locomotive engineer was waiting in the break room, looking out into the rail yard. I sat down across from him. His hands were trembling.
    “Coffee?” Repo asked.
    “Please. Black.”
    Repo took a fire-engine-red mug that read I Love NY from the draining board and filled it for me.
    The locomotive engineer stared out of the window a moment longer before looking at me. He was a thin man on the far side of fifty. His face was etched with the grooves of a hard life. He wore bifocals, the only hair he had left was at the back of his neck and on his ears – and now this.
    “Who was he?” he asked.
    “We don’t know yet.”
    “I’ve done this job for over twenty years and no one has ever jumped in front of me.”
    The man turned to look out of the window again. I could barely hear his words: “Did he jump?”
    “I was hoping you could tell me that.”
    The engineer shook his head.
    “I’m not sure… I was about fifty yards from the bridge when I saw them…”
    “What do you mean, them? Was there someone else on the bridge?”
    “At least three of them, all men. First they were walking side by side towards the City Theatre, so from the direction I was coming from, from right to left. Then one of them ran to the railing and jumped over it onto the lip of the bridge and began crawling towards the edge…”
    The man rubbed his temples uneasily.
    “I could see his face when he turned and fell. I could hear him slam into the roof… And then I caught a glimpse in the mirror of him just lying there next to the track.”
    “What about the other two men? What were they doing?”
    “I didn’t see them after that.”
    “I mean, what where they doing when the man climbed over the railing? Did they try to stop him, for instance?”
    “I’ve been thinking about that this whole time. At first I thought that they were trying to help him, to keep him from jumping…”
    The driver looked at Repo as if he were entering sensitive territory and needed his approval. Repo nodded.
    “Then when I heard what had happened at the bridge, I started thinking harder about it—”
    “Wait a minute,” I interrupted. “What did you hear?”
    “That a murdered man had been found there.”
    “Continue.”
    “Afterwards I began thinking about the whole thing from a different angle, and it seems to me that the guy who fell was afraid… afraid and was trying to get away from those other two men because he was afraid. I saw his face right before he fell, and I’m pretty sure that he was a lot more afraid of them than he was of falling.”

3
     
    “I have a theory,” Oksanen said. He was sitting next to me in the police van, holding a to-go cup of coffee like all the rest of us except Simolin, who only drank tea, preferably green. I also had a doughnut covered with so much sugar it was impossible to keep from showering it all over the place.
    Oksanen’s parka was emblazoned with the logo of a German car manufacturer. I knew that he also had a motor-oil company pen, a tyre-company key ring, a car-parts-chain pocketknife and an