Parallel Lies Read Online Free Page A

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 thewinter 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 tovarious 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