“Maude Rogers, homicide detective. What is your name, sir?” she asked him.
“Blevins, Samuel Blevins, engineer of this run,” he answered, shaking his big, dark head back and forth in denial of what he had witnessed. The fellow seems dazed, Maude thought. Guess I would be too, if I ran over someone with a zillion-pound locomotive.
“Samuel, can you tell me what happened?” she asked him.
“Well, ma’am, one minute I was on time, with an accident-free record in my belt, feeling pretty good, getting ready to go home. The next minute, there she was, lying across the track, and wasn’t a blessed thing I could do to get her to move or to stop the train no matter how hard I blew the whistle. Detective, that’s what happened.”
“Have you ever seen her before?” Maude asked.
“Damn me if I have,” Samuel said, his face scrunched up in concentration. “She was on the train today.”
“Today? Are you sure? You saw this woman on your train today, before the incident?” She called it an incident to soothe the man a little. It sounded less accusing.
“Yeah, I swear I saw her on the train before I climbed aboard the engine. Don’t remember her name.”
“Did she get off anywhere?”
“Wouldn’t know that. I spend all my time in 99, Homeland Security, you know. We make the Wilk run every day. Go down, come back. Takes all day and don’t see much after we get underway. You might speak to Kale Pittsford, the conductor. I expect he could answer that question. Just remember that girl because she was so pretty.” With that, Samuel blushed, his brown eyes downcast, as if looking at a pretty girl who was now dead might be shameful.
Maude walked back to the small red purse that still lay under her handkerchief. She picked it up with a gloved hand and saw an identification card naming the dead woman as Virginia Evelyn Devine, thirty-two years old. Eve Devine, red hair, blue eyes, five feet, five inches tall, and an organ donor. Maude thought about the kid again, wondering who was going to give him the bad news about his mama; someone needed to be there to help him understand. She wondered if the boy had such a person. She wondered why he’d lied to her.
No one could have predicted the boy’s mother was going to be cut in half on the train tracks, no one except the murderer. He knew because he set it up. Maude thought about telling the engineer the truth: that his machine didn’t kill the woman. She knew, though, the coroner should be the one to tell the news. The medical man would search for blood and, not finding it, would quickly come to the conclusion that there was much that needed an explanation. His autopsy would answer the questions on Maude’s mind.
The crime scene unit gave her the evil eye as they showed up—the same technicians who were at the house on Sycamore Street now had additional work to keep them busy through the night. Join the party, she thought. Most of the train riders had scattered when it came to rest and the doors opened. People not wanting to be involved in the woman’s situation quickly made their way down the weed-overgrown trail along the tracks to their cars at the station, eager to be away from the unlucky train. Some might remember Eve Devine. The police would need a list of riders who might have seen the woman get on or off the train. Major interviews were coming up.
Maude thought it seemed a little spooky, but she never put any stock in paranormal reasoning. After the facts were gathered, there were always explanations for strange happenings. This time, she thought, will be no different. Illusions are created by man and must be destroyed by man.
Seven o’clock had come and gone, dinnertime for some, but not for Maude. She heard the low growl in her belly and knew there had been too many hours since her last meal. Without her wristwatch, she had to ask others the time. Her pocket notebook was filled with line after line of information from the brutal scene, with none of it answering the question in her mind. How did Eve Devine make a trip to Bisbey and lie under the wheels of the same train she was supposed to be riding? Pittsford, the conductor, agreed with the ticket agent from the morning sales: Eve Devine had a round-trip ticket to Bisbey, Texas on the day she died. Not only that, but on several occasions during the day, he or at least one employee of the railroad had seen the woman in apparent good health.
People in the parking lot who couldn’t leave were frantic that their lives were about to become encumbered by the death of the woman, for most had been waiting there for some time. Although they hadn’t seen the accident down the tracks, there was always a possibility that an off-scene viewer might have observed peripheral activity important to the case. Some were happy to oblige the police, hoping that something good might come of the tragedy on the rails. Maybe the police would fix the parking problem in front of the station even if the security people wouldn’t. Marge Campbell was one of the people who looked at Maude and indicated she would like to give information.
“Maude Rogers, Homicide,” she said to the woman, displaying her shield where the streetlight’s dim glimmer caught the gold of the star. “What’s your name, please?”
“Marge Campbell, a taxpaying American who has to sit here in this mess of cars because some people who aren’t Americans have blocked the parking lot.” Marge was furious, her round face reddened in a state of high dudgeon. “And another thing, I don’t appreciate the way the police just ignore this sort of thing.”
Maude stared for a minute, remembering the earlier shouting match between the woman and a taxi driver, then asked how long she had been at the station.
“I arrived at 5:30, intentionally early, to pick up my husband Harold, who was supposed to be getting off the 6:10 train. I’ve been sitting here since, wondering when I am going to be able to leave.” Marge seemed almost ready to cry.
“Marge, did you see anything strange happening before the train arrived”
“Well,” the woman stammered, getting her emotions under control, “I saw a lot of people parking illegally, especially an un-American taxi driver who blocked me in.”
“Besides that, was there anything unusual that you noticed? No matter how unimportant it may seem to you, it could be helpful to me. I’m trying to figure out what elements might have contributed to the woman’s death.”
“Why, I thought she was run over by the train!” Marge was in a tizzy. Had she missed something important because of those rude, dark-skinned people?
“Yes she was. But I’m referring to the events leading to her death, Marge.”
“Oh, I see.” Marge was, after all, one of the best players at her regular weekly Scrabble Meet, and therefore savvy enough to follow a person’s conversation with no trouble at all.
“Let me think—there were about four cars that came and went while I sat in this unholy mess. They all got here after I did, but didn’t want to wait, and there was the pickup truck that dropped off supplies to the stationmaster; also a man was jogging and ran across the rails toward a car parked over there on the road. He had his dog with him.”
“Is that all you can remember?”
“Yes, I believe so. Will you be writing tickets to the people who disobeyed parking rules?”
“Uh, no, Marge; I have to find out why a young woman killed herself. Sorry. Oh, and I need your home address and phone. We may need to ask you other questions.”
Marge harrumphed, gave her information, put the car into drive, and began weaving her way out of the parking lot, into a lane that had suddenly opened. She slowed to allow a few people to cross the road in front as they hurried to get away from the scene with the dead woman. She knew a few of them from her regular trips to the train station, but that didn’t matter; she was too pissed to even notice that some of them waved at her. Sometimes, when she was angry with Harold for keeping her waiting, she would get out of the car and say hello to Henry Fonda, but not that day. Oh no. Marge was on the way home, and damn anyone who got between her and the traffic lights. They’d get a honk for sure. She was fuming already after finally receiving a text message from Harold saying he had decided to stay in Wilk for the night after all. Let hi
m find a way to get home tomorrow. Damned if she was going to make another trip.
Maude took a minute to get her wits back together after the conversation with Marge Campbell. She chuckled to herself over the woman’s indignation. Something Marge said had troubled her, but she couldn’t remember what it was that struck her wrong. Probably the woman herself, she thought. Most of the other drivers and the stationmaster had been interviewed by other officers. It would be morning before she would be able to see their notes.
Finally there was nothing more she could do, except take care of her own needs. The Taco Shop on Elm Street was close by, and made the greasy kind of food that Maude loved. She decided to eat there, since she had a fifteen-minute drive to her home, with few places in between serving food. Sitting in the small café that was like a second home, she ate her food and chased it with a mug of root beer. Real beer would have been better, but being on call had its requirements, at least during regular working hours. The first one involved the necessity for sobriety in any person answering a police call; in other words, no beer. The second was that any violation of requirement number one made the on-call person susceptible to firing, or at least disciplining, if they were caught.
Maude sighed deeply, wondering what she should do next. The kid who called haunted her, wherever he was, he must be missing his mama. She stood and cringed at the soreness in her knees, for the rainy weather had set her arthritic joints aflame. Stepping outside into the night air, she relit the butt of her third cigarette; pulling the lighter from the vest pocket in her blazer, she rolled the mechanism to create a spark, then a flame. The butane lighter was old, slick from use. It was one of the reasons she hated to quit smoking. Paul, her husband, had given it to her before he went to Vietnam. He never returned, but the lighter continued working. Maybe it was the woman, dying on the tracks, or the kid missing his mama, but something had triggered a load of sadness.
Shaking off the depression, Maude went to her car and climbed in. When the arthritis was at its worst, she knew ways to get in and out of a vehicle without hurting herself more. Tonight she needed all the tricks. Maude Rogers was still as tough as they came, but the human body didn’t always bounce back in the same arc as mental acuity. Sometimes it just hurt like blazes to get up out of a chair. She knew that the next day was going to be one of those days when every joint would act up. Best to get as much done tonight as she could, for there would be no regular workday in the morning, and maybe she could sleep a little later than usual, but the most important thing to do before going home was to circle by a Target store, and get a new battery for her watch.
After leaving the store, she drove toward 220-A Sycamore Street and reflected on the evening’s tragedy, genuinely stumped. What could have happened in the house, and how did it connect with the incident on the Missouri-Pacific railway? Not a believer in coincidences, Maude began trying to put the puzzle together. There must be evil loose to come up with such dreadful circumstances of murder, if in fact someone had died within the house. A chill touched her, a feeling of someone walking over her grave, as Grace, her mother, used to say. They’d both hated the evil in people. Maude was frightened of those crazed by it, but she never turned away, no matter how much it scared her. To do so was to admit defeat.
The house opened with the master on her key ring. Crime scene units put locks on doors after they were done with printing and photographing a scene, and the detectives carried keys to allow them later entry. The smell of blood was still sharp, filling her nostrils, making her gag for a minute. No matter how many murders she worked, Maude wanted to retch each time she smelled it. She waited to become accustomed to the feeling then began another look-see of the room, using the knowledge gained from the condition of the woman’s body at the train. Blood type was important for identification, and the coroner would have that soon. If Eve Devine’s matched the blood in the house, they would follow through with DNA testing for a positive response. In the interim, it was a detective’s duty to follow the evidence and find the perpetrator.
The small house was plain, with life’s necessities and little else. In the master bedroom a chintz coverlet lay in disarray off the bed after the sheets had been stripped and the mattress photographed. A bathroom the size of a cupboard was in one corner of the room, and a walk-in closet took up the rest.
The other bedroom was an office and sewing room, with a futon on one whole wall. A small desk holding an old-fashioned computer sat next to a sewing machine with a foot treadle. No signs of a small boy were found, not even a ring around the tub in the bathroom. Eve Devine might have lived in the small house, but it was doubtful a seven-year-old boy ever spent time there. The question remained, who was the boy? Was he Eve’s son who lived somewhere else? Did he even exist?
She called the lab to see if anyone was in, hoping that early discoveries had been made by the coroner. They’d said earlier the computer had no hard drive; looked like it was old and worn out. The body at the train station had been packed in bags and taken to the morgue, awaiting the medical examiner’s autopsy. Surely, she thought, something has to have been discovered about the house at 220 Sycamore. She was frustrated without answers. How could she catch a criminal if there was no sign of a victim?
The crime lab’s main phone went to voice mail, a matter-of-fact recording directing her to call back Monday morning.
“Crap, now I wait,” she said, sitting on her porch that night with a large Gilbey’s and tonic over ice. She called dispatch to tell them she would be back on duty at 8:00 a.m. The peace of the night was interrupted by her concern for the kid. He had sounded genuinely frightened for his mother’s safety. Had she been fooled? It ate on her, the questions about the boy not making any sense.
The night came on darker, with a billion stars above consoling her with their truth: human life was less than frail. She decided to go to bed, but sleep wouldn’t come because of the questions in her mind. A couple more gin and tonics later, her head started bobbing and it was past time for sleep. To be on the safe side, she poured one last glass before bed, finishing it while sitting on the toilet. Weary and sick of bloody scenes replaying in her head, Maude finally passed out.
The next morning was all headache and hangover, but a pot of black coffee later, she decided that all the questions from the night before made her second-guess what she knew she had seen. After loading the laptop in its case, Maude headed toward the local resource center.
The library at the local community college had several books about trains—both engines and passenger cars. The place for research was in the heart of the beast, in this case Engine 99 of the Madison 6:10 route. After an hour of study, Maude decided the huge payload—the ten cars behind 99—could never have stopped in time, no matter who was piloting. The woman on the track, dead or alive, would have been bisected given the speed of the train, the location of the body, and the weight of the engine. She looked at schedules, determining that the trip to Wilk, Texas, the farthest stop, would have taken three and a half hours with normal obstacles, such as crossings, heavy or light loads of passenger traffic, and inclement weather. Station stop times would vary according to the amount of people loading and departing—twenty minutes for the larger stops, ten for the smaller ones. Freight trains on a fast track could cause a delay the engineer would be forced to make up later to stay on schedule.
The dead woman had a ticket to visit her sister at Bisbey, a small township about seventy-five miles down the line. The rehab center was on the outskirts of the populated area—the distance would have required her to take a bus or a taxi unless someone from the facility met the train. Maude had never heard of such a convenience from those businesses, so chose to ignore the possibility. That left the city bus, or a taxi. Eve Devine lived frugally; it was obvious from her house and furnishings, also, she took the train because it was less expensive, considering the price of gasoline. The bus was less money than the taxi. It was the obvious choice for a workingwoman’s budget. A quick Google search spat
out the Bisbey-Cloverdell Metro as the transportation of the area, with a phone number listed. A call to the metro office put her in touch with Rain Baxter, the weekend dispatcher.
Rain (who hastened to explain that her parents had just attended an outdoor concert in a thunderstorm when her mother went into labor) reassured Maude that the bus was available for passengers going to Bisbey Rehabilitation Center each hour of the day between 10:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m.
According to Rain, “The driver of the bus that day and every day was a man named Elijah Cromwell. The route is his, five days a week, and has been for the last twenty years or so. He will be back on schedule Monday, Lord willing.”
One more thing to do on Monday, Maude thought. The next best thing was to go back to the scene and interview the station manager/ticket seller, Henry Fonda. Making the assumption he would be there on Saturday, Maude detoured from the resource center, back to the train station, hoping to catch him before he left for lunch. She had observed over her extensive life that clerks and government employees regularly had difficulty returning to work from lunch. Maybe it was the half-day syndrome. It was best to go early. Besides, she wanted to look at the tracks again without the crime scene technicians everywhere.
“Excuse me, my name is Maude Rogers, and I hope you’re Henry Fonda.”
“What, no jokes? Most people right off ask me about my kids Peter and Jane.” The station manager wasn’t complaining, just jawing a little.
Maude nodded. “Must get kind of old,” she said understandingly.
“It does for a fact,” the man agreed, putting down his logbook and pen. “What can I do for you?”
“Just some questions about the woman on the tracks. Hard to put a name to whatever happened,” Maude said. “That fellow manning the train was mighty upset.”
“Samuel Blevins. Yes, he was pretty torn up about it. Not the first time someone has died on the tracks, but his first time to be on the engine. Shook him up real bad. Glad today’s Saturday; don’t think he would have come in to work.”
The Maude Rogers Murder Collection Page 54