by Blake Pierce
Agent Leoni was not just sent plummeting, but tumbling toward the edge of the train. Adele lurched forward, trying to snag her new partner. But she missed, and Leoni struck the top of the train. Then he began to roll, sliding along the slick metal surface.
John, though, moved fast. He was taller, lengthier than Adele. With a herculean groan, his fingers managed to snag the Italian agent’s shirt, gripping him tight. Adele heard a loud cry of pain as John’s arm extended. Leoni’s fingers scrambled against the slick surface as he yelled, trying to find purchase, but it was too late. Above, Adele glimpsed the helicopter just barely move in time to avoid the mountain at the same time as Leoni’s momentum from his fall took him tumbling over the edge of the train.
“No!” Adele screamed.
But it was too late. She watched in horror as the Italian agent fell. John, though, growled, his hand whipping over the edge of the train with Leoni, his arm extended, braced, his whole body beginning to slide. With a shout of relief, Adele realized he’d managed to keep his grip on Leoni’s shirt, despite the plummet.
Desperately, she scrambled to the edge of the metal roof and reached over, noting the handsome agent kicking his feet and trying to latch onto the slick ceiling with both his hands. She reached down and gripped at Leoni’s collar where John also had him.
“On the count of three!” she said.
They were nearly at the tunnel.
John shouted, “Three!”
And together, they both hoisted Leoni up and onto the roof again.
The Italian agent yelled as he was pulled alongside them. They whistled into the tunnel, and all of them went flat, low, with the flashing lights from inside the train reflected in the dark cavern.
Adele lay motionless, her cheek pressed against the cold metal, gasping, staring sightless in the black. She could hear the others next to her, also breathing heavily, cursing and muttering to themselves. She heard Agent Leoni in the dark offer up a small prayer of gratitude but then groan in pain. He might have managed to maintain his balance on the train, but he’d fallen fifteen feet. She wasn’t sure how he’d landed, but by the sound of things, it hadn’t been comfortable.
They all stayed low, hunkered down as the train moved through the tunnel and then burst out the other side.
And like that, they were amidst the trees and sunlit forests, and Adele could breathe a bit easier. She sat up slowly, feeling the wind brush across them, and pointed toward the hatch in the top of one of the cars.
John and Leoni both nodded. The Italian agent was still wincing, and John was massaging the crook of his elbow. Together, the three of them moved along toward the hatch, which John opened.
First Leoni, then John, and Adele, at last, dropped down into the compartment through the hatch.
Her feet on solid ground once more, the sound of the wind suddenly shut out by the insulation of the cabin walls, Adele could hear her own breathing, coming heavy. The other two gasped raggedly, and Leoni winced, stepping delicately on his ankle. John continued to massage his arm, shaking his head and muttering, “That was fun, wasn’t it?”
They stood in the compartment that looked to be mid-remodel. There was no furniture and the walls themselves were bare as if they were simply in a moving steel box. Adele stared towards a lump in the middle of the room, beneath a white sheet.
“John,” she said, hesitantly.
Renee glanced over, frowning, then spotted the source of her attention. He muttered to himself but moved forward, and with his foot nudged the edge of the fabric. A cold hand jutted out from beneath the sheet.
“I think that’s our body,” Adele said, shivering. Normally, corpses were removed before she reached the scene, or if they were still there, the coroner would be as well. But in this case, with a moving crime scene, the police hadn’t managed to reach the train yet. No access roads. Hence the stunt with the helicopter. Which meant that no one had touched the body—at least not yet. No one except the killer.
Adele glanced around the bare compartment, toward the glow of light coming through the reflective glass divider at the back. Through it, she could see faces peering into the car where they had landed.
She glanced at the Italian agent and muttered, “Are you okay?”
Leoni winced and tested his leg, pressing it against the ground and hissing through his lips. “I’ll be fine,” he muttered. “Thanks,” he added, glancing at John.
“Whatever,” Renee muttered. “You’re fine—I got your back, just try not to screw anything else up.” Then he turned promptly away from the Italian and began to march across the compartment toward the glass divider with the faces peering into the car.
“This should be interesting,” Leoni muttered to Adele, his eyes tracking the lanky Frenchman.
Adele sighed and shrugged, but then winced sympathetically. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
Leoni hesitated. “I should be fine.”
“Need a hand? You could balance on my shoulder.”
John looked back from where he’d paused in front of the divider, frowning. Agent Leoni noticed this and just said, “No, I should be fine, thank you.”
Adele nodded, watching as the Italian began to limp along after John toward the divider between the cars. She regarded the lump beneath the thin sheet for a moment, frowning in thought. And then, with a sigh, she followed after the two men. The killer was still stuck on the train with them. One of the faces staring out at them, perhaps? Someone hiding? The train was about an hour away from the nearest station. An hour to solve this. An hour before the German authorities got involved. An hour before the passengers were allowed to disperse, or escape.
***
The man with kind eyes peered over the shoulders of the other gawkers at the three new arrivals on the train. He’d heard the helicopter, glimpsed it through the window. Now, he spotted three new passengers, all of them with the physiques and intense scowls that might accompany law enforcement.
Had they really rappelled in?
He cursed to himself. He’d intended to disembark at the next station, making good his getaway in the crowd. Already, he’d planned out three routes of exit in case the authorities tried to sequester the train. But now, on the move in the wilderness? A much harder feat.
The kind-eyed man listened to the murmurs and mutterings of the passengers around him. He tried to look sufficiently surprised himself.
“Who do you think they are?” one was saying.
“I think I heard a plane earlier,” another replied.
“No, they’re maintenance. They came from the service hatch. Probably just here to take care of the body,” another said.
“That woman,” a third added. “I think I recognize her from the papers. Isn’t she the one who landed that plane on the autobahn?”
A chorus of conversation followed this final comment, accompanied by the murmurings like a bunch of clucking hens.
The kind-eyed man resisted the urge to grab one of the chickens and wring their necks right there. No, he needed to keep a low profile, to blend in. Three wolves had wandered into the chicken coop, but he was in sheep’s clothing—he’d avoided capture so far. He refused to feel afraid. Not for these new arrivals—feds by the look of them. Not for the passengers around him. Not for anyone. Fear was for the uninitiated.
He glanced through the window at the passing terrain—the train had slowed now. Could he possibly leap from the locomotive? Get a running start?
No. Not yet. Too conspicuous. It would be like sending a flare declaring his guilt. Besides, it wasn’t like they knew. How could they? He’d been careful—covered his tracks. Moved from train line to line, country to country. Careful, planned, inconspicuous.
No, they were simply ruffling feathers. Trying to spook him to scamper. But he knew better. He wouldn’t bite.
And so he stood shoulder to shoulder with the sheep in the first class, watching through the divider into the second compartment as the three new arrivals moved toward the door.
He could just faintly hear the helicopter now in the distance, disappearing. For a moment, one of the figures stopped in the compartment. An attractive woman, with shoulder-length blonde hair and a runner’s physique. Her eyes… though. Something about her eyes reminded him of himself. A fire there. A vengeance.
Those eyes settled on him for a moment, staring at him through the window of the divider, it seemed. And then she looked away, gesturing at the two men to follow as they approached the first-class car, leaving the body beneath the tarp on the cold floor behind them.
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
“Calm down,” Adele said, trying to keep her tone soothing, rather than exasperated. The first-class compartment was packed, it seemed, with nearly fifteen passengers staring over Adele’s shoulder, toward where Renee and Leoni were examining the corpse. The train itself was high-end, but nothing like the Normandie Express. Instead of old-fashioned seats and wooden trim, this train was sleek and metal with comfortable, modern seating and flashing reading lights above personal television screens.
Adele stood in the doorway, trying to shoo the civilians back into their car. “Nothing to see,” she insisted. “Please, this is an ongoing investigation.”
“And who are you?” someone demanded.
Adele sighed, flashing her credentials and then stowing her wallet. “DGSI,” she said. “I’m working with Interpol and with the cooperation of the BKA. Everything is going to be fine.”
“Told you they weren’t bloody maintenance,” someone muttered.
“How should I know? They came through the ceiling,” another retorted.
Adele massaged the bridge of her nose but then looked up again, alert, glancing around. No time for tiredness. No time for an adrenaline crash. Someone on this train was a serial killer. Someone here? Watching her?
Her eyes landed on a woman in an expensive sweater with a scarf made of what looked like mink. She had perfectly manicured nails and a nose seemingly—and likely—sculpted by surgeons. The woman stared at Adele, whispering to a handsome man next to her beneath her breath. Another man, thickset with a quivering jaw, was talking loudly, trying to be heard over the others. “Why is BKA involved?” he was saying. “She had a heart attack, didn’t she? That’s what you said, Dr. Lawrence.” He glanced toward another woman, who was leaning against one of the cool windows displaying the slowly moving terrain.
The woman shook her head quickly and said, “It has the markers of it. But that’s a cursory observation. I’m a general practitioner besides, it isn’t like—”
“Well?” said the young woman with the mink scarf. “Why are you here?”
Adele tried to keep track of all of it, but the flood of discussion was beginning to give her a headache. She gritted her teeth and said, “Please, back to your seats, or recreations. No one should be within ten feet of this door, understand?”
Everyone stared blankly at her, eyes blinking like a bunch of owls. “I said get back!” Adele snapped.
Reluctantly some of the passengers complied, but the rest of them continued to gawk. Adele glanced helplessly over her shoulder. John, noting her expression, stepped away from the body, his glare out in full force. The tall, scar-faced agent stepped into the first-class compartment and in a booming voice he said, “Get the hell back before I make you, dammit! We might be on German soil, but unless you want a French ass kicking start moving!”
Half the passengers, at least, likely didn’t understand the Frenchman’s tirade in his native tongue, but his tone communicated more than enough, and the rest of the passengers quickly scarpered, following Adele’s directive and leaving their gawking posts by the glass divider.
Adele sighed and gave a nod of gratitude toward John, before turning and rejoining him in the bare, mid-remodel train car.
She shut the divider behind her, sliding it.
For now, at least, it didn’t seem as if so many eyes were fixed on her or the corpse.
Leoni was still wincing where he stood on his injured ankle. John was glowering at everything unfortunate enough to acquire his gaze and Adele passed a hand through her hair, stepping off to the side so the passengers couldn’t view her from within the other compartment.
“Well?” she said, her voice low, quiet in the still car. “What now?”
John shrugged at her, still scowling. “I got us on the train. You’re the one who had the great idea to get us here before the station. It’s your show, Adele.”
Leoni didn’t comment, but he looked at her as well, an expectant quality to his gaze. She frowned, nodding to herself. For a moment, as she stood over the body draped in the thin white fabric, she felt a familiar chill. The same sense she’d had back in Foucault’s office when he’d first introduced the case…
Something was off… something horrible.
But why was she feeling it now? She shook her head and glanced from John to Leoni, trying to catch her bearings. She said, “All right, I think we split up. We have about an hour before the train reaches the nearest station. Then, no telling what German authorities will do. I don’t think most governments are in the habit of sequestering a hundred citizens in order to catch a possible killer. We need to get this done before the culprit has a chance to slip away, or get his alibi straight.”
“What do you propose?” Leoni said, wincing as he did and favoring his right ankle.
Adele nodded determinedly, shoving aside the sense of foreboding rising in her gut. “We search the train front to back. We question everyone. Hard. John, you start with the sleeper cars, Leoni, you go to the last compartment.”
“Hang on,” John interjected. “I want the back.”
Adele frowned. “What does it matter?”
John shrugged. “I don’t need a reason. Limpy here can have the sleeper cars.”
Adele resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “All right, Leoni, you can take the sleeper cars, John, you get the back. Sound good?”
“Great. And where are you going? Let me guess, with Casanova here.”
Adele glared at John for a moment, but he shrugged off the comment with a snort and glanced toward the body again. Adele said, “I’ll be interviewing first class and see, once they’ve calmed down a bit, if they’ve seen anything untoward.”
“Big word that,” John said. “Untoward. Think our Italian friend needs some help with the French?”
Leoni replied in flawless French, “I understand. Let’s stop dawdling. We’re running out of time.”
Adele gave a quick nod of agreement and then turned, splitting off toward first class and allowing John and Leoni to head toward the back compartment of the train in the direction of the sleeper cars and the caboose.
***
Adele sat across from the beautiful young woman in the mink scarf and her arm-candy boyfriend. Both of them kept shooting glances at each other as if sharing an inside joke as Adele settled before them, across the table divider. Every so often the woman’s eyebrows would twitch and the man would snort as if she’d told a funny joke. Occasionally, she caught them glancing at her shoes, or at the somewhat wrinkled sleeves of her suit.
Adele frowned after this second eyebrow tilt, followed by not-so-hushed giggling.
“All right,” she said, injecting a bit of Renee into her voice. That quieted them both and they stared like deer in headlights. “Tell me again, what happened?”
“Oh, it was horrible,” the woman in the scarf said; she’d given her name as Bella. “Well,” she said, drawling, “Richard and I were quite close to Margaret. Though she was a frightful gossip, mind you.”
Richard, the handsome hunk, nodded along, smiling benignly.
“I’m really quite upset by the whole ordeal—a death on the train. And you’re here,” Bella continued. “Which means…” she raised her eyebrows and leaned in a bit, her mink scarf shifting. “Murder?”
“I can’t comment on an ongoing investigation,” said Adele, testily. She leaned back in the stitched leather padding of the rear-facing s
eat. A slow blur of greens and browns passed by outside her window as the train continued to trundle along, heading in the direction of the nearest station where the authorities would be waiting.
“Well… Margaret was our friend. So if anything did happen to here, I feel like I have a right to know!”
“I can’t comment on an ongoing investigation.”
“Oh, bother,” snapped Bella. “What good are you, then?” She slumped back, crossing her arms and jutting her lips in a pout. Seeing this, Richard leaned in and kissed her cheek, whispering in her ear, and Bella glanced toward Adele’s ears and gave a quick smirk.
“All right,” Adele said, clearing her throat. “Maybe I wasn’t clear. I’m not here to talk to you. I need you to talk to me. What happened last you saw Margaret?”
Bella, though, pretended like she hadn’t heard, staring petulantly out the window. Richard, the quieter of the two, but seeming the more intelligent—or at least, more aware of impending danger—saw the lowering of Adele’s brow and the forming of her fist and quickly said, “Not much, she just left to go powder her nose, if you know what I mean.”
Bella, as if unable to avoid this line of speech, added, “We think she was going to get a drink. She was a frightful drinker, wasn’t she, Richard?”
“Quite so.”
“So she went to get a drink, or to the bathroom?”
“She went through there,” Richard said, waving a hand airily toward the compartment where the body still lay. “We heard a shout and got up to go check.”
“Poor Margaret,” Bella said slowly. “Imagine how her parents will react when they hear the news. Killed on a train—so young. Probably drunk, I’d guess. And I’m usually right about those sorts of things, aren’t I, Richard?”
“Yes, dear, yes, very.”
“The doctor on board didn’t mention any scent of alcohol,” Adele continued. “Did you see anything else? Anything that might matter?”
Margaret and Richard shared a look, glanced back at her, and both shrugged. They began to nuzzle again, with Adele still across from them, and Adele resisted the urge to grab a nearby cup of ice from one of the server’s trolleys and toss it in their direction. Instead, she reached out, snagged a water bottle, and tipped it back.