ONCE BOUND

by Blake Pierce

  The arc neatly intersected with both of the other towns—Barnwell and Caruthers.

  Riley almost gasped aloud.

  “A semicircle,” she said.

  “That’s right. The distances between the towns aren’t the same, and they don’t seem to have anything in common except that trains from Chicago run through them. But all three are almost exactly the same distance from Chicago.”

  Riley’s pulse started to quicken. This certainly seemed like more than coincidence.

  “Show me where the arc goes from there,” she said.

  Eggers kept tracing—and sure enough, the pencil came to a town with a D at the beginning of its name.

  Eggers pointed at the spot and said, “This is Dermott, Wisconsin. I know the place from my days on the job. Like the other towns, it’s got a railroad running through it—with trains from Chicago.”

  Riley’s interest was mounting by the second.

  It was definitely an interesting theory—or at least the beginning of one.

  Eggers shrugged sadly.

  “Maybe this is nothing,” he said. “This old brain of mine isn’t what it used to be. It’s terrible how the body slows down—but it’s worse that I just can’t think things through as fast as I used to. And now …”

  His voice faded off, but Riley knew what he was leaving unsaid.

  Another woman has been killed.

  Eggers said, “Maybe everyone’s right about me. Maybe I should take up fishing or something.”

  Don’t even think about it, Riley wanted to say.

  Instead she said, “Come on, let’s share this theory with the team.”

  Just as Riley and Eggers got up from the bench, the FBI field chief Proctor Dillard came walking down the hall, accompanied by Jenn and Bill and a couple of Dillard’s agents.

  “Where are all of you headed off to?” Riley asked.

  “Home,” Dillard said. “Or at least to a motel. Cullen says we’ve cracked the case and we’ve got our guy, and he’s got no need of FBI help now. So we’re through here—all of us. You too, I guess.”

  Riley started to protest, but then fell silent. The local FBI was clearly in no mood to consider other possibilities, and she didn’t feel that she had enough information to block their exit.

  She just watched as Dillard and his agents strode past her and headed out of the building.

  Riley turned and hurried over to Jenn and Bill.

  “We’re not through yet,” she announced.

  They both regarded her with surprise.

  “This man has a theory,” she told them, indicating Eggers. “And I think it’s a good one.”

  Jenn and Bill looked amazed.

  Jenn said, “What are you talking about? Pollitt seems as suspicious as hell to me.”

  Riley didn’t reply. She silently herded her colleagues and Eggers over to the interrogation room. Cullen was standing outside and looking into the room through a one-way mirror. The lawyer was still sitting in there talking to Pollitt.

  Riley said sharply to Cullen, “I want a word with you.”

  Cullen looked at her with surprise.

  Riley said, “Mr. Eggers here has got a theory.”

  Cullen smirked and looked at Eggers.

  “Have you now, Grandpa? Well, congratulations. But you’re a little late. We’ve got our guy.”

  Cullen looked at Riley again and said, “I was talking with your guys and Dillard just now, and from what they told me, this is an open-and-shut case. Not only does Timothy Pollitt have a record for wife beating, he complete disappears every summer. No one has any idea where he goes. The lawyer hasn’t let us talk to him yet, but he will soon, and you can be sure that this creep hasn’t got any credible alibis for any of the murders.”

  He chuckled a little and said, “Add to that the fact that he ran away from Agent Paige here and refused to identify himself—well, could he possibly act more guilty? That’s because he is guilty. It’s just a matter of tying up loose ends.”

  He looked through the window again.

  “I’ve given the bastard enough time with the lawyer. I’m going in there right now and tell him he’s under arrest. And I expect the three of you to head back to Quantico ASAP. I wish I could say it’s been a pleasure, but the truth is …”

  He darted a nasty look at Jenn.

  “All three of you have been a pain in the ass.”

  Without another word, Cullen opened the door and walked into the interrogation room.

  Riley stood staring into the room as Cullen confronted Pollitt and the lawyer.

  She was shocked at how brazenly Cullen was displaying his resentment over the bloody nose he’d gotten from Jenn. But what could Riley do about that now?

  Orders are orders, she told herself.

  After all, she and her colleagues came from Quantico at Cullen’s request. And the head railway cop was no longer the least bit pleased with Riley or her team. Of course, she wasn’t pleased with him either. And this was now an official FBI case too.

  But Riley’s brain was crowded with thoughts and ideas. For the first time since she’d started working on this case, she was getting a really powerful gut feeling.

  We can’t quit now, she thought. This monster is still out there and he isn’t finished yet.

  Her hand wasn’t throbbing as badly now—and anyway, she didn’t give a damn about the pain anymore. She tossed the bag of ice into a nearby trash bin.

  Then she said to Bill, Jenn, and Eggers, “Come on. Let’s go find a place where we can sit down and talk.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

  In a car borrowed from the local cops, Riley drove Bill, Jenn, and Mason Eggers from the Caruthers police station to a well-lighted little restaurant. She was eager to have Eggers show his theory to her two most trusted colleagues.

  She knew it was going to be tough to sell, because she wasn’t completely convinced about it herself. After all, they had good reason to suspect that Timothy Pollitt was the killer.

  Besides, Riley was sure that Jenn felt especially eager to go home and forget she’d ever met Bull Cullen. For that matter, Riley felt the same way, especially about the railroad cop.

  But her instincts kept telling her …

  We’re not through here yet.

  While they waited for their sandwiches, Eggers spread his paper map out on the table. Then he again went through his quaintly retro demonstration with a compass. Just as he had for Riley, he showed how the three alphabetically ordered towns all fell on a precise semicircle with its center in Chicago.

  He also showed them that a fourth town beginning with the letter D lay in the same path—Dermott, Wisconsin.

  Riley could see that Jenn and Bill were impressed by Eggers’s calculations.

  She also sensed that they were far from sold on the importance of his ideas.

  Their meals arrived, and Eggers folded up his map. He tucked the map and compass back into his briefcase, but he didn’t give up on his theory even as they ate.

  He said, “I know the railroads through this region like the back of my hand. I can remember a precise spot outside of Dermott where I think he’d strike next. I wish I could show it to you …”

  Riley couldn’t tell whether or not Jenn was actually getting interested, but the younger agent finally got out her laptop computer and started to run a search. In a few moments, she’d brought up a satellite image of the town of Dermott, with a clear photographic view of the railroad tracks running through it.

  She showed it to Eggers, and he gaped in astonishment.

  I guess he didn’t know you could do this with computers, Riley thought.

  The old guy really was a relic of bygone days.

  He pointed to a spot on the image that was just outside of town.

  “Right there,” he said. “Can you make that bigger?”

  Jenn zoomed in on the area.

  “There it is!” Eggers said, sounding excited. “See, right there! A curve—just like the curves where
the other victims were killed. The killer chooses curves so the engineer can’t see the victims in time to stop. That’s the spot he would choose. I’m just sure of it.”

  Regardless of how Bill and Jenn might be feeling, Riley found herself more intrigued. Maybe picking Eggers’s brain could actually point them in the right direction..

  She asked, “How do you think he carries out these murders—in terms of time, I mean?”

  Eggers paused and wrinkled his brow in thought.

  He said, “Correct me if I’m wrong—but weren’t all three victims on passenger trains shortly before they were abducted and killed?”

  “That’s right,” Bill said. “Trains from Chicago, as a matter of fact. We think he drugged and abducted them soon after they got off the trains. Then he transported them to the murder sites and bound them to the tracks, where they were killed by freight trains.”

  “That’s interesting,” Eggers said. “If he had a particular victim in mind and knew she was on a passenger train, and he knew where she was going to get off …”

  Riley put in, “Then he’d know where the intended victim was going to be at a certain time.”

  Eggers nodded enthusiastically. “And it also means,” he said, “that our perp must have known when the next freight train was coming through. But the thing is, freight trains aren’t like passenger trains. They don’t follow any strict schedule. He must have had a really good knowledge of the general freight train traffic through those areas. Still, his timing had to be awfully precise …”

  Eggers drummed his fingers on the table for a moment.

  Then he said, “My guess is he’s got a scanner—a radio that monitors railroad frequencies. He listens in on conversations between dispatchers and train crews. By listening during the course of a day, he would be able know when to expect an oncoming freight train in a particular spot. He’d be able to determine the time just about exactly.”

  Riley was fascinated. And despite their doubts, she sensed that the theory was beginning to fascinate Bill and Jenn as well.

  “We should tell Cullen about this,” Bill said. “He can use this kind of information to investigate Timothy Pollitt.”

  Riley’s patience was starting to wane.

  “If Pollitt is the killer, Bill,” she said. “And that’s not an ‘if’ I’m comfortable with, are you?”

  Jenn said, “Pollitt sure seems guilty to me.” She hesitated, then added, “Guilty of something, at least.”

  “Right,” Riley said. “He may be guilty of a lot of things. But we’re still not sure that he’s the killer we’ve been looking for. And if he’s not, we’re wasting valuable time. If our serial is still out there, he seems to be speeding up his game. We could lose another life while we’re all waiting to make sure it’s Pollitt.”

  A silence fell over the table.

  Bill finally said, “What do you want us to do, Riley? We’re officially off the case. And Cullen’s in no mood at all to put us back on it. The whole thing is out of our hands.”

  “We’ve got to do something,” Riley muttered bitterly.

  Bill shook his head and said, “Well, it’s late, and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it right now. Let’s all get a good night’s sleep and talk about all this in the morning.”

  Riley hated to admit it, but Bill was making good sense. It had been a hell of a long and frantic day, interrupted by a lot of travel. First there had been a two-hour morning drive to Allardt. followed by interviews with Fern Bruder’s family and a war veteran, and then Cullen had summoned them to a meeting in Chicago, where they met with Reese Fisher’s lover before checking into a Chicago hotel where …

  Riley winced with guilt as she remembered April’s words to her over the phone.

  “Oh, Mom. Please don’t tell me you forgot!”

  Jilly, Riley thought. I forgot her birthday.

  Jilly had every reason to be angry, and Riley still hadn’t made peace with her.

  And at the moment, she had no idea when or how she might be able to do that. It was too late to make a phone call to see if Jilly would talk to her now. Tomorrow was a school day and the girls should be in bed.

  She felt a wave of exhaustion and despair.

  She realized that she was in no frame of mind to think rationally about the case—or about anything else, for that matter.

  “OK,” she said to Bill and Jenn. “Let’s go find a place to stay the night.”

  Riley paid the bill for their meals, and Bill asked the server for directions to the nearest motel. When they arrived there, Riley saw familiar official vehicles parked outside some of the rooms. It looked like Cullen and his team had checked into this same motel, and so had Dillard and his Chicago FBI agents.

  Probably all asleep by now, Riley thought.

  No doubt about it—she needed a good night’s sleep herself.

  *

  Riley was grappling with the minute hand of a gigantic clock.

  She felt it pushing against her, inching around the dial as the massive machinery cranked away in deep-voiced clicks.

  I’ve got to stop it, she thought.

  She pushed against the enormous minute hand with all her weight and strength, her shoulder hard against it. But the hand was much heavier than she was, and the machinery was vastly more powerful. To make matters worse, the effort was causing her hand to hurt again.

  She heard a familiar voice from somewhere nearby.

  “What do you think you’re doing, girl?”

  It was her father’s voice.

  “Are you trying to stop time dead in its tracks?” he asked with a grim laugh.

  Yes, that’s exactly what I’m trying to do, Riley thought.

  But she didn’t say so aloud.

  She couldn’t spare the energy—not with such a huge task at hand.

  Now she heard another sound. It was the roar of an approaching locomotive. She knew that somewhere nearby a woman was tied to train tracks, and the train was coming nearer by the second.

  She knew that she couldn’t stop a locomotive.

  And that was why she had to stop time.

  But click by click by click, the minute hand kept pushing its way along.

  Worse, she could hear the machinery speeding up.

  The hand was moving faster.

  But how was that even possible?

  She finally let out a wail of despair.

  “It’s cheating! Time is cheating!”

  She heard her father chuckle again.

  “Is that any surprise, girl? Time cheats and lies and swindles constantly, and it always screws you in the end. There’s only one thing in the world that’s bigger and stronger and more damned crooked and mendacious than time. I think you know what it is.”

  Evil, Riley thought.

  That’s what the locomotive really was.

  Pure, unstoppable evil.

  “What can I do?” Riley called out to her father.

  He repeated words that she’d heard him say before.

  “Your job. Do your goddamn job. Just don’t get any ideas that you’ll do any good.”

  Riley’s eyes snapped open.

  Everything was quiet. It took her a moment to realize that no locomotive was bearing down on a helpless victim.

  At least not here and now. She was in her dark motel room.

  There was a clock, however.

  She turned to look at the lighted digital clock on the bed stand. It was 2:13 in the morning.

  She lay there thinking.

  Time is cheating! No way to stop it.

  She remembered what Bill had said earlier in the restaurant.

  “Let’s all get a good night’s sleep …”

  But Bill had been wrong. Now was no time to sleep.

  Like the clock hand in her dream, the killer was moving faster and faster.

  What would stop him from killing again tomorrow?

  Nothing, Riley realized. Nothing except us.

  She felt sure that the time to
act was now.

  Right now!

  We’ve got a job to do.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Riley switched on a light and sat up in bed. She was wide awake now.

  She could hear no sounds of activity in the motel. Could she be the only one not sleeping? The urgency of the nightmare was still with her, and she knew she would probably have to wake up the other members of her team.

  First, she needed to check out certain information.

  She picked up her cell phone, went online, and searched for the coming day’s passenger train schedules between Chicago and Dermott, Wisconsin. She found only one inbound train from Chicago. It was scheduled to arrive in Dermott at 12:30 in the afternoon. It was scheduled to depart again at 1 o’clock.

  Less than ten hours from now, Riley realized. That train would arrive in a different town in a different state. Was the next victim going to be on it?

  She heard an echo from the dream in her mind. “It’s cheating! Time is cheating!”

  She couldn’t stop time. She needed to get ahead of it.

  Riley knew that she needed more details. She needed help.

  She called the motel desk and asked to be connected to Mason Eggers’s room. A moment later, Eggers answered the phone.

  “I’m sorry about the hour,” Riley said.

  “Don’t worry,” Eggers said, not sounding the least bit groggy. “I wasn’t able to sleep myself. I’ve been worrying about when the killer might strike in Dermott.”

  “Me too,” Riley said.

  She told him what she’d just found out about the passenger train.

  “That’s right,” he said. “That’s the one that’s worrying me.”

  She asked, “Do you think somebody on that train will be in danger?”

  “That depends on when the next freight train will pass through there. Like I said earlier, freight trains don’t follow a strict schedule, but …”

  Riley waited for him to finish his thought.

  “I’ve got a dispatcher friend, Hank Deever, who’s on night duty right now. He’s got a lot of information at his fingertips. He might be able to give me some idea. I’ll give him a call.”