Dead Stop

by Barbara Nickless

  She’d greeted us pleasantly when we first walked into her business. But as soon as we mentioned Raya Quinn’s name, her eyes had gone round and wide, her hands had shot out to grip the counter, and she’d stared down at the cash register as if gathering herself. When her head came back up, a faint line of sweat glowed along her upper lip, and a look of worry had crept into her eyes beneath the calm efficiency. She asked for our credentials and verified them with phone calls before she finally waved us to the back of the store where she was working.

  “That was almost thirty years ago,” she said. She set down the knife and snapped on latex gloves from a box on a nearby workbench. “How can Raya’s death be relevant to anything now?”

  “It’s just background for another case,” Mac said soothingly.

  Jill’s eyes swept over my uniform. “Is it about the railroads?”

  “I’m afraid we can’t discuss it.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Mac and I waited.

  Jill sighed. “Look. There was a time when I felt intimidated by people like you. But not anymore. So if this is just some cover-your-ass maneuver by the railroads and the Feds and”—she sucked in air—“you somehow think Raya’s death can help you with that, then both of you turn around right now and skedaddle your asses out of here.”

  She sounded so distressed I had to stifle the urge to hug her. “It’s nothing like that.”

  Jill picked up the knife again. It was small, but her hand trembled as if even that slight weight was too much at the moment. “What is it like, then?”

  “I’m sorry that we aren’t at liberty to discuss our case,” Mac said. “But we do need your help. And”—her eyes met mine across the table—“it might help Raya, too.”

  Tears shone unexpectedly in Jill’s eyes. She swiped them away with her forearm, leaving a wet trail on her skin. “What do you know about Raya?”

  “Not enough,” I said gently. “That’s why we’re here.”

  She looked at us both through narrowed eyes, as if deciding whether we measured up to some invisible standard. But then she shook her head. We hadn’t passed. “I told you. I’ve got nothing to say. Maybe you should talk to the sheriff’s deputy who handled it. Rick Wolanski.”

  “We already did. He told us Raya’s death was ruled an accident.” I decided to try and goad her into defending her friend, to get her angry enough to speak out. “But he also told us that it was most likely suicide.”

  It worked. Jill seemed to regain her energy. She inserted the knife at the base of the bobcat’s tail and began to slice along its spine. I watched, fascinated and horrified. I wasn’t good at dead bodies anymore, whatever the species.

  “That is such typical male bullcrap,” she said. “A woman dies and everyone blames her.”

  “Her car was parked on the tracks,” I pointed out.

  Jill said nothing.

  “And she’d been drinking,” Mac added.

  Jill’s sawing grew more vicious. “So there you go. Step one in the blame game. Raya didn’t drink. Not ever. She saw what drugs did to her mom. She saw all the booze and drugs out in LA. She swore she’d never be dependent on anything other than herself.”

  “You’re saying the coroner falsified his report?” Mac asked.

  A muscle jumped in Jill’s cheek. “Is that why you’re here, to bring up all that horrible stuff again? And somehow that’s supposed to help Raya?”

  “Is there something you know that we should know?” I asked.

  The tears returned, spilling over this time. Angrily, she wiped her face against her shoulder. “What I know is that Raya—”

  She stopped speaking but kept sawing away at the bobcat. I got the sense there was a battle going on, and it wasn’t the one between the human and the dead predator.

  “That Raya wouldn’t have killed herself?” Mac asked softly.

  But Jill shook her head. “I’ve got nothing to say.”

  Instinctively, my hand went into my pocket where I’d slid the picture of Lucy. I rubbed my thumb along the paper.

  “Mrs. Martin,” I said, “there’s another life at stake.”

  “No kidding. Mine.”

  “What?”

  In silence, Jill finished the incision along the cat’s spine, then set down the knife and, with her gloved hands, gripped the skin on one side and began pulling on it. The skin separated reluctantly from the flesh underneath. Like peeling a particularly stubborn orange.

  I swallowed and tasted Iraqi sand at the back of my throat. Stay, I told myself.

  Mac moved around so she had a better view of the bobcat. I gladly stepped back.

  “My father did some taxidermy,” Mac said.

  “Okay,” Jill said with determined disinterest. She began working the skin down along the hips, like she was trying to help a woman shimmy out of pants two sizes too small.

  “He tried to teach me,” Mac went on. “But I was hopeless. I was a good hunter but a terrible taxidermist.”

  “It’s more fun as a hobby than a business,” Jill said, engaging reluctantly. “My damn arthritis. There’s gotta be a better way to skin a cat. If you’ll pardon the pun.”

  “How did you get into it?”

  Mac’s voice was intimate, coaxing. This was a side of her I hadn’t seen.

  Jill’s eyes darted to Mac before she returned to her work. “My husband. He died in a car crash three summers ago. I was still with the railroad but decided to retire early and put everything into the business. This place mattered so much to him, you know? I couldn’t let it go. But it was a bad decision. I’ve been working my ass off ever since, trying to help my daughter with her kids and keep the bank from taking my house.” She gestured with her chin. “Since you know what they are, hand me that tail stripper. If I’d stayed with SFCO, I’d be a few short years from enjoying my pension.”

  Mac picked up something that looked like a fat pair of pliers and passed them over. “My dad used to say, ‘You pays your money and you takes your chances. We never know how things will turn out.’”

  “And my mom used to say, ‘You made your bed, now sleep in it.’”

  Mac’s voice stayed soft as she looked around the room. “Seems to me you and your husband built something good here.”

  Jill’s hands went still and she followed Mac’s gaze. She puffed out a breath. “Yeah? Maybe.”

  Mac moved in for the kill. “It sounds like you know something, Mrs. Martin. That maybe there was more to Raya’s death than a tragic accident or suicide. Special Agent Parnell and I aren’t about defending the railroads. We’re about finding the truth. This could be your chance to let the world know what happened.”

  Jill frowned. “You think I stayed quiet all this time because that’s what I wanted?”

  “Did someone threaten you?” Mac asked.

  “Tell me why I should trust you.” She glared at me. “You work for the railroad. I know who your boss is.”

  “I’m a cop, Jill. And a Marine. The only thing I’m interested in finding and protecting is the truth.”

  “And damn the consequences?”

  She went back to work on the tail. The raw flesh glistened under the bright work lights. Shadows jumped and shifted on either side of the cat, creating an eerie sense of motion. I angled my head away and found myself looking into the black eyes of a badger standing on a shelf. He looked sad about the entire mess. I closed my eyes, but then all I saw was the video of Samantha staring into the TIR in the seconds before she died. And Lucy on the swing, smiling.

  I opened my eyes. “Mrs. Martin—”

  Jill said, “She called me that night, Raya did. Before she left work. She was scared.”

  “Of what?” Mac asked. “What was she afraid of?”

  “I’ve spent twenty-eight years being scared, too. And I’ll tell you something about fear. It’ll wear at you until it takes you down to nothing.”

  The bobcat’s naked tail popped free.

  “That’s excellent work,” Mac sai
d.

  I locked sympathetic eyes with the badger.

  Jill set the pliers down on the bloody tabletop. She said, “I’m the reason Raya died.”

  At Jill’s request and to my relief, we relocated to a family restaurant three doors down. Food, she said, would help calm her nerves. The hostess seated us in a corner, far from the restaurant’s three other customers. A waitress brought Jill a bowl of green chili, a side of corn bread, and a soda. For Mac, she returned with a grilled cheese sandwich and iced tea, while I had black coffee and a ham sandwich. After asking my permission, the waitress also brought Clyde a small piece of steak, winning his immediate and undying devotion. Men and dogs—it’s all about the food.

  Jill pushed her chili around in the bowl for a time, took a single bite, then set the bowl aside. She drew in a deep breath. “I’ve sat on this story for almost thirty years. Now I have no idea where to start.”

  “Wherever feels right to you,” Mac said.

  Jill rubbed her upper arms as if she were cold. Her face grew pensive and her eyes went far away; whatever she was seeing wasn’t in the restaurant with us.

  “Raya and I were friends for most of our lives,” she said. “She stayed at my house a lot when we were kids. Her home life was horrible. Her dad gone, her mom crazy as a loon. In some ways, I blame Raya’s mom for what happened, because Esta was never anything like a mom should be. Raya had to grow up too fast.”

  Mac said, “How so?”

  Jill picked up a piece of corn bread and shredded it. “Esta depended on Raya when it should have been the other way around. It was always like that. Raya had a lemonade stand when she was real little, then a paper route. In junior high she worked summers in the sugar beet fields. Most of that time, Esta was home lying on the couch, high out of her mind. And when she wasn’t high she was . . . scary. There’s no other word for it. As soon as Raya turned sixteen, she got a real job, working for SFCO. She got me a job there, too, but for me, it was just play money. Then after graduation, she went to Hollywood. We all hoped the next time we saw her, she’d be famous.”

  Mac nodded sympathetically. “What did she do at SFCO?”

  “Before she went to LA, it was just clerical. Answering phones, typing memos, filing. When she came back, she worked payroll.”

  “What about you?”

  Jill’s eyes were dark. “I’ll get to that.”

  Mac nodded. “Okay. Go on.”

  “When Raya came home from LA, she was a lot quieter. It’s always hard, right, giving up your dream? But Raya wasn’t one to cry over spilled milk. She moved on to the next dream pretty fast.” Jill’s smile was sad. “Raya always had a plan. And this was one of her crazier ones.”

  “What was that?”

  “She said she wasn’t ever going to be poor again and she decided the best way to make sure she always had enough money was to marry it. Or, if that didn’t work, to sleep with it. Raya wanted a sugar daddy.”

  Mac’s eyes met mine. “Did she have someone in mind?”

  Jill nodded. “A man from Denver she’d known before she left for LA. He was kind of her only choice. I mean, the options were pretty limited, right? Not a lot of rich men in Adams and Weld Counties, especially back then. For sure, there were plenty of men falling over Raya. One creep we used to call Devil Eye—he sent her love notes all the time. But the only men we knew with money were the ones who worked high-level positions at the railroad.”

  “Someone like Alfred Tate?” Mac asked.

  Jill laughed. The sound was girlish and almost merry. As if she and Raya had giggled about the idea in her bedroom a lifetime ago. “Alfred Tate was ug-ly. No, she wanted this man she’d met at a railroad conference in Denver when we were still in high school. She was only seventeen, but she begged to be allowed to go, and Tate finally agreed. Her job was to take minutes at the meetings. This guy was there. He was handsome, worldly. And rich. They flirted at the conference, he took her to dinner, and I think—I think there was more to it than that. Their relationship was one of the few things Raya never talked about. When she told him she was going to Hollywood to be an actress, he laughed and told her to look him up when she came home. So she did. He was still rich and still handsome and he found her beautiful and interesting. So that was that. She decided she was going to make Hiram Davenport fall in love with her.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Love is like falling off a cliff. It’s good for a moment, but it never ends well.

  —Sydney Parnell. Personal journal.

  The waitress came by with more coffee. At my feet, Clyde snored. Distantly, thunder bumped, and he lifted his head before resettling. Another storm on the way. The world was getting water-logged.

  “You’re saying Hiram Davenport and Raya were lovers?” I dumped sugar in my mug. “Wasn’t he married then?”

  “That was the sugar-daddy part,” Jill answered. “Raya claimed she didn’t want to marry someone that old, anyway. So at first, I thought it was just a game. A seduction, like in a movie. She’d get a few trinkets, get taken care of for a few months or years, then move on to the next guy. But over time I realized Raya was serious about Hiram, even if she pretended otherwise. It wasn’t the money. She actually loved him. She wanted him to leave his wife.”

  “The naïveté of the young,” Mac said.

  Jill nodded miserably.

  I frowned. “I read suggestions in the press that Hiram’s wasn’t a happy marriage. But his wife was part of the key to his fortune. She was heir to the lion’s share of the railroad. What made Raya think she could get Hiram to leave her?”

  “That’s where I came in,” Jill said in a voice so soft I had to lean forward to hear her. “She had a plan.”

  Raya’s scheme to get Hiram to fall in love with her happened while Hiram was making his final push to take over T&W, Jill explained. Once Hiram bought the short line in and made it part of DPC, his success there would be unquestioned. He would no longer need his wife.

  “So Raya and I decided if we could help Hiram win that case, he’d realize how much Raya loved him and that she was even more valuable to him than his wife.”

  “How did you plan to do that?” Mac asked.

  I pushed aside my empty coffee cup as understanding dawned. “You knew Alfred Tate wasn’t reporting the crossing accidents.”

  “That’s right. But there was more. Alfred had a general policy for management: don’t spend money maintaining crossings. If there was an accident, employees were to go in after the fact and cover up anything that made the railroad liable. I worked in Engineering, in the signal department, and it was my job to type up memos ordering employees to cut back overgrown vegetation or fix broken crossing equipment. But the memos went out after an accident occurred.”

  Mac and I swapped glances. We were both humming like piano wires now. I thought about all those reports that had never been filed. Reports that might have saved lives if the FRA had ever received them. Reports that would have forced Alfred Tate to maintain the crossings.

  Six lives at Deadman’s Crossing. God only knew how many elsewhere.

  The waitress came by with a coffee refill. After she left, I said, “So you started collecting this evidence for Raya to give to Hiram?”

  “That’s right. I told Raya about it, asking her what I should do. It was wrong to know all this and do nothing. But if I went to a journalist with the evidence, I’d lose my job. And I couldn’t afford to. My husband had gotten laid off, and I was pregnant with our first child.”

  “You figured if Hiram knew about the fraud, he’d use that information to blackmail Tate into agreeing to the merger.”

  “That’s right. Hiram had already promised he wouldn’t lay off any employees if he took over. So I’d have my job, the crossings would get fixed, and—”

  “And Raya would have her man,” Mac finished.

  “But it didn’t go according to plan,” I said.

  Outside, drops of rain spattered the glass, and a long, low roll of thunder ra
ttled the windows. Clyde looked up at me. I dropped a hand to his head.

  Jill said, “Hiram was thrilled with what Raya provided him to use against Alfred. He was building his case. But there was one key piece of information he wanted that I hadn’t been able to get. A stupid list of serial numbers for the parts in the lights at Deadman’s Crossing.”

  “Why was the parts list important?” Mac asked.

  Jill began weeping, a silent, painful sobbing that shook her shoulders. Mac pulled napkins from the dispenser on the table and pressed them into her hands. Jill gave a short, harsh cry and covered her face.

  “It’s all right,” Mac said. “We’ll get to the parts list. Why don’t you tell us about that night? The night Raya died. Tell us what happened.”

  After a few minutes, Jill lowered her hands. Her eyes were wet and red, the lids puffy.

  “It was supposed to be a girls’ night out. We’d been planning to meet up at a bar in Denver named the Saddle Up. Five of us, all friends from high school. It was a Monday, which was ladies’ night at the Saddle Up. We were looking to put aside our troubles for a few hours.

  “My plan was to drive down with two of the women, Carol Mackey and Ellen Yager. I was the designated driver since I was pregnant and couldn’t drink. Raya and our other friend, Irene Nathan, were going to meet us there. We were planning a late night because Raya had to work and Irene had to wait for a babysitter. Since the band wouldn’t start playing until ten, that was fine with us.”

  We’d ordered pie and more coffee as a way to help Jill settle in. Outside, the storm had caught up and it was black as pitch, the rain a sharp drumming on the sidewalks and street. The windows in the restaurant were filmed with mist, the dining room empty. In the kitchen, a Spanish-language radio station played mariachi music. The thunder had bowled past, and Clyde had put his head down again, dozing.

  “Raya was working late to make up for a doctor’s appointment?” Mac asked. “We learned that much from Wolanski.”

  Jill sniffed. “Well, Wolanski should have dug a little deeper. The appointment was fake. Raya just used it as an excuse to work late that night. At night, the whole office would be pretty much shut down. Not the operators, of course, but the admin people. The office would be almost empty. She figured that would be her chance to steal that parts list for Hiram.”