“You know, you’re not too shabby,” Cohen said. “For a railroad cop, I mean.”
“Bite me. Hiram said the name William King didn’t mean anything to him. Then I asked him if he remembered our missing railroad cop, Fred Zolner.”
“And?”
“He said no. But he turned . . . dark. Almost frightening.”
“You think Hiram has something to do with Zolner’s disappearance?”
“Just thought I’d share. What’s going on with McConnell and her team?”
“The CARD lead is here from LA. They’re pounding the pavement with us. You want to see if McConnell can go with you to talk to the deputy? Might not hurt to have the backing of the Feds.”
I doubted Wolanski needed any encouragement. But it couldn’t hurt. “I’ll give her a call.”
“Let me know what you learn up there.”
After we hung up, I dialed Mac’s mobile and filled her in on what I knew so far.
“I’m heading up to Greeley right now to talk to Rick Wolanski.”
“Can you pick me up at FBI headquarters?” Mac asked.
“Be there in twenty.”
Mac was waiting in the visitor parking lot when I pulled in. Cool and collected even in the heat, she waved away my apology for the dog hair and climbed in.
As I drove, I told her about my conversation with Hiram.
“My guess is that Hiram knew Tate wasn’t reporting those accidents,” I said. “When he found out, he used that to force Tate to not only agree to the merger, but publicly support it.”
“Wasn’t strictly legal,” Mac said. “But I can’t say I disagree with what he did.”
We talked about other aspects of the case until we reached the highway, then fell silent for a time. From the back, Clyde’s snores wafted over us.
A moment later, Mac cracked her window. Clyde’s snores weren’t the only thing he was sharing.
“Sorry,” I said.
“It’s all right. I have a chocolate lab. Goes with the territory.” She pushed back her hair and cranked her head from side to side as if her neck hurt. “You sleep last night?”
“A little. You?”
“Some. It’s always hard when I’m on a case.”
“Thirty-six hours,” I said. “That’s how long she’s been gone.”
“I know.” Mac’s gaze on me was compassionate. “With each case, the hours race by. And yet there’s a year in every hour. Just imagine how it feels for Lucy.”
“Do you think she’s still alive? Honestly, I mean.”
“I’m sure you know the statistics. But I never lose hope. Not until we have no other choice.”
I passed an RV. Through the window I spotted kids playing cards at a table. Laughing.
“Why do they call you Mad Mac? Are you really that much of a bull in a china shop?”
“Sometimes.” Mac’s gaze drifted to the window. Outside, corn fields shimmered in the heat. Two motorcycles blew past us, the roar of their engines rising then falling away.
“You feel like sharing?”
She kept looking out the window. A new tension had entered her body—her shoulders were up and she’d pressed a hand to the back of her neck.
“Hey,” I said. “Just making conversation. We can talk baseball.”
“No, it’s all right.” She dropped her hand. “There are three reasons. That I know of, anyway. People like to make stories.”
“We’ve got another forty minutes. And the scenery isn’t going to get any better.”
Her laugh was soft. “Okay. If you’re really interested. The first reason was because of how crazy I went after I lost my daughter. She was a cop.”
I remembered what she’d said about honor making a crappy shield and I wondered what had happened. But it wasn’t any of my business. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s been four years. I keep waiting for it to get easier.”
“You’ve seen a counselor, I guess.”
“Five of them.” She laughed without humor. “I just keep waiting for a miracle, but of course there isn’t one.”
“I get that.”
She shot me a look and nodded. “You probably do.”
“How about the second reason?”
“Sword fighting.”
“Say what?”
“I like medieval and Renaissance weapons. Once a week I practice sword fighting with a group known as the Society for Creative Anachronism. The black eye came from a blow with a modern-day version of a two-handed broadsword.”
I signaled and pulled around a pickup hauling a load of wood. “How’s the other guy look?”
“You’ve seen liver pâté?”
“Remind me not to piss you off.”
She laughed again, and this time it was genuine. “Don’t piss me off.”
Greeley was a town of ninety thousand people best known for two things: The University of Northern Colorado, famous for producing some of Colorado’s best teachers. And, less fortunately, the odor wafting from the feedlots of JBS USA, a meatpacking company and the city’s largest employer.
Former Deputy Rick Wolanski lived in an older neighborhood in the northwest section of town. I pulled to the curb in front of a small brick and stucco rancher with an environmentally conscious rock yard and a half-ton pickup parked in a gravel driveway. A man stepped out onto the small stoop as we walked up the driveway and introduced himself as Rick Wolanski. He was in his late sixties, a big-framed man dressed in Colorado’s rural uniform of pressed jeans, button-down shirt, and cowboy boots. His mustache was robust; what remained of his hair formed a gray horseshoe around his suntanned pate.
I introduced myself and Mac and we shook hands.
“A railroad cop, her K9 partner, and a federal agent,” Wolanski said. “You must be on the trail of something important. Come on in. I’ve got coffee on.”
He led us inside and asked us to make ourselves comfortable in the front room, then excused himself. Mac and I sat on the plaid love seat with our backs to the window, leaving Wolanski his choice of the two recliners. I downed Clyde next to the love seat. A grandfather clock tick-tocked softly on our right. On the opposite wall stood a bookshelf filled with hunting and fishing guides, Cabela’s catalogs, stacks of maps, and a sprinkling of framed photos, mostly shots of Wolanski holding trophy fish. An antelope head stared sightlessly down on us from above the recliners; two stuffed ducks flew over the gas fireplace.
Everything had a worn, patched look to it, but it was neat and clean. Precisely like its owner. Sunlight fell through the south-facing window, spilling over our backs and tossing stray strands of light onto a braided area rug.
We could hear Wolanski in the kitchen, opening and closing cupboards and rattling cutlery.
A thick stack of file folders sat on the coffee table. My fingers itched to go through them.
The minutes ticked by.
“Mr. Wolanski?” I called. “We really need to go through these files.”
“Coming!”
Wolanski bustled back in with an urn of coffee in one hand and three mugs in the other, his fingers shoved through the handles. “Cream? Sugar?”
We declined, and he set the coffee and cups on the oak coffee table. He left and came back with a plate of warm Danish, napkins, and three plates and forks. He filled the mugs with coffee and handed us each one. Then he took a seat and gave us a friendly smile over his coffee. His mug said, I’D RATHER BE FISHING.
“The pastries come from Della’s, down the street,” he said. “You really should try them.”
“It’s very kind of you.” I recognized the loneliness in him, a quiet space like a held breath. He wore no wedding band and the room had no family pictures. An old bachelor, the woman had said on the phone. I wondered if he carried his own burden of ghosts. And if so, what stories they would tell.
I drank some of the coffee and smiled at him. My mug said, I’D RATHER BE HUNTING.
Mac said, “We’re here as part of an ongoing investigation.”
We had agreed that she would take the lead, figuring that would impress on Wolanski the seriousness of our search, should he need impressing. “We want as many details as you can provide pertaining to the accidents that took place at that crossing.”
“Can I ask why?”
“It has to do with a current case,” Mac said. “That’s as much as we can say right now.”
Wolanski gave a rueful shake of his head. “You Feds are always so secretive. But okay, I’ll help however I can.”
“Thank you,” Mac said. “Why don’t we go through the reports one by one?”
Wolanski pushed his coffee mug aside and reached over for the stack of files. They were thick, with multiple manila folders inside a green hanging file folder. Four of them. “I can summarize them for you, if you wish. Then you can look at the details.”
“Please,” Mac said.
He cleared his throat. “The first two deaths occurred together. October 1973. Tim Dalgren, age seventeen, and his sister Christine, age fourteen. They died when Dalgren’s ’65 Chevy was struck by a northbound train.”
He picked up the top green file folder and handed it to Mac, who opened the folder up on the coffee table so she and I could both see.
“Autopsies are in there, too,” Wolanski said. “Along with my report, the coroner’s report, and any eyewitness statements.”
Mac and I skimmed through the paperwork and photos together. According to witnesses, the driver, Tim Dalgren, had made a habit of racing the train. It was what kids did for fun in a rural town on Friday night when it wasn’t football season. Crazy. Unless—like most teenagers—you thought you were invincible.
“I remember that family,” Wolanski said. “Good people. Tim was a little wild, just like most teenage boys. But his sister was quiet. Into 4-H. She raised rabbits.” He shook his head. “Seemed like I wasn’t much past being a kid myself when we got that call.”
As I flipped through the pages, I paused at the school portraits of the two victims. I tried to imagine what a priest or pastor must have said at their funerals. Called home early, going to a better place, happy now as they looked down at their families and waited for the day when they would be reunited. I didn’t know if any of that was true. All I could think when I looked at the photos was how their deaths must have destroyed their parents.
“Parents broke up after that,” Wolanski said, as if he could hear my thoughts. “I see it all the time. Nobody thinks when they say ‘for worse’ it’s going to get this bad.”
“Was there anything at all unusual about the accident that you recall?” Mac asked. “Or the aftermath?”
Wolanski rubbed his mustache again. “I suppose I was a little surprised when the railroad didn’t install a gate. The railroad cop I talked to promised he’d look into it. But he said gates probably wouldn’t have made a difference. People get impatient, don’t want to wait, especially the kids. The railroads have to replace broken gates all the time, I guess. He said that at least having lights on the pole made it more than just a basic crossbuck, like they have at a lot of rural crossings.”
“A crossbuck?” Mac asked.
“That’s what the railroads call a passive crossing sign,” he said. “The giant X you see at every crossing. Standard at rural crossings with low traffic. So in that sense, I guess, the cop was right. We were lucky to have the lights.”
I closed the file and put it to the side. “What about the next accident?”
Wolanski handed us another folder off the stack.
“December 1975,” he said. “Robert Spence, age forty-three, and Bobby Spence, age eleven. Spence drove smack into the train. The two of them died instantly. It was night, there was heavy fog, and Spence was deaf.” Wolanski shook his head. “The fog that night was like pea soup. They shouldn’t have been driving. I doubt they could even see the lights at the crossing.”
My fingers were cold on the file. I didn’t open it. I’d seen enough in two years on the job. I handed the file back to Wolanski.
Mac said, “What did the railroad say?”
“They sent out a maintenance guy to check the signal box. I was right there with him. That was, let’s see, two or three days after the accident. He said everything was working fine.”
“Did Mrs. Spence sue?”
Wolanski shrugged. “I don’t know. That was the one incident I didn’t handle.”
“What about the first accident?” I asked. “Do you know if the Dalgren family sued?”
“Sorry. I don’t have any idea.” He looked back and forth between us. “You guys ready for the third accident?”
We nodded.
Wolanski picked up the next folder. Neither Mac nor I reached for it.
“Three months after the second one. Another teenager. Seventeen-year-old Melissa Webb. She’d gone on an errand for her dad. After the accident, her parents turned down the settlement offer from SFCO. They said the lights weren’t working, and their lawyer sued. They lost, though. I heard that their lawyer and an independent expert checked the signal box and found everything in working order.”
“So nothing more came of that?” Mac asked.
“Well, people got riled up this time. Usually these cases get a headline for a day and then it’s over for the rest of the world. But this time some folks started lobbying the city government to petition the state to get a gate installed.”
“What was the response from the state?”
“More of the same,” Wolanski said. “Which is to say, nothing. State transportation officials had been looking at that site for years. But they said they didn’t have the funding to install gates. They were waiting on the Feds. You want the folder?”
“In a minute,” I said. I was anxious to grab the file for the fourth and final accident so that I could look at the photograph of the victim. Or victims. See if one of them was the woman whose photo had been in Ben’s desk. I was sure that somehow this accident held the key that would help us solve this case and find Lucy. But I wanted Wolanski to unspool the story for us so that nothing was left out. “Tell us about the fourth accident. That was the last one before the crossing was turned into an overpass, is that right?”
Wolanski set aside the folder for the third accident. “That’s right. Raya Quinn. Hers was the only accident where I was first deputy on scene. I was out on patrol when I got the call. In a way, it was the saddest one of all.” He picked up the final folder and set it in his lap. “Back in July, it was. Hottest damn month on record. We were all sniping at each other. The AC in the sheriff’s office was on the blink, so all of us kept going outside to pour water over our heads from the hose, just to try and cool down. We’d have given anything for the kind of rain we’re getting now.”
“July?” I asked. “What was the date?”
He looked at his watch. “Why, tomorrow. It’ll be twenty-eight years to the day. Now there’s a coincidence for you.”
It was also the day the hazmat train identified by the killer had been scheduled to roll through Denver. A buzz started up in my ears like the crackle of lightning. There were no coincidences.
“Who called it in?” I asked, half expecting to hear Bull Zolner’s name.
“We got the first call from the railroad dispatcher, who’d been notified by the train engineer. Then we got a separate call from Alfred Tate. He was the owner and executive manager of SFCO. His railroad owned the T&W short line, which is where that crossing was located.”
Mac said, “You’re sure of that? Alfred Tate notified your office about the accident?”
Wolanski nodded. “It was a terrible night for him. He kept saying he blamed himself for letting Raya work late. Said he should have noticed when she left that she was upset.”
My mind was shooting off in half a dozen different directions. “Raya Quinn worked for SFCO?”
“That’s right. Had for a year or two, I think.”
“So what did Tate say happened that night?”
Wolanski opened the file and looked down at
a typewritten report. “He was heading home after doing paperwork at one of his branch offices. It was just after ten p.m. when he left. The railroad had a couple of rooms in a building in a tiny community called Grant, pretty far out east. Tate had investments in the sugar beet fields there. He told me he could manage both from that office. He was a real hands-on kind of guy, didn’t like to delegate. Anyway, Raya had been working that night, too, but she left about an hour before her boss did.”
“How far is the crossing from the office?” I asked.
“Maybe twenty minutes. Faster if you drive the way I imagine Raya was driving that night. So there was some unaccounted time. I’ll get to that in a minute.”
I nodded for him to go on.
“Tate was driving home when he came upon the scene. The train at a dead stop, blocking the intersection, the car knocked clear of the tracks. He said he knew from the condition of the car and all the blood that anyone in the vehicle was dead. It looked like it had just happened—no one else was on scene yet. He figured the engineer was still walking back from the head of the train. As you well know”—he gave me a nod—“it can take a mile or more for the train to stop. So anyway, Tate returned to his office and called it in. No cell phones back then. After he knew help was coming, he went back to the scene. I got there ten minutes after that. He was in bad shape. Just torn apart.”
“Tate knew it was her?”
Wolanski nodded. “That’s right. He recognized her car. I mean, she wasn’t exactly identifiable. I ran the plates to be sure. And even then, we had to wait and get confirmation from the coroner the next day. You couldn’t make anything out of that mess. Plus, it was dark, and the car had been crumpled up like a soda can.”
“When you got there, was anyone else on the scene?” I asked.
“The engineer and the conductor had arrived. And DPC’s cop was there. Even he was pretty shook up.” He met my eyes. “I bet you’ve seen your share.”
I said, “What was the name of the cop?”
“Fred Zolner. Everyone called him Bull. He was DPC’s railroad cop. The track belonged to T&W at the time, but DPC leased the track from them. It was a DPC hazmat train that hit her.”
Dead Stop (Sydney Rose Parnell Series Book 2) Page 24