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ALFRED HITCHCOCK MYSTERY MAGAZINE
June 2007
Vol. 52, No. 6
Dell Magazines
New York
Cover by Anthony Mullen
CONTENTS
FICTION
THE END OF THE TRAIN by Mike Wiecek
TO HONOR ICHIKO AND DEFEND JAPAN by Alan Gratz
TRUST ME by Loren D. Estleman
STEP ON A CRACK by David Edgerley Gates
SAINT CASIMIR'S FIRE by Marianne Wilski Strong
HOW TO SURVIVE DOWNSIZING by J. Michlitsch
MYSTERY CLASSIC
THE SAFETY MATCH by Anton Chekhov
DEPARTMENTS
EDITOR'S NOTES
REEL CRIME by Steve Hockensmith
THE MYSTERIOUS CIPHER by Willie Rose
BOOKED & PRINTED by Robert C. Hahn
SOLUTION to the May Unsolved
Visit us online at www.TheMysteryPlace.com!
Click a Link for Easy Navigation
CONTENTS
EDITOR'S NOTES: TWO BY TWO by Linda Landrigan
THE END OF THE TRAIN by MIKE WIECEK
REEL CRIME by Steve Hockensmith
TO HONOR ICHIKO AND DEFEND JAPAN by ALAN GRATZ
TRUST ME by LOREN D. ESTLEMAN
THE MYSTERIOUS CIPHER by Willie Rose
STEP ON A CRACK by DAVID EDGERLEY GATES
SOLUTION TO THE MYSTERIOUS CIPHER
SAINT CASIMIR'S FIRE by MARIANNE WILSKI STRONG
BOOKED & PRINTED by ROBERT C. HAHN
HOW TO SURVIVE DOWNSIZING by J. MICHLITSCH
Solution to the May “UNSOLVED"
MYSTERY CLASSIC: THE SAFETY MATCH by ANTON CHEKHOV
COMING IN JULY/AUGUST 2007
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EDITOR'S NOTES: TWO BY TWO by Linda Landrigan
Good things often come in pairs. This month, two favorite characters return, two familiar writers break new ground, and two new authors make their AHMM debuts.
In “Trust Me,” Loren D. Estleman's Detroit P.I. Amos Walker finds himself in reluctant possession of Prince Cortez, a fighting cock, as a retainer for his services when a local gang leader is arrested for murder. Meanwhile, Irish mob lieutenant Mickey Counihan returns in another tale of postwar New York as he probes what's really behind unrest at the West Side docks in “Step on a Crack” by David Edgerley Gates.
Marianne Wilski Strong is known to AHMM readers for her popular whodunits set in ancient Greece, but this month she sets “St. Casimir's Fire” in Western Pennsylvania, in a parrish smothered by an underground mine fire that has poisoned residents in more ways than one. Mike Wiecek won a Shamus award for his 2005 story “A Death in Ueno” (AHMM, March), featuring Tokyo P.I. Sakonju. In “The End of the Train” he takes us to the Newark, New Jersey, train yards, where it appears a train loaded with dangerous chemicals has been inexplicably stolen.
We welcome this month Alan Gratz and J. Michlitsch. A Georgia native, Alan Gratz is the author of Samurai Shortstop (Dial, 2006) and the forthcoming YA mystery Something Rotten. “To Honor Ichiko and Defend Japan” is his first published short story. J. Michlitsch, author of “How to Avoid Downsizing,” is a “reluctant realtor” and a blogger at www.curbly.com, and is currently putting the final touches on a mystery novel about a realtor, which is tentatively called Life Estate.
And we'll note that as of our press date, AHMM columnist and author Steve Hockensmith has racked up two important award nominations. His first novel, Holmes on the Range, has been nominated for both a Dilys Award, presented by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association (www.mysterybooksellers.com) for the mystery book that the member booksellers have most enjoyed selling, and an Edgar Award for Best First Novel, presented by the Mystery Writers of America (www.mysterywriters.org). For a taste of his second novel in this series, see what Robert C. Hahn has to say in this month's Booked & Printed column.
[Back to Table of Contents]
THE END OF THE TRAIN by MIKE WIECEK
At dawn the industrial park lay quiet, none of its hardscrabble manufacturers working a third shift. Security lights flickered off as the sky lightened. An inland breeze picked up, bringing the smell of salt marsh and the cawing of waking birds. Chemical plants and tank farms ran right to the edge of the wetlands, asphalt and chain link a porous barrier between them.
David had arrived an hour earlier, slipping noiselessly to his chosen vantage and easing his ballistic carryall to the ground. Since then, sipping broth from a black thermos, he'd seen only a few vehicles drive past. None entered the park. He was careful not to look east, where the sun's first rays might dazzle his eyes.
Fifteen minutes beforehand, he extracted his equipment from the padded case, softly clicking it together with practiced ease. By habit that probably revealed his age, he sighted in with the optical range finder before activating the digital readout. A hundred and fifty meters, close enough. He ran through the rest of his checklist automatically, every step critical.
You only get one shot.
He looked at his watch—another old guy's habit, since the digital screen carried a min-sec stamp in the corner—and capped the thermos. He knew the schedule as well as the operators themselves. In the distance a train whistle sounded, clear in the dewy air, and David nodded to himself. The grade crossing at Route 16, exactly on time. He bent to his eyepiece, breathed out, and focused. His hands, resting lightly on the controls, were perfectly still.
A few wisps of predawn fog remained in the shadow of the nearest chemical tank. The single-track feeder curved from around back. Just as the lead locomotive thundered into view, a flock of wading birds rose, squawking and flapping around it. It was an extraordinary sight—a dark blue SD70M in full roar, banked on the curve, a dozen pink and black and white herons caught in mid-flight above it. In that split second David knew he had the shot of his life—and a pickup slammed over the curb behind him, spraying gravel as it skidded to a halt, one door ricocheting open. David fumbled, his fingers slipping off the grip. He straightened up and began to swear loudly.
"I knew you'd be here!” The driver was a young guy, hair military-cut, big grin. He came over as the locomotive hammered past, the train making so much noise that neither man tried to say more. David shook his head, looking sadly at the camera in his hand.
When the train had gone and silence returned, David said, “This better be good, Sean."
The young man turned serious. “We lost a train, Dave,” he said. “Where the heck's your beeper? We got county cops all over the property, and an hour ago the FBI shows up. Come on, I'll brief you on the way back."
David glanced at his own car, parked a block farther down. “Give me the short version, and I'll meet you there.” Then the words finally sank in. “Lost a train? What are you talking about?"
"Gone,” said Sean simply. “Thirty-two cars. Disappeared off the face of the earth."
* * * *
David Keegan loved his job because, first and last, he loved trains. Always had, ever since he'd grown up so close to the New York Central he could watch the signalmen in their tower next to his backyard. At ten years old he recognized the reporting marks of a hundred railroads and could di
stinguish a GP7 locomotive from a GP9 with one glance at the radiator screens. In high school he built a Heathkit scanner, mounted it in his Dodge, and soon knew as much about operations as the yard's trainmaster. Unlike many rail fans, a mostly law-abiding and conservative lot, he even hopped freights, hoboing around the country during summer breaks.
But for all that, he never wanted to be an engineer. You could go deaf rattling around on your bedroll in a freezing boxcar, and fifteen-hour shifts in the cab didn't seem like enough of an improvement. So he avoided drugs and hippies and the counterculture generally—albeit not without an occasional wistful glance—and joined the police academy straight out of high school. An occupational exemption from the draft was a bonus. In 1968, while his friends went to love-ins and Vietnam, David became a Special Railway Agent on the Pennsylvania Southern.
Nearly four tumultuous decades later, through mergers, abandonments, deregulation, the collapse of most major roads and the consolidation of the rest, Penn Southern somehow survived—and so did David. Almost at retirement, he was now special agent in charge for the railroad's busiest district, centered on Newark. He and a few dozen officers patrolled eight yards, two thousand miles of track, and more vandals, thieves, vagrants, criminal rings, and white-collar fraud than anywhere else in North America. He had solved murders, broken up gangs so organized they could strip a container bare in fifteen minutes, and recovered three million dollars stashed in a Caribbean bank by a bent procurement executive. He had saved lives and, once, killed a drug-addled squatter who attacked him with a bowie knife under a trestle.
He'd never had an entire train vanish.
David met Sean at the classification yard's dispatch center, a forbiddingly blank building of Sixties-era brick and aluminum, topped by a 360-degree glass tower. They had to park a hundred yards away.
"Where did all that come from?” David gestured at the executive limos, police cars, and civilian vehicles overflowing the center's lot.
"The CEO's here. Wherever he goes it's a rolling cluster—” Sean cut himself off. “You know."
Inside the tower was bedlam: a dozen people clustered around a pair of computer terminals, trainmasters trying to do their jobs, and one skinny, goateed technician hunched over his keyboard. David immediately picked out Penn Southern's CEO, a posse of yes-men ranged at his back. The sheriff stood to one side, and another pair of men in dark suits could only be the FBI agents. Including Sean and himself, the room was armed for a serious firefight.
"Where have you been?” The CEO rounded on him, glaring through rimless glasses.
"I got here as soon as I heard.” David nodded at the sheriff, who gave him a brief smile. She'd been reelected last year in a landslide, on a record of competence rather than politicking, and they got along. “Who was in the locomotive?"
"Nobody knows.” The CEO seemed not to have found his scapegoat yet. “We spend two hundred million dollars a year on computers, and all I get is excuses!"
A long pause. The yes-men frowned.
"No one listed on the call board?” David asked finally.
Sean answered. “There was a jam at the receiving yard,” he said. “Some rockhead in a pickup went off Southside Avenue and knocked a fence over the lead. Incoming traffic was backed up for two hours, and the yardmaster went bananas. No one was paying much attention."
David raised an eyebrow. “Accident?"
"Maybe,” said the sheriff. “Maybe not. Couple of detectives are running it down."
"Good.” David thought for a moment. “The trainmaster must have radioed the engineer before he left the departure yard. And there would have been transmissions later, routine stuff, at the waypoints. He doesn't remember?"
"Two dozen trains went out last night,” said Sean.
"Still.” He might have come late to the show, but David was assuming the authority natural to his position. A mystery train was his problem to solve, not the CEO's. “The radio calls must have been routine, or the trainmaster would have noticed something was wrong. Don't we record them all automatically?"
The technician raised his head from the flat-panel display and nodded. “Just getting it now, sir. The problem is sorting through—we don't have voice-to-text, so someone's going to have to listen to hours of the road channel.” He tapped some keys and the recording started abruptly, in the middle of a transmission, interrupted by bursts of static. It was the usual yard business—brief instructions to the hostlers, acknowledgements, laconic position updates—filled with abbreviations and jargon and slang. They listened for a minute, and it all sounded normal to David.
Outside the tower windows he could see five hundred acres of track, where every day two thousand freight cars were shuffled, shunted, recoupled, and sent on their way. The yard was so large that crews used ATVs to move around, the logistics so complex that only computers could keep track of the big picture. Watching the vast ranks of cars, with switch engines puttering here and there and the endless rows of silent freights, it seemed more credible that they could lose track of a few.
The CEO brought him back to the room, talking loudly over the recorded radio chatter. “We haven't told the shippers yet, and by God, there better not be even a whisper leaked to the press. I want this train set found in the next hour, hear me?"
Murmurs of support from the yes-men. The FBI agents looked on impassively; the sheriff rolled her eyes at David.
"Where was it going?” he asked.
The tech turned down the volume and handed him a printed carload list. “Train number 432, up to Tennebrul for breakdown,” he said. Tennebrul was a flat yard in Connecticut.
David studied the sheet. “Industrial tankers ... one LCL lading, some petrochemicals. A little unusual for Tennebrul."
"How so?” the sheriff asked.
"Not so much heavy industry around there. These kinds of carloads are usually headed inland or south."
David scanned the manifest's “Hazard ID” column, noticing several code numbers indicating dangerous cargo—toxics, flammables, volatiles. The substance names themselves had little meaning for him; like the yardmen and operators, he usually paid attention only to the hazmat placards on the cars.
"Okay, so it left here, when?"
"Oh-one-twenty.” Sean had picked up a military-clock habit in the army. “The dispatcher's sure of that, since he logged it. We'll listen to the radio traffic, but like you said, it couldn't have been anything out of the ordinary. The cars clocked the AEI detector at Croxton, everything normal."
Most freight cars carried passive electronic transponders that identified themselves on the fly to detectors stationed along the track, the data collected centrally for railcar tracking and analysis. Croxton was a few miles away, near the eponymous Norfolk Southern yard.
"But already thirty minutes late at that point,” Sean added. “Traffic was really slow last night."
"Was the locomotive GPS equipped?” Penn Southern was still playing catch-up; only about two-thirds of its fleet had electronic positioning equipment.
"Yup. That's how the dispatcher knew something was wrong. Everything was tracking fine until it just blipped out a few miles past Croxton. He thought it might have been a malfunction—sometimes it just goes down, you know—but he couldn't raise the engineer. He got worried quick and shut down service ahead and behind."
"He red-signaled the main line?” David raised an eyebrow. “No wonder the yard is jammed. We're going to be digging out for a week."
"No sh—” Sean cut himself off again. “Yes, sir."
"I don't understand how you could lose three dozen cars,” said the older FBI agent. “What's that, half a mile of rolling iron? Wouldn't someone have seen it?"
"It's mainline trackage.” Sean realized he was still the center of attention and had to clear his throat. “Civilians hear six or seven trains an hour, they're not going to know one from the next."
"No track workers in the vicinity?” David asked.
Sean nodded. “That's what the d
ispatcher thought of too. He called around until he found a maintenance-of-way crew nearby. They drove up and down the track twenty miles and didn't see anything. That's when the balloon went up."
"And until then, nothing unusual.” David spoke more to himself than anyone else, but Sean answered.
"Well ... one thing, sort of. No FRED signal at Croxton."
After the roads phased out cabooses, they still needed some way to identify the last car of a moving train—to make it visible to overtaking traffic and to let automated equipment like bridges and switches know the train had entirely passed. Management used the acronym EOT, for “End of Train” signaling, but everyone else called it a F—ing Rear End Device.
"Unless the train was braking, it would only signal every forty-five seconds or so,” David said. “If there was interference or cross-traffic the detector could have just missed it."
"Yeah, that's true."
The sheriff spoke up. “What do you mean, the MOW guys didn't see anything? What about other trains, if it was so busy?"
"Oh, they found the other trains—one ahead and one behind, right where they should have been. But nothing in between."
"It has to be there,” snapped the CEO. “Probably on a siding, broken down."
"Or something,” said David. “It went in and it didn't come out, so it has to be in there somewhere."
"That's the puzzle,” said Sean. “It's not."
* * * *
They drove out in two cars, David and the sheriff in her cruiser, Sean chauffeuring Special Agent Mattingly, the younger of the two FBI men. The sheriff flipped on her lightbar and took surface roads, thirty miles over the speed limit, shoving aside morning commuters. David decided he wasn't embarrassed to repeatedly brace himself against the dashboard, white knuckled.
"Maintenance department must love you, Lizbeth,” he said. “How many patrol cars have you totaled?"
"Never had an accident, thanks.” She glanced at the rearview. “Sean's keeping up okay."
AHMM, June 2007 Page 1