Fate couldn’t be more obvious, I thought. What a heavy-handed touch, to see this freight train going by, just as I’m about to leave the city behind.
He could be on this train right now, I thought. This very train going by.
He’s not on this train. There are thousands of freight trains moving all over the country at any moment. He could be on any one of them. That’s why you need the FBI to throw a blanket over the whole thing.
You’re not looking for a serial killer. You’re looking for Darryl.
Who, in turn, might be looking for a serial killer. So no, thanks.
You promised her you’d find him, Alex.
That was before.
Since when do you walk away like this? No matter how futile this may seem, you never, ever walk away.
“Okay, just stop,” I said out loud. An actual argument with myself, maybe the product of living alone for too long. “There is nothing else you can do here. So you have to go home now. You have to go back to Paradise.”
The train kept rumbling by.
“There’s nothing you can do,” I said to myself, “that they can’t do better.”
Car after car after car.
“You’ve got no angle that they don’t.”
The last car passed by.
“Except…”
The train disappeared down the tracks.
“Maybe one.”
I took out my phone and called Leon.
“I’ve got a question for you,” I said as soon as he picked up. “I know it’ll take you all of five minutes to look up the answer.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“How many rail yards are there around Metro Detroit?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
If you look at a map of Michigan, and you look at those railroad lines that people usually ignore, you’ll see that they all converge on the southwest corner of Detroit. It took Leon all of twenty seconds to see this, and another twenty seconds to figure out that this was the CSX Livernois Yard, the biggest rail yard in the state of Michigan. It felt like something beyond a shot in the dark, but I figured I had to try it.
I headed down to Livernois Avenue. A few more blocks south and the road dipped below the tracks. As soon as I emerged on the other side I could see the northeast corner of the yard on my right. The tracks split apart like an unraveling rope, going from four tracks to a dozen to a dozen more. There were long lines of freight cars waiting to be pulled somewhere. Just more and more cars, as far as the eye could see.
I saw a line of semis turning into the yard, each one of them carrying one of those containers you see rolling along on the open flatbed cars. As I looked toward the service entrance, I saw a pair of gates, and I knew there’d be a man or two standing in each one. I pictured them holding clipboards. I also pictured them less than amused if a pickup truck driven by a curious ex-cop got in line with the semis, so I kept driving, figuring I’d eventually find the main office.
There was a high fence running all along the edge of the yard, topped with razor wire. On the other side of the fence were the same kind of closed freight boxes I’d see on some of the freighters going through the locks. Or on the long freight trains I’d see coming over the railroad bridge from Canada. Here there were more of them in one place than I’d ever seen before, stacked two and three high for a good half a mile. I made the turn on Vernor and came around the southern edge of the yard. At last, there was a sign there, CSX INTERNATIONAL, with another service road. This one ran into more gates, but there was a building near the gates and maybe a better chance of someone there in a mood to humor me.
I saw an opportunity to pull off the service road even before I got to the gates. I parked in the lot and went in through the front door. There was a woman sitting behind thick glass. She looked up at me and hit a button on her desk. Her voice sounded like something half metal as it came through the speaker mounted in the glass.
“Can I help you, sir?”
“I’m wondering if I can speak to the head of security,” I said, figuring that was as good a line as any. “I just have a couple of questions.”
“Can I ask what this is in regards to?”
“I’m a private investigator,” I said. “I just want a minute of his time to ask about unauthorized people who ride on the freight trains.”
I saw her frown at that, and it occurred to me that I probably could have phrased that better. You could hear that and think I was there to accuse someone of letting riders on the trains, like maybe one of them got run over and now here I am representing a lawyer looking to make a big payday, but before I could clarify, she was already on her old-school stand-up microphone.
“Mr. Maglie will be out in a minute,” she said. “He’ll meet you just outside the door.”
I stepped outside to prepare myself for Mr. Maglie. About a minute later, a gleaming white pickup came roaring out of the yard, passing through the gate without slowing down. It came to an abrupt halt a few yards away from me. Naturally it raised a cloud of dust that I had to shield my eyes from.
“I’m Maglie,” he said as he got out of the truck. He was wearing a dark blue uniform with short sleeves, the better to show off his forearms. Pushing sixty, once a tough guy, I could tell. Now even tougher with age.
“My name is Alex McKnight.” I didn’t bother reaching out my right hand to shake his.
“What’s your business here, sir?”
I took out one of my cards and handed it to him. He read it with obvious skepticism, then handed it back to me.
“I just wanted to ask you a couple of questions,” I said. “Let me just say, I don’t represent anyone who’s out to make a buck or anything.”
“Who do you represent?”
“I’m not allowed to disclose that, but it really doesn’t matter. I’m just looking for somebody who rides on the freight trains.”
“Does this person work for the railroad?”
“No, I’m sure he doesn’t.”
“Then he doesn’t ride these trains. Not in this yard.”
“This is the biggest rail yard I’ve ever seen,” I said. “How many hundreds of trains do you have coming through here every day?”
“You want an exact number?”
“No, I’m just saying. I know that people hitch rides on trains. They’ve been doing it for years.”
“Look,” he said. “I know you probably have this image in your head. Hobos riding the rails, all over the country, sitting in empty boxcars, playing the guitar, all their belongings tied up in a handkerchief and hanging from a stick…”
“I’m sure it’s not that way anymore, but-”
“Do you see all those boxes?” he said, gesturing at the stacks behind him. “That’s what we pull nowadays. It’s all closed up. It comes off the truck, we load it, we move it down the line, unload it at the destination. Do you see a place for some hobo to hitch a ride?”
“No, I honestly don’t.”
“That’s right. If they did try to hitch a ride, you know where they’d have to go? They’d have to break into one of the helping engines and ride in the empty cab. Do you think that would be a good idea?”
“I’m guessing no.”
“If we were at a construction site, would you want some vagrant to wander off the street and go climb into the cab of a big crane? Some drug addict sitting behind the controls of a twenty-ton machine?”
“Of course not.”
“That’s what we’re talking about here. A high-risk industrial environment where people can get themselves killed in about two seconds if they don’t know what they’re doing, and get other people killed, too. So unless you have some specific reason to believe that somebody is breaking into my trains…”
My trains. He actually said that.