Garvey stepped forward into Collins’s path. Even though Garvey was tall in his own right, Collins loomed over him like a storm cloud. He glared at Hayes over Garvey’s shoulder, but Hayes dawdled on the platform and looked down the tunnel with a mildly interested eye. Samantha gripped her briefcase and looked to him for some excuse for their intrusion, but he was barely aware of Collins’s furious outburst, let alone her frantic looks.
“I invited him here,” said Garvey quickly. “I gave the order to let him through.”
“I guessed that,” Collins said. “What in hell did you think you were doing, bringing a mad thing like that into a scene like this?”
“I thought he could help.”
“Help? Help with what?”
“Unions. He might know something. He almost always does.”
Collins turned to Hayes. “And? Do you know anything?”
“I don’t even know what the hell is going on yet,” Hayes said. “Did you say this is union stuff, Garv?”
Collins gave Garvey a warning look. Garvey winced. “I think it is,” he said slowly, reluctantly. “I think it’s got to be.”
“Don’t go stirring up shit you can’t shovel, Garvey,” said Collins. “Don’t go doing that now. Not at a time like this.”
“Let’s at least show them to him,” Garvey said. “Just to see.”
“See who?” asked Hayes.
“Our passengers,” said Garvey. Then he grabbed Hayes by the arm and dragged him down the tunnel to where a darkened trolley car sat in the shadows. Behind them Collins shouted at Samantha and the other officers to stay back. Garvey hauled him through the broken bronze doors of the trolley, Hayes fumbling with the steps, and suddenly he was aware that there were people in the darkened trolley car with them, sitting silently in the seats or lying on the floor. The coppery taste of blood filled his nose and mouth and he suppressed a gag. Then Garvey flicked the light on and Hayes saw the trolley car fully.
As he tried to take in the room around him he felt as if he were in the belly of something alive and malignant and hungry, and there littered on the floor of this monstrous stomach were staring eyes and grasping hands and faces dull and blank and soulless. His eyes adjusted and he tried to count the figures in the dark. There were around a dozen of them, it seemed. More brutalized than in any murder Hayes had seen in years.
“Oh, my,” said Hayes softly.
“Yeah,” said Garvey. “Oh, my is right.” He shook out a handkerchief and stuffed his nose and mouth into it. Hayes did not, for even though Garvey was murder police Hayes was far more used to the scent of blood and putrefaction.
Hayes swallowed and shook off the shock. Then morbid curiosity took him over, an old and not entirely welcome friend, and he began studying the bodies nearest to him. He found their poses were queerly passive, as though they had simply dropped, as if something had passed through the trolley car and pulled the life right out of them. And yet they were so ravaged. One man sat in his seat with his back and neck open in a dozen places, one hand still on his handhold. Behind him a woman sat on the floor, sunk to the ground with her knees and thighs below her, smooth white flesh spattered with arterial spray and her face calmly fixed as though contemplating a troubling question. At the end of the car the conductor lay facedown on his control board, still in his seat. Behind him a group of three men lay in a heap around one of the poles. Had it not been for the wounds dotting their chests and thighs you would have thought they had simply become tired and decided to lie down to sleep.
There were more. Many more. Propped up in the seats or prostrate on the floor. Each of them serenely drooping as if the little motor that made their hearts beat had simply stripped a few gears and given up. Behind them the windows were lined with hairline cracks, but there was no sign of impact in the car.
“Do you know anything about this?” said Collins behind him.
Hayes looked at them. Took in their shattered figures and glassy stares. Then he stooped and said, “Well.”
“Well what?” said Garvey from behind a handkerchief.
Hayes looked into one’s face. He put a finger on the man’s white chin and moved his head up to look into his eyes. The skin sagged at the edges, like he was wearing a mask and his true face was hidden somewhere below the paling flesh. “I know this one,” Hayes said softly.
“You do?” said Collins.
“Yes,” said Hayes. “I do. Edward Walton. He works-worked-in the Southern District. Can’t remember what he did. He worked under McClintock. Fellow I interviewed. That’s how I know him. He’s a unioner. Remember, Garv? I sent you some information on him. Just yesterday.”
“I’ve been out of the office for the past two days,” Garvey said.
“Damn,” muttered Hayes. “Too late, I suppose.” He stood and moved through the mass of corpses, carefully stepping among them with wobbly, balletic jumps. “There’s Naylor,” he said. “And Evie. And Eppleton. And Craft. They’re dirty, all of them. Only a few are suspected murderers and saboteurs in my book. The others are just sympathizers. I don’t know who the women are. That one’s a whore and no mistake.” Hayes took a seat between two corpses, surveying the mute crowd. “They’re all mine, for the most part. Or were. All McNaughton boys, and all dirty.”
Garvey and Collins stared around their feet. “Jesus Christ,” said Collins. “Why didn’t I hear about this?”
“Do you think it’s sabotage?” asked Hayes. “Someone sabotaged the line?”
Garvey shook his head. “No. The trolley car coasted in like it does every day, right on time. Just odd that its passengers all happened to be dead. How it got in with a dead conductor is beyond me. Scared the hell out of the people on the platform. And besides, look at them, and the trolley. It didn’t crash. No sign of sabotage. But their wounds, it’s like they’ve been…”
“Stabbed,” finished Collins. “Like someone hopped on board and then ran through, stabbing them all. Stabbed all to hell.”
Hayes turned one over with his foot. They all had the exact same wound, a thin puncture mark about an inch long. “Maybe someone stopped the car and did just that.”
“I told you,” said Garvey. “Trolley was on time, almost exactly.”
“So?”
“Well, according to the stops from the platform before, the window for the murders is about, oh, a little less than four minutes.”
Hayes stared at him. “That’s not possible.”
“Yeah. That’s the crux, ain’t it?”
“Someone stabbed all these people to death in four minutes?”
“Or something did.”
“And none of them resisted,” said Collins, stooping. “Look at their hands. No scratches. No cuts. No bruises.”
Hayes frowned, doing the same. “And no witnesses.”
“None,” said Garvey.
Hayes turned to look out the window down the tunnel. It was black as night behind the car. He wondered what was wandering in there, or what might be waiting down the rails. Then he lifted his hand and touched the cracks in the window before him. They ran throughout the other panes as well, all of them slightly broken but never wholly shattered. He looked up. The bulbs in the roof of the car had completely broken. Little half-moons of white glass stuck out of the sockets, the filaments of the bulbs completely exposed.
Then Hayes cocked his head suddenly, like he had heard something. He made a soft hmph, then turned to walk down to the conductor’s chair.
“Where are you going?” said Garvey.
“There’s something wrong down here,” he said. He looked carefully from body to body.
“What do you mean? What’s wrong?”
“I just… I think there’s someone else,” he said.
“Someone else? Someone else what?”
“Someone else in here with us.”
Garvey gave Hayes a sharp look. “You sure about this?”
Hayes nodded absently as he looked through the trolley.