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By Root 447 0

day before, under cover of darkness, someone had parked a car on the train track. Garber was wrong again. He had said there were two trains a day, but Pellegrino told me in reality there was only one. It rumbled through at midnight exactly, a mile-long giant hauling freight north from Biloxi on the Gulf Coast. That midnight train had smashed into the parked vehicle, wrecking it completely, hurling it way far up the line, bouncing it into the woods. The train had not stopped. As far as anyone could tell it hadn’t even slowed down. Which meant the engineer had not even noticed. He was obliged to stop if he struck something on the line. Railroad policy. Pellegrino thought it was certainly possible the guy hadn’t noticed. So did I. Thousands of tons against one, moving fast, no contest. Pellegrino seemed captivated by the senselessness of it all. He said, “I mean, who would do that? Who would park an automobile on the train track? And why?”

“Kids?” I said. “For fun?”

“Never happened before. And we’ve always had kids.”

“No one in the car?”

“No, thank God. Like I said, as far as we know it was just parked there.”

“Stolen?”

“Don’t know yet. There’s not much of it left. We think it might have been blue. It set on fire. Burned some trees with it.”

“No one called in a missing car?”

“Not yet.”

I asked, “What else are you busy with?”

And at that point Pellegrino went quiet and didn’t answer, and I wondered if I had pushed it too far. But I reviewed the back-and-forth in my head and figured it was a reasonable question. Just making conversation. A guy says he’s real busy but mentions only a wrecked car, another guy is entitled to ask for more, right? Especially while riding through the dusk in a companionable fashion.

But it turned out Pellegrino’s hesitation was based purely on courtesy and old-fashioned Southern hospitality. That was all. He said, “Well, I don’t want to give you a bad impression, seeing as you’re here for the first time. But we had a woman murdered.”

“Really?” I said.

“Two days ago,” he said.

“Murdered how?”

And it turned out that Garber’s information was inaccurate again. Janice May Chapman had not been mutilated. Her throat had been cut, that was all. And delivery of a fatal wound was not the same thing as mutilation. Not the same thing at all. Not even close.

Pellegrino said, “Ear to ear. Real deep. One big slice. Not pretty.”

I said, “You saw it, I guess.”

“Up close and personal. I could see the bones inside her neck. She was all bled out. Like a lake. It was real bad. A good looking woman, real pretty, all dressed up for a night out, neat as a pin, just lying there on her back in a pool of blood. Not right at all.”

I said nothing, out of respect for something Pellegrino’s tone seemed to demand.

He said, “She was raped, too. The doctor found that out when he got her clothes off and got her on the slab. Unless you could say she’d been into it enough at some point to throw herself down and scratch up her ass on the gravel. Which I don’t think she would be.”

“You knew her?”

“We saw her around.”

I asked, “Who did it?”

He said, “We don’t know. A guy off the base, probably. That’s what we think.”

“Why?”

“Because those are who she spent her time with.”

I asked, “If your detective is out sick, who is working the case?”

Pellegrino said, “The chief.”

“Does he have much experience with homicides?”

“She,” Pellegrino said. “The chief is a woman.”

“Really?”

“It’s an elected position. She got the votes.” There was a little resignation in his voice. The kind of tone a guy uses when his team loses a big game. It is what it is.

“Did you run for the job?” I asked.

“We all did,” he said. “Except the detective. He was already bad with his kidneys.”

I said nothing. The car rocked and swayed. Pellegrino’s tires sounded worn and soft. They set up a dull baritone roar on the blacktop. Up ahead the evening gloom had gone completely. Pellegrino’s headlights lit the way fifty yards in front. Beyond that was nothing but darkness. The road was straight, like a tunnel through the trees. The trees were twisted