Murder on the Orient Espresso(53)

But Hertel frowned. ‘Sounds simple enough, but the problem is we weren’t traveling at the same speed coming back east as going out west. In fact, I was keeping the throttle at near crawl because the track was flooding. And good thing, too, or I wouldn’t have been able to stop before that wash-out.’

The engineer pulled the paper toward him and dug a stub of a pencil out of his bib pocket. Touching it to his tongue, he started to work. ‘Now if a train’s heading one direction at forty miles an hour, and another at, say, twen—’

I let my forehead hit the table and took the self-inflicted pain without whimpering.





TWENTY-TWO





Pavlik’s eyes were glazed over the instant Theodore B. Hertel, Jr closed the door behind him. ‘So the long and the short of it is that the later it got, the more the rain slowed us down.’

‘There is no short, when it comes to our engineer.’ I was holding my head in my hands. ‘Only long. Really, really long.’

‘Did you understand all that?’ Pavlik asked. ‘I feel like we just lost more ground than the road bed in front of the locomotive’s nose.’

We had Hertel’s chicken scratchings in front of us, but given that we hadn’t maintained a steady speed, even he hadn’t been able to calculate our location with any degree of reliability. And I wasn’t sure we’d have understood if he had. The man had the presentational skills of your average batty theoretical physicist.

‘Well, we have to start somewhere.’ Pavlik drew himself up. ‘We know we reversed around nine-thirty and got stuck here at ten.’

‘Correct. What we don’t know is where “here” is.’ I checked my cell. One a.m.

The ‘Dark Side of Midnight,’ as legendary Milwaukee jazz DJ Ron Cuzner had dubbed his late-night show way back when. Ron had kept me company through countless hours spent rocking Eric when he was a colicky baby. And today …

I shook myself back into the present.

‘… try to bracket the time of death,’ Pavlik was saying. ‘We know Potter was alive as Zoe got up to welcome people. Hopefully she’ll be able to tell us exactly what time that was.’

Or, more likely, Missy would. ‘So that time, whatever it is, will be the early end of our bracket. The latest has to be well before we reversed directions at nine-thirty.’

‘Why “well before”?’

I chewed on my lip. ‘I see your point. Since we don’t know how slowly we’ve traveled since the turn-around – or “reversal,” as Hertel insists – let’s just say Potter went off the train before nine-thirty.’

‘Why not after?’

‘Because you said he’d fallen or been pushed—’

‘Let’s use “exited,” since we don’t know. It’ll be more consistent.’

Honest to God, Pavlik was nearly as maddening as the engineer. ‘You said he’d exited when we came past this point on the way into the Everglades.’

‘Actually, I didn’t. You did.’

I tried to think back to the conversation with the engineer and who had said what.

‘See?’ Pavlik pointed at his notes. ‘You took over questioning here and made the statement to Hertel.’

Son of a bitch, but the sheriff was right. ‘Only that has to be how it happened. We’re on one side of the break in the tracks—’

Pavlik interrupted. ‘Let’s call what lies in front of the train – to the east of the locomotive – the flooded track. We don’t know there’s an actual break or that the tracks are washed away, rather than merely covered.’

‘So stipulated,’ I said, though if I clenched my teeth any harder, I’d need to wear a mouth guard to spare my molars. ‘But my point is that Potter’s body was on the opposite side of the flooded track from where we sit right now. Remember? We had to wade through water to get there?’

Pavlik was writing. ‘The snake was encountered on the opposite side, east of the flooded track.’

‘With Potter’s body in him.’

‘Mostly.’

‘Thank you.’ I was one heartbeat away from—

‘Maggy, you think I’m nitpicking, but this kind of detail is important.’ Pavlik read from his notes: ‘The snake was encountered on the east side of the flooded track, opposite the train’s stopped position. The lower portion of the victim’s body was protruding from its mouth.’

‘The African rock python was encountered,’ I corrected. Two could play this game.

‘We have only the engineer’s opinion that it was a python, and only,’ the notes again, ‘Markus’s belief that it was, indeed, a rock python.’