Face of Death

Shelley skidded to a stop at an entirely incorrect angle in the rail yard parking lot, and Zoe half-stumbled out of the door as she took a deep breath of fresh air to settle herself. She was a few steps behind as Shelley ran for the huge depot building, with massive openings where tracks allowed multiple trains in and out.

There was a five-foot-five man with wiry hair and a potbelly standing near an open entrance, a wad of papers in his hands that he was hurriedly leafing through. By the fact that he was wearing a winter jacket thrown on over what appeared to be pajamas, Zoe knew he was the man they had woken to come there.

“Smith?” Shelley shouted as they drew nearer.

He looked up in acknowledgment, then waved his papers. “I’m trying to identify the train. Says here that it should be in the sixth bay.”

Zoe’s eyes went up, taking in the scale of the place as they entered. Tracks and trains stretched into the distance. She counted nine bays across the front of the depot, and from this far corner she could see that they stretched back at least sixty cars deep. Multiple trains in each bay.

“Take us there,” Shelley told him simply, and he turned and hurried along in front of them, still consulting the notes as he went.

The sixth bay was far enough away that precious minutes were gone, and then he had to double-check and cross-reference the plans before he was sure they were looking at the right engine.

“It’s this one, all right,” he said. “Freight service. Thirty-six boxcars. Each one is sealed with an individual door, but this is for cargo. Most of them don’t have windows.”

Zoe swore, looking down the length of the train. Thirty-six cars without windows. No way to see inside without endangering themselves.

“Which ones do?” Shelley asked.

“Eh, let’s see… Driver car, sixth, sixteenth, and the last one.”

Zoe turned to the troopers who had followed them in, panting with their run across the rail yard. “Go check those first. If you see something, report immediately.”

They nodded and set off at a run again, each of them understanding fully that this was a matter of life and death. One trooper for each car. Somehow, they had managed to find the right ratio of people to bring.

Ratio—that made Zoe think. The cars with windows—that was significant, wasn’t it? One, six, sixteen, thirty-six. A difference that doubled each time. Five, then ten, then twenty cars between them.

This was the correct train, all right.

“ETA on the specialists?” Zoe asked.

“Maybe thirty minutes, maybe a little more,” Shelley said, holding onto the gold arrow pendant around her neck so hard that when she let go Zoe glimpsed the imprint on her palm. “I’ll chase them up. And call an ambulance, in case we need them.”

How long was it going to take them to search every car? When the specialists got here, they would have just a couple of hours to analyze and check the thirty-two that did not have windows. Two hours to be thorough enough that they could have confidence no agents or troopers would die on opening the door.

Not long enough.

Zoe racked her brains, pacing forward and back between their train and the one beside it. Her mind raced amongst the possibilities. She knew in her gut that the cars they were able to search now would not be the right ones. He wouldn’t have made it so easy for them. He wouldn’t have risked someone glancing through a window and seeing something that was not cargo at all.

There had to be something here that told him which car to pick. There was no way he would have chosen one at random—not their killer. Not an apophenic.

The central car? It seemed too obvious, and besides, with an even number of carriages there was no dead center. It would fall between two cars. There were thirty-six, so perhaps a multiple of six? But what did six mean to the killer? The number had not come up before. It wasn’t in the Fibonacci sequence, and neither was thirty-six, for that matter. What was running through his head?

“Tell me everything you can about the train,” Zoe said, turning on the depot manager again.

He stuttered for a moment, leafing through his papers. “Uh, well, it was manufactured in 2008,” he said. “Came here in 2013.”

Eight—thirteen. Those numbers caught on the edges of Zoe’s mind, but she motioned for him to continue.

“Heavy-duty, heavy loads. It’s rated for carrying some low-risk toxic materials. Takes between two and six journeys a day, based on load times and what it’s booked for. Passes through an average of forty stations without stopping each journey, though sometimes deliveries can be more local or can even be split across different stations.”

Zoe held up a hand to him to stop. He was just talking now, just meaningless noise. There were no numbers, no patterns in what he was saying. Averages held no weight. She needed the real data. Specifics.