Ridley Pearson - Parallel Lies

by RIDLEY PEARSON

_Truth remains elusive. Every six or eight weeks, another train derailment. Images fill our TV sets and cover the front pages. "Driver error," "mechanical failure," "a failed signal" --the rail company provides the reasons behind the accidents. But they are hiding the truth. Umberto Alvarez, a suspected terrorist, blames Northern Union Railroad for the crossing guard collision that killed his wife and twins two years earlier. He believes he and his family are the victims of a massive cover-up. The truth is nothing but a publicity stunt. Peter Tyler is an ex-cop looking to redeem himself after being suspended from the force for an assault that was taken out of context. Now a "temp" investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board, Tyler sees an opprotunity to jump-start his career. The truth of what happened that night will never be known, but a woman who steps out of a snowstorm and into his life may just hold the key to unlocking the past and allowing Tyler to move on.

Packed with action, laced with romance, brimming with heart-stopping suspense, and marked by the intelligence and humanity that make Ridley Pearson's novels stand apart, _Parallel Lies stays right on track, confirming that "the best damn thriller writer on the planet" (Booklist) is at the controls.

Born in 1953, Ridley Pearson is the _New York Times bestselling author of thirteen prior novels, including Middle of Nowhere, The First Victim, The Pied Piper, Beyond Recognition, Undercurrents, and Probable Cause. He was the first American to be awarded the Raymond ChandlerstFulbright Fellowship in Detective Fiction at Oxford University. His novel No Witnesses was selected by the ALA as one of the best works of fiction of 1994. Pearson and his wife, Marcelle, and their two daughters divide their time between the Midwest and the Northern Rockies. Check out Ridley's website: www.ridleypearson.com Praise for Ridley Pearson: v "They don't get any better than this!" --Janet Evanovich "Realistic police work, real people, real suspense. Ridley Pearson always delivers." --Tami Hoag

"Ridley knows cops, knows crime, and knows how to make the hair stand up on the back of your neck." --Dave Barry "A killer combination of Patricia Cornwell and John D. McDonald." --Stephen King

SPECIAL SYMBOLS USED

IN THIS VOLUME (4) Accent sign. Placed immediately before the print letter marked with an accent. Computer Braille Code ,2g9 ,-put] ,brl ,code4 End Computer Braille Code. _ (4-6) Period. ALSO BY RIDLEY PEARSON vii _Middle of Nowhere [features Lou Boldt] The First Victim [features Lou Boldt] The Pied Piper [features Lou Boldt] Beyond Recognition [features Lou Boldt] Chain of Evidence No Witnesses [features Lou Boldt] The Angel Maker [features Lou Boldt] Hard Fall Probable Cause Undercurrents [features Lou Boldt] Hidden Charges _Blood of the Albatross Never Look Back

WRITING AS

WENDELL McCALL Dead Aim _Aim for the Heart _Concerto in Dead Flat

SHORT STORIES "All Over but the Dying" in _Diagnosis:

_Terminal, edited by F. Paul Wilson

COLLECTIONS _The Putt at the End of the World, a serial novel

TELEVISION _Investigative Reports: Inside AA (AandE Network, June 2000) ix

Betsy Dodge Pearson

For holding us together all these years. For leading the way with grace and creativity. For the neighborhood art fairs in the backyard. For all those things too big and too small to mention. Support is a tiny word when laid at your feet. You hold the world sometimes. And all of us with it. You are the best. The only. The Betsy.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This novel was edited by Leigh Haber (Hyperion) and my agent Also Zuckerman (Writers House).

Special thanks to William Eder, Nick Gilman, C.J. Snow, for reading with a trained eye. Matthew Snyder, for the film work. Nancy Litzinger, Debbie Cimino, Mary Peterson, Louise Marsh, for everything you do at the office. Heidi Mack for creating and maintaining the web site. Courtney Samway for being our cyberspace mail courier. Thanks, too, to Ellen Archer and Bob Miller.

Marcelle, Paige, and Storey--as always, yours. PARALLEL LIES 1

CHAPTER 1 The train charged forward in the shimmering afternoon sunlight, autumn's vibrant colors forming a natural lane for the raised bed of chipped rock and a few hundred tons of steel and wood. The rails stretched out before the locomotive, light glinting off their polished surfaces, tricked by the eye into joining together a half mile in the distance, the illusion always moving forward at the speed of the train, as if those rails spread open just in time to carry her.

For the driver of the freight, it was another day in paradise. Alone with his thought, he and his brakeman, pulling lumber and fuel oil, cotton and cedar, sixteen shipping containers, and seven empty flatbeds. Paradise was the sound in your ears and that rumble up your legs. It was the blue sky meeting the silver swipe of tracks far off in the horizon. It was a peaceful job. The best work there was. It was lights and radios and doing something good for people--getting stuff from one place to another. The driver packed another pinch of chewing tobacco deep between his cheeks and gum, his mind partly distracted by the hum of the air conditioner in the bedroom of a mobile home still miles away, wondering where the hell he'd get the three hundred bucks needed to replace it. He could put it on the credit card, but that amounted to Peter robbing to pay Paul. Maybe some overtime. Maybe he'd put in an extra run. The sudden vibration was subtle enough that a passenger would not have felt it. A grinding, like bone rubbing on bone. His first thought was that some brakes had failed, that a compressor had failed, that he had a lockup midtrain. His hand reached to slow the mighty beast. But before he initiated any braking --before he only compounded the problem--he checked the mirror and caught sight of the length of her as the train chugged through a long, graceful turn and down a grade that had her really clipping along. It was then his heart had its first little flutter, then he felt a heat in his lungs and a tension in his neck like someone had pulled on a cable. It wasn't the brakes. A car--number seven or eight--was dancing back there like she'd had too much to drink. Shaking her hips and wiggling her shoulders all at once, kind of swimming right there in the middle of 3 all the others. Not the brakes, but an axle. Not something that could be resolved.

He knew the fate of that train before he touched a single control, before his physical motions caught up to the knowledge that fourteen years on the line brought to each situation. In stunned amazement, he watched that car do her dance. What looked like a graceful at first, appeared suddenly violent, no longer a dance but now a seizure as the front and the back of that car alternately jumped left to right and right to left, and its boxlike shape disintegrated into something awkwardly bent and awful. It leaned too far, and as it did, the next car began the same cruel jig. He pulled back on the throttle and applied the brakes but knew it was an exercise in futility. The locomotive now roiled with a tremor that shook dials to where he couldn't read them. His teeth rattled in his head as he reached for the radio. "Mayday!" he shouted, having no idea why. There were codes to use, procedure to follow, but only the one word exploded from his mouth.

The cars rolled now, one after the another, first toward the back then forward towards the locomotive, the whole thing dragging and tilted right and fell, swiping the trees like the tail of the dragon, splintering and knocking them down like toothpicks, the sky littered with autumn colors. And then a ripple began as that tail lifted briefly toward the sky. The cars, one coupled to the next, floated above the tracks and then fell, like someone shaking a kink out of a lawn hose. Going for the door handle, he let go of the throttle, the "dead man's switch" taking over and cutting engine power. He lost his footing and fell into the floor of the cab, his brain numb and in shock. He didn't know whether to jump or ride it out. He would later tell investigators that the noise was like nothing he'd ever heard, like nothing that could be described. Part scream. Part explosion. A deafening, immobilizing dissonance, while the smell of steel sparking on steel rose in his nostrils and sickened his stomach to where he sat puking on the oily cab floor, crying out as loudly as he could in an effort to block out that sound. 5