by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
“Over there.” Pita Cardenas waved a hand at the remaining empty spot on the floor of her office. The Federal Express deliveryman rested a hand on top of the stack of boxes on his handcart.
“I don’t think it’ll fit.”
It probably wouldn’t. Her office was about the size of the studio apartment she’d had when she went to law school in Albuquerque. She could have had a cubicle with more square footage if she’d taken the job that La Jolla, Webster, and Garcia offered her when she graduated from law school five years before.
But her mother had been dying, and had refused to leave Rio Gordo. So Pita had come back to the town she thought she’d escaped from, put out her shingle, and had gotten a handful of cases, enough to pay the rent on this sorry excuse for an office. If she’d wanted something bigger, she would have had to buy, and even at Rio Gordo’s depressed prices, she couldn’t afford payments on the most dilapidated building in town.
She stood up. The FedEx guy, who drove here every day from Lubbock, was looking at her with pity. He was trim and tanned, with a deep West Texas accent. If she had been less tired and overwhelmed, she would have flirted with him.
“Let’s put this batch in the bathroom,” she said and led the way through the rabbit path she’d made between the boxes. The FedEx guy followed, dragging the six boxes on his handtruck and probably chafing at the extra time she was costing him.
She opened the door. He put the boxes inside, tipped an imaginary hat to her, and left. She’d have to crawl over them to get to the toilet, but she’d manage.
Six boxes today, twenty yesterday, thirty the day before. Dwyer, Ralbotten, Seacur and Czolb was burying her in paper.
Of course, she had expected it. She was a solo practitioner in a town whose population probably didn’t equal the number of people who worked at DRS&C.
People had told her she was crazy to take this case. But she was crazy like an impoverished attorney. Every other firm in New Mexico had told her client, Nan Hughes, to settle. The problem was that Nan didn’t want to settle. Settling meant losing everything she owned.
Pita took the case and charged Nan two thousand dollars, with more due and owing when (if) the case went to trial. Pita didn’t plan on taking the case to trial. At trial, she wouldn’t just get creamed, she’d be pureed, sauteed, and recycled.
But she did plan to work for that two grand. She would spend exactly one month filing motions, doing depositions, and listening to offers. She figured once she had actual numbers, she’d be able to convince Nan to take a deal.
If not, she’d resign and wish Nan luck finding a new attorney.
Her actions wouldn’t hurt Nan. Nan had a spectacular loser of a case. She was taking on the railroads and two major insurance companies. She had no idea how bad things could get.
Pita would show her. Nan wouldn’t exactly be happy with her lot—how could she be, when she’d lost her husband, her business, and her home on the same day?—but she would finally understand how impossible the winning was.
Pita was doing her a favor and making a little money besides.
And what was wrong with that?
* * * *
At its heart, the case was simple. Ty Hughes tried to beat a train and failed. He survived long enough to leave his wife a voice mail message, which Pita had heard in all its heartbreaking slowness:
“Nan baby, I tried to beat it. I thought I could beat it.”
Then his diesel truck engine caught fire with him in it, horribly alive, in the middle of the wreck.
The accident occurred on a long stretch of brown nothingness on the New Mexico side of the Texas-New Mexico border. A major highway ran a half mile parallel to the tracks. On the opposite side of the tracks stood the Hughes ranch and all its outbuildings.
Nan Hughes and the people who worked her spread watched the accident. She didn’t answer her cell because she’d left it on the kitchen counter in her panic to get down the dirt road where her husband’s cattle truck had been demolished by a fast-moving train.
And not just any train.
This train pulled dozens of oil tankers.
It was a miracle the truck engine fire hadn’t spread to the tankers and the entire region hadn’t exploded into one great fireball.
Pita had been familiar with the case long before Nan Hughes came to her. For weeks, the news carried stories about dead cattle along the highway, the devastated widow, the ruined ranch, and the angry railroad officials who had choice (and often bleeped) words about the idiots who tried to race trains.
It didn’t matter that the crossing was unmarked. Even if Ty hadn’t left that confession on Nan’s voice mail (which she had deleted but which the cell company was so thoughtfully able to retrieve), trains in this part of the country were visible for miles in either direction.
The railroads wanted the ranch, the cattle (what was left of them), and millions from the ranch’s liability insurance. The liability insurance company was willing to settle for a simple million, and the other law firms had told Nan to sell the ranch and pay the railroads from the proceeds. That way she could live on Ty’s life insurance and move away from the site of the disaster.
But Nan kept saying that Ty would haunt her if she gave in. That he had never raced a train in his life. That he knew how far away a train was by its appearance against the horizon—and that he had taught her the same trick.
When Pita gently asked why Ty had confessed to trying to beat the train, Nan had burst into tears.
“Something went wrong,” she said. “Maybe he got stuck. Maybe he hadn’t looked up. He was in shock. He was dying. He was just trying to talk to me one last time.”
Pita could hear any good lawyer tear that argument to shreds, just using Ty’s wording. If Ty wanted to talk with her, why hadn’t he told her he loved her? Why had he talked about the train?
Pita had gently asked that too. Nan had looked at her from across the desk, her wet cheeks chapped from all the tears she’d shed.
“He knew I saw what happened. He wanted me to know he never would have done that to me on purpose.”
In this context, “on purpose” had a lot of different definitions. Ty Hughes probably didn’t want his wife to see him die in a train wreck, certainly not in a train wreck he caused. But he had crossed a railroad track with a double-decker cattle truck carrying two hundred head. He had no acceleration, and no maneuverability.
He’d taken a gamble, and he’d lost.
At least, Nan hadn’t seen the fire in the cab. The truck had flipped over the train, landing on the highway side of the tracks, and had been impossible to see from the ranch side. Whatever Ty Hughes’s last few minutes had looked like, Nan had missed them.
She had only her imagination, her anger at the railroads, and her unshakeable faith in her dead husband.
Those were not enough to win a case of this magnitude.
If someone asked Pita what her case really was (and if this imaginary someone could get her to answer honestly), what she’d say was that she was going to try Ty Hughes before his wife, and show her how impossible a defense of the man’s actions that morning would be in court.
And Pita believed her own powers of persuasion were enough to convince her jury of one to settle.
* * * *
But the boxes were daunting. In them were bits and pieces of information, reproduced letters and memos that probably showed some kind of railroad duplicity, however minor. A blot on an engineer’s record, for example, or an accident at that same crossing twenty years before.
If Pita had the support of a giant law firm like La Jolla, Webster, and Garcia, she might actually delve into that material. Instead, she let it stack up like unread novels in the home of an obsessive compulsive.
The only thing she did do was take out the witness list, which had come in its own envelope as part of court-ordered discovery. The list had the witnesses’ names along with their addresses, phone numbers, and the dates of their depositions. DRS&C was so thorough that each witness had a single line notation at the bottom of the cover sheet describing the reason the witness had been deposed in this case.
The list would help Pita in her quest to recreate the accident itself. She had dozens of questions. Had someone inspected the truck to see if it malfunctioned at the time of the accident? Why had Ty stayed in the truck when it was clear that it was going to catch fire? How badly had he been injured? How good was Ty’s eyesight? And how come no one helped him before the truck caught fire?
She was going to cover all her bases. All she needed was one argument strong enough to let Nan keep the house.
She was afraid she might not even find that.
DRS&C’s categories were pretty straightforward. They had categories for the ranch, the railroad, and the eyewitnesses.
A number of the witnesses belonged to separate lawsuits, started because of the fender benders on the nearby highway. About a dozen cars had damage—some while they were stopped beside the road, and others because they’d been going too fast to stop when the train accident occurred.
Pita started charting the location of the cars as she figured this category out and realized all of them had been in the far inside lane, going east. People who had pulled over to help Ty and the railroad employees had instead been dealing with accidents involving their own cars.
A separate group of accident victims had resolved insurance claims: their vehicles had been hit or had hit a cow that had escaped from the cattle truck. One poor man had had his SUV gored by an enraged bull.
Cars heading west had had an easier time of things. None had hit each other and a few had stopped. Of those who had stopped, some were listed as 911 callers. One had grabbed a fire extinguisher and eventually tried to put out the truck cab fire. That person had prevented the fire from spreading to the tankers.
But the category that caught Pita’s attention was a simple one. Several people on the list had been marked “Witness,” with no accompanying explanation.
One had an extra long zip code, and as she entered it into her own computer data base, she realized that the last three digits weren’t part of the zip code at all.
They were a previous notation, one that hadn’t been deleted.
Originally, this witness had been in the 911 category.
She decided to start with him.
* * * *
C.P. Williams was a Texas financier of the Houston variety, even though his offices were in Lubbock. He wore cowboy boots, but they were custom made, hand-tooled jobbies that wouldn’t last fifteen minutes on a real ranch. He had an oversized silver belt buckle and he wore a bolo tie, but his shiny suit was definitely not off the rack and neither was the silk shirt underneath it. His cufflinks matched his belt buckle and he twisted them as he led Pita into his office.
“I already gave a deposition,” he said.
“Before I was on the case,” Pita said.
His office was big, with original oil paintings of the Texas Hill Country and a large but not particularly pretty view of downtown Lubbock.
“Can’t you just read it?” He slipped behind a custom-made desk. The chair in front was made of hand-tooled leather that made her think of his impractical boots.
She sat down. The leather pattern bit through the thin pants of her best suit.
“I have a few questions of my own.” She took out a small tape recorder. “I may have to call you in for a second deposition, but I hope not.”
Mostly because she would have to rent space as well as a court reporter in order to conduct that deposition. Right now she simply wanted to see if any testimony was worth the extra cost.
“I don’t have that much time. I barely have enough time to see you now.” He glanced at his watch for emphasis.
She clicked on the recorder. “Then let’s do this quickly. Please state your name and occupation for the record.”
He did.
When he finished, she said, “On the morning of the accident—”
“I never saw that damn accident,” he said. “I told the other lawyers that.”
She was surprised. Why had they talked with him then? She was interviewing blind. So she went with the one fact she knew.
“You called 911. Why?”
“Because of the train,” he said.
“What about the train?”
“Damn thing was going twice as fast as it should have been.”
For the first time since she’d taken this case, she finally felt a flicker of real interest. “Trains speed?”
“Of course trains speed,” he said. “But this one wasn’t just speeding. It was going well over a hundred miles an hour.”
“You know that because ...?”
“I was going seventy. It passed me. I had nothing else to do, so I figured out the rate of passage. Speed limits for trains on that section of track is sixty-five. Most weeks, the trains match me, or drop back just a bit. This one was leaving me in the dust.”
She was leaning forward. If the train was speeding—and if she could prove it—then the accident wasn’t Ty’s fault alone. He wouldn’t have been able to judge how fast the train was going. And if it was going twice as fast as usual, it would have reached him two times quicker than he expected.
“So why call 911?” she asked. “What can they do?”
“Not a damn thing,” he said. “I just wanted it on record when the train derailed or blew through a crossing or hit some kid on the way to school.”
“You could have contacted the railroad or maybe the NTSB,” she said. “They could have fined the operators or pulled the engineers off the train.”
“I could have,” he said. “I didn’t want to.”
She frowned. “Why not?”
“Because I wanted the record.”
And because he repeated that sentence, she felt a slight shiver. “Have you done this before? Clocked trains going too fast, I mean.”
“Yeah.” He sounded surprised at the question. “So?”
“Do you call 911 on people speeding in cars?”
His eyes narrowed. “No.”
“So why do you call on trains?”
“I told you. The potential damage—”
“Did you contact the police after the accident, then?” she asked.
“No. It was already on record. They could find it. That attorney did.”
“I wouldn’t know how to compute how fast a train was going while I was driving,” she said. “I mean, if we were going the same speed or something close, sure. But not an extra thirty miles an hour or more. That’s quite a trick.”
“Simple math,” he said. “You had to do problems like that in school. We all did.”
“I suppose,” she said. “But it’s not something I would think to do. Why did you?”
For the first time, he looked down. He didn’t say anything.
“Do you have something against the railroad?” she asked.
His head shot up. “Now you sound like them.”
“Them?”
“Those other lawyers.”
She started to nod, but made herself stop. “What did they say?”
His lips thinned. “They said that I’m just making stuff up to get the railroad in trouble. They said that I’m pathetic. Me! I outearn half those walking suits. I make money every damn day, and I do it without investing in any land holdings or railroad companies. They have no idea who I am.”
Neither did she, really, but she thought she’d humor him.
“You’re a good citizen,” she said.
“Damn straight.”
“Trying to protect other citizens.”
“That’s right.”
“From the railroads.”
“They think they can run all over the countryside like they’re invulnerable. That train pulling oil tankers, imagine if it had derailed in that accident. You’d’ve heard the explosion in Rio Gordo.”
Probably seen it too. He had a point.
“Tell me,” she said. “Is there any way we can prove the train was going that fast?”
“The 911 call,” he said.
“Besides the 911 call,” she said.
He leaned back as he considered her question. “I’m sure a lot of people saw it. Or you could examine that truck. You know, it’s just basic physics. If you vary the speed of an oncoming train in an impact with a similar truck frame, you’ll get differing results. I’m sure you can find some experts to testify.”
You could find experts to testify on anything. But she didn’t say that. She was curious about his expertise, though. He seemed to know a lot about trains.
She asked, “Wouldn’t a train derail at that speed when it hit a truck like that?”
“Actually, no. It would be less likely to derail when it was going too fast. That truck was a cattle truck, right? If the train hit the cattle car and not the cab, then the train would’ve treated that truck like tissue. Most cattle cars are made of aluminum. At over a hundred miles per hour, the train would have gone through it like paper.”
Interesting. She would check that.
“One last question, Mr. Williams. When did the railroad fire you?”
He blinked at her, stunned. She had caught him. That’s why DRS&C’s attorneys had called him pathetic. Because he had a reason for his train obsession.
A bad reason.
“That was a long time ago,” he whispered.
But she still might be able to use him if he had some kind of expertise. If his old job really did require that he clock trains by sight alone.
“What did you do for them?”
He coughed, then had the grace to finally meet her gaze. “I was a security guard at the station here in Lubbock.”
Security guard. Not an engineer, not anyone with special training. Just a guy with a phony badge and a gun.
“That’s when you learned to clock trains,” she said.
He smiled. “You have to do something to pass the time.”
She bit back her frustration. For a few minutes, he’d given her some hope. But all she had was a fired security guard with a grudge.
She wrapped up the interview as politely as she could, and headed into the bright Texas sunshine.
And allowed herself one small moment to wish that C.P. Williams had been a real witness, one that could have opened this case wide.
Then she sighed, and went back to preparing her case for her jury of one.
* * * *
Most everyone else in the witness category on DRS&C’s list was either a rubbernecker or someone who had made a false 911 call. Pita had had no idea how many people reported a crime or an accident after seeing coverage of it on television, but she was starting to learn.
She was also learning why the police didn’t fine or arrest these people. Most of them were certifiably crazy.
Pita was beginning to think the list was worthless. Then she interviewed Earl Jessup Jr.
Jessup was a contractor who had been on his way to Lubbock to pick up a friend from the airport when he’d seen the accident. He’d pulled over, and because he was so well known in Rio Gordo, someone had remembered he was there.
When Pita arrived at his immaculate house in one of Rio Gordo’s failed housing developments, she promised herself she wouldn’t interview any more witnesses. Then Jessup pulled the door open. He smiled in recognition. So did she.
She had talked with him in the hospital cafeteria during her mother’s final surgery. He’d been there for his brother, who’d been in a horrendous accident, and who had somehow managed to survive.
They hadn’t exchanged names.
He was a small man with brown hair in need of a good trim. His house smelled faintly of cigarette smoke and aftershave. The living room had been modified—lowered furniture and wide paths cut through what had once been wall-to-wall carpet.
“Your brother moved in with you, huh?” she asked.
“He needed somebody,” Jessup said with a finality that closed the subject.
He led her into the kitchen. On the right side of the room, the cabinets had been pulled from the walls. A dishwasher peeked out of the debris. On the left were frames for lowered countertops. Only the sink, the stove, and the refrigerator remained intact, like survivors in a war zone.
He pulled a chair out for her at the kitchen table. The table was shorter than regulation height. An ashtray sat near the end of the table, but no chair. That had to be where his brother usually parked.
Pita pulled out her tape recorder and a notebook. She explained again why she was there, and asked Jessup to state some information for the record. She implied, as she had with all the others, that this informal conversation was as good as being under oath.
Jessup smiled as she went through her spiel. He seemed to know that his words would have no real bearing on the case unless he was giving a formal deposition.
“I didn’t see the accident,” he said. “I got there after.”
He’d missed the fender benders and the first wave of the injured cows. He’d pulled up just as the train stopped. He’d been the one to organize the scene. He’d sent two men east and two men west to slow traffic until the sheriff arrived.
He’d made sure people in the various accidents exchanged insurance information, and he got the folks who’d suffered minor bumps and bruises to the side of the road. He directed a couple of teenagers to keep an eye on the injured animals and make sure none of them made for the road again.
Then he’d headed down the embankment toward the overturned truck.
“It wasn’t on fire yet?”
“No,” he said. “I have no idea how it got on fire.”
She frowned. “It overturned. It was leaking diesel and the engine was on.”
“So the fancy Dallas lawyers tell me,” he said.
“You don’t believe them?”
“First thing any good driver does after an accident is shut off his engine.”
“Maybe,” she said. “If he’s not in shock. Or seriously injured. Or both.”
“Ty had enough presence of mind to make that phone call.” Everyone in Rio Gordo knew about that call. Some even cursed it, thinking Nan could own the railroads if Ty hadn’t picked up his cell. “He would’ve shut off his engine.”
Pita wasn’t so sure.
“Besides, he wasn’t in the cab.”
That caught her attention. “How do you know?”
“I saw him. He was sitting on some debris halfway up the road. That’s why I was in no great hurry to get down there. He’d gotten himself out; there wasn’t much I could do until the ambulance arrived.”
Jessup had a construction worker’s knowledge of injuries. He knew how to treat bruises and he knew what to do for trauma. He’d talked with her about that in the cafeteria, when he’d told her how helpless he’d felt coming on his brother’s car wrapped around a utility pole. He hadn’t been able to get his brother out of the car—the ambulance crew later used the jaws of life—and he was afraid his brother would bleed out right there.
“But you went to help Ty anyway,” Pita said.
Jessup got up, walked to the stove, and lifted up the coffee pot. He’d been brewing the old-fashioned way, in a percolator, probably because he didn’t have any counter space.
“Want some?” he asked.
“Please,” she said, thinking it might get him to talk.
He pulled two mugs out of the dishwasher, then set them on top of the stove. “I thought he was going to be fine.”
“You’re not a doctor. You don’t know.” She wasn’t acting like a lawyer now. She was acting like a friend, and she knew it.
He grabbed the pot and poured coffee into both mugs. Then he brought them to the table.
“I did know,” he said. “I knew there was trouble, and I left.”
“Sounds like you did a lot before you left,” she said, trying to move him past this. She remembered long talks about his guilt over his brother’s accident. “Organizing the people, making sure Ty was okay. Seems to me that you did more than most.”
He shook his head.
“What else could you have done?” she asked.
“I could’ve gone down there and helped him,” he said. “If nothing else, I could’ve defended him against those men with guns.”
Pita went cold. Men with guns. She hadn’t heard about men with guns.
“Who had guns?” she asked.
He gave her a self-deprecating smile, apparently realizing how dramatic he had sounded. “Everyone has guns. This is the Texas-New Mexico border.”
He’d said too much, and he clearly wanted to backtrack. She wouldn’t let him.
“Not everyone uses them at the scene of an accident,” she said.
“If they had been smart, they might have. That bull was mighty scary.”
“Who had guns?” she asked.
He sighed, clearly knowing she wouldn’t back down. “The engineers. They carried their rifles out of the train.”
She raised her eyebrows, not sure what to say.
He seemed to think she didn’t believe him, so he went on. “I figured they were carrying the guns to shoot any livestock that got in their way. Made me want my gun. I’d been thinking about the accident, not about a bunch of injured animals that weighed eight times what I did.”
“Why did you leave?” she asked.
“It was a judgment call,” he said. “I was watching those engineers walk. With purpose.”
As she listened to Jessup recount the story, she realized the purpose had nothing to do with cattle. These men carried their rifles like they intended to use them. They weren’t looking at the carnage. After they’d finished inspecting the train for damage, they didn’t look at the train either.
Instead, they headed for Ty. “That’s when I decided not to stay. I thought Ty was going to be fine.”
He paused. She waited, knowing if she pushed him, he might not say any more.
Jessup ran a hand through his hair. “I knew that in situations like this tempers get out of hand. I couldn’t be the voice of reason. I might even get some of the blame.”
He wrapped his hands around his coffee mug. He hadn’t touched the liquid.
“Besides,” he said, “I could see Ty’s cowboys. They were riding around the train and heading toward the loose cattle near the highway. So if things got ugly, they could help him. I headed back up the embankment, went to my truck, and drove on to Lubbock.”
“Then I don’t understand why this is bothering you,” she said. “You did as much as you could, then you left it to others, the ones who needed to handle the problem.”
“Yeah,” he said softly. “I tell myself that.”
“But?”
He tilted his head, as if shaking some thoughts loose. “But a couple of things don’t make sense. Like why did Ty go back into the cab of that truck? And how come no one smelled the diesel? Wouldn’t it bother them so close to the oil tankers?”
She waited, watching him. He shrugged.
“And then there’s the nightmares.”
“Nightmares?” she asked.
“I get into my truck, and as I slam the door, I hear a gunshot. It’s half a second behind the sound of the door slamming, but it’s clear.”
“Did you really hear that?” she asked.
“I like to think that if I did, I would’ve gone back. But I didn’t. I just drove away, like nothing had happened. And a friend of mine died.”
He didn’t say anything else. She took another sip of her coffee, careful not to set the mug too close to her recorder.
“No one else reported gunshots,” she said.
He nodded.
“No one else saw Ty outside that cab,” she said.
“He was in a gully. I was the only one who went down the embankment. You couldn’t see him from the road.”
“And the truck? Could you see it?”
He shook his head.
“What do you think happened?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, “and it’s driving me insane.”
* * * *
It bothered her, too, but not in quite the same way.
She found Jessup in DRS&C’s list of 911 nutcases. He’d been buried among the crazies, just like important information was probably hidden in the boxes that littered her office floor.
No one else had seen the angry engineers or Ty out of the truck, but no one could quite figure out how he’d made that cell phone call either. If he’d been sitting on some debris outside the cab, that made more sense that calling from inside, while bleeding, with the engine running and diesel dripping.
But Jessup was right. It raised some disturbing questions.
They bothered her, enough so that she called Nan on her cell phone during the drive back to her office.
“Do you have a copy of the autopsy report for Ty?” Pita asked.
“There was no autopsy,” Nan said. “It’s pretty clear how he died.”
Pita sighed. “What about the truck? What happened to it?”
“Last I saw, it was in Digger’s Salvage Yard.”
* * * *
Pita pulled into the salvage yard and parked near a dented Toyota. Digger was a good ol’ boy who salvaged parts, and when he couldn’t, he used a crusher to demolish the vehicles into metal for scrap.
But he still had the cab of that truck—insurance wouldn’t release it until the case was settled.
For the first time, Pita looked at the cab herself, but she couldn’t see anything except charred metal, a steel frame, and a ruined interior. She wasn’t an expert, and she needed one.
It took only a moment to call an old friend in Albuquerque who knew a good freelance forensic examiner. The examiner wanted five hundred dollars plus expenses to travel to Rio Gordo and look at the truck.
Pita hesitated. She could have—and should have—called Nan for the expense money. But the examiner’s presence would raise Nan’s hopes. And right now, Pita couldn’t do that. She was trusting a man she’d met late night at the hospital, a man who talked her through her mother’s last illness, a man she couldn’t quite get enough distance from to examine his veracity.
She needed more than Jessup’s nightmares and speculations. She needed something that might pass for proof.
* * * *
“I can’t tell you when it got there,” said the examiner, Walter Shepard. He was a slender man with intense eyes. He wore a plaid shirt despite the heat and tan trousers that had pilled from too many washings.
He was sitting in Pita’s office. She had moved some boxes aside so that the path into the office was wider. She’d also found a chair that had been buried since the case began.
He pushed some photographs onto her desk. The photographs were close-ups of the truck’s cab. He’d thoughtfully drawn an arrow next to the tiny hole in the door on the driver’s side.
“It’s definitely a bullet hole. It’s too smooth to be anything else,” he said. “And there’s another in the seat. I was able to recover part of a bullet.”
He shifted the photos so that she could see a shattered metal fragment.
“The problem is I can’t tell you anything else, except that the bullet holes predate the fire. I can’t tell you how long they were there or how they got there. They could be real old. Or brand-new. I can’t tell.”
“That’s all right.” A bullet hole, along with Jessup’s testimony, was enough to cast doubt on everything. She felt like she could go to DRS&C and ask for a settlement.
She wasn’t even regretting that she hadn’t worked on contingency. This case was proving easier than she had thought it would be.
“I know you asked me to look for evidence of shooting or a fight,” Shepard said, “but I wouldn’t be doing my job if I let it go at that. The anomaly here isn’t the bullets. It’s the fire itself.”
She looked up from the photos, surprised. Shepard wasn’t watching her. He was still studying the photographs. He put a finger on one of them.
“The diesel leaked. There’s runoff along the tank and a drip pattern that trails to the passenger side of the cab.”
The cab had landed on its passenger side.
“But the fire started here.” He was touching the photo of the interior of the cab. He pushed his finger against the image of the ruined seat. “See how the flames spread upwards. You can see the burn pattern. And fuel fed it. It burned around something—probably the body—so it looks to me like someone poured fuel onto the body itself and lit it on fire. I didn’t find a match, but I found the remains of a Bic lighter on the floor of the cab. It melted, but it’s not burned the way everything else is. I think it was tossed in after the fire started.”
Pita was having trouble wrapping her mind around what he was saying. “You’re saying someone deliberately started the fire? So close to oil tankers?”
“I think that someone knew the truck wouldn’t explode. The fire was pretty contained.”
“Some people from the highway had a fire extinguisher in their car. It was too late to save Ty.”
“You’ll want your examiner to look at the body again,” Shepard said. “I have a hunch you’ll find that your client’s husband was dead before he burned, not after.”
“Based on this pattern.”
“A man doesn’t sit calmly and let himself burn to death,” Shepard said. “He was able to make a phone call. He was conscious. He would have tried to get out of that cab. He didn’t.”
Pita was shaking. If this was true, then this case went way beyond a simple accident. If this was true, then those engineers shot Ty and tried to cover it up.
Ballsy, considering how close to the road they had been.
The other drivers had been preoccupied with their own accidents and the injured cows and stopping traffic. No one except Jessup had even tried to come down the embankment.
And the engineers, who drove the route a lot, would have known how hard that truck was to see from the road. They would have figured that the burning cab would get put out once someone saw the smoke. No wonder they’d lit the body. They didn’t want to risk catching the cab on fire, and leaving the bullet-ridden corpse untouched.
“You’re sure?” Pita asked.
“Positive.” Shepard gathered the photos. “If I were you, I’d take this to the state police. You don’t have an accident here. You have cold-blooded murder.”
* * * *
The next few weeks became a blur. DRS&C dropped the suit, becoming the friendliest big law firm that Pita had ever known. Which made her wonder when they’d realized that the engineers had committed murder.
Either way, it didn’t matter. DRS&C was willing to work with her to do whatever it took to “make Mrs. Hughes happy.”
Nan wouldn’t be happy until her husband’s killers were brought to justice. She snapped into action the moment the state coroner confirmed Shepard’s hunches. Ty had been shot in the skull before he died, and then his body had been burned to cover up the crime.
If Nan hadn’t worked so hard and believed in her husband so much, no one would have known.
The story came out slowly. The train had been speeding when Ty crossed the tracks. Williams’s estimate of more than a hundred miles per hour was probably correct—enough for the railroads to have liability right there.
But the engineers, both frightened by the accident itself and terrified for their jobs, had walked the length of the train to Ty’s overturned truck and, finding him alive and relatively unhurt, let their anger explode.
They’d threatened him with the loss of everything if he didn’t confess that he had failed to beat the train. He’d made the call to satisfy them. But it hadn’t worked. Somehow—neither man was going to admit how (not even more than a year later at sentencing)—one of the rifles had gone off, killing him. Then they’d stuffed him in the cab—whose ignition was off—poured some diesel from the spill on him, and lit him on fire.
They watched him burn for a few minutes before going up the embankment to see if anyone had a fire extinguisher in his car. Fortunately, someone did. Otherwise, they planned to have someone drive them the two miles to the engine for the train’s fire extinguishers.
The engineers were eventually convicted, Nan got to keep her ranch and her husband’s reputation, and the railroads kept trying to settle.
But Pita insisted that Nan hire an attorney who specialized in cases against big companies. Pita helped with the hire, finding someone with a great reputation who wasn’t afraid of a thousand boxes of evidence and, more importantly, would work on contingency.
“You sure you don’t want it?” Nan had asked, maybe two dozen times.
And each time, Pita had said, “Positive. The case is too big for me.”
Although it wasn’t. She could have gone to La Jolla, Webster, and Garcia as a rainmaker, someone who brought in a huge case and made millions for the company.
But she didn’t.
Because this case had taught her a few things.
She had learned that she hated big cases with lots and lots of evidence.
She’d learned that she really didn’t care about the money. (Although the ten thousand dollar bonus that Nan had paid her—a bonus Pita hadn’t asked for—had come in very handy.)
And she learned how valuable it was to know the people of her town. If she hadn’t spent all those evenings in the cafeteria with Jessup, she wouldn’t have trusted his story, and she never would have hired the forensic examiner.
Her mom had been right, all those years ago. Rio Gordo wasn’t a bad place. Yeah, it was impoverished. Yeah, it was filled with dust, and didn’t have a good night life or a great university.
But it did have some pretty spectacular people.
People who congratulated Pita for the next year on her success in the Hughes case. People who now came to her to do their wills or their prenups. People who asked her advice on the smallest legal matters and believed her when she gave them an unvarnished opinion.
Her biggest case had helped her discover her calling: She was a small-town attorney who cared more about the people around her than the money their cases could bring in.
She wouldn’t be rich.
But she would be happy.
And that was more than enough.