Silent Mercy

THIRTY-NINE

I tried the number for the Reverend Jeanine Portland as Mike sped south. My message went to voice mail, and when I rang the landline at the Nantucket church office, I reached a secretary who told me that the minister was off-island until later in the evening. She was sorry, she told me, that she had no idea where Portland’s trip had taken her.

“You’d better call the police department there, Mercer,” I said. “Someone is bound to have a relationship with Portland. I’d like them to track her down and make sure they sit on her for the night.”

“What time’s the last boat?”

I knew the Woods Hole to Martha’s Vineyard ferry schedule cold, on- and off-season, for all of the years that I had been summering there with my family, before my late fiancé and I bought our home. Nantucket was even farther out to sea, and many fewer ferries ran there from the Steamship Authority dock in Hyannis.

“Probably eight tonight. If she’s traveling by car, there should be a reservation in the computer that will give us a clue to her travel plans.”

Mercer was on the phone, patching through from Information to the small police department that watched over the winter population of ten thousand. He explained the situation to a duty detective, who knew Portland and promised to track her down. He would have her met on the Cape side, escorted onto the ferry, and not left alone until we contacted him about the status of our hunt for the killer.

We took the Secaucus exit and at the bottom of the ramp were joined by two patrol cars from the local department. Lieutenant Peterson had given their boss the coordinates of the only triangulated call and sent his men to guide us to the area that was most likely the cell source. Mercer got out of the car to introduce himself and listen to their suggestions.

“Follow these guys,” he said when he climbed back in. “They’re going to take us to the spot our tech team plotted from the cell-tower coordinates.”

Not far from the highway, the cops led us off the local streets and onto a dirt road. It was lined with amber reeds, tall and willowy, that waved in the strong wind and made it impossible to see far on either side of the trail.

Mike drove for more than a half mile before the landscape cleared. Strong odors rose in intensity the farther from the highway we went, unless it was my imagination that had taken hold of all my senses.

The Crown Vic rattled as we rode over a series of gravel-lined railroad-track beds. The tracks themselves trailed off in both directions, crisscrossing back and forth as far as I could see. Old freight cars, with rusted metal trim and weathered paint chipped off the sides, stood at dead-ended points along the way as though they’d been abandoned years earlier.

“Where the hell are these guys headed?” Mike asked, honking his horn at them to slow down. “It’s the ass end of nowhere out here. We’re going to need an army to search.”

“Peterson says he’ll give us one.” I leaned forward, peering over Mercer’s broad shoulders as we rounded a curve, crossed the tracks again, and came upon a sea of white trucks, maybe thirty of them.

Mike pulled up even with the second patrol car. “What have we got, guys?”

The caravan of commercial vehicles were all the same shape, double the size of vans but only half as large as eighteen-wheelers. They were painted a glossy white, with strips of metallic silver material outlining their sides and tops. Unlike the vintage freight cars we had just passed, this looked like an entirely new fleet of trucks.

The cop in the passenger seat pointed with his right hand, and I followed the tip of his leather glove. “That’s a warehouse parking lot.”

“Active?” Mike asked, opening the door and stepping out of the car. Mercer and I followed suit.

“Yeah. It services one of the food-delivery companies based in Newark.”

Close, but not so close that anyone in the main warehouse would be stationed in this lot at all hours.

Mercer and I walked up behind the last van and around its side. Like all commercial vehicles, its name and logo were stenciled on it in bright red lettering.

The words ALDEN’S ANGUS appeared above a picture of a cow grazing in a pasture, blissfully unaware of its fate.

“Are these trucks refrigerated?” I asked Mike, who was on his knees examining the underside of one of them.

Chat Grant had complained of the cold when she called her sister. I knew Mike had that on his mind.

“Beef delivery trucks? Count on it, Coop.” He stood up and turned to the Secaucus cops. “Get your boss to call the main shop in Newark. Somebody needs to get over here yesterday and open every one of these up.”

The driver got back in his patrol car and radioed headquarters.

Mike kept shouting questions. “Find out how many trucks like this there are in the company. How many are supposed to be here. Somebody has to tell us if any of them are missing.”

“I’m not waiting for that answer,” Mercer said, stepping away to make his call. “I’m telling Peterson to get out an APB right now. Use it with the photo of Chastity Grant. I-95 runs from Maine to Florida and passes right through the ’hood. If she isn’t in one of these trucks right here, then our boy is on the run with her.”

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Mike?”

“A mobile abattoir. A slaughterhouse on wheels.”

A chill went through me. We had lost the afternoon sun and the March wind was showing off its strength.

“Help yourself to one of these trucks and you could travel all over the city — any city — and you’d just be one more frigging deliveryman, no matter what time of the day or night. The refrigeration would keep a body cool. No one would make much of the sight of a little more blood inside the rear, and it would be damn impossible to hear anything from within these walls,” Mike said, slamming his hand against the side of the heavy vehicle.

A train whistle blew nearby and I started. “I thought these tracks were dead.”

The second uniformed cop laughed at me. “They don’t see too much action, but one of them’s got a load pulling out now. You’re fine where you are. Gettin’ jumpy, ma’am?”

“High-strung type, she is,” Mike said, walking around from truck to truck, pulling at the handles on the rear of each one and banging on the doors to try to elicit a response, in case Chat Grant was locked inside. “Coop’ll jump if you keep staring at her the way you’re doing. She takes everything way too personally.”

There was an engine coming into sight from around the bend in the tracks. The black locomotive seemed to be headed straight toward us, moving at a snail’s pace.

“Just an optical illusion, ma’am,” the cop said. “He’ll be on that outer rail, nowhere near you.”

The whistle blew again and the train chugged along in our direction. I stepped back anyway and could see the long chain of railroad cars trailing behind, their brightly colored sides a sharp contrast with the ebony steel of the lead engine.

It didn’t look like any train I had ever seen before, because of the reds and blues and yellows that decorated it so gaily. I counted as more than fifteen cars took up the lead in the procession out of the Secaucus swamps, with no end in sight.

Now I could begin to make out the writing that was highlighted by the bold paint. Chat Grant hadn’t been confused when she mumbled something to her sister, Faith, about both trucks and trains.

And my paralegal, Max, hadn’t been far off in her wordplay with the torn papers Naomi Gersh had left behind in her apartment. Max had figured the U and S to have formed the word “bus,” making a trifecta of three forms of transportation — bus, truck, and train.

“Where’s the lightning, Coop?” Mike asked. “You look dumbstruck.”

The whistle was competing with me for Mike’s attention. “Make it stop, Mike. Stop the damn train, will you?”

“What am I supposed to do for you, kid? Throw myself down on the tracks?”

They were all laughing at me, but now I knew what words the letters on Naomi’s note to herself had formed before she left her apartment for the last time. I was on the adjacent bed of railroad tracks, weeds tangled around my legs, waving at the engineer to stop the slow-moving train.

“Yes, if that’s what it takes to keep it from leaving town. I thought you’d do anything for me,” I said, flashing him a smile.

“That was before I met Chat Grant.”

“Well, then, do it for her,” I said as Mike walked toward me. “Remember the notes that Daniel Gersh was ripping to shreds in his sister’s apartment, just hours after her murder?”

“Yeah.”

“They had something to do with a train.” The more frantically I waved, the more times the engineer sounded his whistle at me.

“So?”

“Look where we are. Refrigerated trucks, a whole caravan full of them in a desolate rail yard. And this train.”

“What of it?”

“From the first kids at Mount Neboh Church who said the killer flew over the gates, like he somehow got over the wall with Ursula Hewitt at Old St. Pat’s.” The images were clear in my mind, forming faster than I could speak. “The guy who somehow lowered himself down from the balcony at St. John the Divine — fluid, agile, graceful — like he was when he disappeared on the scaffolding following Faith last night. He’s got to be some kind of acrobat, Mike.”

It was getting through to him that I might be right. “Swinging from the rafters, maybe, to get to the chalice in the Fordham chapel. I could go with the idea of a high flier.”

“Then, think circus train, will you? That’s where she was headed. Naomi Gersh was going to meet a guy on the circus train.”

The uniformed cops looked baffled as Mercer and Mike joined me, wildly waving in unison, both displaying their gold detective shields.

The bold yellow letters on the side of the cars were visible to all of us as the powerful engine ground to a halt just feet from where we were standing. Smoke poured out of the stack, swept into the sky by the wind, as the train idled impatiently on the tracks.

“‘Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey,’”I said. “It’s the circus train.”