Two-fifteen in the afternoon? No, too early. The body would have been noticed way before Lou Purdue stumbled across him. So it had to be the later train, for if it were a train that went to the Portsmouth B&M station, it would have slowed before stopping. Which meant maybe John Doe was murdered on the train and tossed off. From there, start checking the train, the passenger manifest, the conductors and the train crew, and you could start making some effort to finding out just who in hell had been—
“The five forty-five P.M.,” he said. “A local?”
“Nope,” Pat said. “Express. Straight shot from Boston to Portland.”
“Through town? Thirty, maybe forty miles an hour.”
Sam looked back at the glossy prints of his John Doe, lying peacefully in the mud. At thirty to forty miles an hour, the body would have been tumbled in a mess of broken limbs and torn clothes. But there he was. No broken bones, no smears of mud on his clothes, no identification, half starved…
He rolled the fountain pen between his fingers. “Any unscheduled trains come through yesterday? Trains associated with the Department of the Interior?”
A pause, as though the connection had been broken, and then Pat’s voice returned. “No, nothing like that, and please never ask me that again over the phone, all right?”
Sam dropped his pen on his blotter, hearing the sudden fear in the station manager’s voice. “Sure.”
After a quick stop in the grubby men’s room, Sam went back to his desk. The phone started ringing and he picked it up as he sank into his chair. “Miller, Investigations.”
“Inspector? Inspector Miller?” From the rumble of traffic over the wire, he could tell the call was coming in from a pay phone. “It’s me. Lou Purdue. Lou from Troy. You was lookin’ for me earlier, weren’t you?”
Inadvertently, Sam touched his sore cheek. “Yes, I was.”
“Good, ’cause I want to see you again. The other night you said to call you if I remembered somethin’. And I did.” Lou coughed. “Shit, I know I only got a couple of minutes ’fore the pay phone hangs up on me. Look, meet me over at the camp, okay? I’ll be there in five minutes. Hey, will I get another buck from you?”
“You’ll get more if you tell me what you remembered.”
Another cough, and in the background, the sound of a truck driving by. “Like this, I remember standing there in the rain, waitin’ to see if a cop car was gonna come over, there was another guy waitin’, too. So what, right? But now I remember. His shoes were all muddy… and they was nice shoes, too… but they was muddy like he had walked down the side of the tracks, just like me and you and those cops. Made me think maybe he knew somethin’ about that dead guy.”
“What did he look like?”
“Oh, a nice-lookin’ fella, you could tell that—”
“Hello? Lou? You there?”
Nothing save the hiss of static. The operator had cut him off after the first three minutes.
“Dammit!” he said, banging the phone back into the cradle, shoving back his chair and grabbing his coat, leaving the station and Mrs. Walton to her typing, before she could say a word.
Back to the encampment he went, making that long walk after parking in the Fish Shanty lot. Like before, the old man who was the unofficial mayor stalked up to him and said, “You, the cop. Lookin’ for another slug?”
Sam poked him in his skinny chest with his index finger. “Are you?”
The old man laughed. “Like I said ’fore, cop, arrest me, I don’t give a shit, and—”
Sam stuck out a leg and then tripped him. He fell to the ground and squawked. Sam pressed his boot down on his left wrist, bent, and said, “I gave you that last one, pal, but don’t think you can screw with me again, all right? And maybe I’m not in the mood for arresting you, maybe I’m in the mood for breaking a finger or two, so shut up, all right?”
The old man grimaced, and Sam knew he should feel guilty, but he didn’t. He looked around at the worn-out cars and trucks, the shacks and lean-tos, the smoky fires and the children, children everywhere, thin and too quiet. “Lou from Troy. Is he around?”
The old man spat up at Sam. “Nope. He was here a few minutes ago. But he’s gone now. Jesus, step off my arm, will ya?
Sam saw three men, joking and talking by one of the shacks, ignoring him and the man on the ground. “Where did he go?”
“Lucky son of a bitch got himself a job. Ran into camp, grabbed his bundle, said he had a job up north, won’t be back for a month. A month! Lucky bastard.”
“Nope. Jus’ that he was gone, it paid okay, and he’d be back.”
Sam stepped off the old man, who scrambled to his feet, rubbing his wrist, eyeing Sam, spit drooling down his chin. Sam slid a business card from his wallet, passed it over to the old man with a quarter and a nickel. “You save that nickel and call me the minute Lou comes back. Okay? You do that and I’ll pay you a dollar.”
