City of Dark Corners, Jon Talton [top 10 best books of all time TXT] 📗

eighty-five miles per hour. My pop had taught me that the farther back from the locomotive, the rougher the ride. Still, the quality of this car was such that most passengers wouldn’t notice. Suspect after suspect had been eliminated. Although I had learned much about Carrie Dell and her enterprise, I didn’t know the ultimate answer: Who killed her.

After finishing my cocktail, I wandered the train, read in my seat before the porter made my bed, and we rolled into Yuma for a short stop. Soon after leaving, the conductor found me.

“Detective Gene Hammons?”

I showed him my badge. “That’s me.”

He handed me a telegram from Phoenix.

I opened it. And I finally knew.

Detraining at Indio and catching the next train back to Phoenix seemed the prudent thing to do. I thought about wiring the news to Captain McGrath. But how would I make the many explanations—about pilfering evidence from the murder scene, secretly matching prints with confidential police personnel files at the top of the list? And I badly wanted to see Victoria.

In the rear of the train again, the observation car was nearly empty. The conductor let me open the rear door and step out onto the open observation deck. Beneath and behind me, the Sunset Limited sped west, the steel rails polished by a full moon. The train swayed. If anything, we were going faster than eighty-five now. Everything I saw was fleeing behind us, gone, in my past, as we rushed to reach Los Angeles by morning.

Although it was cold, I sat down, zipped my jacket, and let the solitude arrange my thoughts.

The telegram in my pocket was from Don. He had finally matched the prints found on my business card that had been placed in Carrie’s purse. They corresponded to the latents taken from the razor that killed Zoogie Boogie, secreted as insurance in Navarre’s safe-deposit box, as well as those dusted by the Prescott Police from the murder weapon that slit Ezra Dell’s throat. The killer was the same man.

But I wasn’t alone for long. I felt a strong hand on my shoulder.

“May I join you?”

For the tiniest moment I was afraid for the first time since the Western Front in 1918. But I tightened my gut. After we flashed past a freight train waiting on a siding, I found my voice.

“Please do.”

He sat in the adjacent chair and lit a cigarette. “It was my dearest hope that you wouldn’t follow this case so far. Or that I could throw you off, draw the voodoo symbol to point at Navarre as prime suspect.”

“But you know me better than that.”

“Alas, I do.”

“And your dearest hope doesn’t jibe with you putting my card in Carrie Dell’s purse. If Don hadn’t found it, I would be in Florence right now waiting for the drop.”

“Oh, I knew he’d rescue you. The discovery was meant to put you on the trail, and you would find the things that might incriminate me. Which you did and were kind enough to leave on the top of your desk so I could dispose of them.”

“Why not investigate it yourself?”

“Oh, too risky. The girls knew me, and it wouldn’t do for me to go poking around at the college.”

“Her father and Zoogie Boogie?”

“I had to get what they knew. If they knew my name.”

“And Jack Hunter in prison?”

“I was lucky enough to intercept that note he sent you at headquarters. I don’t know what he wanted to tell you. But why take the chance? I sent word to a stoolie at Florence who owed me.”

“You murdered four people. It’s hard to believe.”

“It’s easier to get sucked in and keep killing than I ever realized. First, I had to kill my Baby Girl. That was the hardest. Afterward, covering my tracks was paramount and the killing was easier. Old man Dell, Zoogie, they saw me, knew my face and name. At the least, I’d lose my job and family. At the worst, I’d swing.”

“Big Cat.”

“That’s what she called me.”

“But why kill her and do it that way?”

When he silently smoked, I made a try.

“I think you were her protector and then her lover. Older man, young woman, however confident you are, you can’t believe how lucky you were to have this goddess in your bed. With the powerful people involved with Summer Tours, you had blackmail material to make you a very wealthy man. But she had the power, and you didn’t like it. She bent men to her will. You felt emasculated and yet you couldn’t stop wanting her. She was the itch you couldn’t scratch. It was a fun summer, but then she was ready to move on. And you couldn’t have that. She made threats. You sure as hell couldn’t have those. The breaking point was when she told you she was pregnant.”

“Keep going.”

“Then you killed her with the blackjack. Maybe you didn’t even mean to do it. Maybe she hit you first and you hit back, hard. Then your blood was up. You couldn’t leave it at that, drop her body in an abandoned mine in the desert. More than your blood was up. Real evil took over. You’d seen so many ways people kill each other. And it got to you, taught you. You dismembered her, dressed her in the fine clothes she favored, displayed her just inside the city limits. After you calmed down, you hoped it would either be written off as a train suicide or brushed under the rug because the city didn’t want another sensational crime. Another lust murder, like the University Park Strangler. As the final backup, you put my card in her purse and set it against the tree, in case the cops didn’t pursue the killing as a homicide, which they didn’t. That way I’d blaze the trail so you could do some cleaning up.”

He sighed. “You turned into a hell of a detective.”

“And now I have your prints.”

After a long silence punctuated by the locomotive whistling ahead, the familiar brogue resumed. “I never