Second Chance - 02 - When Dreams Cross Read online

  Then he disappeared, slamming the door behind him, leaving only a scattered pile of paper that represented the hope that Andi was afraid to feel.

  Justin’s hands still trembled with anger as he rode the glass elevator down to the first floor. Deadweight. He knew her words were only an attempt to shock him into signing her papers, but they still rankled him. He’d show her deadweight. And when he did, she would be begging him for a trip to the altar.

  “It’s an awesome responsibility being so blasted sure of yourself, Pierce,” Justin said aloud as he stormed across the lobby and out onto the Promised Land grounds. The cool air ruffled his hair, but did nothing to cool his temper. What if it wasn’t a bluff? What if those papers really were her attempt to rid herself of the extra weight while she fought against her own demise? If she had never bought Pierce Productions, she might not be in so much financial trouble. But the irony of it was that if the park were going to open as scheduled, she would still be a wealthy woman and the amount of money she had paid him for half of his company wouldn’t have even put a dent in her bank account. It was the threat of nervous stockholders that would do her in. If he could just convince them to give her some time to make the park work. If he could just convince her to try.

  He jammed his hands into his pockets and started toward the wreckage, desperately racking his brain for some way to give her back her hope. He understood futility because he’d felt it many times himself. They were two of a kind, he and Andi, and neither of them could survive on someone else’s good graces. But if he could give her back some of what she had lost—if he could find a way to salvage the park’s reputation … Maybe they could put the harsh words and cruelties behind them and just move forward with their dreams.

  Rounding the Noah’s Ark section of the park, Justin could see the work crews still laboring to clear the rubble out of the smashed buildings. The wrecked FanTran cars had been removed and were crumpled between two buildings, and the thick tracks hung from the broken bridge, as if waiting for someone to come along to put them back together. You can do it, Lord, he prayed silently. You can put it all back together. You can show us how to.

  Helpless, he racked his brain for what could have gone wrong. How could Andi’s engineers have made such a colossal error? The FanTran had been on hundreds of test runs, and there had never even been the hint of a snag in the tracks before. How could they have just worked loose so suddenly? Why would it have happened on that day, of all days?

  Walking through the workers and the civil engineers with their clipboards and reports, Justin went to the site where the first car had fallen and kicked aside the splintered beams.

  Jeanine Calaveras, the anchorwoman he had met at the press party, came up behind him with her live camera and sound crew. “Mr. Pierce,” she said, taking him by the arm and turning him to face the camera. “How is this disaster going to affect Pierce Productions?”

  Moving his arm out of her grasp, Justin took an evasive step backward. “The same way it affects Promised Land,” he said, starting to walk away.

  But the crew followed him. “Mr. Pierce, do you regret selling your company to Miss Sherman?”

  Justin stopped, keeping his back to the reporter and her camera. “No, I do not.”

  “Will this affect your relationship with Miss Sherman in any way? Rumor had it that the two of you were becoming involved again.”

  Justin set his hands on his hips and turned to face the probing woman. “What is it, a slow day? No murders? No wars? Is my love life really that interesting to you?”

  Squaring her shoulders, Jeanine gave a flick of her fingers telling her cameraman to stop rolling. “He’s not going to give us anything,” she told her crew. “Why don’t we go ask Andi herself?”

  Justin’s granite features were cold and unyielding, and his eyes gave warnings that no one with any intelligence would have challenged. “You get within forty feet of her and I’ll have you arrested for harassment. You’re already trespassing.”

  Jeanine shrugged. “Security has been a bit lax since the crash. I guess they figure ‘what’s the use?’”

  Justin raked his hands through his hair, desperately trying to keep calm. “You know, Miss Calaveras,” he said in a dangerously unaffected tone, “I’ve had a rough day. The kind of day that makes me want to smash someone’s face in. I’m not accustomed to hitting women, but shattering those cameras of yours might let off a little of my frustration.”

  “Are you threatening me?” the woman asked in a haughty voice, though she stepped back.

  Justin gazed down at her for a moment, a slow, agitated grin curling his lips. “That’s exactly what I’m doing,” he said, then walked away.

  A group of men a few feet away caught his attention. Another reporter was interviewing them about their “expert opinions” on the crash. Givens was among them. “It’s simply what I’ve been warning the state about for months. When the legislature takes away a parish’s right to govern something within its boundaries, they’re asking for trouble. If we had been involved in this, the accident would never have happened.”

  “But, Mr. Givens,” the reporter prodded, “isn’t it true that the parish was gratuitously involved in inspecting each structure?”

  The man shrugged his massive shoulders, clasping his hands over his belly. “Yes, that’s true. But our building inspectors’ suggestions were usually ignored. We had no means of enforcing anything we saw. In this case they obviously used lower-grade materials, did a haphazard job of bolting—”

  Unable to stand another word, Justin changed directions and saw Wes sitting off to the side on a crate, his chin propped on a fist. Picking up one of the heavy broken beams, Justin went to sit beside him. “What do you think?” he asked.

  Wes shook his head helplessly. “It was not lower grade,” he said in a voice too low for anyone else to hear. “And the bolting was done with an air compressor. I checked them myself.” He slid his hands down his face and looked at the wreckage over his fingertips. “I was here every step of the way. So were the other engineers. When anything looked even questionable, we started over. We don’t do shoddy work. Those tracks were stable.”

  Justin stood up and surveyed the broken tracks overhead, then brought his eyes down to Wes. “Then how do you explain what happened?”

  With bloodshot eyes, his friend looked up at the tracks still hanging from the sagging bridge. “If it was what they’re saying, we would have noticed it. It wouldn’t have jumped like that. Even a loose track wouldn’t have worked completely free that fast. And I would have noticed it yesterday morning when I ran the detector car around. It would have picked up any flaw in the rails. But there was nothing.” Wearily, he rubbed his hands across his jaws. “I can’t help wondering if I missed something. I’ve been a little tired with the new baby and Clint’s disappearance and Sherry’s depression and all … what if there was something I should have checked, something that could have prevented all this? I just can’t think what it would be.”

  “You’re not the engineer, Wes. There’s nothing you could have done.”

  “It just doesn’t make sense. It ran so smoothly.”

  Justin moved his thumb along the bare spot of his chest, a frown working at his brows as he looked at the bent rails. “Do you think someone could have deliberately done this? We’ve established that the fire was arson. Maybe somebody was trying to finish the job of sabotaging the park. This would be a terrific way to do it. It worked.”

  Wes brought tired, troubled eyes to Justin’s. He opened his mouth to speak, then glanced around him to make certain no one could hear. “I can’t prove a thing,” he muttered.

  A new sense of purpose fell over Justin as suspicion filled his heart. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? Forgetting Wes, Justin stood up and walked the length of the trestle until it sloped to the ground enough for him to climb up on it. Then he walked back up the tracks, studying each cross tie for any clue, until he stood above Wes. Kneeling down, he ran his h
and along the rails, praying he would find something, anything. A state engineer ran up the tracks behind him, holding his clipboard under his arm as he glared down at Justin. “May I ask what you’re doing, sir?”

  “Examining the rails,” Justin clipped without ceasing his work.

  The man stepped closer to hinder Justin’s progress. “For what?”

  “For anything,” Justin said.

  “I’ve already examined them and made my report,” he said. “There’s no need—”

  “Get out of my way!” Justin bellowed as he ran his fingers over the holes of the tie plates where the spikes had come loose.

  The man became more ruffled. “If you don’t stop right this minute, I’ll have you forcefully removed from the premises. You’re getting in the way of an investigation.”

  “Fine,” Justin mumbled, glancing up at the man with imposing, daggerlike eyes. “You just try it.”

  Catching an exasperated, agitated breath, the man hurried away, presumably to get help. But Justin still wasn’t daunted. “There’s not a bolt left in place here, Wes. Not on either rail for about twenty feet.” He leaned forward to an almost hanging position until he could see the end of the twisted piece of rail. “Did you notice that one of the joint bars is missing?”

  Wes shook his head sadly. “We checked every bolt. I walked these tracks myself, just the other day.”

  As if he hadn’t heard, Justin studied the twist of the rails, battered on the ends and bent, as if some outside force had pried the ends up enough to ensure their instability. He got up and walked back up the tracks, racking his brain for an answer. He looked around for a camera from which the security guards could monitor the rails. If someone had sneaked in, as they’d done the other night to start the fire, and had deliberately damaged the tracks, wouldn’t it be recorded? Wouldn’t they be able to replay the tapes and see if someone was there?

  He leapt down and headed to the security guards’ station. “I need to see the tapes monitoring the damaged section of the FanTran rails,” he told the guards sitting at the closed circuit televisions. “All the tapes just prior to the accident.”

  One of the guards, an elderly man who looked like someone’s grandpa, got up and went to the tape room at the back of the small building. “Let’s see,” he said as they found the tapes of that edge of the park. “Here are the cameras monitoring the Noah’s Ark ride, and part of that track is visible from that camera. But now that I think about it, it’s not the part that was damaged. It’s just the part before it curves around …”

  Justin took the tape and popped it in the VCR at the corner of the room. “Sure is. It just misses the section I need to see. What else you got?”

  “Well … there’s the Jacob’s Ladder section. It might show some of that track, but from a distance.” He took the tape out and popped the new one in. The track was too far above the picture. “Nope. That doesn’t show it.”

  Justin couldn’t believe it. “Do you mean to tell me that we don’t have cameras monitoring every part of the FanTran track?”

  “No, sir. You see, the cameras are to monitor people. And it isn’t likely that people will be on those tracks. So the cameras aren’t on them … not specifically.”

  “So there’s no way to see if someone walked those tracks and damaged them?”

  “No, sir. But we can do like you did the other day, when you checked the tapes of those who came in and out.”

  “That’ll never work this time,” Justin said. “Too many people were here yesterday.”

  Frustrated, he thanked the man, then went back outside. He sat on one of the painted benches under a tree and stared across the grounds to the broken tracks. Someone had done it deliberately. They had known that part of the track wasn’t monitored. They had known that they wouldn’t be caught.

  An insider, he thought. Someone who could walk across it without being suspect. Someone who had inside information about the security setup.

  He rushed back into the office building and hurried down the hall to the personnel office. No one was there today. Andi had given the office staff the day off, for she’d been too despondent to think of any work that could be done when she didn’t even plan to open the park now. He went to the file cabinets lining the walls and found the one marked, “Engineers.” He flipped through, until he found all of those who worked on the FanTran. One by one, he slipped them out into a sloppy stack on the floor. Then he went to the cabinet marked, “Security.” All of those assigned to that area of the park were added to the stack. He moved to the “Maintenance” drawer, and did the same.

  By the time he’d pulled the file of everyone who’d had anything to do with the FanTran, he had a stack at least a yard tall. He sat down on the floor and began to read through the files for anything that might clue him. There was quite possibly someone within this stack who had a background or a former job or a skill or an association that might clue him. Anything. There had to be.

  You’ve got to help me, Lord. Don’t let them win.

  He began to go through each file, reading every word. Night fell, and grew old, and then dawn came, before he’d gone through all of them.

  By morning, he had five employees that he considered suspects. One had a two-year inexplicable unemployment on his something that often indicated that he either had a job he didn’t want to report for whatever reason, had been in jail, had been ill, or had encountered an incredible run of bad fortune. He doubted it was the latter, but intended to find out which of the others explained it.

  Another had once been employed by one of the businesses that Givens owned. In fact, he’d held a position much higher than he held here. That, he thought, was a little suspicious.

  The other three files had inconsistencies regarding overlapping dates of employments, educational backgrounds, etc., things that could have been typographical errors. But Justin intended to take no chances.

  Bone-tired, he made a call to Henry Baxter, a retired police officer and one of his father’s former partners.

  The man’s raspy voice reminded Justin of the early hour. He’d awakened him.

  “Y-ello.”

  “Henry? This is Justin Pierce. Robert’s boy?”

  “Justin!” the man said. “Well, I’ll be. Sure didn’t expect to hear from you so early in the morning.”

  “I’m sorry I woke you, Henry. But it’s an emergency. I need for you to pull some strings at the police station to get me some information. Do you still have any clout there?”

  “I should. I was on the force for forty-two years. What do you need?”

  “I’m working for Promised Land, Henry. You probably heard about the accident here.”

  “Yeah. Good thing no one was killed.”

  “Sure is. The thing is, I think it was sabotage, maybe an inside job, and I’ve narrowed it down to five employees who might have something to do with it. I need any information you can get me on them.”

  “I can do that,” he said. “Tell you what. Give me an hour to get down to the station, and meet me there with whatever you already have. It shouldn’t be a problem. I still know everybody there. Used to be boss to most of them.”

  “I knew you could do it, Henry. I’ll see you in an hour.”

  He met his father’s old friend at the station, and was startled by how much the man had aged. But he still seemed to command a great deal of respect at the police station. They quickly gave him a desk at which to work, and he began to peck information into the computer that would call up rap sheets, credit reports, phone records, and other information on the men Justin suspected.

  When all the information had been printed out, he slipped the old man a hundred dollar bill and thanked him profusely. Henry, who seemed to miss his police work, asked him to let him know if there was anything else he could do. Justin promised him he would.

  Activity was just resuming around the accident scene as Justin made it back to the park. It didn’t occur to him that he hadn’t showered since yesterday o
r that he was wearing these clothes for the second day in a row. He was too anxious to study the information he’d compiled on these men. He went up to his office, locked himself in, and studied the records more intently than he’d ever studied anything in his life.

  One by one, he eliminated men, as explanations became apparent and inconsistencies were cleared up. Finally, he was down to one man. The one who had worked for one of Givens’s companies—a man named Allen Jenkins.

  He pulled out the phone record and studied the numbers. They meant nothing to him unless he had the names that went with them. Frustrated, he called Henry back. “I’m sorry to bother you again, Henry, but do you have any way of getting the names that go with these phone numbers?”

  “Give me a few minutes,” Henry said. “I’ll get back to you.”

  A few minutes later, the phone rang, and Justin snatched it up. It was Henry on a three-way call with a friend of his from the phone company. “This call never happened, Justin. But tell my friend here the numbers you’re interested in, and he’ll tell you who they belong to.”

  Justin began reading the numbers off, and the unidentified voice gave him the names. The moment he got to Givens’s name, he knew he’d hit pay dirt. There were at least fifteen calls to or from Givens to this particular security guard in the last three weeks. Funny thing, since the man had allegedly been fired from his job with one of Givens’s companies.

  He tried to think clearly, in spite of his fatigue. If Givens was behind this, was he behind the arson, too? He closed his eyes, rubbed them roughly, then had an idea. “I need one more thing, guys. I need the phone record of a man named Charles Butler. Can you get that for me?”

  “How about it?” Henry asked his friend.

  “Sure,” the man said. “What’s your fax number?”