The Wrecker (Isaac Bell 2)

“Kincaid? Are you joking. Of course not, why would I?”

“To procure his help in the Senate.”

“He helps me when I tell him to help me. I don’t have to prime him.”

“Why did you say ‘Of course not’?”

“The man’s a fool. He thinks I don’t know that he’s hanging around me to court my daughter.”

Bell wired for a Van Dorn courier, and when he arrived handed him a sealed letter for the Sacramento office, ordering immediate investigations of the Southern Pacific’s head engineer, Lillian Hennessy, Mrs. Comden, two bankers,

two attorneys, and Senator Charles Kincaid.

30

A SOUTHBOUND WORK TRAIN, RETURNING HUNDREDS OF exhausted men for three days’ recuperation after four straight weeks of work, was sidelined to let a northbound materials train through. They were waiting to climb the Diamond Canyon Loop, a sweeping switchback curve fifty miles south of Tunnel 13. The siding had been gouged out of the canyon wall at the foot of a steep slope, and the sweep of the switchback allowed a clear view of the tracks running parallel high above them. What the men saw next would haunt them for the rest of their lives.

The locomotive hauling the long string of boxcars and gondolas was a heavy 2-8-0 Consolidation. She was a mountain-climbing workhorse with eight drive wheels. On this light grade, etched from the side of the canyon, the coupling rods that linked her drivers were a blur of swift motion as she entered the curve at nearly forty miles an hour. Few of the weary slumped on the hard benches of the sidelined work train below took much notice, but those who did look up saw her smoke flatten behind her as she raced high above them. One even remarked to a dozing friend, “She’s highballing like Old Man Hennessy’s got his hand on the throttle.”

The 2-8-0’s engine truck, the short, stabilizing front wheels that prevented swaying at such speed, screeched as they pressed against the curve. Her engineer knew the run to the cutoff like the back of his hand, and this particular bend on the lip of Diamond Canyon was one spot he did not want to hear the screech of a loose rail. “Don’t like that noise one bit,” he started to say to his fireman. In the next millisecond, long before he could finish the sentence, much less throttle back, the one-hundred-twenty-ton locomotives’s lead drive wheel hit the loose rail. The rail parted from the ties with a loud bang.

Free of the wooden ties that held them a hard-and-fast four feet eight and a half inches apart, the tracks spread. All four drive wheels on the outside of the curve dropped off the steel, and the locomotive charged straight ahead at forty miles an hour, spraying crushed stone, splintered wood, and broken spikes.

To the men watching from the work train sidelined at the bottom of the canyon, it looked as if the freight hurtling overhead had developed a mind of its own and decided to fly. Years later, survivors would swear that it soared for an amazingly long way before gravity took charge. Several found religion, convinced that God had intervened to help the freight train fly just far enough that most of it overshot the work train when it tumbled down the mountain. At the time, however, what most saw when they looked up at the terrible thunder was a 2-8-0 Consolidation locomotive toppling off the edge of a cliff and rolling at them with fifty boxcars and gondolas that swept trees and boulders from the slope like a long black whip.

Most remembered the noise. It started as thunder, swelled to the roar of an avalanche, and ended, hours later it seemed, in the sharp, rending clatter of steel and wood raining down on the stationary work train. None forgot the fear.

ISAAC BELL WAS ON the scene within hours.

He wired Hennessy that the wreck was very possibly an accident. There was no evidence that the Wrecker had tampered with the rails. Admittedly, the heavy Consolidation had so battered the point where she jumped the track that it was impossible to distinguish for sure between deliberate removal of spikes or an accidental loose rail. But meticulously filed Southern Pacific Railway police reports indicated that patrols on horseback and handcar had blanketed the area. It was unlikely, Bell concluded, that the saboteur could have gotten close enough to strike at the Diamond Canyon Loop.

Livid because the wreck had unsettled his workforce, Hennessy sent Franklin Mowery, the civil engineer he had hauled out of retirement to build the Cascade Canyon Bridge, to inspect the wreck. Mowery limped along the ruined bed, leaning heavily on his bespectacled assistant’s arm. He was a talkative old man-born, he told Bell, in 1837, when Andrew Jackson was still president. He said he had been present when the first continental railroad linked east and west lines at Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869. “Nearly forty years ago. Time flies. Hard to believe I was even younger that day than this rascal helping me walk.”

He gave his assistant an affectionate slap on the shoulder. Eric Soares, whose wire-rimmed glasses, wavy dark hair, expressive eyes, broad brow, narrow chin, and thin, waxed handlebar mustache made him look more like a poet or a painter than a civil engineer, returned a sly smile.

“What do you think, Mr. Mowery?” asked Bell. “Was it an accident?”

“Hard to say, son. Ties smashed like kindling, no piece large enough to register tool marks. Spikes bent or snapped in two. Reminds me of a derailment I saw back in ‘83. String of passenger cars descending the High Sierra, the rear cars telescoping into one another like that caboose over there rammed inside that boxcar.”

The tall detective and the two engineers cast sober eyes on the caboose stuffed into the boxcar like a hastily packed suitcase.

“What will you report to Mr. Hennessy?” Bell asked.

Mowery nudged Eric Soares. “What should we tell him, Eric?”

Soares removed his glasses, glanced about myopically, then dropped to his knees and closely examined a crosstie severed by a locomotive drive wheel.

“As you say, Mr. Mowery,” he said, “if they did pull spikes, no tool marks survived.”

“But,” Mowery said, “I’d venture the old man is not going to want to hear that slack maintenance was the culprit, is he, Eric?”

“No, Mr. Mowery,” Eric answered with another of his sly smiles. Their friendship, Bell noticed, seemed based on Mowery acting like an uncle and Soares the favorite nephew.

“Nor will he welcome speculation that hasty construction could have resulted in a weakness exploited by the fast-moving heavy locomotive, will he, Eric?”

“No, Mr. Mowery.”

“Compromise, Mr. Bell, is the essence of engineering. We surrender one thing to get another. Build too fast, we get shabby construction. Build too scrupulously, we never get the job done.”