Let It Burn by Steve Hamilton Page A

family. Yours, mine…”
    “Any idea why she was here?”
    “Not yet. We’re contacting the husband right now.”
    I walked away from him. It was getting harder and harder to keep the scene out of my head. Now I was imagining being the husband, too. Hearing that knock on my door, opening it up and seeing two police officers.
    “So tell me,” Bateman said. “How did you end up checking out that balcony?”
    “I was coming back and I saw the open door. I thought it was worth investigating.”
    He walked down the tracks to the far end of the station. The door was propped open now. I could see the sudden bursts of flashbulbs from inside. The crime scene unit was up there, doing their work.
    “That door right there,” he said. “You’re saying you didn’t actually see him coming out of the building?”
    “No. Like I said, he was on the tracks.”
    He stood there looking at the door, then down the tracks, then back at me.
    “I didn’t know it went down that way,” he said. “I’m sorry if it sounded like I was trying to find fault. Under the circumstances, if you really didn’t have any knowledge of the suspect being in the building…”
    “It’s all right, Detective. It’s a tough day for everyone.”
    “This whole back end of the building is abandoned, anyway. How could you have even known? I mean, how did you even think of trying that door?”
    “It was just a hunch.”
    “Okay,” he said, nodding like he was deep in thought, his mind already racing ahead to something else. “That’s good. But go back to that first pursuit. He goes east down these tracks, right? You were calling for backup at Bagley Street?”
    “That’s right. I saw him throw something. I assumed it was a bag of crack.”
    He rubbed his chin. “But that would take him back to being just a dealer,” he said. “Why throw away a few dollars of crack if you just killed somebody?”
    “In hindsight, it doesn’t make much sense.”
    “Hell, maybe this kid isn’t our killer after all. Maybe he just happened to be here at the wrong time, huh?”
    “It’s possible.”
    “Are you sure he wasn’t throwing away a knife?”
    I played the scene back in my head. “I don’t know exactly what he threw away,” I said, “but a knife I would have recognized. This was something smaller. I didn’t even really see it once it left his hand.”
    “Show me where that happened,” he said. “Whatever it was, we should try to find it.”
    I walked with him, retracing my steps along the railroad tracks. I tried to remember when he had thrown the object, but there weren’t any good landmarks to measure how far down we had gotten. It was, after all, just unbroken lines of metal with identical ties at regular intervals.
    “It’s gotta be around here,” I said, slowing down. “I can’t be sure exactly. I could be off by a few yards either way.”
    Detective Bateman was already scanning the ground.
    “Which way did he throw it?”
    “He was running in this direction.” I was thinking back again, trying hard to re-create every detail in my mind. “He threw with his right hand, toward the other tracks.”
    The detective stepped over the tracks, to the second set running parallel.
    “Did he make it this far? To the other tracks?”
    “I’m going to say yes. I’m pretty sure he did.”
    We were inside the fenced-off part of the track now, about twenty feet wide. There was the rough gravel at the base, then the railroad ties, then the tracks on top. The detective was walking right down the center of the rightmost tracks, looking closely at every inch of the ground.
    “I don’t imagine anybody else got back here to pick up whatever it was,” he said. “Not with this fence and all. But if another train came by…”
    “It did,” I said. “I just remembered.”
    He looked up at me.
    “When I was in the building. A train came by. It didn’t stop.”
    “A freight train?”
    “Yes.”
    “Heading in which direction?”
    “Into the