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got the green beans, for Christ’s sake. Low Man cuts his pal out of the chili, and they duke it out.”
    “Maybe,” Greistein said confidently, “but then why was the door open this whole time?”
    “What?” Banner muttered.
    “The car door,” Greistein said. “I have solid evidence that the freight car’s door was open exactly thirty-three inches throughout this whole ordeal. And you didn’t let me go on to explain the fight that ensued. In my opinion, a hand-to-hand fight, that suggests the two men wrestled, both bleeding.” His penlight traveled back and forth across the car. “We have tracks. I can practically show you the dance steps. First, there. Then, there. And the whole time, Mooch is bleeding out.”
    “And Low Man is waiting for him to pass out,” Tyler said. More may have been said. Tyler wasn’t sure. He traveled back to his own battle in that grungy apartment months earlier. He had relived those few minutes of horror repeatedly, to where he wasn’t sure if they were real any longer or if he had embellished or augmented them or even diminished them in some desperate attempt to understand them more clearly. But as always they consumed him, and he missed whatever Greistein added as his conclusion.
    “I’m going to leave our guards here,” Priest informed Banner. “They’ll protect the property after you and your people have wrapped. Is that okay with you, Detective?”
    “Dandy,” Banner replied.
    To Tyler, she said, “You want a cup of awful coffee?”
    Tyler hesitated. “I want the bodies that belong to this blood. I want to hear that this is a confined incident. That’ll close it for us, and I can get down to abusing an expense account.”
    She grinned. Her teeth were perfect, which he guessed pretty much described the rest of her as well. She said, “Mr. Madders, can we find someplace warm and out of this weather?”
    “Yes, ma’am.” Madders pointed toward a weather-beaten trailer some distance away.
    Following the footprints in front of him kept Tyler’s feet dryer on the way back across the yard, though Priest took long, determined strides—matching her long, determined legs—and she walked fast, a woman with purpose. Tyler wondered about that, about her company’s attempt to outflank local police. Risky politics at the very least. The snow fell in wet flakes the size of quarters, practically splashing as they hit the ground.
    Halfway to the distant double-wide trailer, Priest stopped and turned around. “We need to find these bodies ahead of the evening news,” she announced.
    It took Tyler a moment to realize that they had just joined forces. “Is that what this is about?” he shouted through the snowfall. But Priest was walking again, and she didn’t answer.

CHAPTER 5
    Tyler kept the convertible’s top up for the long drive east to Terre Haute. In the fading light, the remnants of the storm left sugarcoated hills that reminded Tyler of the jagged Maryland countryside and the life he had so abruptly lost. He saw the legal system now as something that expected the worst of people, as more comfortable jumping to conclusions than discovering the truth. He had beaten a man nearly to death, but the guy had been a drunken child-beater and Tyler had thought of it as being in the line of duty. What hung him was that the child-beater was black and he was white, and for that he had paid with his career. Five minutes of terror and rage had erased a dozen years of dedicated service.
    Repeatedly, he tugged the wheel sharply, fishtailing left or right, to prevent the icy highway from spilling the rental into the ditch. A convoy of sand trucks had failed to improve the road, and now, as temperatures dipped, the highway surface froze into a black ice peril.
    Nell Priest was up ahead somewhere, her rented four-wheel-drive Suburban more stable than his convertible. Northern Union Security provided well: she had flown private into St. Louis. Tough life, the corporate expense