The doctor and his orderlies ran to where another, smaller group of men were attending to two figures lying inside a tent that was used as a temporary zone office.
Five dead and two wounded, Bell thought. Not as bad as at Pedro Miguel, but a high butcher’s bill nevertheless.
He circled the excavator in ever-tightening rings, looking at the ground, the sprayed pattern of coal. He looked for footprints or trash or anything that shouldn’t have been there. He lifted the shirts covering the faces of the two West Indian islanders who’d been struck by flying coal. Both men had fist-sized indentations in their foreheads and multiple other places.
Bell knelt over the body of the stoker, who’d been blown fifteen feet from the excavator, and gently pulled back the tarp. The force of the blast had stripped him of all his clothing, and the scalding heat of the steam explosion had stripped him of all his skin. He looked piebald and boiled. The only small mercy was, death would have been instantaneous. Bell settled the shroud back over the corpse and continued his preliminary inspection.
The only thing of note, and he wanted to know if it was unusual, was that the giant boulder they were trying to dislodge with the shovel’s iron bucket seemed too big for the machine to move.
He gave himself fifteen minutes. Any longer, and the witnesses either would drift away or they would start to misremember the incident. He’d heard of controlled experiments where witnesses to a single incident were asked about it in differing increments of time—minutes, hours, and days of the week—and the accuracy of their recollections faded sharply while, at the same time, their imaginations created details that hadn’t occurred.
Before talking to the men, Bell sought out the doctor and gave him permission for he and his men to retrieve Lyle Preston and the bodies of his crew from inside the excavator and asked that an autopsy be performed. The doctor said he’d planned on it anyway as a formality.
Bell spoke to each witness individually, breaking from the group and walking a short distance away. He kept his questions vague enough so that the men gave rambling answers often tending to fill in subtle details. It was another investigator’s trick. Yet, in the end, he learned nothing. The boulder would have put a strain on the steam shovel, but it could handle it. There was no warning before the blast, no whistle or unusual jet of steam or odd color to the smoke coming from the stovepipe funnel atop the digger. It had been a typical workday, unremarkable in every way.
Bell cut any worker off who wanted to discuss how Viboras Rojas had managed to sabotage the Bucyrus. He had no interest in conjectures or theories.
He had two more men to interview as Colonel Goethals’s private train arrived. It slowed just enough for its passengers to jump free since there was a long ore train behind it, and nothing, not even the Canal Administrator, could slow the work. Bell cut the witnesses loose as Goethals led a two-man entourage straight for the damaged steam shovel. The Colonel wore a tropical suit, while the men in his party were in grease-stained overalls. Mechanics, Bell assumed. The older was a fireplug of a man and the chief, obviously. The other, younger and taller, was his protégé. Bell desperately needed their cooperation and had no idea how to get it because he was about to accuse them of gross incompetence.
30
Bell gave Goethals and the others a few minutes to inspect the wreckage before walking over. Sam joined him.
“I’ll figure it out, Colonel,” a voice said in a rasp from inside the ruined husk. Bell assumed it was the chief engineer. “I’ll know by nightfall how they sabotaged my girl here.”
“I expect nothing less,” Goethals replied, appearing from behind the boiler. He saw Bell and Sam Westbrook standing at the base of the ladder. The Colonel spun so he could back down the iron rungs. They shook hands. “Bell, I’m glad you’re here. Did you find anything?”
“Nothing definitive, but I have my theories. We should talk back in your office. First, I need a word with your engineer. What’s his name?”
“Jack Scully. Be quick about it. Looks like rain’s coming. The Donkey can’t handle the ground down here when it rains.”
“It’ll only take a second.”
Bell climbed up onto the Bucyrus steam shovel and moved aft to where Scully and his assistant were on their hands and knees, peering into the guts of the blown boiler.
“Mr. Scully?”
“Who’s asking?” the man barked without climbing out of the boiler’s tank.
“My name is Bell. I’m a Van Dorn detective working with the Colonel on the whole Red Viper mess.” Bell could hear Scully and his aide talking, their voices muffled yet echoing inside the hollow cylinder. He was being ignored. “Sir?”
“I heard you. You haven’t said anything I give two bits about.”
“It’s just that I want to ask that you not jump to any conclusions as you determine the cause of the explosion.”
Bell had just poked a hornet’s nest with a very short stick. Scully scrambled from the boiler and rushed over so he was standing just a foot from Bell’s face. While Bell had seven inches on the engineer, that didn’t slow him one bit. His face was as flushed red as a boiled
