Free Meter Maids Eat Their Young by E. J. Knapp Page B

credentials to the gate guard and walked in.
    I was walking along a row of carts, inspecting the decals, when I noticed something funny about them. I knelt down and ran my finger along the lower, right-hand edge. It was slightly rougher than the other edges of the decal. The corner had been clipped off. A printer’s mark, perhaps? I looked at eight or nine more carts, hoping the Mangler had missed one, knowing he hadn’t.
    Walking over to where a group of cops were talking, I recognized one and stepped over to him.
    â€œHey, Jack,” I said. “Long time.”
    â€œHey, Teller,” he said. “How’s it hangin’?”
    â€œAbout the same as always,” I said. “Finding anything?”
    â€œ Nada . This is one smart cookie, this Mangler perp. Hasn’t left us shit to work with.”
    â€œSo,” I said, “any idea how the Mangler got in here? I assume he must have done his work here. During the night.”
    â€œWe checked the perimeter. Didn’t find anything like a cut fence but hey, there’s a row of trees along the back a cripple could climb. And a gully back over yonder,” he nodded back over his shoulder, “along the side fence. He could’ve pulled up the fence and crawled under that. Basically, we got squat, Teller. Like always.”
    I thanked him and headed back out the yard. I made my own circumnavigation of the lot, noting the rusting razor wire circling the top of the fence. Though there were several large trees bordering the fence in the rear, only two had branches thick enough and close enough to the ground for a grown man to cross over the razor wire. I checked the trees carefully, looking for disturbances in the bark or some other sign that someone had recently climbed them. There was nothing on the first, a broken branch on the second. The break looked fresh. It could have been broken by a climber.
    I looked around. I was back in the old industrial part of town, several blocks from the pawnshop. Several more from my old apartment. I saw the old railroad tracks, all but overgrown now, and realized that the DPE was using the south end of the old rail terminal as their central yard. I started walking toward the old railway station. If I were the Mangler, this was the way I would have approached the yard.
    The old railway station was a classic of design. Red brick, sloped roof, a long portico facing the tracks; the columns once ornately carved were now chipped and covered in graffiti. The place had been abandoned for years, its sad windows boarded or covered in heavy wire. Back before I left town, I had tried several times to get some historical preservation types to develop an interest in the place. I had a thing for railroads. Especially old railway stations.
    Thomas Edison had worked this line in his youth. Rumor had it this was the station where he’d been thrown off the train, the incident which left him deaf in one ear. I could see from the condition of the place that no one had taken me up on the idea.
    I walked around the back of the station. Someone years ago had punched a hole in the bricks there. To break in, or just misdirected youthful energy, was hard to know. There was graffiti around the wound, the white paint distressed with the years. “ In here, summer of ’52, Walter Kissed Kay. ” I had always found that strangely romantic.
    There was an overgrown rock- and glass-strewn parking lot on the far side of the building. I wandered around it for ten minutes but it would take a far better tracker than me to determine if anyone had parked there recently. I kept walking.
    Several blocks past the station, and several decades in time, I came to a somewhat newer part of the industrial section. There was an old man pushing a battered metal shopping cart down the broken sidewalk. Other than a delivery van and several workers catching a smoke out back of a small parts factory, I hadn’t seen another soul on the