"Dashwood! What's your given name?"

"Jimmy--James."

"O.K., James. Here's what I want you to do. Find out everything about Mr. William Wright that 'everybody' doesn't know. What union does he belong to? Is he an official of that union? What have the police arrested him for? What are his grievances? Who are his associates?" Staring down at the smaller man, he fixed James Dashwood in a powerful gaze. "Can you do that for me?"

"Yes, sir."

"It's vital that we know whether he worked alone or with a gang. You have my authority to call on every Van Dorn operative you need to help you. Wire your report to me care of the Southern Pacific's Burbank station. I'll read it when I get off the train."

As the Los Angeles flyer steamed from the piers, the fog was thick, and Isaac Bell looked in vain for the electric lights of San Francisco twinkling across the bay. He checked his watch that the train had departed on time. When he returned the watch to its pocket, he felt the brass key that shared the same space. He had planned to surprise Marion with a middle-of the-night visit. Instead, he was the one surprised. Badly surprised. The Wrecker's reach extended much further than he had presumed. And more innocent people had died.

THE SHARP SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA noonday sun illuminated wreckage unlike any Isaac Bell had ever seen. The front of the Coast Line Limited's locomotive stood pitched forward, intact, at a steep angle in a dry riverbed at the bottom of the railroad embankment. The cowcatcher in the ground and the headlight and smokestack were readily identifiable. Behind them, where the rest of locomotive should be, all that remained was a crazy spiderweb of boiler tubes, scores of pipes twisted at every angle imaginable. Some ninety tons of steel boiler, brick firebox, cab, pistons, and drive wheels had disappeared.

"Close shave for the passengers," said the director of maintenance and operations for Southern Pacific, who was showing Bell around. He was a portly, potbellied man in a sober three-piece suit, and he seemed genuinely surprised that the death toll had not been much higher than the now-confirmed seven. The passengers had already been taken to Los Angeles on a relief train. The Southern Pacific's special hospital car stood unused on the main line, its doctor and nurse with little to do but bandage the occasional cut suffered by the track crews repairing the damage to reopen the line.

"Nine of the cars held to the rails," the director explained. "The tender and baggage car shielded them from the full force of the explosion."

Bell could see how they had deflected the shock wave and the flying debris. The tender, with its cargo spilled from its demolished sides, looked more like a coal pile than rolling stock. The baggage car was riddled as if it had been shelled by artillery. But he saw none of the singeing associated with an explosion of dynamite.