Wrongful Death - Softcover

Kerr, Baine

3.67

42 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0515135747 ISBN 13: 9780515135749

Publisher: Jove, 2003

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After serving on the War Crimes Tribunal in the Hague, railroad lawyer Elliot Stone returns to the U.S. and finds himself embroiled in a medical mystery surrounding the string of apparent murders of terminally ill patients. Reprint.

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About the Author:

Baine Kerr is a medical malpractice lawyer who spent a year as a war-crimes journalist in The Hague and as a supervisor in the Serb Republic of Bosnia's first democratic municipal elections. The recipient of a Fiction Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Editors' Prize from the Missouri Review, he is the author of Jumping-Off Place and Harmful Intent. He has also been published in the Best American Short Stories anthology. He lives in Boulder, Colorado.

Chapter 1

Trials can have moments of truth -- subtle, unexpected, even magical. Like the sudden stillness of songbirds or animal tracks filling with water or a name called from a dream. All at once a meaning comes to light, if you're paying attention. If you're not so taken up in the action you miss it, a revelation that flares and blows out.

I was incidental to the action in Stillwell v. The Western Pacific Railroad. As the court-appointed conservator for Dale Stillwell, my only job was to approve a settlement between the company and the injured brakeman and his wife. Ten minutes into Stillwell's testimony, the adjuster for the Western Pacific's captive insurer had seen the writing on the wall. The robber barons were going to get hammered again. It was settlement time. Given Stillwell's impairments, the judge and lawyers wanted a conservator to bless the negotiations.

As a piece of legal work the Stillwell case made no particular impression, but I'll see the facts of the accident as long as I live. I probably would even if they hadn't led five years later to the Colfax Center for Rehabilitation, where June Stillwell was warehoused in Denver with other hopeless patients.

December 25, 1993. Triple overtime at the Western Pacific switching yard in Laramie, Wyoming, for the unsentimental few who'd service locomotives on Christmas Day. June Mooney might as well sign up. Her daughter was spending the day with June's ex. Her father was snowed in seven hours away in Lander. Dale Stillwell showed up too. A loner, that was no surprise. Christmas was just another day.

June was the only female engineer at the Laramie yard. She put Stillwell on the lead of the three-engine string she was hostling in to be serviced. Dale Stillwell was quiet, good-looking in an offbeat way. Wiry, tough, aloof, he'd worked June's trains once or twice, rarely talking, always moving, quick as a cat. June liked to know what made folks tick. She'd wondered about his hidden depths.

From the cab of the trailing locomotive June couldn't have seen much in the ground blizzard tearing by. Her task was to nose the string through the maze of track and on into the roundhouse. The yard was backed up with cars going nowhere on Christmas. Stillwell stood outside atop the lead engine, checking switches and hand-signaling go-aheads back to June.

The yardmaster in the diesel tower radioed permission for June to come inbound. There shouldn't have been any other power out there -- any other locomotives, cranked and manned. June's engine started down a line that curved, then converged with a cutoff spur, the two lines merging to form a curving Y, a gantlet. Neither knew it but an outbound coal train was standing on the cutoff, fouling her tracks, the brakeman working the switch instead of protecting his power. Stillwell scampered down the front steps and hung off a grab iron to check what lay ahead. From back where the curve began, back in the cab and behind the string, and through the plumes of snow, June couldn't have seen a thing.

I imagine, in the two seconds when calm turned to terror, a weightless feeling. Stillwell'd trotted up the lead engine's hull like a sailor and dropped down the right side for a look. Bent and leaning, one bulky glove hooked on the angle iron, balanced on the ball of a boot. Lulling sounds of rolling wheels and wind-rushed snow. No sky or ground, as the locomotive burrowed into the storm. Straining through the spray at the shadow taking shape ahead like a rockfall blocking the road.

June kept the engines coming though he hadn't waved her on. The cowcatchers closed with six inches to spare. Stillwell raced up the rungs but missed one, cracked a knee, lost his hold on the frozen metal. He slipped between the locomotives as they nearly touched, rolled like a rag in a wringer, dropping when they parted, with two collapsed lungs and eleven snapped bones and a penetrating head wound from a bolt that had jammed his skull like a geartooth. June said she never saw the standing power until she passed it. She never saw Stillwell until the yardmaster called her to stop, she had a man on the ground.

June Mooney was the ace switch engineer of the Laramie yard, envied for her gentle throttle. A "Casey Jones," in railroad lingo, she could close on a coupling at a quarter mile an hour, so smooth that water wouldn't tremble in a cup. But the switchman is the engineer's eyes, clearing the track and signaling forward. Nothing's worse in a yard than a curve where a hand signal can't be seen. A radio would have helped, or a relay crew, but they hadn't been assigned.

June was running her string without a go-ahead from Stillwell, but the yardmaster shouldn't have let the outbound power leave. They should have kept the gantlet clear. There were no clearance markers. In zero visibility, how was she to know a locomotive would have to be cleared inside the curve?

She did know. She "sixth-sensed what was going down before it did. Everything, Dale bleeding in the snow and me running at him screaming. Something kept the power on," she later typed in her journal, "like I froze up too, paralyzed by fate."

Guilt is a dangerous motivator. Sometimes it leads to breakthroughs. More often it takes you places you've got no business going.

While Stillwell was hospitalized, first in Cheyenne for six weeks of drug-induced coma, then down to the brain-injury unit in Boulder, through months of hysteria when he was strapped down, and finally the faltering baby steps of therapy, June was there every day, feeding him, reading, singing, whispering prayerfully, unfolding his balled hands. A year into his recovery she married Dale Stillwell in the Boulder hospital chapel. They got an apartment near the brain-injury unit once Stillwell was discharged to outpatient care. They filed suit in Boulder, kept it out of federal court when the Western Pacific tried to remove, and in Boulder -- my town -- it came to trial.

Four days into the plaintiff's case Dale Stillwell took the stand. For his wife, for his lawyers and the house counsel for the WP, and surely for its adjuster, the moment of truth had arrived: halting answers to simple questions that built into a pressured, panicked rush of scenes of snow and steel, agitation, then incoherence that flew apart in convulsive stammers and shuddering tears of frustration and shame, and then the moment. The agonized silence that hung in the courtroom when he gave up trying to speak.

Their moment of truth, not mine. I was called in afterward, and I caught sight of a very different man.

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