Sarah Armstrong - 01 - Singularity (15 page)

“That’s something,” I said.

“Let’s hope,” David said. “At least it’s a chance.”

“Drops of blood, believed to be from the victim, lead to the bathroom and what appears to be a ring of diluted blood around the sink drain. Looks like our guy cleaned up. No murder weapon has been found,” Detective Morales added. “As far as the boyfriend can tell, nothing’s been stolen. She had nearly thirty dollars in tips, untouched, on the kitchen counter.”

“Is the boyfriend the one who found the body?”

“Yeah. He called it in from the neighbor’s house. Ms. Gonzales didn’t have a phone. Probably couldn’t afford one.”

“You’ve questioned him?” I asked.

“Sure. We thought at first he might be involved,” Morales admitted. “But his alibi checks out. Based on body cooling, the medical examiner figures she died sometime before ten o’clock last night. Maida’s currently working with a crew on a ranch outside town, putting up a new barn. The foreman said he left the site sometime after ten-thirty. He couldn’t have gotten here much before eleven, just three minutes before his call came in to the nine-one-one dispatcher. Then, one of the guys in the office remembered your e-mail, and we figured maybe we had another case for you.”

“We’re grateful you called and that you kept the scene intact for us,” said David.

“Where’s the boyfriend?” I asked.

Detectives ringed a diminutive man seated in a chair when David and I walked into the bare, white kitchen, with an old gas stove and a chipped porcelain counter, the kind that’s shaped in one piece to form a sink. Santos Maida couldn’t have stood more than five foot three, slightly built but strong, with the well-defined muscles that come from working construction. Dressed in what I assumed must have been his best clothes, ones fitting for a date with Mary, he wore a carefully pressed blue-plaid shirt and blue jeans with heavily starched creases. His face was buried in his hands, and until I spoke, he didn’t seem to either sense or care that we’d entered the room.

“Mr. Maida, I am very sorry for your loss.”

He looked up, his eyes searching my face.

“Gracias”
he said. “Mary was a good woman. Why would anyone do such a terrible thing to her?”

David and I said nothing.

“Did she suffer?” he asked. “Did this devil make her suffer?”

“That’s a question we can’t answer until the autopsy,” I said, secretly hoping by then he’d forget to ask. Of course, if we caught the
deviant responsible, I knew this man would probably sit in a courtroom someday, where expert after expert would recount how the woman he’d loved had been tortured.

“What will happen to her children?” he asked. “Who will care for them?”

“Do they have a grandmother, an aunt, any other relatives?”

“In Mexico.”

“After we’re finished talking, why don’t you tell the detective what you know about them, so they can be notified,” I said, hoping that gave him some, even if little, peace. When he nodded, I asked, “But first, tell me about Mary. Had she complained at all that anyone bothered her, frightened her, in any way?”

“No,” he said, pushing hard against his knees, his brown-black eyes smoldering. “If she would have said those things, I would have found the man and made him afraid to do this. I would not have let this happen.”

“Did she tell you about anything unusual, anyone unusual or threatening, anything out of the ordinary?” David asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “She was happy. We were going to get married. We were going to have more children and live here, in this little house, together.”

“Can you tell us anything at all that might help us find the person who did this?” I asked.

Santos pondered our questions. Before long, his head bowed and he again succumbed to tears. He shook his head and whispered, “No.”

It appeared we’d again leave with little physical evidence, so far only a few black threads and the possibility of a partial fingerprint, a clue Mary had fought valiantly to provide. But just then, Detective Morales called us outside. There stood Lily Salas, waiting in the street, in front of the house, an elderly woman wrapped in a loose flowered cotton robe, Mary’s next-door neighbor.

“Santos said she’s dead. Is Mary dead?” she asked, her shoulders stooped, her hands spotted from decades of exposure to the sun, trembling with age.

“Yes,” I said. “Mary’s dead.”

“No,
Dios mio”
she cried. “How could someone kill Mary? How could he do this? She was such a good woman, a wonderful mother.”

Lily sobbed for a few moments, Detective Morales helping to support her as she appeared ready to collapse from the weight of the tragedy.

“Señora Salas,” Morales said, softly. “Dígalos. Tell the officers what you saw.”

Slowly she fought back the tears, collecting her thoughts.

“Señora Salas,” I prodded, holding her frail hand in mine. “Please help us find the person who did this to Mary.”

She nodded and took a long steady breath.

“Last night,” she said. “I saw a man, outside, on the street. Dressed all in black. I nearly hit him with my car, when I drove home from the market. I didn’t see him until he was before me, and I could hardly stop.”

“What did he look like?” David asked.

“Young, about the age of my grandson, Ramon. Maybe nineteen, as old as twenty-four or twenty-five, no older, I think. He had blond hair, long and straight. And he had terrible eyes, blue eyes, like ice, cold and dead. I rolled down my window and apologized. I said, ‘I am sorry. I did not see you in the dark all dressed in black.’ I think, nothing is really hurt. I didn’t touch him. At the most he is maybe frightened. But he is not frightened. I can tell by the way he says nothing, just looks at me with those eyes,
peligroso, muy peligroso.”

“Dangerous,” Detective Morales interpreted. “Señora Salas is saying that the man looked dangerous.”

Lily fell silent, lost in her thoughts.

“Tell us what happened then,” I asked.

She nodded and continued. “I was frightened, very frightened. How I knew this man was bad, I can’t explain. It’s like I know other things in life,” she said, her hand fluttering to her heart and then her head. “It is here, inside me, that something told me to say nothing more. I roll my window quickly up and I drive home. Just here, it happened, a few houses from my home. He stood there,” she said, pointing perhaps a hundred feet away. “And he watched me, even until I walked inside and locked my doors.”

“What time was this?”

“Maybe eight, a little earlier.”

“What happened next?”

“A little while later, I am watching television, and Perroito begins racket that is so loud, I know something is not right.”

“Perroito?”

“My dog. He is in my backyard, fenced up. I name him Little Dog, but he is big and very mean.”

“And then?”

“I look out the windows but see nothing. I listen but hear nothing, until I hear Mary drive up, just like every night after work at the restaurant,” she said, her eyes filling with fresh tears. “And then nothing more happens, nothing until Santos runs to my house screaming that Mary is dead, that someone has slaughtered her like a beef or a hen.”

Two hours
, I thought. The dog barked, and if he planned to make Lily Salas his next victim, he knew he’d lost any hope of surprise. Instead, it was Mary. She drove up, parked her car, walked inside. He saw her. Climbed through the rear window. Perhaps he confronted her then. Maybe he waited, watching her undress, watching her prepare for a night with Santos. And then…two hours later she died. Perhaps she begged for death when it finally, mercifully, came.

“Thank you, Señora Salas. This is very helpful,” I said. “Would you do something for me?” I asked.

“Anything.”

“Would you sit down and talk to me, tell me what this man looked like, while I draw what you remember?”

Lily Salas nodded.

We sat in her living room together, alone, Lily Salas and I, while she described the details that made up the man’s face. I carefully monitored every word I said, not wanting to implant any images in Lily’s mind, to in any way distort her memory. I wanted her clear, unpolluted recollection of the killer’s face. In college I’d sketched portraits of my friends; now I drew a brutal serial killer.

“Around here, the chin, it was round but not too round. The cheeks were very high, thin. He carried little weight in his face, in his body. A slight young man, all bone,” she said.

With a charcoal pencil on a sketch pad the detective had sent to the scene for me, I outlined a lean, thin face with a slightly rounded chin.

“No,” Lily said. “That’s not right. Make his chin longer and he was thinner in the cheeks. Very thin and long, but at the base of the chin round.”

I erased and began again. “Ah, that’s right,” she said. “And let me tell you about the mouth…”

Ninety minutes later, Lily looked down at the face we’d drawn together and nodded.

“That’s him,” she said. She’d remembered incredible detail, so much more than most witnesses. Her memory was fresh, and it helped that she’d had time to look at the man before she became frightened of him, before her mind switched from curiosity of the stranger to alarm.

Back at Mary Gonzales’s house, where David waited for me, I gave the sketch to Morales.

“Fax us a copy as soon as you get to the office,” I said. “Then start using it to canvass the neighborhood and in the local newspaper.”

“It’ll be waiting for you in your office when you land in Houston,” Morales said, as I shook his hand.

“Well, we’ll be going then,” David said to Morales. “We’ll be in touch with you later this afternoon, when we’re back in Houston, to find out what else you’ve uncovered. Fax us a copy of the fingerprint fragment as soon as you can, too?”

“Certainly,” said Morales. “Along with anything else we’re able to pull together from the scene.”

“Thank you,” I said. Then, turning to Lily, I added, “Señora Salas, I thank you. What you’ve done tonight may help us stop this animal.”

“I will do everything I can to stop this beast,” she said. “Anything.”

“I am truly sorry for your loss,” I said. “I can tell that you adored Mary and her children.”

“She was a good woman, a good mother,” she said. “Why would anyone do such a thing?”

“For some questions, there are never good answers,” David said, taking the old woman’s hand in his. “Perhaps you can help Detective Morales and Señor Maida help find the children’s grandparents in Mexico?”

“I can,” she said, her face brightening at the prospect. “I know the village where they live in Oaxaca. Mary told me once. And I know her mother’s name.”

“Good,” I said. “That will make it easier to reunite them with family.”

We’d been there for nearly five hours, and I hadn’t noticed the press milling on the street in front of the house until David and I walked toward his car, but they’d obviously noticed us, and one of them, a photographer, fired off frames before we’d even reached them. A
man I judged to be his counterpart, the reporter he traveled with, ran toward me.

“Lieutenant Armstrong,” he shouted. A wiry man in his thirties with a bristly manner, he followed along beside us as we hurried past. “Is this murder in any way connected to the killings of Edward Lucas and Annmarie Knowles?”

Startled, I turned to confront him.

“What?”

“Evan Matthews of the
Galveston County Daily News,”
he said, extending his hand.

I didn’t take it.

“I’m working on an article on the Lucas murders, and I’ve been told by someone close to the investigation that you and Agent Garrity have an alternate theory, that you believe those deaths can be linked to others, and that they’re all the work of a serial killer.”

I said nothing, as David nudged my shoulder and urged me away.

“Shouldn’t people be warned if this is the work of a serial killer?” Matthews shouted. “Shouldn’t they be told to take precautions?”

How could he have known!
I wondered.
Who told him about the Gonzales murder so quickly that he made his way to San Antonio to confront us here?

David and I rushed to the rented green Saturn Ion. He hit the keypad and the locks popped open. I swung open the door and got in, just as Matthews inserted his knee between the car and the open door.

“Lieutenant, do you deny that you and Agent Garrity are investigating a serial killer and that you believe this killer is actually the one responsible for the Galveston double murder?” he prodded.

“You’re off base here, Matthews,” David shouted.

“Am I, Agent Garrity?” he asked. “Is that true, Lieutenant Armstrong?”

I said nothing.

“Didn’t you, in fact, argue strenuously against charging Priscilla Lucas with solicitation of murder?”

“This is an ongoing investigation,” shouted David. “We’ll make no comments at this time.”

“Is that true, Lieutenant?”

Finally regaining my composure, I pulled on the door. “I have no comment on this case, the Galveston murders, or any other case currently under investigation,” I said, vainly attempting to push Matthews out of the way. He didn’t move.

“Don’t you have a theory that this murder is linked to the Galveston killings? Isn’t that why you’re both here,” he shouted, as I pulled harder, this time succeeding in pushing him back and slamming the door hard on the tip of his knee.

“Damn,” he cursed, as he pulled his leg out in obvious pain. “Damn it, Lieutenant, just answer the question.”

I yanked the door shut and David threw a U-turn, gunned the engine and we were gone. As we drove toward the airport where the chopper waited to take us home, he shot me an exasperated glance.

“How did he know all of that?” he charged. I could see the anger in his hands as he gripped the steering wheel. “Did you tell anyone, anyone at all what we were working on?”

“No,” I answered. “Don’t you know me better than that?”

David was angry, furious at the confrontation with Matthews. “So how did he find out?”

“I don’t know.”

“Take a guess.”

“Someone in Galveston is talking. Nelson, Scoggins, maybe Judge McLamore?” I said. Then I mentioned something I’d kept to myself about my meeting the day before. “All I know is that when I got to Priscilla Lucas’s house, her father knew we’d argued against charging his daughter with solicitation of murder and that we were chasing a suspected serial killer.”