Sarah Armstrong - 01 - Singularity (16 page)

“You didn’t confirm that?”

“No,” I said. “I didn’t deny it, but I told them nothing about the investigation.”

“Come on, Sarah,” he chastised. “Think about it. You didn’t have to confirm it. That you wouldn’t voice some kind of a denial, even a vague one, was enough for him to call Matthews and clue him in. What better for his daughter’s defense than for the newspapers to contaminate the Galveston jury pool with speculation about a serial killer?”

“David, this isn’t coming from me and it isn’t coming from Bobby Barker, at least not without a police source, a well-placed informant. Barker had no way of knowing about Mary Gonzales’s murder so quickly. It’s got to be, as Matthews said, someone close to the investigation. He must have gotten the call and left for San Antonio not long after we did.”

David thought about that for a minute. “So who’s responsible?”

“My guess is Nelson.”

“Why?”

“I don’t think Nelson needs a reason, that he dislikes me is enough,” I snapped. “But the truth is that we’ve got history between us, not a good situation, and sticking me in the hot seat wouldn’t give him a moment’s hesitation.”

David chewed on that for a few minutes, and when he spoke again, his voice was calm but strained. “Let’s not jump to conclusions,” he said. “Why would Nelson jeopardize his own investigation?”

“Maybe he doesn’t see it that way,” I speculated. “Or maybe he wants me in a position to take the blame if his case against Priscilla Lucas falls apart. We both know that the evidence he and Scroggins pulled together is full of holes. A good defense attorney will make fools of them.”

“Well. Maybe,” he said, considering the possibility. “Nelson
could
be setting you up as a scapegoat.”

“So, where does that leave us?”

David considered the possibilities.

“However it happened, you’re now in the frying pan with flames licking the sides,” he said, with an angry frown. “We’d better find this killer before you end up in the fire.”

S
arah,” Mom called out the following morning, a Friday. “You’ve got a phone call.”

“The phone?”

“The captain,” she said.

I stepped out of the shower, toweled off and threw on a robe.

After leaving San Antonio, the rest of the previous day had been long and unproductive. David and I went over the Mary Gonzales homicide in detail with the captain, and then followed with a briefing session for Nelson and Scroggins. We’d been ordered to bring them up to date, but they were less than grateful. In fact, they showed up at the office loaded for bear, ready to shoot down any and all theories that didn’t implicate Priscilla Lucas. I finally gave up and kept my mouth shut while David contended with them. Still, I couldn’t keep from watching Nelson, wondering if he was the one who’d tipped off the reporter. I purposely didn’t mention the confrontation with Evan Matthews to the captain. David and I decided I hadn’t really given him anything to run with. Why cause
a problem when none existed? At least, that’s the way we saw it at the time.

“Armstrong here.”

“Lieutenant, have you seen this morning’s
Galveston County Daily News!”
Captain Williams growled. “How about the
Houston Chronicle?”

“No, I haven’t. Why?”

“Well, I suggest you take a look. And I also suggest you get yourself into this office, pronto.”

“Hell,” I said. “Matthews?”

“Yes. Matthews. Agent Garrity is on his way. We’ve got a situation. The Galveston D.A.’s office is furious. Even the governor called. Get in here. ASAP.”

With some difficulty I sidestepped Mom’s pancakes, kissed Maggie, and arrived at the office an hour later. Friday morning, one full week after the Lucas murders, and the whole place bristled with unexpended energy. Sheila, the captain’s secretary, gave me one of those withering stares she reserves for those who’ve made her boss’s blood pressure climb. I, of course, was the cause of all the anguish, my photo from the day before under the headline “Texas Ranger tracks serial killer.” The subhead read: “Suspect in Lucas double murder.”

A week on this case and I’d made the front page of both newspapers, the
Chronicle
picking up the
Daily News
piece off the wire. The photographer caught me with a glint of surprise in my eyes, just as Evan Matthews popped the question, “Is this murder related to the Galveston double murders?” My non-answer, as David feared, was lost near the bottom of the article and hadn’t put the matter to rest. Instead, it only made me appear to be hiding information, which, of course, I was.
Matthews must be having a good day
, I thought. Scooping the big-city rival newspaper twice on a case was a major coup.

“Sarah,” David said, as I entered the conference room.

“Good morning,” I said, warily glancing toward the captain who pulsed with anger. Behind him hung the chart he and David constructed a few days earlier to compare the murders. David and I had already written in the Mary Gonzales information, what little we had to work with.

“Didn’t I tell you this could happen?” my boss said, slapping both newspapers down onto the table before me.

“Captain, let me explain.”

“Explain? How can you explain?” he scoffed. “Isn’t this precisely what I warned you and Agent Garrity about?”

“Yes, but—”

“But? There’s a but? I don’t think so, Sarah. In fact, I know better.”

I’d never seen the captain so angry, not even the day a novice ranger crashed his squad car on the interstate, injuring himself and two civilians, during a high-speed pursuit of a guy who turned out to be just evading a traffic ticket.

“The governor’s already called headquarters, and they want answers. What am I supposed to tell them? That one of my best rangers couldn’t keep her mouth shut?”

“That’s not fair.”

“Not fair?” he echoed.

“No, it’s not fair,” I said, my voice rising. “I told Matthews nothing. This is coming from someplace else. David can tell you. He was there.”

“Is that the truth?”

David nodded.

“I wasn’t at the Lucas estate when Sarah talked with Bobby Barker,” he admitted. “But I can tell you that she told Matthews nothing. He arrived knowing everything that’s in that article. At most, Sarah never denied his assertions.”

“How could I do that?” I asked, my voice rising in indignation. “It’s the truth. We’ve got another murder, same MO in San Antonio. We’ve got a serial killer. Evan Matthews is right.”

“Right?” shouted the captain. “What’s he right about?”

“Instead of hiding information, we should be warning people,” I said, standing up and walking toward the chart. “This morning, our chart has another murder. Number four. How many more before we own up to the fact that we’ve got an active serial killer on the loose?”

“I’m not going to jeopardize the case against Priscilla Lucas, not yet,” said the captain. “Not until we’re sure.”

“We’ve got a sketch, the San Antonio composite,” I said, feeling my own anger rise. “Shouldn’t it be on newscasts across the state tonight? Isn’t that the best way to warn the public and bring this guy in?”

“No,” said the captain, pounding his meaty fist on the table with a heavy thud. “Circulate a flyer on the Gonzales murder across the state. Identify the guy only as a possible witness in the San Antonio homicide. But in no way tie him to the other murders. It’s too soon, Sarah. Think about it. We need more time.”

“More time for what?” I said, seething. “So this guy can supply us with more tortured bodies?”

Captain Williams flinched as if I’d slapped him.

“That’s not fair,” said David.

With that, the captain and I looked at each other, and I felt my anger subsiding. I’d just attacked a man I truly respected, one I’d trust with my life.

“Sarah.” He sighed. “What’s going on here?”

“I’m being unfairly reprimanded. That’s what’s happening here. I said nothing to Matthews. I told Bobby Barker absolutely nothing about any of our suspicions or the investigation. They both knew everything before I met them. Someone else is talking.”

The captain sat down in a chair and pushed back, staring at the ceiling.

“Sarah, the least you could have done was warn me, so I wasn’t blindsided,” he said.

“You’re right. I’m sorry.”

“So, what do we do now?”

“We do nothing differently than we do every other day. We find the murderer, solve the case, just like we always do,” I said, hoping the uncertainty welling in my chest didn’t give me away. “We prove once and for all who killed Edward Lucas and Annmarie Knowles, and we put this matter to rest. We save lives by stopping this SOB.”

“And how does that happen?” the captain asked. “What next?”

I’d anticipated that question but hadn’t been able to come up with a ready answer. Grateful, I heard David speak up.

“We heard from San Antonio this morning. The partial print doesn’t match anyone known to have been in the house. There’s a good chance it’s the killer’s,” he said, my hopes rising. “We can run it through the computer and look for a match on the national database.”

“While the lab guys do that, David and I will head to the valley,” I said. “We’ve got an eighteen-month-old murder there that could help tie these cases together.”

“All right,” said the captain. “But do what you need to do and make it quick because, as I see it, this thing’s only getting worse.”

The Southwest Airlines flight home from McAllen, Texas, that night took only seventy-five minutes but felt like one of the longest of my life. It had been a day filled with disappointment and bad news. First, shortly after we’d arrived in the Rio Grande valley, the captain called to say the fingerprint Mary Gonzales had fought so valiantly
to provide us proved too small a sample to compare with the database.

“There’s just not enough there to work with. If we get a full fingerprint, there’s not enough to say if we have an exact match, but we will be able to determine if it conforms to what we have,” he explained.

Then, our afternoon in the small town of Redbluff, fifty miles north of the Mexican border, fell far short of what we’d hoped.

Driving from the airport, I was struck by how much the valley had changed, even in the five short years since I’d been in the most southern reaches of the state. Among the citrus orchards growing Ruby Red grapefruit and oranges were subdivisions of trailer homes populated by snowbirds, seniors from the North who in winter flooded area grocery stores.

Still, this wedge of Texas has historically been a hotspot for crime, and that hadn’t changed. Nearly a hundred years ago, during Prohibition, rangers stationed on the border intercepted burro trains of bootlegged liquor crossing into the States. Today the cargo’s different: illegals and drugs.

In his office, where a poster on the window announced an upcoming golf tournament, Sheriff Tim Hagen, wearing tennis shoes, khaki shorts, and a blue polo shirt, pulled out his file on the murder of Sheryl Wilcox, a forty-eight-year-old health-care aide. Before us we had an incomplete autopsy report with photos, conducted by the local mortician, photos of the crime scene, lab results, and witness statements. A former detective from Corpus Christi, Hagen ran down the case as he knew it. Wilcox had been found on the deck outside her mobile home, in a rural section outside of town. In the crime-scene photos, she was nude, her throat cut, her arms and legs tied to a battered aluminum-frame lawn chair. Her chest was bloody with gashes. On the copies that came over the fax to our office, the gashes could have been interpreted as forming the pattern of a cross. Yet
within minutes of arriving, David and I knew our trip had been a waste of time and resources.

We’d known before we arrived that the knots in the rope were wrong, square, not slip and overhand knots as in our four murders. And there was no bloody cross over the body. Still the murder had sounded enough alike to pique our interest. But when we looked at the crime-scene photos and talked to the sheriff, it became clear: this wasn’t our guy.

The deciding factors were the gashes in her chest. Looking at the actual autopsy photos, it was easy to see that they bore no resemblance to our victims’ crosses. Instead, they appeared to be the result of a heated battle between the woman and her killer. Finally, the cause of death, not a clean incision as in our cases, the wound to her throat was a jagged, sloppy laceration that left the skin torn and bruised.

While disappointed, to keep the trip from being a total loss, we reviewed the evidence with Sheriff Hagen.

“This woman knew her killer,” I said, looking at the photos of the woman left with her legs spread wide. “The murderer posed her to humiliate her. There was incredible anger.”

“Sheryl had been working for an elderly couple,” he explained. “She cared for the wife, who was dying from liver cancer. We thought at first that the husband might have done it. For an old guy, he’s in good shape. There were rumors that they’d had an affair. Figured it had gone bad and he hadn’t been able to take the rejection. But he had an alibi. He was on the golf course with three friends at the time of the murder. We sent him to Corpus for a polygraph and the guy admitted he’d had the affair, but he said he knew nothing about the murder. The examiner said he was telling the truth. The test came out clean.”

“What about the wife?” asked David, inspecting a close-up of wounds on Wilcox’s chest.

“We never seriously considered her,” the sheriff admitted. “We questioned her about her husband’s connection, but she claimed she knew nothing. She seemed heartbroken about the killing. Why do you ask?”

“Because my guess is that your killer’s a woman,” David said. He picked up the sheriff’s wire-rimmed reading glasses off the desk and used them like a magnifying glass to examine a photo of the dead woman’s face, then another of her upper body.

“See these marks?” he asked the sheriff, pointing to the woman’s chest.

“Yeah, what about them?”

“Send these photos to the M.E. in Houston, tell them we requested they take a look. They may disagree, but my guess is that they weren’t made by a knife,” he said. “Looks like she’s been gouged, maybe by long fingernails.”