Sarah Armstrong - 01 - Singularity (17 page)

“You think that sick old woman could have done this?” the sheriff scoffed. “That’s possible?”

“I’d question her.”

The sheriff frowned.

“Missed our chance. She died about three months after the murder,” he said. “The husband still lives here, but from the results of that lie detector, I doubt that, if she did it, he knows anything about it.”

There were a variety of fingerprints found at the scene, and to ensure we weren’t prematurely dismissing the possibility that the case could be linked to ours, we took the precaution of e-mailing them to the captain. We both felt confident, however, even before the lab confirmed it while we waited for our return flight at the airport, that they didn’t match the San Antonio fragment.

That evening, we skimmed above a shelf of gray-white clouds, on our way to Houston.

“Now what?” David asked.

“The composite should be in the San Antonio papers on Sunday morning,” I said, grabbing at the last remaining straw. “That always starts the phones ringing.”

“Sunday,” he said, pressing the gray button in the armrest and pushing his seat back. His eyes closed, and we flew the rest of the trip in silence.

S
ee if you can catch me,” Maggie taunted, gliding backward.

“Maggie, you know I can’t ice skate.”

“Come on, Mom. You can do it. Just follow me,” she ordered, sprinting away with a giggle.

Ice skating was something kids in Houston didn’t do much of years ago, when I was growing up. We get an inch of snow here about every five years, and hardly ever ice. But I was willing to try.

Determined, I pushed forward. Breathing deeply, I concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other, keeping myself upright on the blades. I built speed, thinking it wasn’t all that different from roller-skating, and I began to gain confidence, skating past a young mother coaching her toddler son and a pack of teenage boys with camouflage clothes and earrings who conferred in the center of the rink. I grinned with sincere satisfaction as I skated toward my daughter. Nearly close enough to touch Maggie, I held out my hand to her, then glanced to the right and realized that I was still moving and my skates were aimed directly at the padded barrier bordering the rink.
I swiveled, hoping to stop, the way I remembered those Olympic figure skaters doing at the ends of their performances.

It didn’t work.

Instead, my right ankle shot out from under me. On one foot, unable to regain traction, I slid forward, fluttering like a sparrow in water. Then my skate caught on a groove in the ice and I jarred to a stop, in control, both legs firmly on the ice.

“Good work, Mom,” Maggie said, grinning. “Way to go.”

Triumph.

Just then, my blades wobbled, and my skates shot out from under me. I fell, knocking my tailbone, hard. Flat on my back on the ice, I surveyed the amused faces of spectators peering down at me from balconies circling the ice rink in the center of the Gallería, the sprawling shopping mall that housed layer upon layer of Houston’s ritziest stores. I was trying to remember why I’d suggested ice skating instead of shopping, when Maggie, peering down at me as if I were the child, asked, “Mom, are you okay?”

“Fine,” I said, holding up a hand. “Now pull me up.”

We turned in our rented ice skates and headed to a second-floor restaurant to watch the other skaters try to outdo my performance. After baked potato skins and Cokes, we were in the process of inhaling hot fudge sundaes when I noticed David across the mall.

“Well, imagine this,” he said, holding up a bag. “We both get the same idea on our Saturday off.”

“Not really,” I said. “We were here for the ice rink. You didn’t happen to be watching, did you?”

“No, should I have?”

“You missed a good one,” Maggie said, grinning. “Mom plopped right down on the ice.”

“Maggie, please,” I said, feigning embarrassment. “David, this is my daughter, Maggie. Maggie, this is Mr. Garrity.”

“You’re the FBI agent working on that case with my mom, aren’t you;

“What case is that?” I asked, surprised.

“The one in the paper where those two people got killed in Galveston,” she said, licking a scoop of sundae off her spoon. “You know, where that lady got arrested, but you think it’s really a serial killer?”

“I didn’t know you’d heard about that,” I said, motioning for her to wipe a fudge trail drizzling down her chin.

“Gram hid our newspaper, but Strings had one at his house,” she said, with a shrug. “I don’t know what the big deal is. You chase killers all the time.”

“Well put, Maggie.” David laughed.

“I didn’t like your picture though,” she said, scrunching up her nose.

“No?” I said. “Didn’t do me justice?”

“It made you look really old,” she said.

Deciding it was undoubtedly better not to comment, I asked David, “Would you join us?”

“Mom, this is mother-daughter day,” Maggie whined, a scowl replacing her grin. “You promised.”

“Maggie,” I said. “Just for a few minutes…”

“I can’t anyway,” David protested. “I’m hunting for just the right sweater to go with the shirt I bought for my son. It’s Jack’s birthday next week. I need to get his present in the mail. Nice to meet you, Maggie.”

Maggie just stared at him.

“Maggie!” I admonished.

“Nice to meet you, too,” she said, lips pursed.

After David left, she turned to me. I had the feeling she was studying my face.

“Do you like him?” she asked.

“What do you mean? We just work together.”

“You look like you like him. Are you going to date?”

“Maggie,” I scolded, wondering just how transparent I’d become.

At home that night, Maggie appeared to forget our meeting with David. Mom created her special leg of lamb with a thick mustard-and-parmesan-cheese crust. Afterward, we cleaned up the dishes, while Maggie went outside to bed down Emma Lou. It was just getting dark, the days getting longer, leading toward summer.

“Any progress on the Priscilla Lucas case?” Mom asked.

“A few more pieces have fallen into place,” I said, deciding to emphasize the positive. It wasn’t a lie. We did have the composite and the fingerprint fragment.

“Then, it’ll all be over soon?”

“I can’t say that, Mom,” I admitted. “I don’t know when or how this will end.”

As I was bending down to put the washed roasting pan away underneath the stove, I heard Mom say, “Well, look at that. What’s that girl up to now?”

I joined her at the kitchen window and stared out at the corral. Emma Lou stood off to the side warily watching Maggie, who’d hauled a cardboard box out from the garage. Under the elm tree in the center of the corral, she was digging through, pulling out what looked like string. She had a ladder propped up on the thick tree trunk.

“What’s she—”

“Christmas lights,” Mom said. “More Christmas lights.”

Mom threw off her apron, and I followed her outside.

“Maggie, what are you doing?” Mom shouted, as she stalked toward the corral. “Now if that isn’t the most ridiculous…you’ll get hurt up there, you know.”

Climbing up on the ladder into the tree, Maggie shouted back. “It’s okay. I can do it.”

Mom was right. Maggie’s behavior seemed odd. It wasn’t like her. “Why?” I asked. “Why are you stringing lights in the tree?”

“Because it…” She started to answer, then stopped. She looked down at me from near the top of the ladder and said, “Just because I want to look out at them from my bedroom window.”

Mom and I walked through the creaky corral gate, the one I’d been meaning to oil. All the while, the filly paced back and forth at the fence, uneasy.

“You’re going to give Emma Lou a scare, lighting up her corral like that,” Mom said. “Look, you’ve got her nervous already. And it’s spring, Maggie, not Christmastime. You shouldn’t—”

I put my hand on Mom’s arm, and she stopped talking.

“Why, Maggie?” I interrupted. “Why the lights?”

I stood at the base of the ladder, holding it still while Maggie climbed higher, toward the top of the tree, the crinkled cord of the white Christmas lights trailing behind her.

“Because I want them, Mom,” she said. “I want to be able to see them.”

Perched on a limb just leafing out with its Spring foliage, she turned around and stared down at me.

“Because, maybe it’s like what you and Gram talked about. Maybe Dad’s up in heaven,” Maggie said.

“Well…what does…?” Mom stuttered.

“Explain it to us, Maggie,” I said. “Gram and I need to understand.”

Maggie inched out a ways on a limb, where the tree was barely thick enough to hold her. She stopped when it swayed.

“You and Gram talked about Dad being in heaven and wondered if he could see us,” she explained, her eyes narrow and serious. “I thought about what you said, about believing in what you can’t see.”

“And the lights?” I asked. “Why the lights, Maggie?”

Again she paused. I sensed that this was something vastly
important to her, and she wasn’t sure she could trust us to understand. When she did speak, her voice was edged in sadness.

“The lights kind of look like stars,” she said. “I figure that if Dad’s in heaven, then he’s up there with the stars. I thought maybe if I brought the stars closer to us, Dad would be closer, too. The lights were the only thing I could think of. They make me feel like maybe he’s not so far away.”

My daughter’s eyes were glistening with tears in the last light from a bright gold sunset.

Mom glanced at me, and I nodded at her.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s help.”

I threw down the dish towel I was holding into the dirt under the tree and grabbed another strand of lights.

“Sure,” Mom said. “You two get started. I’ll go for the bigger ladder. We can get them up higher. Might as well do this job right.”

Two hours later, we’d strung all twenty strands of outdoor Christmas lights in the corral tree, and Maggie held the end of the cord with the plug. Emma Lou was in the stable. She’d have to spend the foreseeable future in the rear pasture with the other horses, to keep her from tripping on the extension cord I’d run out from the front porch outlet.

“You ready?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Maggie said. “But I want to say something first.”

“Okay, say away,” I said.

Maggie took my hand in hers and then took her grandmother by the other hand.

We were three generations of women holding hands under the still-dark elm tree.

“God,” Maggie said. “If you’ve got my dad up there, I’ve got a favor to ask. I know I can’t get him back. But I’d like him to be able to visit here sometimes, to be with us. If you can work it out, it would be really good if he got to see me grow up.”

Maggie looked up and smiled at me, and I leaned down and kissed her cheek, not bothering to wipe away the tears that were rolling down my own. Mom pulled a tissue out of her back jean pocket and dabbed at her eyes.

“So this is kind of an invitation,” Maggie said, looking up at the dark sky and the true stars shining far above us. “We’re going to light this tree up and maybe, if you don’t mind, you can let my dad visit sometimes. Just to see that Mom and Gram and I are okay. And that we miss him.”

“Your grandpa, too,” Mom said. “Ask God to let your grandpa come visit?”

“Oh, yeah, God, Grandpa, too.”

With that, Maggie let go of our hands and turned her full attention to inserting the plug into the extension cord. Moments later, the lights flicked on and lit up the corral bright as daybreak.

“Amen,” Maggie said.

“Amen,” Mom and I repeated.

T
he drive into the office on Monday morning was a dismal one. A heavy rain clogged the 610 loop with cars jammed like logs bottlenecked in a stream. I didn’t care. I’d called in off and on all day Sunday hoping to have to rush into the office to follow up on a lead. I knew nothing waited for me at the office except another confrontation with the captain. We’d come up dry. Typically after broadcasting a composite of a suspect, we’d be flooded with calls, but not this time, not a single lead, although not only newspapers but TV newscasts across the state had displayed the sketch along with our 800 number. It was as if this guy, whoever he was, didn’t exist. We didn’t even have reports of any strange cars in the neighborhoods at the times of the killings. Why didn’t someone at least see the guy’s car? With the exception of his run-in with Lily Salas, this psycho was invisible.

Making my morning even more perfect, I’d have to face the captain alone. David had called the day before from the airport. By now he was in Quantico, at FBI headquarters, consulting on another case.

“Morning, Sheila,” I called out as I walked past her desk, grabbing a stack of phone messages and mail from my cubbyhole. “Captain in yet?”

A round, motherly woman with curly gray hair and a penchant for polyester slacks and brightly flowered rayon blouses, she frowned at me as if I were an errant child in need of discipline. From the beginning, she’d treated me better than the other rangers, all men, who often caught her pointed barbs. I’d always assumed she was proud that a woman had finally broken through the ranks. Today, she didn’t seem sure.

“He’s been asking for you,” she answered, her voice echoing my disappointment. “He wanted to know first thing this morning if any leads came in over the weekend. I gave him the bad news.”

In my office, I flipped through a one-inch stack of pink message slips, hoping Sheila had missed something. I found a message from Friday, Maggie’s teacher, Mrs. Hansen. “Last few days, homework on time,” it read. I couldn’t help but smile.

The next was from Laurie Thomas, assistant to the director at the Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

“Ben,” I whispered, picking up the telephone and pushing the button for an outside line.

“We have a hit on the reconstruction photos you e-mailed in,” said Laurie. “A kid named Darryl Robbins, age four. Disappeared about six months ago in Centerville, Texas. The mom and her boyfriend reported him missing.”

“Dental records?” I asked.

“Kid doesn’t have any,” she said. “We’ve called the medical examiner’s office, and they’re going to compare the DNA they’ve got on file from the little guy’s skeleton to a sample from the mom. Put a rush on it.”