Sarah Armstrong - 01 - Singularity (2 page)

“Sorry. This is a closed crime scene,” the baby-faced officer guarding the door said, as he threw up his arm to keep me out.

I frowned and stared at the kid. Not too bright this one.

It wasn’t a totally unexpected reaction. There’s an old story from the 1901 oil rush about a riot in an East Texas boomtown. At wit’s end, the sheriff telegraphed Austin, begging the governor for rangers to put down the violence. At the railroad station the day his salvation was to arrive, the exhausted lawman waited for a squadron, but only one tall, lean, dusty cowboy wearing a badge exited the train.

“The governor only sent one ranger?” the sheriff gasped.

“The way I hear it,” the ranger growled back, “you’ve only got one riot.”

Imagine that sheriff’s surprise if instead of that tall drink of water carrying a Winchester, I’d been the lone Texas Ranger on that train.

“Okay, kid,” I said, shooting him a warning glance. “We’ll do this one more time before I call your sergeant. You want another look at the badge?” I’d had a bad year, the worst of my life, and I’d long since used up all my patience on more important matters. I was about to let the young cop have it when Detective O. L. Nelson, Galveston P.D., popped the door open.

“Boy, don’t you know what a Texas Ranger looks like?” Nelson snarled, giving the kid a conspiratorial wink. “This pretty lady is Sarah Armstrong. Lieutenant Armstrong to you. There’s a whole cotillion of people inside waiting for her and her alone to solve this heinous crime. Now get your bony butt out of the way and let this famous and learned lady through.”

Suddenly the kid was a genius. Obviously, the detective planned to have a little fun with me, so the rookie swooped into an exaggerated
bow as he pulled open the door. “Why, right this way, ma’am,” the kid crooned, winking back at the detective. “They’re waiting for you inside.”

These days, women cops are about as common as male nurses, but it’s different with Texas Rangers. It’s the oldest law-enforcement agency in the country, and change doesn’t come quickly when you’re dealing with the stuff of legends. I’m one of only two women in what’s still a good old boys’ club, and, I’ve got to admit, sometimes it’s about as much fun as wearing a flak jacket in Houston in July.

Detective Nelson, a tall, heavyset man with a cocky swagger and a twitch that now and then jerked the right side of his face, placed his hand under my elbow and squired me into the house as smug as a high school senior escorting his date into the gym for the prom.

“Kid’s still wet behind the ears,” he scoffed, in mock disgust. “He just ain’t learned his gentlemanly manners yet.”

“Imagine that,” I said, stone-faced.

I’d first met Nelson years earlier, and neither of us particularly liked the other.

That summer there’d been a string of carjackings on the island. With Galveston dependent on tourists who flock to the beaches, that didn’t sit well with the chamber of commerce types. Frightening headlines rarely do. I don’t usually take robbery assignments, but it was busy that week and the request came in when all the other rangers were out. My arrival on the island didn’t please Nelson, who’d been working the case for weeks. I disagreed with his theory, that the stolen cars were being trucked to the mainland. Why hide an entire car, when they’re easier to transport and more valuable in parts? Once in charge, I focused the search on the Galveston port. On the second day, an unmarked squad spotted the thieves’ waterfront warehouse.

We borrowed a DEA armored vehicle with a battering ram to raid the place that night. Once we were inside, chaos erupted, as the
perps fled like red ants out of an injured hill. In all the commotion, some stupid white kid jumped out from behind a crate and smacked Nelson on the back of the head with a two-by-four. He fell, his gun dropped on the cement floor, and a scrawny black kid with a straggly goatee dove for it. My luck, I just happened to be close enough to plant my .45 on the center of the kid’s forehead. I didn’t have to say much to convince him to drop the gun.

That night, we arrested four thieves and recovered parts from six stolen cars crated and waiting to be boarded on a ship for Mexico. As far as I was concerned, the case was closed, but Nelson’s superiors suspended him for a week without pay for not protecting his weapon. I thought it was tough luck, that given the right circumstances it could happen to anyone. Silly me, I even considered calling to tell him that. Then a week later, I found an envelope with a Galveston postmark and no return address on my desk. Inside was a hand-drawn cartoon of a half-naked woman cop straddling a urinal.

I hung it up with the
Ziggy
and
Bizarro
strips on my office door. It was there for nearly a year before I tore it up and threw it away.

Inside, the beach house looked like a furniture store ad, a place where real people could never live, at least not comfortably. Everything was perfect, from the leather couches and rough, bleached pine tables the color of Galveston’s sandy beaches, to the watercolors of waves crashing on dunes.

“Where are they?” I asked.

“This way,” said Nelson, visibly relishing being in the lead. He snickered and added with a grin, “Prepare yourself. You ain’t seen nothin’ like this before.”

“Maybe. Maybe not,” I said, chewing on the memory of that damn cartoon. “Let’s take a look.”

Once we reached the master-bedroom wing, sunlight poured
into the room—immense with high ceilings. A wall of windows framed a spectacular view of the Gulf surf. But my eyes were drawn dead center, to the king-size canopy bed. There, on top of the cream satin bedspread, two naked bodies appeared like a life-size statue, motionless figures caught in the act of making love.

The scene was at the same time beautiful and horrifying. For what felt like minutes, I couldn’t look away. So much so, that at first I didn’t notice the wall above the bed. Then Nelson tapped my shoulder and pointed up to where someone had smeared a thick, vertical four-foot reddish-brown line crossed by a three-foot horizontal bar. I didn’t need lab results or my FBI training in profiling to know I was looking at a bloody cross.

“Figured crime-scene photos wouldn’t do this justice,” someone said behind me. It was the gruff voice of Captain Don Williams, my boss, who walked up beside me. The captain’s as unlikely a ranger as I am. He’s nearly seven foot, a former University of Texas basketball star, the first black Texas Ranger and the first to make captain. I’ve always favored the basics, namely black Wranglers, cowboy boots, and a white cotton shirt with a jacket, but like most of the men I work with, the captain dressed Western, from his polished snakeskin boots and silver-belly Stetson, to his gold captain’s badge pinned on a dark brown leather vest. “Pretty strange, eh?”

“Sure is,” I said.

I’d nearly forgotten Nelson was there until he gloated, “I told you this was one of a kind.”

“What do you think?” the captain asked.

I stood for a few minutes, taking it all in. I thought of a museum sculpture I’d once seen, pure white marble cut and polished into two Greek lovers. The victims’ upper bodies had that same pale, bloodless sheen, but I nudged down the comforter and saw that the woman’s calves and the man’s backside were bluish purple, postmortem lividity, gravity pooling blood in the lowest regions of the bodies. That
meant they’d been dead for at least six hours. When I brushed the back of my hand against the woman’s forearm, she felt cold, and a shiver ran through me. I quickly moved on, but when I glanced his way, Nelson was watching me and he smiled a small, crooked grin. I ignored him and went back to work.

As a profiler, I’m trained to view victims’ bodies as evidence, no different from fingerprints and blood splatter. Sometimes that’s hard, trying not to think of them as people, I mean. No matter how often I’ve done it, no matter how engrossing the scene, working around dead bodies, my skin prickles. I think about the horror of their deaths, and my stomach gets unsettled, as if I’d had too much red wine the night before. Especially after all that’s happened in my own life. It’s made it even harder not to let my mind drift to thoughts of the families left behind, the pain that waits for them.

After my second trip around the bed, I pulled out a steno pad and jotted down notes: the man was spread-eagled, tied to the bed frame with expensive silk ties, most likely out of his closet. A dime-size bullet hole in his forehead, its edges burned and sooty, exposed tissue turned a bright cherry pink from absorption of carbon monoxide, explaining the bloody halo on the pillow.

The woman was on her knees, straddling the dead man. Left to their own devices, dead bodies don’t do that, stay upright I mean. From across the room, all I could see was that something tied to her upper body braced her. Up close, I tapped a latex-gloved finger against translucent fishing line, the sturdy, deep-sea kind, anchoring the corpse to the bed’s ornate brass canopy. A single length hog-tied the dead woman’s ankles, her wrists behind her, and then formed a slipknot around her neck. The killer knew what he was doing; as she struggled, the fishing line cut into her throat, squeezing her airway tighter and tighter. What from across the room appeared to be sexual rapture was in reality a vain attempt to keep her head back and live.

Thinking about how the killer had used the dead rich guy’s ties, I asked the captain, “The fishing line from the scene?”

“Looks like it’s off a rod and reel in the downstairs storage,” he confirmed.

That settled, I climbed a few rungs up on a ladder the Galveston crime-scene guys had positioned and inspected the woman’s corpse from a better angle. She had all the outward signs of ligature strangulation, her face bloated and bruised. A line of blood spilled from a gash across her throat. Whether or not he needed to, the killer had finished her off, slitting her throat with a razor-sharp blade.

A dark burgundy river of dried blood on her chest came from slashes cut from collarbone to navel, then breast to breast. Down from the ladder, I gave the man another look. He had the same marking on his chest, mimicking the bloody cross on the wall.

“Who are they?” I asked.

“Meet Edward Travis Lucas the third,” Captain Williams said.

He needed to say nothing more. The Lucas family, real estate developers for more than three generations, had their name on half the buildings in Galveston along with a healthy chunk of Houston. In its present condition, I barely recognized the man’s plain face framed by graying, mousy brown hair from the frequent photos in the
Houston Chronicle
society columns. I vaguely remembered a wife from those same photos, taken at the poshest parties. The woman I remembered looked nothing like the deceased on the bed. The wife was pretty, petite, and dark-haired. This woman was at least a decade younger than Lucas, tall and slim, with short blond hair. Athletic—from the muscles jutting down her thighs and calves, I guessed a runner.

“Not the wife,” I said.

“We found her ID in her purse. The dead woman is Annmarie Knowles, a lawyer at Lucas’s Galveston office,” the captain said. He picked up a framed photo from the nightstand, of the dead man standing
beside the brunette I remembered, surrounded by three apple-cheeked kids. “My guess is this is the wife.”

“Does she know?”

“Yeah,” said Nelson, reinserting himself into the conversation. “We sent a squad car to tell her an hour ago. Our guys said she took the news with less emotion than the dry-cleaning being late.”

“Any leads? Anyone hear or see anything?” I asked.

“Nothing,” said the captain.

“This time of year you could fire a bazooka off around here and no one would hear it,” explained Nelson. “On weekdays ninety-nine percent of these houses are empty until summer.”

“Do we know how the killer got in?”

“No forced entry,” Nelson said.

“The killer followed or brought them here? Entered when they did?” the captain asked.

“That would be my guess,” I said. “Absent any evidence of a break-in.”

“So you figure they knew him?”

I thought about the bodies, about the type of mind that would fantasize about killing in such a ritualized way. “Probably not,” I said. “You never know this early in the investigation, but even though he didn’t force his way in, I doubt—”

“I’m thinking the guy had a key.” Nelson interrupted, pulling up on the worn leather belt that held up his shapeless gray slacks. It was obvious that he hated having me on his case. Despite the cartoon, my sex had little to do with it. Nelson and I both knew why I’d been called in on the carjackings and why I stood across from him now; his boss didn’t trust him to solve the tough cases. Every cop has a jacket, a reputation. O. L. Nelson’s was that he’d earned a detective’s slot based on seniority and little else. He did nothing to challenge that image when he righted his buckle over his bulging waistline and
speculated. “I figure Lucas’s old lady gave the killer the key, set the whole thing up. The way I’ve got this thing pegged, this has the look of hired talent.”

Then, slowly, as if explaining algebra to a second grader, Nelson looked at me and went on. “Little woman finds out hubby is screwing the hired help. Maybe he talks divorce. Maybe he and the wife have a pre-nup and the old lady figures he’ll find a way to leave her high and dry. Bye, bye checkbook. Hello full-time office job. She doesn’t like the prospects, so she puts out feelers, a little dough, and poof. Her problem vanishes.”

“Why the elaborate staging of the bodies?” I asked. “Why the crosses?”

“Camouflage,” he answered. Although I’d posed the question, he flashed the captain a knowing glance. “The guy wants us to think he’s some kind of psycho to keep us from connecting the murders to the wife.”

“Possible,” I said.

“You look doubtful,” the captain said.

“Take a look at their hands and feet,” I suggested.

Nelson bent down to get a better look at the rash of small cuts on both victims, as the captain shot me a questioning glance.

“This killer’s piqueristic, fascinated by knives. The coroner will be the final judge, but from the bleeding, my guess is that they were still alive. The SOB tortured them, most likely using the same weapon he used to slit her throat.”