Sarah Armstrong - 01 - Singularity (26 page)

“Listen, I’ve got no love for this guy. I hated jail, and I wouldn’t go back to protect my own mother,” he said. “But you gotta believe me. I don’t know shit about this guy. Just what I told you, and that people say he’s easy to spot, stands out in a crowd.”

“How?”

“His eyes,” he said. “People say you’ll know him by his eyes.”

Our plan was to let Quaker stew for an hour and then go back at him, after he’d had time to fully appreciate the prospect of a sentence that would put him away until he was well into middle age. But Captain Williams called on my cell phone, and I knew immediately from the sound of his voice that my time was up and I wasn’t in line for a reprieve.

“We made an agreement,” he said.

“But—”

“You gave me your word, Sarah. Three days and you’d walk away.
Remember?” he said. When I didn’t respond, he went on, “Besides, there’s something else. You got another letter in today’s mail. This Gabriel guy’s focusing on you. You’ve become a liability to the investigation. The chopper is waiting. Garrity can handle things there. I want you in the office ASAP to turn over all your files on this case to Ferguson.”

T
he captain and Sheila stopped talking the moment I walked into the office. He looked tired and worried, but when he saw me, he smiled.

“This isn’t your fault, Sarah,” he said.

“No one would be able to tell that from the way I’m being treated,” I said.

“Come on. Let’s talk. My office.”

Seated among his collection of ranger memorabilia, the frame full of aged badges, decades-old prints of our Stetson-wearing predecessors, he poured me a cup of thick black coffee. Bitter enough to have been made first thing that morning, it flowed warmly down my throat and gave me something to do with my hands. At the moment, I didn’t feel totally in control.

“The situation, Sarah, isn’t that I believe you’re mishandling this case. Hell, you and Garrity have done a great job. Looks like you two were right about this guy all along,” he said.

“Then why am I being punished?”

“It’s not that you’re being punished. It’s that between Matthews’s
headlines and this guy’s letters, attention’s being diverted to you, instead of where it belongs, on the investigation.” He hesitated and looked warily at me. “Plus, to be blunt, I’m concerned about this guy’s interest in you. I don’t want you visible in this investigation in any way. Heck, take some time off, a few days to spend with Maggie—you deserve it.”

He picked up a plastic evidence sleeve from his desk and tossed it at me.

“Look at this,” he said.

I’d almost forgotten that he’d mentioned another letter on the telephone, but there it was, just like the others, on ordinary white copy paper, penned by the same precise hand.

Man
will never understand the will of God.

I cannot be judged by human standards
.

“Looks like Gabriel’s given up on the guys on the train and he’s lecturing me,” I said, fighting to keep my voice light and calm. “This is certainly nothing to worry about. He just wants to use his newfound fame as a soapbox. Besides, he’s too smart to come after me. He can’t take me by surprise, unarmed, the way he did Mary Gonzales.”

“Maybe so, but you’re missing the point,” he said. “Whether you like it or not, this guy’s focused on you, and I can’t have that.”

“So how do you propose catching him?”

“We’re going to extend the train searches another forty-eight hours.”

“That won’t work.”

“Why not?”

“This guy’s not dumb. By now all the press has alerted him. He’s not going to deliver himself into your hands. He enjoys what he’s doing. He doesn’t intend to stop.”

“Then what’s your suggestion?” he said. “Give me an alternative.”

“It’s time to go public,” I said, seeing his face immediately harden. “This works twofold. We get people all over the state, all over the country, looking for this guy. Plus, we alert people to lock their doors and windows, to protect themselves.”

“You understand the circumstances. We’re under a gag order. We can’t.”

“Yes, we can,” I said. “We just don’t link him to the Lucas case, the only one involved in Judge McLamore’s ruling. We say Gabriel’s sought for questioning only on the Gonzales and Neal murders.”

The captain hesitated, considering my proposal.

“I haven’t told you, but I’ve agreed for a long time that we need to warn people about the danger, but the call isn’t mine. This case has become a boondoggle at headquarters. Too many of the people at the top have an interest in how it turns out. Seems like the contingent that wants to see Priscilla Lucas guilty has been running the show,” he admitted. “That said, I like your idea, and I’ll run it past the bosses in Austin. In the meantime, I need assurance from you that whatever they decide you’ll adhere to it. That you won’t go public on your own.”

When I didn’t answer, he cautioned, “Sarah, so far you haven’t mortally wounded your career. You do this without permission, and that’s the result. Everything you’ve worked for, gone.”

That afternoon, I turned over my files on the case to Lieutenant Dick Ferguson, explaining everything I knew so far. He seemed reluctant to take them. Ferguson, one of my favorite rangers, an old-timer who’d been with the department for nearly thirty years, understood that I felt as if I was handing over a part of myself, the part that made me feel valuable.

“We’ll get this guy,” he said.

“Do it quick, before he kills again,” I said. “Because he will.”

I also gave him my “To Do” list, parts of the investigation that I’d been too busy to follow up on. Number one on the list were bank statements and financiáis on the whole lot, including all the victims and their immediate families. We had them on Priscilla Lucas, but Scroggins and Nelson had never requested them for the rest, even though they’d assured me they would. Since the money motive—the Lucas/Knowles murders being a paid hit—still hadn’t been entirely put to rest, I’d wanted to know everything I could about everyone’s bank accounts. All we’d discovered in the past two weeks made me even more certain Priscilla Lucas wasn’t involved. If this operation fell apart and we never found Gabriel, I wanted to do everything we could to make sure that she wasn’t unjustly prosecuted.

My desk cleared, I was almost out the door when the phone rang. Laurie Thomas, from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, wanted to fill me in on the status of the investigation into Ben’s death.

“The DNA’s a match, and the Centerville police arrested the mom’s boyfriend this morning,” she said. “He confessed to the killing. He beat the boy with a pipe for wetting his pants. Get this. He says he didn’t mean to hurt him. He disposed of the body outside Houston because he thought in a big city no one would spend much time investigating.”

“Thanks, Laurie. You don’t know how much I needed good news today.”

“Glad I could accommodate,” she said. “Hope whatever’s gone wrong goes right.”

I’d almost hung up the phone when I had a thought. “Laurie, can you age progress from a sketch—you know, a drawing?”

“It’s not easy, harder than dealing with a photograph, but we’ve done it once or twice,” she said.

“If your staff can predict what a child will look like as a teenager, can you take a sketch of a man, like a composite drawing from a criminal investigation, and regress it, reconstruct what the person probably looked like as, say, an adolescent?”

“I don’t know why not,” she said. “What do you have in mind?”

M
om didn’t press when I walked in the door. She never asked why I was home unexpectedly for dinner. Guess she could tell it wasn’t good news. Maggie and Strings were at his house doing homework, so the place was quiet. The aroma of roasting chicken hung in the air, and I tried to convince myself it wasn’t the worst thing in the world to be free from the case. It was a hard sell.

At dinner, Maggie buzzed about plans for the next afternoon. Mom had promised to take her to the University of Houston to meet with Dr. Norton Mayer, an astronomy professor. Mrs. Hansen had made the arrangements, including an early dismissal to allow her to get there by two.

“I’m hoping he has some more ideas for me,” Maggie said, very grown up. “He’s going to show me the observatory, the telescope, and everything. Bet it makes my little telescope look like a stick.”

“That’s great, honey,” I said, only half-listening.

“Mrs. Hansen says that Dr. Mayer was really impressed with Maggie’s interest in singularity,” said Mom proudly.

“Gram said she would bring me, because you’re busy chasing that
killer,” Maggie said. I almost objected, since it appeared I’d be free for a few days, when I realized how excited Mom was about the event. Besides, it saved me from having to explain the reason I was free. “Couldn’t Dr. Mayer see her after school? So she wouldn’t miss her last class of the afternoon?”

“No. That’s the only time he could fit Maggie in,” Mom explained.

“So this is someone Mrs. Hansen knows?” I asked. “She’s familiar with this man?”

“She’s the one who set it up,” Mom said. “She says he’s well known in his field.”

“He’s a famous scientist and everything, Mom. I don’t want to tell him I can’t take off school to meet him. Besides, Mrs. Hansen says it’s okay. She’s even going to let Strings go with us,” Maggie stressed. “I pulled some stuff up on the Internet about him. Dr. Mayer has published lots of articles on black holes.”

“Very exciting,” I said.

“I think I’d like to be an astronomer,” Maggie mused. “Just like Dr. Mayer and write about things that people know are there but can’t see.”

I marveled at my daughter, who’d gone from accepting only what could be proven to exist to believing in heaven and celestial explosions that hadn’t yet been documented with the most powerful telescopes.

“Then that’s what you will be, Magpie. Someday, you’ll be such a famous astronomer, I’ll have to make an appointment to see you.” Placing my fist next to my right ear, thumb and little finger extended, I said, in my best old-lady voice, “Hello. Is my daughter the famous stargazer available? This is her mother. Does she have time to talk to me?”

Maggie giggled. “You can be totally dumb sometimes.”

After dinner, I had a few things to clean up. I climbed the stairs to the workshop, where, as I’d hoped, I had a fax waiting from Laurie
Thomas. Though fuller and younger, the face was unmistakable, Gabriel as an adolescent. I scanned the new sketch into the computer and e-mailed it to Captain Williams at the office. On the cover sheet I typed: “since our guy’s so young and he may have been riding the rails for a while, I thought a sketch of him at a younger age might help. This might be more the way people remember him.”

Later, in my bedroom, I peeled off the shirt and slacks I’d worn all day and slipped on a robe. Down the hall a bathtub full of lavender-scented bubbles waited—Maggie’s Mother’s Day present from the year before—when the phone rang.

“I’m sorry, Sarah,” David said. “I knew this was happening, but I really didn’t believe it.”

“Neither did I, right up until the moment the captain pulled me off the case I hoped he would back down. Guess not this time. Did you get anything interesting out of Quaker?”

David laughed.

“All that big, important information he had, the guy kept saying he didn’t want to be a snitch, he had hardly anything,” he said. “Figures, right?”

“Yeah, it does.”

“He met Gabriel once. Says he looks like the guy in the sketch and that he scared the hell out of him. He knows nothing about him. Not his real name, not where he’s from, zip.”

“Couldn’t tell you anything about what the guy’s like?”

“Besides being scary, he said the guy has an accent.”

“What kind?”

“A Southern drawl, like he grew up in Alabama or Mississippi.”

“That’s something, but not much to go on.”

“Yeah, tell me about it,” he said with a rueful chuckle. “Another road to nowhere.”

There was an uncomfortable distance between us that I sensed meant more than just my being taken off the case.

“Sarah, we never talked about the other night,” David said. “I don’t want you to think…”

“I don’t think anything right now, David. We’ve been caught in a whirlwind. I reached out for you, and I appreciate your being there for me,” I said. “Beyond that, our lives are too chaotic right now to read any more into it.”

“I guess you’re right. But it’s important that you know that I do care about you and that I’m there for you. Whenever you need me,” he said. Then he laughed. “Just so you don’t misinterpret, we’re not talking just physically here, although I’m definitely there whenever you need a—”

“Thank you, David, that’s comforting,” I broke in, with a laugh. “Hey, you know, it’s late and I’m exhausted. Maybe we’ll talk tomorrow?”

“Sure,” he said. “And maybe the tomorrow after that.”

“Maybe,” I agreed.

Moments after I’d hung up, the phone rang again. This time it was the captain. The powers-that-be in Austin had scrapped my suggestion. There’d be no public announcement.

“I don’t agree with this decision, and I told them so,” he said. “I’m sorry, Sarah. I know how strongly you feel about warning people.”

I thanked him, mentioned the e-mail with the new composite I’d just sent, and then hung up.

After the captain’s call, I soaked for a while in the bubble bath, the water by then cooled, never really relaxing. Afterward, I couldn’t concentrate on the television screen. Giving up, I clicked it off and went downstairs, where Mom had water heating on the stove. She pulled out a second cup and plopped in a bag of chamomile tea. As
we let it steep, she talked about the high school girl she’d hired to help with the horses after school, how she needed a few days off to visit colleges with her parents. Mom sounded sympathetic but worried about caring for the stock while she was gone. Then she talked about how one day I’d be taking Maggie off to look at colleges, just like this girl and her parents. I was only half-listening. I didn’t notice at first that Mom had stopped chattering and instead stared at me.