Sarah Armstrong - 01 - Singularity (29 page)

“Who’s the boy’s father?” I asked.

“Don’t rightly know,” said W. O. with a shrug. “Thelma never said, that I know of. But she had him not long after her daddy disappeared. Some in town always figured, isolated like she was, that Doyle’s most likely daddy was…”

“Say it,” I said.

“Some always figured Thelma’s daddy wasn’t living what he was preaching, and that he fathered the boy,” he said. “But that’s only gossip. Don’t believe no one really knows for sure.”

“Tell us about Doyle,” David prodded.

“Well, that kid was smart as a whip, but doing some very peculiar things, even when he was a little one,” he explained, shaking his head in disbelief. “One day I walked up on him skinning a possum.”

“Why’s that odd?” I said.

“Damn thing was still alive,” he said, shaking his old head.

David shot me a glance, and I could feel the fine hair on my arms stand up, as if from static electricity.

“That poor thing wailed like a sinner on judgment day. I asked that boy, he was maybe eight then, why he was doing that to that poor animal. I never liked possum much, but some things you just don’t do. He never said a word, just looked at me with those eyes, those hateful eyes, ice-cold blue eyes. I just shrugged it off. Left to go see his momma, which was what had brought me out there in the first place.”

“Tell us more,” I asked.

“The last time I saw Doyle, he looked like that sketch you got there. He might’a been twelve or thirteen. After that, when I did go see his momma, which weren’t too often, mainly because my years were coming on and my manly needs weren’t as strong, the boy was never around. When I asked about him one time, Thelma said he was living out in the Thicket. He hardly ever came ‘round, even to the house. Strange kid.”

“And what happened to them, to Doyle and his mother?” asked David.

“‘Round ‘bout two years ago Thelma stopped catering to the local men. Her religion got real strong,” Harris explained. “Last time I went to see her, she told me she was hearing the call herself, just like her daddy. She said she was devoting her life to God and that she needed to start over, someplace different. Guess that’s what happened. Never saw her again.”

“And Doyle?”

“Don’t know. He might’a gone with her. Or, it could be that he’s still out there somewhere, living off the Thicket,” Harris said. With a chuckle, he added, “Guess that’s a question you two big-time police will have to answer.”

“We need to go out to the house, to see where they lived,” David
said, an edge of excitement in his voice. “How long will it take to get a search warrant, Sheriff?”

“One thing about little towns like this one. Not a lot of red tape,” Broussard answered. “I can have one for you in ten minutes. This time of day the judge is easy to find. He’s eating lunch in his office.”

That settled, David turned back to the old man. “We’d like you to take us, Mr. Harris.”

“Guess I could, but I’d prefer not to.”

“Why not?”

Harris shook his head as if David had taken leave of his senses.

“It really ain’t too far from town. You used to be able to drive right up to the place, but we had a hellacious storm little more than a year ago. Trees down all over. No one living there so nobody’s been around to clean up. Now, the only way there’s on foot,” he said. “Plus, that woods is full of critters, hogs, wild cats, not to mention cottonmouths and rattlers. Never had much love for snakes, which is one reason I settled here in town. Besides, I’ve claimed this here bar stool and my ass weren’t planning to leave it the rest of the day, except to relieve myself, and then I’m just going as far as that there men’s room.”

“Mr. Harris,” I said, softly. “There’s something you’ve got to understand. Doyle Tyler isn’t just a suspect in Miss Fontenot’s murder. We believe he’s responsible for the murders of at least five people, one a young mother who left little children behind.”

Harris looked at me and gave me a wizened grimace. “I know what you’re doing, making me sympathetic and all.”

“That’s exactly what I’m trying to do. There are a lot of families suffering because of this man,” I said. “And if we don’t stop him, there’ll be more. Because this boy, as you call him, isn’t going to stop killing.”

Harris thought for a moment, and then nodded. “All right. Guess I gotta do it. I’ll meet you out front in ten minutes. No bathrooms in the Thicket. I suggest you do your business here before we leave. These days, it takes me a while to do mine, ‘cause of age, you know.”

I
n the bright midday sun, W. O. Harris’s skin had a gray-yellow cast not apparent in the dim light of the bar; it reminded me of cigarette smoke and liver disease. He took David’s place in the Tahoe’s front passenger seat and directed me to back up and turn right onto the main road. We wound through the town, past the sheriff’s office and turned left onto a narrow back road just past the Cut and Curl beauty parlor, then drove ten minutes east, where the houses ended and the pavement was replaced by gravel that pinged the SUV’s undercarriage. As we traveled deeper into the Thicket, we passed narrow dirt roads that trailed into the forest. Some we’d traversed just hours earlier with Gus Warren.

In the backseat, David stared silently into the woods. I knew he had to be considering the uncertainty of what lay ahead. Was Doyle Tyler Gabriel? Would we find him waiting for us in the Thicket? I had that familiar gnawing in my gut I get when we’re closing in on a suspect, and I guessed David had it too. But what if we were wrong? What if Doyle Tyler had nothing to do with the murders, beyond the unfortunate circumstance of resembling the killer? Lost in thought, I
almost missed the turn when W. O. motioned to the left. I steered off the gravel and, as the old man directed, parked at the entrance to what appeared to have once been a dirt road, blocked by fallen trees and claimed by high grass.

“That’s what that storm did. A bunch of tornadoes whipped through, bringing trees down all over the place. Unless you’re fixing to move these here trees, this is where we start walking. Hope you’re up for it,” said W. O., as we all climbed out of the SUV.

“How far is it?” David asked, staring into the woods.

“The most a couple of miles, but you should’ve worn boots, like your lady friend here,” he said, glancing down at David’s tennis shoes. Spitting the runoff from his tobacco chew onto the ground, he smiled, his decaying teeth coated with thick brown saliva, and raised his right foot to display his own tattered lizard-skin boots. “Like I said, there’s critters you don’t want to step on out here.”

I didn’t have an extra pair of boots for David in the Tahoe, but I unlocked the metal locker in the back and pulled out two Kevlar vests, a twelve-gauge Remington shotgun with a twenty-one-inch barrel, basically a riot gun, that I handed to David and a .30 caliber Remington semiautomatic rifle for myself. We both had our pistols in our belts. Whether we stepped on an unfriendly snake or met up with Doyle Tyler, we were prepared.

Our vests on, we hiked what remained of the overgrown dirt road for twenty minutes or more, W O. in the lead, with David stepping over fallen branches. Every few minutes, I felt for my pistol, just for security’s sake. On one side of the road, rickety poles with electrical lines ran overhead. Around us, the woods grew dense. The temperature felt ten degrees cooler than in town, and the pine-scented air filled my lungs with a heavy dose of oxygen. Sunlight dappled a mat of ferns, pine straw, and fallen leaves. The only sounds were those of courting insects, the breeze ruffling through trees, and the crush of our own footsteps.

Not far ahead, a wide swath of sunlight.

“Almost there,” flapped W. O.

Moments later, at the edge of a clearing, we stopped. Two hundred feet ahead stood a dilapidated, weather-worn cabin, large sections of its wood siding rotted away. A front porch ran the length of the small wooden structure. An ancient tree crumpled one corner of the cabin, its trunk still attached to a knotted ball of roots heaved from the ground, and a thick branch pierced the roof. On the only section spared by the tree limb, someone, perhaps decades earlier, had built a makeshift steeple, topped by a cross.

“Must’a been that storm I mentioned,” wheezed W. O., sizing up the damaged cabin and scratching his head, his breathing labored from the walk. “Place looked bad before but never this bad.”

“What a lonely place,” I said.

“For me and you, yeah. But not for Thelma. She loved it. Never liked neighbors or seemed to have the need of other folk, just her and the boy. She used to say the best thing about living out here is that no one bothers you. You get to live like you’re the only people on earth, with no one but God to answer to.”

David wasn’t listening, his eyes narrowing as he scanned the clearing, five acres or more, around the cabin. He was worried. Without cover, we would be easy targets. A gun wasn’t Doyle Tyler’s preferred weapon, but he’d used one in Galveston. We could be walking into a trap.

“Wait here,” I ordered the old man, as David and I stepped forward.

“Don’t worry about me,” he said, slipping his hand inside his jacket pocket and retrieving a .38. “I always carry it with me. Snakes.”

“If you see the kid, don’t shoot unless you have to,” David ordered.

“Hell,” scoffed W O., “I’m too old to worry about being a hero. Leave that to you two. I see that boy coming at me with anything but
an olive branch in his hand, he better have said his prayers, because he’s meeting his maker.”

With that, David and I warily worked our way toward the cabin. I focused on the woods, scanning the trees, searching for movement, anything that appeared out of place, a futile effort at best. The forest offered abundant opportunities to hide. Behind a tree trunk or with his belly pressed flat against the earth, Doyle would be nearly invisible.

David led the way, holding up his shotgun and keeping his focus on the cabin, as I rotated side to side, aiming my rifle at shadows. Something slithered away from our approaching footsteps, under the thick coat of ferns that covered the ground. A hawk flew silently overhead, the only sound the rhythmic thudding of its muscular wings against a pale blue, nearly cloudless sky.

When we reached the battered log cabin, David nodded toward the front door, and I cautiously took the five steps up onto the porch, its boards ulcerated with rot, the once rust-colored paint buckled and peeling. I positioned myself at the front door, listening intently for any sign someone might be waiting for us inside. Footsteps. A voice. I heard only silence from the cabin and the sounds of the forest around me.

David left me standing guard, as he circled to the back of the house. My heart threatened to drill a hole through my chest as I waited, silent, alert, surveying the woods with my rifle scope as a guide and listening at the cabin door until I heard David shout, “Now.”

At that moment, I became instantly calm. I turned the handle; the door was unlocked, and I pushed through into the cabin.

“Police,” David shouted. “We have a search warrant. Come out with your hands up.”

His only answer was silence.

Once inside, we rushed to the center of the room, then stood
back-to-back, shuffling in a circle, our weapons targeting the walls, as if partners in some awful dance. My mind registered snapshots, a spray of light flooding through the jagged opening surrounding the tree limb, a sink black with mildew, battered kitchen cabinets, a table with two ladder-back chairs, and what appeared to be the remains of a broken third chair leaning against a wall. A fireplace and a stack of wood. A television with a shattered screen. A small corner altar had a cross anchored to a post behind it.

I heard a sound and swiveled, aiming my rifle at the tail-end of a cat-size rat vanishing into a hole left by a missing chunk of wall.

Satisfied the main room was clear, we cautiously made our way to a closed door next to the soot-black stone fireplace. David swung the door open and we entered the cabin’s only bedroom. A scratched and tarnished metal frame held a sagging mattress.

“Look,” David said, nodding toward the wall.

Above the bed, another bloody cross.

We circulated through the room, guns drawn, my pulse quickening.

Thelma Tyler’s clothes, housedresses, jeans, and blouses worn to threads, hung on a rusted metal rack. The dresser drawers yawned open, the top one containing a few careworn yet neatly folded negligees and lace undergarments, tools of her trade. I zeroed in on a faded color photograph, on top of the dresser in a black plastic frame, of a plump young woman with an anxious smile, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat and a beige cotton dress. Next to her stood a small boy, no more than seven or eight, with an empty expression and a mop of pin-straight blond hair.

The bedroom secured, David nodded toward two doors leading off to the right.

The first was the bathroom, so small the corroded sink, toilet, and shower left barely enough room to stand. Behind the second door we found what could have been a closet, had most of the floor
not been consumed by a tattered blue-and-white-striped stained mattress. Abandoned boy’s clothing and frayed, soiled schoolbooks lay scattered beside it. The low ceiling and sloped walls made it impossible to stand upright once inside.

“I saw a shed around back,” David said.

We left through the back door and made our way to the shed, again watching the forest, knowing it was possible we were being observed in return. I saw W. O. Harris in the distance, still clutching his .38.

At the shed door, I put down the rifle and held my .45 in one hand, the doorknob with the other.

“I’ll stay here,” David said.

I nodded. With both of us inside, we would have been easy targets, like killing livestock in a pen.

I turned the knob and eased inside. The only window was thick with filth and covered by a frayed cotton curtain. Coming out of the bright sunlight, at first I saw only darkness. As my eyes adjusted, I detected a glint of metal. My heart lunged and I swiveled, expecting Doyle Tyler to spring at me, brandishing his knife. Then I realized the glare reflected off the walls, covered with chains, saws, hammers, and a sickle, all dangling from hooks. My eyes swept the shed, not knowing exactly what I was looking for. In one corner I saw the skeleton of a fourth kitchen chair, broken, lying in a heap little bigger than kindling. In another, a large cardboard box. Wiping away layers of grime with a handful of brown leaves I grabbed off the floor, I read the top and sides. The box had once held a twenty-four-inch RCA color television, most likely the one inside the cabin, its screen reduced to shards of glass, as if someone had kicked it in.