Sarah Armstrong - 01 - Singularity (30 page)

Pushing against the box, I felt weight shift inside.

“I found something,” I called out to David.

“What?”

“Probably nothing, but give me a minute.”

Someone had tied the box shut with a thin rope, the kind used for hanging laundry. I took out my pocketknife, flipped open the blade, and sliced back and forth twice. The rope, rotted and weak, easily severed. I edged it away, careful not to disturb the two knots that held it together. They could end up in a courtroom someday, evidence in a trial. I felt certain they were the same as the slipknot the killer used around Annmarie Knowles’s neck.

The rope pushed to the side, four strips of silver duct tape bound the carton shut. I yanked off two, enough to open one side of the box, but an inner flap blocked my way, so I ripped off the remaining two. I eased open the box and uncovered a layer of dried pine straw. The faint smell of something rotting filled the shed. I gingerly pushed the straw aside, uncovering a shiny, black plastic garbage bag. Not wanting to disturb the green wire tie at the top, where fingerprints would most likely be found, I again used my knife, slicing through the bag. With the blade’s first puncture, the cabin filled with a heavy, unmistakable stench. My stomach roiled, and when I breathed in, it felt as if the noxious odor coated my throat, tongue, and teeth.

A surge of nausea made my body tremble.

Certain I knew what waited inside, I stretched open the black plastic, exposing one fragile, leathery human hand, its fingernails painted the deep blue-red of blood as it makes its way to the heart.

I walked outside, took a deep breath of fresh air, filled my mouth with saliva and spit, and then turned to David.

“My guess is that we’ve found Thelma Tyler.”

T
he body was mummified.

In death, the woman’s skin had cured translucent amber brown. Decomposition tightened her muscles and tendons, until they pulled as taut as expanded rubber bands, locking her joints. The orbits of her eyes empty hollows, the brown roots of her dyed blond hair still anchored in a cheap plastic barrette. Wearing a silky red camisole and panties, she’d been bound at wrists and ankles, cinched together with rope discolored by the seepage of bodily fluids. Inside the box, her body had been neatly folded into a fetal position, knees pulled up and her chin tucked against her chest. From the side, I saw the edge of a gaping wound at the base of her throat.

Minutes after discovering the body, I contacted the captain, who called the department higher-ups. An hour later, DPS helicopters began landing in the field beside the cabin. The scene soon swarmed with FBI agents and my fellow rangers, most pulled off the train searches, and a DPS crime-scene unit there to process the cabin and confiscate evidence. Along with Doyle Tyler’s discarded schoolbooks,
they bagged dishes, clothes, and a hairbrush to send to the lab, in hopes of uncovering clues, including DNA.

While David and I watched, two men readied what remained of the woman for transport. With no local medical examiner capable of handling the examination, the captain made arrangements to send the body to the coroner in Houston. The rest of the unwrapping would take place at the county morgue, where conditions could be controlled. They’d already sealed the box in sterile, white trace-element sheets, to prevent any evidence from being lost during the trip. I had no doubt we’d verify that the corpse was what little remained of Gabriel’s mother.

Meanwhile, W O. Harris sat back, eyes wide and just a little sad.

“Yeah, Thelma looked great in that red getup,” I heard him tell an FBI agent who scrawled his every word into a notebook. “True, that woman wasn’t a saint, but I gotta think she deserved better than that. Can’t understand how any boy can do that to his very own mother.”

At two-thirty that afternoon, the sun hung high overhead and glared relentlessly down upon the scene at the cabin. One team of lab techs concentrated on the house, while another scrutinized the shed, including firewood stacked and leaning against the back wall. This was just the beginning. The lab guys would be here for days, examining, inspecting. Including the woman found at the cabin, we now had six murder cases, plus the probable killings of no one knew how many unfortunate illegals on the trains, hanging in the balance.

As I watched a deputy carefully pull away the first piece of firewood, Sheriff Broussard bumped me on the radio. I’d asked him to use his contacts in Bardwell to find out anything else he could about Doyle Tyler, aka Gabriel. Townsfolk, he said, described the boy as a loner, a sullen child who faded into the shadows, easily
overlooked. In school, his grades were average, Cs and the rare B, but more than one teacher sensed a keen intelligence. Some said they’d attempted to break through the wall the boy had around his emotions. All eventually gave up, their intentions thwarted by his persistent silence.

From an early age, small and spare, he’d been a frequent target for schoolyard bullies. That ended at the age of ten, when he retaliated against one young tyrant. Half the bully’s size, Tyler left the playground thug with three broken ribs and a gash from a knife across his cheek. After that, the other boys left Tyler alone. The following year, he virtually disappeared. According to school records, the boy simply stopped showing up. The local sheriff at the time, Broussard’s predecessor, remembered once traveling out to Thelma Tyler’s house with the mission of bringing her son back to school.

“The sheriff had a spat with her, told her he didn’t care how she made her money, but she was going to educate the kid,” said Broussard. “She said she saw no reason the boy needed to know any more than she could teach him and claimed she didn’t know where Doyle was anyway, said he spent most of his time in the Thicket. For a few years after that, hardly anyone saw the boy, unless they came upon him unexpectedly in the woods. When someone did, he never talked, just stared at them until they got spooked and left. That point on, it’s like Doyle Tyler ceased to exist. No driver’s license, no work records, nothing. Can’t tell you where he’s been for the last eight years. Guess he must’a lived out there with his momma, but nobody I talked to remembers seeing him.”

After I thanked the sheriff and hung up, I did something I’d wanted to do since I first noticed the photograph on Thelma Tyler’s dresser. Wearing evidence gloves, I carefully removed it from the frame and scanned it into my laptop. With the photo on the screen, I cropped in around Doyle’s young face until everything else
disappeared. I then moved the image onto the left half of the screen. On the right side, I pulled up the sketch of Gabriel as a boy. My fingers sprinting across the keyboard, I played with the two images until they became similar in size, then I superimposed the sketch over the photo, easing it into place, lining up the corners of the eyes and the unusually high cheekbones. I clicked on the photo two more times, to blow it up, just a bit, until it filled the outline of the sketch. My body shivered, as if chilled by an undetected breeze. The two faces were a close match, their bone structures eerily similar.

Finished, I bagged both the photograph and the frame to turn over to forensics, just as David returned from taking a phone call.

“The captain just got a report from the lab. Some of the fingerprints they’ve collected from the house and e-mailed in are consistent with the San Antonio fragment and identical with the one from Dr. Neal’s back window. Did you notice that the knots on the box and the bindings on this body match those used in the other murders?”

“Yeah, I noticed,” I said.

With that, we both sank into silence, watching the activity surrounding us, lost in our own thoughts.

“So this is how you grow a Doyle Tyler?” I finally asked. “Are we supposed to feel sorry for this kid?”

“No,” said David. “We’re not.”

I wasn’t willing to leave it at that.

“So from the mattress, we surmise he lived in the closet, slept in there, probably listened to everything going on in the other room while his mother bedded down the locals for money and spouted Bible verses. But is that enough?” I asked. “What transformed the child in the picture into a psychopath, obsessed with torture and murder?”

“You can quote the same studies I can,” he said, frowning, his eyes carrying the sadness of having seen too much suffering. “Abuse, physical, sexual, verbal, emotional, usually factor in. But that can’t be
all. Otherwise, why do some kids live through indescribable hell and grow up to be normal, functioning adults? And what about serial killers who aren’t abused as children? What happens to them? Maybe someday, along with defective genes for cancer and heart disease, they’ll identify one that predisposes children to grow into monsters.”

“Do you think he’ll come back here?” I asked.

“No,” David said. “My guess is he’s happy to be rid of this place and all it represents.”

“But he’s been here, recently,” I said.

“How do you know?”

“When I went back into the kitchen, I looked around. I found an empty pint-size milk carton in the trash,” I explained. “The expiration date isn’t until next week.”

Just then, one of the crew dismantling the woodpile called out, “Lieutenant Armstrong. Agent Garrity. Over here. We found something.”

A group crowded around the man, but as David and I approached, they opened their ranks, making a path for us to walk through. There, crouched on the ground, was a deputy holding a paper grocery sack in one hand and a fistful of newspaper clips in the other.

“We found them inside the bag, hidden behind the woodpile,” he said.

On top was the
Galveston County Daily News
photo, taken as I left the scene of the Mary Gonzales murder. That wasn’t surprising, but as the deputy quickly paged through the pile, he uncovered every article that had run on the killings. The last clip on the stack was Dr. Neal’s obituary, three columns wide, listing his many affiliations and awards. The only articles missing were those that had just run that morning, the interview I’d given to Evan Matthews and the profiles of the victims. Wherever he was now, I was sure Doyle Tyler had already read them.
He must be furious
, I thought.

“That’s not everything,” said the deputy. “There’s one more.”

Something about the way the officer looked at me telegraphed that this would not be good news.

“We found this,” he said, handing me a soiled sheet of computer paper.

At first, I simply stared at it, trying to understand how I could be holding a copy of the photo and article about Maggie and Strings from the school newspaper. That wasn’t possible. Doyle Tyler could never have found it. How could he? It was a school newspaper, handed out only to students in Maggie’s middle school. Then, my pulse drumming ever harder and a shadow of dread descending upon me, I noticed the school district’s Web site address printed across the top. No, I thought.
They wouldn’t
…? But they had. The main office had recycled
The Armadillo
photo and article, using them in an online newsletter. My hands began to shake when I realized that I must have been distracted the night Maggie showed me the article and the photo. Why hadn’t I noticed before that my face was visible in the background?

“Oh, God, no….” I said, my head reeling, as if I’d sustained a hard physical blow. “David, no.”

M
om would have called if there was a problem. Maggie’s not due to get out of school for ten minutes. She’s safe there,” I said, as David and I ran toward one of the helicopters parked in the clearing. Every word stumbled off my lips. I felt as if I were moving in slow motion, trapped in a bizarre dimension where seconds became minutes, and minutes lingered like hours. All the while, inside my head, a terrified voice screamed “No” over and over, growing louder and louder, until I barely recognized my own, still remarkably calm voice say, “I’ll have headquarters connect me with the school, and Mrs. Hansen will keep her until we arrive. It’ll be all right, David. You’ll see. It’ll be all right.”

At the chopper, David pulled back the door and we jumped in. My heart pounding, I didn’t realize at first that we were the only ones inside. No pilot. I had to keep reminding myself that, as unreal as it felt, this wasn’t a movie, where a wild-eyed guy in a leather jacket invariably stood ready to whisk us to Houston in the span of a few frames of celluloid. We had an hour’s flight ahead of us.

While I struggled to remain calm, David stuck his head out the
door and shouted toward the men still milling around the shed, “Where’s the pilot?”

“Sorenson. Now. They need the chopper,” someone yelled, and a man loped toward us. The engine geared up and the blades churned, at first slowly and then building speed. We were airborne, on our way to Houston, when David radioed the captain.

“Why does Sarah need to talk to Maggie’s teacher?” he demanded. “What’s wrong?”

“Not now,” David ordered. “Just patch us through.”

Seconds later, as the helicopter cut across the sky over the top of the forest, the school receptionist’s familiar voice crackled through on the speaker.

“This is Mrs. Armstrong, Maggie’s mother,” I explained, shouting over the noise of the engine and the blades sweeping overhead. “I need to talk to Mrs. Hansen. It’s an emergency.”

“Mrs. Armstrong?”

“Put me through to Mrs. Hansen, now,” I shouted, a ragged edge of hysteria creeping into my voice. “This is important.”

“Mrs. Armstrong? How nice of you to call. My, it’s loud wherever you are,” said Mrs. Hansen, cheerfully. “Hold on a minute, would you?” Without waiting for an answer, she turned her attention to a student.

“Mrs. Hansen, please…” I yelled into the radio.

She didn’t respond. Instead, I heard her say, “Todd, I told you that you had to have that paper in by last Thursday, not this Thursday; now please sit down at your desk and wait. I said we’d discuss this after dismissal. Right now, I have a phone call to take care of.”

See,
everything’s all right. They’re still in session
, I thought. Maggie’s
safe
.