Sarah Armstrong - 01 - Singularity (9 page)

“How do you figure that?” I asked.

“We’re not claiming Lucas murdered her old man herself. Nelson and I have said all along that this was a murder for hire, probably by some asshole who’s murdered before. Another body changes nothing.”

“It seems unlikely for this type of a killer, with this kind of MO, to be motivated by money.”

“Unlikely but not impossible,” he said, fully inflated with his old ardor. “When are you and the Quantico guru driving back?”

“We hope tonight—if not, tomorrow afternoon,” I said. “We’ve got work here first. We need to track this guy down or at least find out who we’re looking for.”

“Well, I’m going to get a pocket warrant,” Scroggins mused. “That way when we’re ready to pick her up, the red tape will be out of the way.”

“That’s probably a good idea, if you’re convinced you need a warrant,” I conceded. Issued and signed by a judge but not recorded at the
county clerk’s office until an arrest is made, a pocket warrant is kept secret. “At least the press won’t be the wiser. But wait until we get back to pick her up. Wait until we know what we’ve got here. Okay?”

“You got it. We’ll hold off,” he agreed. “But if Priscilla Lucas doesn’t start answering our questions and if you don’t find something more concrete, we’re gonna haul her pretty ass in and book her. Understand?”

“It would be a mistake,” I said again.

“Maybe, maybe not,” he said. “But it’s the way this case is going down.”

Judging by the gully in the center of the mattress and the black cockroach—nearly the size of a small mouse—that crawled out of the drain into the sink, I had little hope for the shower, but it turned out that the Easy Street Motel’s water supply was hot and plentiful, even if the towels were wax-paper thin. I pulled my only lipstick out of my purse, a light mauve called rose sunset. In my spare clean white shirt and Wranglers, my boots and blue blazer recycled from the day before, I emerged from my cabin to find David waiting, just as we’d agreed. He’d already had his morning run and shower, but just like his business suit the day before, his jeans and white shirt hung undisciplined on his body. I briefly wondered what he’d look like if he learned how to iron. Over a hot breakfast at the same hole-in-the-wall as the night before, I filled him in on Scroggins’s news.

“That lady ought to just tell them what she used the money for, answer the questions,” Garrity said, shaking his head in disgust. “If she’s not involved, she’s wasting their time and this thing could really backfire. She could end up splashed on the front page wearing handcuffs.”

“She must have some reason for not talking,” I said. “If we can figure out what that is, maybe we’ll be able to sort through all of this.”

“Sure, she’s guilty,” he said, using his fingers to comb back an errant fringe of hair falling over his forehead.

“You don’t believe that,” I said.

He paused, as if considering the possibility.

“No, I don’t. My guess is that you’ve been right from the beginning,” he grudgingly admitted. “These murders have nothing to do with money or Priscilla Lucas. We’re most likely looking at a serial killer. One who has visions of grandeur, a pathetic loser who tells himself that he’s on some kind of twisted mission from God. They just crossed paths with the wrong guy.”

“How?”

“What do you mean?”

“How did they cross his path?”

“That’s something we need to answer if we’re ever going to pull this thing together,” he said.

I thought about that for a moment, and then ventured, “But you said, ‘If Priscilla Lucas isn’t involved.’ That means you still believe she might be.”

David sighed, as if my insistence tested his patience.

“Sarah, come on, you’ve got to take those blinders off. Nothing here is certain, and we have to at least consider the possibility. The widow Lucas had motive and means,” he said. “We don’t really know at this point, do we?”

Stunned, I didn’t answer. I couldn’t believe David even vaguely agreed with Nelson and Scroggins. My silence hung between us, until David went on.

“One thing I’ve learned is that you never dismiss a theory until you’ve got hard evidence that it’s wrong. Cases will surprise you. You think you know what kind of guy the killer is and what’s motivating him, but you can be wrong,” he said. “Remember that case in Virginia, the pretty young teacher everyone thought was killed by her husband? Everything pointed to domestic violence, every bit of
evidence at the scene. The local cops easily built that case and nearly prosecuted the poor bastard.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I do remember it.”

“Well, I worked it. Helped the local cops profile the killer. We were right about the murder being an up-close and personal matter—hell, she was bludgeoned to death with a tire iron. The guy smashed her face like a jack-o’-lantern. That’s about as personal as anyone can get. We were right about the love-gone-bad motive, but we were wrong about who did it. Of course, we didn’t know until later that she was bedding her students, widening the field of suspects who had a romantic motive to kill her. If the lab hadn’t found that latent print on the body, we might have convicted the wrong guy of murder. Who would have thought it would turn out to be a shy sixteen-year-old, a member of the high school chess club, no less?”

Silent, I waited for him to continue.

“Right now all we’ve got is speculation that our guy’s a conventional serial killer, as if anyone who kills for kicks can be described as conventional,” he said. “Do I think she hired the murderer? No. Am I in favor of charging Priscilla Lucas with solicitation of murder? No. But Ted and Detective Nelson have a lot of years of experience behind them, their own instincts, and an arguable theory with at least some evidence, including the unaccounted-for hundred grand. The biggest strike against Priscilla Lucas’s innocence is her own behavior. She’s put herself under suspicion.”

“You honestly believe there’s the possibility that she hired the same person who killed Louise Fontenot to kill her husband and Annmarie Knowles?”

“I can’t rule it out,” he said. “And neither can you.”

T
he dense forests that begin in Maine carpet the East Coast and end in Texas, where they spread into the hybrid of woods, streams, marshes, and swamps called the Big Thicket. It’s a bucolic setting, but I’d learned early in my career that looks can be deceiving. During Prohibition, moonshiners counted on the Thicket’s dense vegetation to hide their stills from revenuers. For decades, escaped prisoners built hideouts in the woods, living off the land and feral hogs they castrated in the fall to fatten for a spring kill. In recent years, the Thicket’s spawned more than one sensational killing, including a state congressman shot through the heart by his trophy wife, after he beat her until doctors couldn’t repair the damage; and the bizarre case of a small-town doctor, ostensibly happily married for nearly four decades, the father of six, the grandfather of thirteen, who slipped a deadly drug into the soft drink of every suitor his pretty young nurse dated. Since he also served as the county coroner, three young men died before the local sheriff realized that they couldn’t all have had weak hearts and that there seemed to be more of a connection than that the doc’s nurse was particularly unlucky in love.

On the southern edge of the Thicket, Bardwell rested shouting distance from the Louisiana border and north of 1-10, the main highway that connects Houston and New Orleans. The town had a post office, a grocery store, three churches, a Wal-Mart, an old limestone courthouse across from a park, a Sonic, and a Dairy Queen. In the evenings, the locals congregated at a dance hall on the highway outside town to drink and listen to country music. That’s where David and I began our search.

A metal building the size of a small house, cooled by fans and open garage doors on all sides, J. P.’s wasn’t ready for business yet, but as we drove by, its owner, J. P. Lancett, a stubby yet muscular man with dark olive skin and dyed, thinning black hair greased straight back from his forehead, hauled in stock, a case of Lone Star Beer in longneck bottles hoisted on his right shoulder. I put the Tahoe in reverse and swerved into the parking lot.

Minutes later, we were seated in the clammy shade of the bar. Insects buzzed loudly in the surrounding woods as we inquired about the late Miss Fontenot.

“Bitchy old lady,” Lancett said, his bulk uneasily balanced atop a rickety wooden bar stool that wobbled under the strain. “She never had a good word to say about anyone.”

“Fifteen months ago, before the murder, was there anyone in particular she was talking about, anything out of the ordinary happening in town?” I asked.

“There’s always something going on around here,” he said with a frown. A lack of teeth folded his chin into his upper jaw, making it appear that the lower half of his face had collapsed. “Girls turn up pregnant. Maybe some old boy, he’s got a lunchtime date with some girl in the Thicket for a little fun. Sometimes wives leave husbands or take up with someone else’s. Old Lady Fontenot, she didn’t let any of it go without talking it up to the good ladies in town.”

“But right before she died,” I repeated. “What was she talking about then?”

“She was always talking about someone, but at that particular time, I can’t hardly think of who it would’ve been. If she hadn’t been talking, now that would’ve been news,” he said.

“Is there anyone in town you suspected at the time the murder happened, for any reason?”

“Nah, can’t say as I did.”

“Anyone who disappeared about the time of the murders, maybe a young man with blond hair?”

The barkeep stroked his whisker-stubbled chin and considered my description of the possible killer. “Nobody I can think of,” he admitted.

“Did you ever hear rumors that anyone in particular was complaining about Louise Fontenot, for any reason?” David asked.

“Like I said before, I didn’t hear anything,” he concluded with a shrug. “It seemed to me at the time that people were pretty befuddled by the entire thing, her dying like that and all. Murder ain’t particularly something that happens every day in this town. Especially an old lady like that. Just wasn’t natural, that’s all.”

“Well, thanks for your help,” I said, taking out a card and scribbling on the back. “This is my cell phone. If anything comes to mind after we leave or if you mention what we’ve discussed with anyone who believes they might have any information, call.”

“Bet I will,” Lancett promised.

Despite his avowed enthusiasm, we watched as he tucked the card in among a sheaf of matted, stained papers next to the cash register that looked as if they’d remained untouched for decades.

As we drove away, I asked David, “What do you think the odds are we’ll be hearing from Mr. Lancett?”

“About the same as the odds that he’s reporting all his liquor
taxes,” he said with a short laugh. “Sometimes, in towns like this, it’s my impression that people make it a point not to notice things.”

“Except for Louise Fontenot,” I said. “She would have been the one with a theory or two. Too bad she’s not here to ask.”

With no firmer leads than a list of the names and addresses of the “good ladies” supplied by the sheriff and the barkeep, David and I began circulating through the town to clapboard houses with porch boards that squeaked under our weight. Timid old women answered, their white hair secured with bobby pins. To our insistent questioning, they each maintained they remembered nothing about what their murdered old friend, Louise Fontenot, might have told them in the months preceding her death.

By noon, we were canvassing block to block, house to house, repeating the same questions until they became routine. We always finished with “Do you know of anyone in town who disappeared around the time of Louise’s murder?”

“Can’t say as I do,” said Sally LeBoef, the owner of the Cut and Curl Salon on Oak Street, as she chopped Cyndi Lou Styles’s mane of thick, midnight-black hair, at about three that afternoon.

“Think back,” Garrity asked. “It could be anyone, but most likely a man with blond hair, maybe in his twenties or thirties?”

LeBoef stared at us, wrinkled up her nose as if deep in thought. Styles shrugged.

“You know, there’s lots of people back in them woods. It could be one of them, but I can’t say one in particular comes to mind,” the hairdresser said. She flicked the switch, and raising her voice she shouted over the hum of a blow dryer. “If you leave your number, though, I’ll be more than glad to ask my customers and call if any of them have an idea.”

Since no one noticed our guy’s absence, David and I decided LeBoef could be right. Perhaps our killer lived away from the townsfolk’s prying eyes. So after the Cut and Curl, we gave up on Bardwell
proper and focused on the back roads that radiated from town, onto gravel and dirt roads that turned into driveways and ended next to double-wide trailers. When those were exhausted, we followed paths that led to hunting cabins with deer blinds anchored on stilts and camouflaged to blend into the foliage.

No matter how many questions we asked, it seemed we were destined to learn nothing about the three murders.

Early that evening, David Garrity and I agreed on one more day in Bardwell before we admitted defeat and drove home. There were still camps and houses, hidden farther back into the Thicket, we hadn’t been able to reach without a guide. Since there was nothing to be done until morning, we checked ourselves back into our rooms at the Easy Street and contemplated dinner at the usual place. I showered, pulled clean clothes out of my stash from the trunk, wishing I’d brought something nicer than T-shirts and jeans, and thinking about my dance with Garrity the night before. As I smoothed a healthy layer of rose sunset on my lips, I wondered what Bill would think of me prettying up for dinner with Garrity.

I looked in the mirror, my shoulder-length dark-blond hair fanned out like I’d been hit with a bolt of static electricity. I wet my comb and tried to tame my hair, but it was no use, so I pulled out a black scrunchy from my purse and yanked my hair into a tight ponytail. In the mirror, my skin seemed paler, more sallow than I remembered, and my face more drawn. I squinted and my forehead furrowed. “Well, Bill,” I said to the mirror. “If you’re watching, don’t worry too much. The way I look, a man would have to be blind.”