The Devil Went Down to Austin (30 page)

"You're chasing ghosts," he told me. "If you want me to, I'll go to the police, change what I said about that night on the boat. I'll help in any way I can. But if you go to them, say this is about some longlost child—"

"They'll think what the police have thought all along. That the obvious answer is the right answer. And all along, they've been wrong."

He threw his duffel bag on the bed. He went to the bookshelf, pulled out a drawer, and began tossing papers and pictures. There were photos from Dwight's childhood, report cards, Christmas cards, college transcripts.

"You want to save your brother," he said.

"Of course."

"But you don't want the truth."

My face turned hot. "What are you not telling me, Dwight? What's got you so upset?"

He shoved the drawer closed, stared at the documentation of his childhood on the shabby carpet. He kicked an old report card. "I was trying to get up the nerve, Tres.

Now, I'm not sure it's a good idea."

"What?"

"You said Garrett couldn't find the back door in the software. I don't think that was his problem at all. I'm wondering if you already knew that."

He stared at me, waiting for some kind of confession.

"I'm sorry, Dwight. I'm lost here."

He picked up a leather belt from the shelf. "The way the back door was written, the way it's embedded in the program. Not many people could do that, Tres. Not many programmers are that good, at Techsan or anywhere else."

Only then did I see where he was going.

The walls of the little dark bedroom seemed to be closing in. I wanted to open the window, turn on the lights.

Dwight curled his belt into a limp snake, shoved it into his bag. "Your brother wrote that damn back door, Tres. I'm positive."

This time, I didn't fail to inform Maia.

On our way to the marina, I told her and Detective Lopez what Dwight had said about the back door in the software—how Garrett might've been responsible. My only consolation was that Maia and Lopez didn't know what to do with the information any more than I did. Lopez said he'd call the High Tech Unit, bat the problem over to them.

When we got to Point Lone Star, Clyde Simms was waiting at the gate, and he did not look delighted to see us.

He removed the giant chain with the CLOSED sign, then followed us down to the water on his motorcycle. He unlocked the security gate at the pier, walked us down to where the Ruby, Too was docked.

"What's the matter?" he growled at Lopez. "Six hours' questioning, and you didn't get enough out of me?"

"Thanks, Mr. Simms," Lopez said courteously. "You can wait here."

Clyde glared at me, like he wanted to have a very long conversation over beer and brass knuckles, but he said nothing.

On board Ruby's yacht, aluminium fingerprint powder covered the hatches and railings like pixie dust. Some evidence tech had left a surgical glove and a Ziploc bag on the pilot's deck. I could see Maia Lee taking mental notes, her defence lawyer's mind assessing the trial potential—sloppy handling of evidence, amateur crime scene processing.

We went below. The Dell workstations were gone. There was nothing but dustless squares on the tables.

"Machines were impounded by High Tech," Lopez told us. "Early reports—they'd been wiped clean. Nothing to trace without a deep recovery method—very expensive, very timeconsuming. Kind of like my machine."

Maia had been lifting pages on Ruby's wall calendar. She stopped on November, turned her attention to Lopez. "Your machine?"

"Yeah, counsellor." Lopez mimed a strike on a keyboard. "I got mail. Message came in when I got back to the office this morning. I read it, hit the print command, froze my system to hell. You should've seen the look on our tech guy's face when he rebooted and got a screenful of static."

"The killer," I said, understanding. "The killer emailed you."

Lopez looked like he was trying to swallow a foul taste out of his mouth. "Anything's possible, Navarre, once you get some local press. The Techsan buyout, Jimmy Doebler's murder—both have been in the news the last few days. We got our share of hackers in Austin. Could be some seventeenyearold looking for something to do on his summer vacation. But this emailer—he claimed he shot Jimmy Doebler. He knew the calibre of the weapon. He also said something interesting—said it was a hideandseek game now. He thanked me for closing my eyes and counting to ten while he slipped off."

The boat rose and fell gently under my feet.

"Someone's toying with you," I said. "It isn't Garrett."

"Of course not, Navarre. It's never Garrett. I got an APB out for the killer and that's the first line of the description—It's not Garrett. Now if you don't mind, maybe you could tell me what you expected to find here?"

Maia brushed past him, went into the sleeping cabin. We followed.

Nothing had changed in the bedroom as far as I could see. Maia studied the photos, the Lake Travis wall map with its green and red pushpins. The nightstand drawer was open. There was no gun inside.

"Scuba equipment?" Maia asked.

Lopez shook his head. "We don't know what was normally aboard, and Mr. Simms wasn't much help. He said Ruby often stored a dive

tank or two on board. There weren't any when we got here. That doesn't necessarily mean anything."

Out the small porthole window, the lake was hazy. A momentary slice of sun made its way through the rain clouds. Smoke rose from a barbecue at the public park. A hawk circled the woods.

Lopez's cell phone rang. He answered, listened for a long time.

Maia came over to me.

"The email," she said. "Pena."

"If it's wiped off the hard drive, there's no proof."

"In the spring, I got several messages like that, Tres. I'm sure."

Lopez was looking at the ceiling. He said into the phone, "Yeah. You're probably right about that."

More listening, then his face paled. He looked at me, offered me the cell phone. "For you. Just thought I'd screen it for you first."

I took the call.

"Navarre?" a man's voice said. "Ben Quarles. Firearms."

"Quarles." I forced myself to sound upbeat. "Miss me already?"

His next exhale was a strong wheeze, maybe what passed for riotous laughter down in the ballistics lab.

"I wanted to follow up," Quarles said. "I got the full picture after you left—well, shit.

Listen, that was a tough break about your brother."

"Not your fault."

"Yeah, well. I did a little digging—ran a Drugfire search on the casing. We keep a database of casing images from all over the state, goes back two, three years. It's hit or miss, depending on what individual departments choose to enter into the system, but I ran a check for similar firing pin impressions on spent brass, just to see if I got any hits." "And?"

"And I got one. Maybe. Scored a cold hit on a case from Waco, robberymurder back in 1987. It's an old damn case. Waco PD just put all their unsolved homicides on the network last month. Sheer luck—"

"The case," I interrupted.

"Robbery gone bad. Perp broke in the back door, surprised the occupant, shot this old guy four times. The victim's stuff was rifled through—boxes of papers, a file cabinet overturned, all his IDs and money taken. Perp wasn't too bright.

Dragged the body all the way into the bathroom, dumped it in the tub, ran water over it.

Who knows, maybe he was shaken up, got some stupid idea he could scrub the scene clean, then realized it was no good. Despite that, he got away—no leads, no prints.

The murder weapon was never found, but Waco PD did recover the four casings—all with distinctive BOB markings. Almost an exact match to the one from Jimmy Doebler's murder."

"You're saying Garrett's gun was involved in a crime in 1987?"

"No. That model wasn't even made back then. What I'm saying is that a gun was used in Waco in 1987 that left an almost identical BOB marking to the casing you found in the lake. And the Waco gun was never recovered."

"Hell of a coincidence."

"Don't use the C word with me, Navarre. Another thing I found out, chatting with people up in Waco—police weren't careful with their information. They publicized that they were working an anomaly in the shell casing, put a quote to that effect in the local paper. Either they were desperate for leads, or maybe they wanted to sound like they were making progress. Maybe they just didn't see the case as important enough for tight security. Whatever, it wasn't any secret."

"I still don't—"

"What I'm saying, Navarre—if I were that killer, and I heard the police talking about my gun that way, I could have some fun with that information. I could examine my own casings, then deface another gun's firing pin area. I'm saying I could do this, a master gunsmith, somebody who knew what they were doing. In a couple of minutes, I could make another gun have the same BOB markings as mine—as long as it was a similar calibre and make. Potentially, you could play hell with ballistics—modify somebody's gun, commit a crime with your gun, and then frame the other guy. The BOB markings would be so rare, your frameup victim would seem like a dead ringer. I'm not saying it's likely, but it's sure as hell possible."

I looked at my friendly neighbourhood homicide detective, who was stonefaced, tapping his fingers against his sidearm. "Quarles, you share this information yet?"

"Yeah. And look, Lopez will tell you it's a farfetched idea. He's right. I'm just trying to give you something you could use. You get a good lawyer, maybe he could use this Waco case to cast some doubt on the evidence, point out that ballistics aren't exact.

Shit."

"What?"

"I can't believe I'm giving you advice to help a defence lawyer. God forgive me."

"Waco. What was the victim's name?"

I could hear Quarles shuffling papers. "Lowry."

Out the window of the sleeping cabin, the white barbecue smoke was streaking the tops of the trees. My chest felt like it was turning into something just as insubstantial.

"Ewin Lowry?"

"You know the case?"

I thought about the picture I'd seen in Faye Ingram's garden— the rakish gypsy gambler next to Clara Doebler, both of them smiling. I thought about the letter Clara had received from Waco in 1987, the letter she'd thought was from Ewin Lowry, promising retribution.

"Navarre?" Quarles asked.

"I've got to go, Quarles. Thanks."

I hung up, handed Lopez back his phone.

"Forget it, Navarre," Lopez said. "It's the longest of long shots."

I told Maia about the Waco case. Then I told Lopez who Ewin Lowry was, and about Matthew Pena's parentage.

It's hard to shake up a homicide detective, but Lopez's face completely deconstructed.

For once, he was without a reply.

"The bathtub," said Maia. "Water. Adrienne Selak drowned. Jimmy's truck was half submerged. Clara was shot by the lake. This man—Lowry—intentionally dragged into a bathtub. The girlfriend, the brother, the mother, the father ..."

"And Ruby," I said. "Disappeared off a boat."

Lopez snapped his phone shut, clipped it to his belt. "I like criminal psych profiles as much as anybody, counsellor. But what you're suggesting ..."

He stared at the photos on the nightstand—the smiling pictures of Ruby McBride.

"All right," he relented. "What are you saying—the water has meaning?"

"The killer submerges his victims," Maia said. "At least, he tries to. Water could mean cleansing. Absolution. My guess—he cares for the people he's killing."

"Cares for them," Lopez repeated.

"He's a sick individual. He wants to be close to these people. Maybe he even picks special places—Doebler's lakefront property, for instance. He killed Jimmy just where his mom died."

"Kills his victims and then washes them," Lopez said. "Tries to cover them in water. A purification ritual."

Maia nodded.

"Shit." Lopez scowled. "Now you got me doing it. Okay. So you've got a crazy theory.

Now what?"

"The killer has contacted you," Maia said. "Made himself known to the investigator in charge. Usually, that means one thing. He's preparing for the endgame."

I studied the Lake Travis wall map—the white topographic lines etched into the blue.

"There," I said.

Maia and Lopez turned. I went to the map, counted up the arc of red pins, the submerged property line that Ruby had been mapping. I put my finger on the sixth pin—the one farthest out from the shore.

"A special place," I said. "A submersion. Call your recovery unit. Tell them to dive there."

"In the middle of nowhere," Lopez said. "Upstream from where we found the boat. You want me to call Search and Recovery and tell them that?"

"Tres," Maia said. "Why there—why that pin?"

"Because," I said, "when I broke into this boat, two nights ago, that pin wasn't there."

XeGroupsReturn: sentto375227171 958727973 returns@shell_list.com MailingList: Murder@shell_list.com DeliveredTo: ListUnsubscribe: mailto:Murderunsubscribe@shell_list.com Date: 14 June 2000 09:19:32 0000

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Subject: dinosaurs

I was in the backyard. This is my earliest memory.

My friend and I were playing. We'd taken an old card table and covered it with mud, stuck some plastic dinosaurs in it.

I don't remember what my friend looked like back then, which is funny, because he is such a presence for me now. Later images have superimposed themselves on that first memory—years of hating and wishing.

He must've been a cute little guy—talkative, funny, always the one who made up our games. I remember he ran to get something I'd thrown in the bush—another plastic dinosaur, maybe—and I heard car sounds in the alley.

Then there was a woman at the back gate, and she asked me to come with her, quickly.

I wasn't really startled. I was too young to understand that strange women weren't supposed to sneak into your backyard. Her face was tight with emotions I didn't even know the words for.

She asked me again, more desperately, to come with her. This was all happening in a few seconds.