Sarah Armstrong: Singularity Part 1

Singularity.

KATHRYN CASEY.

In memory of Joan Lippolis, who left too soon.

One.

Consciousness crept through him, as gradually as night yields to daybreak. His eyes adjusted, shade by shade, dark giving way to a gray haze. Gathered beneath his head, his backpack played pillow to the bed of coa.r.s.e, tan sand. The young mans bones ached from a night of half-sleep and disturbed dreams, thoughts that toyed with his exhaustion and left his brow layered in thick sweat. It always began that way, as a hollow anxiety that built, until it left him jagged and edgy, as lethal as the eight-inch blade on the hunting knife he carried inside a leather sheath, tucked flush against his back.

Where am I? he wondered, scanning the emerging landscape.

Overhead, a sheet of gray-white clouds tented the sky, and a warm, early spring breeze cooled his skin. The salted fragrance of ocean filled his nostrils and stirred his memory, just as streaks of sun painted the pewter waves of the Gulf of Mexico gold.

Ah, thats right. Galveston, he remembered.

As the sun crawled above the watery horizon, he left the beach behind and entered the nearly deserted streets of old Galveston, where he surveyed the empty avenue before him. A brightly painted arch, patterned with jacquard and exuberant flowers, crowned the aged pavement, illuminated by the burgeoning morning. Seagulls squawked urgently overhead.

He paused, considering a boxy, brown brick building with five rows of tall thin windows, a former warehouse where more than a hundred years earlier cargos of Texas cotton waited to be loaded aboard ocean-bound ships to supply English sweatshops. A sign across the top of the building read NEWLY CONVERTED, LOFT APARTMENTS. He scanned the aged structure, checked the address stenciled in gold above the gla.s.s door, and noted that the lobby was well lit, inviting, while nearly all the apartments remained shrouded in darkness.

It wont be long, he thought.

"Give it to me. Give it to me," someone mumbled. The young man turned back to the Victorian storefronts that lined the street and eyed a disheveled old man wrapped in an oily, stained wool coat sleeping on a makeshift bed against a doorway. Above the vagrants rumpled figure, a window displayed gaudy Mardi Gras costumes-yellow-, purple-, and green-feathered masks on wands, all with empty eyes.

The young man scowled as the old man muttered, twitching and trembling. From the look of him, the drunk would soon die from the alcohol that ate away at his mind and his body.

"Youre not worth killing," the young man whispered, a small laugh escaping his lips.

Drawn by the bright display inside, he gazed into the store window, and his expressionless image stared back from far inside the gla.s.s, a bland, characterless, ordinary face framed by hair the color of ripened wheat but with extraordinary eyes-ice blue, sharp, and resolutely cold.

Dead quiet moments pa.s.sed, and he waited, nearly motionless, until something unseen p.r.i.c.ked his senses, filling him with a visceral antic.i.p.ation, a sensation hed grown to welcome as the first sign of impending release.

"Its time," he whispered.

Moments later, a woman rounded the corner and walked toward him: slim and athletic in neon pink running shorts and a sweat-stained white T-shirt, short blond wisps escaping from under her white baseball cap.

He drank her in: the tilt of her head as she wiped her brow with the corner of a thin, light blue towel draped about her neck. She had a lovely neck, long and white. The image of his blade tracing above her collarbone, slicing through her soft, yielding flesh flashed through his mind. He imagined the perfume of her fear, as the seeds of arousal trembled deep within him.

Im here, he thought. Im here for you.

The woman walked hurriedly past him but then glanced back. At first, a warm smile. Then her lips froze, pulled taut and anxious. Instantly, she turned away and quickened her pace, sprinting across the street, toward the converted warehouse, and disappearing inside the lobbys welcoming golden light.

Outside on the street, the young man smiled.

Two.

I glanced at the clock on my office wall when the message from the captain hit my desk at 1:07 that Friday afternoon. The governors office had called, and my services were requested in Galveston. Some bigwig was dead, not of natural causes, and the islands police chief wanted a.s.sistance. At the time, nothing appeared out of the ordinary. Later Id wonder why the little hairs on the back of my neck didnt stand up or I didnt hear a bell go off. Seems like there should have been some kind of warning, a heads-up that my life was about to throttle into high gear, and that nothing Id encountered in my years in law enforcement would prepare me for the task ahead, that maybe this time Id met my match.

Texas Rangers arent supposed to be caught unawares. Theres a saying that dates back to the bad old days when the West was wild and rangers were commissioned for $1.25 a day to fight Indians and war with Mexico: "The Texas Ranger can ride like a Mexican, trail like an Indian, shoot like a Tennessean, and fight like the very devil."

Whoever said that wasnt insulting Mexicans, Native Americans, or Tennesseans. But can anyone really be prepared to battle the devil?

The evil that invaded my life the moment I hung up the telephone, packed my Colt .45 semiautomatic with the worn staghorn grip inside my holster, grabbed my navy blue jacket, and rushed out the office door would soon threaten all that I held dear, everything I believed in, even my very life.

So I ask, shouldnt G.o.d have given me a warning, rung that d.a.m.n bell? But then, in hindsights twenty-twenty, its evident that the Almighty wasnt entirely to blame.

The truth? I wasnt listening.

Most people dont really understand Texas. Its a cliche that its big, so people rarely consider how big. Texas contains more land than Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin combined. We rangers are kind of a lone-star Scotland Yard, under the auspices of the Texas Department of Public Safety and reporting directly to the governor. Our jurisdiction encompa.s.ses the entire state, from the panhandle to the Rio Grande, from El Paso to Corpus Christi, including the bulk of the U.S.-Mexico border. In all, 118 rangers cover 163,696 square miles of mountains, valleys, and forests, ranch lands, little towns, and big cities. Still, were a reclusive bunch. We enter an investigation only when invited by local authorities, when a case exceeds a departments resources, when it crosses jurisdictions, or, as in this case, when from the get-go the local police know its bound to make headlines and hold their feet to the fire. Were counted on to put the fire out by solving the case quickly and quietly.

As for me, Im the rangers only criminal profiler. A police department anywhere in Texas needs a profile to narrow down a list of suspects, Im the one they call. I work out of Ranger Company A, based in my hometown, Houston, a brash city, part cowboy, part wildcatter, part gray pinstripe and Italian loafers. Like Texas, Houston sprawls. Just driving across the city takes longer than crossing most of those skinny East Coast states.

Picture a flat, inland Los Angeles covered by trees.

Galveston Island lies southeast of Houston, just off the coastline, in the Gulf of Mexico. With the strobe flashing on the top of my burgundy Chevy Tahoe, I left my westside office that afternoon and sliced on 1-10 through downtowns slick mirrored skysc.r.a.pers, housing a whos who of oil giants, from Sh.e.l.l and Chevron to Exxon, and then drove south on 1-45, the Gulf Freeway, pa.s.sing the exit where the cars bottle up to tour the Johnson s.p.a.ce Center. An hour later, Id crossed the causeway into Galveston. I cut across the island and then trailed along the coastline on Seawall Boulevard until I arrived at Playa del Reyes, in English "Beach of the Kings," a sw.a.n.ky colony of multimillion-dollar beach houses that serves as a playground for Houstons big money crowd. The local guys were right; a murder in this zip code wouldnt go unnoticed.

Galveston PD. squads lined the street in front of a beige stucco mansion on fifteen-foot stilts. The place was enormous, perched on a spur, jutting out over the water, so exposed to the Gulf that it had to be uninsurable. Theres that little matter of hurricanes. The most powerful to hit Texas dates back to 1900; even counting Katrina it was the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history. It nearly leveled Galveston and killed more than six thousand, including ninety orphans from the old St. Marys Asylum. Some folks in this part of Texas still figure the island is haunted.

On the beach a band of the curious in swimsuits and shorts stared up at the yellow crime-scene tape. TV news cameras whirled, and a clutch of reporters holding spiral-bound notebooks shouted questions as I hurried past. I kept my mouth shut. First, I didnt have anything to tell them. All I knew was that thered been a double murder, a rather grisly one involving a prominent citizen. Second: rangers scrupulously avoid the press. Its one of our credos. I just wanted to get inside, get busy, and do my job. At the ma.s.sive front door, I flashed my badge, the traditional silver wagon wheel with the Texas Lone Star in the center.

"Sorry. This is a closed crime scene," the baby-faced officer guarding the door said, as he threw up his arm to keep me out.

I frowned and stared at the kid. Not too bright this one.

It wasnt a totally unexpected reaction. Theres an old story from the 1901 oil rush about a riot in an East Texas boomtown. At wits end, the sheriff telegraphed Austin, begging the governor for rangers to put down the violence. At the railroad station the day his salvation was to arrive, the exhausted lawman waited for a squadron, but only one tall, lean, dusty cowboy wearing a badge exited the train.

"The governor only sent one ranger?" the sheriff gasped.

"The way I hear it," the ranger growled back, "youve only got one riot."

Imagine that sheriffs surprise if instead of that tall drink of water carrying a Winchester, Id been the lone Texas Ranger on that train.

"Okay, kid," I said, shooting him a warning glance. "Well do this one more time before I call your sergeant. You want another look at the badge?" Id had a bad year, the worst of my life, and Id long since used up all my patience on more important matters. I was about to let the young cop have it when Detective O. L. Nelson, Galveston P.D., popped the door open.

"Boy, dont you know what a Texas Ranger looks like?" Nelson snarled, giving the kid a conspiratorial wink. "This pretty lady is Sarah Armstrong. Lieutenant Armstrong to you. Theres a whole cotillion of people inside waiting for her and her alone to solve this heinous crime. Now get your bony b.u.t.t out of the way and let this famous and learned lady through."

Suddenly the kid was a genius. Obviously, the detective planned to have a little fun with me, so the rookie swooped into an exaggerated bow as he pulled open the door. "Why, right this way, maam," the kid crooned, winking back at the detective. "Theyre waiting for you inside."

These days, women cops are about as common as male nurses, but its different with Texas Rangers. Its the oldest law-enforcement agency in the country, and change doesnt come quickly when youre dealing with the stuff of legends. Im one of only two women in whats still a good old boys club, and, Ive got to admit, sometimes its about as much fun as wearing a flak jacket in Houston in July.

Detective Nelson, a tall, heavyset man with a c.o.c.ky swagger and a twitch that now and then jerked the right side of his face, placed his hand under my elbow and squired me into the house as smug as a high school senior escorting his date into the gym for the prom.

"Kids still wet behind the ears," he scoffed, in mock disgust. "He just aint learned his gentlemanly manners yet."

"Imagine that," I said, stone-faced.

Id first met Nelson years earlier, and neither of us particularly liked the other.

That summer thered been a string of carjackings on the island. With Galveston dependent on tourists who flock to the beaches, that didnt sit well with the chamber of commerce types. Frightening headlines rarely do. I dont usually take robbery a.s.signments, but it was busy that week and the request came in when all the other rangers were out. My arrival on the island didnt please Nelson, whod been working the case for weeks. I disagreed with his theory, that the stolen cars were being trucked to the mainland. Why hide an entire car, when theyre easier to transport and more valuable in parts? Once in charge, I focused the search on the Galveston port. On the second day, an unmarked squad spotted the thieves waterfront warehouse.

We borrowed a DEA armored vehicle with a battering ram to raid the place that night. Once we were inside, chaos erupted, as the perps fled like red ants out of an injured hill. In all the commotion, some stupid white kid jumped out from behind a crate and smacked Nelson on the back of the head with a two-by-four. He fell, his gun dropped on the cement floor, and a scrawny black kid with a straggly goatee dove for it. My luck, I just happened to be close enough to plant my .45 on the center of the kids forehead. I didnt have to say much to convince him to drop the gun.

That night, we arrested four thieves and recovered parts from six stolen cars crated and waiting to be boarded on a ship for Mexico. As far as I was concerned, the case was closed, but Nelsons superiors suspended him for a week without pay for not protecting his weapon. I thought it was tough luck, that given the right circ.u.mstances it could happen to anyone. Silly me, I even considered calling to tell him that. Then a week later, I found an envelope with a Galveston postmark and no return address on my desk. Inside was a hand-drawn cartoon of a half-naked woman cop straddling a urinal.

I hung it up with the Ziggy and Bizarro strips on my office door. It was there for nearly a year before I tore it up and threw it away.

Inside, the beach house looked like a furniture store ad, a place where real people could never live, at least not comfortably. Everything was perfect, from the leather couches and rough, bleached pine tables the color of Galvestons sandy beaches, to the watercolors of waves crashing on dunes.

"Where are they?" I asked.

"This way," said Nelson, visibly relishing being in the lead. He snickered and added with a grin, "Prepare yourself. You aint seen nothin like this before."

"Maybe. Maybe not," I said, chewing on the memory of that d.a.m.n cartoon. "Lets take a look."

Once we reached the master-bedroom wing, sunlight poured into the room-immense with high ceilings. A wall of windows framed a spectacular view of the Gulf surf. But my eyes were drawn dead center, to the king-size canopy bed. There, on top of the cream satin bedspread, two naked bodies appeared like a life-size statue, motionless figures caught in the act of making love.

The scene was at the same time beautiful and horrifying. For what felt like minutes, I couldnt look away. So much so, that at first I didnt notice the wall above the bed. Then Nelson tapped my shoulder and pointed up to where someone had smeared a thick, vertical four-foot reddish-brown line crossed by a three-foot horizontal bar. I didnt need lab results or my FBI training in profiling to know I was looking at a b.l.o.o.d.y cross.

"Figured crime-scene photos wouldnt do this justice," someone said behind me. It was the gruff voice of Captain Don Williams, my boss, who walked up beside me. The captains as unlikely a ranger as I am. Hes nearly seven foot, a former University of Texas basketball star, the first black Texas Ranger and the first to make captain. Ive always favored the basics, namely black Wranglers, cowboy boots, and a white cotton shirt with a jacket, but like most of the men I work with, the captain dressed Western, from his polished snakeskin boots and silver-belly Stetson, to his gold captains badge pinned on a dark brown leather vest. "Pretty strange, eh?"

"Sure is," I said.

Id nearly forgotten Nelson was there until he gloated, "I told you this was one of a kind."

"What do you think?" the captain asked.

I stood for a few minutes, taking it all in. I thought of a museum sculpture Id once seen, pure white marble cut and polished into two Greek lovers. The victims upper bodies had that same pale, bloodless sheen, but I nudged down the comforter and saw that the womans calves and the mans backside were bluish purple, postmortem lividity, gravity pooling blood in the lowest regions of the bodies. That meant theyd been dead for at least six hours. When I brushed the back of my hand against the womans forearm, she felt cold, and a shiver ran through me. I quickly moved on, but when I glanced his way, Nelson was watching me and he smiled a small, crooked grin. I ignored him and went back to work.

As a profiler, Im trained to view victims bodies as evidence, no different from fingerprints and blood splatter. Sometimes thats hard, trying not to think of them as people, I mean. No matter how often Ive done it, no matter how engrossing the scene, working around dead bodies, my skin p.r.i.c.kles. I think about the horror of their deaths, and my stomach gets unsettled, as if Id had too much red wine the night before. Especially after all thats happened in my own life. Its made it even harder not to let my mind drift to thoughts of the families left behind, the pain that waits for them.

After my second trip around the bed, I pulled out a steno pad and jotted down notes: the man was spread-eagled, tied to the bed frame with expensive silk ties, most likely out of his closet. A dime-size bullet hole in his forehead, its edges burned and sooty, exposed tissue turned a bright cherry pink from absorption of carbon monoxide, explaining the b.l.o.o.d.y halo on the pillow.

The woman was on her knees, straddling the dead man. Left to their own devices, dead bodies dont do that, stay upright I mean. From across the room, all I could see was that something tied to her upper body braced her. Up close, I tapped a latex-gloved finger against translucent fishing line, the st.u.r.dy, deep-sea kind, anchoring the corpse to the beds ornate bra.s.s canopy. A single length hog-tied the dead womans ankles, her wrists behind her, and then formed a slipknot around her neck. The killer knew what he was doing; as she struggled, the fishing line cut into her throat, squeezing her airway tighter and tighter. What from across the room appeared to be s.e.xual rapture was in reality a vain attempt to keep her head back and live.

Thinking about how the killer had used the dead rich guys ties, I asked the captain, "The fishing line from the scene?"

"Looks like its off a rod and reel in the downstairs storage," he confirmed.

That settled, I climbed a few rungs up on a ladder the Galveston crime-scene guys had positioned and inspected the womans corpse from a better angle. She had all the outward signs of ligature strangulation, her face bloated and bruised. A line of blood spilled from a gash across her throat. Whether or not he needed to, the killer had finished her off, slitting her throat with a razor-sharp blade.

A dark burgundy river of dried blood on her chest came from slashes cut from collarbone to navel, then breast to breast. Down from the ladder, I gave the man another look. He had the same marking on his chest, mimicking the b.l.o.o.d.y cross on the wall.

"Who are they?" I asked.

"Meet Edward Travis Lucas the third," Captain Williams said.

He needed to say nothing more. The Lucas family, real estate developers for more than three generations, had their name on half the buildings in Galveston along with a healthy chunk of Houston. In its present condition, I barely recognized the mans plain face framed by graying, mousy brown hair from the frequent photos in the Houston Chronicle society columns. I vaguely remembered a wife from those same photos, taken at the poshest parties. The woman I remembered looked nothing like the deceased on the bed. The wife was pretty, pet.i.te, and dark-haired. This woman was at least a decade younger than Lucas, tall and slim, with short blond hair. Athletic-from the muscles jutting down her thighs and calves, I guessed a runner.

"Not the wife," I said.

"We found her ID in her purse. The dead woman is Annmarie Knowles, a lawyer at Luca.s.s Galveston office," the captain said. He picked up a framed photo from the nightstand, of the dead man standing beside the brunette I remembered, surrounded by three apple-cheeked kids. "My guess is this is the wife."

"Does she know?"

"Yeah," said Nelson, reinserting himself into the conversation. "We sent a squad car to tell her an hour ago. Our guys said she took the news with less emotion than the dry-cleaning being late."

"Any leads? Anyone hear or see anything?" I asked.

"Nothing," said the captain.

"This time of year you could fire a bazooka off around here and no one would hear it," explained Nelson. "On weekdays ninety-nine percent of these houses are empty until summer."

"Do we know how the killer got in?"

"No forced entry," Nelson said.

"The killer followed or brought them here? Entered when they did?" the captain asked.

"That would be my guess," I said. "Absent any evidence of a break-in."

"So you figure they knew him?"

I thought about the bodies, about the type of mind that would fantasize about killing in such a ritualized way. "Probably not," I said. "You never know this early in the investigation, but even though he didnt force his way in, I doubt-"

"Im thinking the guy had a key." Nelson interrupted, pulling up on the worn leather belt that held up his shapeless gray slacks. It was obvious that he hated having me on his case. Despite the cartoon, my s.e.x had little to do with it. Nelson and I both knew why Id been called in on the carjackings and why I stood across from him now; his boss didnt trust him to solve the tough cases. Every cop has a jacket, a reputation. O. L. Nelsons was that hed earned a detectives slot based on seniority and little else. He did nothing to challenge that image when he righted his buckle over his bulging waistline and speculated. "I figure Luca.s.s old lady gave the killer the key, set the whole thing up. The way Ive got this thing pegged, this has the look of hired talent."

Then, slowly, as if explaining algebra to a second grader, Nelson looked at me and went on. "Little woman finds out hubby is s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the hired help. Maybe he talks divorce. Maybe he and the wife have a pre-nup and the old lady figures h.e.l.l find a way to leave her high and dry. Bye, bye checkbook. h.e.l.lo full-time office job. She doesnt like the prospects, so she puts out feelers, a little dough, and poof. Her problem vanishes."

"Why the elaborate staging of the bodies?" I asked. "Why the crosses?"

"Camouflage," he answered. Although Id posed the question, he flashed the captain a knowing glance. "The guy wants us to think hes some kind of psycho to keep us from connecting the murders to the wife."

"Possible," I said.