Sarah Armstrong - 01 - Singularity

C
onsciousness 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 coarse, tan sand. The young man’s 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, that’s 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 glass door, and noted that the lobby was well lit, inviting, while nearly all the apartments remained shrouded in darkness.

It won’t 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 vagrant’s 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.

“You’re 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 glass, 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 passed, and he waited, nearly motionless, until something unseen pricked his senses, filling him with a visceral anticipation, a sensation he’d grown to welcome as the first sign of impending release.

“It’s 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.

I’m here
, he thought.
I’m 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 lobby’s welcoming golden light.

Outside on the street, the young man smiled.

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 governor’s office had called, and my services were requested in Galveston. Some bigwig was dead, not of natural causes, and the island’s police chief wanted assistance. At the time, nothing appeared out of the ordinary. Later I’d wonder why the little hairs on the back of my neck didn’t stand up or I didn’t 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 I’d encountered in my years in law enforcement would prepare me for the task ahead, that maybe this time I’d met my match.

Texas Rangers aren’t supposed to be caught unawares. There’s 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 wasn’t 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, shouldn’t God have given me a warning, rung that damn bell? But then, in hindsight’s twenty-twenty, it’s evident that the Almighty wasn’t entirely to blame.

The truth? I wasn’t listening.

Most people don’t really understand Texas. It’s a cliché that it’s 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 encompasses 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, we’re a reclusive bunch. We enter an investigation only when invited by local authorities, when a case exceeds a department’s resources, when it crosses jurisdictions, or, as in this case, when from the get-go the local police know it’s bound to make headlines and hold their feet to the fire. We’re counted on to put the fire out by solving the case quickly and quietly.

As for me, I’m the rangers’ only criminal profiler. A police department anywhere in Texas needs a profile to narrow down a list of suspects, I’m 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 downtown’s slick mirrored skyscrapers, housing a who’s who of oil giants, from Shell and Chevron to Exxon, and then drove south on 1-45, the Gulf Freeway, passing the exit where the cars bottle up to tour the Johnson Space Center. An hour later, I’d 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 swanky colony of multimillion-dollar beach houses that serves as a playground for Houston’s big money crowd. The local guys were right; a murder in this zip code wouldn’t 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. There’s 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. Mary’s 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 didn’t have anything to tell them. All I knew was that there’d been a double murder, a rather grisly one involving a prominent citizen. Second: rangers scrupulously avoid the press. It’s one of our credos. I just wanted
to get inside, get busy, and do my job. At the massive front door, I flashed my badge, the traditional silver wagon wheel with the Texas Lone Star in the center.