Sarah Armstrong - 01 - Singularity (12 page)

Behind Lucas followed a feisty-looking, white-haired man, his face flushed with anger, who looked to be in his seventies, a man I recognized from newspaper photos as Priscilla’s father, Bobby Barker. He whispered to another man, fiftyish, in a well-cut suit. Her lawyer, no doubt. Probably from one of downtown Houston’s mega firms.

“On Galveston Island, early this morning, Priscilla Lucas was charged with solicitation of murder in the deaths of her multimillionaire husband, Edward Travis Lucas, and a young lawyer, Annmarie Knowles,” said the reporter. “Sources within Galveston PD. allege that, at the time of the murders, Edward Lucas and Knowles were lovers and the Lucases were in the midst of a contentious divorce battle, fighting over custody of their three children. According to the arrest warrant, Mrs. Lucas has refused to answer questions regarding one hundred thousand dollars she withdrew from her personal bank account just days before the murders.”

I cringed when the station cut to footage of Scroggins and Nelson in front of the courthouse.

“What we have here is an age-old scenario, jealous wife has unfaithful husband and his lover murdered,” said Scroggins, frowning into the camera, as Nelson stood solemnly behind him. “We feel confident that we have enough evidence to ensure that the Galveston district attorney’s office will have no difficulty in obtaining a conviction.”

“This morning, Mrs. Lucas is free on one-million-dollars’ bail. No alleged hit man has yet been charged in connection with the double murder. More news tonight on the arrest that’s rocked Houston and the island,” said the reporter.

Mom clicked off the television and asked, “Why did Agent Garrity want you to watch? Is that the case you’ve been working?”

“Yeah, it is.”

“Looks like those detectives think they’ve solved it,” she said.

“They were grandstanding. She didn’t do it.”

Mom walked over and looked at me, intently sizing me up.

“Are you sure? They made it sound pretty cut-and-dried.”

“I’m sure,” I said, with an edge of resentment I didn’t try to hide. “I don’t believe for a second Priscilla Lucas had anything to do with either murder. I’d bet my career on it.”

Mom was silent, mulling that over.

“Well, can you prove it?” she asked with a frown. “Because if you can’t, it appears what you’re really betting is the rest of that woman’s life.”

I turned to Mom, wondering why she seemed so concerned about the outcome of the case.

“I knew Priscilla’s mother,” she explained, as if she sensed my puzzlement. “We went to school together. Our parents traveled in the same circles.”

It wasn’t something I thought about often, probably because it predated my birth and had never had anything to do with my life. Mom hadn’t always had to scratch for a living. Her dad was a successful wildcatter who’d made millions drilling for oil in West Texas. Someplace in the attic, we have pictures of my grandparents and Mom-the-debutante at her coming-out ball.

Then my grandmother died young, and the grandfather I never met disowned Mom when she married Pop, who Grandpa said would never be able to support her. Financially, the old guy was right. An Englishman who’d come to Texas to make his fortune, Pop used up Mom’s trust fund digging dry holes from West Texas to the Louisiana border. Still, my grandfather had been wrong about the most important thing: my father was a good man. When I was a kid, I sometimes wondered how my life would have been different if my grandfather had understood that and hadn’t written us off and left his millions to charity.

“I hadn’t seen Jessica Barker in years until Priscilla’s wedding,”
Mom explained. “But I work with the family caterer, and I made the cake when she married Edward Lucas. Jessica was very gracious, not treating me like an underling. And Priscilla was a beautiful bride, such a waste when everyone in Houston knew Edward Lucas was a spoiled playboy.”

“I didn’t know that you knew the family.”

“There was never any reason to bring it up,” she said, frowning. “I knew all those families, years ago, before your father entered my life. Since then, I’ve been something of a social outcast, not that I’ve cared. There’s more to life than money. Anyway, Priscilla’s mother was always kind. I honestly grieved when I read that she died of breast cancer a few years ago.”

“You were friends?” I asked, genuinely surprised.

“I guess you could say that. Jessica offered to help us once, a long time ago,” Mom continued. “Something that meant a lot to me. I never forgot.”

“What’s that, Mom?”

“She heard about your father’s stroke and offered to move him into the clinic at the medical center, the one the Barker family funded,” she explained. “It was too late. Your father was near death. The doctor examined him and said there was nothing they could do. But I never forgot her kindness. When I faced a crisis, Jessica Barker was the only one from my old life who cared.”

Mom tilted her head and looked at me closely. “Sarah, are you certain Priscilla Lucas is innocent?”

“I can’t be sure. There’s the possibility I’m wrong,” I admitted. “But my instincts tell me that I’m right.”

“Well, then you need to not worry about Maggie and me for a while,” she said.

“Mom…” I protested.

“No,” she said, raising her hand to shush me. “I promise you that I’ll handle things here. We’ll be all right. Until this case is closed,
you just go do your job. Because if Jessica Barker’s daughter is truly innocent, you need to prove it.”

Maggie and I shared the car but little else on our drive to her middle school. I tried talking; she just didn’t answer. Mom was right—something was troubling her and she wasn’t yet at the point where she was willing to talk about it. Picking up Strings cut through the silence, and they gabbed about their science projects, his still based on an ever-expanding theory that dinosaurs were not only alive and hiding somewhere on the planet but would someday reclaim the earth after yet another ice age. I couldn’t help smiling when Maggie clicked her tongue in disbelief; it was just so Mom. When I pulled up in front of the school, she seemed surprised that I parked the car.

“I’m going to stop in to visit with Mrs. Hansen for a few minutes,” I explained.

Maggie frowned, but I sensed she was actually pleased.

As they ran off to talk to friends, I found my way to Emily Hansen’s classroom. Mrs. Hansen was Maggie’s homeroom teacher, as well as her instructor for math and science. It was Maggie’s first year in middle school, but I’d been at the school a few times before, most recently for spring open house. The classroom reminded me of mine in sixth grade: blackboards, books, desks with attached chairs, and a bulletin board full of profiles of ancient scientists and mathematicians, including Galileo and Pythagoras. The class pet, a gerbil named Leo, after Leonardo da Vinci, spun aimlessly inside a wheel, and Mrs. Hansen, a stocky woman in her late fifties with a helmet of highlighted hair, sat behind her desk, making notations in her grade book.

“Mrs. Armstrong,” she said, sounding genuinely pleased I had come. “Thank you for dropping in.”

“I’m worried about Maggie,” I said. “She told me about her math test.”

“I think you should be concerned,” she said, frowning. “Maggie’s having a difficult time, maybe not surprisingly so for a child who’s lost a parent, but a hard time.”

When I left, Mrs. Hansen’s words were still ringing in my ears. “Maggie’s having a difficult time.” I’d known, but hearing it from her teacher somehow made my daughter’s sadness more real. We had only a few minutes before the bell rang and a herd of young bodies invaded the room, but we agreed to talk again by phone in the coming week. She also promised to call if Maggie failed to turn in her homework or wasn’t prepared for class. As I was on the way out the door, she handed me a paper brought to her by Maggie’s English teacher. The assignment: to write about what makes her happiest.

I read it in the car. It began, “What makes me happiest is being with my mom,” Maggie wrote. “But she’s gone a lot, because she helps solve crimes, like my dad used to do. My gram takes care of me, but I’m lonely a lot. Since my dad died, everything is different. We don’t have fun like we used to when my dad was with us. He’d kid us, and call Mom and me his girls. My dad could make anything fun.” Maggie wrote about our trip to the dinosaur exhibit and that Strings and Mom came along. It ended: “We had a good time, but the next day my mom was gone again, working on a case. Her job is important. People die if she doesn’t catch the killers, so I guess the truth is that I’m being selfish.”

I tucked the paper in my bag and drove to the office, but it was impossible to put it out of my mind.

D
avid and Captain Williams were in the conference room when I arrived. They’d already begun compiling the information we’d collected by building a chart on a sheet of poster board. Across the top, they listed the names of the three victims and the dates of each of the murders. Below each name, they noted details of the offense and the murder scene: nature of the wounds, position of the bodies, any forensic evidence. Here they had only the two strands of blond hair to enter. They also wrote in the cross slashed across each victim’s chest and the bloody crosses painted on the walls above their bodies. They’d left two empty columns in front of the Fontenot murder and four before those of Edward Lucas and Annmarie Knowles. I knew without asking that they anticipated writing in the names of other, still unknown victims.

Most frightening, they’d left five columns after the Galveston murders, reserved for future victims, a possibility that increased in probability every day the killer remained free.

“This is where you two have a problem, if you’re going to prove Priscilla Lucas wasn’t involved,” said Captain Williams, pointing at
the final category, “connection with the killer.” That square remained empty under Louise Fontenot’s name, but under the Galveston murders the captain had penciled in
hired by PL
followed by a question mark.

“Seems to me that you two have to find a way to fill that square with hard evidence if you’re going to erase Mrs. Lucas’s name,” he said.

“Maybe when we track down other cases,” I said, pointing to the open areas they’d left between the murders. “As we fill in the blanks, we’ll be able to determine how our guy made contact with the others, suggesting how and why he chose Lucas and Knowles.”

“The captain and I were just talking about the same thing,” said David, frowning. “I think it’s safe, at least until we uncover other evidence, to assume that there were others before Louise Fontenot. We did a pretty good canvass in Bardwell, and we came up without any clues. We really have no evidence she was his first. After her, of course, we’ve got a substantial lapse until the Galveston murders. Very uncharacteristic for someone who gets such a kick out of killing.”

“So why are we coming up empty on other matches?” I said, posing the question we all knew had to be answered.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “Maybe we’re wrong and there are no other murders. In my view, as we’ve already discussed, highly unlikely.”

“Or?”

“Our guy is smart. He changes MO, at least enough for the murders not to match on a computer search. That’s a possibility,” David said. “This guy’s sophisticated enough to cover his tracks on the scene. He doesn’t leave physical evidence. He’s also shown an ability to adapt parts of his MO to fit the situation. He slashed Louise Fontenot’s and Annmarie Knowles’s throats, but when he found a gun at the scene, he used it to finish off Lucas.”

“Any other possibilities?” I asked.

“One. In my opinion, the most likely: for some reason we’re missing cases. Some just weren’t reported.”

“So none of us believe these three are this guy’s only victims?” I asked.

David glanced at the captain, and then turned back to me.

“No,” he said. “None of us believe that.”

“Well, if the only factor here is that the murders aren’t being reported, it’s going to be nearly impossible to fill in those blanks,” I said, unhappy at the prospect that we may have hit a dead end.

“Then we have to ask why these other agencies aren’t reporting,” said David. “What cases don’t make the list?”

“Of course, theoretically, they all do,” I said. “But we all know that’s not true.”

“Right,” he agreed. “It could be that the murders are taking place in small towns where police are often too short staffed to take the time to report.”

“Also, departments don’t report cases if they believe they know who committed the murder and just can’t prove it,” I added. “They don’t consider those cases truly unsolved.”

“That happens,” agreed the captain. “What else?”

“High-risk victims, vagrants, homeless, prostitutes, drug addicts, or dealers,” I said. “More often than not, they’re considered nonpersons.”

“That wouldn’t fit the profile of the murders we’ve got so far,” David said.

“So where do you two start?” asked the captain.

“If we assume it’s number three, unreported cases, what’s the best way to contact agencies to ask them to look through their unsolved case files?” asked David. “Something that will have a wide distribution.”

“We could e-mail a departmental bulletin to rangers and law-enforcement agencies across the state,” I suggested. “One asking for
information on any murders even remotely similar to the three we’re investigating, anything that hasn’t been reported to ViCAP.”

“That’d work,” said David. “But should we extend the search? Go national?”

The captain thought about that. “Since ViCAP is a national database, we should have had hits on similar cases in other states the first time we ran a comparison. I’m reluctant to go too broad with this. Search too wide and we’ll be swamped in cases. At least for now, let’s keep this in Texas. I’ll get Sheila to get the bulletin out,” the captain offered, referring to his secretary.

“It’ll be a while before we start getting responses. While we’re waiting for those to come in, where do we look?” asked David. “How do we fill in those blanks on our own?”

“Why don’t we follow through on your second possibility, that the killer may be changing MO?” I suggested. “Maybe the murders are being reported, but, as you said, they’re just different enough that we’re not tying them to our cases?”