Sarah Armstrong - 01 - Singularity (7 page)

“I’m not writing off Nelson’s theory,” I protested again, reining in my building frustration. “I’m like Agent Garrity. I haven’t ruled out the possibility that Priscilla Lucas is involved. That she didn’t come clean about being in the dead woman’s apartment the night before the murders is suspicious.”

“Well, at least that’s something,” Scroggins said, with an impatient
huff. “It seems to me that when the lady won’t admit she argued with one of the victims, that means
something.”

“Something, but not necessarily that she was involved in killing her husband,” said Garrity. “Lieutenant Armstrong is right. This is too early in the investigation to settle into one theory and exclude the other.”

“Not excluding theories, there’s something we all agree on,” said Scroggins, with a forced grin.

I took a deep breath, stifling my irritation and said, as nicely as I could muster, “All I’m suggesting is that we work both angles, until we’ve got more proof. We’re not facing any kind of deadline on this investigation. Priscilla Lucas isn’t a flight risk. Why narrow ourselves down to investigate only one scenario when we have time to take a good look at this case?”

With that, the two agents glanced warily at each other, and I thought back to one of Bill’s old ranger stories, how in 1934, it took Senior Ranger Captain Frank Hamer 102 days to track Bonnie and Clyde to the Louisiana farm where they riddled them with bullets and ended the careers of the notorious bank robbers. Something about Scroggins’s and Garrity’s reactions suggested we weren’t going to have that kind of time to solve the Galveston double murders.

“There are factors at work here, aspects of this case we all need to be aware of,” Garrity said. “There’s big influence being parlayed all the way up to the governor’s mansion—in fact, all the way to the White House—by both families. Priscilla Lucas’s father, Bobby Barker, is calling not only Austin but D.C., trying to use his money and influence to have his daughter ruled out as a suspect. On the other hand, the Lucases have a long history of major political contributions. There’s a laundry list of politicians who owe them favors, and they’re twisting arms in the opposite direction. They want Priscilla Lucas put under a magnifying glass.”

“Why?” I asked. “Because she has a boyfriend? Hell, in this marriage, she didn’t have a monopoly on infidelity.”

“There are motives for both families,” Scroggins said, with a rather mysterious glance at Garrity. “It’s easy to see why Barker wants his daughter cleared, but the Lucases have reasons for wanting her charged. Let’s just say that it would be advantageous for their entire family if Priscilla Lucas turned out to be involved in the murders.”

I had the unmistakable impression that Scroggins was being intentionally vague, so I said, “Ted, I need to know exactly what you’re talking about. Lay it on the line. We’re working together on this case. Aren’t we?” I thought I sounded remarkably calm considering my impulse to pull out my gun and make him start tap dancing.

That fantasy didn’t disappear when he blustered, “I understand that, Lieutenant. But you have to understand our position. We’re the FBI. We have sources, and we’re not at liberty to share everything. We can’t just—”

While his fellow agent rambled, Garrity must have realized I was teetering on some kind of precipice, because he interrupted. “Our sources tell us that both families were in on the divorce negotiations, and things got pretty nasty. The late husband and the widow were fighting over the kids. And the fight got so dirty that they were each preparing motions charging the other was unfit to raise the children.”

“And?” I prodded.

“Lieutenant Armstrong, these murders have put us in the middle of a power struggle between two of the state’s wealthiest families,” Garrity continued. “With her husband dead, Priscilla Lucas avoids a scandal and walks away with not only her lover but her children without a court fight. That means the widow had motive. If that’s not enough, there’s another reason for Priscilla to want her husband dead.”

“And that is?” I asked.

“Money. Big money,” he said. “Priscilla Lucas didn’t lie when she said she didn’t need her husband’s money. She just didn’t tell you everything. The Barker and Lucas fortunes are tied up in irrevocable trusts. Priscilla and Edward’s children are the only ones in either family, the only heirs. The family that wins custody of the Lucas children controls more than a billion dollars.”

Scroggins glared at him, while Garrity shifted uncomfortably in his chair, perhaps aware of how it sounded, as if power and money could influence the investigation.

“The point is that money talks. Neither of these families will back down until they’ve got what they want, and they’ll use everything they have to get it,” Garrity said. “In the meantime, this case is a political landmine for everyone with ties to either family, and here we’re talking a who’s who of Austin and D.C. One thing Agent Scroggins and I agree on is that we need more than theories; we need answers and we need them fast, before this case spins out of control.”

“And even if you and the guru from Quantico here are doubtful, we can’t afford not to take a microscopic look at Mrs. Priscilla Lucas,” Scoggins concluded.

The discussion wrapped up. Agent Scroggins left for Galveston to work with Detective Nelson. Their job would be to investigate Priscilla Lucas and determine any role she may have played in the double murders. I couldn’t help but muse that from my perspective Scroggins and Nelson deserved each other. Meanwhile, Agent Garrity and I began what I call the needle-in-the-haystack phase. Suspecting a serial killer, to bolster our theory, we needed to find other murders, similar enough to have been committed by the same man. We both knew what we were looking for: murders committed with a knife by an UNSUB, an unknown subject, where victims
were tortured and posed in unusual positions. The bloody cross, that too was a definite possibility, a high probability of being part of his signature, ritualistically repeated at other murder scenes, an integral element of our killer’s fantasy and, therefore, his pattern.

Over the weekend, I’d completed two questionnaires, one for each murder, and reported the Galveston homicides to ViCAP, the FBI’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, a national database that tracks serial and unsolved homicides. Each characteristic of the killings had to be noted, down to the torture wounds in the victims’ hands and feet. Below item 84, elements of unusual or additional assault/trauma/torture to victim, next to carving on victim, I wrote:
superficial cuts to form crosses on victims’ chests
. In the proper slot, I’d listed the type of knots used to bind the victims, although it appeared they’d offer little help in revealing the killer’s background. Rather than rare Chinese upholstery knots or surgical knots used by docs in operations, the lab described the ligature around Annmarie’s neck as anchored with a common slipknot. The bindings on the victims’ arms and legs were even less helpful, tied as they were with simple overhand knots. While the knots in other homicides might match, they weren’t unusual enough to link these murders to any others on their own or to suggest anything about the killer.

Under the weapons section, I listed the gun as a weapon of opportunity and the knife as the killer’s weapon of choice.

Although they’d had to work over a weekend, the research staff at the FBI ranked the case a priority, and Garrity and I already had a screen full of e-mails to follow up on, suggesting cases that shared characteristics with ours.

Computers are an incredible advantage when solving serial crimes, allowing investigators to assess thousands of cases at once. Yet they’re also a danger. Become too convinced the answer waits somewhere untapped in a database, and a cop can waste precious hours that should be devoted to pounding the pavement and asking
questions instead of sitting in front of an answerless screen. We both knew the risk.

Morning grew into afternoon, and Garrity stood beside me as we worked, pulling up the information on each case, splitting them up into two piles. He would follow up on one; the other would be my responsibility. Before long, I found myself wondering about him. Why had he stood up for me against Scroggins? That hadn’t been my experience with FBI agents. They tended to stick together, forming a united front against local police. Distracted as I was, my hands hesitated on the keyboard, and I found Garrity looking quizzically at me, waiting for me to begin again. Embarrassed and annoyed with myself, I refocused on the job at hand. Yet in the quicksand that was fast becoming this case, I wondered if Garrity could be trusted.

By late morning, we’d called departments throughout the state investigating ViCAP’s laundry list of unsolved murders. On each, we’d compiled a list of the essentials: names and locations of the victims, any telltale clues that suggested one or another of the cold cases could be tied to the Galveston murders. Slow, tedious work.

There were similarities: a garage mechanic stabbed to death in his backyard and left hunched over an old Buick he was in the process of restoring, an elderly minister discovered murdered in the church sanctuary, the six-year-old murder of a woman who had been found nude in the bathtub with her throat slit. Each time, we quizzed the officers who’d handled the investigations. Each time, we came up dry. None of the MOs were similar enough to our case to suggest a connection.

“What about this one?” I asked, at three that afternoon.

I pointed at a case on Garrity’s list, one he’d drawn a star next to. The victim: an elderly woman murdered in Bardwell, an East Texas town cut out of the rich expanse of forests and swamps collectively known as the Big Thicket. Garrity’s summary was brief: no apparent means of entry into the woman’s house; nothing had been
taken. What caught my eye was his notation
two knife wounds on chest
.

“The sheriff wasn’t in to answer questions, and no one in the office seemed to know much about the case. I got the info on the chest wounds from the courthouse secretary. But that’s the closest I came to a probable match,” he said. “You up for a drive east?”

T
he drive to Bardwell took about two hours. I parked the Tahoe in front of an aging stone mansion surrounded by oaks trailing heavy, ruffled shreds of Spanish moss. Decades earlier it had been converted into a combination county assessor’s office and sheriff’s department. Sheriff Tom Broussard had delayed his dinner to meet with us, curious that a Texas Ranger and an FBI agent needed his help.

“Yup, Louise Fontenot was a good old woman. People in this town were mighty upset by her murder,” said Broussard, chewing a plug of tobacco that stained the corners of his mouth and made his right cheek bulge. Every so often he paused and spit into a dented Sprite can. “Her family was one of the originals around here. Pioneers. She didn’t deserve to go that way.”

At the time of her death, Louise had been eighty-six years old. In the photo he showed us, she wore a flowered cotton housedress, her white hair permed into tight curls, her glasses too wide for her narrow face. A tightness about her features gave her a pinched, spinsterish
look. She’d been found nude, her throat cut, in her bedroom. There were wounds on the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet that the county coroner, most days the local family practitioner, described as puncture marks. The “two knife wounds on her chest” formed a cross.

With that, Sheriff Broussard drove us out to the old Fontenot place, a deserted frame house that backed up to the woods on the outskirts of town. The yellow paint was faded, and the plastic holly wreath on the front door drooped from sun and weather. Strands of multicolored lights entangled a small bush next to the front door. Louise had been murdered fifteen months earlier, two days before Christmas.

Inside, the house looked as if its owner had just stepped out. Her furniture remained in place, and her cane leaned against a wall. The old woman’s Bible waited on a lamp table next to what was undoubtedly her favorite chair, its back covered by a crocheted doily.

“Louise was the last of her family in these parts,” explained the sheriff. “For a long time, nobody could agree on what to do with her stuff. The county attorney said no one had a right to touch any of it—until the property taxes were left unpaid and the county seized the place, but there’d been talk about going through and seeing if anything was right for the local history room at the library. The taxes came due about six months ago giving the go-ahead, but the museum ladies haven’t gotten around to it yet. I think they’re spooked about even walking in this place.”

“Is that how the killer got in?” I asked, pointing at a boarded-up window.

“No. We’re not sure how he got in. We think maybe through an open window in the back bedroom, although we couldn’t find any footprints or fingerprints to confirm that,” the sheriff said. “Teenagers broke that, months after the killing. They’re the only ones not afraid
of ghosts, I guess. They used the house to smoke pot after school, until we ran them off.”

“Sarah,” David called. “Come take a look.”

I found him in the bedroom, standing next to the bed. On the wall above the tarnished metal headboard was a bloody cross, a smaller version of the one wiped onto the wall above the tortured, murdered bodies in Galveston.

“Is this where the body was found?” David asked, pointing at the bed.

“That’s it,” said the sheriff. “Funny thing, nothing was taken, not even the fifty dollars she had in her billfold.”

“How was she positioned?”

“In bed, flat on her back, the covers folded real neat at her feet,” he said. “The killer tied her ankles together and her hands. He had her hands propped up, on top her chest. When we walked in the room, it looked like she was praying.”

“Anything else strike you as odd?” I asked.

“Well, one thing,” he said, smacking the corner of his lips and tapping the straw cowboy hat he held against his thigh.

“And that was?” I nudged.

“The telephone was smack on top of her chest.”

“The phone?”

“Yup,” said Sheriff Broussard.