Sarah Armstrong - 01 - Singularity (3 page)

“So?” Nelson said. “He enjoys his work. So what?”

“That knife is his preferred weapon. He carries it with him. When you find him, he’ll have the knife on him,” I said. “The gun is an afterthought. My guess is he picked it up on the scene like the fishing line and the ties. You might even find it abandoned in the house. He doesn’t care about it.”

Captain Williams glanced at Nelson.

“We found a 9mm pistol, wiped clean of prints but recently fired, on a table in the den,” Nelson said. “We’re thinking it’s the murder weapon.”

“And it belonged to Lucas not the killer?” I speculated.

The captain nodded. “There’s also an empty gun box with Lucas’s name engraved on it. And this is odd, blood traces around the shower drain.”

“He didn’t wash the bodies,” I said, looking again at the bloody scene and considering the possibilities. “The guy showered?”

“Maybe, but if he did he cleaned up. Not a trace of anything left,” the captain said. “This guy was careful.”

“To take down two victims at once, he’s had practice. He was sure of himself. He didn’t run. He watched them, targeted one or both well before the killings, followed them until he knew their habits. He knew they wouldn’t be interrupted. He took his time and enjoyed the killing, then afterward…” The film playing in my mind wrenched my gut tighter, and I felt suddenly ill.

“So our guy has balls.” Nelson shrugged. “So what?”

I visualized them in the room, the terrified couple tied to the bed, begging for their lives, while the shadowy killer lurked in the background.

“What about other physical evidence?” I asked. “Anything we can use from forensics?”

“The maid comes three times a week, even if the family’s not around. She was here yesterday, so there aren’t many. We’ll have a report by the end of the day,” said the captain, frowning. “There are so few, my guess is our killer wore gloves.”

“Which proves my point,” Nelson said, smugly. “He’s a pro.”

“Think about it,” I challenged. “What kind of hit man counts on finding a gun at the scene? He didn’t even bring his own rope to tie them up.”

For a moment, Nelson appeared to reconsider, but then he smiled. “Maybe the wife told him there’d be a gun and where to find it.”

“This isn’t about money,” I said, turning from Nelson to the captain. “This guy gets off slicing people up. This wasn’t personal. It wasn’t work. It was about power, control, obsession, and, maybe most of all, pleasure.”

The captain took off his hat and scratched his temples, vainly attempting to repair the ear-to-ear indentation the Stetson left behind. Gray had been taking over in the past few years, and I’d noticed he’d started cutting his hair shorter. “You’ve got to admit, we’ve got a murdered husband and his mistress, you’ve got to like the wife at least enough to give her a close look,” he said.

“That’s all I’m saying, Captain,” Nelson said.

I looked at the detective and frowned. This was going to be a long day.

“I’m not suggesting that it’s impossible that you’re right, Detective. None of us knows enough yet to throw out any theory,” I said. “But the captain wanted my impression, and it’s that Lucas and this woman had the misfortune of running into a seriously twisted killer, one who enjoys slicing people up.”

“So we can agree that this is just your opinion, and that I’m entitled to a different one?” Nelson asked. I couldn’t help but consider that perhaps this case wouldn’t be a fresh start for us. I might have to live with the prospect that Detective O. L. Nelson and I would never be best friends.

“Of course,” I conceded. Eager to avoid further confrontation and to start the investigation that would end all the speculation, I asked. “Where’s the wife?”

“At home,” said the captain. “She’s the one who called the station, asked Galveston P.D. to check out the beach house.”

“Another reason to like her for this,” Nelson insisted. “She tells us to check the beach house and sure enough, what do we find? Two dead bodies.”

I had to remind myself not to groan.

“Captain, I’m finished here. You can let the M.E.’s folks process the bodies. I’m assuming you have the search warrants signed?” I asked Nelson.

“All done,” he said.

“Good. Then I’m going to the dead woman’s place to take a look.” I frowned at Nelson, unhappily considering departmental protocol that dictates we work with the local P.D., and reluctantly added, “Detective, you are, of course, welcome to come along.”

A
nnmarie Knowles lived in a loft apartment in downtown Galveston, ten minutes from the beach house. The building manager said she’d signed the lease a year earlier. She paid her rent on time and kept to herself. It was obvious she thought of it as no more than a temporary setup. She’d done minimal decorating, little furniture beyond a bed, an old dresser, a tomato-red couch and two old tables that could have come from the Salvation Army resale shop. She had one painting on the wall, a small work by Jackson Pollock that looked, at least to my untrained eye, like the real thing. Most likely a gift or loan from Lucas. That meant the relationship must have been serious. You don’t trust a masterpiece, even a minor one, to a casual girlfriend.

Annmarie was a good housekeeper. The place was spotless, except for rinsed breakfast dishes stacked in the sink and a well-worn pair of Nike running shoes discarded on the living room floor. The view from her window was of Old Galveston, restaurants, Victorian storefronts, and, a brisk five-minute walk away, the rail yard.

She
must have been here just this morning
, I thought. Healthy, young people don’t expect to die, even today with the papers crowded with the fear of terrorist attacks and headlines about deadly convenience store holdups. Violent, senseless crimes are nearly always a surprise. It’s assumed they only happen to others, people who aren’t careful, aren’t lucky, aren’t smart. Not beautiful young lawyers who live in expensive apartments and bed their multimillionaire bosses.

In the kitchen, Annmarie had covered the refrigerator with photos held by magnets attached to papier-mâché fruit, her only personal touch. A green-and-yellow apple gripped a likeness of two young girls, maybe nieces or the daughters of a friend? Nearby, a sprig of bright purple grapes held a sixty-ish couple, who, from the resemblance, I guessed were her parents. Someone would have to find them. Another family introduced to the unrelenting pain of inexplicable loss, another set of parents left to wonder about the horror of their child’s final moments, the fear that must have sliced through her as surely as the killer’s knife through her throat.

For the next hour, Nelson and I rifled through Annmarie’s papers on her desk, her Jimmy Choo, Giuseppe Zanotti, and Miu Miu shoe-boxes and the Prada, Michael Kors, and Gucci frocks in her closet. The girl dressed well on a young lawyer’s salary. Of course, once the police show up, nothing is sacred. I played the answering machine: one message, a reminder for a hair appointment the next day.

We found nothing apparently tied to the murders.

Questioning the neighbors proved more fruitful. First, we learned Edward Lucas had been a frequent visitor to Knowles’s condo. No surprise there. Then I stopped a gray-haired medical-software salesman returning home from a day at the office, as he waited for the elevator. He’d heard about the murders on the car radio during his commute, but until we told him, he didn’t know one of the victims had been a woman from his building.

“A couple of mornings ago, something strange did happen,” he explained. “I didn’t think much of it at the time.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“I was on my way to work, say seven or so, maybe earlier.”

“And?”

“And, I was walking through the lobby to the garage when that woman you’re asking about kind of burst through the door after her run, looking frightened.”

“Of what?”

“I remember she was fumbling her keys,” he said. “She looked rattled.”

“Why?” I asked, again.

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I didn’t ask. I didn’t know the woman well enough to ask. She just looked, well, scared.”

A few minutes later, we learned another bit of information that might prove fruitful, when Nelson and I tracked down Annmarie’s immediate neighbor, a real estate woman in her fifties, busy washing clothes in the second-floor laundry room.

“There was shouting in that girl’s apartment last night, starting about seven. I thought about calling the building manager, but I knew he’d be gone. His poker night,” she said, still annoyed at the memory. “Anyway, I had an early meeting scheduled with an important client and wasn’t happy about all the noise. I wanted a quiet dinner and an early night. When the quarrel ended, about eight or so, I looked out my peephole and saw a woman leaving.”

“What did she look like?”

“Rather short. Brunette. Expensively dressed.”

The description fit Mrs. Lucas down to her undoubtedly French-manicured nails. Nelson puffed up with such self-satisfaction, I considered warning him that the wind might change and leave his face frozen that way.

“Could you hear what they were arguing about?” I asked her.

“I couldn’t make out any words,” she said. “Just loud voices. Both the women sounded very angry, very upset.”

Outside on the street, early evening tourists sat on benches overlooking the water. It’s days like this, spring, winter, and fall, that make this part of Texas habitable. In the summer, when the temperatures and humidity hunker down at the mid-nineties, even Gulf breezes can’t break the sweat factor. Summers, I wonder how my great-grandmother survived without air-conditioning.

I knew Nelson had been biding his time to get me alone, and on the way to our cars he let loose. There’s nothing like a redneck cop with a snout of self-righteousness to build up a head of steam.

“Who do you think Annmarie Knowles had reason to be scared of?” he prodded. “Think maybe the petite, brunette wife of the man she was screwing? The woman she was arguing with last night in her condo?”

I smiled back at him, the sweetest, blandest smile I could muster, the way my mom taught me when I was a kid and Sam Reyerson pulled my ponytail in math class. I’d turn around in my seat, smile at that kid, and presto, the little weasel stopped bothering me and got back to the weekly quiz. At first, Nelson looked puzzled, but pretty soon I got the result I’d hoped for. He shut up.

“You know, you may be right. At the very least Mrs. Lucas has some questions to answer,” I said. “Let’s have the uniforms bring a spread including her driver’s license photo over for Annmarie’s neighbor to ID. In the meantime, let’s talk to the grieving widow.”

A
s prominent as the Lucas family was in Galveston, many people assumed they lived on the island. They didn’t. As the sun set, Nelson and I parked our cars in front of a River Oaks mansion, on six acres surrounded by an eight-foot fence, just west of downtown Houston. The place was white brick, pillared, right out of
Gone with the Wind. A
maid in a black-and-white uniform answered the door and assured us Mrs. Lucas would be with us momentarily. That gave us a chance to scan the front parlor: all antique furniture, oil paintings, and polished wood floors. Nelson gawked at a bronze Remington of an Indian warrior on horseback with his lance drawn on stampeding buffalo. I felt like a small-town tourist in the big city, as I admired the antique Afghan prayer rug.

Moments later, Priscilla Lucas bustled in surrounded by a wave of nervous energy, the kind that instantly makes my curiosity tingle. Her long, dark brown hair was anchored with a gold-and-diamond barrette. She wore a tight white silk shirt over breasts too round and firm not to have been tampered with and black silk slacks that hugged her trim waistline and hips. Even without plastic surgery, she
would have looked good, a development that didn’t escape Nelson’s pop-eyed scrutiny. I studied her face, not flushed, eyes clear. She hadn’t been crying.

Unusual for a woman whose husband had just been brutally murdered.

“Please, come with me,” she said, leading us to a sunroom off the parlor. “The children are watching a movie. I’m waiting for my father and a grief counselor to arrive. I haven’t told them about their father yet. I hope this will be all right.”

“Of course,” I said.

We barely sat down when Nelson got right to the point: “Mrs. Lucas, we have some questions for you.”

“I knew you would,” she answered. “You might as well know up front, Edward and I weren’t happily married. We were talking to attorneys. The word ‘divorce’ had been mentioned.”

Nelson shot me a knowing glance, but I turned back to the new widow. I was impressed that she was being so open, but then I realized that a woman like Priscilla Lucas isn’t used to being questioned by police. She undoubtedly believed her social position placed her above suspicion.

Always a fan of the one-word question, I asked, “Why?”

“Edward was a rather distant man, rather cold. We grew apart,” she said, so matter-of-factly I felt sure she’d rehearsed. “And there were the affairs. This one with this young lawyer in his office, Miss Knowles, well it was just the latest in a long string. And—I may as well tell you this because someone else surely will—I’ve been seeing someone.”

For the wife of a murder victim, this seemed a surprising admission, and I saw Nelson straighten up, perching expectantly on the edge of the calico-cushioned couch.

“Who?” I asked.

“A man I met this past fall. We’re in love and want to marry.
Edward didn’t initially favor a divorce, but I was winning him over to my point of view.”

“What does this man do?” Nelson piped in. “Your lover?”

“He’s a professor at Rice University,” she said, blanching at his characterization. “He teaches French.”

“What does a French teacher make?” Nelson asked, as he fingered the thick lip of the swan-shaped Lalique bowl resting on the coffee table. “Forty, maybe fifty or sixty a year, max?”

“I’m sure I wouldn’t know,” Priscilla answered, eyebrows arched in peeved commas. “Money wouldn’t be a concern.”

“Counting on the divorce settlement?” Nelson prodded, his implication hanging in the air between us.