Singularity (Sarah Armstrong, 1) - Hardcover

Casey, Kathryn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312379501 ISBN 13: 9780312379506

Publisher: Minotaur Books,US, 2008

Synopsis

Profiler Sarah Armstrong knows what it’s like to be in a sticky situation. As a single mother and one of the few female Rangers in Texas history, she has had to work twice as hard to rank among the best cops in the Lone Star State. But when megawealthy businessman Edward Lucas III is found murdered along with his mistress, their bodies posed in grotesque ways, Sara quickly senses that this will be the deadliest case of her career. While others focus the investigation on Lucas’s estranged wife, Sarah disagrees and hunts a suspect only she believes in. Yet nothing in her career could have prepared her for the horror of a young man who believes he has been sent from heaven to massacre innocent people. When Sarah picks up on the killer’s elusive trail, following his scent all over Texas, the psychopath makes her his next target. And as Sarah closes in, the madman sets his sights on all she holds dear. Singularity features a feisty, funny, and tough heroine and a truly creepy killer, as it races along to a chilling and unexpected climax.

About this title

About the Author

Kathryn Casey is a former magazine reporter and the author of five highly acclaimed true-crime books. She has been featured on Oprah Winfrey, Nancy Grace, Montel Williams, A&E, and Court TV, as well as in numerous radio interviews. She lives in Houston with her husband and their schnauzer, Max.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Singularity

By Kathryn Casey

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 2008 Kathryn Casey
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-312-37950-6

CHAPTER 1

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 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.

CHAPTER 2

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.

"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 wasn't a totally unexpected reaction. There's an old story from the 1901 oil rush about a riot in an East Texas boomtown. At wit's 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, "you've only got one riot."

Imagine that sheriff's surprise if instead of that tall drink of water carrying a Winchester, I'd been the lone Texas Ranger on that train.

"Okay, kid," I said, shooting him a warning glance. "We'll do this one more time before I call your sergeant. You want another look at the badge?" I'd had a bad year, the worst of my life, and I'd 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, don't 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. There's a whole cotillion of people inside waiting for her and her alone to solve this heinous crime. Now get your bony butt 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, ma'am," the kid crooned, winking back at the detective. "They're waiting for you inside."

These days, women cops are about as common as male nurses, but it's different with Texas Rangers. It's the oldest law-enforcement agency in the country, and change doesn't come quickly when you're dealing with the stuff of legends. I'm one of only two women in what's still a good old boys' club, and, I've got to admit, sometimes it's about as much fun as wearing a flak jacket in Houston in July.

Detective Nelson, a tall, heavyset man with a cocky 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.

"Kid's still wet behind the ears," he scoffed, in mock disgust. "He just ain't learned his gentlemanly manners yet."

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

I'd first met Nelson years earlier, and neither of us particularly liked the other.

That summer there'd been a string of carjackings on the island. With Galveston dependent on tourists who flock to the beaches, that didn't sit well with the chamber of commerce types. Frightening headlines rarely do. I don't usually take robbery assignments, but it was busy that week and the request came in when all the other rangers were out. My arrival on the island didn't please Nelson, who'd 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 they're 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 kid's forehead. I didn't 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 Nelson's superiors suspended him for a week without pay for not protecting his weapon. I thought it was tough luck, that given the right circumstances 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 Galveston's 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 ain't seen nothin' like this before."

"Maybe. Maybe not," I said, chewing on the memory of that damn cartoon. "Let's 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 couldn't look away. So much so, that at first I didn't 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 didn't need lab results or my FBI training in profiling to know I was looking at a bloody cross.

"Figured crime-scene photos wouldn't do this justice," someone said behind me. It was the gruff voice of Captain Don Williams, my boss, who walked up beside me. The captain's as unlikely a ranger as I am. He's nearly seven foot, a former University of Texas basketball star, the first black Texas Ranger and the first to make captain. I've 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 captain's badge pinned on a dark brown leather vest. "Pretty strange, eh?"

"Sure is," I said.

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

"What do you think?" the captain asked.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Singularity by Kathryn Casey. Copyright © 2008 Kathryn Casey. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Minotaur Books,US
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312379501
• ISBN 13: 9780312379506
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 308