Sarah Armstrong - 01 - Singularity Read Free

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.
    I stood for a few minutes, taking it all in. I thought of a museum sculpture I’d once seen, pure white marble cut and polished into two Greek lovers. The victims’ upper bodies had that same pale, bloodless sheen, but I nudged down the comforter and saw that the woman’s calves and the man’s backside were bluish purple, postmortem lividity, gravity pooling blood in the lowest regions of the bodies. Thatmeant they’d been dead for at least six hours. When I brushed the back of my hand against the woman’s forearm, she felt cold, and a shiver ran through me. I quickly moved on, but when I glanced his way, Nelson was watching me and he smiled a small, crooked grin. I ignored him and went back to work.
    As a profiler, I’m trained to view victims’ bodies as evidence, no different from fingerprints and blood splatter. Sometimes that’s hard, trying not to think of them as people, I mean. No matter how often I’ve done it, no matter how engrossing the scene, working around dead bodies, my skin prickles. I think about the horror of their deaths, and my stomach gets unsettled, as if I’d had too much red wine the night before. Especially after all that’s happened in my own life. It’s made it even harder not to let my mind drift to thoughts of the families left behind, the pain that waits for them.
    After my second trip around the bed, I pulled out a steno pad and jotted down notes: the man was spread-eagled, tied to the bed frame with expensive silk ties, most likely out of his closet. A dime-size bullet hole in his forehead, its edges burned and sooty, exposed tissue turned a bright cherry pink from absorption of carbon monoxide, explaining the bloody halo on the pillow.
    The woman was on her knees, straddling the dead man. Left to their own devices, dead bodies don’t do that, stay upright I mean. From across the room, all I could see was that something tied to her upper body braced her. Up close, I tapped a latex-gloved finger against translucent fishing line, the sturdy, deep-sea kind, anchoring the corpse to the bed’s ornate brass canopy. A single length hog-tied the dead woman’s ankles, her wrists behind her, and then formed a slipknot around her neck. The killer knew what he was doing; as she struggled, the fishing line cut into her throat, squeezing her airway tighter and tighter. What from across the room appeared to be sexual rapture was in reality a vain attempt to keep her head back and live.
    Thinking about how the killer had used the dead rich guy’s ties, I asked the captain, “The fishing line from the scene?”
    “Looks like it’s off a rod and reel in the downstairs storage,” he confirmed.
    That settled, I climbed a few rungs up on a ladder the Galveston crime-scene guys had positioned and inspected the woman’s corpse from a better angle. She had all the outward signs of ligature strangulation, her face bloated and bruised. A line of blood spilled from a gash across her throat. Whether or not he needed to, the killer had finished her off, slitting her throat with a razor-sharp blade.
    A dark burgundy river of dried blood on her chest came from slashes cut from collarbone to navel, then breast to breast. Down from the ladder, I gave the man another look. He had the same marking on his chest, mimicking the bloody cross on the wall.
    “Who are