Sarah Armstrong - 01 - Singularity (18 page)

“Thanks for filling me in.”

“No problem,” she said. “I’ll let you know as soon as we have more news.”

“If it’s him, who’s our suspect?”

“Centerville P.D. is working on that, too, of course. We’ll call when they have something.”

“Good.”

Between Mrs. Hansen’s good news and Ben’s—maybe I’d soon be able to call him Darryl—I felt vaguely reassured about my place in the world, as I hung up the phone and shuffled through the handful of mail that had accumulated in the week I’d been too busy to bother with such mundane matters. Captain Williams, I knew, would be waiting. I was procrastinating, no doubt about it. Instead of admitting I had no idea where to go with the investigation, I paged through the departmental newsletter, skimming an article on a Dallas case solved by carpet-fiber analysis. Then, on the bottom of a stack of memos from headquarters, I found a slim, white, business-size envelope, my name printed in a small, precise, even hand.

Minutes later, I stood at Captain Williams’s office door.

“I think you’d better look at this,” I said.

I handed the captain a sheet of unlined, white paper—the kind used in a copy machine or a laser printer—one I’d encased in a protective plastic evidence sleeve. In the same careful hand as on the envelope, someone had written:

Why do you pursue me?

Don’t you know that I do the work of another?

“Our guy?” he asked.

“It came addressed to me, here at the office. This was in the envelope,” I said, handing the captain a similarly preserved newspaper clipping—my photo cut from the front page of Friday morning’s
Houston Chronicle
, the one taken as David and I left the scene of the Mary Gonzales homicide. The envelope was postmarked the same day the article ran, from a downtown Houston zip code, and must have arrived in Saturday’s mail. It had been sitting on my desk all weekend.

“What’s he trying to tell us, that Lucas hired him?” asked the captain.

“Or that he’s on a mission from God, which fits the profile Garrity and I have of him.”

“Sign them into evidence and take them to the lab,” the captain said. “Let’s hope he’s finally made a mistake and unknowingly sent you something we can use.”

“Let’s just take a look,” said Frank Nguyen, a slight man with high cheekbones and an uneven trim of charcoal-black hair. Nguyen, whose parents had immigrated to Houston from Vietnam, was one of our best techs. I’d never run into him outside the DPS lab, a cluttered collection of equipment in a fluorescent-lit room down the hall from our offices. At times, I wondered if he existed outside the lab walls. I’d entertained a recurring fantasy that when we turned the office lights off at night, Nguyen unrolled a cot and slept next to his DNA separating apparatus.

Wearing latex gloves, Nguyen examined all three items, looking for fingerprints. He came up empty on the note and newspaper clipping but isolated two on the envelope. A quick comparison confirmed that neither matched the fragment from San Antonio. He then fed the prints into the computer and keyed in a command to compare each with AFIS, the Automated Fingerprint Identification System, a library of prints from past offenders across the nation. The computer clicked through until NO AVAILABLE MATCH printed across the screen.

“My guess is when we run them through the civil service files on post office employees we’ll come up with matches. They most likely belong to whoever handled the letter in transit at the post office,” he said. “They could even be someone’s in our office, like Sheila’s, since she sorts the mail. We’ll do a broader search, but since the letter itself and the newspaper clip are clean, I don’t think we’ll get lucky.”

“What next?”

“Let’s see if any evidence piggybacked on the paper,” he suggested.

Under the stereomicroscope, Frank examined the letter, starting at a magnification of six and working his way up to twenty-five. With each increase, the field of view diminished, and the white, smooth paper gradually transformed from a slick sheet to a substance that resembled tufts of layered cotton. It was a painstaking procedure.

“Here’s something. It looks like electrostatic dust,” he finally said.

“What’s it made up of?”

“Give me a minute,” he answered, sounding excited. There was nothing better than this, I suspected, for Nguyen, using his equipment to zero in on hidden evidence.

He motioned, and I peered through the eyepiece and had no trouble identifying what had drawn his interest, jagged-edged, translucent flecks adhering near the lower edge of the letter. After examining the newspaper clip and the envelope, he again turned the microscope over to me. On both, easily identifiable, was what appeared to be an identical residue.

Saying nothing, Nguyen, who had the manner of an irritated Pomeranian when he was hot on the trail of a bone, collected a microscopic sample of the substance from the lower right-hand corner of the sheet of paper, followed by examples from the news clip and envelope.

“Let’s test its IR,” he said, with a broad grin. Nguyen held a palpable esteem for his infrared microscope. Although it resembles any other microscope, the IR has one big difference: instead of lenses, it relies on mirrors that reflect a specimen’s infrared energy, so it can be charted and identified.

Readying the sample, he focused in on the material through clear glass optical windows. Nguyen then swung the windows out of the way and lined up a series of curved mirrors. During the process, infrared energy passed through the microscope into the sample, where the mirrors redirected the energy to sensitive detectors, resulting in a chart of peaks and valleys, resembling an electrocardiogram of a heartbeat.

“What is it?” I asked when he’d finished, prompting him to look at me as if I were the specimen under his microscope.

“Haven’t the foggiest,” he said, plainly irritated. “Give me a minute.”

With that, Nguyen keyed in a command and the IR microscope transmitted its results to a computer designed to compare the readout to a library of known patterns. The results came quickly.

“It’s a polycarbonate,” he said.

“You mean a plastic?” I asked. “What kind? Plastics leave dust?”

“Plastic resins do,” he explained. “In a raw stage, like the plastic pellets used in manufacturing.”

“So, what does this tell me?” I asked, eager for anything that could break the case out of its current slump. “Tell me how we can capitalize on this to find this guy before he tortures and kills someone else.”

“I’m not sure,” Nguyen admitted, looking uneasy. I suspected that, isolated in the lab, he rarely thought of the bigger picture, the ramifications of his work. To him, that dust was merely a specimen to analyze. To me, it was a clue to the identity of a killer who had already butchered four people, including the mother of four young children.

“If this is a generic plastic resin, it may not help at all,” he admitted reluctantly. “But if it’s a more specialized compound…”

“How do we find that out?”

“I’ll work on the samples and run a few more tests. We’ll also send the envelope in to start having it checked for DNA, in case our guy was dumb enough to lick it shut,” he said. “I’ll let you know as soon as I have any answers.”

Two hours later—after Nguyen tapped the FBI lab for assistance—I was on my way to the Harkins Plastics Company in southeast Houston, an unimpressive compound of three vast metal buildings on a dead-end street in a neighborhood populated by blue-collar families with roof-top satellite dishes and chain-link fences. Nguyen and his counterparts at the FBI had discovered not only a UV stabilizer in the plastic resin, added to keep the clear material from discoloring when exposed to light, but an antibacterial additive so new it was still under patent to a Massachusetts chemical corporation. One call to the main office in Boston and I discovered that Harkins was the only company in Texas using resin containing the additive.

As I waited in the lobby for the owner, Theodore Harkins, I examined a dusty display case. Next to trophies won by the company Softball team sat heavy, bright yellow-and-red plastic pipe fittings, probably built to specification for one of Houston’s many oil companies. I bent down to get a better look. My eye was drawn to a spiral of clear plastic tubing on the bottom shelf.

“That’s our medical line,” said Harkins, who’d walked up behind me. “That’s what we discussed on the telephone, the product we’re building with the new additive.”

I followed Harkins, a slope-shouldered, thick-necked man with curly hair and a wide mustache, to the main conference room. One complete wall held shelves of product guides from plastic resin manufacturers. The sign outside boasted that Harkins had been family-owned for sixty-five years. From the look of this room, they’d done
little to update. Dusty and worn, the thin green carpet buckled in places under our feet. The Formica-topped conference table bore the scars of decades of use.

“I’m not really sure how we can help you,” Harkins said, with a wary smile. “Yes, we use that type of plastic in manufacturing, but all our employees have been here for years. We’re a family business, and I trust all of them.”

“Can you show me where the tubing is made?” I asked.

Harkins nodded and turned, and I followed. Through the door at the rear of the room we entered a storage area. We were surrounded by large bins of pea-size plastic pellets—white, black, some bright red, yellow, and blue.

“That’s the resin, the way it comes in to be used in manufacturing,” he said. “All different types of polymers specialized for individual jobs.”

“Which one has the additive?” I asked. He indicated containers near the back of the room, and I walked over and picked up a milky-white pellet, rubbed my thumb over it, and a powdery residue came off.

“It’s an exciting new product,” Harkins said. “Perfect for medical usage.”

The clanking of heavy metal machinery reverberated off the walls as we walked through a second set of doors and snaked through the factory, past two rows of massive steel machines attached to computers, each monitored by a silent worker. Through a window in one of the machines, I watched as liquid plastic was drawn into a mold and expelled into dies which cast it into tube-like branches, of the sort that hold together the pieces of a model airplane. This time, however, each branch ended in a one-inch cube. A stooped, gray-haired woman sat, patiently cutting the boxes from their plastic stems, trimming off the excess with a tool similar to a wire cutter and then methodically assembling two cubes to form small white plastic boxes.

“Postage stamp containers,” Harkins explained. “We have a regular contract. But come this way. What you want to see is back here.”

After passing workers piecing together a specialized toothbrush for dentures, Harkins and I left the building for a smaller structure bordering the parking lot. Inside, a dozen sparkling new machines churned. In contrast to the rest of the plant, this building was meticulously clean and well lighted. Focusing so intently on their work that they failed to acknowledge our presence were six white-smocked workers, one middle-aged black woman, three Hispanic men, and two Anglos, one man and one woman. The first four didn’t fit the San Antonio description. Of the two Caucasians, the woman appeared in her fifties with salt-and-pepper gray hair. The man caught my full attention. He was young, slender, with chin-length blond hair. From the side, I examined his profile. Could he? Could he be the killer? I felt for my pistol under my jacket and slipped my hand around the grip.

“These machines extrude the resin into the tubing using three hundred and sixty metric tons of hydraulic force,” Harkins said, picking up a yard-long spiral of the clear plastic tubing. “We got the contract about two years ago. It’s a component for a new dialysis machine. The antibacterial qualities of the plastic…”

In the background, I heard Harkins drone on about the plastic and the additive’s promise for the future, principally in medical applications. I couldn’t take my eyes off the young man with the blond hair, who bent over a carton filled with more yard-long sections of the finished tubing, expertly maneuvering a long thin-bladed knife to trim any imperfections on the cut ends. He was the right height, the right coloring. The curve of his face resembled the outline of the composite, and I began to ease my gun out from under my jacket.

He must have felt my eyes boring into him, for he suddenly looked up and returned my gaze. Full-face, his bone structure was
wrong, as were his eyes, a dark, dark brown. But something else convinced me this wasn’t our killer; the man had a half-dollar-size birthmark the color of red wine across his right cheek. Lily Salas would not have missed that in her ID.

The man smiled at me and I smiled back, gingerly taking my hand off my pistol in the holster.

“Who else has access to this room?”

“Just the cleaning staff,” Harkins said.

“I’d like to see your employee records.”

In the privacy of his office, I took out a copy of the San Antonio composite.

“No one I know,” said Harkins.

“You’re sure?” I asked, and Harkins nodded. “If you don’t mind, I’d still like to take a look at your files.”

Since the company had a small contract for a component for NASA, plastic hinges used in the shuttle galleys, all of Harkins’s employees had a base-level security clearance, including file photos and fingerprinting. After a quick look-see, I left the plant carrying copies of the files on all the company’s employees—including the cleaning staff—for the past two years, the length of time they’d used resin containing the antibacterial additive. None resembled our guy, but I couldn’t take chances; I had to be sure. If the letter hadn’t been exposed to the resin there, then where?

At the office, later that afternoon, I’d just handed the files to Sheila to give to Nguyen to start on the fingerprints, when the captain cornered me.

“You got another one. Today’s mail,” he said. “It’s in the lab.”

Nguyen already had the letter under the microscope when the captain and I walked in.

“Anything?” Captain Williams asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “Same as before, a few prints on the envelope and nothing on the letter. Nothing remarkable about the paper itself.
It’s standard copier paper, just like the last letter. No debris except what appears to be traces of common dirt.”