Sarah Armstrong - 01 - Singularity (23 page)

The Science Fair so satisfactorily completed, Maggie didn’t seem displeased to find David waiting in the crowd as we collected her things.

“Are you two still looking for that serial killer together?” she asked him.

“Yes, we are, Maggie,” he said.

“I wish you’d get him soon,” she said, wrinkling her nose in a ball. “Mom promised we’d go ice skating again when she has a day off.”

“It’ll happen soon,” David said.

“Unfortunately, Agent Garrity and I have to go back to work tonight. We’re following a lead.” Maggie looked instantly disappointed, until I added, “But we have time for a celebration first. Where would you and Strings like to go?”

Strings looked at Maggie, and Maggie looked at Strings.

“Saigon,” they said in unison.

Minutes later, we sat in a booth along the back wall of our favorite Vietnamese restaurant. In between sips of his Sprite, Strings enthusiastically recounted the moment the blue ribbon became his.

“I could’a fainted, Mrs. A,” he said. “I figured Maggie had it. She always wins.”

“I wasn’t surprised at all,” said Maggie. “I knew you were going to win.”

“For real?” he challenged. Maggie nodded.

“How’d you know?” Strings asked, looking more than a little doubtful.

“Because the judges kept smiling while they looked at your project,” said Maggie. “And I heard that man judge tell the two women judges that you had real imagination.”

Intermingled with conversation, we dunked thin-skinned spring rolls packed with rice noodles, mint, and shrimp into thick, sweet peanut sauce. Usually, I insist Maggie and Strings eat lemon chicken or cashew shrimp along with their favorite delicacy. Tonight, there was no such rule. In fact, when the first platter disappeared, I ordered a second.

Finally satisfied, the doings of the night fully recounted and celebrated, Strings turned to David.

“Are you a real FBI guy?” he asked, looking somewhat skeptical.

“Yes, I am.”

“I watch a lot of those shows on TV, where cops are looking for bad guys,” Strings said, one brow arched, his dark eyes curious, as if concerned about what he planned to say next. “You know, on TV, sometimes the bad guys are smarter than the cops.”

“Frederick, that isn’t nice,” Mom chastised.

“Well, my mom’s smarter than
any
bad guy,” Maggie said, defiantly. “Aren’t you, Mom?”

“We hope we are,” I said. “Sometimes we even pray we are.”

I
’ve been riding the rails on this job for the past six years,” said Mick Keitel, an unlit cigarette dangling from his thin lips. On the table before him, next to his black leather jacket, lay a loose-leaf binder, dictionary-thick with sheets of battered white paper. “A white guy would stick out like a prostitute in a convent if he rode with the illegals. Plus, the illegals don’t turn on their own, never let us in on Resendiz and what he was up to, although I’d bet some of them knew, but they’d turn in your guy in a heartbeat. Guaranteed.”

“We agree,” I said. David and I had discussed the possibilities on the way back to the South Central offices. We knew our blond, blue-eyed killer would stand out among the sea of illegals jumping trains. He’d be likely to try to blend in, to become an anonymous member of the white gang subculture.

“So in your opinion our most likely scenario pegs our guy as traveling as part of this gang,” confirmed David.

“Yeah. He’d feel right at home. They’re all real thugs,” Keitel said. “Let me show you.”

Although Roger James sat nearby, he let Keitel, clearly the authority when it came to this band of criminals, control the meeting. Just down the hall, Scroggins and Nelson had arrived to lead more than a dozen hastily gathered agents and technicians from Houston P.D., the rangers, Galveston P.D., and South Central as they compared former employee photos with the composite drawing. They’d been ordered to scan the fingerprints of anyone who looked even vaguely similar into a computer and e-mail it to ranger headquarters in Austin, where the department’s top fingerprint expert waited to compare it to the Fort Worth fingerprint.

As we watched, Keitel, his dark hair rubber-banded in a ponytail, brandishing a tattoo of a grinning skull on his muscular left arm and a marijuana leaf on his right, swung his binder open to the first page, a copy of a grainy driver’s license photo of a forty-something man, long dirty blond hair, a beard, wild eyes, and a missing front tooth. Underneath the photo, Keitel had detailed all he knew about this guy, a hoodlum who operated under the nickname Pilgrim.

“Pilgrim is unusual, simply because we know a lot about him,” said Keitel. “When he was arrested last year on a rape charge, we got access to his record. Guy has a twenty-page rap sheet, going all the way back to elementary school.”

“How long’s he been riding trains?” I asked.

Here James took the lead. “Near as we can figure, about fifteen years,” he said. “Many of the Fighters go back a long way. I’ve been hearing about them since I started in this job eighteen years ago. This is a way of life for them, traveling around the country. They want a change of scenery, they just hop the next train. Most don’t care much where they end up.”

Keitel had compiled a long list of suspected offenses under Pilgrim’s name, which culminated the previous year when he entered a Louisiana penitentiary.

“Most of the Fighters we don’t know much about,” explained
Keitel. “Like Pilgrim, they all go by handles or nicknames. Without a real name, it’s tough to know where they come from.”

“How well organized is this gang?” I asked.

“Not well,” he admitted. “Pilgrim, for instance, is a relatively minor player. No real power. There’s a loose hierarchy, but it’s meaningless. About all that sets this gang apart is that they have a uniform of sorts. They always wear all black. And they have a symbol.”

With that, Keitel pulled a small flag out of his pocket, a replica of the original U.S. flag, thirteen stars in a circle. “They allege that they’re patriots, living the freedom the founding fathers guaranteed,” he explained. “They say that government has corrupted American ideals and invaded personal freedoms.”

“We’ve found railroad cars painted inside with the thirteen stars,” added James. “And we’ve found bodies—illegals—murdered, the women raped first, with the stars cut into their chests.”

David and I exchanged a glance. What we were hearing was different but eerily similar to our guy’s victims.

“Of course, it’s a thinly veiled argument few if any of them really care about,” continued Keitel. “Beneath all the rhetoric, it’s simply an excuse to do whatever they want. Over the years, we’ve arrested and successfully prosecuted a few for stealing, drugs, got one guy for murder, but for the most part, we’ve got a disappointing record. The truth is that even with post nine-eleven homeland security, we can’t police the majority of the trains that ride our tracks. There’s just not enough money or manpower. These guys know how to hop on unnoticed. They fall asleep and the next morning they’re in a new state, a new city. They stay until they’re either bored or the police pay too much attention. On the trains, the illegals pouring in from over the Mexican border are their most common prey. They steal from, rape, and sometimes murder them. First because they hate anyone who’s not born here. Second, that population is available and easy.”

“And when they disappear…” I began.

“No one misses them, except their families in Mexico, and what can they do? Nothing,” Keitel continued. “Someone throws an illegal’s body off a train while it barrels through some little town, and to the people there, it’s a stranger. There’s rarely any identification, and it’s someone no one in town cares about. Their deaths rarely warrant any public notice.”

“There’s no pressure to find their killers, and no one reports the murders to ViCAP,” said David, looking at me, as we both began to realize how all the pieces were locking into place. “They were invisible from the beginning, and now they’ve just disappeared.”

We sat silently for a moment, thinking over all Keitel had told us.

“Did you tell Mick about our murders?” I asked James.

“No,” he said. “Thought you and Agent Garrity should be the ones to explain what you’re looking for.”

“Of course,” David said. “What we’ve got here are a series of at least five killings….”

Keitel listened intently as David continued. He nodded at times as if he anticipated what he might hear next. When David finished, concluding with the account of the most recent murder, that of Dr. Neal in Fort Worth, he pulled out the composite drawing.

“This is our guy,” he said. “Now, does he look familiar, or does any of what I’ve told you fit anything you’ve seen or heard?”

“Yeah,” Keitel said. “It sure does.”

With that, he shuffled through his notebook until he came to a nearly blank page. The name across the top read
Gabriel
. No picture, it offered only a description, slim build, blue eyes, and blond hair. Age: early twenties. Under favorite weapon, someone had noted: hunting knife.

“If this is your guy, he’s going to be tough to catch,” said Keitel. “I’ve never had the pleasure or the misfortune to meet him in person, but he’s legendary in the Fighters. The other members rarely talk
about him. It’s almost like a superstition: if they don’t mention his name, he doesn’t exist. And he’s someone none of them want to cross paths with.”

“What do you know about him?” I asked.

“We know he’s ruthless, that he kills simply for the love of killing,” said James. “We know he’s probably the one responsible for at least a half-dozen murders on the railroad during the past two years, most of them illegals with their throats slashed.”

“And we know he’s a religious fanatic,” added Keitel. “On the train, he holds court, preaching to the others on the will of God.”

“That sure sounds like our guy,” I said. “Anything else that can help us?”

“He’s been trying to recruit, pull together an army from the Fighters,” said Keitel. “So far, no one we know of has enlisted. These guys are bad news, but to a man everyone I’ve met is afraid of this guy. No one wants to get too close.”

“The name, of course, is from the Bible. Gabriel was one of God’s angels,” James noted.

“Yeah,” said David. “Gabriel the archangel was God’s messenger. He’s the one who broke the news to Mary that she was carrying Christ.”

“This guy hardly seems the bearer of good tidings,” said Keitel.

“But it fits,” I said. “This is the way our guy sees himself, his delusional self-image.”

It was then that the door opened and Scroggins walked in, just as David asked, “How do we find this guy?”

F
ive o’clock the next morning, just as the sun came up, I stood in the waiting room of the white clapboard train station in the center of Killdeer, Texas, a Hill Country burg north of Austin. The biggest thing in this little town? The Dewberry Festival.

For one weekend every June, the local police chief blocks off Main Street, and booths spring up where housewives sell their wares, handmade dolls, everything from paper-towel holders to tennis shoes decorated with bluebonnets, and homemade dewberry jam, tarts, and wine. Next to the largest structure in town, the high school football stadium, a traveling carnival raises a temporary camp, providing the townsfolk with the opportunity to ride a Ferris wheel or win a stuffed animal. When hungry, they line up at trailers, where grills fashioned of thick black oil-field pipe belch smoke. Their proprietors sell chopped or sliced beef brisket, smoked long and slow over smoldering mesquite, served on buns, topped with onions and pickles, and smothered in a rich, thick barbeque sauce. When they cut the meat, fat runs like juice from an overripe tomato.

The thought of it made my mouth water. There’d been no time
for anything, especially eating or sleeping, since the previous evening’s spring rolls. The night had evaporated in a flurry of activity. By midnight, Captain Williams, David, and I had pulled together a task force at South Central’s main office consisting of the higher-ups at DPS, HPD, and sheriffs’ departments from all the surrounding counties. It felt like déjà vu. We’d done the same thing to try to catch Resendiz. It didn’t work then. I had my doubts that it would work now.

Be that as it may, to pull off our plan, we needed cooperation and officers from nearly every police outfit in Texas. Our intention was to stop and search as many trains as possible in the next forty-eight hours, for the purpose of apprehending our bad guy. The fingerprint comparison of past South Central employees had drawn a blank, and we were now even more certain that the man we looked for was the one who called himself Gabriel.

With hundreds of trains barreling through the state each day, Roger James helped us map out our strategy. As we’d done during the Resendiz go-around, we would focus on railroad hubs, locations that boasted a concentration of activity. In addition to dewberries, little Killdeer had another peculiarity: nearly forty trains crossed through this town daily.

They came because of the train yard. Bordering the town, adjacent to the terminal, it covered more than fifty acres. Filled with hundreds of idle railroad cars, the yard was contained within a rusty chain-link fence. On miles of track, laid on top of the slag that first connected our killer with the railroad, the cars lay idle for days, months, and sometimes years, waiting to be needed, at which time they’d be scheduled for transport, made up into a train, and hauled away.

Altogether we had twenty such search sites and nearly three hundred officers, barring none, the largest single task force in Texas history. While I supervised twenty deputies in Killdeer, six hours
away, north of Dallas, David headed a similar operation in another small town. Scroggins was in charge of the activity in a town thirty minutes east of Houston, while Nelson spearheaded a large contingent of GPD officers monitoring the Galveston train yard. Captain Williams oversaw the activities in Houston’s busy railroad terminal, bordering downtown. Meanwhile, watching over all of us, James surveyed the action on the computer terminals in South Central headquarters, hovering over the controllers’ stations on the lookout for anything suspicious. We communicated on a private radio band, set up just for the task force.