Singularity (Sarah Armstrong, 1, Band 1) - Hardcover

Casey, Kathryn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312379501 ISBN 13: 9780312379506

Verlag: Minotaur Books,US, 2008

Inhaltsangabe

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.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.

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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...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Minotaur Books,US
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0312379501
• ISBN 13: 9780312379506
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar