CHAPTER TEN
Miles and Vic had checked into the hotel exactly one hour and two minutes before Kowalski called.
Miles knew this because he had looked at the clock on the nightstand when he set his bag down, partly out of habit and partly because he was calculating how long he could reasonably sleep before waking up tomorrow.
He had his jacket off, and his shirt untucked, with one hand on the bathroom door when his phone went off on the bed behind him.
He listened to Kowalski describe the new scene, at a bar not too far away from the hotel. Miles sighed, buttoned his shirt again, and went off to get Vic. They plugged the address into the GPS and drove to East Sixth Street. Miles was already pretty sure what they'd find when they arrived.
Kowalski was standing on the sidewalk outside when they pulled up, talking to a man who had his back to the street and his shoulders drawn in tight.
A friend of the victim, Miles gathered, or someone who had been with him earlier in the evening and was only now hearing the news.
Kowalski saw them arrive and raised a hand but stayed where he was, still working through it with the man.
Miles and Vic ducked under the tape and went inside without waiting.
The bar was a mid-sized room with low ceilings and a stage along the far wall still set up with the karaoke equipment—monitors, a microphone stand, and a projection screen with the service logo frozen on it.
The body was near the front windows. It had been covered and was positioned a few feet back from the glass on the hardwood floor.
Austin PD officers were stationed near the entrance and at the back of the room.
A lone crime scene technician was working methodically along the near wall.
A man that Mile assumed to be the bar manager was a heavyset man in his forties, standing near the service bar.
When Miles and Vic identified themselves and showed their badges, he moved toward them with visible relief.
“Paul Garrett, good to meet you,” he said in a bit of a grumble. He didn’t look shocked, but very confused. It was almost as if he was waiting for someone to rush out and tell him that this was all a big, elaborate prank.
“You discovered the body?” Vic asked.
“Yeah, I did. I heard a sort of whump noise and came out her to see what was up. And then there he was…right there on the damn floor.”
“Was anyone else in the room?” Miles asked.
Garrett shook his head and went on to explain to them that he had already locked the front door before it happened. And his key had been on a ring in his pocket the entire time.
“So why was he here by himself?” Miles asked.
"Derek stayed to help clean up," Garrett said. "He always did. I told him a dozen times he didn't have to, but he did anyway."
"How well did you know him?" Vic asked.
"Well enough. He'd been coming in maybe once a week, sometimes twice.
He'd help organize the karaoke nights and stay till close.
" He paused long enough to scratch at his head, still looking perplexed.
"He didn't drink. He was upfront about that from the start.
I think he was something like five years sober.
He told me once that karaoke nights were a good way to meet people who needed someone to talk to. "
"Did he ever elaborate on that?" Miles asked.
"He was a youth pastor at a church over on Lamar.
He said bars were where fallen people went, and that was where he wanted to be.
Meeting them where they were." Garrett glanced toward the front windows and then back.
"He wasn't preachy about it, though. He just showed up and sang and stayed late and talked to whoever wanted to talk.
People liked him. He won the gift card contest tonight, actually… one hundred dollars to the kitchen."
Miles looked toward the windows. The four neon signs along the front glass were all dark and inert, their power cut. "Who killed the power to the signs?"
"I did. First thing, when I found him." Garrett moved around the service bar and led them to the breaker panel on the wall beside the back shelving.
It was a standard commercial panel with its cover propped open.
One breaker had been tripped to the off position, and a strip of evidence tape ran across its face.
"That one feeds the window signs,” he said.
“I knew enough not to touch anything else.
I mean, I figured that sound I heard and then just…
the smell you know. Like burnt ozone. I knew he had been electrocuted somehow. "
Kowalski came in from the sidewalk and joined them at the panel.
He looked at the open cover and then at the wall beside it, where a small transformer unit was mounted on a bracket just below the panel.
It was roughly the same size and configuration as the one from Madame Celestine's shop—the same black metal housing, and the same output terminal arrangement.
"Our tech flagged that about fifteen minutes ago," Kowalski said. "The ground wire was disconnected and capped internally. It was pretty much the modification as the first scene."
Miles examined the unit without touching it.
The external housing showed nothing irregular.
Whoever had done this had opened it, made the necessary modifications, and closed it again cleanly.
From his basic knowledge and point of view, there was nothing about the exterior that suggested it had ever been disturbed.
"The window frame," Vic said, looking toward the front of the bar.
"Aluminum, with a continuous run along the whole window bank," Kowalski said.
"It's in contact with the internal bracket system for the sign mounting. Once that transformer was putting out ungrounded current through the sign wiring, anything in contact with the frame completed the circuit. I’ve been texting with our consultant to confirm it all.”
Miles turned back to the panel. Below the breaker box, a folded index card was taped to the wall at roughly knee height. It was the sort of the placement that was easy to overlook from a standing position. Garrett noticed where Miles was looking and nodded.
"I found that when I came in," Garrett said. "I nearly took it off but figured it was weird enough that I should leave it…let the cops handle it.”
Before he could comment, Detective Kowalski was holding out a pair of latex gloves.
Miles nodded his thanks as he took them and slipped them on.
He carefully removed the note from the wall and unfolded it.
The handwriting was the same small, even block letters Miles had seen on the card from Celestine's shop. He read it carefully.
“This place sells manufactured warmth. It strings false light in its windows and calls it welcome, and the desperate come because desperate people follow any glow.
There is no fellowship here. There is only the transaction dressed up to look like one.
False light doesn't become real because you want it to.
The current knows the difference, even when people don't."
Miles handed it to Vic to read next. He was aware, as he did it, that a second victim changed the shape of things considerably. One killing could still yield a conventional motive. Two killings with near-identical methodology and near-identical notes had a different geometry entirely.
He walked to the front windows and stood looking at the neon signs in their dark frames.
The largest was the bar's name situated around a robust cactus, an elaborate custom piece that took up most of the upper window.
He leaned forward and looked at the rear of the transformer mounted behind the sign's frame, angling his phone's light toward the back of the housing panel.
A small adhesive sticker with a stylized star logo and clean sans-serif type.
Lone Star Neon.
“What is it?” Vic asked, slipping the note into an evidence bag.
He straightened up and looked at Vic, who had followed him to the window.
"Looks like we’re absolutely going to Lone Star Neon first thing tomorrow," he said.