CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The address they’d pulled from the personnel file for Rivera was a rental house on Chestnut Avenue in East Austin.
The house was a bit on the deteriorating side, a narrow one-story with a cracked driveway and a dead plant on the porch.
Nobody answered when Miles knocked. He knocked twice more and they stood there for a moment in the morning heat.
“It is rather late in the morning,” Vic pointed out. “He could be at work.”
As she said this, Miles noted a man in the neighboring yard, working a pair of hedge clippers along the top of a low shrub. He wasn’t making much of an effort to hide the fact that he was watching them closely.
"He leaves early," the man said when it was clear the jig was up. "Seven, seven-thirty most days. Big white van."
"You know where he's working?" Vic asked. She came down from the porch, approached the shrub, and showed the man her ID.
The neighbor looked appalled for a moment as he studied the badge and then looked rather nervous.
“He works with an electrical contractor. Miller and Johns.”
“Are you close with Mr. Rivera?” Miles asked.
"Nah. We'll have a beer out on the back porch every now and then, but that's about it. He seems like a good enough man, though…if that helps."
“Thanks,” Mile said, already typing Miller and Johns into a Google search.
The name and number of a local electrical contractor popped up.
He called the number as he and Vic walked back to their car.
The woman on the other line was very helpful and was able to give them the address of Rivera’s current, active job in under two minutes.
The drive from Rivera’s address to the location took another fifteen but Miles still felt like they were making fairly swift progress.
The location of the job was a small commercial building on Berkman Drive.
It was two stories of pale brick with scaffolding along the front face and a dumpster in the parking lot filled with demo debris.
A white panel van was parked along the side of the building with the rear doors standing open.
They pulled into the lot and got out. Even before the entered the building, Miles could smell the scents of renovation.
It smelled of sawdust and fresh concrete, and through the open front entrance they could hear power tools running somewhere on the interior.
Within just a few steps of entering, Miles saw two men.
One was tall and African American, inserting a series of screws into the wall along the back.
The other looked to be of Hispanic descent, in his mid-thirties, working near the building's exterior junction box.
He was lean and dark-haired with a tool belt around his waist and a coil of conduit leaning against the wall beside him.
“Are either of you men Marcus Rivera?” Miles asked in a loud voice.
Both been turned toward them, and the Hispanic-looking man closer to them raised his hand hesitantly. “Yeah, that’s me.”
His posture instantly went rigid before they were within speaking distance.
He set down the metal tool he was holding.
His weight shifted toward the far side of the parking lot in a way that was not subtle.
As they got closer to him, Rivera’s eyes moved between them and then to his van and then back again.
Miles kept his pace steady and unhurried, not slowing and not speeding up, giving Rivera nowhere to put the decision except on himself.
Rivera's weight stayed on the balls of his feet.
His gaze went to the gap between the van and the building's side wall, a clear path to the street. The moment held a little too long for Miles’s comfort—so long that Vic shifted her position slightly to the left, widening the angle between them without making a production of it.
Rivera looked at Miles and then at Vic, but he stayed where he was.
Miles showed his badge when they were just a few feet away. "I’m Agent Sterling, with the FBI. This is Agent Stone. We'd like to ask you a few questions."
Rivera's arms crossed over his chest. His eyes were moving too much, tracking between them and the street and the building entrance behind him. "What about?"
"Two recent deaths in Austin. Both involved modified neon sign transformers. Your name came up in connection with a company that installed equipment at both locations."
"Lone Star." Rivera's voice had a tight, clipped quality. "I don't work there anymore. I haven't for over six months."
"We know that," Vic said. "We're just trying to understand where you were on two specific nights…. trying to get some answers on this case."
Vic gave him the dates and the times and as she spoke, Rivera uncrossed his arms and then crossed them again. He looked down at the asphalt and then back up with a look on his face that looked almost embarrassed. "I was driving around."
"Both nights?" Miles said.
"I drive when I can't sleep. It helps." He shifted his weight and looked over their shoulders, as if wondering if he could make a break for it. "I've had some anxiety issues lately and the meds my doctor gave me screw with my sleep.”
"Both nights, you were just driving," Vic said, sounding very skeptical.
"Yes." He said it too fast. "The second one, I stopped and got something to eat. There's a burger place on Airport. I was there late, working. That damn job didn't wrap until almost ten o'clock."
Miles mentally noted that was the night of the Song murder.
"Mr. Rivera," Miles said, "there’s a van outside, parked right out front. Is that yours?”
“It is.”
“Would you have any problem with us looking it over?”
He didn’t answer right away, which was better than the instant rejection. Miles had been expecting. Finally, he said, "I haven't done anything."
"Then you shouldn't have any problem with us taking a look, right?”
Rivera stared at him for a moment and then started for the door. “Come on then,” he said, sounding slightly angry now.
Outside, Rivera unlocked the van for them and stepped back. He looked almost like a scared child as he stood to the side, letting the agents search through his work van.
The van's interior was dense with the ordinary accumulation of a working electrician's life.
The cargo area held a metal shelving unit bolted to one wall, its shelves loaded with organized bins of connectors, wire nuts, terminal blocks, and cable ties.
Coils of wire in various gauges hung from a horizontal bar across the top of the shelving.
A hard plastic tool case sat on the floor, and Vic unlatched it and went through it systematically: wire strippers, a voltage tester, lineman's pliers, needle-nose pliers, a conduit bender, and a handful of breaker toggles still in their packaging.
Standard tools in good condition, nothing modified or out of place.
Miles opened the bins one by one. Wire connectors sorted by size in labeled compartments.
Weatherproof outlet covers still in their packaging, untouched.
A bin of terminal strips, another of assorted breaker hardware.
He worked his way along the shelving methodically, checking behind and underneath each shelf, running his hand along the wall of the van where the metal met the floor.
He found nothing that did not belong to the ordinary inventory of a working electrical contractor.
No transformer units, no disconnected ground wires, no secondary terminals, nothing that bore any resemblance to the equipment that had been used at either crime scene.
The passenger-side door opened without resistance.
The console between the seats held a phone charger, a registration envelope, a pair of sunglasses, and a prescription bottle.
Miles picked up the bottle and read the label.
Lorazepam, prescribed to Marcus Rivera, was filled three weeks ago; the pill count is consistent with regular use. He set it back in the console.
On the floor behind the passenger seat was a crumpled paper bag from a fast-food restaurant.
Miles picked it up and unfolded the top.
Inside was the wax paper from a sandwich, a used ketchup packet, and a receipt.
He smoothed the receipt and read the timestamp.
It was from the night of Derek Song's murder, at 11:05 at night, from the burger place on Airport Boulevard that Rivera had mentioned.
The order was two burgers and a large drink.
Miles showed the receipt to Vic without comment, folded it carefully, and set it back in the bag.
“The timing works in his favor,” she said. “But it doesn’t rule him out completely.”
They found nothing else. Miles climbed out of the van and Rivera was there on the asphalt, arms at his sides now, watching them with an expression that was still tight but had shifted from its earlier intensity.
"That it?" Rivera said.
“Yes,” Vic said. “And thank you for your cooperation.”
"One more thing," Miles said. "For the next few days, don't leave Austin. We may need to speak with you again."
Rivera's jaw worked as if he wanted to say something, but he chose not to. In the end, he repeated: "I didn't do anything."
"I certainly hope that’s the case."
Miles and Vic nodded their thanks as they walked back to their car. Rivera stayed where he was on the asphalt, watching them go.
Miles pulled out of the lot and onto Berkman.
The receipt accounted for Rivera on one of the two nights, which was something, but the alibi was thin and uncorroborated beyond a timestamp.
A receipt put him at a drive-through, not at home, and didn't eliminate anything.
And nothing about the search had produced evidence linking him to the crime scenes.
But the nerves had been real. Rivera's anxiety disorder and his prescription explained some of it, sure.
Hell, maybe all if it. A man with a documented history of workplace complaints and a restraining order on his record, confronted by two federal agents at his job site, had plenty of reasons to be visibly uncomfortable that had nothing to do with murder. Miles understood all of that.
He still felt uneasy. The way Rivera's eyes had gone to the street when they first approached had not been the reflex of a man deciding whether to be cooperative. It had been the reflex of a man deciding whether to run. That was a particular kind of awareness, and it didn't come from nowhere.
And as they left the site behind, Miles wasn’t so sure they’d seen the last of Marcus Rivera just yet.