CHAPTER TWENTY
Kowalski had cleared them a larger table in the conference room, one that accommodated both laptops and the food without requiring anyone to balance a container on their knee.
Miles set the bags down and distributed everything while Vic opened her laptop and pulled up the video call software, loading up Sarah Kim’s information.
Sarah's face appeared on the screen a few seconds later, already sitting forward in her chair, clearly ready to go.
She had an iPad, a second laptop, and several printed sheets of paper scattered all around her.
"Good timing," she said. She looked frazzled but in a good mood about it.
"What have you got?” Vic said and pulled her burger from the bag.
Miles unwrapped his own and took a bite before he was fully settled, and the burger was, without question, one of the better ones he'd had in recent memory.
The beef was dense and well-seasoned and the bun had been toasted on the grill.
He made a note to say something to Kowalski, who had recommended the place.
"Okay," Sarah said, pulling her own notes closer on her end.
"So, Miles offhandedly mentioned that the killer might have been nearby.
I started thinking about the watch position for such a task.
And then I started thinking about the crime scenes themselves.
And I went back to basics…in addition to making requests for CCTV footage and private security cameras in the area. "
"Walk us through it," Miles said.
"I've been running the Elemental murder database since this assignment started, cross-referencing cause of death with the element in each case.
But for this one, I'd been filtering for electricity as the broad category, which gives you a very wide net.
Electrocution covers a lot of ground." She cringed and then said, almost guiltily, “No pun intended.
Anyway, after talking to Miles, I ran a different filter.
I kept electricity as the mechanism but added neon sign equipment as a secondary filter.
Not just high-voltage electrical deaths, but specifically deaths where a neon sign or neon sign infrastructure was the source. "
"And?" Miles said. He felt a bit embarrassed that he’d not thought of something like this. But he also reminded himself that Sarah’s brain just worked differently.
"The number drops to almost nothing," she said.
She looked at them over the top of her screen.
"Nationwide, in the past five years, I found just fourteen deaths where neon sign equipment was the confirmed cause.
Two were ruled industrial accidents involving sign installers.
One was a maintenance worker. And one was ruled a suicide. "
Miles set his burger down, waiting…knowing the ball was about to drop.
"The suicide was two years ago, right there in the Austin area,” Sarah said.
“It was a woman named Rachel Gallagher, twenty-three years old.
She was found outside an after-hours club off Red River Street at approximately two in the morning.
The club had a very large custom neon sign on the exterior of the building.
The sign was powered by a commercial transformer array mounted in a utility cabinet on the exterior wall.
" She looked at her screen, a bit grim. "The medical examiner's report indicates Gallagher grabbed the terminals of the two-hundred-amp electrical box that fed the sign. Death was instantaneous."
The room was quiet for a moment. Vic had stopped eating and muttered, "Jesus…"
"The investigating officers noted that the cabinet had not been tampered with and that there was no sign of struggle,” Sara went on.
“The terminals were accessible if the cabinet door was opened, and the cabinet door was not locked at the time, which the club was subsequently cited for.
The ruling was suicide." Sarah moved to a different window on her screen.
"Here's where it gets more specific. Gallagher had a social media presence that went back several years.
Most of it was ordinary, but in the eight months before her death, there was a visible shift.
Her posts became more erratic, more distressed.
She referenced a personal crisis repeatedly without describing it in full. "
"Was there any reference to the victims?" Miles asked.
"Slow down, Sterling, I’m getting there,” she said with a satisfied smile.
“In two separate posts, she refers to seeking help from people she trusted.
She doesn't name Song directly, but she mentions his church by name and says it offered her nothing but platitudes. Then, in another post, she calls out what she describes as occult frauds who charged her significant amounts of money and left her worse off than she started. In one post, she specifically calls out Celestine.”
“The language tracks with a person who had paid for spiritual services repeatedly and came away feeling exploited,” Vic said. “There's real bitterness in it. She's not venting generally. She's describing specific experiences."
"Almost certainly, given the timing and the language,” Sarah said. “Now…Rachel Gallagher is survived by a father and an older brother. The father is currently living in San Antonio. The brother is Owen Gallagher, thirty-one years old, Austin resident."
Miles looked at Vic. “Still? Currently?”
“Yes. But…here’s another enormous lead for you: the brother, Owen Gallagher, was employed for three years by a company called Nightly Neon.
Looks like it was a small operation, about the same size as Lone Star.
They manufactured and installed custom neon signage for commercial clients in the Austin metro area.
They went out of business about eighteen months ago, which would be roughly six months after Rachel's death. "
"So, Owen has professional training in neon sign construction and installation," Vic said.
"Looks that way. It's not a stretch." Sarah closed the window she'd been reading from and looked directly at the camera.
"I know this breaks slightly from the established pattern with the elemental murders.
Those killers are usually responding to Kane's framework, not to a personal loss.
But I think that's what's different here.
I think our killer has built a framework around something he was already feeling.
The intimacy of the method, the specific people he chose, the manifesto language about false light and fraudulent healers.
It's too personal to be purely ideological.
Maybe Kane sniffed that out and knew Owen would be easy to exploit. "
"He's not punishing a category or an element per se," Miles said. "He's punishing specific people."
"People who had contact with his sister before she died. People she had trusted and said failed her." Sarah sat back slightly. "The church, the fortune teller, maybe the energy healer. And then she went and grabbed two hundred amps of current from a neon sign cabinet at two in the morning."
Miles looked at the food on the table in front of him without really seeing it.
The whole shape of the case had just changed.
Not the method, not the evidence they had already gathered.
The shape of the thing underneath all of it.
He had been building a profile of a killer who selected victims based on an ideological framework, a man who had absorbed Kane's philosophy and was applying it to a category of people.
And instead he was looking at a grieving brother whose sister had suffered, had reached out to people who took her money and couldn't help her, and had then died with her hands on a neon sign terminal. Everything after that was consequence.
"The manifesto notes," Vic said. "He named Valdez specifically. He described exactly what she charged and how she operated."
"Because he knows," Miles said. "He probably looked into all of them after Rachel died…trying to understand what she had paid for, what she had been told. He built a case against them and then he started executing it."
"And he used the element that killed her," Sarah said. "He didn't just land on neon because it fit the elemental framework. He chose it because of what it means."
"Okay," Vic said. She opened her laptop and started pulling up records. "Owen Gallagher, thirty-one, former employee of Nightly Neon. Does he have a current address?"
"Last known is a rental property on the east side," Sarah said. "I'm sending it to you now along with everything else I've compiled. DMV record, employment history, the social media archive from Rachel's accounts, the ME report."
Miles looked at Sarah on the screen. "How certain are you?"
"Certain enough that I'd want to talk to him," she said. "But of course, I’m not there…I’m stuck behind a desk and a series of screens.”
“But that’s where you work your magic,” Vic commented.
“The employment history alone puts him in the right professional category,” Miles said. “The connection to Rachel and at least two of the victims is documented in her own words.”
“And the timeline works,” Sarah said. “Nightly Neon closes, Owen is suddenly unemployed, and six months later Madame Celestine is dead." She met his eyes through the screen. "I'm not saying it's airtight. I'm saying it's the most coherent picture we have."
"It's more than that," Miles said. He looked at Vic, who was already reading through the files Sarah had sent. "It's the only picture we've had that actually makes sense of all of it."
"What do you want to do?" Vic said, eyes still on her screen.
Miles picked his burger back up, more out of automatic motion than appetite.
It was still good, even cold. He thought briefly about all the lists and timelines and electrical schematics they had been working through for the past two days, and how none of it had pointed here.
Sarah had pointed here. She had shifted her filter and sat with the data quietly and come out the other side with Rachel Gallagher's name.
"We speak to the father of the Gallaghers," he said. “And then we go speak to Owen himself.”