Page 27 of Wrong Way

There was a brief pause on her end. He could hear her chair shift, the faint sound of her moving closer to her desk, maybe. He wished he could be there with her, and when that thought landed, he let it stay, too.

"You know, I think I know where to look," she finally said. "Give me a few minutes with the case files and the scene photographs."

"What are you—"

“Hush. Let me work.”

“Yeah, but—”

"Order one-oh-seven!"

The voice from the counter was flat and automatic, the cashier barely looking up as she set two bags on the pickup surface and placed the drink carrier beside them.

"That's me," Miles said. He stood and moved to the counter, tucking the phone between his ear and shoulder as he picked up the bags and confirmed both drinks were secure in the carrier. "Okay, I've got the food. What are you looking at?"

But Sarah had ended the call. She was off to look into whatever idea she'd come up with. Miles smiled in spite of the situation, and now, with the food, drinks, and a possible breakthrough from Sarah Kim, he found himself in much better spirits as he hurried back to the precinct.

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.