CHAPTER 1
MURDER IN TEXAS
THE night before, the thirty-two-mile-long island strip had been lit up by growling thunderstorms and the temperature plummeted, but on that last Sunday of September 2001 the 58,000 inhabitants of Galveston, Texas, were basking in a seasonable 78 degrees. The folks in the blue-collar port city are used to sudden squalls that blow in and fizzle just as quickly. They also know that anything the angry sea doesn't swallow, it spits back up.
David Avina and his two kids had spent the afternoon fishing off a breakwater where Channelview Drive intersects 81st Street, less than a block from their home in the row of beach houses that rim the bay and look out over the Texas City Ship Channel. He was stretched out lazily enjoying the last rays of the downing sun and fending off his daughter Elyse who was pelting him with questions only an eight-year-old could ask as he impaled some bait on a hook for her. His 13-year-old stepson James Rutherford had wandered off to troll the rocks with a net looking for small fish to use as lures.
He called over to the youngster. "I could use some help with these lines."
"Okay, I'm coming," James replied and started back along the shore. Suddenly, he stopped. Over by the pier, there was a shapeless, pinkish object bobbing in the waves. The teen stared at it for a few seconds, barely able to comprehend what it was. Slowly, his eyes widened as his brain processed the gruesome sight; the gory lump used to be a living creature which now was very, very dead. Recoiling in horror he cried out, "Hey, Dad, there's a body over there."
"Don't kid around," David told him without looking up. "Don't tease your sister."
"I'm not," the boy protested. "It really is a body."
David dropped his line and rushed to the boy's side. "Is it a pig?" asked James, gazing down at the bloated mass of bloodied flesh.
"No," said his stepfather, shaking his head. "No, it's not." David Avina worked as a surgical nurse and he knew exactly what the youngster had found. It was a human body, or at least, what was left of it. What remained was the clearly naked trunk of a man. His head had been severed, his legs and arms had been chopped off.
Gathering up his kids and the gear as fast as he could, Avina ran for help. A few minutes later the Galveston cops and the beach patrol arrived and roped off the area to keep the growing gaggle of curious onlookers from getting in the way of the forensic team. When the preliminary on-site measurements were completed, and the area swabbed for evidence, the torso of what appeared to be an elderly man was loaded into an ambulance and removed to the police morgue.
There the medical examiner determined that the body hadn't been in the water for long and the dismemberment had been executed, not by a frenzied lunatic who'd gone berserk with an ax, but by someone with chilling clinical expertise. The killer, he concluded, was a cold-blooded butcher who knew what he was doing.
For the next several hours, the Sunday quiet of the sleepy bay was transformed into a hive of police activity. Cops fanned out along the half-mile stretch between the recently renovated pier and the old stone pier near the humpbacked railroad bridge. Once, the only way onto the island was by boat or rail; Galveston didn't join the rest of the country until the span carrying the I-45 over the 2-mile-wide Intercoastal Waterway was built.
Some of the folks who lived across the street told the cops that they'd seen garbage bags floating in the bay thatmorning, but paid them no attention, thinking that some antisocial slob had tossed his trash in the surf. As darkness fell floodlights lit up the area where police divers got ready to wade into the shallow water, then trawl the floor of the bay. Floating just offshore about eighty feet from where the body had washed up were three black plastic bags. In them were hacked-off arms and legs, which were dispatched to the morgue to be united with the rest of the victim. Scouring the shoreline, the cops found four more silver and black bags. But the poor devil who lay as cold as a fish on the mortician's slab was still without his head.
It was Galveston Police Officer Gary Jones's job to sift through the bags and make an inventory of the contents. He found two arms and two legs, one of them with two Band-Aids on it, but no head. They also contained a cash register receipt dated September 28 for trash bags and a drop cloth from Chalmers Hardware, a cover for a Green Thumb $6.99 bow-saw, with the store identification number attached, bloodstained towels, a flip-flop sandal, a red zori shower shoe, a piece of tan fabric that looked like it had come from a tool apron, blue plastic cups and paper towels. Officer Jones also discovered a Metamucil packet with the identification number NDC37000-024-09 on the top and another number, (L) 1128XD06, on the back. In one of the bags was a copy of the weekend edition of USA Today with a delivery address sticker still on it. A pair of men's underpants and a blue bedsheet were recovered near where young James Rutherford had stumbled on the headless, limbless body.
Reading Officer Jones's report, Cody Cazalas, the burly, mustachioed detective assigned to the case, decided that although the killer was undoubtedly vicious, he was either incredibly sloppy or downright stupid to leave such a trail of evidence. He was also unlucky. If thunderstorms hadn't cleared the air on Saturday night, allowing the sudden cold front to move in, this poor sucker would likely have sunk to the bottom of the bay and never been heardof again. His butcher would have gotten off scot-free. As it was, the sudden change in temperature had made the corpse rise to the surface and the churning tides brought it back.
Officer Jones had obtained a set of fingerprints from the limbs that had been found in the trash bags and ran them through the police computer. He got a perfect match. The victim of this stomach-churning homicide was 71-year-old Morris Black, a white male born on the 21st of October, 1929.
Cazalas knew they were looking for an out-of-towner, someone who didn't know about the tides. That left plenty of suspects: people pass through Galveston like water through a sieve. There are the sailors who man oil tankers the size of New York city blocks, berthed two and three deep, their diesels humming, waiting to lade with the one million barrels of oil that are pumped to the docks 24/7 through gurgling pipelines from refineries forty miles away in Houston. And there's the low-rent trade that follows them--two-bit motels, greasy-spoon diners and whores, especially whores, of every shape, size, color and preference. Whoever dubbed the bustling seaport "Queen City of the Gulf" had a wicked sense of humor.
It's also an easy town to leave. Every year, hundreds of these massive vessels ferry their cargoes of black gold to destinations in Europe, South America and Asia. Yet more ships carry grain, cars and the city's newest bulk export, the 150,000 vacationers who crowd onto luxury cruise liners headed for resort paradises in Mexico or the Caribbean.
The day after the body was found, Cazalas went to Chalmers Hardware. The clerk looked at the receipt and confirmed that both it and the ID sticker on the bow-saw had come from the store. On October 2, Jones and Cazalas headed over to 2213 Avenue K, the delivery address on the newspaper that had been in the bag with the saw, the same address that had popped up on the computer for Morris Black.
It turned out to be what realtors call a fourplex: an unremarkable beige-and-brown-painted wood-frame house with gingerbread trim and storm shutters that had been restored and converted into four small apartments. Both the...
