Renting a boat, he weighed down the remains with anchors, dropping his morbid bundles into Trinity Bay. He camped out in the dead man’s trailer for the next three nights, and on Halloween he set out in the stolen Denali after his real target and reason for coming to Houston. Pandora aerospace engineer Noah Bishop was inside a bar the hitman doesn’t name but I know he’s talking about Woody’s.
A popular NASA watering hole near Johnson Space Center, the place was hopping with Halloween-related events. A lot of hopeful astronaut candidates were in town for the next round of interviews at Johnson Space Center, including my sister. I’d been there the week before for the same thing because NASA wanted us separated to see how we would do without each other.
The night of October 31, Carme and Noah happened to be at Woody’s but not together, and some of this I know from what Dick told me earlier in the week. My sister was in a private room with other astronaut candidates. Noah was at the bar with a female colleague and friend from Pandora’s Houston facility.
At almost 10:00 p.m., he, his friend and Carme ended up in the parking lot at the same time. They got into an argument that likely was fueled by alcohol. Soon after, my sister returned to the restaurant while Noah drove his friend home, dropping her off. He didn’t go inside the house, and headed in the direction of his Shore Acres neighborhood, the hitman following.
Waiting until they were on a dark, deserted residential street, he sped up and “passed the target’s vehicle, dropping 6 tire spikes out the window. What an embarrassment of riches, three flats!” he fairly chortles. “A clean shot to the head, and they might find him and his rental car some day at the bottom of Clear Lake. Or maybe they won’t . . . ,” he concludes in log Number 41, accompanied by a toy pistol.
Since Halloween night there’s been no sign of the Pandora aerospace engineer alive or dead, and that’s caused considerable trouble for Carme. Under a cloud of suspicion, she’s wanted for questioning at the very least. I don’t know why she and Noah Bishop were arguing or if they knew each other. But she’s not the one who disappeared him.
Neva’s hitman did, eliminating him the same way he had Pebo Sweeny several months earlier on August 7. In his case, it wasn’t a job but “an obstruction to progress, and a means to an end,” I read in shooting log Number 39, a toy figurine of an owl inside that baggie.
Sweeny is described simply, unimportantly as “an elderly male living alone on a remote property in a trailer park in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia.” After the hitman “choked him out and prepared him for disposal,” he rented a 21-foot Sailfish motorboat. “Other than being hot, it was a good ride,” he says, adding that all went according to plan when he deposited body parts in the Chesapeake Bay.
Next, he cruised around the eastern edge of the peninsula near Plum Tree Island, swinging around into Back River, passing by my family’s farm, what he refers to as the “Big Prize.”
“I’m going to give you dates and general locations for each,” I say to ART as I get ready to pack up the logs and their Cracker Jack treats. “What we’re looking for is anything unusual that might have happened. Deaths, injuries, other types of violations and intimidation.”
A drowning in Kiln, Mississippi . . . A house fire in Las Vegas . . . two more in Houston . . . A jump from a balcony in Orlando, Florida . . . Accidental falls from heights in New York City and Seattle, Washington . . . A questionable suffocation with a dry-cleaning bag in Ogden, Utah . . . A pipe bomb in Silicon Valley . . . A drive-by shooting in Pasadena, California . . . One in Huntsville, Alabama . . .
ART shows me tragedy after tragedy, almost all of them occurring in locations that are hubs in the aerospace world. I monitor the depressing crawls going by in my smart lenses, realizing not every victim died. There are multiple nonlethal cases of break-ins, vandalism, arson, blasting a shotgun through someone’s window, of muggings, maimings, and the implication is obvious.
The hitman was a thug, a goon, and killing wasn’t his only assignment or goal. It wasn’t his intention Christmas Eve three years ago when he followed his targets “into a tunnel that runs deep under the water, ships passing over on top of us . . . ,” he writes, and I don’t have to flip through many pages of notes and diagrams to know exactly what happened on the worst night of Fran Lacey’s life.
Driving home with Easton who was three at the time, they were returning from supper and a candlelight service in Portsmouth. It was close to midnight, he was asleep in his seat as they crossed under the Chesapeake Bay, the 4-lane tunnel empty except for the pickup truck that passed them.
Suddenly, it cut in front, and as Fran hit the brakes, her tires blew, two of them as it would turn out. One of those strokes of bad luck that happens in the wrong place at the wrong time, and in this case the wrong person offered roadside assistance. Or that’s been the assumption.
00:00:00:00:0
THE MAN in the pickup truck stopped, and Fran remembers him as broad shouldered and tall, clean shaven and bald.
Maybe in his 30s, maybe older, she wasn’t sure after the fact. He had on a Bass Pro Shops fishing cap, amber-tinted glasses, and she didn’t get a good look at his face. She didn’t have time to think about the pistol in her fanny pack before he temporarily blinded her with a blast from a powerful LED flashlight while shoving a gun to the back of her head.
Forcing mother and son into the cargo area of Fran’s disabled SUV, he zip-tied and gagged them. She remembers that he did all this silently and with astonishing speed, spending at most 10 minutes with them. Possibly as few as 5, then he cut the engine, turned on the flashers, and she heard him speed off.
Later she would tell me it seemed like an eternity as she lay there, her heart hammering, trying to free herself to no avail as she listened to the occasional car going past, nobody stopping until a state trooper did. The entire incident lasted no more than an hour, and from the beginning the story hasn’t made a lot of sense.
I never completely bought that robbery was the goal. The man in the fishing cap took nothing but the cash in Fran’s wallet, less than 50 dollars, and didn’t want her Walther PPK pistol or police credentials. Your average Joe criminal wouldn’t leave either or think of using a high-lumen flashlight to disable someone.
Since no tire spikes were recovered from the scene, I can only conclude that he collected them before leaving. Rather much like gathering his brass after shooting someone, and I don’t know if Fran’s going to feel better or worse when I tell her. Returning to the living room, I find it grandly illuminated in battery-powered lighting.