Total Victim Theory (6 page)

“Protection
from you.
” I’m frazzled now and you can hear it in my voice.

“Oh
from me
? Sorry, no pun intended.”

He's obviously just trying to get under my skin. Got to stay calm. “Look, the cops are in the other room. They don't know I'm on the phone with you. I asked you that because I wanted to
know—”

“Why I like Shakespeare?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

“Well, it’s a good way to learn about the human condition, an area that’s not one of my strong suits.”

“You don’t consider yourself human?” I ask.

“I’m wired differently than most people.”

“How so?”

“If you could get inside my head, you'd understand. It's a weird, gray place. Not many emotions.”

“And Shakespeare teaches you how to experience the ones you're missing?”

“More like how to
imitate
them.”

Goosebumps. I picture him standing there on the stairs. Holding the backpack with Jessica's hands inside.

“Can I ask you a question now?” he asks.

“Sure.”

The line's silent for a moment, except for the sound of his breathing. “Why did you keep my glasses?”

I look over at the window. At the little gap between the blinds and the glass. I can hear my aunt’s dog barking. “How did you know about the glasses?” I ask, my voice a desperate whisper.

“When I looked in through the window, I saw you with them,” he says.

For a moment I can’t breathe. Want to run out of the room and go to the cops. Just to see that they're still there—that nothing’s happened. I rise and take a step toward the door.

“Relax, Nicole. I was just joking. I wasn’t watching you through the window. That would just be creepy.”

The dog’s still barking.

7

Mexico

After crossing the border, I drive into downtown Juárez and meet Silva at the District C Station. I ditch the Explorer, and we take his police issue Land Cruiser because it's got sand tires. Silva's already spent most of the day at the scene along with a lot of other cops from the force and only doubled back to scoop me up.

As we drive through Juárez, Silva's busy on the police radio, trading cryptic remarks on the evidence at the scene with other members of the force. I haven't been filled in on all the details yet and much of the staticy garble comes across like fragments from a nightmare. Snippets like “the blood trail measures twenty-three meters” and “all the feet have been matched up with the discarded footwear.”

It's not long till we've left the fumes and bustle of the city behind and are miles out in the desert. I tune out the radio chatter and look out at the nighttime terrain. The moonlight brightens the sands more than you'd expect, casting it in a porcelain white that seems to bleed its own phosphorescent glow. You could drive without headlights if you had to. And this isn't like the sand on a beach. It's a denser, sturdier make, more tightly packed, like dirt. Your feet don’t sink down in it when you walk, and you can drive over it just like you would a road, as long as you've got your sand tires.

I can make out miles of the desolate landscape with its rocks and ripples and gradually rolling hills. Occasionally, a lone cactus will show itself, like a lanky giant with arms outstretched in a pose of theatrical menace.

Silva mentioned earlier that the bodies were out really deep, so I imagine we have a ways to go. It's a wonder he knows the desert well enough to find his way back to the spot at night. I hear him sign off with the other detective he's been speaking to. Then he sets the CB back in its cradle and switches off the scanner. For a while he says nothing. His face looks sullen, as if his features were weighed down by all he's seen today.

Leaving his right hand on the steering wheel, he lights a cigarette, and a floating red ring appears in the darkness. He puffs periodically and ashes out the cracked window. Through the gap, the night air shrilly whistles.

“You said there were six of them down there?” I ask, hoping to be filled in on more of the facts prior to our arrival.

At first I think he hasn't heard me. But finally he turns and looks at me. “Yeah, six. Minus the heads, of course. As usual, he's holding on to those.”

“That's a lot of bodies for him,” I say. “Who are they?”

“All Hispanic males between forty-five and fifty-six years old.”

“That's a bit out of his age range, isn't it?”

Silva nods. “Before today his oldest was twenty-seven.”

“That's another big change. Are we one hundred percent sure it's him?”

“It's him. The cutting and the binding are all the same.”

“It couldn't be a copycat?”

“Not unless it was a copycat who had access to the police file. Some of the similarities are things the press doesn't know about.”

“It's strange,” I say. “You don't see these guys change their MOs very often.”

“Maybe he heard you joined the case and wanted to do something special to welcome you on.”

“That's a nice gesture, but he really shouldn't have.”

I expect to find a morbid grin on Silva's face, as befits such banter. But instead he looks quite grave. “There's something else too, Jake.” The cigarette lighter in the console pops out with a ping and Silva lights another smoke.

“What is it?” I ask.

Silva blows the smoke out the window and turns to face me. “There's a body missing.” He speaks in the somber tone one might use to tell a ghost story.

I'm not prone to goosebumps, but just now I feel a few crop up. “What do you mean?”

“The old man who stumbled on the scene this morning is from a village five or six miles away. After he found the bodies, he left them behind and hiked back home so he could get a hold of the police.”

“Yeah, you mentioned him on the phone.”

“He told the police about the six bodies in the dune. But he also said there was a woman. A white woman all the way up beyond the dune's ridge. She was alive when he got there, and he was with her when she died. You can tell when someone's confused or making things up, and this guy wasn't. He even described her missing feet and the yellow rope tied around her ankles.” Silva takes another puff of the cigarette. “He described it all down to a T. But guess what? When we finally got there—no white woman to be found.”

For a moment neither of us speaks. Silva's pronouncement seems to linger in the air, like an unpleasant odor I'm forced to breathe in.

“We're sure the guy's not confused?” I ask. “I mean, if the victims were all in a similar condition, he could have just mixed up.”

“He wasn't confused,” Silva says. “There are marks in the sand. Trails the woman left, just the way the old man described them . . . and if that doesn't convince you, we also found a pair of dainty white feet at the scene that are short an owner.”

I feel my face wrinkle into a perplexed expression. “Then what are the possibilities?”

“After the villager left the bodies, it was three hours before the first responders showed up. So, the way I figure it, either this woman had a little juice left in her and she crawled off—”

“But wouldn't she have left another trail?” I interject.

Silva rolls his eyes. “I'm being facetious, Jake. She didn't crawl anywhere. Somebody, and I'll let you guess who that was, came back and took her.”

“Jesus,” I mutter, incredulously. “Why would he do that?”

“Couldn't tell you,” Silva says. “But the villager also thinks he might have seen someone at the dune.”

“Meaning the perpetrator?”

“It's possible.”

“Was he able to give a description?”

“Not at all. The person was too far away and our first eyewitness after ten years has cataracts the size of mothballs.”

“Damn,” I say. “That’s bad luck.”

Out the window, it's sand and darkness as far as I can see. Feels like we're a million miles from everything now. “How much farther out is it, anyway?” I ask.

“Still got a ways to go,” Silva says, as he fumbles with the dial on the radio. He eventually finds a signal and some scratchy Ranchero ballad is playing.

It sounds old and far away. As if the sounds had leaked to us from another universe, a world lived in black and white. As I listen, I turn and look back at the lights of Juárez glittering in the distance.

I’ve known Silva about six months now, and it's because of him that the Bureau got the chance to work on this one. It’s not a routine thing for the two sides to put their heads together on a case. It took some finesse on his part to make the production happen—what we’re calling a
joint task force.

I first met him at a seminar on border crime I teach twice a year. It’s open to law enforcement personnel of any persuasion, north or south of the border. Silva had seen a taped version of one of my lectures, found it germane to his own work, and called me to find out when the course was offered next. He mentioned working for the Juárez PD and we started talking shop. Before we knew it, an hour and a half had gotten away from us. His job as an investigator in Juárez deals with much of the same subject matter as my own, but is, in many ways, its mirror image. It was fascinating, hearing how things worked, and often didn’t work, on the other side of the fence.

Silva enrolled in my course the following month, and we met face to face in Nogales, Arizona, where a small conference on border crime was being held. The conference had a fairly poor turnout, probably owing to the low profile venue, with only thirteen attendees. A full day was devoted to serial murder in border regions, and during the group discussion, Silva mentioned that he'd worked personally on the
Ropes
investigation. From then on, the brooding detective from Juárez had my full attention, as I
tried to ferret out any information I could on the case.

Ropes
was the quintessential border predator. The worthy poster child for the festering city that was his hunting ground. But for me, he was also the embodiment of those wicked energies that had long swished about beneath the surface of my imagination—drawing me to them in the outside world and haunting me within.

After the seminar, Silva and I grabbed drinks and discussed the case in more depth. I was completely engrossed by the things he told me, and it was that night we came up with the idea of a collaborative effort—of adding the Bureau’s hefty profiling and forensic resources to the Juárez PD’s tireless apprehension efforts. Within a month, Silva had introduced me to the appropriate contacts in Juárez to make the joint task force happen. Within six months it was up and running with Silva and me serving as the liaisons from our respective camps.

It may be that the more unpalatable the work, the stronger the camaraderie. From day one, Silva and I had a good rapport, one that budded over the course of the task force’s development into a fledgling friendship. My soul usually only cracks its seal with the passage of eons or the prying of a crowbar, but in six months, Silva has wriggled out of me most of my juicier secrets. By now he knows me pretty well, and it’s my hope that the trust and respect lie on both sides of the table.

Something pokes me. I turn and Silva's nudging me with his elbow. “There it is, right up ahead. At least, that's the edge of it.”

I try to follow where his finger's pointing. “The edge of what?” I ask.

“It's called the Neruda Dune. It's basically a giant bowl. A meteor made it.”

“They were all down in there—the bodies?”

“Yeah, near the bottom, for the most part.”

Gradually, I'm able to make out the circular arc of the dune’s southern rim. Five or six more police vehicles, mostly Land Cruisers, are parked along the edge. However, I can't see any people. They must all be down inside.

Within a minute or two, Silva parks the Land Cruiser alongside the other vehicles and we step out into the cool desert air. We’re about fifty yards from the dune’s edge, but what’s inside remains completely hidden from view.

Overhead, dozens of murky shapes drift in circles beneath the starry sky. Birds, I soon realize.

“Come on,” Silva says.

I follow him and we tread across the final stretch of flat, rocky sand that separates us from the extreme verge.

Almost there. Only a few seconds more. I feel a pang of trepidation or maybe it's exhilaration, shimmying through my insides. With all the time spent setting up the task force and with over a hundred days logged on the case, there's been a lot of buildup to this moment. And not just any Ropes' crime scene, but his magnum opus to boot.

And yet all the while, my mind keeps returning to that missing woman. I keep picturing the scene where the villager discovered her. Thinking about what became of her and what all the killer's strange take-back move might mean. But all this just heightens the palpable sense of menace that's forming in my mind. It's like a perfect storm. The aura's almost intoxicating. And you can feel the mystery permeate you to the teeth and bones and soul—and as it does, you shiver.

I take a breath and hold it in my lungs, trying to savor the moment. Because what we're about to see and discover can only happen once. One day, sooner than you'd think, this guy will be behind bars and he'll seem like nothing but a sap in a disheveled mug shot. But right now, the awe he fills us with, the terror of his open-endedness and his power, as strange as it is to say, may be the closest we ever get to God.

I peer over and as if to greet me, a current of wind wafts out of the immense abyss that gapes before me. I blink as a few grains of sand catch me in the eyes.

8

Colorado

“How did you know about the glasses?” I repeat, my voice low and rattled. My mask of composure, gone.

“Just an educated guess,” Chris says, nonchalantly.

“How would you have guessed that?”

He’s not just a harmless disembodied voice now. He’s a real person, who could be anywhere. Who could be right outside the window. Or hiding in my closet or under the bed.

“You’d be amazed at the things you can learn from a police scanner,” he says.

“What are you talking about?”

“All day the Boulder cops were discussing the evidence at the scene. They talked all about the note I left and the rope I used to tie Jessica’s wrists. They went on and on about a couple of hairs they found in the bathroom sink. But no one ever mentioned the glasses. The only thing I could think of is that you kept them, as crazy as that sounded.”