Borderline Insanity

by Jeff Miller

  None of it made much sense to him. He had killed eighty-five Mexicans. He’d confessed to the crimes on Hank Frank’s talk show. He’d planted the cell phones in the park. Cops should have been combing the streets. It should have been the biggest news story in the country. Instead, four people spent a few hours picking up trash in the park. When they finished, they didn’t go to the police station—they went to the young officer’s house. Who was this woman? She wasn’t local. Possibly ICE, possibly FBI. Probably FBI, he decided. But why were they working out of the officer’s house?

  The door to her motel room opened, and the man stepped out. Red hair, young. Some meat on his bones—fleshy, not muscular. The guy walked down the landing and opened another door. So, he had his own room. Clearly, they were not lovers. And now she was alone.

  The thin man opened the glove box and pulled out a box of Camels, slid one from the package, and lit it. He rolled down his window and blew out a cloud of smoke. She was pretty, wasn’t she? And she was up in that room, all alone, thinking about him. That made him smile.

  He imagined opening his car door, walking up those steps, and opening her door. Her eyes would be closed; her chest would be heaving with every breath. A quick gag to the mouth would stop her from screaming; he could detain her with ropes around her wrists and ankles, tied to the bedposts. Reaching down below his seat, he pulled out his bowie knife, unsheathed it, and turned it in his hand. He imagined plunging it into her chest as she lay tied on the bed. Eighty-five dead Mexicans wasn’t enough to get some attention, but a knife in the heart of an FBI agent would do it.

  She could have stayed anywhere in the county, but she chose the Bilford Motor Inn. It was almost as if fate demanded he do it.

  If he was going to do this, she’d need some time to fall asleep, and he’d need some time to get supplies. He turned the key, started his engine, and drove home, thinking about the FBI agent. She was thin, like him. There was virtue in that. There was too much fat in the world, too much gluttony and greed.

  He lived in a two-story house on a large, rural lot, surrounded by trees. Parking his truck on his gravel drive, he ran inside and down the steps to the basement, where he gathered sheets, rope, and a tennis ball, and stuffed them into a bag. Cardboard boxes were stacked against a wall, and he picked through them until he found a Ziploc bag full of keys. Reaching into the bag, he found a gold key with an oversize handle that read in engraved letters BILFORD MOTOR INN, MASTER. He’d swiped it during his short tenure as the motel janitor a few years back.

  The thin man ran up the steps with the key and the bag and darted into the kitchen. There was a black case on top of the refrigerator, and he pulled it down and set it on the counter. Opening it, he pulled out the gun, loaded a cartridge, and tucked it into his waistband. She’d have a gun, he figured, so he’d need one, too.

  It was nearly 3:00 a.m. when he parked across the street from the Bilford Motor Inn. He tossed his knife into the bag with the ropes and sheets and pressed the gold key in his hand. Steeling himself, he lit a cigarette and took some puffs. All the room lights at the motel were off. He rolled down his window to listen. Bilford was quiet, except for the breeze. He stepped out of the car and carried the bag across the street and through the inn’s parking lot. Grabbing the rail, he started up the metal steps to the second-floor landing, his fingers wrapped so tightly around the teeth of the master key that they pierced his skin. He lessened his grip and walked toward the woman’s door, tossed his cigarette to the floor, and stepped on it. Setting his bag down, he grabbed the gun from his waistband with his left hand and inserted the key into her doorknob with his right.

  He tried to turn the key, but it wouldn’t turn.

  He smiled. The bastards were too cheap to give him a raise, but somehow they’d found enough money to upgrade the locks.

  It was time to come up with another way to get some attention.

  CHAPTER 17

  After World War I, the military sent its return vehicles and tanks on a cross-country tour from New York City to San Francisco. Lieutenant Colonel Dwight Eisenhower traveled with the convoy over broken, confusing, and meandering roads, many of which weren’t paved. Some vehicles slipped into ditches, while others got stuck in mud and sand. Twenty years later, General Eisenhower advanced his troops into Germany on the Autobahn, the beautiful and durable four-lane superhighways that permitted rapid, uninterrupted movement from city to city. Smitten with the soaring overpasses and wide lanes, Eisenhower made a nationwide highway system a centerpiece of his political agenda. As president, he signed the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, allocating $25 billion to the construction of a massive interstate highway system.

  Detroit, unions, planners, and the oil and construction industries did well under the Federal Aid Highway Act. So, too, did the big cities that were connected by the national highways and the small towns lucky enough to be included on the routes between them. But these highways couldn’t connect every town. Once planners decided the highway wouldn’t pass through downtown Bilford, there wasn’t any reason to build anything new there.

  The Bilford Motor Inn was the last significant construction in downtown Bilford. It opened in 1953, with a ceremony involving the mayor, a ribbon, and a comically oversized pair of scissors. Folks were proud of the addition to their town. Families spent their post-war surplus on vacations, and they didn’t fly—they drove. Bilford might not have been a destination, but it was a place they’d stop along the way, and maybe they’d spend a buck or two while they did. The motel was clean and new and modern; it had a television in every room, like a Hilton. For its first three years, the motel’s neon VACANCY sign was never lit. But once the highways went in, no one passed through Bilford anymore, and the vacancy light was always on until it burned out.

  When her phone beeped at four forty-five, Dagny was already tying her sneakers. Getting by on three hours of sleep was about as smart as feasting on midnight combo meals, but running was the only thing that calmed her. She holstered her gun under a Late Night With David Letterman zip-up sweatshirt and grabbed the earbuds for her iPhone. Fiona Apple’s “Extraordinary Machine” carried her out the door, down the stairs, and over the sidewalks of Bilford.

  Dagny had a sense of New York and Austin and Cleveland. She understood Portland and Decatur, Macon and Orlando. When she was chasing Martin Benny, she knew Chicago, and that kind of thing mattered. She had no sense of Bilford. She didn’t know, for example, if the downtown streets were dangerous or just desolate. The money in New Bilford was coming from somewhere, but she had no idea what it could be. Agriculture? Pharmaceuticals? Was there a factory making things? Was there old money there? What was the average income? What was the median income? What kind of music did the local bands play? Were there any local bands? What percentage of townsfolk had high school diplomas or college degrees? When kids left Bilford to go to college, did they ever come back? She knew Sheriff Don held an elected office, but was there a sizable opposition to the man? A vocal one?

  As she sprinted past homes, she noticed that many of the smallest of them had American flags and window boxes of flowers. Although there were some Toyotas and Hondas in their driveways, there were more Fords and Chryslers. These details told her that she was in a small town but little else. There were bumper stickers on the back of some of the cars, and they tended to favor politicians and policies rarely featured on bumper stickers back in her hometown of Alexandria. She noticed that the sidewalks were cracked and uneven, upended by tree roots at irregular intervals. It was not a runner’s paradise, but Bilford probably wasn’t a runner’s town.

  Track four—a driving, bouncy song called “Better Version of Me”—propelled Dagny to the downtown business district. There wasn’t a lot of business in it. The half-lit marquee above the theater read 12 ANGRY MEN: THE MUSICAL. The Bilford Art Gallery appeared, by her quick glance, to be more of a craft show, though a well-stocked one. Half the storefronts were empty. The remainder seemed makeshift antique stores and r
estaurants, all decorated lightly enough to suggest their owners weren’t counting on anything.

  Everything about downtown Bilford was charming, and all that charm was being wasted. She tried to imagine a circumstance that could bring it back to life but couldn’t. People who like cities move to bigger ones. Nobody was going to move to Bilford.

  But that wasn’t true, Dagny realized. Immigrants had been coming here, and a hundred small towns like it. The rent was low. Farms were close and needed labor. So did dairies and meatpacking facilities. There was a lot of construction in New Bilford. Someone had to put the roof on an Applebee’s. Someone had to clean the Hampton Inn. She wondered what would happen to downtown Bilford if the immigrants were free to live conspicuously. Maybe it would thrive.

  She sprinted through the city square and around a statute of a soldier on a horse. There must be some law that said every small town had to have a statue of a soldier on a horse, she figured. Each step woke her senses and jolted her with a burst of life. She hurdled a park bench, just to prove she could, and then hurdled another.

  Bolting across the street, she raced up the thirty-seven steps that led to the entrance of the Bilford courthouse. It was enormous—a relic from a time when every town required an imposing edifice fronted by marble columns. She paused at the top of the steps to take in the view of the city, or what she could see of it in the predawn light. Somewhere out there were anguished families, praying that the missing were still alive. Somewhere, in the dark of the night, was a madman bent on more devastation.

  Dagny bounded down the steps of the courthouse and ran for another hour and a half—up the hillside, across one-lane bridges, beyond the city limits, past Sheriff Don’s tents, through cornfields and woods. As she circled back, the sun began to peek over the horizon. It gave a glowing aura to the silhouette of a man kneeling on top of a small house, pounding a mallet against the roof. She stopped in the front lawn of the house and looked up. The man was shirtless, trim and muscular. He wiped his forehead with his arm and then pounded some more.

  “Good morning, Diego.”

  He stopped and looked down at her. “Up early, I see.”

  “You, too.”

  He walked to the edge of the roof and climbed down a ladder. A scorpion tattoo covered a good third of his back.

  “Didn’t know a priest could have a tattoo.”

  “Rabbis can’t?”

  “Jews can’t.”

  “That’s funny,” he said. “I’ve known plenty of Jews who had them.” He grabbed the T-shirt that was lying on his front porch and put it on.

  “You really don’t believe in God?” she asked.

  “Huh?”

  “Yesterday, you said you didn’t believe in him.” She’d let the statement pass at the time, but it lingered in her mind.

  “Yeah, I don’t know.”

  “How can you be a priest if you don’t believe in God?”

  He shrugged a little and smiled. “I like the idea of God. And at the end of the day, it’s more important to like the idea of him than it is to actually believe in him.”

  That made some sense, and she decided not to question it further, lest it fall apart. She wondered what inspired the scorpion tattoo but decided not to ask. “A colleague of mine—Special Agent Victor Walton Jr.—is going to tackle the phones today.”

  “You’ve brought in reinforcements?”

  “Only one, and he’s here on the sly. But there’s no one better for this kind of thing. I want you to spend the day with him. He’ll need help translating texts and e-mails.”

  “Sure. What are you going to do?”

  Hank Frank was leaning on the hood of a Ford Escape in the parking lot of WKBL studios. As soon as Dagny pulled into the lot, he was off the car and coming toward her. Middle-aged and slightly worn, Frank had an earnest look about him. He seemed to be a man who had lived a few lives and was grateful for the one he had now.

  “I thought it was a prank,” he said, leaning over her car. She grabbed her backpack and slung it over her shoulder. “We get those sometimes in radio.”

  He was, it seemed, looking for absolution—for her to tell him that it wouldn’t have made a difference if he had gone to the cops about the phone call. He’d have to work for absolution; she didn’t give it out for free.

  She climbed out of the car and shook his hand. “Good to meet you, Mr. Frank.”

  “I’m so sorry if this guy was real. But there was nothing in the papers. No one was talking about missing people. So, it seemed like a hoax.”

  “Why don’t we go inside?”

  There wasn’t much to WKBL studios. Two glass booths, a control room, and a handful of small offices, one of which had a HANK FRANK nameplate on the door. Frank took a seat behind his desk, and she sat across from him. He grabbed a disc from the shelf behind his desk, put it into a CD player, and hit “Play.”

  “Brother, you are speaking the truth today. You are speaking the word of God.”

  It was, in all likelihood, the voice of a mass murderer. Their voices were always chilling, she thought. It wasn’t because they spoke with a different cadence than everyone else; it was because they spoke with the same cadence as everyone else. A serial killer sounded like the neighbor you’d spoken to only twice. That’s why their voices were terrifying.

  “Sometimes I feel so alone. And then, to hear your voice, speaking so rationally. Speaking such sanity. These people are taking our jobs. They’re taking our money. They’re taking our lives, Hank.”

  She reached over to the player and hit “Pause.” Frank started to say something, but she stopped him with a wave of her hand. Something struck her about the caller’s tone. She hit the back arrow and listened to the start of the call again, playing it through to the end.

  “They’re killing us. They are killing us, Hank. And that’s why I’m killing them.”

  And then Hank Frank’s voice: “It’s killing us, John.”

  And the murderer: “Which is why I’m killing them. I’m killing all of them. I’m killing them—”

  Click.

  She played the message a few more times. The sentences built upon each other in a very natural way—too natural for extemporaneous speech. Taking our lives flowed into killing us, which served as the predicate for the declaration that he was killing them. It wasn’t merely a declaration; it was an argument, stated in its simplest form. It was a performance, in fact. The unsub wanted to declare his crimes in a dramatic way. To heighten the drama, he wanted his reveal to be a surprise. And so he used the vernacular of the average caller to build to that reveal.

  There were two main reasons a murderer would kill illegal immigrants, she figured. First, he might despise them for all the reasons they were sometimes despised: misguided patriotism, bigotry, fear, or delusion. Second, he simply might like killing, and it was easy to kill illegal immigrants. There’s no documentation of their existence. Families feared working with the authorities. People assumed the missing had moved back home or to another town. It seemed to Dagny that the killer here was wearing the guise of the first kind but was more likely to be the second.

  In a way, Hank Frank was right: The call was a prank—of sorts. He wanted the police to look for someone full of political malice and hatred, because he didn’t have any.

  Or maybe that was all wrong. Listening to the recording one more time made her less confident of her conclusions. She wished she had the Professor’s opinion of the call. He was a genius at deciphering the psychological makeup of an unsub.

  “Do you have the number of the caller?”

  He slid a piece of paper across his desk. It was a printout from the station’s log, and it listed the number, date, time, and duration of the call. In a proper investigation, she would subpoena telecommunication companies for any information regarding the ownership of the account associated with the number. Better yet, she would query the FBI’s own database. Although Bureau spokespeople had publicly denied it, the FBI kept a database of informa
tion on millions of cell phones—things like device identification numbers, phone numbers, owner names, and addresses. The NSA had even more data like this. She lamented the fact that her antisocial disposition within the Bureau left her with no friendly contacts with those who had access to this kind of data. This was the price of surliness and introversion.

  She pulled out her iPhone.

  “You’re calling him?”

  “No.” If the unsub were still using the phone, calling the number would cause him to ditch it, and they wouldn’t be able to use it to track his movements. She used her phone to Google the number, and when nothing came up, texted the number to Victor to see if he might have some luck with it.

  Dagny punched the “Eject” button and put the disc back into its sleeve, placed it and the printout in her backpack, and stood up to leave.

  Frank rose, too. “That’s it?”

  “That’s it, Mr. Frank.”

  He walked her to the door, continuing his quest for forgiveness. “I assure you, ma’am, if I thought he was really killing anyone, I would have reported it immediately.”

  “How many listeners do you have for an average show, Mr. Frank?”

  “Twenty thousand or so.”

  “Well, twenty thousand people heard the same thing you did, and none of them called the police, either. So I wouldn’t feel so bad.”

  He nodded, but it was slight enough to show that he appreciated the effort more than he actually bought it.

  Bilford High School was fifty years old and looked every bit of it. Worn brick, cracked windows, peeling paint—the only thing that looked new was the football stadium scoreboard, half of which served as a billboard for John Weeney Chevrolet. A security guard stood inside the door. When Dagny flashed her creds, he didn’t know what to do.

  “Tell me where the principal’s office is,” she said, and he did.

  As she walked toward the office, the bell rang and students poured out of the classrooms, headed toward their next classes. About a tenth of them seemed to be Hispanic. She tried to gauge whether there were more girls than boys, but it was hard to keep track as the sea of students kept shifting.