Borderline Insanity

by Jeff Miller

  Victor was the first to breach a pause in the tirade. “They are still processing evidence from the silo. So there’s still hope that—”

  “Hope is for horses,” the Professor sputtered. Dagny didn’t know if the phrase was archaic or if it was just something he had made up on the spot. She turned to Brent. He shook his head, shorthand for: You’re crazy if you think I’m going to speak now.

  If she didn’t speak now, the Professor would start up again, and they’d lose the rest of the hour. “I want to chase another lead,” she said.

  “What lead?” he barked.

  “Diablo Rico is one of the major coyote outfits that service this region. None of the dead seem to have been escorted by them. I want to go to Texas and see what I can find out about them.”

  “Fine,” he said, surprising Dagny, who had expected an argument. “Take Brent.”

  She couldn’t take him, of course, because she was taking Diego. It was time to lie some more. “Not necessary. I’ve already lined up a team of agents from several Texas field offices—”

  Brent interrupted. “I spent some time in Texas and am probably familiar with a lot of those guys. I’d be glad to come and help—”

  “Again, not necessary,” Dagny said. “Victor’s overseeing the collection of physical evidence. We need Brent to do the same with witness interviews.”

  “Agreed,” the Professor said. “I don’t want too much of the team to be gone. Dagny, this can’t take more than a day or two.”

  “Understood,” she said. It might take three days with the travel, but this wasn’t the time to press the point.

  The meeting lasted another thirty minutes, which allowed the Professor to continue to lead by reprimand and still digress on unrelated topics like the designated hitter, the Hays Code, and Jung’s Theory of Temperaments. He was in the middle of a sentence about Alexander the Great when he stormed out of the room.

  They waited in silence.

  “I don’t think he’s coming back,” Victor said.

  Brent turned to Dagny. “Why’d you box me out of Texas? I could help you down there—I have a ton of contacts.”

  Flattery seemed to be the best bet to defuse the situation. “The heart of the investigation is in Bilford, and I don’t like leaving the Professor alone with it. I need you here to make sure he doesn’t do anything crazy.”

  “Yeah, well . . . I guess that makes sense.”

  “Texas is dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s. But it probably won’t lead to anything.”

  He nodded. “I get it. Just wanted to make sure we’re okay,” he said, gesturing between the two of them.

  “We’re great, Brent.”

  “All right.” He gathered his things.

  Victor waited for Brent to leave, then asked her, “So, what’s the real reason you didn’t want him to come to Texas?”

  “I’m taking Diego to Mexico to find out more about Diablo Rico.”

  “That sounds really unwise. What’s the plan?”

  “He’s going to pose as a Mexican seeking transport to the States.”

  “And you?”

  “I’ll be listening through an earpiece in a van, maybe.”

  “And if things go wrong? Do you need a team for this, preferably of the tactical variety?”

  “We would need the approval of Mexican law enforcement, which would be hard to get and would require a visibility within the Bureau that would preclude Diego’s participation.”

  “Well, he shouldn’t be participating,” Victor said. “I’m not qualified to do what you’re asking him to do, and I’m a special agent.”

  “We’d never pull it off as an official part of the investigation,” she said. “Too many sign-offs required, too much chance for tipping off Diablo Rico. Diego’s set on doing it with or without me, anyway. His chances are better if I’m involved.”

  “Diego has a death wish.”

  “Diego wants to give meaning to his life.”

  “That’s the brave-sounding way to describe a death wish,” he said. “Why don’t you at least let me come? Three is better than two.”

  “No, you’re too important to come. I need you here.”

  “That’s the same line you used on Brent.”

  “But I mean it with you.” This wasn’t flattery. Victor’s oversight of the collection and analysis of physical evidence was the best thing they had going. He had cracked the phone code that got them to the bodies, and he might just crack whatever code would get them to the unsub. Dagny grabbed her bag and slung it over her shoulder. “See you soon, Victor.”

  “You better, Dagny. You better.”

  CHAPTER 52

  The thin man sat at his kitchen table, staring at the blank front page of a legal pad. His right hand’s fingers wrapped around the shaft of a blue Uniball pen and squeezed harder with each additional minute the page stayed bare. After forty-eight minutes, he dropped the pen and shoved the pad from the table.

  The clock on the oven said it was 12:37. He opened his refrigerator and pulled out a package of Kraft American Cheese. It would do. He tore the tab to open the wrapper, peeled the plastic from three slices, and slapped them between two pieces of Wonder Bread Classic White. For a moment, he lost track of what he was doing. It was hard to concentrate on the task at hand with the Catholic priest still rattling around inside his head. The imposter priest, that is. The man wasn’t holy—he was just another migrant from Mexico.

  Making a sandwich for the girl—that’s what he was doing. He thought about grilling it. There was little more disappointing than a cold cheese sandwich. But how much kindness did he owe her? None—he owed her nothing. She was a parasite, trying to become famous on his accomplishments.

  A piercing pain shot through his head, and he fell to the kitchen floor. The seizures had started after he’d learned the truth about the boy and had grown worse with time. Pressing the palms of his hands against his temples, he writhed on his back. His eyes closed, and he could not open them. His teeth locked down on his tongue, and he screamed.

  The pain receded slowly in the back recesses of his mind until it disappeared. Wiping away tears, he stood back up and looked at the cold cheese sandwich. The girl was going to be the vessel through which he told his story, if he could ever find a way to write it. She needed to see the kindness in him, even as he struggled to.

  He grabbed the butter from the fridge, dropped a tablespoon of it in a pan, and turned on the burner.

  CHAPTER 53

  If they’d been traveling on official FBI business, they could have flown direct to Brownsville on one of the Bureau’s planes, but the covert and unsanctioned nature of their mission required them to fly on American, with a layover in Dallas. They didn’t get to Brownsville until 11:00 p.m., and it was after midnight when they checked into the Comfort Suites. Diego retired to his room, Dagny to hers. Late and low on Weight Watchers points, she ventured out to the vending machine at the end of the hall and traded two singles for a package of Hostess Twinkies. They left her feeling sad and sick. This wasn’t any way to live.

  The bed was warm and soft, and it pulled her quickly into slumber. She dreamed that Victor was her son and Brent was her husband. They were in marriage counseling with Dr. Childs, who tried to get them to talk about their trust issues, but Dagny kept ignoring her in order to play Angry Birds on her phone. The Professor barged into Childs’s office, walked to the bookcase, and started throwing books at them, screaming that it was time for them to get back to work. When he ran out of books, he glared at Dagny, screamed that lying was beneath her, and accused her of betrayal.

  She woke at five the next morning, feeling groggy and gross. It had been too long since her last run, so she laced her Nikes, grabbed her iPhone, and hit the streets of Brownsville. Texas was nothing but highways and access roads, and she hugged the latter, running parallel to US 77, headed south toward the border. She passed a discount tire shop and then a Chili’s. The side streets were empty, but the highway hummed
with traffic. Dagny clicked through the albums on her phone and settled upon the soundtrack to Magnolia. Aimee Mann carried her past the Dillard’s at the Sunrise Mall, a chiropractic clinic, and a Whataburger, which took her back to her college days at Rice University in Houston. Whataburgers were everywhere in Texas.

  It felt good to run—to spring forward and bounce along to the pulsing beat of music. Each slap of foot against pavement was something that could be counted and accumulated until tens became hundreds and hundreds became thousands. Sometimes she used a run to think about a case. This time, she was using it to escape one. There were no silos, no cell phones, no media vans, and no evidence. There was nothing but music, the pounding of her steps, and the gentle hum of traffic on a warm Brownsville morning. It was glorious.

  Dagny Gray was thirty-five years old and as fast as she ever was. That was something. She had that at least.

  By seven thirty, she was back at the hotel, changed, and ready for the morning’s farce. At eight, two dozen field agents from various Texas offices met with her in the hotel conference room. She showed them a PowerPoint presenting the basic facts of the case and briefed them on the potential importance of Diablo Rico. None of them had heard of the outfit, which said a lot about Diablo Rico’s competence and the Bureau’s lack of it. At eleven, she sent them off to scatter throughout South Texas, looking for information about the coyote organization.

  The rest of the day was spent in preparation for the next one. This meant fitting Diego with the Bureau’s smallest wire and transmitter, testing it from several distances, playacting the encounter with him, and talking through various scenarios and options. It also meant providing for some security.

  Dagny knew that private security firms that had previously patrolled Iraq and Afghanistan had increasingly accepted work in Mexico. She called a former agent who had worked with Halliburton, and he gave her the contact information for Vance McGilligan at Blackspotted Security. Googling the company’s name led her to a Washington Post story about the company’s soaring income from its Mexican division. The article noted that noncitizens in Mexico were not permitted to carry a gun as part of a security detail, so the company had to team with Mexican nationals. She called McGilligan and explained the nature of the operation, sussing out information concerning Blackspotted’s capacity to support a rescue operation. He quoted her a price of $60,000 for a team of two Blackspotted officers, five armed Mexicans, and an armored truck. Dagny told him she needed a few minutes to consider it and that she would call him back.

  Since it wasn’t a sanctioned FBI expenditure, she would have to finance it with her own funds. That would require her to liquidate some assets—something she didn’t have time to do. Even if she had the time, funding a rogue paramilitary exercise in a foreign country was the kind of thing that could set off a diplomatic crisis if things went wrong. It could also land her in jail.

  She decided not to personally fund an illegal SWAT team for a dangerous raid against a criminal organization in a foreign country and called McGilligan to explain her decision. He helped her devise a plan for a solo operation and offered to lend her a gun and armored van for free, which she accepted.

  Later, she ate dinner with Diego at Chili’s, where she discreetly entered the points from her Santa Fe Chicken Salad into her Weight Watchers app. He ordered the Chipotle Chicken Flatbread, which he nibbled at with the glum look of a man sentenced to death.

  “You don’t have to do this,” she reminded him.

  “Believe me,” he said. “I don’t want to do this. But I have to.”

  After dinner, they returned to his room, where they rehearsed some more. At ten, she instructed him to get some sleep, and she returned to her room. Climbing into bed, she grabbed the remote and flipped on the television. Talking heads on CNN were hypothesizing about the abduction or murder of Allison Jenkins. When Jenkins’s picture flashed on the screen, Dagny realized that she was the reporter who had tried to get onto the Hoover farm with Sheriff Don. She called Victor, who told her that the investigation had expanded to include Jenkins’s disappearance, although there was no evidence tying it to the prior murders. She hated that she was in Brownsville while things were happening in Ohio.

  After the chat, she turned off the lights and slipped under the covers. Her mind drifted, not to sleep but to nightmarish visions of the next day’s operation. It was a bad sign that she couldn’t conjure images of success to combat them.

  She flipped on the lights and fired up her laptop, seeking distraction in the Dear Prudence advice column on Slate, and then a few Funny Or Die videos. At midnight, there was a knock on her door.

  Peering through the peephole, she found Diego on the other side. She opened the door.

  “I saw the light under your door,” he said.

  “You can’t sleep?”

  “No. You?”

  “No,” she said. “Come in.”

  He sat on the edge of the bed. “You ever been in a dangerous situation?”

  She laughed.

  “I know. Dumb question.” He looked at her with searching eyes. “What was it like?”

  She sat down next to him. “Which time? When I was kidnapped by a serial killer? Or shot at by the mafia? Once, I was stabbed during an arrest gone bad. Another time, I was trapped inside a burning house.”

  He laughed. “Okay, I get it. You’re used to it.”

  “No,” she said. “You never get used to it. But if you do it enough, you realize you’re stronger than you think. One time, I was even climbing up the side of a giant concrete silo when it exploded, and somehow, I survived. And you did, too.”

  Diego smiled. “That seems like a long time ago.” There was a creak in his voice she’d never heard before. “So, what’s the key? How do you not get scared?”

  “Honestly?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have a generally low regard for my own life, so I’m not in fear of losing it,” Dagny said. “I have no meaningful connections to anyone, so I don’t worry about how they’d take it. And my self-esteem is largely pegged to solving cases, so my mind is usually trained on the objective.”

  “So, the answer is self-loathing and loneliness?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, I have good reserves of both,” he said.

  Something had broken him. “What happened to you?” she asked.

  “Life,” he said, waving his hand.

  They sat in silence for a moment, and then she said, “Tell me about it.”

  He lifted his head and looked into her eyes. Her normal inclination was to turn away from such a gaze, but she stared back at him. They were going to have a real conversation—the kind that usually sent Dagny running.

  “I grew up two hours north of here, in Corpus Christi,” he began. “My dad was an electrician. My mother stayed at home and later worked as a waitress. They were both wonderful, but I never really understood them, and they never quite got me. Some kids seem to have a telepathy with their parents. We had trouble communicating with words.

  “My parents were devoted to the church,” he continued. “And so I spent much of my life there. It had such a sense of community. These days, the city’s mostly Hispanic, but back then, it was evenly split. Outside the church, there were two Corpus Christis. But inside the church, we were all Catholics. There was something powerful about that.

  “When my mom started working, I’d head to the church after school. Eventually, they asked me to become an altar boy. Got to carry candles and ring the altar bell during Mass. I felt like a rock star. Every day, I got to go to the most important place in town and be part of the most important things it did.

  “One of the priests—Father Tisch—told me I was special. Said he wanted to become my mentor. I was eleven years old. That this man saw something in me . . . I can’t tell you how much I needed that. At school, I never fit in. I was picked on. Didn’t have any close friends. At home, my parents provided for me. Treated me fine. But never showed me any affection
. No one had ever said I was special before. And now, this man I admired wanted to spend time with me. Just me.

  “You know enough about the church to know what happened.”

  Dagny nodded.

  “At fifteen, I ran away to Houston. Lived on the streets. Did things to get by that I’m still trying to forget. I was in a gang for a while, although it’s not as exciting as it sounds. Mostly, I stood on the corner and shouted if I saw a cop.”

  “The scorpion tattoo on your back?”

  He smiled. “Yeah, that’s when I got it.”

  “How long were you in Houston?”

  “Six months. One day I got caught in the middle of some crossfire with a rival gang. I darted down an alley, over two streets, and right onto a bus that took me back to Corpus Christi.”

  “Back to your parents?” Dagny asked.

  He nodded. “They were relieved enough to see me that they forgot to be angry for a little while.”

  “Did they know you’d been molested?”

  “No. I couldn’t do that to them.”

  “Do what exactly?”

  “Destroy their God.” He paused. “They needed the church. And so did I, actually.”

  “You went back to the church?” It seemed inconceivable to her.

  “Yes. Got my high school diploma, applied to the Saint Charles Seminary in El Paso, and was accepted.”

  “What happened with Father Tisch?”

  “Both of us acted like nothing had happened. He recommended me for the seminary.”

  “The seminary—that’s how long?”

  “Eight years. Finished at twenty-five and became a deacon. Six months later, I was ordained. I requested placement back in Corpus Christi and got it. For a year, I did everything a priest should, but the whole time, I was waiting.”

  “Waiting for what?”

  “Courage and opportunity. And then I was given the honor of leading Easter Mass. When we got to the homily, I said what I’d been planning to say for nine and a half years.”