by Ian Ballard
“Wait a minute now. I thought you were the one hitting on me—while your roommate’s in the shower no less. I’m the victim here.”
We tilt our heads conspiratorially upwards, listening to the sound of the shower.
“I did not hit on you. For once I'd like to meet a cute guy who's not cocky.”
“Are you suggesting I have a ‘big head’?” He actually winks at me when he says this.
I blush and turn away.
“Sorry. No pun intended,” he says.
I bite my lip and look back at him. My hand brushes against his. “Look, Chris, you seem like a nice guy, but double-entendres are as far as I want to go with my roommate’s “friend” or significant whatever. I didn’t sleep a wink last night, and I think I might not be on my best behavior.”
He sighs and for just a second takes my hand in his. “Lack of sleep,” he says, “is no excuse for sexually harassing someone.”
I swallow, audibly. I think my heart's beating harder than it was before. Feeling really conflicted here. My lips purse as I look him over. “On the other hand, things change all the time. You could give me your number for future reference.”
His eyes linger on me for a moment. Finally, he says “I’ll do even better than that,” and he starts unzipping a compartment of his backpack. He takes out a pen and notepad and starts writing something. “I’m going to give you my e-mail address and a top secret message. But you have to promise you won’t read it till I’m gone or the secret will be spoiled forever.” He hands me the folded paper.
“Promise,” I say, taking it. A pause. “Well, I hope we meet again—under less awkward circumstances.”
“I’ll make sure we do.”
He’s really close now. His face just inches from mine.
I retreat a half step, which I guess means I lose the staring contest. “Now I’ve got a secret for you, Chris,” I say.
“What’s that?”
“I’ve always been a sucker for guys with glasses.” I take the glasses off his face and look into his eyes.
He doesn't even budge. “Try them on,” he says, as if he’s daring me. “It might give you a new perspective on things.”
I take my glasses off and slide his on.
After a moment, it dawns on me what’s wrong with this picture. Holy shit—what a weird coincidence. “There’s no prescription in the lenses,” I say, hiding my own glasses behind my back.
“That’s right,” he says, an odd smile forming on his lips.
We’re silent for a moment. He’s looking hard into my eyes. Like he knows. But surely there's no way he could. “Why do you wear fake glasses?” I finally ask.
His smile slowly broadens, till I can see his teeth. “Because the false face must hide what the false heart knows.”
The line’s from Macbeth. So he caught my reference earlier and played dumb. I feel a shiver run down my spine.
For a moment, it's like we're frozen in place. As if neither of us is allowed to move even the smallest part of ourselves.
“Parting is such sweet sorrow,” he says with a sudden burst of congeniality. Then he makes a quick, gentlemanly bow and abruptly turns to go.
A second later, the door closes behind him. I stand there for a moment, thinking about what just happened. It's confusing. Maybe I'm a little creeped out and a little ashamed of myself. But mostly I'm just giddy. It dawns on me that I'm smiling.
Just now I realize his glasses are still perched on my nose. Crap. I step forward, open the door, and shout his name. But everything's still and silent. He's already gone.
I slide the Buddy Hollys off my nose and look at them. Why was he wearing these anyway? And why did he insist on showing them to me? No—I'm being stupid. He's not psychic. And he's not a weirdo. At least not in the same way I am. He's a goofball and leaving the glasses was just an excuse to see me again. End of story.
I slip his into my pocket, slide my own glasses back on, and start to climb the stairs.
From above, the sound of running water.
Kind of a long shower.
Also, it’s a bit odd, now that I think about it, that Jess got into the shower before Chris left. Why didn’t she walk him out first? Is she that comfortable with him that she gave him the run of the house after only a few days? She must be head-over-heels. But then again, who wouldn’t be?
Reaching the top of the stairs, I see that the door to the bathroom is cracked half an inch or so. “Jess. It’s me. I’m back. Hey, I met Chris on his way out,” I shout through the gap.
No answer. Only the sound of water.
“Hey, Jess, can you hear me? Did you fall asleep in there?”
Nothing but the constant drumming.
Suddenly, my heart begins to race and a flurry of disquieting thoughts descend upon me. “Jessica,” I shout, my voice cracking.
I unfold the piece of paper in my hand.
“There is no one named Chris” is all it says.
I push the door slowly open.
I want to scream Jessica’s name over the sound of the drumming water. But no scream comes.
“Jessica,” I say, my voice falling to a whisper.
The door stands open.
The bathroom floor glistens a soft, diluted red.
Propped up naked in the bathtub, arms tied together with yellow rope, hands severed at the wrists, is my roommate, Jessica.
Her eyes are open wide.
They stare directly at me, as clear and blue as if she were alive.
3
El Paso
I just got off the phone with Detective Silva of the Juárez PD. Earlier today they found a new crime scene. This one's deep in the desert. As far as they can tell, it's him. The one they call “Ropes.” The MO matches up for the most part, though there are a few discrepancies—the bodies weren't buried the way they usually are, and there's never been this many at once before. You rarely see these guys change their patterns, so I was a bit skeptical at first. But Silva's sure it's him and Silva would know.
It's been fourteen hours since a local villager stumbled on the scene. I've been assured it's still just the way they found it. They haven't moved a thing. A few butterflies are flitting around my stomach. This will be my first time to see Ropes' handiwork in person—if, indeed, it turns out to be his.
Already on my way, fastening on my shoulder holster and feeling the weight of the revolver under my arm. I put on my navy blazer and pat my breast pocket to double check that my badge is there. If the traffic at the checkpoint is light, I can probably be at the scene in less than an hour.
My name’s Jake Radley. I'm a special agent in the Border Crimes Unit of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Been in seven years so far, working Border Crimes for two. It's not the most upbeat gig in the world—it would be a lot of people's worst nightmare—but for me it's a perfect fit. You’ll see things in this division you won’t see anywhere else, or you’ll see the same things, but the industrial strength varieties. Narcotics trafficking, human trafficking, gangs, serial murder. And that’s just your first day on the job. The border is like an experiment into the worst possibilities of the species. How low we can sink. Something about it, maybe the anonymity or the constant flux, attracts wickedness the way decaying garbage attracts roaches and flies.
I was drawn to the border as well (though hopefully for different reasons). Something inside me has been pulling me toward it for as long as I can remember. Like a bird that's guided to some remote point on the other side of the globe by a secret compass buried in its brain. I've realized that a person can have a connection to a place, just as people can to one another. There's a pattern concealed within you, something essential, that you recognize in the world. You might glimpse it in the eyes of a stranger and convince yourself you've known that person your whole life. For me, I feel it in the throbbing energy of a landscape. I don't know how or why, but it’s like the border’s my soul mate.
They say like attracts like. So, what does it say about m
e that I sought out a place like this? I ask myself that question a lot. Sometimes half-joking, sometimes seriously. Is the border holding a mirror up to something vile inside me? Is there a little box of wickedness buried deep down, in the crawlspace of my mind? I guess there must be. But then again, doesn't a dab of depravity exist in us all? Moments where we look down at our hands and just know that, with the right provocation, they could do truly nasty things. We deny it and hide it away, but every once in a while, there it is. Opening up within us, like a yellow reptile eye.
But, who knows? When you're alone in your own head, you talk yourself into a lot of nonsense. Maybe there's nothing quite that wretched in you or in me either. Maybe this love affair with the border is just because deep down I'm a nice guy and opposites attract. I'm probably just hyper-sensitive about the subject of my morbid disposition. But all the edgy introspection isn't just academic. I don't know myself the way others do. I don't know a damn thing about my dark places. You see, I've got this handicap that you don't have. That it would be hard for you to even understand—
But let's save that for later. I've never been one for unsolicited confessions.
I lay a small suitcase out on my bed and pack three changes of clothes. Then I go over to my desk and put two items into my briefcase. The first is the bulky accordion binder that’s labeled “Ropes.” It's stuffed with victim photos and reports on murders that might be linked to our killer. The second thing I put into my briefcase is the ledger.
I should probably just take a moment and explain about this second item. The ledger is, outwardly and in point of fact, nothing more than a big black book. A tattered twenty-five-year-old accounting document I tend to tote around with me. However, inwardly and in spirit, the ledger is a mystery. A riddle around which my thoughts move like ripples encircling a ker-plunked stone (though the document's impact on my stomach is not always so serene—being, as it is, a frequent source of indigestion).
The ledger first crossed my path at 7:12 a.m., October 15th, a Monday. That was the precise time I first saw it, just over three months ago. I was heading out the front door of my apartment in Washington, DC, on my way to the Marriott to teach a seminar on human trafficking when I saw it sitting there on my doorstep. At first I just frowned at it. It wasn’t enclosed in a package or envelope, so it couldn’t have come by mail. It was just plopped down, square in the middle of the welcome mat, as blatant as a new phone book. The surreptitious delivery had presumably occurred between Sunday night and Monday morning, since it wasn't there when I'd returned home the previous evening.
People don’t use ledgers anymore, so I didn’t immediately realize what it was. It looked like a big hardbound notebook with a leather cover, fourteen inches tall and a foot across, but not particularly thick having, I would later discover, a mere 120 pages. It looked dusty and old and there was nothing inscribed on the front. Nor were there any identifiable names, addresses, or locations written on the back or the inside cover or indeed anywhere, almost as if the document had been rendered untraceable by design.
Stooping to pick it up, a tiny tingling of nerves proved my only premonition of the ledger's larger and grimmer significance—a significance I was slated to soon discover. In fact, it so little impressed me at the time that I left it behind on my coffee table and hardly gave it a second thought the whole day at the conference. It wasn’t until later that evening, when I’d returned home and had a chance to examine it more closely, that my conception of the book began to take on a more sinister aspect. I set the unwieldy volume on my desk, opened it, and perused the first few pages of entries. Each page was divided into three columns—a wider column describing the given financial item and two thinner columns recording the item's cost and the date of the transaction. Of the book’s 120 pages, sixty-six were filled with entries, all written in the same masculine cursive script that wasn’t terribly challenging to decipher.
Most of the entries in the item description column appeared to be farming- or ranching-related equipment and services. Expense figures were preceded by a minus sign and included entries such as “55 lbs sorghum”, “barbed wire”, “HTL fertilizer”. Income items, marked with a plus, appeared less frequently and were limited to five types: three breeds of cattle (Weinstein, Mueller Steer, Dorsey) and two breeds of sheep (Moffit, Black Ear). All of the ledger's entries were dated between March 1985 and December 1992, a span of seven-and-a-half years.
The first two pages of ledger entries appeared completely innocuous, and if my perusal of its contents had ended there, the document would have raised few eyebrows. This, however, was not to be the case. Within five minutes of commencing my examination, the ledger revealed its first peculiarity. On the third page, amidst other routine jottings, the names of two men appeared. Rodrigo and Paulo were written in consecutive rows under item description. In the cost column each name was marked as a “$300” expense. This was, in itself, not out of the ordinary, since a ranch would clearly need to employ and pay ranch hands.
What was strange was that directly to the right of each man’s name, where the individual’s last name might have been listed, a rectangle of paper had been carefully cut away leaving a small hole. The smooth, meticulous nature of the cut suggested it was made with a razor blade. The two holes were of differing lengths as if created to efface last names with differing numbers of letters. I estimated, based on the scale of penmanship elsewhere, that Paulo’s last name was likely nine letters long, whereas Rodrigo’s was probably a much more succinct six.
The excised names were what transformed the document in my estimation from a mere curiosity into an object of darker significance. The deletions, I reasoned, could only be interpreted as an effort to hide something, in this case, the identity of a person since the commonality of the first names with no further information would make it very difficult to link them to particular individuals. Between the first ledger entries in March 1985 and those in December 1988, there were approximately fifty excised last names, each showing an expense figure between 100 and 600 dollars.
But then in late 1989 the pattern changed—and this is where the devil really is in the details. Two consecutive entries dated September 7 of that year showed the names Paco and Andres. However, the only notation in the cost column was the symbol 0, executed with a diagonal slash through the middle of the 0, dollar sign omitted. If the cost column in fact showed what each worker was paid, then Paco and Andres, one was tempted to infer, had been paid nothing. After November 2, 1989, not one of the remaining thirty-six names in the ledger showed a cost figure.
The owner of the ranch, whoever that might have been, had either stumbled on an abundant pool of volunteer laborers or something was amiss. Inspecting the document further, even gloomier patterns began to assert themselves. In 1990, the ledger shows twelve names with the zero notation—unpaid workers. And yet, each of these names was still marked with a transaction date: November 1, 1990. What can this transaction date refer to, I asked myself, when no payment was made? An event, perhaps, which made the payment of the workers no longer necessary. A queasy, quicksand feeling was beginning to take hold of my stomach.
The next year, the exact pattern repeated itself to the day. Twelve zeroed-out workers, this time with a transaction date of November 1, 1991. By now the wheels were turning. My mind, suspicious as it's disposed to be by nature and the training of my vocation, began to conjure bleak scenarios of what might have become of these twenty-four unpaid souls and of what menacing annual event fell on that pair of November 1st dates.
Of course, an optimist could wrangle out some harmless hypothesis that involved no loss of life or limb—the ranch owner could have covertly reported all his workers to immigration authorities and had them deported—but, no, I was bent on more macabre divinations. A conviction which, I believe, the ledger's final pages lend credence to. But I'll let the facts speak for themselves. In the year 1992, the ranch employed a third group of twelve workers. However, unlike the years 1990 and 1991, many of
the name entries show neither the zero notation, nor any transaction date. In fact, only two names, Fernando and Esteban, bear the dour null symbol (and, in both cases, a transaction date of 10/2/92). The other ten names show only blanks in both the second and third columns.
These gaps constitute the sole omissions of our otherwise assiduous bookkeeper. Indeed, price figures appear for other items up through the final page of entries. “Halloween costumes” -$117.38, “sprinkler heads” -$86.14, “foundational concrete, 10 200 lb bags” -141.87, “cleaning supplies” -32.16. Among such mundane notations, we have the final ten names: Ramon, Gregorio, Carlos, Mateo, Juan, Miguel, Jorge, Marcos, Arturo, and Raul. Each name preceding two vacant and grave rectangles.
If I still haven't foreclosed the possibility of a happy ending, let me point to a last fact. On the final two pages of ledger entries, pages sixty-five and sixty-sixty, one can observe quite distinctly, indeed, one might feel put upon if asked to overlook them—six dark red droplets. These dollops are of varying sizes and shapes and are dispersed in a splattery paisley pattern. If you went to the trouble of forensically analyzing them, you would no doubt determine that they are human blood. The Type O blood of a Hispanic female.
And that's it. That's the case in chief against this dubious bean counter and this unnamed and unnamable cattle ranch.
But I've dwelled too long on this ledger business. It's no more than a pastime really, since despite my most diligent efforts, I've yet to link the volume to any real ranch past or present. Nor have I connected the records to any crimes or any missing persons from the years in question. The excised last names and the lack of other identifiable material has, so far, thwarted my investigative ingenuities. The matter is, therefore, not even an open case. It is too immaterial to even call it a matter. It is, merely, a conundrum.
Whatever you call it, it's certainly burrowed its way into my head, as insidiously as any golf course gopher. It's hard not to think about this eerie, unknown cattle ranch or what unsavory fates may have cancelled those forty-three zeroed-out workers. Visions of these things bump and rattle endlessly about my brain like some klutzy, personal poltergeist. And then there's perhaps the most disquieting question: why was it left on my doorstep?