Total Victim Theory

by Ian Ballard

  Someday there will be answers, but not today.

  I lock the ledger in the oversized briefcase I bought especially to accommodate its ungainly proportions. With a click, it's out of sight and if I'm disciplined enough, will remain out of mind. At the moment there's a bigger fish nibbling at the line. A bigger, badder fish called Ropes, who we've got to catch before we can fry.

  4

  Colorado

  My Aunt Pat hands me a toothbrush and a neatly folded towel and then hugs me. We're standing in the hall outside the spare bedroom. “Everything's going to be okay, Nicki,” she whispers, mid-embrace. “You know you're safe here.”

  “I know I am,” I say.

  The hug concludes and she gives my arm a squeeze. “If you need anything, just holler.” A brief hesitation. “Well, maybe don't holler,” she gestures toward the back door, where one of the officers is standing guard. “They might not like that. But if you need anything, I'm right upstairs.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Sleep tight, honey.”

  “You too,” I say.

  Inside the bedroom, I close the door, set the towel and toothbrush on the nightstand, and sit down on the bed. I take off my glasses and rub my temples with my fingertips. It's crazy—just yesterday I was back home at a bar in Pampa doing Jaeger Bombs with old friends and trying to count the calories in a basket of chili cheese fries.

  What a difference a day makes.

  I glance around me at the room. It used to be Betsy’s before she moved in with her boyfriend. She's my pathologically peppy cousin. The photos of her beaming smile all around me on the walls seem out of place at the present moment. The room's like a time capsule of her senior year of high school. A pair of red pom poms rests on her bureau. Beside that, a purple retainer case, open just enough to give a glimpse of the metal skeleton that's still inside. Over the bed, a poster board collage of her life. A gleeful barrage of pep rallies and slumber parties, along with images of an oversized orange cat named Roger, who I just saw asleep on the dining room table.

  The police brought me here about an hour ago. Here being a suburb of Denver called Thornton. My aunt and I aren't super close, but she’s my only relative in Colorado and they had to take me somewhere. Obviously my apartment wasn't an option. A Mickey Mouse clock on the wall says 10:32 p.m. It's been sixteen hours since I found Jessica. Since I opened that bathroom door and saw her there.

  God, Jessica . . . where are you now? Are you looking down on me from some angelic ledge? Or is it all just black? It's hard to wrap your head around it. So many little things that will never happen again. Laying out by the pool with you. Splitting a frozen pizza. Sharing a hangover on a Sunday morning. And I was a bitch to you sometimes. For stupid stuff like playing your dubstep too loud or for eating my food out of the refrigerator when you had the munchies. I'm sorry I was like that, Jessica.

  Two tears fall on the pink bedspread, and the spots darken into red. I wipe away the tears and pull my hair back and put it in a scrunchie. I'd forgotten what these first stunned hours are like.

  It's been a while.

  I talked to six detectives today. And a psychiatrist and a portrait artist and a doctor and a pair of forensic CSI lab guys. And I’m still supposed to meet an FBI profiler tomorrow morning. The two Boulder cops are staying here overnight, one by the front door, one by the back. Guarding against the risk that something bad will happen. That the guy will come back.

  I’m just going to call him Chris, whatever his real name turns out to be. He could be a Chris. Chris is kind of an open-ended name. They can be good or evil. And I can’t just call him “the killer” or “the Handyman” the way the police do. That only works when someone’s a complete stranger. Not when you’ve spent five or ten minutes nose to nose with him. Close enough to touch him, to smell him.

  I realize now that rusty smell on him was her blood. It makes me sick. Maybe his pants were drenched with it and I was too drowsy and out of it from the drive for it to register. Or maybe the scent was wafting off her hands—they must have been right there in his backpack. I picture them. Blue and clammy and with purple fingernails and wrapped up in toilet paper. Were the fingertips shriveled up like prunes from all that time he kept her in the water?

  Suddenly I've made myself afraid. And not in a vague way, like the universe is a scary place. And not in a sad way, like for Jessica, but in a here and now way, like I'm shivering. I walk over to the window, crack the blinds, and peek out into the yard. I can’t see anything except the light from my room reflected in the glass. The fact is he's out there—maybe somewhere not far away—and there's nothing between him and me but empty space, a couple of sleepy cops and a flimsy pane of glass. There's a narrow gap around the edge of the blinds that shows a little sliver of the window on one side. It's big enough that someone could peek in, if they had binoculars. Or if they were standing right outside. I pull the blinds slightly to the left to try to cover it up, but the gap just reappears on the other side. There's no way to get rid of it.

  Chill out, Nicole. There's no one out there. There are cops here, just a few feet away. Like Aunt Pat just said, you’re safe here. I turn away from the window and try not to think about it. There’s a leftover tear or two drying on my cheeks. This was the first time I let myself cry since it happened. All day I wanted to so badly. To just stop and drop and curl up into a catatonic ball. But I didn't want any of the cops to see that. To know what I was feeling. That's between me and Jessica.

  It wasn't easy staying dry eyed. All day pictures of her wanted to spring into my mind. Over and over again, they'd pop up, but I just kept smacking them back down. Playing Whac-A-Mole like my life depended on it. The same technique I’ve been using for years, only today I was applying it to a new outbreak of vermin. Speaking of which—I'm not telling the police about Gunnison. It has nothing to do with what happened to Jessica.

  More pictures flash before my eyes. Not of Jessica, but of that day seven years ago. Bloodshot eyes flickering in the firelight. The yellow teeth. And then, finally, the blade going into him, soft as a pillow. My throat constricts and for a moment I can hardly breathe.

  I grab the mallet and make them go away. Whack, whack, whack. Make my mind silent again.

  My breathing slows.

  Yeah—I'm not as normal as I pretend to be. Wish to God I were, but I don't think it's in the cards.

  Just now I remember the glasses—speaking of abnormal behavior. Another pang of panic, as I slowly, skittishly open my purse and reach inside. I'm holding my breath as my hand blindly fumbles around. There they are. I pull them out and hold them at arm's length by an unfolded bow. My hands are sweaty on the plastic. These are the Buddy Holly ones Chris left on my nose this morning. I stare at them with a sort of terrified reverence. As if they had the power to conjure him like a magic lamp and he might suddenly plop down, cocky and cross-legged, on the corner of the bed.

  Not turning the glasses in probably makes me like an accessory or something. No pun intended.

  I didn't really mean to. I just sort of forgot about them with all the hurly burly—

  Well, that's not exactly true. I kept them on purpose.

  Shit. That's really bad.

  I don't know why I did it, actually. I really couldn't say. Regardless, I guess it’s too late now. I can't just go to the cops tomorrow and say “Oh, by the way, I forgot about these.” If I did that, I’d have to tell how I got them—“I'm a sucker for guys with glasses” and all that flirty stuff I left out. I don't want everyone from the Boulder PD to the CIA thinking I’m insane. Or worse, that I'm infatuated with a killer.

  Besides, I’m sure he left plenty of other evidence at the scene. Fingerprints, bodily fluids. All that stuff. They're not going to need the glasses to catch him. And the fact is, what’s done is done and can’t be undone. That's from Macbeth. The play Chris quoted on the stairs, after he played dumb about my Hamlet reference.

  Once I had this professor—I think it was my intro to
theater class—who said that everything that can happen in life corresponds to the plot of one of Shakespeare’s plays. If you can figure out which one applies to you, you’ll have a good idea what’s going to happen next. After today, Macbeth has to get bumped to the top of the list. At least we can narrow it down to one of the tragedies, with all the blood and foreboding symbols. Hopefully, it will turn out to be one of his masterpieces. If things have to end badly, I’d at least like them to end beautifully.

  I bring the glasses close to my face and peer through the clear lenses. It's freaky. Two people with the same secret. It's coincidences like that that make you think things happen for a reason. And I don't want to be selfish—I mean, my thoughts should be with Jessica—but it's hard not to think about how close I came to sharing a spot on her cloudy ledge, and it's hard not to wonder why it didn't happen to me. The guy's a monster. I’m not forgetting that. He drowned her in a fucking bathtub. He held her head underwater until she was dead. But he did those things to her and he chose not to do them to me and there’s some reason for it.

  I’m not going to claim there was “good” in him. I'm not that sappy. But I think people are better than the worst things they do, just like they’re often worse than their best. Everybody has to have at least some tiny possibility of choosing to change, whoever they are and whatever happened before. Long sigh . . . maybe I'm just too damn optimistic. How am I ever going to hack it in this tragic role the universe wants to cast me in? I'll probably be trying to sneak my way into of Comedy Errors around Act V, when the shit's hitting the fan and being doomed doesn’t seem that glamorous anymore.

  I should get some sleep. I slip the Buddy Holly glasses back into my purse and close it. Then I brush my teeth and change into a pair of Betsy's Snoopy pajamas that I find in her bureau. I lay down on the bed, but I'm still wide awake, so I get out my iPod and listen to some tunes. Before long I’m starting to nod off and I switch off the music.

  As I pull out my earbuds, I hear a soft buzzing noise close to me. Like there's a bumble bee trapped under a book. The sound makes me flinch—my nerves are still on edge—but then I see it's just my cell phone next to me on the nightstand. I'd put the ringer on silent mode when I was in the police station earlier, so it would just vibrate.

  There's an incoming call. I take the phone in my hand.

  As I see what’s flashing on the screen, I give a gasp and nearly hurl the phone across the room.

  It says that Jessica's calling.

  5

  US-Mexico Border

  Waiting in a line of cars at the border.

  I’ve passed the American side and am in that narrow strip of no man's land that leads to the Mexican point of entry. A dozen lanes of traffic are being patiently swallowed up by the evenly spaced border guard stations. My Explorer's somewhere in the middle. A Bureau vehicle with Texas tags and a Mexican registration sticker, so I can cross over and back without much fuss.

  The Bureau office I‘ve been working out of is in El Paso, but most of the bad stuff happens across the river in Juárez.

  If the border is the holy land of depravity, Juárez is its Mecca. A clearing-house for all the vile things people dream up to do to one another. A convergence of negative possibilities that, in its least becoming moments, starts to look a lot like hell. Picture factories, pollution, honking cars, garbage, maggots and everything cast in a dim red glow. But it's not so much the details that capture it as it is the sinking feeling it gives you in your gut.

  The desert that surrounds the city is where the bodies turn up. It’s a giant dumping ground that’s liable to put graveyards out of business. Men, women, children, and anything else that will die. Shot, stabbed, strangled, cut into pieces. Dream up the most heinous deed you can devise, and chances are it's already happened a hundred times. The cops probably have a code word for it. Oh, looks like another “stick job” or a “black mass” or one of the desert's other routine abominations. In the two decades since people started counting, over three thousand bodies have littered these damp and unhallowed sands.

  Sometimes I think about all those dead eyes. How, if you were up above the desert after dark and all the bodies were laid out at once, the ground might twinkle like the night sky. A vast, murdered constellation.

  Obviously one person didn’t do all that. The city’s hosted a thousand murderers with as many motives. Drug cartels. Gangland executions. Pimps killing pimps in the sex trade. Cab drivers killing their fares. Johns killing hookers. Shift operators killing workers at the maquiladoras. Thieves killing tourists, after they’ve picked their pockets—because why not? Everyone else is doing it. Murder's just the industry standard here. If you're a victim, you've got the right to expect it of your assailant.

  Among the city's homicidal residents were a few serial murderers, their crimes hidden in the sprawling camouflage of other corpses. The authorities in Juárez weren’t big on criminal databases until about ten years back, so it took a while to start connecting the dots. But once they sifted through the records, patterns emerged. Police detected six distinct MOs that triangulated back to a half dozen lethal individuals. After a sustained effort by the Juárez PD over a seven-year period, five of these six offenders were eventually apprehended.

  One, however, was not. This perpetrator, identified early on because of his highly recognizable MO, was thought responsible for a large number of deaths. The killer would bind his victims with cattle rope, always tied with a distinctive slip knot called a “narrow lariat.” The killer, dubbed “the Monster of Juárez” by the press, and referred to as “Ropes” by authorities internally, remains active and at large.

  For the last six months, the FBI—the Border Crimes Unit in particular—has been collaborating with the Juárez PD on the Ropes' apprehension effort. So it is to Ropes and his latest desert offering that I owe the pleasure of tonight's visit.

  I hear the sound of idling engines. Lines of red taillights in the darkness. It's slow going at the moment. The guards must have decided to be sticklers tonight.

  I catch a glimpse of my face in the rearview mirror. I can just make out the scars in the dim interior. The patch of twisted skin on my throat that's always reminded me of pizza dough and my right ear, mottled and half missing and hardly recognizable as an ear at all.

  And there's more where that came from. There's the swath of scar tissue that covers most of my right hand. Then, there's the big daddy—a two-inch-wide circle just below the crown of my head that's ever-so-slightly caved in. A little crater that marks where my skull was crushed.

  Now’s probably as good a time as any to fill you in on a few pertinent details about me. You can't really get the big picture, unless you know about the past. About who I am and who I'm not and about this handicap of mine.

  So let’s go back a ways.

  I’m thirty-five years old. At least that’s how old my body is. You could argue that I'm only twenty, if you're going by the age of my mind. And the issue isn’t emotional maturity, it's about how you measure lifetimes. You see, the first fifteen years of my life are as gone and forgotten as if they never were.

  March 17, 1993, was the day I was born for all practical purposes—I actually consider it my birthday since I've no way of knowing when the real one was. That was the day I woke up from a five-and-a-half-month coma in a hospital bed in Bethesda, Maryland, my body tangled amid the tubes and tentacles of beeping machines. When I opened my eyes, it so shocked the nurse on duty, she almost knocked over an IV stand. I heard the electronic replica of my pulse accelerate.

  Soon doctors gathered around. Leaning in, jabbering away in doctor speak. I, understanding nothing, greeted all queries with blank stares. A strand of drool surely dangled off my chin. At that moment, I had no idea who I was, where I was, or how I’d gotten there. No one was ever in more dire need of an intro to philosophy class than I.

  Two nurses plopped me in a wheelchair and whisked me to the bathroom so I could take the first real whiz my body had been treated
to in half a year. En route, they rolled me past a mirror. I would have pissed myself with shock, had I remembered how. Staring back was a bandaged-up Mexican kid I‘d never seen before. He looked as battered and bewildered as I felt. My heart went out to the poor kid.

  For the first few months my brain didn't work right. Not that it was broken, but all the software had to be reinstalled from scratch. I didn’t really think about much, at least not in the way we adults think. I just existed, like an infant, in a state of perpetual incomprehension. Trying to wrap my head around the big issues: time and space and how my pee-pee worked. They figured out I could understand Spanish, though I rarely said much in any language. At most I would offer single-syllable croaks, like a reticent bullfrog.

  One blurry memory stands out from those early days. It happened about two weeks after I woke up. Someone called me in the hospital. The nurse put the phone on my food tray. There was a man on the line speaking Spanish. He said he was a police officer. He kept asking about “the fire” and what I remembered. He must have eventually tired of my uninformative grunts because, after repeating his questions three or four times, he hung up. I never heard from him again.

  My rehabilitation was slow. They put me with a Spanish-speaking physical therapist named Lucinda. It was Lucinda who started calling me Jake because my hospital wristband was blank, and they needed to call me something. I guess she watched a soap opera that had a character by that name. I picture him as a broad-shouldered, brawny specimen of manhood, without physical defects of any kind. A person very much unlike me, but a person I would have been delighted to become.

  I grew rather fond of the name. It always struck me as very normal, without resonance or reminder of my erased past, as might have been the case if they'd called me Raul or Gabriel or anything Mexican sounding. I suppose most of the crucial things in life are arbitrary. And it doesn’t matter what a thing is, but only how tenderly you embrace it that makes it your own. And so, I'm Jake.