by Ian Ballard
Courtney’s scream. A weak, gurgling scream.
Looking down, I see I’ve stabbed her several times. In the throat. With the knife. There's a lot of blood.
I do it again and her incredulous eyes watch as the blade goes in. She’s muted now. Moving in slow motion like she’s running out of batteries.
She reaches out toward me. Her silent mouth opening and closing. I don’t know what she’s reaching for.
I wish she could tell me what she’s reaching for. If there’s something she’s reaching for in her final moment that could give her some kind of comfort, I could at least do that for her.
But then I realize she’s reaching for my hand. I think she’s reaching for my hand.
As her eyes begin to glaze over, I reach out and take her hand.
22
Mexico
When I wake the next morning in my hotel, the ledger's sitting beside me on the nightstand. It's open to the pages with the blood drops and the twelve first names. I must have taken it out of my briefcase in last night's tearful stupor—no doubt to ponder its connection to all that's happened. My eyes linger for a moment on the blue cursive writing and the razor blade cutouts where the last names should be.
I must have put it there, but for the life of me I don't remember doing so.
They talk about losing yourself in grief. That must have been literally true for me last night. It was like my memory's record button was switched off and I didn't register a thing. But I'm not going to get bent out of shape about it. After all, in my life I'm accustomed to dealing with much larger gaps.
On the coffee table next to the ledger is the photo of Lisa and me. I say 'the photo' because it's the only one there is. Back then, I was so caught up in what was happening, I never stopped to take any pictures. And of course, I didn't know we'd only have six weeks together. In the picture, we're in the back of a car. Heading downtown. Lisa's friend pointed the camera at us from the passenger's seat. Just hours before our first kiss. I study our eyes. Was there some hint of darkness in them even then? Some glimmer of premonition that sensed all that was to come?
The photo's a survivor. It's been enduring for more than a decade now, scraping by in a slew of inhospitable wallets. I had to snip off the sides and a bit of the bottom—so it would fit in the plastic picture flaps—but other than that, it's unscathed. Its existence seems subversive now. Like holding up a candle to a great darkness. I grab my wallet and slide the photo back into its place.
After I've pulled myself together, I walk up to the station. As soon as I'm past security, I run into Detective Luna who tells me the day's first bit of news. Yesterday afternoon around 4 p.m., Pedro Gonzalez, a.k.a. suspect number one, shot himself in the face. As it happened, he ducked out early from his shift at the Purina plant. Thus, he wouldn't have been around to meet us even if Silva and I had shown up.
When an officer dropped by Gonzalez's residence this morning, he found the front door wide open and Gonzalez sans brains in a Barcalounger in the living room. Laying on the floor a few feet away was a .38 caliber revolver with Gonzalez's fingerprints on it. In the garage, the officer discovered the body of a prostitute stuffed in a garbage can. She'd been strangled about thirty-six hours prior. The medical examiner set Gonzalez's time of death at 5:00 p.m.—two hours before Lisa's body was returned to the dune. Suspect number one was, therefore, not Ropes, and whatever murders Gonzalez was guilty of were almost certainly unrelated to the dune killings.
When I get to my loner cubicle in the homicide division, there's a slip of red paper taped to my desk. It's from Detective Ochoa and says “Autopsy report on female victim complete.” I know this pertains to Lisa, but my response is blunted now. As if the torrent of grief last night on the dune had exhausted, for a time, my capacity for further sorrow.
I leave my cubicle to track down the report. After a few minutes meandering through District C's mazy corridors, I come to a set of double doors above which are written the words 'Coroner's Office.' Inside is a waiting room and a window with a secretary sitting behind it. I tell her what I'm looking for and she gives a nod. Her fingers walk across an open filing cabinet, and she passes me a sealed manila envelope through a cutout in the bottom of the glass.
I thank her and return to my hotel with the report. I want to be alone when reviewing it, in case my sorrows choose to reassert themselves.
In my room, I slice open the envelope with my pocket knife and pull out the paper clipped report inside, setting it in the middle of the desk. My hands tremble a bit as I touch the document's gray pages. The report has four pages in all—a cover page, two pages of medical description, and a one-page toxicology report. The cover page refers to Lisa only as “white female” since no one other than Silva and I is aware of her identity.
A color photograph is paper-clipped to the top right corner of the second page. When I saw her last night, I didn't look that closely at her. I couldn't bring myself to. But the time's passed for the comforts of such evasions, and I unclip the photo and force myself to gaze at it. Her face is a white oval and the empty sockets are dark holes—like a mask from some Greek tragedy. A red sediment stains her cheeks. The residue of what flowed from her eyes. A few grains of sand still cling to her skin and to the wispy hair of her eyebrows.
My gaze lingers on the empty sockets. Around the edges, you can still see the lashes. Some of them are bent and broken. It's always the eyes we make the scapegoats of our affections. I wrote a poem about this pair once. Now this is all that's left. A pair of ransacked circles.
Finally, I flip the photo over and start reading the medical description. The top of the page says “Autopsy Report of Unidentified White Female Recovered from Neruda Dune, January 17, 2011.”
The cause of death is listed as “dehydration and exposure.” As I wade slowly through the descriptions of her injuries, I try my best just to focus on the meaning of the words without visualizing all they imply. On the first two pages there's not much that wasn't evident from my and Silva's cursory examination at the scene. However, the third page contains a sentence which stops me dead in my tracks. I feel my brow wrinkle as I read the eighteen words over again.
Examination of the pelvic region indicates that the victim had given birth at some point in the past.
My mind's blank for a moment. No thoughts. Just an at-sea feeling. . . .
That's something I never expected to learn from an autopsy report. Something that never would have crossed my mind in a million years. But it's no big deal. Doesn't seem to merit whatever this feeling is that's taking hold of me.
An image of a pregnant Lisa pops into my mind. Hands resting on an exposed and bulging abdomen. Like something from the cover of Cosmopolitan magazine.
Now something akin to jealousy mingles and meddles with my thoughts. Of course, that's ludicrous. She's dead and he's a stranger. And besides that, I should be glad she found someone who made her happy.
Thinking now about those few euphoric weeks I spent with her. And about how she skipped town.
There was someone she hadn't run away from. Someone she shared everything with. All the little pieces of a life. All those Sunday mornings that just barely slipped through my fingers. Golden curls spread out on the pillow beside me.
The other thing is that there's a kid somewhere. A kid who's an orphan now. And a husband, maybe, who's now a widower.
I read the report again, start to finish. Then a third time. Don't know what I'm looking for. Meanwhile, my mind keeps replaying old events. The handful of nights we spent together. How open ended everything was when she left. Not just with us, our relationship or whatever it was, but with matters of more practical significance. The thing is that we never used protection. I bought her a morning-after pill once, but she said she wasn't going to take it. I hoped she was serious, but thought she was joking.
Midway through the fourth read, the thought presents itself in earnest. Of course it's a ridiculous thing to think—I mean, what are the odds that some
thing like that could have happened without me ever hearing about it? But the thought keeps buzzing around in my brain like a pesky fly you just can't shoo away.
And it's the kind of thought that changes everything.
God, what a thought.
23
Washington, DC
Agent Quentin Bloom was sitting at his desk when a knock came at his office door.
“Come in,” he said and Cindy, his shy and mousy secretary, appeared and tiptoed over with an armful of mail.
There might have been twenty items in all, which was on par with the average daily bombardment. Most would be profiling requests—some from within the Bureau and some from state and local law enforcement. Bloom looked forward to the task of reviewing such correspondence, providing, as it did, a brief break from his interminable work as lead profiler on the Handyman case.
Among the pile of FedEx and UPS packages Cindy handed him, Bloom spied a couple of gold-and-brown DHL envelopes. A DHL label meant the package came from outside the country—either a communication from an agent on assignment abroad or an entreaty from police in some faraway land seeking advice on a particularly baffling crime. Such international matters tended to be more urgent and more intriguing than standard domestic fare, so Bloom pulled these two out first.
The top DHL envelope, postmarked Manchester, England, was of the “baffling crime” type. The police wanted help on a case where bits of human bone (along with a great deal of acidic sludge) had clogged up the sewage pipes beneath a huge and overcrowded tenement house in the middle of the city. The building housed four thousand residents, which was making it difficult to figure out who'd been flushing human remains down the toilet. The case sounded interesting, but when Bloom saw the letter was accompanied by a fifty-page brief, he decided to set that one aside till after his first cup of coffee.
Bloom now grabbed the second DHL envelope, hoping it pertained to pithier matters. The postmark read Juárez, Mexico—hopefully, it wasn't in Spanish. Opening it up, he was relieved to find that not only was everything written in English but also that the envelope contained nothing more than a three-page letter and a few crime scene snapshots. Pictures went well with his not-quite-awake brain, so he looked at these first.
No sooner had he glanced at the first image than his lips began to mutter hushed explicatives. “What the. . . .”
For several seconds he just stared in complete bewilderment. The subject of the picture was clear enough—a pair of mutilated legs with the feet cut off—but how such an image had come to be in the first place was mystifying. Bloom’s stupefaction was based on the presence of the yellow rope binding the victim's legs. Such rope had absolutely no business in a photograph taken in Mexico. There was no mistaking it. This was Cattleman No. 4, the exact same type the Handyman killer used to bind the wrists of his eleven victims. What's more, the rope appeared to be tied into a three-point lasso, the same knot used by Handyman as well.
And speaking of knots, Bloom’s stomach was suddenly full of them. Was he looking at another Handyman victim, two thousand miles removed from the prior kill zone?
Surely not. Here the feet had been removed, which would seem to be a very different MO. And yet the similarities were unmistakable.
Bloom flipped quickly through the other photos.
Close-up of blonde woman, no eyes.
Close-up of male torso, no head.
Pile of discarded belongings.
Close-up of severed female foot.
Panorama of bowl-shaped desert landscape with multiple headless bodies.
What the hell was going on?
It felt like he'd just walked into a surprise party thrown by all his worst enemies.
He loosened his tie, then grabbed the letter that had come along with the package and began to skim it.
“No fucking way,” he muttered midway through.
It was a request for profiling assistance from a Bureau agent collaborating with local Mexican detectives on a case in Juárez. Bloom wasn't aware the Bureau was even involved in this, though he had heard of the case—the Monster of Juárez. Of course, he’d heard of it. It was infamous. He'd followed the newspaper articles for years, though he’d never heard the moniker Ropes till now. Clearly the Mexican cops had withheld a lot of details. There'd never been a word in the press about victims being bound or about the missing feet.
He returned to the notion he'd dismissed as impossible at first blush. Could this be the Handyman killer? Maybe these recent eleven murders in the US were the work of Ropes on sabbatical. Maybe he'd just changed his pattern a bit, so no one would make the connection. But just seconds after Bloom formed that hypothesis, a paragraph near the bottom of the letter dispelled the notion.
The enclosed photos were taken yesterday in the Neruda Dune near the city of Juárez. The victims died over an eight- or ten-hour time span on the night of January 15th and morning of January 16th.
January 15th was the same day the Handyman had abducted and murdered Jessica Davis in Boulder, Colorado. She'd sent her last text message around 11 p.m., and the killer was seen leaving the crime scene at 6 a.m. on the morning of the 16th. Even allowing for jet travel, it was physically impossible that one person could have committed both crimes.
“There's two of them,” Bloom whispered.
Then he looked up Agent Radley's contact information and picked up the phone and dialed.
Part Two
Ranch
Hands
24
El Paso, 1992
The sun had just set. An eager darkness seemed to swarm into the space the orange dusk had left behind—you could almost see it thickening before your eyes. Raul and his father sat on the ring of stones that encircled the small fire. They rubbed their hands together, warming themselves. The twigs crackled and yellow flames lashed about like eager tongues, while upturned and wavering shadows clung to each bristle of his father's unshaven chin.
They were alone, more or less. Most of the other workers were already getting ready for bed. Raul couldn't hear them from where he was, but he could see their figures moving about in the narrow windows of the bunkhouse. His father was talking about something back in Zacatecas. A wedding they would attend at the end of summer after their stint on Glattmann Ranch was done.
It was right at that moment when Raul first noticed the problem.
He interrupted his father, tugging at his sleeve with one hand and pointing toward the horizon with the other. “Mira, Papi!”
His father turned and looked. A pair of red tail lights seemed to hover in the distance. A moment later they vanished as the Ford passed over a hill somewhere near the ranch's western edge.
“Qué ves, mi hijo?” his father asked, as if he attached no importance to what he'd seen.
“You saw it, didn’t you?” Raul's voice lowered to a whisper.
“What is it I'm supposed to have seen?”
“The truck. It turned the wrong way.”
He didn't know why his father was so slow to catch on. The red Ford had just disappeared over the western hill. The red Ford with Gary behind the wheel and Fernando and Esteban stowed away in the hidden compartment.
Raul knew Gary was supposed to be driving them across the border and dropping them off in Juárez. If that's where they were going, the truck needed to turn left and exit at the main gate. But where the dirt road forked, the truck had turned right. That route would only lead them to the back corner of the ranch, where there was nothing but vacant pastureland and a red barn no one ever used. Since the property was surrounded by barbed wire fences on all sides and the gate was the only way in and out, Fernando and Esteban weren't getting to Juárez unless the truck doubled back.
His father's doubtful expression showed that he didn't share his son's concern over the wrong turn. Raul was about to press the issue when suddenly, he realized they were not alone.
Behind them, not far away, stood a dim silhouette. A woman. It had to be Emilia, Gary's live-in housekeeper. Sh
e was the only woman living on the ranch. Raul didn't know her well, but he'd heard she was from Juárez, an illegal like themselves. In her hands she held a basket of laundry. She must have just pulled it off the line and been passing by. But something had made her stop. Raul saw that she, too, was gazing at the horizon right about where the truck had disappeared. She must have overheard what he just said to his father. For a moment the three of them shared an awkward silence, watching the empty skyline.
In the near darkness, Raul couldn't make out the expression on Emilia's face. Then, without a word, she turned and headed off toward the main house.
When she was out of earshot, his father spoke. “Mi hijo, you worry too much. You think everything you can't explain is out to get you.”
Raul said nothing, not wishing to argue with his father. But the bad feeling in his gut persisted. And the more he turned things over in his mind, the worse that feeling got. . . .
He understood pretty well how things worked around the ranch. Laborers, he and his father included, were smuggled across the border in the hidden compartment beneath the flatbed of Gary's truck. The compartment could only hold two people, so workers arrived in pairs, the ride over being part of the deal. Raul's father said the pay wasn’t great, but it was fair. Fifteen hundred bucks paid in cash the day your three-month stint was through. The same deal for everybody and when the ninety days were up, the workers left, two by two, either heading back to Mexico or moving on to look for higher wages elsewhere in the States.
Today had been the end of Fernando’s and Esteban’s ninety days. Their last day on the ranch—one of the facts that wasn't sitting well with Raul. Earlier in the afternoon, the two men had said their good-byes to the other workers and hiked down with all their things to the main house. They’d then spent an hour or two helping Gary put up drywall in the garage, so none of the other workers were on hand when they departed. It was just by chance, or perhaps because he was always a little bit wary of things, that Raul had even noticed.