Total Victim Theory (29 page)

“Did it ever happen?”

I stand up, walk over to the window, and peek out through the curtains. A view of some rolling hills and a few rusted-out cars on a neighboring property. “No. It didn't happen yet.”

“Jake—” Danielle says.

“Yeah?”

“I think she was your soul mate.”

I sit back down on the edge of the bed and begin putting my
shoes on. “I think she probably was too.”

Danielle scoots close and pats me on the shoulder.

I look away, not wanting her to see the sadness on my face. “Let’s get ready, Danielle. We need to hit the road.”

“Okay.” She stands up and starts putting her shoes on as well. “Dad—I mean Jake—can I ask you one other thing?”

I smile. “You can ask me as many other things as you want. But it doesn’t mean I’ll know the answer.”

“Don’t dads have to know the answers?”

“I’m not sure. I’ve only known I was a dad for a few hours. But what’s the question?”

“Do you think a person could love someone they never saw?”

I draw a deep breath. “Anything’s possible.”

“Well, if it’s possible, I think I’ll love Lisa too.”

I run my hand through her hair. “And how do you plan on doing that, since she’s not around?” For a second, I get a sense of déjà vu. Like I’m looking into Lisa’s eyes again. Danielle’s are so similar.

“Easy. You have to tell me all your stories about her. Tell me all the things that made you love her. And if you do a good enough job and don't forget any of the details, I’ll be able to fall in love with her too.”

“It's a deal.” We shake on it. “What do you want to know first?”

A pause. “Can you tell me why she went away?”

36

El Paso, 1992

Good help was so hard to find, thought Gary, as he pulled the knife out of Emilia’s chest. Her body lay on its back in front of the desk. The ledger was next to her on the floor, opened up to a page that revealed some of his handwritten entries. Leaving the keys out for her to grab had been a set-up. Once she’d gone into the study without permission and looked at his passport, her trustworthiness had to be tested. Obviously, she'd failed the test.

This situation illustrated well one of the problems with wetbacks. They had an inborn tendency toward nosiness. Always fucking worried about everyone else’s business. And suspicious too, with that skeptical squint they always had in their eyes, like they didn’t quite know how, but they were sure you were trying to pull a fast one on them. And to think when he was growing up, people used to say they were gullible.

Try as he might, he’d never been able to cultivate much sympathy for that crew. Dirty, nosy, and stupid didn’t exactly tug at the heartstrings. And the way he saw it, they'd gotten themselves into this mess anyway. If they were so dimwitted as to let themselves get duped, then they deserved the consequences. That was just natural selection in action, and he didn’t need to apologize for being its local agent in El Paso County.

Not that their stupidity meant his job was always easy. There were always unexpected twists you couldn't plan for. In the twelve years he'd been in business, things had gotten hairy maybe a half dozen times. But not once had a close call ever materialized into a legal entanglement. And wasn't that the true measure of risk
management? Some of the credit for that perfect safety record had to go to Gary's meticulous nature. He wasn't one to brag, but he had a flare for organization. Perhaps you would even call it a gift.

Ever since his boyhood, Gary had been enthusiastic about record keeping. He loved receipts and keeping tabs on the change in his piggy bank. He’d prepared his parents' taxes when he was twelve years old. So, even if it were ill advised from a legal standpoint to record everything in the ledger, it was something he felt compelled to do. But worrying about evidence was for people who planned on getting caught. Negativity was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If people—cops or the media—ever did find out about this little operation of his, they'd probably focus on the killing. Blow that aspect of it all out of proportion. It wasn't really that big of a deal. It wasn’t even interesting at this point. Just a routine part of the operation to make ends meet. He'd certainly never enjoyed it, the way his older son always had. In fact, the only fun part about it was hearing their last words. And he had to confess he was something of a connoisseur of these quaint, final utterances. He collected them like stamps.

The things they would say in those last moments, when it dawned on them what was what, were fascinating. There was more truth in those shocked exclamations than in whole volumes of philosophy. Not truth they intended, but truth about the world. He didn’t like to brag, but his experiences on the ranch had probably made him one of the world’s leading experts on Mexican oaths—and who knows?—maybe on death itself.

Their main emotion in those final moments, aside from fear, was outrage. The irony always seemed to escape them that they were all liars and cheats themselves who would have done the same goddamn thing to him if only they’d have thought of it first. But hypocrisy was a quality humans possessed in infinite reserves. It didn't dry up and blow away just because the shadow of death was suddenly looming over you.

*

Luke opened his door and saw his father standing there with a knife in one hand and a pair of oven mitts in the other. He was wearing the green apron Rose used to wear. The one that said
“World’s Best Mom.” There was now a bloody handprint right in the middle of it. It looked fake, like the kind kids make when they're finger painting.

Luke wondered why some details, like the oven mitts, hadn't shown up in Movie Time. Was his brain like a TV that got bad reception?

Gary took off the apron, walked into the bathroom next to the kitchen and closed the door. Luke heard the water go on.

He wanted to see what his father had done to Emilia. He wasn't sure why. Maybe because of what had just happened with Movie Time or maybe just because it was Emilia. His father probably wouldn't want him to, so he'd have to just sneak over and take a peek.

He could hear his father splashing water on himself and making sniffling and grunting sounds. There was a lot of blood, and Gary was always real careful about cleaning everything up, so maybe Luke would have a minute or two. He walked over to the study and after a moment's hesitation, slipped inside.

There she was. Laying on her back in front of the desk. Her white nightgown soaked through with red. So bloody it made the cloth lay tight against the shape of her body. Almost like one of those wet T-shirt contests he’d seen on MTV
Spring Break
. There were ten or twelve deep knife slits scattered across her chest. They went up as high as her collarbone and down as low as her stomach.

The gown had a hummingbird on the front. A couple of the slits made holes through its colorful body. Luke reached out and ran his fingers over the small pierced bird.

He looked at her throat, expecting to find two large slits there. In Movie Time, he'd seen two huge holes open up. Blood had been gushing out. But all he saw there now was brown unbusted skin. Where had the holes gone?

He ran his hand slowly across her face from her forehead to her chin, carefully, the way a blind person would. As if he were recording her expression with his fingertips, so he could remember.

Her eyes were closed. Like she'd been praying or didn’t want to watch. He opened them with his fingers. There were some beads of water along the bottom. Tears.

She was so empty. The energy that had moved the tiny muscles
in her face had all gone away.

He’d hoped when he looked at her, all the things he'd just felt in Movie Time would come back. But there was nothing left in her to feel. All the words—despair, terror, regret—whose true meanings she'd just taught him, felt as empty as her. As lifeless as a scrap of roadkill on the shoulder of the road.

Maybe the only way to really feel was to watch someone you cared about die in front of you.

Emilia’s arm was flung out to the side. Luke saw that her palm was crowded with slits where she’d tried to stop the knife. He had often held that hand. She would take his hand in hers when they’d walk somewhere. To the Loaf and Jug or the bus stop or the time they’d gone to the dog races. Sometimes she would grab it all the way around, and sometimes she would make the fingers interlace. She’d say it was to keep him safe. But sometimes she would hold his hand when they were just watching TV, without any reason at all.

The first time she’d done it, he’d looked at her, confused, and had pulled away. But later, when she’d reach for him, when her fingers would go between his, he wanted it. It made everything warm, inside and out, like tomato soup and a blanket. It felt like her hand could make them both invisible or make them float away like a magic carpet to another place. He didn’t want her fingers to ever undo. To ever let him go.

That gave Luke an idea.

He'd noticed in the past when he was drying off a drowned animal and putting back the pieces the way he'd found them, a weird thing would sometimes happen. Sometimes when he handled a cut-off paw or some other part, Movie Time would start up again.

True, it was a bit weaker and fuzzier than the live kind—sort of a knock-off version—but still Movie Time in spirit. Luke was so astonished the first time it happened he dropped the paw to the ground. Movie Time immediately stopped. He picked it up again. Again it started. He gripped the small paw in his hand, as thrilled as he was bewildered.

As he squatted next to Emilia’s body, Luke was staring at her hand. He pulled her arm toward him, carefully lined his fingers up with her fingers, her palm with his palm, and pressed their two
hands together. Like he'd hoped, touching her hand made everything light up in his mind like when she was dying. Even all the new thoughts and emotions that had never been there before. He was back on board that terrifying roller coaster. His insides trembled and twitched. A bit weaker maybe, but still amazing.

As he pressed his hand to hers, he knew there wasn’t much time. Gary could come in at any second. But he knew what he had to do.

He could keep Emilia near him, keep her alive in his mind, and at the same time, have a way to escape the grayness of his thoughts. To visit the pulsing wonderful universe she'd just shown him.

There was a way. But he’d have to be quick.

And he was going to need a knife.

37

Mexico

Danielle and I check out of the hotel around 9 a.m. and head east toward Juárez. A couple of hours later, we pull into a truck stop along the highway to grab a bite. Danielle seems to be in good spirits, all things considered. She shows a great affinity for chorizo tacos and Mexican ice cream. The ice cream tends to run down her chin. I embrace the role of monitoring these dribbles and wiping them off.

Attached to the restaurant part of the truck stop, there’s a small arcade with a few video games and some animal rides—the kind of ride kids cling to as if it were a horse, while the ride vibrates and jostles them about. There’s a duck, an alligator, and an elephant. Danielle crawls up on the duck and tells me to ride the alligator. I comply, despite looks of disapproval from several employees. After that, we play the game where you try to grab toys in an enclosed cube with a mechanical claw. Twice we have a large panda bear firmly in our grip, but at the last moment, it slips away and in the end, a terrible buzzer rings and we're left empty-handed.

While we’re at the truck stop, I buy a disposable phone and check my regular phone’s voice-mail. It’s been three days since I’ve been in contact with anyone from the Bureau, and I'm curious to find out how my employer is interpreting my absence. More importantly, I want to see if there’s anything to suggest I've been linked to the kidnapping.

The seven new messages are all business as usual, and nothing hints that I've been consigned to a fugitive status. However, the
second-to-last message is very interesting, but for a different reason. It's from Agent Bloom, a profiler I had recently written to requesting advice on the Ropes case. He thinks the killings show a strong resemblance to those of a serial killer in the Western US called the Handyman.

I listen to the message again, but I’m not crystal clear on what he's getting at. Whether he's just saying the two killers share a common psychological profile or if he's proposing that an actual connection exists between the two? Obviously, the latter would be a far more remarkable insight. For a moment I consider calling him back, but decide against it for fear of having my location traced.

Next I call Silva. I pat Danielle's hand from across the table, while she polishes off a waffle cone.

Silva answers on the second ring, and I tell him it's me.

There’s a relieved sigh. “Jesus, Jake. I don't mean to sound like your mother, but you could check in a little more often.”

“Sorry about that, I've been trying to keep a low profile and stay off the phone.” At this point I switch over to Spanish, as some of the upcoming subject matter might not be suitable for Danielle's tender ears.

“You’re safe?” Silva asks. “Everything’s okay?”

“Alive and well, for the moment,” I say.

“What's the news?” he asks. “Where are you?”

I tell him everything that's happened, including the fact that I nabbed Danielle—her safety being in imminent peril—and that I may now be a fugitive as a result.

“Holy shit,” Silva says. “Might need a minute to wrap my head around all that. I mean, holy shit.”

“You said that already.”

“So you know for a fact it was him—that Ropes was north of the border?” He sounds bewildered.

“Yeah, as of yesterday. And he was keeping real close tabs on me all the while.”

“Did you shake him?”

“I was pretty watchful yesterday. I don't see how he could have followed me back across. But then again, I don't know how he managed to tail me in the first place.”

“So the girl's with you now?”

“Yeah, she’s right here.”

“I didn’t quite follow that part. Why was it necessary to take her along?”