Total Victim Theory (7 page)

“You heard all that stuff over the police radio?” I ask. I have no idea whether to believe him or not. Anything he says could be a lie. I keep imagining him standing out in the back yard. Next to a shed or the woodpile, like a killer in a slasher movie. Feels like he's watching me right now. Peering in that little crack at the edge of the window. His eyes touching me from somewhere out in the darkness. Walking across my skin like spider legs.

I should run over to the police. Check to make sure everything's okay. That they're getting the trace and that the house is safe.

But he’d know from my voice if I went for the cops. Somehow he'd be able to tell and he'd hang up. They might lose their chance to get him, if they're zeroing in on him now.

The police are right outside my door. I'm safe. Just got to keep him on the line. Just got to keep this up for a few more minutes. That might be all they need to get him.

“What else did you find out from the police radio?” I ask.

He gives a little laugh. “You don't have to worry about that. They would never relay sensitive information, like a witness's whereabouts, over a police scanner—”

Suddenly, there’s a note of anger in my voice. “Where are you?” I demand.

“But there are plenty of other ways for a resourceful guy to find things out. The Internet, the Yellow Pages. Even a roommate with a big mouth could have told me where your closest relative lives.”

I pull the phone away from my ear and stare at it. Can't breathe. Finally, I bring the phone back to my mouth. “Why would Jessica have talked about me?” My voice no more than a whisper.

“We had eight hours to kill before the sun came up. We talked about all kinds of stuff. She even told me about that one really bad thing that happened to you.”

Losing it now. “You’re full of shit!” Almost shouting. “Jessica didn’t know anything about that!”

The line's silent, except for the sound of my panting.

Finally, he speaks. “Jessica may not have known . . . but now I do. Call it a lucky guess. Something in your eyes said
damaged goods
.”

Tears well up in my eyes. My hands shake violently.

“I think you and I have a lot more in common than you want to admit, Nicole,” he says.

“You don’t know anything about me,” I whisper.

He makes a little snickering noise. “I know you’re wearing Snoopy pajamas.”

I hit the red button on my phone and end the call. Hyperventilating.

I turn and run to the bedroom door, stubbing my toe on Betsy's bureau. I see my terrified face streak by in the mirror.

What if something’s happened? What if he’s done something to Aunt Pat or the police?

I fling the bedroom door open and burst out into the hall. My heart feels like it's going to explode.

Oh God, there’s no one by the front door. They should be there, the police, but they're not.

“Officer Devlin!” I cry, tears streaming down my face. “Aunt Pat!”

A moment later, a door opens upstairs. “Nicole?” It's my aunt's alarmed voice. “What is it, Nicole?”

“Where are the police?” I yell up at her.

My aunt ties the sash of her bathrobe as she rushes down the stairs. A second later, the front door opens and Officer Devlin’s imposing frame comes into view. Behind him stands the shorter Officer Sanchez, his head just visible over Devlin's shoulder.

Devlin sees me and a worried look gathers on his face. “What is it, kiddo?” he asks.

“Where were you?” I ask, gasping for breath.

“We were just out front, having a smoke.”

9

Mexico

Silva's beside me as the dune comes into view.

A feeling that's part awe, part nausea spreads through me as I take it all in.

The dimensions are staggering. The massive crater yawning before me must be a half mile across. The sides slope down to form a vast bowl that bottoms out hundreds of yards below. In the pale gray moonlight, it looks lunar, otherworldly.

Down near the center, I see the bodies. They’re tiny from up here. Each encircled by an oval of light, courtesy of a police flood lamp. They're naked brown islands inset in a sea of sand. The lines of the buttocks and the absence of heads are the only discernible features at this distance.

I count them.

There are six, as there should be. They're scattered about, mostly toward the bottom and seemingly at random, as if they'd been flung outward by a bomb that exploded in the middle. Four of them are within twenty or thirty yards of the center, but two are farther up along the sides. They all face out and away from the middle, like they were fleeing—which, I suppose, in a sense, they were. Despite the similar direction of movement, the postures of their bodies and limbs are very different. Some are curled up as tight as dead bugs, some are flat on their stomachs, while one has his arms stretched out, one forward, one back, as if performing a freestyle swimming stroke.

I notice that at the very bottom of the dune there's a small slumped mound of material, also ringed in a circle of light. From
here, it's just an indistinct, disordered blur. Like a heap of laundry or trash. “What's all that stuff?” I ask Silva.

“Personal belongings. We're still sifting through it, matching articles up with bodies,” Silva explains.

“He dumped them all at the bottom?” I ask.

“Yeah, they started near that pile and drug themselves around for a while.”

“Was decapitation the cause of death?”

“No. We had a medical examiner out here already. The muscle tissue in the neck wasn't contracted which tells us the heads came off post postmortem—which is consistent with what we’ve seen him do before.”

“So what did they die of?”

“Blood loss and dehydration.”

I wince, doing my best not to picture too vividly what all these people went through. “What was the time frame for all that . . . dragging?”

“We think he dropped them off sometime after sunset. By sunrise they would have all been dead.”

“So he stuck around and waited them out?” I ask.

Silva's tone is solemn. “I would bet he watched each of them draw his last breath.”

I rub at the scar on my right hand. Nervous habit. “Each of them, except the girl. She was still alive when the villager found her, right?”

“Right,” says Silva. “Sounds like the villager interrupted him and scared him off—which would explain why he broke protocol and didn't bury them.”

“And that could also suggest a reason for taking the girl's body back,” I suggest.

“How so?” asks Silva.

“If he wasn't done cleaning up and didn't want to leave evidence behind?”

Silva runs his hand over his mustache. “Or for that matter, it could be something psychological. Some piece of his ritual that wasn't finished.” Silva looks down, studying the scene. “But something else feels different this time.” He pauses. “I mean, maybe he was interrupted and that's why he didn't bury them. But, to me it feels . . . staged.”

“Yeah,” I agree. “That's my sense too. Like he's showing us something.”

We stand there, mulling it over. Below us, in the midway air, a few dark shapes are circulating about. More birds. It’s a curious reversal peering down on them. Like they're the murky shapes of fish trolling beneath the surface of a pond. The only other movement comes from police officers—they must be Juárez PD—little stick figures traipsing in and out of the pools of light. Their movements remind me of foraging ants—

Bam
.
Bam
.
Bam
.

The silence is suddenly interrupted as three crisp gun shots ring out, the reports echoing across the dune.

Fear jolts through me. I fumble for my gun, trying to discern the source of the shots.

“Relax, Jake,” Silva says. “They're just trying to keep the birds away.”

It takes me a second to get it. “Oh,” I say, a bit chagrined. “I guess I'm a little jumpy.”

“If you've gotta choose a time to be jumpy,” Silva says, “this is as good as any.”

I give Silva a wry smile as I button the snap on my holster. Silva prompts me with a nod and we begin our descent into the bowl. At first we tread real slow with cautious steps. But the grade isn't very steep, and managing it easily, we soon pick up the pace.

My eye tracks the body closest to us. At this distance, the shape beneath the oval of light reminds me of a burrito languishing under a heat lamp. It's about three-quarters of the way down, but maybe fifty yards to the left of our current trajectory.

“Mind if I take a gander at that one?” I ask.

“Be my guest,” says Silva and we veer off toward it.

About this time, other sounds from farther below begin to filter up. Officers and detectives at the bottom, bantering away in hard-boiled Spanish. Footsteps and the clanking of police gear. The snapping of a photographer's camera.

Soon we're standing over the first body.

The ground around us is littered with slain birds. Grotesque patches of feathers and sideward glances. I enter the circle of light and squat down next to the corpse. There's a murmur of flies. They gather on the leg wounds and along the edge of the severed neck.

This one's a Hispanic male, as Silva mentioned they all are. I'd say late fifties, though it's a bit hard to judge without seeing the face. The body's turned on its side, toward me, right arm stretched out in front of the torso. The limbs are bent in the awkward mannequin angles that are always the hallmark of the lifeless.

I note the missing feet and the lower legs tied together with Cattleman rope—the aspects of the MO with which the killer apparently does not permit himself any flexibility. I put on a pair of latex gloves and give a little tug at the three-point lasso knot. This is Ropes’ trademark—what earned him that nickname. It's a slip knot he can tighten or loosen as he sees fit, speeding up or slowing down the blood loss from the legs. It's basically a tourniquet he can adjust like the flow of a garden hose—deciding how long the victim lasts.

The light, which comes from behind the body, casts much of the torso in shadow. I carefully roll the body over on its back to get a better look.

A feeling—half-confusion, half disgust—wells up in me. Like what you might feel if you turned over a log and found it swarming with maggots. “What the heck is this?” I exclaim.

Most of the man's chest and large portions of his forearms and hands are covered in scars. The mottled, twisted kind that result from severe burns. I initially draw back, as if the sight posed some physical threat to me. But the next moment, I'm leaning in, reaching out to touch him. I run a gloved finger along the swath of scars on his chest.

“Those scars are old,” Silva says. “Ropes had nothing to do with them.”

I take off my right glove and hold out my hand, comparing it to the scars on the dead man's chest. Both mine and his have gnarled swirling patterns that, at least in this light, look much the same. Almost like the fabric on a pair of matching gloves. “They kind of look like mine, don’t they?” I say in a low and tentative voice.

Silva stoops over to get a better look. “Hmm . . . yeah, maybe a little,” he says, noncommittally, as if reluctant to acknowledge what's readily apparent.

I keep looking at the burns. Mine and his. Comparing different points of the turbulent and desiccated surfaces. It's like these flames left their fingerprints on us. I wonder what one of our
forensic experts from the Bureau could tell me about the fires that caused them. If they came from the same type of fuel or burned at the same temperature.

Silva’s shadow intrudes into the ring of light. I look up at him, feeling self-conscious now. “Quite a coincidence,” I say, pulling my hand away from the dead man.

“Well, if you get spooked by coincidences, then you might want to brace yourself.”

“What do you mean?” For a split second I think Silva might be joking, but I see from his face that he's not.

“They all have them,” he says, turning and gesturing at the bodies.

“They all have what?”

“Scars . . . like his.”

“All of them?” I ask in astonishment.

“Yeah,” he says. “Not really sure what to make of it.”

I draw a deep breath trying to organize my thoughts. Then I rise unsteadily to my feet.

Silva snuffs out the butt of his cigarette on the thick heel of a cowboy boot. A swatch of greenish reptile leather ventures into the light. “Maybe they were all firemen or something,” Silva says. I can tell he's trying to play this off casually. Pretending this isn't something personal to me—presumably to lessen my misgivings.

I glance again at the scars on my hand. “Or maybe they were all in the same fire,” I say. Now there's a glint of something familiar deep inside me. Some distant, black-sheep cousin of déjà vu. I've been here before. Or I've seen some piece of this before. I tell myself to snap out of it. This isn't the time or place for a meltdown or a mystical revelation—or whatever it is these unconscious flickerings might be prologue to.

I shrug it off and we recommence the grim tour, continuing down toward the center, and stopping to have a look at several other bodies along the way. All show the marks of old burns, as Silva promised, though the extent of the scarring varies considerably from victim to victim. In several cases, the damage is quite minor, limited to just a few square inches of skin, most commonly on the hands and arms. However, on two of the bodies, scarring is more severe. Large portions of the skin have been obliterated to the point you'd call it a disfigurement. A handicap
that would have crippled these people and changed how strangers looked at them on the street.

With each successive set of scars, my apprehension grows. Weird speculations nibble at me like sharp-toothed fish going at a swimmer's naked legs. I do my best to act composed, but I fear the act is obvious. When other detectives greet us, I stumble and stammer, my preoccupation, I imagine, plainly written on my face.

My examination of the last body—whose condition is consistent with the other six—brings us near the dune's central and lowest point. When I rise, I turn my attention to the pile of belongings no more than twenty feet away.