Total Victim Theory (3 page)

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?

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.