Total Victim Theory (11 page)

They're scars from a suicide attempt with a razor blade.

Scars I remember well.

Throat constricts. Like I’m being choked by an invisible, phantom hand.

I reach out and grasp the corner of the handkerchief and pull it slowly off her face.

Even in this mutilated state, my mind finds within her an indestructible constant. An image burned into me eleven years before that will never fade or age or decay. That will endure as long as I endure.

I reach out and touch her face.

“Lisa,” I whisper and I lay my head down on her chest and weep.

13

Colorado

This sting operation thing is actually happening. I agreed to do it, of course. How could I not—knowing that if he isn't caught, he's going to keep killing, knowing that we might be able to save other Jessicas?

So, it's happening. As if my life needed any more drama. They—the FBI—have already set me up in this new apartment at University Terrace. It's a three bedroom and it comes furnished with two undercover agent roommates who are supposed to protect me. They're moving stuff into their rooms as we speak. There's a blond surfer guy named Bryce and a chick with short, dark hair named Ronette. The scenario is kind of like
Point Break
meets
Three's Company
.

“Yo,” says Bryce, appearing in the doorway of my room. He's holding some sort of radio transmitter contraption in his arms.

Bryce is attractive, I suppose. Super tan and muscly in the way people get when they drink too many protein shakes. He looks too young and baby faced to be an FBI agent, which I guess is the point, since he's pretending to be a college student. “Everything copacetic?” he asks.

“Wicked nar,” I say, poking fun at his surfer roots.

Bryce give me a thumbs up, looks me over just a split-second too long, then turns and goes.

The sting operation was Quentin Bloom's idea. He's the head profiler on the Handyman case. We're not on the best terms. The rift occurred because the FBI recorded that cell phone conversation I had with “Chris” at my aunt's house. During the
call, he mentioned leaving his glasses behind. Bloom, who knew no glasses were found at the scene, put two and two together and they searched the room at my aunt's and found the glasses in the nightstand. Pretty embarrassing. And I wish I had a sane explanation for what I did.

But they must still consider me sane enough for undercover work. Unless I've been hand-picked precisely on account of my kookiness—since no one level-headed would have agreed to do it. At any rate, Bloom's hunch is that Chris may keep trying to “interact with me”—a term broad enough to include anything from him writing me an e-mail to him stopping by for a face-to-face chat. The more “interaction,” the better from the FBI's perspective, since that ups the odds of nabbing him.

As far as that night goes, the cell phone records confirmed that he was really close. But that came as no surprise, since he knew about my Snoopy pj's. How he managed to follow me remains a mystery—

Suddenly the thud of a bass beat starts up from Ronette's room. A moment later, she peeks her head into my doorway. “Does that music seem like it's at the right level?”

“At the right level, how?” I ask.

“I mean, does it seem realistic? Like a volume you or your friends would set your music at—but not so loud that it attracts undue attention to itself?”

“It's fine.”

“Sorry,” she says. “Just trying to make sure everything feels authentic, you know what I mean?”

I honestly don't know what she means, but she ducks out again before I can express my perplexity. We're setting up to be ready by tonight. Bloom thinks if it's going to happen again, it's going to happen soon. Like in the next few days. Chris has my cell number, plus they published my new address in directory assistance and on the CU website. So, if Chris has even passable research skills, he'll be able to track me down. My job's just to act chill and be the bait. Maybe that role sounds questionable, but they've assured me there's only a very modest chance of me being killed.

But I'm sure Johnny Utah here has it all under control—and speaking of, Bryce has popped up again in the doorway. He's holding a black gun and cleaning something on the barrel with
what looks like a miniature toothbrush. I get the feeling there's some weird ulterior motive behind this display. Like he thinks cleaning a firearm will impress me.

“So the van is all set up,” he says. “It'll be parked a block away and stocked with a couple of agents keeping an eye on everything twenty-four seven. Meanwhile, Ronette and I will be with you all the time. We're not going to let you out of our sight.”

“So you're gonna go to class with me and everything?” I ask.

“Yep, we're theater majors now. The Bureau set it all up and the university was super cooperative. They even gave us parts in that play you're in.”

“Really?” I ask.

“Bryce Brantley starring in
Caucasian Chalk Outline
.”

“
Caucasian Chalk Circle
,” I correct him. “What part did they give you?”

“Junkyard attendant. Three lines.” he says. “Gonna do a bang-up job, too.”

There's movement behind us. “What are you gonna bang, Bryce?” asks Ronette, who's suddenly standing right behind him.

She flashes Bryce a smile, then steps past him into my room. She's got something glittery in her hand. “See this, Nicole,” she says in a matter-of-fact tone.

“Yeah?” I say.

“What I have here is a silent-alarm bracelet.” She holds it out. It's silver and has little oval pearls inlaid along its length. “The pearl in the middle is a button. If you hold it down for more than six seconds, it triggers an alarm that me, Bryce, the agents in the van, and the Boulder police will instantly hear. Try it on.”

I take it from her and fasten the clasp around my wrist.

Ronette continues. “If you push that button, way more help than you could possibly need will arrive in less than five minutes. Of course, it's very unlikely you'll ever need it, but it should at least give you some peace of mind.”

I extend my arm and look it over. Not bad, though it looks more like something a person from my mom's generation—or a passenger on the Titanic—would wear.

“Keep it on all the time. Never take it off,” she stresses.

“Even in the shower?” I ask.

“Yeah,” says Ronette. “It's designed to be waterproof.”

14

Mexico

The dead woman beyond the lip of the dune is Lisa. My Lisa. The only one there will ever be. I’m lying beside her in the sand, holding her in an awkward, frozen embrace.

My mind grapples with this. Thoughts spinning like the tires of a high-centered car.

I'm alone with the cold alabaster fact. The fact of her not being in the world. The fact of her being here in my arms in the desert of Juárez.

I close my eyes.

It was eleven year ago. Eleven years since I kissed her and she got into the white Malibu and drove away. The memories should be sun blanched or eroded with mildew by now. But they seem more vivid than things that just happened yesterday. How could they not? Hardly a day's gone by when I haven’t thought of her.

Yet, it also seems long ago. A different life. Before this one and before the blank of my childhood. She was there on the dark shores of the firmament, waiting for me.

I guess everybody—everybody who’s lucky—has one. One that stands alone when everything’s said and done. And she was mine.

One night I heard a song in a diner, just after she left me. There was a line that said
If I could start again, a million miles away
. Sitting there, eating a slice of key lime pie, I imagined for a moment that I’d had many lives. Imagined that I could glimpse them all at once from far away in space, a dozen Earths lining up next to one another, orbiting the same sun.

And then I imagined that these Earths began to move. And I
saw myself starting a dozen separate lives. But just one of them was the one with her. And it was just beginning, my time with her still ahead, everything still possible. A version of me would live there—a doe-eyed baby Jake waiting to grow up and one day touch her.

But after our lips meet, but before I suffered the great loss a second time, I could jump to another Earth and become another me, and never know about that man one world removed whose fate it was to love and lose her. And when those planets finished their full cycle around the sun, it would all reset and begin again.

I imagine this string of worlds again, as I lay here with her in the sand. I picture that one where I'll be with her and just for a second, I almost smile. But now I watch them all slowly merge, all of them vanishing, except just one. This one now. And I know these are just the pranks of a desperate mind that wants so badly to save itself from despair.

My time with her was a thing that happened once and can never happen again.

But there had been a time when it all still lay ahead. It was the summer after my first year of law school. I interned at the DA’s office in Baltimore. Lisa got hired as an office assistant after I’d been there for about a month. An attorney named Derrick came by my office and introduced her. “This is Lisa,” he said. It was her first day, he said. “She makes copies, scans, and e-files.”

She stood there biting her upper lip. It curved like a bird in flight. The stripes on her shirt were so vivid. I can still see them. Yellow, green, and red. Terrycloth. The little fibers like taste buds on a tongue. One lithe wrist was wreathed with a yellow band, the kind people wear to show their support for dolphins or kids with leukemia. She had a way of making everything that touched her, even that little plastic band, inexplicably beautiful. She tucked the toe of one ballerina-like shoe beneath the instep of the other. A golden curl rested on her shoulder. She had a very Helen of Troy thing going.

It felt like I'd been clobbered with a crowbar in the face. I scratched a place on my nose that didn’t itch. Her presence made breathing seem so complicated.

It was imperative to say something witty and professional that would mask my state of inner turmoil and start the infinitely
delicate process of wooing her. I undertook the word
hello
, but what came out was the squeak of a panicked mouse.

When the door closed, I sat listening to my pounding heart. I'd set my foot down firmly on a cobra. And as I well knew, there was no escape, or antidote, or hope. The lovely venom was already at work and within a month I was utterly and desperately in love with her.

One Friday afternoon at five o’clock, fate placed us alone in an elevator going down. I was always depressed Friday afternoons since it meant I wouldn’t see her until Monday. Sixty-six some odd hours, if you were counting. But her sudden nearness in the enclosed space incited my heart’s ludicrous and now familiar palpitations.

It was casual day and she looked at me and said, “I like your jeans.”

I stammered and said, “I like yours too.”

But, unfortunately, she was wearing a skirt. She smiled awkwardly and stepped off the elevator. The doors closed and I continued my descent to the lowest level of the parking structure.

Of course, I didn't really let myself believe that it could really happen. She'd probably sooner develop feelings for a baked potato than for my scarred and mangled mug. And, of course, there was a boyfriend in the wings. Inevitably, a villain. A man I despised more than anything and would have given anything to be.

But then one day, without pretext really, she told me she wasn’t with him anymore. We exchanged numbers and talked on the phone until late one night. Things were hinted at.

A few days later, by some inconceivable chain of events, she was in my bed, as if the dream world had invaded and overtaken the real one. At one point during our first night together, she whispered to me not to wear a condom. And during the two seconds that I considered the issue, I saw no good reason why I should. Because, come to think of it, it wouldn’t really be so bad to have a child with her. And come to think of it, wasn't a child with her what I wanted more than anything in the world?

And so, for several weeks we carried on like that, as unprotected as a tightrope walker cavorting about without a net.

Then one morning I said, “If we are doing this, it must mean something. It must mean we want to be with each other.” That last
part was a question.

She said nothing.

Then I said, “I want to be with you.”

And she said, “I think you’re the most amazing person I’ve ever met.” Maybe she meant that. Maybe she didn’t. Either way, she was sort of side-stepping the issue.

The most crucial things are always ambiguous. She either loved me or she didn’t, but there was no way of ever knowing. Even alive, the truth was hermetically sealed up in her skull, behind her inscrutable eyes, beneath her inscrutable words. There was always the unbridgeable gap between minds that neither love nor intimacy could ever overleap. And even if, for a moment or two, we'd cleared that gap, you could never prove it.

Before anything happened between us, during those first two months of lovesick simmering at the internship, I’d written her a poem. The only poem I’ve ever written. The only time I’ve ever felt the slightest urge to write a poem. I hadn’t planned to give it to her. But that night I felt compelled to, the way lemmings throw themselves off cliffs.

On what turned out to be our last night together, during a brief coital intermission, when we were whispering sweet nothings to each other, baring our souls and whatnot, I got the poem and read it to her. After I was done, she looked at me with lost, forlorn eyes, as if searching for something in my face. Something she didn't quite know how to recognize.

Then she crawled over to me and held out her wrists. She was showing me her scars. Presenting them to me. Like a ceremony. Of course, I'd noticed them—you couldn't miss them when she wore short sleeves—but I'd never directly asked what happened.

She told me she did it in high school. She'd done it three or four times, and once she almost didn't make it.