Total Victim Theory (45 page)

Going home is a good idea. My roommates will be there. My new ones that is—which makes me wonder how my old ones, Bryce and Ronette, are doing. It turned out Chris didn’t hurt them that night, after all. He just drugged them and tied them up, though at the time I was sure they were goners.

Sometimes you convince yourself things are bleaker than they really are. That’s bad because it means you live in a world that’s worse than the real one. That’s what I’m doing now by telling myself I’m in danger—

I’ll calm down once I’m inside behind a locked door. I'll drink a glass of wine and take a bubble bath.

Campus is a circle and I take the longer counterclockwise route, rather than the quicker clockwise one. Just in case someone's following me.

I pull up outside my apartment and flip my headlights off. Look around to make sure nothing seems out of the ordinary. A car a half-block away approaches from the other direction, parks a
ways down and turns off its lights. My mind doesn't like the timing. But it came from the other direction, so I'll let it slide.

Feeling less afraid now. Fear is such a discretionary emotion. You can invite it in or shut the door in its face, as you wish. You can make a monster out of the flimsiest shadow or you can ignore a real one that's breathing down your neck.

I take a deep breath. Let fear out. Let serenity in. All there is around me is a calm, nurturing Boulder night.

Ready now for the walk to my door. I can see the lights on. No more than fifteen or twenty seconds till I'm home safe. No problem. I take a final breath and step from my car's warm interior out into the chilly night air.

I look around. Nothing's moving. I slam the door closed. It's loud. It breaks the silence.

Somewhere far away, but not too far, I hear footsteps. But it’s a public street. That's normal too. People walk around, just like they sit in cars.

Where is the moon when you need it? And where are the street lamps? I can feel the darkness on my heels. It seems like it could swallow me or spirit me off to the place vanished things go when they never come back.

I hurry along the sidewalk up to the path leading to the front door. My footsteps click and echo. Makes me think of some cobblestone street in Victorian England—with Jack the Ripper stalking some hapless woman through the foggy, gas-lit night.

Again I hear, or think I hear, a second set of footsteps, clicking away in the downtime between my own. Whosever they are, they're still far away. Don't even think about them, because in ten or fifteen seconds you'll be inside. I can already see myself breathing a sigh of relief on the other side of the door. Chiding myself for getting worked up about nothing.

But at the same time I can see Tad materializing from the darkness. A flash and I'm gone, and in my place, an overturned purse on the welcome mat.

Jesus, the air is full of footsteps now. Mine, another’s, and the echoes of both. They seem close now. Running. Or is that just my own?

I look back over my shoulder. Nothing.

Almost to the porch. Just a few feet away.

Pull my keys out of my purse. Then bound up the three steps and aim the key at the keyhole.

Shit. I cleanly miss the hole, and somehow in my panic, the keys fall from my hands. They plummet to the doormat with a jangle. Shimmers of silver in the yellow porch light.

I stoop down to get them. I see the house key. I have it.

Standing now.

It makes it in the lock no problem now. One second and the handle will turn. I’ll be inside.

But no.

No such luck in this life.

A gloved hand alights upon my lips. A real leather one. Not the fake kind made of fear.

I smell the leather and something pungent that makes me think of hospitals.

56

El Paso

It’s been two weeks since I was arrested and charged with the kidnapping and murder of my daughter. I've been placed in solitary confinement in the El Paso County Jail—considered a suicide risk based on the noose that was around my neck when I was taken into custody.

The evidence against me is pretty hard to refute at this point. I told the detectives all about Silva and they were kind enough not to laugh in my face. All the forensic evidence points to me having murdered Danielle about two days before I crossed the border. There apparently never was a safe house or any officers to guard it. He never contacted a witness protection program, and he has no wife and no child. That was all just made up for my benefit.

Indeed, the sole corroborating fact I can point to tying Silva to any of this is the registration of a 2008 Ford pickup in his name. The color was black, not red, and the police haven't been able to locate it—so nothing's come of it yet. However, I would bet my last dime this is the truck that's popped up time and again during the Ropes investigation. I'm sure Silva painted it red and fitted it with some comfy hidden compartments in the back—just like his old man's. It’s a curious question whether he chose that make for practical or for sentimental reasons?

As for Silva himself, the man's conveniently disappeared—a fact which does little to incriminate him, since missing police personnel in Juárez is the rule rather than the exception. In the investigation into his disappearance, I am myself, ironically, considered a person of interest. My guess is that he's long gone. In
a different place far, far away beginning his next villainous incarnation.

From what little I can piece together, he'd probably been plotting all this for at least a year. He was drawn to the Juárez Police department long before I was on his radar. He chose the job because it let him relive his crimes by investigating them. And because he could lead the police on every wild goose chase he could devise, whenever they were getting close. Among the numerous red herrings he dangled before us in his suspect roster was one that wasn't. Silva was, of course, Adrian Caiman, as well as Tad Glattmann. The dates of Caiman's crimes, along with his brief period of imprisonment, fill in most of the missing years between the fire at Glattmann Ranch and the start of the Ropes killings.

My hunch is that Silva first became aware of me when he saw my border crime seminar on video. His next step was to phone, on the pretext of signing up for the next course. During the conversation, he buddied up to me so deftly, I divulged a few key details about my memory loss and my missing past. That day, the outline of all that was to follow began taking shape in his vile and giddy brain.

It started with that phone call eight months ago, and it ended with the destruction of all meaning in my life.

When I think about what he did to her—to Danielle—I sometimes vomit.

I want to convince myself that there's nothing I could have done. That he was some criminal mastermind whose schemes no one could have foreseen or foiled. But, of course, that’s bullshit. You have to be careful with bullshit now, because there’s so much incentive to lie to yourself. But I promised myself I wouldn't go down that road, because lying disrespects the dead. A better detective or a better man than me could have stopped him. Could have saved Danielle and all the future victims that are out there now, unwittingly awaiting that day when, for a few hours, the world will become a hell.

But to tell the truth, those other deaths add little to the guilt I feel. The death of my daughter made a blown eardrum of my conscience.

When nothing matters, the world suddenly abounds in irony. The prosecutor wants to seek the death penalty against me—for
the premeditated murder of a child. Meanwhile, they take every precaution to keep me from killing myself, even as they threaten to do it for me.

I have a half a mind to just confess to everything they allege. To sign their affidavits and be done with it. My negligence and selfishness and stupidity caused her death, almost to the point where you could call it murder.

I tried for a while to build a life around despair and self-loathing. But even those modest pastimes wear thin over time, and I cannot claim the pale satisfaction of deserved suffering.

The one thing I do possess is my memory. Pictures of my moments with Lisa and Danielle. Their faces, their hands, their voices. These are mine forever—all the enduring, exuberant detail of the times I spent with them.

You might think there'd be some consolation there. You might think recalling those times might whisk me from this cell, this world, this fate, and let me repose a while in some sealed sanctuary, shielded from all the rest of this. However, that’s not at all how it is.

The smell of decay wafts backwards into the clean air of the past. Ropes has contaminated everything. Made death spread to every part of my soul like a gangrene rot. He’s made a dump sight of my memories. Lisa's lips were rotten the first time we kissed. And Danielle was blind and blue and mutilated from the first moment I saw her.

The fact I loved them redeems nothing. It doesn't matter that they gave my life the only bit of meaning it ever had. The only things that can have meaning are things that are, not things that were. It's a perversion to find solace in something beautiful that's gone. And all they are is gone.

My tragedy is played out, but without the natural consummation of death. What remains is consciousness grinding onward, without purpose and without end. Life striving to ingest itself, like an ulcerated stomach.

57

Colorado

I didn't see the man who grabbed me.

His hands were on my face. I was breathing something in. Chloroform maybe. And then I woke up here. In the trunk of a car.

You don't have to be a fortune teller to sense this doesn’t bode well.

We've been driving for maybe an hour. The rumble of the engine and the sound of the tires on the road. The road is wet. When he hits the gas, I can smell the exhaust coming up from below. I’m lying on my side with my knees drawn into my chest. Can't see and can hardly breathe. I'm blindfolded and there's a piece of duct tape covering my mouth. My hands are tied in back with rope. I wonder if it’s the kind Jessica had on her wrists that day. The kind Bloom said both Luke and Tad used on their victims.

I didn't see his face, but who else could it be but Tad? I wish to God there were other suspects, but that’s what common sense has it down to. Sometime down the road, when they put all the facts together, what's happening tonight will probably seem obvious. Of course he would go after her. The girl who sent his brother to jail. Maybe my mom and stepdad will file a lawsuit against the state of Colorado or the FBI for not doing anything to stop this. Not because they think it will bring me back, but just because they want to do something.

Strike that last comment. Any scenario where I imagine myself dead is off limits. That's the rule. If you want to survive something like this, you have to believe in the impossibility of your own death, or at least the possibility of your survival.

But much of my brain is not on board with this hopeful outlook. It understands that this is Ropes we're talking about. A fact that makes nasty inroads in the odds I’ll get out of this alive. So my brain is getting a head start on the whole life-flashing-before-your-eyes thing.

And so a million-picture slide show is clicking through my mind. Thinking about my mom, my brother, my study abroad in England, my plays, and Alex—my first boyfriend. And a few of the bad things too, like Gunnison and Jessica and what it feels like to lose a finger.

But throughout this little montage, my mind keeps circling back to that night when they caught Chris—though I guess Luke is his real name. Of course, it's not important now. It doesn't deserve more than a few seconds in the Nicole Copeland highlight film. And yet it keeps hogging the spotlight.

That night six months ago.

I was crumpled up on the floor. He stood over me. Just frozen there. And I looked up right before he turned away. And I saw something in his eyes that I won't ever forget. Not the look you'd expect to see from a guy who killed twelve girls. Something helpless and tender and terrified. And what he did to me a moment before, I believe he did not out of callousness or cruelty, but out of desperation. Out of an inability to cope with what was happening inside him.

Who knows? Maybe I'm the desperate one, trying to twist the facts, to make something sick into a love story. Of all the stuff there is to fear, the most terrifying thing is that maybe none of this was real.

But no—there were tears in his eyes that day. I swear to God, something glistened. Something dripped. But after six months, a tear drop is a pretty tentative thing.

My psychiatrist thinks I’ve coached myself to remember it that way. Because I needed to see something good in him. So there’d be more than randomness to explain why I'm alive. In other words, a purpose might take away the guilt I feel for being spared. The only catch is that this teary-eyed Chris might be nothing but a cuddly figment of my imagination. Dr. Taylor’s words, not mine.

But rehashing all this now is ridiculous. Someone may be shoveling dirt on top of me in a few hours. It doesn't make a damn
bit of difference what the status of his tear ducts was.

The road is quieter now. Fewer cars. Like we're outside the city. A stream of cold air filters in from a crack somewhere and hits me in the face. There's still the sound of moisture. Kicking back as the tires move through it. I guess it could be rain. But somehow, I know it's melting snow.

The engine revs hard as if the road were steep. A few minutes back I felt my ears pop.

I think he’s taking me up into the mountains.

My mind wants to think about Luke, so it doesn't have to think about Tad. I wonder, if he were here, would he protect me? Or would he just watch it happen?

Feeling claustrophobic now. Like I'll die if I don't get this tape off my mouth and these ropes off my hands. I thrash around, bumping into a jack by my feet and turning it over. Clank.

Eventually the panic passes. I stop flailing and lay on my back. Panting and with tears in my eyes.

This is really happening. These may be the last few moments of unclouded clarity, before there’s too much pain to think about anything else. This may be the last chance to be grateful for my time in this wonderful, off-kilter little world.