Borderline Insanity

by Jeff Miller

  They were gathered in the stockroom. The oldest were sitting; the younger were standing among piled boxes and supplies. A few were dressed in their Sunday finest; most were dressed in T-shirts and jeans. The children were chasing one another. Angel and Cesar, as expected, but also the twins, and Jorge, who usually sat looking glum. The men were talking to the men and the women to the women, and nobody noticed that he’d entered. Diego ate his tamale and listened, but it was all cacophony, and louder than usual.

  He squeezed his way through the crowd to the front of the room. As he passed through, the noise subsided. Parents shushed their children and gathered them close. He stepped onto a wood crate and began.

  “Today, I would like to talk about faith. And why faith isn’t enough.” He always led with his sermon, since the congregation seldom had the patience for much more than that. “In Matthew, we find the parable of the sheep and goats, which teaches us nothing about running a farm.” No laughs. He had hoped for a laugh. “It’s a parable about faith and works, and their intersection. For Matthew tells us that Jesus will divide the people like a shepherd divides the sheep from the goats. And he’ll turn to the people on the right—to the sheep—and say to them, ‘I was hungry, and you gave me food. I was thirsty—’”

  “Father, there’s something important we need to talk about.”

  The interruption came from Juanita Valquez, a petite, gentle woman. It was not her habit to interrupt the services; the fact that she spoke now told Diego that it was a serious matter.

  “What is it, Juanita?”

  She rose from her seat. “Father Vega, my brother is missing.”

  “From church?” He scanned the congregation.

  “No, I mean he is missing. I haven’t seen him in seven days.”

  That wasn’t unusual. Much of the Mexican population around Bilford, like much of the Mexican population in the rest of America, was transient. “I’m certain he will call, Juanita. Sometimes it takes a little while to settle in.”

  “He’s not the only one missing.”

  Miranda Delgado stood. She was a lovely, round woman who brought Diego baked treats nearly every week. “My oldest boy, Javier, is missing, too. Also for seven days.”

  It was his instinct to provide comfort to these women. “Perhaps they left together. To find some place where it is easier to find work. This happens, Miranda, and then a few more days pass, and you get a call and everything is okay.”

  Juan Sanchez stood. He was a large man with a booming voice, and one of the few legal residents who attended services at Barrio Burrito. As the owner of a Ford dealership, he was by far the richest man in attendance. “Father, there are times that those things happen, but this is not one of those times. Three of my boys are gone, too.” Sanchez was not referring to his sons but rather to the stable of illegal immigrants he employed to clean cars or cut grass—jobs he doled out as charity to help the community. Lest anyone challenge his motives in hiring them, he paid these men the same wages he paid his legal employees and footed the expense from his own pocket, without deducting the wages as a business expense. “I’ve heard of at least four others who are missing, which would make nine young men in the past week. Most of these boys were close to their families. They wouldn’t leave without telling anyone. When you call their phones, it goes straight to voice mail. Something has happened.”

  Diego surveyed the congregation. There were about fifty people in the room—almost all of them illegal immigrants or their family members. They were not looking for comfort. They were looking for help. “Who else knows someone who is missing?”

  A few hands flew into the air.

  “Let’s make a list.” He tore an invoice from the side of a box of paper cups, turned it over, and scratched down the names as they were called. Lino Fuentes. Hector Morales. Gabriel Diaz. Emilio Garza. Diego added Miranda’s son, Juanita’s brother, and Juan’s boys. In all, there were thirteen names on the list—all men in their late teens or early twenties. Diego read their names aloud. “No one here has heard from any of these young men?” Silence. “Does anyone have any idea what might have happened to them?”

  Roberto Soto rose. He was a mechanic without a garage; if you needed your car fixed, he came and fixed it. “It’s got to be Sheriff Don.” This generated vigorous agreement, so much so that Diego had to quiet them.

  “Please, please. If it were Sheriff Don, he’d be bragging about it on the news. And he’s not. So it’s not him.”

  The crowd stayed silent until Juanita stood again. “If it’s not Sheriff Don, then it’s something worse, isn’t it?”

  Diego wanted to tell her that it was not worse, but this would have been a lie, and he never lied to his parishioners. “Let me make some inquiries and see if I can find out anything. In the meantime, I think we should proceed with Mass and pray for these young men.” But his mind was elsewhere as he began again. “Let’s talk about the sheep and the goats.”

  We live in the goats’ town, Diego thought. We live with the goddamn goats.

  CHAPTER 3

  Dagny Gray grabbed the next rusted rung of the fire-escape ladder on the east wall of the sixteen-story Tandoor Apartments building on the west side of Chicago. Special Agent Brent Davis followed behind her. “You first,” he’d insisted. “That way I can catch you when you fall.”

  Dagny had seen Davis interview people, charm them, even disarm them—but she’d never seen him confront an actual danger. So you first could have been general chivalry or just plain cowardice. It didn’t matter. Dagny was fine with going first. As a general rule, she didn’t follow anybody. Not even up the side of a building, in the dark, on the west side of Chicago.

  The ladder rose straight up the side of the building. There was a platform to the left at each floor. When Dagny got to the sixth platform, she looked down. This was a mistake. “Don’t look down,” Brent said.

  “The view’s terrible,” Dagny replied. “All I see is you.” Queasy and chastened, she looked back up and realized the climb ahead was bigger than the climb behind.

  Martin Benny had killed thirteen young women at nine colleges in five states over the course of three months. They had been chasing him for weeks, and now they had him. The serial killer was staying in a two-bedroom corner unit on the thirteenth floor. It belonged to the estate of Harriet Swinton, the aunt of Benny’s grandmother’s friend. Harriet had died four months earlier, but the estate was in dispute, and the apartment remained furnished but vacant. Special Agent Victor Walton Jr. had traced through connections and pegged it as Benny’s hideout. The twenty-five-year-old forensic accountant was great at that sort of thing, and maybe not much else that the job required. Dagny loved him like a little brother and prayed he wouldn’t blow this mission.

  An old man’s voice barked in her earpiece. “Can’t the two of you go any faster?”

  “Easy to say from the comfort of a couch, Professor.”

  “I’ll have you know, I’m standing at the window.”

  Dagny looked at the building across the street and counted the windows up to the seventeenth floor, where Timothy McDougal was watching Swinton’s apartment through parted curtains. In McDougal’s younger years, fellow agents tired of his didactic lectures and mockingly referred to him as the Professor. To their dismay, he embraced the nickname. These days, few called the crusty octogenarian-ish Bureau lifer anything else.

  “What do you see?” Dagny asked.

  “The shades are drawn, but I can see the flickering light of a television around the edges of the master bedroom window,” he replied.

  “Looks like the rent on your unit there is really paying dividends.” She heard Davis chuckle below and hoped Victor wasn’t laughing from the thirteenth-floor stairwell in the Tandoor.

  The plan was simple and reckless. When Dagny and Brent reached the thirteenth floor, Victor would walk to Benny’s door and knock. With his attention drawn to the door, Dagny and Brent would break through the windows. Then, Victor would burst through
the front door, and somehow the three of them would apprehend the nation’s most feared killer.

  Anyone with any sense would have sent a SWAT team to do this job, but the Professor had long advocated that a small team could do a better job than a big one, and proving the point was more important than trifles like personal safety. So Dagny, Victor, and Brent, along with the cozily ensconced Professor, were the entire operation.

  As Dagny scaled the building, she noticed the wind, and the sound of the cars below, and the whine of a distant siren. She noticed that the birds would fly away from the bricks jutting from the building’s walls when she got within two floors of them. She noticed the cigarette butts that littered the platforms and the tangles in the cords of the cheap venetian blinds that covered some of the windows. She did not once think about things she hated about herself, the losses she had suffered, or what she hoped to accomplish in life. And so she smiled the closer she got to Benny’s floor.

  “Where are you?” Victor whispered through the earpiece.

  “Tenth floor,” Dagny said. “Nervous?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve got your Glock?”

  “Yes.”

  “Safety off?” It was an inside joke.

  “Funny.”

  “Eleven.”

  “What?”

  “I’m on the eleventh floor now.”

  “Oh. I thought you were making a Spinal Tap reference.”

  “I’m heading to twelve.”

  “Wait a second,” Victor said.

  “Why?”

  “I need a few moments to breathe.”

  “No breathing,” the Professor barked through the earpiece. “Just do it.”

  “Says the man in the building across the street,” Dagny replied. She stepped onto the platform at the twelfth floor. Brent joined her. “Victor, remember, when you knock, don’t knock too softly, because he needs to hear it over the TV. But don’t knock too loudly, because it’s a casual knock, right? Not a panicked one. The knock of a neighbor who wants to borrow an egg. Not quite the knock of a pizza deliveryman, because Benny hasn’t ordered a pizza, and if you knock like that, he’ll be on guard.”

  “They didn’t teach knocking at Quantico, Dagny.”

  “One more thing, Victor.”

  “Yes?”

  “Please don’t shoot us.” She was more worried about this than anything Benny might do. “Now go.”

  She heard Victor’s steps through the earpiece and climbed up the ladder to the thirteenth floor, crouching on the platform under the left living-room window. Brent joined her on the platform, crouching down beneath the window on the right. The steps stopped; Victor’s breathing did not. He was at the door. They waited for his knock.

  “It’s time, Victor,” the Professor said.

  Three quick knocks, like a neighbor who needed to borrow an egg. Dagny unzipped her backpack and withdrew a crowbar; Brent did the same. She nodded to him, and they swung through the windows. The first bash shattered the glass; a second helped clear the shards. They barreled inside, guns drawn. Once the glass settled, it was quiet, save for the sound of a television in the other room. Dagny looked around. A green-velvet couch. A console television. Maroon lampshades with tassels. Scenic watercolors on the walls.

  There was a bang at the door. Victor had tried to break through. Another bang. Dagny moved backward toward the door, keeping her eyes on the hallway, feeling blindly for the deadbolt. She flipped the lock and opened the door just as Victor was making his third attempt at an entry. He tumbled to the ground.

  The three formed a triangle, each facing out. Brent checked the kitchen; Victor, the dining room. Dagny opened the entry closet and pushed the coats to the side. Nothing. She headed down the hallway and ducked into the bathroom. There was a man’s razor and an open can of shaving gel on the counter, a pile of hair in the sink. She heard a drip behind the shower curtain and pushed the curtain aside. The shower was empty. She opened a small linen closet—nothing but towels and medication. Dagny walked out to the hallway; Brent finished with the guest bedroom and joined her. He motioned to the closed door of the master bedroom. They could hear the television playing a potato-chips jingle. Victor joined them in the hallway.

  “What is happening?” the Professor said through their earpieces. No one answered him. Not yet.

  Brent raised his foot and kicked the door, knocking it open. Dagny tried to enter first, but Brent nudged past her. The television sat on a dresser. An Indiana University sweatshirt was draped over a chair in the corner. There were framed pictures of grandchildren on the walls. An envelope sat on top of the neatly made bed. Brent kicked in the door to the master bath. Dagny checked under the bed and tore open the door to the closet. Victor shifted from foot to foot.

  Benny was gone.

  Dagny took a pair of nylon gloves from her pockets and put them on, picked up the envelope from the bed, and tore it open. She unfolded the note that was inside. In large script, it said:

  I’m too tired, and you’re too late.—Martin Benny

  The commercial ended, and a news anchor appeared on the screen. “To repeat the breaking news, serial killer Martin Benny turned himself in to Chicago police earlier this evening. Benny will be housed at the county jail until law enforcement determines where he will be detained and which jurisdiction will try him first.” The screen showed a half-dozen officers loading a handcuffed and clean-shaven Benny into the back of a police van.

  “For the love of all that is good, will someone tell me what is going on?” the Professor barked.

  “We’re too late,” Dagny said.

  They took a booth in the back of a TGI Fridays. The Professor sat next to Dagny. He was a short, shriveled man, with slight patches of white hair above his ears but bald on top. In moments of considered contemplation, he would stroke his short white beard to its fine point, but this was not such a moment.

  Brent and Victor sat across from them. Under different circumstances, the sight of the two tall men stuffed uncomfortably into the same side of a booth would have brought Dagny some measure of joy. Apart from their size and job, they had little in common. Brent was a handsome black man; Victor was a pale redhead. Brent was fit and athletic; Victor was a little doughy and a lot clumsy. Brent was in his mid-thirties and looked like a man; Victor was in his mid-twenties and looked like a boy. Brent worked people; Victor worked paper. Dagny valued Victor’s skills more highly, but the Bureau rewarded Brent’s.

  When the waitress came, Brent ordered a coffee, Victor, a piece of apple pie, and Dagny, a cheeseburger with extra cheese. The Professor ordered nothing. They all looked glum.

  The Professor had leveraged the success of their last case to achieve unprecedented independence within the Bureau. For the time being, they operated with virtually no oversight. They could choose their cases and commandeer whatever resources were necessary to solve them. Bureau protocol, rules, standards—none of that applied to them. They appeared on no FBI organizational chart. Every facet of the operation was an experiment—the culmination of the Professor’s entire career in the Bureau, and a test of everything he believed. And so far, they were failing that test.

  Victor broke the silence. “I’m a bad person.”

  A minute passed before Dagny finally asked, “Why?”

  “The guy turned himself in. He’s going to jail. He won’t kill anyone else. So I should be happy, and yet I’m not. And the only reason I’m not happy is that we didn’t get to catch him.”

  “That’s a perfectly fine reason to feel sad,” she said.

  “I don’t know,” Victor replied. “It’s just selfish.”

  The Professor turned to Victor and pounded his fist on the table. “You’re damn right it’s selfish, and thank God for that. That selfishness that makes you want to be the one to catch a criminal—that thing that drives you crazy when you don’t—that’s the very thing that makes one a good agent. We spent two months tracking this fool, and he shows us up by turning himself
in. I’m not sad—I’m furious. I feel rotten and low, and I wouldn’t want to work with anyone who didn’t feel the same way.” He paused as the waitress set their orders on the table. “Your pride, your greed, your vanity—they can either undermine you or make you great. You choose how to use them. I use them to catch bad people.”

  Dagny agreed. Although she had no appetite, she picked up her cheeseburger and took a bite.

  CHAPTER 4

  Marcia Bell’s law office was on the floor above a Quiznos. Diego pressed the intercom button and announced himself. The door buzzed, and he opened it, climbed the steps, and turned the knob of a glass door marked by the painted words LAW OFFICE. The receptionist’s desk was empty; he walked past it and down a hallway. Marcia shared her space with several other solo practitioners; he passed their offices and found hers.

  Bell was forty-six years old and looked exactly that and nothing more. She wore a white blouse and a dark-gray skirt; her suit coat hung from the back of her chair. Years of coffee stained her teeth. Her dark hair was only partially contained by the large barrette at the top of her head, and she swiveled back and forth in her chair in apparent synchronization with her thoughts. She waved Diego in, and he took a seat in front of her.

  The phone on her desk rang. She silenced the ringer, but the lights kept blinking. Manila folders were piled on her desk in irregular stacks. Her diploma and bar certificate hung on her wall, which was otherwise bare. A picture of her husband and teenage daughter sat on the second bookshelf from the top. The rest of the shelves were filled with immigration-conference materials and various iterations of the United States Code and Code of Federal Regulations.

  “Don’t tell me . . .”

  He wasn’t sure what he wasn’t supposed to tell her, so he waited.

  “I know you from somewhere.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I never forget a face.”

  There was nothing familiar about her. “If we’ve met, I’m sorry to have forgotten it, Ms. Bell.”