Taylor’s Ranger unit, Company D, was headquartered in Weslaco, a soupy, sleepy town a few miles from the Gulf. The bodies had been left in five different counties, as far away as two hundred miles northwest.
Taylor’s Rangers and sheriffs’ investigators were handling the more recent cases. He had asked the FBI agents for help with the earlier killings, starting by re-interviewing family members and friends. Old-school detective work, Taylor said. No suspects, no DNA, not much forensics. Do this the hard way. Which meant tracing connections between the victims, or at least patterns that might show them how the killer had found his targets.
The interviews took more out of Rebecca than she expected. Nothing was worse than having your daughter or sister murdered, except having her murdered and knowing years later that her killer hadn’t been caught. Rebecca had doors slammed in her face. Nobody’s in jail because nobody cares, one father told her. She died, nobody cares.
She found herself dreaming about crime scene photos, one in particular that showed a teenage girl with her hands pressed together in prayer. No one knew why the killer had placed her hands that way. No one knew her name. No one knew anything.
You need to stop, Brian said. You can’t solve this working two weekends a month. And you’re not being fair to the kids.
He was right. But she couldn’t stop. She told herself the case badly needed a female perspective. The victims were women, but the investigators were men. Some victims appeared to have gone with the killer willingly. Maybe Rebecca could figure out how he’d managed that trick.
But after a while, she wondered if she was punishing herself to soothe some deeper guilt. Not just the guilt that she was alive and these women were dead. The guilt of pulling up in her cherry-red BMW outside rusted trailers. She might not be the perp, but she sure felt like a thief, stealing time and hope from these people. She poked at the holes the murderer had made in their lives.
Tell me everything you can remember about the most painful week of your life. By the way it’ll probably be useless. And yeah, I’m the best hope you’ve got even though I’m only down here on weekends.
Going after Draymond Sullivan had been scary. But she’d felt like she was in a fair fight. Nothing about what was happening down here seemed fair.
* * *
She kept going. She grew to appreciate the otherness of the borderlands, the slums that lay not far from the gates of ten-thousand-acre ranches, the wide-legged way the men walked. Sometimes she had to remind herself that South Texas and Boston were part of the same country.
But her badge meant as much here as anywhere else. She didn’t worry about working alone. She had her pistol, too. As Uncle Ned had predicted, it had grown to be a part of her.
She was more an archaeologist than a cop on this case. The Bandit had long since moved on to new victims. The biggest risk she faced was having her ego bruised.
Or losing her heart to Todd Taylor.
* * *
She didn’t realize what was happening at first. But inch by inch her life turned inside out. The border weekends were what mattered. Two days on and twelve days off.
She always checked in at Company D on Saturday mornings, even if her interviews were a hundred miles north. She had a good excuse. She couldn’t link to the Ranger computer system, so she had to visit the office physically to catch up on documents and forensics.
Taylor just so happened to be in the office every Saturday morning, reviewing the week’s work. He had to work the case on the margins, too. The Ranger higher-ups in Austin wanted the case, but they didn’t like it. The victims were an all-too-forgettable batch of Annas and Esmeraldas.
One fine Saturday morning in December, the unsparing heat finally gone for a couple of months, she didn’t see Taylor’s Silverado in the lot behind Company D’s headquarters. Her heart wilted. What am I doing here? Might as well just go home, the words unexpected, and then—
Oh shit. She couldn’t pretend she didn’t know what she’d meant. Her disappointment had nothing to do with the work. She wanted to see Todd Taylor, with his cowboy slouch and piercing hazel eyes. She wanted him to nod her into his office and look her over the way he always did. He never said anything, and he never looked too long, just long enough to make her pulse pick up. She wanted to see him in a way she hadn’t wanted to see a man in a while. Though in truth she knew next to nothing about Taylor, except that he didn’t wear a wedding ring.
When the receptionist buzzed her into the secure area she was surprised to see Taylor in his office, cowboy boots perched on his desk, flipping through a file. Surprised and relieved.
“Where’s your truck?”
“In the shop. What I get for changing the transmission fluid myself. How was the drive?”
And they were off. Not much had happened in the case in the last two weeks. In fact the Bandit had been quiet since the spring. One reason Rebecca suspected he was a cop—waiting to see if the investigation had picked up, if they were close. They weren’t. Taylor had drawn up a list of everyone in the five-county region who had a murder or rape conviction, asked investigators to request they provide DNA samples and fingerprints. Of course, the state already had their prints and samples. Taylor was hoping to provoke them, see if anyone reacted.
“Could work,” she said. Though she didn’t think so.
“So, look, can I take you out to dinner tonight?”
Okay, that was unexpected. What? Yes, no, please. Suddenly she was conscious of what she was wearing, so juvenile but she couldn’t help herself.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be presumptuous. Just, you drive down here for free, spend weekends, I thought it was the least I could do.”
“I’m in Zapata tonight.”
“I can meet you up there, there’s a barbeque place that’s pretty good. If you like barbeque.”
“Your wife won’t mind?” Smooth, Rebecca.
“Doubt it. Seeing as we’ve been divorced five years.”
* * *
Their affair began.
Not that they ever kissed. Much less had sex. But she yearned for him, and she knew he felt the same. On their dates—if dates was the word—they drank lightly, he sipped Shiner Bock and she allowed herself a single Bloody Mary, if one was on the menu. The drink’s peppery tang went equally well with barbeque and Tex-Mex. They tried not to talk about the case, but her frustration boiled over.
“If the Rangers want it so bad how come they won’t work it properly?”
“I know.”
“Have you ever thought about resigning?”
He put his beer down and looked at her. “Easy for you to say.”
“I don’t like women getting killed and left for the coyotes. I know, call me crazy.”
“You have some bite, don’t you, Boston?”
“Now and then.”
They rarely talked about their families, preserving the illusion of freedom. But eventually, he told her about his marriage. He’d grown up in Lubbock, gone to the University of Texas—the main campus, in Austin. Sophomore year he’d met the middle daughter of an old-money Texas oil family from Houston.
“She liked the idea of marrying a guy who had nothing to do with oil. I think she had the wrong idea about my job. And I didn’t know what growing up with money like hers meant. Full-time staff in the house, mommy and daddy never saying no. She was nice, really, but she had no idea how entitled she was. She was great when I was in Garland—that’s Dallas, basically. Then they moved me to El Paso. She didn’t like El Paso. Anyway, when they told me I was coming here she said no way, it was her or Weslaco.”
“And here you are.” She wondered if he’d try to kiss her tonight. She wondered what she’d do if she did.
“Here I am.” What might have been a smile crossed his face. “I shouldn’t joke about it. Divorce stinks, and divorce with kids stinks worse, but she’s a good mom and a good person and we didn’t fight about custody. And she’s decent about it; she lets me take my vacation with them,
and I was always too into the job to be the dad I should have been. This way I don’t resent them, I value the time I have with them.”
Rebecca’s stomach knotted. Resent? Did she resent Kira and Tony?
“You’re looking at me like I’m the world’s biggest jerk,” Taylor said.
“Or maybe you’re just being honest.”
He coughed into his hand. “I should go,” he said a few seconds later. “Long day ahead.” She realized afterward that the word honest had triggered him, that he wasn’t comfortable doing whatever it was they were doing.
She spent the entire drive home on Sunday doing what she’d sworn she’d never do, comparing Brian and Taylor. Taylor wasn’t clever or ironic. He was dogged and quiet, genuinely furious that he had failed to catch the Bandit. He wasn’t perfect. Sometimes he showed an unthinking acceptance of the disparities in wealth and power that cut through the borderlands like barbed wire. I don’t make the laws, I just catch people who break them. On the other hand, Rebecca was sure if he did sniff out the Bandit he would follow the trail just as hard whether it ended in a slum or the King Ranch.
* * *
The next time she came to town he didn’t ask her to dinner, and she couldn’t help feeling like the whole trip had been a waste. The lack of progress on the Bandit didn’t help. If the guy had left any patterns, she couldn’t see them. He’d been quiet for almost a year now, too. Too long.
Back home Brian had gone mostly mute. He took the kids to school, cleaned the house. Like he was practicing for life without her. Only in the bedroom did he expose his feelings. He seemed to know he was losing her, because more and more often he turned savage, slapping and biting her, fucking her like she was a toy, until the pain turned into pleasure and the pleasure turned to orgasms and the orgasms turned back to pain. She didn’t try to stop him. She didn’t say No, don’t—though sometimes she found her mind drifting, not so much to Todd Taylor but to the border itself, the unforgiving land that had swallowed those women.
Not then or ever did they talk about what she was doing, much less why.
She wondered what he knew, what he’d guessed. If she should even feel guilty.
* * *
Their tenth anniversary was coming. A Saturday, a Weslaco weekend. She would make the right choice. She would stay in Houston. She would have an anniversary dinner with her husband, the father of her children. Her life partner. She made a reservation for two at the sushi place that the Chronicle said was the best in town. And she told Brian, get ready, we’re going out to dinner like husband and wife. Alrighty then, he said.
But even before they sat down, she knew she’d made a mistake. The place was wrong for them, too fancy, too expensive. The lights were low, the room was round and windowless. When the host whispered, “Reservation?” Brian whispered back, even more softly, “Yessss.” Rebecca knew the pretension infuriated him. Maybe intimidated him too, though he’d never say so.
They fell back on the last refuge of the sinking couple, sneering at everyone else. The room had ripe targets, jowly sixty-year-old men and their thirty-year-old wives. The cattiness was no substitute for real intimacy. Suddenly she felt the void in her life, in their lives, of the way she’d thrown everything into the job.
“Brian.” She reached across the table. “I’m sorry. I know I haven’t been a good partner recently.”
He pulled his hands away, leaned forward. He looked not sad or even angry but eager. Ready to pounce. “What does that mean, exactly?”
Don’t do this. She couldn’t play this game. Did he want her to confess? And to what, exactly? I had dinner a few times with the Ranger who runs the case? Because in reality she’d done nothing else.
Or, closer to the truth: That I found someone who makes me feel the way you used to?
And this: I’m sorry you never found anything you like the way I like my job, but that’s not my fault. Maybe we can try to make our lives more about you, but you have to ask.
“It means I know I’ve spent a lot of weekends away. I know I care too much about this case.” The safe answer. The true lie. “I can’t stop thinking about it.”
“Do you think you can solve it, Becks?”
He still called her Becks. Still used her nickname. A good sign, right? Except that being so desperate for hope in your marriage that you ticked off good signs was a bad, bad sign.
No. “I know I have to try.”
“Uh-huh. Interesting people down there?”
She realized at that moment she wasn’t cut out for an affair. If she felt this guilty without having done anything, what would she feel if she did?
They stared at each other over their yellowtail rolls. Until her purse buzzed.
* * *
“You can look,” Brian said. “It’s okay.”
“What?” She feigned surprise. Badly.
“I know you want to check, just go ahead.”
Don’t. It’s your anniversary—
She pulled out the BlackBerry. Not the office. Todd Taylor. Call me. Please.
“Sorry. The office. I have to call.”
* * *
She stood beside the valet stand, where two Ferraris shared space with a Rolls. Quiet wealth was not the Houston way. “Todd? Everything okay?”
“You know it’s been a month since we had dinner?” His voice was low, urgent, a tone she’d never heard. “I miss you, Rebecca.”
“You must be bored down there.” Her voice was light. False.
“Don’t pretend you don’t know.”
She knew.
“Come down here. No—I’ll come up.”
A new life waiting. All she had to do was blow up the one she had. She thought of Brian, inside, alone, staring at an empty seat. Her children, waiting for her. Kira. Tony. “I need to think about this.” Though she had her answer.
The dream had turned real and destroyed itself.
“I’ll drive up tomorrow.”
“Don’t do that. Don’t.”
A long pause.
“You sure?”
The night blurred and the headlights on the avenue streaked, and she realized she was crying.
She wiped her face and went back to her husband.
* * *
She went down to Weslaco one more time. As soon as she saw Taylor she knew she couldn’t be part of the case. He was friendly and polite. They had nothing to say to each other, and much too much. Even in May, when border patrol officers stumbled across two more corpses, the Bandit’s first victims in more than a year, she stayed away.
And a month later, when a counterintel job on the Russia desk opened up in D.C., she put up her hand and grabbed it.
15
Washington, D.C.
In Washington the stakes were high. Rebecca had a safe in her office where she locked away files stamped TOP SECRET/SCI/NOFORN/NOCON. She talked about SIGINT and HUMINT and ELINT in windowless conference rooms swept weekly for bugs. She met once a quarter with the CIA’s Russia desk officers—mostly at Langley, the agency’s way of pulling rank over the bureau.
Yet for a while she couldn’t help feeling the job was more of a game than her work in Houston and Birmingham had ever been. Move and countermove. The Russians recruited army colonels who were angry they didn’t have stars on their collars, blackmailed scientists with drug problems, caused trouble wherever they could. The FBI tried to limit the damage. In Moscow the CIA and the FSB played the same game in reverse.
She had arrived in D.C. at the right time. The terror threat was waning, while the American effort to improve relations with Russia had gone nowhere. In fact, the Kremlin was becoming more openly anti-Western. Her ability to speak Russian made up for her lack of espionage experience. Within months, she’d been anointed a rising star. For the first time she felt as though her career at the bureau was assured.
The pace at headquarters surprised her, too—not because it was harder than the field. The opposite. In Houston, even before she became involved in the Bandit case, s
he’d always worked several others simultaneously. If she finished one, another inevitably bubbled over. In Washington, Russians were her only target. They were professionals, and they worked that way, mostly nine to six, nights and weekends only on special targets. Plus the deputy assistant director who ran her unit discouraged his officers from helping other desks. There’s going to be times I need you quick. I don’t want to have to pry you from some van outside a mosque when I do. For the first time, Rebecca saw the bureau’s Washington fiefdoms up close.
* * *
She spent the extra time at home. She saw the kids nights and weekends. She glimpsed what she’d lost by being so absent in Houston and Birmingham. Sometimes Kira and Tony and Brian seemed to be a single unit, with their own in-jokes that she didn’t always catch. She tried not to let the three-against-one vibe bother her, and over time it faded.
As for Brian… she didn’t know what to do about Brian. The more time she spent with the kids, the more she respected how he’d parented. Kira and Tony were smart, decent, and fundamentally happy.
Yet he was as directionless as ever. The gap between her success and his stillborn career had grown painful. And they needed him to make some decent money. Money was by far their biggest problem. Though she was making more than she ever had.
She’d gotten a promotion in Houston and—unusually—another soon after she arrived in Washington. Between those two and her annual seniority bumps and the cost-of-living allowance the bureau gave its D.C. agents, she made ninety-nine thousand her first year, about what they had earned together in Houston. And the FBI had gold-plated health insurance and a great pension plan, if she got that far.
The Power Couple Page 13
