Houston
Buzzing at her feet. An angry hiss, as if an inch-high demon were stuck in her purse.
Her BlackBerry. Again.
Probably the office. She couldn’t be sure. Because she couldn’t see it. Because she’d left it in her purse so she wouldn’t check it during dinner. Of course, if she’d really planned not to check it she would have left it at home.
She should have left it at home. She and Bri hadn’t had a date night in months. Tough to make time for dates when she didn’t get home until seven thirty on weeknights and spent every other weekend chasing a serial killer and maybe something else too in South Texas.
Now she sat across from Brian at a white-tablecloth sushi restaurant in River Oaks, Houston’s fanciest neighborhood, surrounded by oil company executives and their second wives. She and her husband were sipping sake they didn’t like and eating yellowtail rolls they couldn’t afford.
Happy anniversary!
Because not going out together for six months meant overcorrecting when the big night arrived, trying too hard to prove everything was copacetic. Even though Rebecca knew the mistake she was making. Even though she could still remember when the perfect meal was fried eggs and hash browns and a kitchen counter on which to enjoy Brian’s company.
Because those hash browns might not even have been that long ago—eleven years wasn’t that long—but that couple no longer existed. Might as well have been Antony and Cleopatra, that’s how dead they were. The days of push-the-plates-in-the-sink sex were gone and not coming back.
She and Brian needed to be a different couple, a grown-up couple. They needed to celebrate their anniversary properly. To find a new way to be together. Maybe the new way wasn’t as much fun as the old way, but they needed to pretend it was, or else…
“You can look,” Brian said. “It’s okay.”
“What?” She feigned surprise. Badly.
“I know you want to check, just go ahead.”
She’d been intimidated when they arrived in Texas three years before. The Houston office had over three hundred agents, many more than Birmingham, investigating everything from money-laundering by Mexican cartels to big white-collar crime cases like Enron.
What Rebecca had pulled off in Birmingham didn’t mean much here. And the office was very male. The bureau claimed almost a quarter of its agents were women. But that number was misleading. Human resources and other back-office jobs leaned female. Only a few women were frontline agents doing real investigative work.
For the first time Rebecca saw the bureau’s casual sexism. It had been hidden at Quantico, because headquarters watched training so closely. In Birmingham, Fred Smith hadn’t put up with it. But here male agents hung out after work at bars where the only women were cop groupies.
Smith had connected her with two agents he knew, but one rotated out a month after she arrived. The other had suffered a heart attack and retired. Quickly she felt like a cog in a big machine, jumped from case to case on the orders of her bosses. Whatever momentum she’d had from Birmingham was gone. She worried coming here had been a mistake.
It was Brian who gave her the answer.
“What about the US Attorney’s Office? Bet it’s not ninety percent guys.”
He was right. From what she’d seen, at least one-third of the prosecutors in Houston were women.
“You’ve got a law degree, they’ll like that. And maybe they’re tired of dealing with all that testosterone coming out of Jester.” T. C. Jester Drive, home of the bureau’s main Houston office, although the bureau was moving to a new building off the Northwest Freeway.
“You think the way to get ahead is to ignore what my bosses want and beg the AUSAs for help?” The question came out more aggressively than she’d intended.
“I think if the prosecutors like you, it’ll make your bosses happy, Becks. Have coffee with them. Help them out when you can.”
“Extra work.”
“Not usually a problem for you.”
I’m not worried about me.
Brian was right. The prosecutors took to her. Within six months they were asking for her. Her immediate supervisor, a crusty Oklahoman, tried to complain, but his boss told him to stop yapping. They like her, one less problem for me. Rebecca had to admit, for a guy who had always bounced from job to job, Brian understood office politics.
But she was right, too. She paid the price with the kids for the late nights. Kira was in school now, and Tony kindergarten. Both were old enough to know she was shorting them. She had one ironclad rule. She reserved Sunday afternoons for family. But they needed more.
The second-worst part was that Brian barely seemed to care. She had steered him to a new job as a systems administrator at ConocoPhillips, which would happily hire anyone with an FBI connection. When she asked him if he liked it, he said, “Installing and maintaining enterprise software, every boy’s dream.”
But they both knew he couldn’t quit. They lived basically paycheck to paycheck. Working for the FBI was surprisingly expensive. The bureau expected its agents to dress professionally. Good women’s clothes didn’t come cheap. Rebecca was stuck buying five-hundred-dollar Theory suits. Plus, yes, she had one indulgence. She’d bought a 330i, the BMW one model down from the M3. It was a sedan, so she could haul the kids in it, though after one too many spills on the leather she tried to keep them in Brian’s old Jeep Cherokee.
Should she have spent thirty-eight K on a car? Maybe not. But the M3 had spoiled her, and she did drive a lot. Everyone in Houston drove a lot.
Anyway, she was the primary earner, wasn’t she? A man in her position would have bought himself a nice car and not felt guilty. She knew, because the FBI garage was filled with equally flashy vehicles. The feeling in the office seemed to be that a million-dollar house was impossible—and would make everyone wonder how you’d paid for it—but a thirty-five-thousand-dollar car was achievable.
She didn’t just spend on herself, either. She wanted the kids to have nice clothes. Maybe because she felt guilty about not spending enough time with them. A predictable feeling, but its predictability didn’t make it less real. Not to mention taxes, and babysitters, and trips back to Massachusetts to see her parents, and groceries, and making sure she picked up her share of the drinks when she went out with the AUSAs, and everything else—no, Brian couldn’t quit. They needed the thirty-four thousand he made just to stay on top of the bills every month.
“So you don’t like the job?” she said.
“Does it sound like I like the job?” He used the Socratic method with her a lot these days.
“I just want you to be happy, Bri.”
“That what you want? For me to be happy?”
So often their conversations now slipped into the thrust-and-parry of a swordfight. Or maybe more accurately the cape-waving of a bullfight. She wasn’t sure who was the matador.
She wanted to scream at him. Maybe she should. Maybe a good screaming match would break the glass wall that was rising between them, a millimeter a day, slow and certain. She could still see him. He still looked the same. But she couldn’t reach him. Even their sex life had withered. They weren’t in a dead bed, not yet. But they rarely got together more than a couple of times a month. He’d wanted the lights off recently, another first. She wondered what porn star or model he was thinking about, because she knew it wasn’t her.
She couldn’t help but laugh. “Do you know how annoying you are these days? Professor Unsworth?” She looked over, hoping the joke had broken through. Not that she particularly cared. If the second-worst part of her dereliction of duties at home was that Brian hardly cared, the worst part was that she didn’t either. Yes, she missed the kids. She wanted to do more for them, with them. But all her guilt didn’t get her home a minute earlier.
Being an agent was still her dream job. Especially now that Brian’s advice had put her career in Houston back on track. Maybe one day she’d get cynical, tired of the bureau. Not yet. Every morning she woke up in awe of her responsibility. She put criminals in prison.
And, yeah, she liked showing all the bureau’s Jims and Johns that she could make cases better than they could, find the pressure points in interviews, the hidden bank accounts, the extra video camera that had the clear angle.
Anyway, if she and Bri were asking rhetorical questions, how about this one: What had he expected when they met? If she hadn’t gone to a big law firm, she’d be a young partner at this point, working nights and weekends. Or she wouldn’t have made partner, and she would have had to find another job at a smaller firm. Either way, they’d have more money, but she’d spend even less time at home.
Thing about rhetorical questions, they are mostly better off unasked. So she didn’t. She poured herself into the bureau instead.
Most nights, Rebecca barely made it home in time to tuck in Tony, talk to Kira for a few minutes. By ten she was ready for bed herself. The schedule gave her an hour or two to spend with Brian. But she needed that time to decompress. To watch dumb television, American Idol, The Bachelor, whatever. Anything that would lock her mind in the off position.
Sometimes she wanted to tell him about her day. But she could rarely find the energy. His own work was so boring neither of them could pretend to care. When they wound up talking for more than a few minutes on weeknights, the subject was usually the kids.
Then she went to bed—alone—and woke by five forty-five to work out for an hour, get Kira and Tony dressed and pour their cereal. Having breakfast with them was the only way she could know she’d see them each day.
Meanwhile Bri hung in the kitchen past midnight, wearing headphones as he stared at his laptop. He claimed he was coding an app. But the couple of times she’d surprised him, he’d snapped down the screen so fast she figured he was watching porn. He’d been right about movies on the Internet, she had to admit.
He was right a lot of the time. In truth, he was probably smarter than she was. But if she had learned anything since college, it was that brains only went so far. Getting ahead meant grinding.
Only she wasn’t sure Brian cared about getting ahead. Though the layer of irony that coated him meant she couldn’t entirely tell. She understood. They were both Generation X. They had grown up with irony as their default setting. When they were teenagers, no cultural influence—at least for white kids—had been more important than Nirvana, its very name a thumb-in-the-eye joke. Brian had seen Nirvana in Seattle. He had his signed first-edition copy of Microserfs. If she tried, she could still connect with him that way. But trying no longer interested her much. The FBI wasn’t a very ironic place. Solving crimes wasn’t a very ironic job. For the most part she’d left irony behind.
Sometimes she feared she’d left her husband behind, too. Viewed in straightforward, brutal terms, the equation was simple. Her workday left her barely enough time to be a mother or a wife. Not both.
She saw what the job was doing to her family. She tried to back off. Truly. She stopped raising her hand for Saturday jobs. She read to Tony and listened to Kira.
Then the Border Bandit showed up.
Rebecca hated everything about the case, starting with the cheesy nickname the media had given the perp. “Border Bandit” made him sound like a used-car salesman, not a psychopath who had murdered somewhere around twenty women in Texas and more in Mexico.
She hated the way the murders were caught in immigration politics—the women were nearly all either undocumented or first-generation arrivals. She hated the fact that the investigators couldn’t even guess what the body count on the Mexican side might be. Corpses from the narco wars piled up in the desert so fast that the federales could barely make basic cases, much less help a transnational homicide investigation.
She hated the killer’s effectiveness at covering his tracks. He’d left only the faintest traces of forensic evidence: a partial tire track at one murder site, a piece of rope at another. She hated that investigators had processed some crime scenes so poorly that they weren’t even sure if the Bandit had killed his victims where they were found. She hated her sneaking feeling that the Bandit was a cop.
And she hated the way the bureau was stuck on the margins of the case. The FBI had become involved after the Texas Rangers asked for profiling help. But the Rangers wanted to keep control of the case, and they had the political juice to do so. In response, the Houston FBI office told agents they could work the case only as volunteers on days off. The political signal could not have been clearer. We aren’t responsible for an investigation that isn’t ours. Enter at your own risk.
But Todd Taylor, the director of the Ranger company in South Texas leading the investigation, came to Houston to ask for volunteers.
We all know that Austin wants us Rangers to run the investigation. Taylor didn’t say anything about what he wanted, Rebecca noted. But I look around this office, I see you have more agents than all the Rangers in Texas. I’d be a fool not to ask for help. Especially if you speak Spanish. Outside a thunderclap hit, as if to punctuate his words. Then another and another. July in Houston meant end-of-days weather. Can’t promise any of us are going to be covered in glory. This case is tough. But I can tell you this. Guy’s not gonna stop until we catch him. Reason I came up here.
Rebecca found herself nodding.
Her vow to keep Sundays for the kids vanished. Every other weekend she drove to the border, three hundred fifty of the most boring miles anywhere. Even without stops, the trip took five hours. She ached to speed, of course, and she knew she could escape tickets if she showed her bureau identification. But getting pulled over inevitably cost more time than speeding saved. So she kept to a steady eighty-one, a pace that hardly counted as speeding on a Texas highway. She left before dawn Saturday morning, came home after dark Sundays. The schedule was ridiculous, exhausting. On Mondays she was a zombie. Even Tony noticed. Mommy, are you okay? You look sickie. One afternoon she realized that she hadn’t seen Brian riding his motorcycle in a while. You should go for a ride, she said. It’s a nice day. He looked at her strangely. I sold it. Last month. So we could pay the credit card bill.
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.