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