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