Scattered around Andres were small yellow numbered placards beside items of interest. Some were incomprehensible to me, the blood, in particular, imbued with mysterious hieroglyphic meaning. Others—fingerprints—were obvious.
Every surface was covered in sooty black smudges. Fabian’s fingerprints had not been found where they might be expected: the interior or exterior door handles, the bathroom sink or tub, or Andres’s belongings. But because the door handles had been cleaned of prints altogether, the detectives had speculated early on that the perpetrator hadn’t worn gloves but, rather, wiped where he might have touched, leaving more room for error. It was the placard marked nineteen that gave police the lead they needed: a partial fingerprint on the wooden platform base of the bed.
I brought that photo closer to my face. Why would his fingerprint be there? I lowered myself beside the bed. He’d need to be on his knees. Maybe he was checking whether Andres was breathing—though he’d be closer to Andres’s ankles than his chest. Maybe he was waiting for Andres to die. Maybe he needed to brace himself against what he’d done: a low crouch, shallow breaths, ears ringing. Was it here, in this spot, that he’d decided to take Andres’s wallet?
I glanced around the room. Most men kept their wallets in their back pocket, but if that was the case, Fabian would have needed to move Andres, and there would be some evidence of that. Maybe Andres had tossed the wallet beside the hotel key on the nightstand. Maybe Fabian had seen it in this low crouch, casting desperate glances around the room. But if he’d been hoping to obscure Andres’s identity, he hadn’t thought about the passport, which, according to the evidence log, had been tucked neatly into an interior pocket of Andres’s duffel bag. Not to mention that in 1986, Hotel Botanica was almost new, a decent family motel with appropriate record keeping. But most people don’t think clearly after committing a murder. Killing gets to people.
I pored through the photos again. That strip of skin between Andres’s sock and the hem of his jeans, black hair sprouting from a bony shin. A piece of himself he hadn’t meant to show.
A strange image rose: Dolores, naked, her shoulders gleaming silver beneath a blood-orange sun. The dark curls of her youth falling tangled to her waist. Teeth like a shark’s, one ancient row tucked behind another. Her fingernails—long, sharp as arrowheads, and eerily pearlescent. The soles of her feet worn smooth and hard as diamonds.
Then I thought of the woman I’d met today, her linen shirt and running shorts, thighs dimpled in the unrelenting sun. The ways we can hide in plain sight.
I woke up at eight in the morning with a dull pulsing behind my eyebrows, a tremble in my fingers. I’d stayed up until four reviewing the case file. The empty bottle of wine on the motel nightstand caught the accusing morning light. I felt all six dollars of that hangover.
I grabbed for my phone, hoping for an early-morning message from Dolores. Nothing.
After checking out, for lack of anything better to do, I drove to Mall del Norte. This was where Lore and the twins had seen Aliens the night of the murder. Not surprisingly, that theater was long gone. There was a new one, with stadium seating and reclining leather chairs. The two kids working the box office hadn’t even been alive back then.
I left and aimlessly ended up back on I-35 South, swerving off just before accidentally joining the line for Nuevo Laredo on the bridge. I turned down a narrow one-way street, trying to regain my bearings. This part of town was old. Not in a historic, Main Street way, but worn the way things get when they are abandoned to the elements. Spanish-signed storefronts and blistered red awnings, women browsing racks of pleather Betty Boop purses as children pointed to windows bright with cheap plastic toys. Men smoking, shoulders slumped, on the stoops of battered convenience stores. A Casa de Cambio (money exchange, according to Google Translate at a red light) on every corner.
Through the dilapidation, there was a sad echo of a kind of splendor. A plastic banner for an electronics store hung incongruously across a building with a sleek marble facade, as if it had once been a bank or high-end department store. Beside the tiny Border Beauty Supply was a tall brick building with mosaic-tiled bald eagles hovering, regal, over arched windows. The four-story courthouse with elegant white columns overlooked a plaza with globe streetlights, where brown-skinned men sat on benches beneath the shade of mature oaks. It felt like a different country, which of course it used to be.
I ended up at an outlet mall, a cheerful, garish monstrosity wildly out of place a block from the tiny Mexican storefronts I’d just passed. Instead of turning right into the parking lot, I turned left onto dirt. Mere feet in front of me was the Rio Grande, a wide swath of brown water separating one country from another. The two riverbanks looked identical—long, flaxen weeds and inhospitable snarls of mesquite. The vantage looked familiar, and I realized with surprise that the YouTube video of near-distant artillery fire must have been taken nearby. I couldn’t imagine it now, not with this unbroken sky and motionless ribbon of water, murals for Coach and Banana Republic beckoning behind me.
I opened Andres’s autopsy report, imagined a cold room, chrome shining. On the table, Andres reduced to the sum of his parts: he was six feet, two inches tall, weighed 195 pounds. No facial hair, teeth in good repair. No needle marks or tattoos. Bloody liquid found in nostrils. His heart weighed 400 grams. Its surface was smooth, glistening, and transparent.
The slug was seen through X-ray, then extracted and submitted as evidence. It was, as the Laredo Morning Times reporter had written, “later matched to ammunition found in Fabian and Dolores’s home, ammunition used for the Ruger Mark II .22 caliber pistol Fabian claimed to have lost.” It washed up on the bank of the Rio Grande days later.
I couldn’t stop staring at the slug. Such a small thing. Innocuous and almost pretty, like a golden teardrop. A fraction of a second. The curl of one finger, and Andres’s life was over. But what had brought him to that exact moment?
My phone rang—a Laredo area code. My heart jumped.
“Cassie Bowman speaking,” I answered, too eagerly.
“I was reading that article again.” Dolores Rivera gave a mirthless laugh. “No sé por qué—I have the damn thing memorized. Do you know what really bothers me?”
“No.” I tried to keep my voice even, casual, as if we were picking up right where we’d left off.
“Penelope,” Dolores said. “The things she said: ‘She used us. Then threw us away, like trash.’ What does she think I used them for?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Did you ever reach out to them again? After . . . ?”
“Yes! I wrote them letters, for months. That pendejo got everything wrong. He thinks I’m a psychopath. That I didn’t love anybody.” Dolores’s voice vibrated. “He can’t even imagine the truth.”
“And what’s that, Dolores?” I held my breath. “What’s the truth?”
For a beat, she didn’t answer. Then: “I loved everybody. ?Me oyes? I loved them all.”
The hair on my arms floated up in the slant of sunlight through the window. She did want to be understood. And I wanted to understand her. I set the autopsy report on the passenger seat.
“Dolores,” I said, “let me help you tell your story.”
She exhaled, long and slow. “One condition.”
In that moment, I would have given her anything. “What?”
“I don’t want to talk about the day—” She faltered, the strength in her voice giving way to something softer, bruised. “The day Andres died. Everything else, fine. But not that day. I don’t want to relive it. And it’s not—that’s not how I want either of them to be remembered.”
I bit my lip, canines sharp. Her double marriage was the story I wanted to tell—but we couldn’t just pretend the murder didn’t happen. It was, after all, how everything ended. I glanced at the open autopsy report. Obviously, her memories of that final day were more valuable, but if it came down to it, I could get most of what I needed from the case file.