ODESSA, TEXAS

JANUARY 1994

The outskirts of Odessa, Texas, are a moonscape of mile after dust-caked mile of oil derricks and drilling rigs. At night, the oil fields appear to be lit from within, casting an unearthly glow into the dark expanse of West Texas sky above them. The fields are neighbored by rows of slipshod shacks and trailers that serve as cheap housing for the oil industry’s disposable labor force.

Follow the train tracks closer to the center of town and you wind through a barren maze of industrial warehouses, heavy machinery yards, and a handful of strip clubs that service their workers, with neglected letter boards outside:

T O TUESDY!! ALL LIVE GIR ZGRLZ RLZ!!

EVERY HOUR HAPPY HOU

Follow the tracks still farther into the city with one of the highest rates of violent crime in America, and you pass megachurch after megamall after megachurch to reach the world’s largest jackrabbit, by the name of Jack Ben Rabbit, standing eight feet tall and firmly bolted to the ground to discourage thieves. Beyond that, you’ll find rows of modest, well-tended brick houses, familiar to any watcher of Friday Night Lights, the television show famously based on the town’s high school football team. These houses include the one in which Denise Christie Brothers, born Denise Doreen Powell, January 19, 1956, grew up.

In January 1994, Denise didn’t live in her childhood home anymore, but her two middle boys, Dustin and Damien, still resided there with her parents. That night, they were probably tucked into their beds, Damien reading a comic book under the covers with a flashlight, waiting up, listening, to see if she was going to try to break in again, like she did on Christmas. Because he wanted to bust her. Or because he just wanted to see her face.

She’d felt guilty, sure, but you can’t think about it too much. As she’d told Damien, “You get hungry enough and you do what you need to do. As long as there’s a tomorrow, there’s always another chance.”

She would get back those gifts and more. She usually did. They always forgave her, especially Dustin, with his liquid chocolate eyes. Just the other day, her boys rode their bikes through a storm to visit her. She held their wet faces in her hands, kissed their velvety cheeks. They smelled like grass and sweat and rain. They arrived at a bad time, when a mean jones started to gnaw at the back of her throat, and her delight wore off quickly. She sent them out for a loaf of bread and a pack of cigarettes.

“You’re supposed to be taking care of us, you know, not the other way around,” Damien said, his arm around his little brother. The boys returned to a locked door.

The drawer of the nightstand was open an inch. Inside, Denise could see the glint of a spoon’s edge, the bright orange of a syringe cap, several creased packs of matches, and a few scattered Polaroids: her second wedding, she and her mom getting their hair styled. Her favorite was her and the three boys at the Monahans Sandhills, a state park where she used to rent red plastic disks and take them sand surfing. Her boys posed on either side of her, squinting into the sun: Damien and Dustin, always joined at the hip, Dennis to the other side, practicing his handsome glower. She hadn’t seen Derreck since he was born. She had been too far gone by then.

Damien was the angriest at her, the angriest, period. She worried. All that anger can get twisted up inside, make you do stupid things. He had once asked her, shortly after Derreck, why she kept having babies she couldn’t take care of. She’d tried explaining to him that every single time, she knew, knew, it was finally going to be the love that saved her.

From the window of her second-floor motel room, on the corner of Royal and Second Street, Denise looked out at a no-man’s-land of body shops, industrial warehouses, and cheap but never cheap enough motels. The yellow arrow was the only part of the motel sign that still lit up.

Below it, the words receded into darkness:

LOW WKLY AND MONTHLY RATES

DIRECTDIALPHONES

HBO AND CABLE TV FRIENDLY

KING AND QUE…

She buttoned the waistband of her newly lifted Gitanos, ran her hands over her sharp hips. She hadn’t been eating much. Her boyfriend Elton gave her shit about it.

“Have a Waffle House. Treat yourself, baby. Skinny-legged women ain’t got no soul.”

On the twelve-inch screen in front of her, some bouncy Jewish kid with poseur dreads was singing about what? Something about Sha-la-la-la-la.

Something about we all wanna be big, big stars.

Something about I want to be someone who believes.

She gave consecutive handies to six sensitive assholes who sounded just like that when they came around slumming last week. They wanted to sit and talk about the government. They wanted to cry about their mean mommies. They wanted to tell you about the one who got away. If they gave you a fifty, one dollar was for the pussy. The remaining forty-nine dollars were for the rest of you. In the end, they found a way to feel cheated somehow. Usually because you only pretended. To love them? To come? Such fake-ass bitches.

Denise wiped a water mark off the nightstand with a thin square of toilet paper. She sometimes even got down on her hands and knees and tidied the brick-red syringe blood spatter from the grout between the tiles with a threadbare towel and a sliver of soap. She always liked things to be tidy, and needles are messy business.

She pulled a bedazzled D T-shirt over her head. D for Dennis, Damien, Dustin, Derreck.

D for Denise.

Denise had been a head turner. Her academic performance had been spotty, but she had the talent of simply being herself: popular, bright-eyed, a little bit wild, a lot beautiful. She was fashionable, creative. She made her own too-short dresses, paired with go-go boots and sparkly blue eye shadow shoplifted from the pharmacy.

She married at fifteen to a vain and violent man who believed himself entitled to many more prizes than he had won in life and blamed her for the injustice. She was stumbling out of that marriage when her second husband, Ron, caught her.

Ron was square jawed and broad shouldered, with a theatrical mustache and a defiant glint in his eye. He was a roofer—a respectable trade. He loved her. For a moment, it felt like all their jagged edges had come together to make something whole. It was another illusion. She found him shooting up heroin in the bathroom. She packed a bag. She came back.

She remembered the night he tenderly tied a blue bandanna around her bicep, felt for a vein in the crook of her elbow, and pulled her into the endless sea of forgetting. Heroin wasn’t the crazy cosmic orgasm she’d expected. It simply and irresistibly softened the edges of an unfairly sharp world. Who is invulnerable to something that feels so much like mercy? Until “mercy” hits you like a two-by-four and becomes nothing more than a cruel joke.

Denise pulled on another T-shirt, another pair of socks. At least the rain had stopped, and it was a dry, cold, clear January night, with a sliver of moon hanging over the sad industrial stretch. Need gnawed her nerve endings. Her skin crawled, and her body shuddered with waves of profound unease, as if all her organs were in the wrong place. She’d had a fix earlier, but not nearly enough. Half a hit was worse than none.

She took one last look in the mirror, finger-combed her blond bangs, and half-heartedly applied a dab of concealer to the bruise-colored circles under her stormy eyes. She remembered the first time she’d stepped a toe onto the stroll. She could almost laugh. She had worn white patent leather pumps, a pair of matching hot pants. She had put a swing into her hips. This wasn’t really her life. It couldn’t possibly be. She was a character in a movie, with Richard Gere in his silver Lotus waiting right around the next corner to save her.

Denise headed toward Elton, four blocks down. She only made it half a block before an engine grumbled behind her. A boxy white Cadillac with a blue fabric top and a shiny steel grill idled.

She used to try not to look eager so they didn’t lowball her. She was thirty-eight years old now and shivering inside her coat. There was little call to pretend anything else.

The driver slouched in his seat, partially in shadow. From what she could tell, he was a light-skinned Black guy, heavy browed, broad shouldered. She had a rule that she never went with a trick if she didn’t like the look in his eye, but she couldn’t see him well enough. Elton didn’t like her to go with Black dudes, period. Misgiving fluttered in her gut, but a biting wind kicked up behind her, and she yanked open the passenger-side door against it.

“Just pull up here,” she said in a girlish voice, resonant of her years as a soprano in the church choir. “A little farther up. I gotta get me and my man our fix first, then I’ll take care of you, big daddy. Look at you! You a tall, strong one.”

“Yeah? You like that? I used to be a prizefighter.”

A little mischievous, maybe, but seemed kind enough. Maybe her luck was changing.

“Now that’s something. I love a good fight. Just up here.”

They pulled up to another fleabag motel that reeked of despair. Denise got out, gifting the man in the car with a little hip wiggle as she gave him the one-minute sign, and took the steps to the breezeway two at a time. When Elton emerged shortly after, he stormed toward the Cadillac.

“Who the fuck that? That ain’t your nigger. I’m your nigger.”

The man in the Cadillac was easy, unconcerned by the man’s size or disposition. “No, no, no, brother. You her nigger. I’m just a friend.”

When the three returned an hour later, they were thick as thieves and high as fuck. Denise kissed Elton goodbye. He gave her a pat on the ass as she slid shotgun.

Denise had been surprised when the guy, what was his name? Sam…when Sam had shelled out so generously. Plenty of dope to last her all night, plus some crack thrown in just for fun.

“What do you do for work?” she asked.

“I’m a traveler.”

“The fuck kind of job is that?” She was always playing. What else could you do?

“Like to see new places, meet new people. I’m also an artist. Ooooh, I could draw you so pretty. Just like van Gogh.” He cracked himself up. “You’re beautiful. I love you.”

It seemed a little strange and sad, but also sweet—a man who actually told her he loved her when he wasn’t coming.

“We can go to my place up here.”

“Nah, I got somewhere else I like.”

He rolled his shoulders snugly back into his motorcycle jacket. His worn T-shirt read HUG ME, I’M HAIRY! He was sort of funny.

“Sure, whatever.”

A few miles northeast of that corner, she’d once cartwheeled all the way down the block. She held the neighborhood record to this day. She still remembered what it felt like for her body to be strong. Strong and hers.

Sam swung into an alley. His teeth were sharper and longer than she’d noticed. The big bad wolf. The crack could do that sometimes—make the world into a scary fairy tale. Especially when it was wearing off.

“Cross those legs for me.”

He stroked her thigh. She noticed his hands were abnormally large, smooth, and hairless as a woman’s. A man who hadn’t done an honest day’s work.

“God, you’re gorgeous. And you’re mine forever.”

“Right, baby. I’m all yours.”

She looked down and spit into her palm. Give ’em a fast handy, and you might be spared a degrading negotiation, where you tell some married cheapskate it’ll be an extra twenty-five dollars to stick his dick up your ass, and he says twenty.

Before the saliva even hit, a hand grabbed her by the throat and tossed her over the seat like a doll. The pain in her twisted legs brought her back to the surface of consciousness.

Shoes? Shoes. Find your shoes. She reached. Gone.

Jeans, tights, underwear tangled around her ankles. D T-shirt shoved up over her bra. The world was out of focus, stained with floating blotches of color that almost obscured the boxer straddling her with his dick in his hand.

With the hand that he wasn’t using to jack off, he fondled her neck.

Trust me. I’m not going to hurt you. I love you…

Her arms sprang to life. She thrashed, clawed. His arm was solid as a tree trunk. She grabbed for his face.

“Wildcat!”

He dropped his cock, delivered four blows to her head in rapid succession. The Mad Daddy. The Machine Gun. Her hands went instinctively to protect her face. He pressed down harder, and her arms went numb and dropped to her sides. She was almost disappointed when the world appeared above her again.

She still had some hope. She had been raped and tossed out of a car alive. This guy surely knew there was no danger in leaving a junkie ho as your only witness. No one would believe her anyway. If they did believe her, no one would care.

She tried, “Please.”

No sound came out. She cried, and he softened, kissed the tears off her face.

Maybe he would let her live after all.

He sat her up in the seat beside him, legs still immobilized by the tangle of clothes. He put his arms around her and she leaned into him, shaking with soundless sobs. He stroked her hair.

“All I ever wanted was you,” he said. He laid her down gently in his lap and tilted her head back, her hair spilling over the seat onto the floor of the car. “Look at your eyes. Like two big marbles,” he chuckled. “Like you looking at the devil himself.”

She could feel his erection growing again. He wrapped both hands around her throat, thumbs resting on the indentation between her collarbones.

“Swallow for me. I love it when you swallow.”

She heard a low sound like a train whistle. Or was it hooting? An owl. The owl that had nested close by to her childhood window for years, who had spoken to her in the night, promising that it understood the things that haunted her. Telling her it would be okay. It had left when she was eleven, but she’d always known it would mean good things when it returned.

Blood and mucus filled her mouth.

She was so sorry. So sorry, sons.

She should have seen it coming.

Three weeks later, a truck driver making a turn into a vacant lot at 2700 South Van Street, adjacent to the Coca-Cola plant, spotted a department store mannequin discarded among the blowing plastic bags, fast-food wrappers, used condoms. He shifted gears, but something told him to stop and look twice. As he approached the mannequin, it became clear it was not a doll at all. It was a half-naked, half-green dead girl, concealed by underbrush at the other side of a guardrail. He stopped about ten feet away. He looked one direction up the deserted street, then the other, hoping to see a pay phone.

Dogs barked. He looked back, almost reluctant to leave her alone. Wasn’t like she was going anywhere. From the looks of it, she’d been alone a while. The man went in search of a phone.

When Odessa Detective Sergeant Snow Robertson pulled up in an unmarked blue Chevy Lumina, uniformed patrol officers had already secured the yellow-taped perimeter, and the crime scene photographers were snapping away. Like a hawk surveying a field, his eyes scanned the large picture, then zeroed in on the object with the strongest gravitational pull. The wind cut through his suit. He folded his arms across his chest and approached what was left of a female body, lying half on her side, face to the sky, arm wedged under her.

This cold streak had been a lucky break, because she was still basically intact. Her skin had begun to slip from its contours, looking more like crumpled silk than skin, her lips were cracked and dry as tree bark, and her nose and mouth crawled with fly larvae. Still, he recognized her. He shook his head. They’d identify her with fingerprints, but they wouldn’t need to. Denise was familiar to local law enforcement. Hard time, that one. Rough friends.

The medical examiner’s van pulled in behind him, scattering pebbles. He held out a hand for them to stop. Dead hookers are dogs for cases. Something stirred in him for Denise. He wanted to make absolutely sure it was done right, so he did this one himself. He walked the scene, photographing what needed to be photographed, tagging what needed to be bagged. He crouched beside her, breathing through his mouth, and ran a hand through his white-blond hair.

“Okay, honey,” he said. “What happened to you?”

He reached into his pocket and snapped on a pair of rubber gloves before carefully bagging her hands, then lifting first her upper body, then lower, into a black body bag and zipping it up. He lifted the scant hundred pounds of her and placed her in the coroner’s van.

The medical examiner did a thorough and meticulous job with the autopsy, noting the clean break in the hyoid bone, a horseshoe-shaped bone situated in the anterior midline of the neck between the chin and thyroid cartilage. The hyoid is anchored by muscles from the anterior, posterior, and inferior directions, and it aids in tongue movement and swallowing. It’s also essential to breathing and speaking.

“Hyoid” is derived from the Greek hyoeides, meaning “shaped like the letter upsilon or the Latin Y.” Upsilon is known as Pythagoras’s letter, because Pythagoras used it as an emblem of the path of virtue or vice. The fork in the road. The crossroads.

“This woman was strangled to death,” the medical examiner concluded. “Manual, with tremendous force.”

The investigation wore on. From the vaginal swabs, police identified two likely suspects, including Elton, for whom there was both DNA and circumstantial evidence. There was also the fact that not one but both of the suspects were utter scumbags. Many detectives would play eeny, meeny, miny, moe, and call it a day. Robertson didn’t roll that way. His Spidey sense told him it wasn’t right. It wasn’t scumbag number one or scumbag number two. Someone more nefarious had met Denise at this particular crossroads.

Denise fell somewhere in between “more dead” and “less dead,” but unlike many of Sam’s other less dead victims, she did not suffer the indignity of being ignored. Robertson put his back into it. He called in the Texas Rangers. He questioned every single prostitute arrested. He sniffed out all known associates and hit wall after wall.

Odessa is a city full of transients, truckers, and careless domestic violence. It could have been anyone. In his gut, he felt a sexually motivated serial killer murdered Denise. It had all the hallmarks. Serial killers are notoriously hard to catch, because the connections with their victims are fleeting, the traces left behind hard to locate.

A week after the body was found, Robertson arrived home an hour and a half late for what would have once been dinner in the years before his divorce. There was no longer a lasagna under foil. He shoved a Marie Callender’s frozen dinner in the microwave and dove for the phone, desperate to hear the voice of his nine-year-old son. It rang and rang. So many moving pieces you can’t control. He tossed his briefcase under the desk off the kitchen that served as an office in his two-bedroom apartment and settled in to fill out a ViCAP entry on Denise.

A couple of nights a week, he generally spent an hour or two inputting his homicide cases, past and present, into the ViCAP system, because he believed in its still underused and underrecognized capabilities. He imagined a U.S. law enforcement system that was more than a scattered network of haphazardly connected jurisdictions but rather a single organism working toward a common purpose: getting the bad guys.

He pulled out a ViCAP booklet and began to manually enter the information in block letters.

Someone in the future will see the pattern. Someone will find the missing piece.

DATE: FEBRUARY 2, 1994

AGENCY: ODESSA POLICE DEPARTMENT

VICTIM: DENISE CHRISTIE BROTHERS

CASE TYPE: HOMICIDE

OFFENDER: UNKNOWN