Total Victim Theory Read Online Free

appeared to be farming- or ranching-related equipment and services. Expense figures were preceded by a minus sign and included entries such as “55 lbs sorghum”, “barbed wire”, “HTL fertilizer”. Income items, marked with a plus, appeared less frequently and were limited to five types: three breeds of cattle (Weinstein, Mueller Steer, Dorsey) and two breeds of sheep (Moffit, Black Ear). All of the ledger's entries were dated between March 1985 and December 1992, a span of seven-and-a-half years.
    The first two pages of ledger entries appeared completely innocuous, and if my perusal of its contents had ended there, the document would have raised few eyebrows. This, however, was not to be the case. Within five minutes of commencing my examination, the ledger revealed its first peculiarity. On the third page, amidst other routine jottings, the names of two men appeared.
Rodrigo
and
Paulo
were written in consecutive rows under
item description
. In the cost column each name was marked as a “$300” expense. This was, in itself, not out of the ordinary, since a ranch would clearly need to employ and pay ranch hands.
    What was strange was that directly to the right of each man’s name, where the individual’s last name might have been listed, a rectangle of paper had been carefully cut away leaving a small hole. The smooth, meticulous nature of the cut suggested it was made with a razor blade. The two holes were of differing lengths as if created to efface last names with differing numbers of letters. I estimated, based on the scale of penmanship elsewhere, that Paulo’s last name was likely nine letters long, whereas Rodrigo’s was probably a much more succinct six.
    The excised names were what transformed the document in my estimation from a mere curiosity into an object of darker significance. The deletions, I reasoned, could only be interpretedas an effort to hide something, in this case, the identity of a person since the commonality of the first names with no further information would make it very difficult to link them to particular individuals. Between the first ledger entries in March 1985 and those in December 1988, there were approximately fifty excised last names, each showing an expense figure between 100 and 600 dollars.
    But then in late 1989 the pattern changed—and this is where the devil really is in the details. Two consecutive entries dated September 7 of that year showed the names
Paco
and
Andres
. However, the only notation in the cost column was the symbol
0,
executed with a diagonal slash through the middle of the 0, dollar sign omitted. If the cost column in fact showed what each worker was paid, then Paco and Andres, one was tempted to infer, had been paid nothing. After November 2, 1989, not one of the remaining thirty-six names in the ledger showed a cost figure.
    The owner of the ranch, whoever that might have been, had either stumbled on an abundant pool of volunteer laborers or something was amiss. Inspecting the document further, even gloomier patterns began to assert themselves. In 1990, the ledger shows twelve names with the zero notation—unpaid workers. And yet, each of these names was still marked with a transaction date: November 1, 1990. What can this
transaction date
refer to, I asked myself, when no payment was made? An event, perhaps, which made the payment of the workers no longer necessary. A queasy, quicksand feeling was beginning to take hold of my stomach.
    The next year, the exact pattern repeated itself to the day. Twelve zeroed-out workers, this time with a transaction date of
November 1
,
1991
. By now the wheels were turning. My mind, suspicious as it's disposed to be by nature and the training of my vocation, began to conjure bleak scenarios of what might have become of these twenty-four unpaid souls and of what menacing annual event fell on that pair of November 1st dates.
    Of course, an optimist could wrangle out some harmless hypothesis that involved no loss