The Texas Murders

Book 3: A Texas Ranger Thriller

by James Patterson, Andrew Bourelle

Genres: Women's Fiction; Thrillers

Synopsis

A cold case turns deadly hot when Texas Ranger Rory Yates goes on a no-holds-barred pursuit of a serial killer targeting young women. 

Texas Ranger Rory Yates wears a five-pointed silver badge and travels his home state investigating unsolved crimes alongside local law enforcement.

He’s also a quick-draw champion, and at a weekend target-shooting competition, he’s impressed with archery champion Ava Cruz. 

Cruz, an officer with the Tigua Tribal police, is wary of Texas Rangers, but she and Yates forge an uneasy partnership when he joins her in investigating the disappearances of native women who have gone missing on the summer solstice over the past several years.

When a killer lures them to the edges of Texas’s most unforgiving landscape, Cruz and Yates discover that they have more in common than they realize. 
 

Release date: January 14, 2025

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 416

Sample

ISABELLA HEARS THE unmistakable vibration of a rattlesnake tail, freezing her in a cold chill.

The seventeen-year-old girl raises her eyes from the stream—she was drinking from water hardly deeper than a puddle—and sees the snake on the other side of the bank. Its head is raised above its slithering body, thicker than a Coke can and stretching to longer than six feet. The scales are olive and gray in the distinctive diamond pattern.

The girl blinks her eyes to determine if she’s hallucinating. She’s lost track of the number of days she’s been crawling through the desert, dragging her useless leg behind her while following the trickle of the creek bed meandering through rocky canyons of sagebrush and prickly pear cactus. She’s been surviving on water and the tiny fruit buds blooming on cacti. She knows she can’t go on much longer like this.

She should crawl backward, but she can hardly move. She hasn’t eaten in days. Her hands are scraped raw and bloody, with several fingers missing the nails. And her right leg—the worst of her injuries—is broken in multiple places. Her shin bone is bent at an unnatural angle and bruised deep burgundy, her knee is almost as big as a volleyball, and her ankle is so swollen that she’s long since removed her shoe and left it behind.

The last thing she needs is a snakebite.

If treated quickly, snakebites aren’t fatal. She knows that. But she is already knocking on death’s door. A dose of venom squirted from the fangs would finish the job within a day.

That is if the snake is even real—not just her starving brain playing tricks on her.

As if in answer, the tip of the tail stands vertically, and the snake shakes the segmented point again, producing a rattling sound that sends a fresh chill down Isabella’s spine.

She’s not hallucinating.

She’s face-to-face with a real rattlesnake.

And if she doesn’t back away, the snake is going to strike. If there wasn’t a trickle of water separating them, it might have already attacked.

Once, when she was younger, she watched an uncle on the reservation kill a rattlesnake, but he had the benefit of wielding a long-handled shovel in one hand and a machete in the other.

She doesn’t have so much as a pocketknife.

Isabella attempts to ease backward, but when she tries to lift her stiffened leg, the limb screams in pain. Isabella’s eyes drop from the snake to the water, and she catches a glimpse of her own reflection. Her skin is coated in dirt and sweat and blistered by the merciless sun. The left side of her face is swollen and marred with a deep laceration that feels hot with infection. Her hair dangles down around her face, the strands tangled and dirty, knotted with twigs and cactus needles. Her face is coated with dust, her lips dried and cracked, her eyes wild.

She looks like some kind of cavewoman out of a movie, more animal than human.

Seeing herself like this, what’s become of her, ignites a rage inside her. Adrenaline floods her bloodstream. She looks around for some kind of weapon. She spots a rock within her reach. Roughly the size and shape of a football, the rock is half submerged in the water. Balancing on her one good knee, she attempts to pry the rock loose with both hands.

The snake lifts its rattle and shakes it again—the last warning she’s going to get.

She frees the rock and holds it over her head.

“Come on!” she growls at the snake, her teeth clenched.

The snake lunges forward, mouth open in a wide V, just as Isabella slams the rock down in an explosion of water.

Everything happens so fast she’s unsure if she hit it.

Then she sees a reddish color clouding the water. The snake’s long body flops around but the head remains under the rock. The death throes last for almost a whole minute before the snake’s body finally goes limp.

When Isabella shoves the rock aside and pulls the snake up, she sees the creature’s neck is smashed at the base of its skull, its mouth still hanging open, the forked tongue limp between its fangs.

She drags the body onto the bank and digs her fingernails into the scaly skin of the belly. It’s hard work without a knife, but she starts to peel the outer skin from the snake with a fevered determination. Her uncle breaded and fried the snake he killed, but she recalls the flavor being bland, like sinewy fish. The meat was full of tiny bones. She never wanted to eat snake again. But now she finds herself salivating, ready to devour the meat raw.

As she works, she remembers her uncle skinning the snake he killed. He cut the head off, then nailed the body to a board, where it dangled lifelessly while he peeled the scaly outer layer. Isabella’s mind is a fog of hunger and exhaustion, but she tries to remember something her uncle said to her as she watched. Some lesson she’s forgotten. The memory is right there at the edge of her grasp.

A sharp, stinging pain shakes her awake from her thoughts.

The snake’s mouth is clamped onto her forearm, the fangs embedded in her muscle, two syringes emptying themselves of poison. As she tried to tear off its skin, she must have triggered a muscle reflex.

Now she remembers the lesson.

Make sure to cut the head off, her uncle had said. A rattlesnake can still bite after it’s dead.

ISABELLA YANKS HARD on the snake, tearing its fangs out of her arm. She flings its body against the rocky ground with a smack. She grabs the stone she used to kill it and begins bashing the creature’s head with all her remaining strength.

She realizes she’s screaming.

In anger.

In pain.

In defiance of the fact that she knows she’s going to die.

When the snake’s skull is no more than a bloody pancake, she hurls the rock out into the canyon and sobs into her hands. She examines the bite marks in her forearm, two red punctures the size of pencil lead, with the flesh swelling around them.

Already she can feel the effects of the poison. Nausea rolls through her body in waves. Her breathing shallows. She blinks her eyes, her vision suddenly blurry.

The sun is setting, filling the western horizon with an orange glow. She wants to simply lie down next to the water and close her eyes.

Let death take her.

No, she thinks. I will fight to the end.

She doesn’t bother trying to eat the snake. That would waste too much time. Instead, she resumes her days-long crawl downstream. The creek has been flowing through a sandstone canyon, with the land only now beginning to flatten out. In the falling darkness, the desert air cools her feverish skin. A numbness overtakes her pained limbs. The earth underneath her keeps tilting with vertigo, threatening to dump her sideways.

But she pushes on.

Time slips by in a blur.

She wonders if she’s already dead. Is this the afterlife? Crawling through a dark desert for all eternity. She collapses onto her back and stares at the stars spinning above her in a whirlpool.

Go ahead, Death. I’m ready.

She blinks her eyes and the sky turns bluish—she’s lived to see another sunrise. But she knows it will be her last. Her labored breathing drowns out the only other sound, the faint trickle of water.

She thinks she hears a vehicle on a road but knows her mind must be playing tricks on her. When she hears it again, she rolls onto her stomach and pushes herself up to look around. The sun is rising, filling the landscape with light. A blurry boxy shape glides across the horizon, glinting in the sunlight.

“Help!” she screams. “Help me!”

The car keeps on going. Out of sight.

She hobbles forward. She retches, although nothing comes up.

The road is too far. She focuses on a boulder ten feet away. Just make it to that rock, she tells herself. Then when she gets there, she picks out a cluster of cacti as her new goal. Then a yucca plant. Piece by piece, she chips away at the distance.

Until finally she spots the raised berm of a roadway and a corrugated metal cylinder carrying the stream underneath.

Just make it there, she tells herself. And when she does, she crawls onto the warm blacktop and lies on her back on the center yellow line. Overhead, a hawk circles.

She closes her eyes. She has no fight left.

Screeching brakes pull her from unconsciousness.

“Oh, my God,” a woman says. “Is that the missing Indian girl from the news?”

A man dribbles water into her mouth. Isabella coughs it up. Then gulps more.

“Not too much,” he says. “You don’t want to throw up.”

Time slips forward and other cars have stopped. Paramedics are there. A police officer.

As strong arms lift her onto a stretcher, a cop asks, “What happened? Where have you been?” The voice urges her that if someone abducted her, the more she could tell them right now, the more likely they would be able to find the person responsible.

“They did this to me,” Isabella mutters, barely audible.

“What?”

“I can’t believe they did this to me,” she says, and begins to sob.

“Who?” the cop asks.

“You don’t know?” she says, looking at the cop’s confused expression.

The officer’s hand is poised over a notebook, ready to write down whatever she tells him.

But Isabella thinks of what she’s been through—and those responsible—and she decides in that moment to never speak of what happened.

Not to anyone.

No matter what.

Four years later

THE ARROW SOARS silently through the air and strikes the target a hundred yards away with a thunk.

I lift my binoculars to see where the arrow hit.

Dead center.

Bullseye.

In my Texas Ranger uniform of shirt, tie, boots, and cowboy hat, I lean against the fence and watch as the woman nocks another arrow and draws back her bow. Even through the rustling noise of the small crowd, I can hear the creak of the bowstring. She stands poised, the muscles in her arms taut. The other competitors—all men—have been using modern compound bows with cams on the strings and peep sights to make aiming easier. They have wrist releases to draw back the string. But the woman, a Native American wearing a uniform from the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo Tribal Police, has only an old hickory bow she pulls back with three fingers—and no sight to aim with except the tip of the arrow.

And yet she’s been cleaning up against all her competitors. They started shooting at forty yards and worked their way up to one hundred. She’s so far ahead in points that she could miss the target entirely and still win the competition.

She releases the arrow, and this one strikes dead center, too.

I applaud along with the small crowd gathered to watch. The woman takes no notice. She draws back her third and final arrow.

Her body is the picture of concentration. Spine arched. Right arm drawn back into a tight V. Left arm holding the bow as straight as the arrow she’s about to fire. Her hair is pulled into a single braid that runs down the length of her back. Her eyes squint ever so slightly. She holds the bowstring back by her jawline, touching the corner of her mouth with the tip of her forefinger. Then, in a fluid motion, she releases the tension on her fingers and lets her hand slide back, gently brushing her shoulder.

The arrow launches forward, cutting an arc through the air as it travels the length of a football field.

I hold my breath along with everyone else watching.

The arrow strikes the target, not only in the center area, but so close it seems to be touching the other two arrows. The only way she could have a tighter pattern is if she’d split the arrows like Robin Hood.

The crowd—not nearly as big as the demonstration of talent deserves—applauds the woman. Her competitors, gracious losers, take turns shaking her hand to congratulate her. She nods her head politely. She doesn’t smile.

Over the PA system, a voice announces the winner. Ava Cruz.

I’m at the second annual Texas Law Enforcement Charity Shoot, a fundraising event held on a massive shooting range outside of San Antonio. Sheriff’s deputies, state troopers, highway patrol deputies, and Texas-based representatives from the FBI, ATF, and DEA are all here showing off their shooting skills to raise money for the Texas Fallen Officer Foundation.

I’m slated for the fast-draw competition.

I skipped the event last year, caught up in an investigation. But this year my captain called me up and told me he entered me in the contest.

“Rory,” he said to me, “the Texas Rangers didn’t win a single event the first year. I want you to change that.”

Wandering around, waiting for my competition, I stopped on a lark to watch the archery contest, mostly because I thought the archers deserved an audience as much as the shooters. As someone who’s honed his weapon skills to an art, I can appreciate the female officer’s dedication to become that good.

I step forward to go congratulate her, but before I get two feet, a hand clasps my shoulders.

“So you decided to show up this year?”

I turn to find a man dressed in a loose button-down shirt and a ball cap lettered FBI. He stands an inch or two under six feet, and has dark hair and a big, confident smile.

“Hey, Ryan,” I say, extending my hand. “Good to see you.”

It’s Ryan Logan, an FBI special agent in charge based out of Dallas. He and I have crossed paths a few times, but mostly we know each other through our reputations.

Ryan is a quick-draw specialist. Aside from having an impeccable record with the FBI, he spends his free time going to shooting competitions throughout Texas and the Southwest. Though my captain entered me this time, I’m no stranger to fast-draw competitions like this. In my twenties, I used to enter them for fun—and even won a few. But Ryan’s familiarity with this scene goes far beyond my experience. Going into today, I knew that as last year’s winner he’d be my toughest competition—the clear favorite.

Over the PA system, we hear an announcement that the fast-draw competition will begin in five minutes.

“Ready to have your ass handed to you?” Ryan says affably.

I SLING MY duffel bag over my shoulder and walk with Ryan toward the fast-draw area. The shooting range spans acres set up for various events. We can hear the pop-pop of trapshooting shotguns in the distance, as well as the less frequent report of rifles in a long-range event on the other side of the property. Although most of the competitions use wax bullets, not real rounds, keeping people safe with all this shooting going on requires a lot of organization and strict rules for crowd containment. The folks behind the event have done a good job.

“Congratulations on your medal, by the way,” Ryan says, as we wind our way through throngs of uniformed officers and spectators eating cotton candy and corn dogs. “The ceremony’s coming up soon, right?”

What we’re talking about is the Medal of Valor, the Texas Rangers’ highest honor. Only a handful of Rangers have ever earned the award.

Next week, they’ll be giving it to two.

I’m getting one.

Unfortunately, the other award will be given posthumously.

My old lieutenant, Kyle Hendricks, died in the line of duty helping me make a major drug bust in West Texas last summer. I would just as soon have the focus be on Kyle’s sacrifice. But everyone in my life is treating the award like a big deal.

“How are things in Dallas?” I ask Ryan to change the subject.

“Oh, I’m not in Dallas anymore,” he says. “I’ve got a new assignment. I’m bouncing around state to state.”

Ryan explains that Congress has recently created a task force to investigate an epidemic of Native American women going missing each year. He’s been charged with coordinating the Southwest region’s arm of the task force, working with tribal, state, and local police, along with the Bureau of Indian Affairs and FBI.

“You must know the woman who just won the archery competition?” I ask, hooking my thumb back toward where we came from. “Have you worked with her?”

“Oh, I know her,” he says, rolling his eyes. “I wouldn’t exactly say we work together. Some of these reservation police don’t quite play nice with the federal government.”

Ryan and I arrive at the quick-draw area, where a large crowd has gathered. As we proceed to the shooting area, I can hear people talking about us—about Ryan being a competition ace, and about my reputation of being good with a gun. Unlike Ryan, most of my shooting experience is in real-world situations.

As the competitors line up facing a wooden fence about thirty feet away, the event host briefs us on how the contest is going to work. Between us and the fence, metal targets two feet in diameter are displayed at about waist height.

The metal targets are coated in lithium grease to mark where the wax bullets strike. There’s a light, covered in Plexiglas, in the center of the target. And each target has an impact sensor that will clock the speed of the shot.

In fast-draw competitions, if the competitors are any good, no one will be able to tell who wins with only the naked eye.

In the first round, the targets are placed fifteen feet away. Then they’ll be moved back another three feet for the next round, and another three for the final. Twenty-one feet might not seem like a lot, but when you’re shooting from the hip, you’ve got to be a hell of a shot just to hit the target, let alone be able to do it with any kind of speed.

We get to shoot three times each round, and the average scores decide who moves on. The top two shooters from each group in the first round move on to the next, but after that it’s single elimination.

For safety, the crowd will gather behind us. Ordinarily I wear a SIG Sauer P320 on my hip. But a semiautomatic pistol is strictly forbidden in a contest like this. Today, that gun is holstered at the small of my back. On my hip is a Ruger Vaquero, a six-shot single-action revolver. The single-action makes shooting fast even more difficult because you have to cock the hammer back as you draw. I’m a little rusty with the Ruger, and I’m just hoping I can hold my own against someone like Ryan.

“Shooters on the line,” the announcer says, and the first five of us take our place.

I position myself on the far left, and Ryan takes the spot directly to my right.

I dig my cowboy boots into the dirt like a batter getting into position beside home plate. I focus my eyes—shaded by my Stetson—on the target in front of me.

I wrap my hand around the smooth rosewood grip of the revolver.

I slow my breathing, trying to keep my nerves under control.

“Shooters set,” the announcer says.

The crowd is silent in anticipation.

The light flashes, and I pull the gun, cock it, and squeeze the trigger—all in one fluid motion that takes less than half a second. The air fills with pops as the other competitors do the same.

I look down the end of the line to see the times displayed.

The guy to the far right, a highway patrol trooper out of Odessa, recorded a time of 0.687 seconds.

The next officer, a female detective from Houston, recorded 0.551.

The middle guy, an embarrassed DEA agent, missed the target completely.

Then comes Ryan’s score: 0.315.

All the scores—those who hit the target anyway—would be more than respectable at any event held by the most elite quick-draw organizations.

Ryan’s is downright amazing.

I open my mouth to tell him so, but he has a look of unpleasant surprise on his face as he examines the numbers.

I check my own time.

0.314.

Ryan’s perturbed expression disappears and is replaced by a friendly smile.

“Hot damn, Yates. That’s some fine shooting,” he says. “This is going to be fun.”

THE ANNOUNCER DECLARES enthusiastically that the matchup of two world-class fast-draw competitors is something special. He’s not being hyperbolic.

For pros who practice this stuff every day, anything in the 0.3 range is an excellent day’s work. It’s possible to go lower, but very rare. There probably aren’t twenty people in the last twenty years who have shot faster than 0.3 at any organized competition.

Ryan and I aren’t there, but our first shots are pretty damn close.

For our next two shots, Ryan and I both shoot in the mid-0.3 range, easily making it to the next round. Round 2 is single elimination, but Ryan and I aren’t in the same group.

Ryan goes first and doesn’t disappoint, easily winning by hitting the target all three times in 0.379, 0.344, and 0.319 seconds. His fastest just barely hits the edge of the target, but that doesn’t matter in this competition. They say close only matters in horseshoes and hand grenades, but apparently it matters in fast draw, too.

In my round, I score 0.359, 0.347, and 0.330—each one a full tenth of a second faster than any of my competitors, each one in the center of the target.

For the final round, they move the targets back to twenty-one feet, and the five top shooters all line up on the line.

So far, no other competitors have drawn faster than 0.4 seconds, so even though there are five of us on the line, everyone knows the contest is really between Ryan and me.

The crowd has grown large—and raucous—but when the announcer says, “Shooters set,” everyone quiets down.

The light flashes, and our hands fly to our guns.

Ryan’s bullet splats against the edge of the target for a time of 0.310.

My time—dead center—is 0.322.

The announcer shouts the scores and the crowd erupts, no one able to believe what they’re witnessing. I can’t believe it myself. I’d told myself not to worry too much about winning, just to have fun. But I’m caught up in the fervor of the crowd.

I want to win.

We have two more shots remaining. Ryan gets set on the line, the picture of concentration. His body is tensed, his eyes focused. I do the same. When the light flashes, I snatch my gun as fast as possible.

I nail the target’s center for an unbelievable time of 0.309.

I look over and see Ryan’s time: 0.306.

Ryan has a grin on his face as he glances over at me.

“It’s still anyone’s ball game,” the announcer states. “Well, I mean, between Yates and Logan, that is.”

I’m behind, but we’re talking about fractions of seconds here. All I need is an excellent draw—and for Ryan to have one of his worst.

The other three shooters confer and all decide to bow out, letting the two of us face each other head-to-head.

“It’s been fun, Rory,” Ryan says to me.

“You’re the fastest I’ve ever seen, Ryan. You’ve made me faster than I thought I could be.”

“Same,” he says.

He looks . . .