Rage Against the Dying

Eighteen





Flowing between several different mountain ranges like a river of pavement and buildings, the Tucson area is tucked into the center of the Sonoran Desert. The Sonoran Desert is the largest, possibly the only, stand of saguaro cactus in the world. It’s pronounced “swarro,” and they’re the kind of cactus you always think about when you think cactus, the kind that studs the landscape like a giant Gumby.

Now desert is mostly beige, that is to say rocks and sand. Only the hardiest of plants can survive, and you get to thinking, if that cactus can take it, so can I. I like the ruggedness of a place that can kill you, either by brush fire, dehydration, or drowning in a flash flood. Next to the desert, I feel soft and gentle.

Unlike Tucson, the area around the town of Benson, about an hour east from the easternmost part of the city, and at a higher elevation, sports less desolate-looking vegetation, with apple, peach, and pecan orchards. Benson has at least as many mobile homes as houses, and even a lot of the houses are prefab, their aluminum skirts hiding their lack of foundation like modest librarians.

As Coleman had suggested, I had met her in the parking lot attached to one of several skyscrapers in downtown Tucson, a twelve-story building in which the FBI occupies the sixth. She was sitting in her car looking at her watch when I pulled into the space next to hers.

I couldn’t bring myself to apologize for being fourteen minutes late, and besides, in that time she’d cranked up the AC so her Prius was bearable. Almost. Having taken my suggestion to dress in less intimidating attire, she was wearing black slacks and a white short-sleeved linen blouse. I guess that was as casual as Coleman could be. I pressed the button to shut off her radio, which was playing a song by one of those girls who all sound alike.

“Do you mind?” Coleman asked.

“Not anymore. Please leave it off. I hate music.”

Coleman allowed that and as the Prius pushed the speed limit along I-10 East, she grilled me about my reaction to the video, and nearly crowed with triumph when I told her I not only saw the part about the ears but forwarded it to Sig Weiss, who concurred.

“So both of you think it’s awfully suspicious,” she said.

“That’s right.” I repeated how Weiss thought we should interrogate Floyd again from the supposition that his confession was false. “But we still need evidence. We need the big holes in his confession.” I smiled at a thought. “We need to show Lynch the gun that isn’t smoking.”

Satisfied that for the time being she had Sigmund and me on her side, Coleman spent the rest of the trip briefing me on what she knew about Wilbur and Michael Lynch, Floyd’s father and brother, respectively:

“Wilbur works?”

“On disability.”

“Michael lives at home?”

“Yeah.”

“Employed?”

“Started paramedic training, but I don’t know if he ever finished.”

“Mother?”

“Unknown.”

“Call ahead?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Resistance?”

“Not much.”

And so on, with my thoughts half on Lynch and half on the dead guy in the wash, and whether this interview would help me discover a connection between them.

Coleman turned right on Palo Verde Drive into a trailer park, where I directed her to park a little ways off and we walked to the childhood home of Floyd Lynch. Dirt coated the roof of the trailer, its windows, a dirt bike with wheels the size of small blimps parked out front and the ragged umbrella with faded blue and white striping that tilted over a rusted metal patio table.

Wilbur Lynch stepped through the front screen door with his shotgun and did not invite us in. Tall and cowboy lean, his body belied the sixty-three years that Coleman had told me he had. His face, on the other hand, was lined with a lifetime of low humidity and Camel cigarettes, one of which fit a notch in his lower lip that looked like do-it-yourself cancer surgery.

Coleman flashed her badge while I put my hand on my tote as if I still had a badge to flash. “I’m Agent Laura Coleman,” she said, “And this—”

I was about to interrupt her, but my disguise, hair down and Jackie-O sunglasses, was preserved by Lynch’s own interruption.

“You don’t look like FBI,” he said, explaining his shotgun.

Privately I disagreed; I would have thought Coleman looked like FBI even if she wasn’t. But we both did that little side head tic that gets past the allusion to our not being male, and Coleman shot me an arch look that said, “I should have worn the black suit.”

“I wondered when you’d get here,” he said, sitting down on a rusted chair by the rusted umbrella table and gesturing to the other two. We cautiously took two of the other chairs, taking care not to get scratched. “I thought you’d all be over to see me right after you captured him. I thought I’d be on the news.” His drawl was easygoing, but he fixed his eye on us as if he wanted to make sure we noticed how much he didn’t care. He put out his cigarette on the table and casually brushed the ash off with the side of his hand.

“I’m sorry about your son,” Coleman said, without elaborating on the part she had played in putting him in jail.

Lynch smiled and took a packet of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket. “Well, good for you. I guess it’s good that somebody’s sorry.” He tapped the packet so a couple cigarettes slid out and offered us one with an excessively smooth gesture that told me he was concentrating on keeping his hands steady. We declined, so he lit one for himself.

Once the cigarette was fitted securely into the notch in his lip, Coleman said, “Can we take it from that that you didn’t have a good relationship with Floyd?”

“You could say that.”

I picked up the slack left by his comment. “He grew up here, though, right? Went to school, had friends?”

“I suppose. He always kept to himself, read a lot. He was a reader.” Lynch left his upper lip cocked in a snarl as he said the word, as if that was the first step on the road to sexual homicide. “So he confessed. Don’t send me the body.” He made a heh-heh sound that was supposed to be a laugh.

“The fact is, Mr. Lynch, it may comfort you to know we’re here because we think that Floyd didn’t commit the crimes he confessed to,” Coleman said.

Lynch turned his head away from us and stared at some buffle grass that hugged the side of the trailer. He looked like a man who expected little in the way of comfort, ever.

“And we’re here trying to corroborate a few remaining questions,” I said. “Can you think of a reason why Floyd would take blame for something he didn’t do?”

“Nope.” Lynch took a bitter drag off his cigarette, jerking his head as if his lungs alone weren’t strong enough to pull in all the smoke he craved. “Because I think he did,” he said after he exhaled it. “That boy always had bad blood.”

“Bad blood?” I asked.

“Evil seed, I think they call it. Look, I don’t know what you were expecting from me. Maybe somebody ashamed because his son is a serial killer. Maybe you’d like to see me wringing my hands and crying. Well, let me tell you something. I was glad when he finally left home and I didn’t have to worry about him killing anyone close by.” Lynch paused as if he were listening to an echo of his words, made the heh-heh sound again, and looked to us to laugh, too.

Coleman and I could not bring ourselves to comply.

“When was the last time you saw Floyd?” Coleman asked again.

“He got his own rig about four years ago. Came around to show it off to us.”

“Was your wife alive at the time?”

“No. Why, you wanna pin that on him, instead?” Lynch laughed, louder this time but with as little mirth as before.

“What did you think of Floyd’s truck? Did he take you inside, show it to you?”

“Didn’t go inside. I was hopeful, though. It’s a big deal when a man can afford his own rig. I figured I could stop wondering when someone like you would show up with questions about him, heh-heh.”

I could see now how the laughter was a cover, maybe had always been a cover, for the fears he had denied. Perhaps his son’s capture was, in some part, a release. Maybe he really looked forward to a time when his son was dead.

Four years ago Floyd Lynch bought the truck. I did a mental calculation and figured at that point Lynch was tiring of going up the mountain to Jessica’s body. Maybe that was partly the motivation for buying his own rig, so he’d be more comfortable storing a body in it.

“Did he just come to show you the truck? Is that all?”

Lynch thought back a moment. “He told me how successful he was, how he was making a ton a money.”

“He didn’t tell you anything about his life?”

Wilbur Lynch glazed over a bit. Almost as if he didn’t realize he was speaking aloud, “Something.”

“What’s that?”

He seemed surprised to find us sitting there, had to go on. “A box that he asked me to keep.”

“Do you still have it?” Coleman asked. Her tone was a little too eager and I hoped Lynch wouldn’t notice.

“I never thought about that box until just now.”

“Could we see it?”

“He said it was just books.”

“We’d still like to see it if you wouldn’t mind too much.”

He considered, possibly, whether it would be more to his benefit if he agreed or refused. “I’ll see if it’s still there.” Lynch uncoiled himself from the chair and started into the trailer without speaking, apparently a little curious himself.

“Would you mind if we came along?” Coleman asked.

He didn’t say no, so we followed him in.

The word “squalor” was invented for the interior of the trailer, ten feet wide and twenty feet long. Over time the dust had found its way in here, too, mixed with hair oil and thickened into a patina on the back of the shabby couch. Intersecting rings of various shade and depth where countless aluminum cans puckered the wood veneer coffee table. The kitchen area smelled like it was waiting to catch fire.

Lynch led us down the right hallway to a bedroom, where the roar of the AC window unit in the living room was quieter. The desert-frosted windows there made me feel encased. “He and his brother used to share this room before he left,” Lynch said.

Pretty much the only thing in the room was a mattress that must have become a little cramped for two growing boys. A sheet lay wadded up on top of it. Both the mattress and the sheet were the same shade of gray. A small pile of clothes in the corner presumably served as the closet. The only other thing in the room was a stack of five boxes towering nearly to the low ceiling in the far corner, each one smaller than the one underneath it, an empty pint bottle of Jack resting on the narrow ledge formed by the largest box at the bottom.

Lynch pulled the boxes down and looked in each one, then handed them to Coleman, who gamely placed them in another stack in the other corner. When he got down to the last box he knelt down. This one was sealed.

A mason jar filled with alcohol and ears. Or vacuum-sealed in a baggy. Or at least something that connected Lynch to the man who tried to kill me.

He seemed to reconsider for a moment opening it, or at least opening it in front of us, but then took a Swiss Army knife from his right back jeans pocket and pulled out the blade. He wasn’t about to just give up something that may have been of value. He neatly sliced through the single strip of packing tape and lifted the cardboard flaps.

The box was loosely packed enough so that Lynch could push the contents around with his blade. As the three of us leaned forward all we could see were some crime novels and porn and thriller DVDs.

“I told you he was a reader,” Lynch said. He dug into the box, using the blade of his knife with a combination of curiosity and hesitation, like someone who doesn’t want to reach bare-handed into a dark hole. He pulled out a few of the items and put them on the floor next to the box while Coleman and I stood watching him to see what he would find and what his reaction would be.

He drew out a DVD of a National Geographic program called The Mummy Roadshow, read the back of it still as if he were alone, and placed it on the floor next to the box. Then he found a manila folder, opened it, and paged through articles about serial killers that had been printed off a computer. I was standing just behind him, which allowed me to read some of the names over his shoulder: Ted Bundy, the Green River Killer, Jeffrey Dahmer, the BTK killer, Son of Sam, the Route 66 killer. Also a description of Natron, its uses, and how to order it. Also a printout of the home page of a site devoted to information and discussions about serial killers in general. Apparently unaffected by these things, Lynch put the folder on top of the video and looked back inside the box.

A glimpse of something tucked down on one side between the cardboard and the books got his attention, and he hooked it with his knife, pulling it out of the box and staring. It was just a shabby old dog collar, brown with silver studs, the leash still attached.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“This collar. Had a dog. Barky. A good dog. The boys told me he ran away, but maybe I’m misrecalling.” Lynch seemed a little dazed. He didn’t say heh-heh.

“Did you still have Barky when Floyd came with his truck to visit you?” I asked gently.

That finally did it. He shed his careful façade as if he had been able to deny the unspeakable reality until this moment. “Oh f*ck,” he breathed in the voice of a very old man, the indignity that was his son too much on display in this artifact.

We were interrupted by the sound of boot heels ringing up the metal steps and the trailer door crashing open. “Hey Dad!” a voice called over the muffled roar of the AC unit. “You ready to hunt us some wetbacks?”

“We got company,” Lynch called back, a little too quickly, from his kneeling position.

I glanced at Coleman and saw she understood why I had told her not to park in the yard. You never know what you’ll hear if you don’t leave your car in the yard.

The man who owned the voice skidded to a stop as he saw us, and stared.

I eyed Mike right back. His haircut, shaved to the scalp back and sides, with a longer patch on the top of his head, looked like a portobello mushroom cap. Largely due to the haircut combined with a menacing air, he was the kind of man who looks silly and scares you at the same time, the kind you doubt will someday grow out of his rage. I didn’t ask what Floyd’s brother might mean by “hunting some wetbacks” but felt confident he wasn’t recruiting migrant farm labor.

He looked at his father rather than us when he said, “What are you doing back here?”

“They’re from the Ef-Bee-Eye,” Lynch said as precisely, as meaningfully as he could, but there was no telling from Mike’s unchanged expression if he was able to spell. “They don’t think Floyd killed those girls.”

Mike strode back down the hall, speaking without turning around. “Come on, Pop,” he said. “We’re losing daylight.”

Lynch rose and shouted after Mike, “Hey, did Floyd take Barky with him?”

I peered through the desert-frosted window where Mike had moved very quickly to saunter toward the dirt bike at the edge of the property. Lynch started after him.

I picked up the box before he could think about selling the contents on eBay and asked, “Would you mind if we took the box along, Mr. Lynch? You don’t seem to have any use for this stuff.”

“Mr. Lynch, what was in that box doesn’t necessarily prove your son is a serial killer,” Coleman said.

Lynch started to turn away, snapping as he did, “Oh, just kill him and get it over with.”

I saw us losing control of the interview, gave Coleman a hard look. This wasn’t an authorized visit and we needed to make the most of it. She stopped him and handed him a card, which he tucked in his shirt pocket without looking at it. “Mr. Lynch, do you know of anyone else who might have been associated with your son over the years?”

“Can’t rightly say,” he said, heading quickly down the hall to the living room as if he couldn’t care less how long we stayed.

“Is there anyone who might benefit from your son confessing to the Route 66 murders?” I called after him as he went out the front door. “Did he ever mention any name at all?”

But Lynch had other things on his mind. Over the growl of the motorbike he set his feet wide apart and yelled at his son with raw fury, “You tell me, goddamit. You get off that f*ckin’ bike and tell me if Floyd killed my dog.”

As we stepped down the rickety metal steps of the trailer, between the shouting and the motor, I was able to come closer to Lynch, take off my sunglasses. I hoped to catch him off guard when I asked without Coleman hearing, “Did he ever mention the name Brigid Quinn?”

All I was to him was an annoyance. He gripped me around the upper arm and his face came very close to mine. He tongued the groove in his lip.

“It’s not my fault,” he said, his breath muddying the air with its shame. “You have a kid who turns out to be a monster. Doesn’t deserve to live. What do you do then? I shoulda drownded the little bastard when I had the chance.”