Rage Against the Dying

Nineteen





Coleman expertly turned on the ignition and the AC simultaneously. “Shit, we forgot to ask him if his wife was a fan of Kate Smith. That’s what Floyd said.”

“Textbook interviews only happen in the textbooks,” I said. “Here’s to Barky. May he rest in peace.”

She said, “I never said Floyd was a nice man. Did you know he said he experimented by mummifying animals?”

“Yes, that was part of the video you gave me, but the family pet? I mean, come on.”

“Still not a capital offense,” Coleman said. She deftly maneuvered her Prius out of the trailer park and onto the main street of Benson. “I’m going to stop at that Burger King we saw on the way in to get a Coke for the ride back. Want something?”

“Yes. Don’t go through the drive-through, park so I can go inside and pee. And please get me a Coke, too.”

I did, she did, and we were back on I-10 in short order heading west while slurping our sodas. It’s about an hour’s drive back to Tucson proper, so she got chitchatty the way people do on long automobile rides after interviewing a couple of jerkwads. It’s a way of assuring yourself you’re one of the normal people.

“How did you get into the Bureau?” she asked.

I slurped the remaining soda, jiggled the ice to make the most of it. “Family was a cop family, dad and brother in city police, sister joined the CIA. My sister Ariel and I played with Barbies, but they busted Ken for possession instead of going to the prom.” Coleman laughed, I assume because she thought I was kidding. “How about you?”

“I joined right in the middle of the Route 66 killings,” Coleman said. “I thought you got lousy treatment, by the way, then and, and later.” “Later” would be code for when I shot the perp. “I thought you were one of the best,” she said.

“I’m not dead yet,” I said. Time to change the focus: “Beyond the ears, that whole interrogation video was something to watch. Good work. You spent a lot of time with that guy. Pretty disgusting, huh?”

“Not—” and stopped to clear her throat.

I was rapidly coming to recognize that Coleman always had something on her mind and that she always started by talking about something trivial first, like how I came to join the Bureau. Facing straight ahead, I said, “Coleman, you may have heard things about the kind of person I am. One thing I’m not is a therapist. We don’t have limitless sessions to indulge in, so spit out what’s on your mind. I promise not to shriek with laughter or twitter it.”

Coleman took a deep breath. In my peripheral vision I could see her grip the steering wheel a little more tightly. “I read all those books, like the one by David Weiss, to get ready for the interviews. Before I started them, I thought to myself, kind of excited, ‘ooh, here I am, I’m going into the mind of the monster’ like they say.

“The scary thing is, it never happened. Like you said, I was expecting ‘disgusting.’ But after a while, I think it happened shortly after that session you saw, it felt like I was just talking to some guy, all right, some totally f*cked up guy, but not the inhuman monster I was expecting.”

“What did you expect, somebody who laughed evilly while twirling his mustaches?”

“Couldn’t he have looked at least a little like Charles Manson?” Coleman finally laughed, and it eased us both. “Well, yeah, yeah, I kind of did expect him to look that way. It was almost like, he was too much like one of us, Brigid. Kind of a pathetic jerk, but I was unnerved because he was a human being and I was expecting something else.”

“Let’s cut to the chase. He got you with the business about the popularity of vampire movies, how there’s something of a turn-on in combining sex and death.”

“No,” she said.

“Yes.”

“All right, yes.”

“We’re a depraved race. To some extent, Lynch is right. We might as well admit it.”

I turned to look at her. She had drawn her lips between her teeth and her eyes narrowed, as if her face was closing in on itself for protection. I wondered what she would say if I told her how I’d killed the guy in the wash. I pretended I was sucking wet air through a hose, joked to lighten the mood, “Luke. Come to the dark side.”

She didn’t laugh that time, so I went for the more serious approach. “Hey, Coleman, don’t worry about it. Liking the Twilight series is a far cry from draining someone’s blood. We all embrace our inner serial killer at some point. Because, because,” I said, rapping my knuckles lightly on my window to make sure I had her attention and accentuate the point, “that’s precisely one of the things that will make you so good at this it will scare you.”

Coleman gave a weak but semi-encouraged smile. “Except, how do you know if you’re empathizing with someone not because of the killer in you, but because they’re not a killer after all?”

“Your intuition, you mean.”

She nodded.

“I’ve been there, Coleman. You said it yourself the other day. Sometimes you can be so certain who the bad guy is you don’t sleep till you prove it, even if it takes decades. But every once in a while it works the other way, like now. After all that time you spent with Lynch, in your core you knew he wasn’t a killer. You couldn’t stop thinking about it. That was what made you ask about the ears, and that was why you noticed his reaction when no one else did.”

She nodded again.

“So I say you go with your intuition. Just don’t tell the men I said so.”

Coleman grew quiet after that, maybe mulling over what we’d talked about for the rest of the drive. Thinking she might want to talk some more, I suggested we stop at Emery’s Cantina for lunch. She agreed, and pulled in to the space next to my car when we got back to the Bureau office. I told her I’d be there as soon as I checked up on Zach at the hotel.

“How is he holding up?” Coleman asked, while scanning the parking lot like she was looking for someone, or hoping someone wouldn’t see us.

I waggled my head. “That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

“Are you going to tell him that Lynch’s confession is suspect?”

“Hell no, I don’t want to tell him anything this time until I’m sure we have something solid to prove Lynch’s confession false. We need to find the physical evidence, and we need to present it to Lynch in such a way that he’ll tell the truth. Until we can do that, Morrison doesn’t have to listen.”

Coleman gave a little grimace. “Lynch signed the confession this morning and his hearing is scheduled for Thursday.”

“Three days to recant before it gets in the news and Morrison looks like an even bigger jerk. I remember the guy hates to look like a jerk worse than anything, and he comes by it so easily. Shit.”

“And despite what you say about following my intuition, the evidence in that box makes him seem more guilty than ever.”

“No, it doesn’t,” I said. “Why would you research other killers, go to the trouble to print their stories and store them, if you were a famous serial killer in your own right? It makes him seem more like a wannabe. See you.” I got out of her car.