Rage Against the Dying

Twenty-two





I had spent the rest of the afternoon bumming around with Carlo—Walmart, Home Depot, that sort of thing—and baked the meatloaf I had prepared that morning. For the rest of the evening I threw all my remaining energy into acting serene, aided by watching Schwarzenegger duke it out with Predator, which always relaxes me. Carlo had never seen the movie and he even confessed to enjoying it. So despite my wanting to get working on the material Coleman had given me, I wasn’t able to do so until I slammed awake around four the next morning, hot-flash hot, thinking about the dead guy in the van.

Nothing to be done about that, so I quietly slipped out of bed, fired up the coffeepot, and headed into my office. With a pad beside me to jot down whatever action would be necessary, I poured through the slim binder, compelling enough reading to take my mind off the things I couldn’t control.

Not even this was the whole thing. It was missing all the photographs, which Coleman had not taken the time to copy, and everything regarding the original series of Route 66 killings. This report went from Floyd Lynch’s capture at 11:19 P.M. July 26 on page 1 to his signed confession on page 268. Along the way there were crime-scene-processing reports, lists of physical evidence found on the truck and on his person: Plastic bags lining the cab where the mummy rested while he drove. Trace evidence of Natron, which had been used to mummify the body. Body hair (only his and the mummy’s) despite the plastic bags. A Jeffery Deaver novel, so worn it looked like he had read it over and over, not remembering the plot.

A printout of an e-book called How to Kill Women and Get Away With It, by Anonymous. The copyright was 2009. Along with the printouts we had seen the day before, another odd choice for an already-successful serial killer. I wrote, “find out if the copyright is registered with the Library of Congress, if so under what name.”

A small battery-powered video player with, unsurprisingly, a DVD called Zombie Strippers inside, the one he’d described in his interrogation. Cheap watch. Extra pair of jeans and several T-shirts. Socks and briefs. Small toiletries bag of the kind he could take into a truck stop to clean up. Road atlas. GPS device. Cell phone. Trucking logs.

I stopped there. Truckers had to keep meticulous logs of all their activities and routes, I knew, even down to number of hours slept, since they could be stopped and checked at any time to determine if they were following safety rules. Find out the dates on the logs, I wrote on my pad. Find out how long a trucker is expected to keep his logs. Find out if he kept his old logs anywhere. Compare to company GPS records during the time he was working for a company, if they had GPS systems in place then.

Sudden flash of inspiration: I got my tote bag and pulled the postcards out that Zach had given to me. Sure enough, the latest one was sent in June, not too long before Lynch was caught. It had a postmark of June 7, sent from Las Vegas with a picture of the strip at night. Bingo. Check current logs to see where Lynch was on June 7, I wrote.

By eight in the morning my list had grown: check numbers programmed into his cell phone, find out trucking company Lynch had worked for from 2000 to 2007 when he bought his own truck, interview whoever he reported to during that time, talk to likely contacts at truck stops on his routes, get history of credit card purchases. I thought a little more, then added: go through trash found in car, check beer cans for prints and run against AFIS. The chances of anyone following through on that were really slim, since most of those cans had been drunk by local teenagers, but someone had picked those cans up from the ground and put them in the car. And remembering my last conversation with Sigmund, I wrote: find out more about “lot lizard,” the Jane Doe in the front seat of the Dodge.

I sent the list as an attachment to Coleman’s private e-mail account so she could get started getting the information, along with a list of questions we could ask Floyd Lynch at an interview that afternoon. She responded immediately: Got it gotta run meet jail 3 BTW you were right! Sort of.

I went back to the murder book, started on the summaries of the autopsy reports, beginning with the Jane Doe found on the truck. Mummification, blah blah, extensive hard tissue blah blah, postmortem mutilation blah blah. Nothing I didn’t already know.

I was about to get a caffeine dose when, after a warning salvo from the Pugs, I could hear a recognizable voice talking to Carlo at the front door. Like a criminal, I hid the pad I was writing on in my tote bag. I came out of my office to find Max Coyote standing somewhat at attention in the middle of the great room, hat in hand, but still in uniform and looking ready for business.

Like I said, Max and Carlo were friends. At any other time Max might have arrived for a game of cards or a discussion of existentialism. I would have fixed them sandwiches and listened to jokes that started with, “Sartre and a donkey go into a bar…”

But Max’s presence here so soon after my experience in the wash could only mean one thing: someone had seen me—I’d been busted. Still, no use confessing outright. I forced the words around my heart, which had become lodged in my throat. “You coming to check up on me?” I joked.

Max looked a little pale. “You should see what we found down in the wash a couple hours ago. I knew you lived close by, so I thought I’d stop in and tell you myself.”

I was cautiously relieved; it didn’t sound as if he’d instantly connected me.

“Sit down, Max,” Carlo said. “Can we get you some coffee?”

Max took his time getting settled on the high wooden stool that Carlo directed him to, and slowly placed his hat on the breakfast counter without noticing the rocks that had been set there to dry. The same rocks I had picked up the day I killed the guy he was going to tell me about. The rocks I had forgotten to move into the yard like I usually did. Why did I leave them on the counter? I tried not to watch the rocks while trying to keep the carafe from knocking against Jane’s Bavarian china coffee cup as I poured his coffee. Instead, I watched him. Even at his most excited Max was so slow and somber your first inclination was to comfort him even if you were the one in trouble. He might have seemed a trifle intense just now, but with Max it was hard to tell. Despite his apparently not being here to arrest me, I nevertheless curled my fingers and imagined them black with fingerprint ink.

He looked doubtfully at the cup and saucer I had given him, as if his only problem was whether he could get his wienerlike fingers through the handle. After some deliberation, he wrapped his whole hand around the cup and took a solemn sip, heightening the drama of what I hoped wouldn’t be bad news.

Making a small show of bravely hiding chronic back pain, a woman incapable of committing homicide, let alone staging a vehicle crash, I pulled myself up onto the stool next to his.

He ran his hand through his perfectly combed dusty-dark hair, as if the hat had mussed it, which it had not. “Wait till you hear this.”

Before Carlo could profess curiosity, or I could force myself to breathe, Max spotted the rocks on the counter between us. “Did you get these from your usual place?”

He knew I went down to that part of the wash. I’d often left him and Carlo at the dining room table for one of their poker and philosophy sessions and come back before he was gone. I had to answer the question honestly or Carlo would know I was lying. Pointing to the rocks, “You bet. Look at the new specimens for my rock garden.”

No “Did you see an overturned van?” just “Hm.” Max turned the rocks this way and that with a rising excitement usually not given to rocks. “When were you there?”

Always tell as much truth as possible, but no more than necessary. Liars always want to embellish and it gets them into trouble. I looked at the clock, stupidly. I told myself it must be time to inhale. “The other day. Why, what’s up?”

“Don’t you die in this heat?”

What was his game? “I try to keep under the bridge where it’s shady. Isn’t it funny how the temperature changes drastically when you’re in the shade here?”

“I told her not to keep going down there,” Carlo added inconsequentially and reached over the breakfast counter to push my hair away from my forehead to expose the faint remains of my bruise, while I jerked slightly, annoyed at being a specimen. “Look, she fell.”

That qualifies as more information than necessary. Thanks, Carlo. Now I’d have to incorporate the fall into my story.

Max squinted at the spot Carlo indicated. More interested than usual, I thought, but maybe it was just the guilts working. I tried to look vulnerable.

“That must have been a bad knock,” he said.

“Oh, it’s okay, I’ve had worse. That looks good.” I got off the stool to get my own coffee. I used the action to get control over my pounding pulse, hiding lips that threatened to twitch incriminatingly behind the coffee cup, trying to anticipate Max’s questions and where they might lead: Did you see anyone driving a white van? Where are the clothes you were wearing when you tripped? I waited, mentally calculating the number of holes in my story. Why was he toying with me like this?

Regretting what Carlo might be about to hear, I still had to pretend ignorance. “So tell us what you saw. From the look on your face I’d guess it was something more exciting than a rabid bobcat.”

“Found a vehicle upside down in the wash.”

I let my eyes flare briefly, held his glance one count, two count, what an honest person would do, before looking away with feigned lack of interest. Pulse racing, take a deep breath through my nose to calm it, so my heart doesn’t show up in my voice. Oh my God, this is what a murderer feels like. “That’s not something you see every day. Who found it?”

“Clifton Davies. You know him, don’t you?”

“Nice kid. Met him at your party, saw him at that place the other day, Emery’s Cantina. You know the place?”

“Sure, been there a few times.” But he shook his head with annoyance that I wasn’t staying on topic. “Clifton was coming back from his night shift and saw some buzzards circling over the area, just was curious.”

“Could the accident have happened after I left?”

Max shrugged in a tough-guy manner rather than admit to anything. This was a big event for him and he was choosing to keep me in suspense. “Where were you collecting rocks again?”

“Usual place, around the bridge where they wash up, and it’s shady there, too.”

“That explains it. Clifton found it around the bend in the wash north of the bridge.”

“Ah, you’re right, that explains it. If it was far enough around the bend from the bridge area I wouldn’t have been able to see it.” Too many words, stop spilling, turn the focus. “So why do you want to know?”

“You’re the only person we know who goes there regularly, so it kind of makes you a potential witness. But knowing you, you would have noticed something and called.”

“Of course. What about the van, just abandoned after an accident?”

Focused on what he had seen, Max’s eyes lit with the finding of death that we all feel despite the inappropriateness of the thrill. “Hell, no. It was disgusting inside. Stunk to heaven, guy dead for maybe what the ME thinks is a few days but maybe he’ll be able to tell more after the autopsy.”

“Oh my God.” I turned in the direction of Carlo’s voice, so concentrated on what I was saying to Max that I’d forgotten the Perfesser was standing there listening. He spoke in the hushed voice you save for church and funeral homes. “Less than a mile away from our house. And Brigid goes into that wash every day.”

“Not every day,” I said quickly.

Carlo’s face went gaunt and pale. This was upon simply hearing of a body. I looked at that face and imagined his reaction upon hearing I was the one who made the body dead. Not to mention how. For the first time I felt maybe I’d done the right thing after all. But there was still Max, and he was just getting warmed up.

“The body was thrown into the back. Maggots were there and gone like even they couldn’t take the heat. ME said probably a hundred and eighty degrees and with the wash running the other day decomp was accelerated; it was like a Crock-Pot in there. The bastard’s stewed. Big fissures in his flesh where the gases broke through.”

Cops love to talk about this shit the way little boys like frogs; it’s a guy thing. But Carlo shivered and excused himself. Max was polite enough to wait until he was out of the room. “Made me gag,” he confessed. “I’ve never seen anything like it except in pictures.”

“So who is it?” I asked. “Anybody reported missing?”

“No clue right now. Even if he wasn’t in such decrepit shape he would of looked like a bum, long hair, ragged Wildcats T-shirt, nylon shorts, no shoes. There was no wallet on the guy, no insurance card or vehicle registration. Ran a check on the license plate, though.”

Come on, Max, don’t stop now. Give me a name, give me a name. I tried to sound casual. “So was it stolen?”

Max shrugged. “Who knows? Registered in the name of Gerald Peasil but no guarantee that’s who died.”

“Unfortunate name,” I said, trying to look semibored with the whole thing. “Did Gerald Peasil have a sheet?”

“Arrested for assaulting a hooker outside the Desert Diamond Casino about six months ago. And once for groping an elderly lady on the bus in Phoenix. That’s it. I still keep thinking drugs, though.”

“I don’t know, two sexual assaults might not be coincidence … what do you think the ME will call it?”

“Right now, accidental. Could have died in the crash—” Max gave a weary crime-fighting sigh. “George Manriquez will try to slip his skin for fingerprints so we can compare against Peasil’s but they’re not even sure they’ll have that. But I have to get back there. I left Clifton to take care of transferring the body to the morgue and getting the van hauled away, just wanted to see if you…” He stopped in midthought. Then his eyes narrowed, his mouth opened as if to say something he did not want to say.

Earlier in the conversation, before he said van, I had said van. I shouldn’t have known the vehicle was a van. I could almost smell him thinking, going back over our conversation, recalling the sequence, trying to remember who said van first. I stared at him as innocently as I knew how, silently hoping that he would get it wrong.

“… if I knew anything?” I said, finishing the sentence he had begun and shaking my head.

His expression adjusted, and when Carlo came back into the room he seemed to give it up. But the fact that he hadn’t come out with what he was thinking was almost worse; it made me feel like a suspect.

“So are you staying around? Want me to fix you a sandwich?” I asked.

“Thanks, I better get back to the office and start my report,” he said.

“Well, if you need me for anything, Max, you know where to find me.” I gave him a cheery grin.

He looked at me speculatively. I looked at him more speculatively. Max left soon after.

“I think I’ll walk down there, see what’s going on,” I said, after a little while, and started out the door.

Carlo looked mildly repulsed but didn’t object. “Don’t forget your stick.” He glanced at the umbrella stand. “Where is it?”

I was sure the question was innocent. It wasn’t like he was thinking of it as a potential murder weapon.

“It broke. That was the best thing you made me, with that X-Acto knife you put in the bottom. I’ll have to get you to make another one.” We stood there looking at each other a moment, both of us thinking, Why hadn’t I told him it was broken before now? “You know, I guess I won’t head down after all, it’s probably all blocked off.”

Murmuring something about poisoning an anthill, Carlo went into the garage. I got the suspicion that he wasn’t believing me much anymore, either, that I was losing my knack. And I was going to have to figure out fast how to spin this whole thing to Max once he had more time to review our conversation. But at least I now had a name, one small lead in finding out who hired Gerald Peasil.