Rage Against the Dying

Two





Paul was right, your past doesn’t die. Hell, it doesn’t even wrinkle.

About a week after the rock-sex episode, I’m sunk into the overstuffed cushions of Jane’s shiny brown brocade couch, sipping coffee from a Grand Canyon souvenir mug from one of their vacations while pondering how hard it could be to bake something, a pastry or something. As I paged through one of Jane’s cookbooks her scent wafted up at me, honey and flour, and I wondered whether she would approve of me. Not for the first time I resisted the urge to just once go to my e-mail, key in [email protected], and ask her.

The doorbell interrupted my thoughts with “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” and I cringed. I hate music, but I couldn’t figure out how to reprogram the doorbell.

I found Max Coyote on my front porch. Deputy Sheriff Coyote was half Pascua Yaqui tribe and half Columbia University anthropologist on his mother’s side. He and I worked a few cases together when I was still with the Bureau. Unlike many in law enforcement, he didn’t think FBI agents were total a*sholes and was part of the reason I stayed out here. We had become friends of a kind; I’d even told him about Paul over one too many Crown Royals, but this would not be an invitation to dinner.

The Pugs frisked and barked. “Hey guys, it’s just your uncle Max,” I said as I opened the screen door.

“Carlo home?” he asked, walking in and looking around comfortably, the way you do when you know people well enough that it’s okay to be nosy.

“He’s checking the price of gin at Walgreens. You here for poker or philosophy?”

Max and Carlo had met at a house party and hit it off, maybe were better friends even than Max and me. They would get together once a month and teach each other what they knew about Bertrand Russell and Texas Hold’em. Max was quite good at complex thought. Carlo kept losing his shirt.

Max didn’t answer right away, pausing instead to stoop and rub each grateful Pug between its bulgy eyes with his thumb before he moved aside one of the too-shiny purple pillows that lined the back of the couch and settled down. He had been at the house enough so that he no longer made fun of Jane’s peacock feathers in the oriental vase, but he did pick up the cookbook I’d been looking at and sniffed the stain on the bread pudding recipe.

“How’s the cooking coming along?” he asked.

“I’m still discouraged by ingredients like crème fraîche,” I said, taking the book from him and thwumping it shut. I put the cookbook on the coffee table but something about him made me stay standing. “Why are you stalling?”

He sighed, looked mournful, but that was his default expression so I wasn’t too concerned yet.

Not too. Having lived in a world where the news was usually bad, I asked, “Why do you want to know where Carlo is?”

Now focused like a man on a mission, he again ignored the question. He put a hand on each of the Pugs that flanked him. I had the odd sense he was prepared to use them for cover if I threw something at him. “We have a serial killer in custody,” he said.

I’d been in the business so long those words could still send a pleasant little reverb up the back of my skull. “Good job. Who?”

He spoke cautiously, like an actor still learning his lines. “Long-haul trucker, name Floyd Lynch. Border Patrol picked him up a couple weeks ago about seventy miles north of the border on Route 19, heading to Las Vegas with a load of video-poker machines. Routine stop, but there happened to be a cadaver dog at the checkpoint who alerted to a dead woman in his truck.”

“In the trailer?”

“No, the trailer with the poker machines was clean. The body was in his cab. Both the sheriff’s department and the FBI got called to the scene.”

“They ID the woman?”

“Not yet. The trucker says she was an illegal.”

They use dogs to locate aliens who don’t make it across the desert. My mind was rushing about trying to figure why he was here telling me this while I let him take his usual time. I said, “Now I’m remembering. I think I saw this on the news. It died fast.”

“The FBI kind of made that happen.”

“But that was two weeks ago.”

“The FBI took over the interrogation.”

“Priors?”

“None. He never got so much as a traffic ticket.”

“You want a Diet Coke?” I walked across the expanse of open room to the kitchen area and pulled two cans out of the fridge without waiting for his answer, talking as I did so. “I assume you’re here because the victim has some connection to me.”

He paused, and then didn’t answer my question. “You couldn’t tell much from the victim. The body was mummified.”

“Curiouser and curiouser. Smell much?”

“No.”

I nodded, making a mental note to get more celery before I closed the refrigerator door. “Did he confess to killing her?”

“Not at first. He said he had found the body just off the side of the road, that it had been dressed in shabby clothing, the shoes already stolen, an illegal alien who hadn’t made it across the desert. He said he was just using it.”

“Using it. Nasty.” None of this explained why Max took this long to tell me, let alone why he was telling me at all. This should have been maybe a phone call in a bored moment, not a special visit. A nerve sparked on the side of my neck. I handed one of the Cokes to Max and popped open my own, but still couldn’t bring myself to sit down. “So far this isn’t a serial killer case, Max. You’ve got one victim and he denies killing her.” I didn’t have to tell Max that would only amount to a class 4 felony, desecration of a corpse. A little jail time. “Not to be all self-absorbed, Max, but what the hell does this have to do with me?” I sipped from the can.

“When the techs went over the truck they found a compartment with scrapbooks and journals.” Here Max measured out his words more carefully than he had before, if that was possible. “And postcards.”

Some soda splashed on Jane’s rug when my hand jerked. “Were they addressed?” I asked.

He shook his head. I shrugged. “Lots of people buy postcards. Even truckers.”

He took a deep breath and said, “The journals were all about the Route 66 murders.”

Route 66, the biggest sexual homicide case in my career, and the case I had failed to close. The case where I lost a young agent who became the killer’s last-known victim. She was the only victim who was never found. I didn’t want to ask the obvious question, the one I’d wanted an answer to for seven years. So instead I said, “A groupie. This, this what’s his name?”

“Floyd Lynch.”

“He could be a groupie.” Even serial killers have fans. It’s celebrity reality at its most debased.

“The journals really seemed to implicate him. He knew a lot, names of the victims.”

“That was in the news.”

“The writing was all, ‘I slashed her Achilles tendon so she couldn’t run, I raped her, I strangled her slowly and felt the bone in her throat give way’—”

“That was all in the news, too. He could have been fantasizing, making it his own.”

“—‘I sliced off her right ear.’”

That blasted the story I was making up. No one but law enforcement knew what the killer’s trophy had been. No one had ever found any of the ears. “We withheld that,” I admitted.

“That’s what they tell me.” Increasingly nervous, Max shifted on the couch and cleared his throat. His voice went soft and gentle to calm me. I hate it when people do that. It’s never a good sign. “Then, Brigid, when the techs told George Manriquez, the ME—”

“I know the medical examiner.”

“—about the journals he got the facts of the case and put them together with his examination of the body found in the truck. Despite the mummification he had detected a crushed hyoid bone, slashed Achilles tendon, missing right ear. It was all there, the whole MO.”

“The mummy on the truck,” I said.

Max nodded. “Just like the Route 66 victims.”

Unable to come up with any other explanation, I finally asked the question, my heart pounding in anticipation of the answer. “Is it her? Is the mummy on the truck her, Max?”

His answer was both relief and disappointment. “No. It’s not Jessica Robertson’s body. At least according to Lynch.”

“Oh,” I breathed, a very small, empty nothing of an oh. So close to finding her after all this time, and yet she wasn’t there. I fumbled my way to the recliner that faced the couch, and folded into it when my knees gave way.

And then he added more hurriedly than before, “But he says he can take us to her.”

Even with this information I didn’t trust what I was hearing. “Just like that, he confessed?”

“They had him boxed in and offered life.”

“The f*cker made a deal.” The violin string I hadn’t felt in a long time vibrated in my chest, and I felt my ire rise. “Where is she?” I was ready to grab my bag.

“Allegedly, in an abandoned car. Off the old back road to Mount Lemmon.”

“Has anyone informed her father yet?”

Who knows how they all thought I’d react? His mission accomplished and observing my failure to freak, Max relaxed his spine and let himself get sucked a little into the overstuffed couch. “Don’t worry. We’re waiting for verification before we do that, but it was time to let you know. Your involvement in the case, I mean. I spoke with the special agent on the case, you know Laura Coleman?”

“I met her while I was doing time in the Tucson office. I thought she worked fraud.”

“She switched to homicide after you left. She thought we should tell you and bring David Weiss in.”

“David Weiss knows already?”

My tone must have gotten its edge back then, and Max struggled to extract himself from the back cushions, sit up a little straighter, and return to his soothing voice. “Yes. Since he was the profiler on the case he’s flying in tonight to do a competency test so we can make sure we’ve got all the ends tied up for life without parole.”

“I want to come to the dump site,” I said.

But before Max could respond, I heard the garage door go up and the Pugs both whisked off the couch to greet their master. Carlo’s deep voice of all things normal preceded him into the kitchen area. “Honey, the Tanqueray was ten dollars more than at Sam’s Club so I just got a few other things, Breath Busters for the dogs and a salami.” He stopped at the sight of Max and me staring back at him as if we’d been caught trying to hide something, which in a way we were.

“Walgreens sells salamis?” I asked.

“Hello, Max,” Carlo said.

“Hey, Carlo.”

“Is something wrong?” Carlo asked.

Max opened his mouth to speak but I got there first, shifted to normal for Carlo’s sake. It was a knee-jerk reaction.

“Everything’s fine, honey. Max was just saying he needs a poker and philosophy session.”