Rage Against the Dying

Forty-five





I woke up at six, showered, changed my clothes, and neatened myself up so I wouldn’t look and smell like a crazy woman. I was wild to get to the hospital, but it was located only a few miles from Coleman’s house and showing up before eight would be suspect. To kill some time I nosed through Coleman’s fridge and came up with little bottles of liquid yogurt that had the word “probiotic” written on them. I took three and lined them up like the little vodka bottles they give you on a plane, tearing the foil top off each one and sipping it while I sat at a table on her shaded back porch, my cell phone with me just in case Coleman finally called to tell me I was all wrong.

It rang. I watched Max trying to reach me. When he was done I listened to the message. He’d been by the hotel to confirm I had a room there. I took the battery out of the phone.

Coleman had some mouthwash, deodorant, and makeup in her bathroom. I covered up the dark circles under my eyes and chose a lipstick with the pale name of Barely Caramel. I brushed and rearranged my white hair in an unbecoming twist. I tucked my T-shirt into my jeans, then pulled it out again. Needed to put my gun there.

There are benefits to being small and faded. A glance in the mirror told me I was just right for blending into the background of a hospital. I put the trucking log that showed Lynch’s routes in August 2004 in my tote and headed over to the hospital, along the way passing through a McDonald’s drive-through for coffee and a sausage biscuit so I wouldn’t get the caffeine and carb shakes.

The Tucson Trauma Center on Campbell is four stories, complete with a helipad on the roof for transporting patients. The directory in the reception lobby told me that the first floor was all administration. I stopped a volunteer, told her my husband was in the hospital, bad traffic accident. I trembled. She tsked.

I said I had heard there was a dangerous killer somewhere in the hospital and should I be nervous about that? My husband was staying on the fourth floor. She said I shouldn’t be concerned for my husband’s safety—the killer only killed women, and from what she had heard, wasn’t in a condition to kill anyone right now. Conveying a sense that this was the biggest thing that would happen to her all year, she also whispered confidentially that everyone knew Floyd Lynch was on the third floor because of all the policemen coming and going, but she didn’t know in which room.

That was easy; it would be the room with the guard standing outside. I planned my next move on the elevator, came to a vestibule with turns to the right and left. Turned to the right, looked down hallways heading in both directions, didn’t see anyone who didn’t look like a nurse.

Came back to the elevator area and headed in the other direction. Sure enough, there was the metro police guard standing about midway down the hall, barely paying attention. Looked like he had been there all night and was waiting to be relieved. It was hard to be sure precisely which room Floyd was in because the guard was standing between two doors, one open, one closed. If I had to take a chance, though, I’d bet my money on the door that was closed.

I ducked into the closest room on the opposite side of the hall, luckily empty so I didn’t have to make up a story, and found a clean hospital gown. I drew it on and doubled my slacks up over my knees. Tucked the trucking log into the front of my jeans and hid my tote behind the door after taking out my cell phone and a pocket mirror. I put the battery back into the phone. More like a patient now, I stopped at the edge of the open door and held up the mirror to reconnoiter prior to making my next move.

But before I could put the mirror down to dial the phone, a chubby nurse with proportionately fat hair and feet turned out like a duck emerged from the elevator with a full intravenous-fluids bag. Wary of being spotted, I drew further back into the shadow of the room and only stepped toward the door when I saw her waddle by. I watched her reflection in my mirror as she opened the door to Lynch’s room and closed it again behind herself. Now I knew it wasn’t locked.

Still watching, I waited patiently for three or four minutes until the nurse exited the room with a half-empty IV bag. She nodded at the guard, who didn’t look up, and exited via the stairway to the side of the elevator.

On my cell I dialed information to get the main hospital number and asked to be patched into the nurse’s station on the third floor. When the nurse answered, I said, “This is the Tucson Police. Would you please put Officer Joe Btfsplk on the line?”

“Do you mean the policeman standing guard at four-twenty-six?” she asked.

“Yah, that’s the one. Thanks.”

In a moment I heard her, “Officer Bit … Officer there’s a call for you on the hospital phone.”

He looked puzzled but took the bait. I grabbed a rolling intravenous rack from the room on my way out, and hung by the wall as I approached, just a patient getting a little exercise. I slipped through the door before the deputy could find out whoever was on the phone had hung up. He would take a little time calling the office and trying to find out who wanted to talk to him.

Lynch was resting with the back of the bed slightly raised, his head rolled a little to one side, his hands on the cover. He was thin when I first saw him at the body dump site, but prison food followed by twenty-four hours of nothing by mouth had made him a mere sliver of a man. Tubes ran fluids in and out of him, including one leading to a colostomy bag that might or might not be permanent depending on the seriousness of his wound. A tube for oxygen led from his nose, and an IV was attached to his hand that was providing him with hydration and megadoses of antibiotics to stave off peritonitis. Besides the monitors that allowed the nurses to keep tabs on him from their station down the hall, he was also hooked up to two machines that dispensed painkillers, one a morphine pump he could press himself, and the other an epidural.

I recognized it all; I had been in this position once myself. If infection didn’t set in, he’d live. I threw my tote on the single chair near the bed, shrugged off the hospital gown, rolled down my jeans, and pulled out the logbook.

He appeared to be sleeping. “Hey, Floyd,” I said, reluctantly nudging his shoulder. There was something about this man I didn’t want to touch.

He looked up at me, groggy. “Wha?” he said. The morphine was going to make this a little harder. “Who’re you?”

“Brigid Quinn. We’ve met. I’m working with Agent Laura Coleman.”

“Now I’m shot, everybody wants to see me,” he said.

That gave me pause. “Who else?”

“My father was here yesterday. He didn’t care I was attached to this shitbag, all he wanted to know is what I did to his f*ckin’ dog. Christ, you don’t think I’ll have this thing hanging out of me forever, do you?”

“I didn’t think you were allowed to have any visitors.”

“He got in. The cop threw him out.”

Lynch giggled, a hiccupy kind of laugh that appeared to hurt. “My hand hurts,” he said, and fumbled for the button of his self-administering morphine pump.

Rather than continue talking about his father or his ongoing medical condition I held the logbook in front of his eyes. “I need you to look at this. Do you know what this is?”

His eyes grew a little more alert, either from the mysterious presence of this woman in his room or rising pain. He ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth and then licked his lips. “I’m thirsty.”

“That’s because you’re not allowed to drink anything. Answer my question and I’ll get you a wet swab for your mouth.”

“Where’s the guard?” He reached for the nurse call button but I got there first and covered it with my hand.

“Wait a sec. Look, Floyd. I’m not here to hurt you. I don’t care one way or the other about you anymore. I don’t care about you f*cking mummies, or about your colostomy, or even whether you go to prison for life. There’s something more important for me just now.”

He made contact with dull eyes that were still a little unfocused, but I could tell I had his attention.

“This is your logbook that places you far away from the scene of Jessica Robertson’s murder. I’ve got all your logbooks. I didn’t take the time to match up all the Route 66 murders, but the chances are you weren’t there when they happened.

“That means you’re covering for someone. I think the someone you’re covering for tried to kill me and has kidnapped Agent Laura Coleman because we got suspicious about your confession. I want the answers to some questions and I know you can give them to me.”

He licked his lips again before he could speak. “Why do you think I know anything?”

“Let me ask the questions for now. How do you know Gerald Peasil?”

“I don’t know any Gerald Peasil.”

“Then try this one: who’s got the ears?”

He grew as pale as I remembered him in the interrogation video. He started picking at the IV in his hand the way he had picked at his wart. You could tell he didn’t want to talk, but the morphine might have been acting as a kind of truth serum. “He’ll kill me, man. He said he’d kill me if I went back on my confession.”

“He. You mean the real Route 66 killer.”

He shook his hand. “Goddamn thing burns. Feels like a bee sting.” He giggled again. “Aw shit man, all I wanted to do is get a life sentence. Live. Is that too much to f*ckin’ ask?”

“Maybe not, but right now the chances are against it. You’re not safe. None of us is safe. Even if you go back to jail he can get you there because you can’t run. It’s easier to kill somebody in jail than on the outside.”

The giggling turned abruptly to blubbering. When faced with the truth they often blubber.

“You’re not a killer, are you, Floyd Lynch?” I said.

“No. I’m a loser.” He looked at me with big sad eyes, like he thought he should apologize. He went to grab my hand, which was resting on the pull-down metal side, but jerked back as if appalled to encounter live flesh. “You know how you want to be somebody else so bad. I thought I could go slow, build up to it. You know?”

I looked at him a moment, and then got back on track. “Tell me the truth now, Floyd.”

And this guy who felt sorry for himself because he didn’t have big enough balls to kill people started talking the way people do when they’re drinking, like he’d found in me a new best friend. “I met him, 66, in one of those Internet chat rooms. Then we went out of the room and started to write. I’d use the computers at truck stops. He was writing to just me. It was just me. He was like, you know, the real thing. At first I told him no way was he the Route 66 killer. He was pissed. He wanted to prove he was the one. He told me all kinds of details that weren’t in the news and it sounded right to me. I pretended I was killing women, too, but I wasn’t. I made up stuff. I was ashamed to tell him I was just … just … a little dizzy … whoa.”

As if it were too heavy for his neck, Lynch’s head lolled suddenly back onto the pillow. His eyelids flickered. When he felt me take the morphine pump out of his hand he came back to me. “I didn’t kill nobody, but that body I found … making it into a mummy, that was all my idea. I ordered that stuff off the Internet. That Natron business. Nobody else thought of that but me.”

“What about 66, what else do you know about him?”

“Nuthig.” It came out slurred. I hoped nobody would be coming in to adjust his pain meds until I was finished with him. “I jush needed a little more … time … to do it.”

“Come on, Floyd. He took you to the dump site to show you the bodies.”

He shook his head and looked like the act made him dizzy. “He shed he’d hidden ’em in this old abandoned Dodge on a mountain road. I knew about that car and went to see if … maybe that was the one.”

“So you’ve never seen his face.”

Floyd shook his head, more carefully this time. “I saw the bodies and I used ’em. But I got tired of going all the way up the mountain.” He walked the fingers on his right hand over his chest and smiled at them.

“Why didn’t you just move one of the bodies onto your truck?”

“I tried. It came apart when I tried to move it. I didn’t like it that way.”

I guess even necrophiliacs have an aesthetic sense. “You used both the bodies? The one you called the lot lizard?”

“Uh-huh,” he said in kind of a singsong.

“He didn’t tell you how or when he killed that one, did he?”

“Nuh-uh,” in the same singsong and did that childish zipper thing across his lips. “He was pretty closemouthed about it. Jush-ed she was different.”

I alerted. The killer blabbed about every detail of his other kills but didn’t want to talk about that first one. If he wouldn’t talk about her maybe it was because he hadn’t been as organized with her. Maybe he knew he’d made some mistakes, done something that could connect her to him. “Different? How?”

“Jus, diff…” he said, trailing off. I wished I knew how to punch in the codes that would cut off his drugs, but other than ripping the epidural out of his back, which was sure to cause a stink, I was at a loss.

“How different, Floyd? Physically? Mentally? Tell me what you remember, Floyd.”

Lynch wasn’t paying attention to me, just telling the truth. It must have felt good. “Then I studied about how to make a mummy and I was going to kill someone, I swear I was, but I didn’t have the time to work up to it. I printed out his e-mail messages and pretended I was the one who did it all. I sent some postcards to the father of the FBI agent like he did. I even sliced the body I found to pretend it was one of his victims. Then they picked me up. He got a message to me in jail. Shed if I ever denied it he’d have me killed.”

“Route 66.”

Lynch put a finger to his lips, “Shh. Don’t even say it.” Then he giggled.

Oh God, I didn’t have time for this. “I’m near certain he’s got Agent Coleman. Floyd, she was nice to you. She was trying to get a fair deal for you. Can’t you help me find her?”

He licked around the inside of his mouth as if he wanted to speak but his tongue was catching on his teeth. “I don’t know anything else. I’m sleepy. Let me…” His eyes closed and his mouth dropped open so I could hear his breathing. It struck me that there wasn’t much breathing, shallow and much, much too slow. Suddenly worried, I slapped his face lightly.

As if in response to my touching his face, a loud ping from the monitor beside the bed made me jump. It felt like the timer going off to tell me my interview was done.

About two seconds later a male doctor and two female nurses came through the door. One of them glanced my way but then all focused on bringing Floyd Lynch back from what they apparently considered the brink.

The doctor shone a light in Lynch’s eyes. “Can you hear me, Floyd? No response. Respiration?”

“Shallow, six per minute, pulse rapid, thin.”

“Looks like an overdose.” The doctor punched at the panel on both the morphine pump and the epidural to stop the flow. “Nurse, check his IV. You, go get a crash team.”

One of the women dashed out, the other stayed, checked the IV. “I hung the bag myself but I didn’t open it to full. It’s all the way open now. Maybe there’s an obstruction,” she said. She fiddled with it, trying to be useful until the emergency response team arrived.

“He was complaining that his hand was burning,” I said, but no one paid attention to me.

Three guys crashed through the door pushing a metal cart filled with emergency gear. Without asking for directions one of them grabbed a board while the other two lifted Lynch off the bed so the third could push the board under him. At the same time that Lynch was being lowered onto the board the guy who had put it on the bed got a syringe off the cart and plunged it into Lynch’s chest. That would be the epinephrine. It had no effect.

They were getting the defibrillator off the cart to try that next when the guard poked his head in the door, cell phone held uncertainly, not having been given instructions about this eventuality. He saw me standing against the wall, watching the activity. “Who are you?” he asked.

“His mother,” I said, and turned back to watch the heroics of the medical team even though something told me that, being the last person to see Floyd Lynch in a stable condition, I should be hightailing it out of the hospital.

“Clear.”

I watched the nurses standing by, powerless to help. One still tapped at the chamber connecting the IV bag to the tubing. Neither of these women was the one I’d seen earlier.

I thought about that nurse who had gone into the room before. Carrying the empty fluids bag. No, not empty. Not by half. Nobody ever switched to a second bag until the first one was empty. Then I thought about Lynch complaining shortly after that his hand was burning as if he’d been stung. Then I thought about how he had seemed to get drunker by the minute while I talked to him.

“It’s in the bag,” I said, pointing to the stand where the fluid dripped into his IV. “It’s in his bag,” I shouted and tried to fight my way to where I could rip the IV out of his hand or at least knock the stand over. I got as far as the side of the bed. A member of the crash team who wasn’t working the paddles held me back.

“Get this woman out of here,” the doctor shouted, “Get her out of here.”

The bag continued to drip. Keeping Floyd alive might help me, but it wasn’t helping to find Coleman. I thought he had told me everything he knew. I left the room while the guard was distracted by the drama.