Rage Against the Dying

Forty-seven





The fifteen-minute tram ride down out of the canyon, plus the drive through back roads to make being spotted less likely, gave me a little time to think about what I had learned from Floyd Lynch.

He was innocent of murder.

He had met the real killer in a chat room. We all knew that the Internet had created a paradise for pedophiles and other perves. You google serial killer chat room and you get a quarter million hits. I know because we’ve tried to monitor them. You can’t do anything with that amount of intel, let alone tell the difference between the fantasy and reality from that many sites.

By doubting Lynch’s confession, Coleman and I were on to something that threatened the real killer to the extent that he sent Gerald Peasil to get me. He probably met Peasil the same way he met Lynch, had shared information and knew that Peasil had a taste for older women.

When that failed, he tried to kill me himself in the park and then kidnapped Coleman.

Even if I could convince Max that Coleman had been abducted, if all the efforts of the sheriff’s department and FBI were thrown into finding her, there was no guarantee it would accomplish any more than I could. The search could even scare the killer. He seemed to know what we were doing and would just go deeper than he’d ever been. One thing he knew how to do was hide. And if he hadn’t already killed Coleman, he would now.

But who knew of Coleman’s analysis and our investigation? Not even Morrison knew everything we were doing. Not even Royal Hughes. I couldn’t imagine who would know that we were investigating off the reservation, let alone leak the information to someone who wanted to harm us.

Who would that person be, connected to both of us, to Floyd Lynch, and to Gerald Peasil?

The only answer was no answer at all. The real Route 66 killer.

I ran over these thoughts with the regularity of the pistons firing in the car’s engine. “Round and round we go, and where we stop nobody knows,” Peasil had said as we circled in his van. Except we had never stopped, Peasil and I. The mystery kept on going round and round well after he was dead.

The only clue I had to follow up on was the fact that the first kill, identified only as a lot lizard, was “different.” Whoo-hoo.

I was back at Coleman’s house by early afternoon. I let myself in through the back door, grabbed a box of organic cereal from her cupboard, and spilled some onto her desk to eat while I opened one of the binders to the section labeled Victims.

At first I wanted to scream that it was just too much to cover and I felt like I was running out of time. I wished I had Sigmund here with me. I was more of a kick-ass-take-names kind of person. He’d be able to see what was different about one of the victims. He could see the part of a picture that was missing.

He would not feel pressured, or panicky, or worried. He would not feel at all. I imagined him sitting somewhere, staring at the pages, blinking. That’s all.

I turned the pages without reading, the words dancing, unable to process, aware of the time slipping by. Then I got to the photos and things got easier. I skipped over Floyd’s mummy; I was after the other Jane Doe. When I got to the old crime scene shots taken over the five years that the Route 66 murders were committed, I slowed down, forced myself to let the answer come to me rather than hunt for it. Maybe I would discover a pattern of similarities or differences that would help me find out what was unique about the Jane Doe in the car.

Despite various differences in hair color and length, these newly dead victims all looked alike in some respects, young white girls, their eyelids not quite closed, their faces settling into what some call peace but what I see as final resignation, the blood-encrusted wound that had been their right ear, and of course their nudity. But before this happened they were not victims, not evidence, not entertainment in a crime drama, but people, and I remembered all their names without having to look at the labels.

Here was Patricia Stanbaugh, found June 26, 1999. She had a twin brother, Patrick, who proved her platinum-blond hair was natural. Hurriedly thrown facedown from a car rather than posed, the first known victim.

Here was Anna Maria Carrasco, found August 12, 2000. A kindergarten teacher in a private school, having an adventure she could share with the children. She bled more than the rest, the second victim.

Here was Kitty (really Kitty, not Kathryn) Vaught, found June 30, 2001. Engaged to be married and this trip her last hurrah, the third victim.

Here was Arline Blum, found July 19, 2002. A wisp of a girl, she was Jewish but had a tattoo of an Egyptian ankh, the symbol of eternal life, on her ankle. The fourth.

Here was Mary Sneedy, found June 4, 2003. She was from Arlington, Virginia, and had the biggest funeral I’d ever attended. The fifth.

Here was, here was … repeating like a litany in those novenas at Saint Anthony’s that Mom used to drag me to on Monday afternoons after school. The smell of incense, the chime of the handheld bell, the adoration of the host, the mournful singing of the Tantum Ergo, the murmured responses in the prayers of repose for the souls of the dearly departed. I could hear the dearly departed talking back.

Have mercy on us.

Have mercy on us.

Have mercy on us.

Nothing was coming to me, goddamn it. I clutched the photographs as if I could squeeze something useful from them. Work with me, girls.

Lastly I got to Jessica’s picture. Disappeared August 1, 2004. This photo was different from the others in that it was taken years rather than days after her death, her body a brown husk. There was nothing of the woman I had known in that picture.

Only lastly was not Jessica after all. Here was the photo of the other mummy that had been found in the abandoned car. The only victim of the Route 66 murderer that had gone unidentified, unnamed. I remembered wondering who she was, and why no one cared about her.

You were the first, we know that now, that Patricia Stanbaugh wasn’t the first after all. You still have both your ears and your tendons weren’t slashed. You were killed before the killer had designed his MO and signature. That was different. Was that the difference the killer meant? Too obvious.

You were killed before the killer knew he could get away with killing. Maybe it was unplanned, maybe it was spontaneous. Maybe he knew you. If I knew who you were, I might know him.

I remembered George Manriquez from that morning when Zach arrived to view Jessica’s body, how kind George was to Zach. How he had said with a sigh that he’d moved here from Florida looking for a change of pace, but only switched from Haitian floaters to Mexican mummies. It had given him pain, I could see. He was one of those people in the business who hadn’t lost their feelings. He might care about this woman whether she was a prostitute or not. I flipped to the medical examiner’s report. Sure enough, he had done a complete autopsy on the Jane Doe.

No organic disease that could be ascertained. The other victims were healthy, too.

Method of death: strangulation. That wasn’t different either.

X-rays showed her dental work in the event records could later be found to match them. George pronounced her teeth and state of her jaw in keeping with good hygiene and nutrition. So far not the sort of thing you’d find in a low-class prostitute, certainly not an addict. No difference there—all the victims had been wholesome sorts.

The body had been dumped in a car and naturally mummified in the dry desert heat. Different.

No noticeable marks, tattoos, or the like. Pierced ears. Arline Blum had the tattoo on her ankle. All the victims had pierced ears.

Bone structure indicates ectomorph, a small, slim build even before her flesh had desiccated.

Skull indicates African American descent.

I read the line again. Now that was different.

I swiveled Coleman’s chair back to the computer and went back to www.findthemissing.org. In the unidentified-remains database I keyed in the little information I had before: sex, geographic area, year she went missing. This time I changed Caucasian to African American.

Then I cross-checked my entry with the missing persons part of the database. There was only one African American missing in that year. Just to double check, I keyed in a date range of three years. She was the only African American to go missing from the area during that whole time. There was a photograph of her, a high school graduation photograph. And she had a name. Her name was Kimberly Maple.

She was not an unknown prostitute. At least she had a name. Kimberly Maple.

I had an inkling, but quick went to a population-statistics site and searched for African Americans in Arizona. Less than four percent. If you reduced that by half to eliminate the males and reduced again for Kimberly’s probable age at time of death, it was less than one chance in fifty. The waitress at Emery’s Cantina was black and had a relative who was the victim of a violent crime. Not quite two bombs on a plane but maybe close enough.

I picked up Coleman’s phone again and dialed directory assistance. Yes, there was a number for a woman named Cheri Maple. But why would Emery say that her sister was the victim of a violent crime? Why wouldn’t he say she had disappeared? Unless Cheri told him that because she knew Kimberly was dead.

A female serial killer? Cheri killed her sister and found out she liked doing it enough to keep doing it?

You’re tired and you’re desperate, I thought. Stop and think some more. I breathed in and out a few times, pictured Sigmund. Always reject your first assumption. I picked up the photograph of Kimberly Maple taken at the crime scene. I thought how, if she was the first, as Lynch had said, that her corpse would have been in that car for at least thirteen years. How old would Cheri have been, fourteen at the most? Absurd to think she had anything to do with all those deaths far from Tucson so long ago. She couldn’t even get a driver’s license, let alone rent a car. I looked at the photo again and watched as my blasted imagination switched Kimberly’s face to Cheri’s and back again.

Once more. Go through the sequence. Coleman suspects a false confession when Lynch tells her he threw away the victim’s ears. She goes to her superior, and to Royal Hughes, and God knows who else, to make her case. They all ignore her. Or do they? Could the killer be someone on the inside?

Morrison takes her off the case when she goes around him to bring in me and Weiss.

Frustrated after being suppressed by Morrison, Coleman backs off, but gives me a careful analysis applying Sigmund’s profile and the video of the interrogation. Who knew she was continuing her investigation without authority? Coleman and I only talk about it in her car on the way to and from the Lynches’.

And in the bar. Twice. I scanned my memory to see everyone who was in the bar during those meetings. Cops, Cheri, Emery, other people I didn’t know. Who were those other people? Who might have heard us talking?

I scanned the rest of the bar in my head, the dusty bottle of Tarantula Tequila on the top shelf, the rose next to the cash register, the jar of pickled pigs’ feet. People at tables, guy at the end of the bar. No one had been close enough to hear us talking except for the couple of times I raised my voice and people looked over. What had I said?

Still on the NamUs site, I clicked on the police reports and was tickled to see how much information had been entered there. Not by law enforcement, the girl had gone missing years before the database was started, but by Cheri, who had learned so much from her criminal justice studies. Parents lived on a ranch near Durango, Colorado. Kimberly had been attending the University of Arizona, working on an undergraduate degree in anthropology. They started a search after three days. Everyone interviewed in the case was entered into the database, including all her professors, her classmates, a roommate who was the last to see her, and her boyfriend. Cheri had entered all the names. I scrolled down each one, reading a synopsis of their interviews, recognizing none until I got to the boyfriend.

Who was listed as Imre Bathory.

He would have known Cheri while he was dating her sister. He was good at showing sympathy. He would have befriended the whole family and the seduction of Cheri was insurance. Did Cheri tell him about NamUs, and how she had fed all the information into the site? It was a calculated risk, not selling the bar and leaving town. Doing everything that an innocent man would do. He couldn’t change his name without anyone asking why. But he could tweak it a bit. Just like I knew that egészségedre was the Hungarian toast, I knew that Imre was the Hungarian form of Emery.

It’s those little pieces of information you collect because you never know how they’ll be useful until they are. And how did I know for sure that Emery was the connecting link to everything?

That night I’d gotten drunk at Emery’s Cantina, what I thought I’d seen, had convinced myself I had only imagined, in that jar of pickled pigs’ feet. That jar covered with dust because no one ever asked to eat them. That jar that must have sat on the counter for years.

I should have trusted that image of those things that were not pigs’ feet. Because sometimes imagination is not imagination.