Rage Against the Dying

Seven





At two the next afternoon I picked Zach up at Tucson International (one terminal, two concourses, twenty gates). I watched him come down the escalator into the baggage claim area, his body slowly clearing a dip in the ceiling, coming into view from the bottom up, shoddy hiking boots to balding crown. He wasn’t much taller than me and was a lot skinnier. And though he was six years my junior, I don’t think it’s vanity to say he looked older than me.

The moving staircase gave way abruptly to the stationary floor, making him falter into my embrace. So as not to face reality head-on, he whispered into my hair, “Yee-ha. That last bit was like riding a bronco.”

“You come in between the mountain ranges, the wind funnel makes it choppy.” Besides being genuinely affectionate, the hug allowed me to give him a quick sniff. Last time I’d seen Zach personal hygiene had not been a priority. But he’d cleaned himself up for Jessica’s sake and even had a new short-sleeved blue shirt on. I could tell from the perpendicular creases in the denim that it hadn’t been out of the package long. I couldn’t smell alcohol either. He must not have had a drink on the plane and that may be why he pulled away quickly, so I couldn’t feel his fingers flutter like moths against my back.

I let his body go but kept his hands still in mine a moment longer, let him look into my eyes without looking away from him the way so many others had. “Don’t do this, Zach. You don’t have to see her. We got the confirmation from the dental records.”

“Did I ever tell you I thought of being a forensic dentist there for a while?”

Yes, he had told me that, on four or five occasions, along with how he didn’t blame me for Jessica’s death. Zach retrieved a small canvas bag from the carousel and we walked from the terminal to the parking lot, where I got him situated in the car, handed him the bottle of water you always give to new arrivals in the desert, made him drink some, and headed up Palo Alto Drive, turned left onto Valencia, right on First, for the relatively short drive to the medical examiner’s office downtown.

Max Coyote and Laura Coleman were already there, and Dr. George Manriquez met us almost instantly upon arrival in the lobby.

“Dr. Manriquez,” I said, the situation calling for formality despite my having known him during my brief time with the Tucson Bureau, and stepped back to let him prepare Zach for what he was about to see.

“Mr. Robertson,” he said, indicating a couple of small armchairs placed at an angle to each other in a far corner of the lobby, “Please sit here for a second.”

Zach followed his instruction while the three of us, me, Max, and Coleman, faced each other pretending not to listen.

“Mr. Robertson,” George said again, once they were both seated. “No one understands better than I do that this is real life, not drama, so I want to prepare you a little. We have no mystery here, no indirect lighting like in TV shows. You’re not going to see your daughter, that is, anything that looks like your daughter. This is some dark brown skin covering a skeleton. Have you ever seen a mummy?”

“In books, yes,” Zach said, nodding. “We … we went to Pompeii once but I know those bodies aren’t the same.” The memory of some vacation bowed him like a weight.

“Yes, those are plaster casts, but still, that’s something how the remains you’re about to view will appear. Do you have any questions you want to ask me? Anything at all.”

Zach wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, seemed to decide not to ask, then asked. “Is there … is there any smell?”

“Not really, or not that disagreeable one you may be thinking of. A little musty, perhaps, but you won’t be shocked by it. It’s the sight that is likely to be disturbing.”

Zach’s head drooped and I noticed the knuckles of his laced fingers were white. I wanted to go to him but knew he was in good hands with the sweetheart Manriquez.

After a long enough pause to show Zach that there wasn’t anything more important to him than this, George stood and put out his hand to help Zach up. Then he led us all down a corridor to the autopsy room.

They could never get the smell out of a room like this, a combination of disinfectant and old diaper, like a government-run day care center. On a plastic gurney rested the body of Jessica Robertson covered with a sheet. It was all purposefully clinical, like Manriquez had said, no shadowy corners, no instruments suggestive of cutting flesh, no background music. Zach was placed on one side of the gurney flanked by me and an autopsy assistant burly enough to catch him if he dropped. George stood on the other side. Max and Coleman hung back.

With a final glance at Zach for permission, George drew the sheet from the top of Jessica’s head so Zach could see her dried hair and a bit of dark brown flesh on her forehead. When Zach appeared to be able to take that much, George drew the sheet down to just below her chin.

I had my head tilted enough to see Zach out of the corner of my eye but felt more than saw the tremor that passed through him like a private earthquake. There was a single soft groan. Other than that he was incredibly composed, worked through his own thoughts and memories without sharing. Then he lifted his index finger and delicately stroked the shriveled brown lobe of her left ear, still preserved over the years by the mummification process. He stroked her ear the way you would a thing that was terribly fragile but too amazingly beautiful not to touch. He couldn’t see the side of her head where the other ear had been cut away. Then he pulled his hand away and the medical examiner pulled the sheet back up.

“I won’t see her again,” Zach said.

“No,” agreed George, whether he understood or not. He looked at the assistant, who apparently had been given prior instructions, and then paused until Zach was led out to the waiting area. I was so proud of him.

Even with the weight of the corpse still in the room, we all breathed a little deeper.

As Max and Coleman came closer to the gurney, George said, “I moved here from Miami about ten years ago looking for a change of scene. Too many immigrants washing up on the beaches, I said. All that happened was I went from Haitian floaters to Mexican mummies. With the summer heat I’ve got a whole refrigerated truck out back full of unidentifieds that they picked up off the desert.”

But then he went on with his job as he pulled the sheet off with less ceremony than before, this time all the way off the corpse. The body was in the fetal position as it had been when first placed in the car. The head was positioned where it would have been in life, though it was no longer attached to the torso. “This mummification happens quite a lot, naturally formed in the desert where the humidity is so low. You know, like the other body in the car.” He was referring to the prostitute who must have frequented truck-stop parking lots, who Floyd had dismissed as a lot lizard, his first victim.

“I didn’t have much time to look at the other one,” I said. “Was it the same MO as the others?”

“I concentrated on this one first. All I can tell you is that the other corpse has both its ears. I can give you a better report when I’ve done the autopsy on the other.”

I asked, “What about the body found in Lynch’s truck? Are there any similarities of cause and manner of death?”

“Like I said, Jessica Robertson’s body seems to have been naturally mummified. The one in Lynch’s truck had some help. It’s all in my report.”

Coleman and Max nodded. “Help me out, Doc,” I said. “I’m trying to catch up.”

Manriquez didn’t seem to mind at all, and started in eagerly, “He used something called Natron. It’s commercially available, a mixture of four kinds of sodium: carbonate, bicarbonate, chloride, and sulfate. You pack it in and around the body so it dehydrates and makes it inhospitable to the bacteria that would usually decompose the tissues. Plus he removed the organs, which accelerated the process. All that was left was the bones and dried soft tissue.”

Like many medical examiners, it turned out there was nothing he enjoyed talking about more than his work. I was aware of Zach waiting by himself and needed to get this over with, but my curiosity was piqued. “You say this Natron is commercially available?”

“It’s used in those little desiccant packages they put in things to keep them dry. Mr. Lynch apparently isn’t stupid, and knows how to look things up on the Internet. That’s how he found out how to do it. Agent Coleman could confirm from her interrogation, but I would guess he put the body in a ventilated box out in the desert while it was drying. There was no evidence of predator scavenging.”

“Lynch said it only took a few months until he could use the body without smelling up the truck,” Max said.

“How long did Lynch have it in his truck?” I asked.

“About a year and a half,” Max said.

Manriquez nodded that it agreed with his findings on approximate time since death and added, “He didn’t try to move it so it stayed pretty intact. Of course once it gets that old you can hardly pinpoint a date, but I found enough dried semen on it to show he had it quite a while.”

“Sure it’s his?” I asked.

“We’ve had time to do the DNA analysis that matched it to Lynch.”

“Back to Jessica,” I said. “Cause and manner of death?”

“It’s hard to find ligature marks because the way the head was angled it had fallen off the body anyway. And of course with the eyes dried you can’t see the typical petechiae though it might show up in histopath. But no need to go that far, the hyoid bone is definitely crushed, the Achilles tendon slashed, and the ear removed on this side.” Manriquez shook his head. “After the confession I read the autopsy reports on the Route 66 murders. That’s when I discovered the body in the truck had the same mode associated with it. So I checked the body of Jessica Robertson for semen and found some on various parts, just like the mummy in the truck. Preliminary tests don’t exclude Lynch. We’ve put a priority on the DNA analysis to confirm.”

I thought again about Zach alone out in the waiting room and wanted to get back to him, but Coleman was talking now. “In his interrogation Lynch said he’d been using Jessica’s body for several years but got tired of driving up the mountain road and worried someone would spot him. So he started experimenting with animals and ended up with the body he had on his truck when we caught him.” She turned to Manriquez, “Would you send me both the reports, for Jessica and for the other body found in the car?”

“Sure. I’ve got it over here.” Manriquez walked to the far end of the autopsy lab where the other body waited on a gurney, covered with another green cloth. Max and Coleman turned their attention to it as Manriquez withdrew the cloth. I saw the dark tissue that was speckled here and there with yellowed bits, pieces of trash that had stuck to it before it completely dried. I left the others gazing at the body, Manriquez enthusiastically waving his hands as if he was going to levitate it. He was saying, “This one was fairly intact, like that of Jessica Robertson.”

Max said, “Intact? The heads came off when they took them out of the car and this one is in pieces.”

Manriquez said, “I’m talking hard-tissue damage.”

“Hey, I gotta go,” I said, still standing next to Jessica’s body, but no one heard me.