Rage Against the Dying Read online

  He put the box in his shirt pocket and said, “You and I know some things about each other, don’t we?”

  He didn’t have to elaborate. I could tell he was referring to some very specific thing, the questionable circumstances of my shooting the perp, and wondering if he had a vigilante on his hands.

  “I suppose we do.”

  “Well, those things might make us think differently. Here’s something. Something you might not know about me yet. I can take a lot before I go over the edge. I can take stupidity, for example. And even disrespect. Sometimes people think that because I’m always quiet and slow that I never get upset at all. But you know what really burns my ass?”

  “What’s that, Max?” I said gently, trying not to fan his flames.

  “The feeling that I’m being suckered. Like somebody doesn’t think I’m smart enough to know when I’m being suckered.”

  Twenty-eight

  I couldn’t blame Max for thinking I was holding something back, but I kept telling myself it was a long way from not reporting the van to actually killing the guy, and my story about hesitating before I called it in was plausible. Still, he would have to think that if I lied about one thing I might lie about others.

  I had at least four days and probably more until the DNA tests were done, even if Max could discreetly pull some strings and bump my sample higher up in a long queue. But then the other trace would have to be analyzed, too, to make a match, and maybe there would be none placing me at the scene. One thing I could count on, Max would extend me the friendly courtesy of not voicing his suspicions to anyone until he had some solid evidence. I knew I could expect that from him.

  For now I needed to focus on two things: finding where Peasil lived so I could make sure there wasn’t anything more linking me to him, like the photo and news clip I found in his van, and tracking down Coleman, partly because I was pissed at her for going off the radar the day before, but also to find out what she might have discovered that made her send me the cryptic e-mail BTW you were right! Sort of. Right about what? And if she had evidence, who was she going to present it to before Lynch made his plea twenty-four hours from now?

  I was already in the downtown area, so I drove the couple of blocks from the medical examiner’s office to the Bureau. I pulled into the parking garage to keep the car at a temperature that would support life and took the stairs up to the sixth floor, partly for exercise and partly because I don’t like the thought of being surprised in an elevator. I told Maisie I was going to see Morrison, and she buzzed me through the door without calling him first. She wouldn’t do that with someone who hadn’t worked there as I did.

  I asked someone in a cubicle where Coleman’s office was, went down the hallway, and found it open. No one seemed to be around so I spent a few seconds glancing around on her desk, in the top drawer, for something that seemed like an address book, or even a phone number scratched on a pad. In the course of doing that I bumped her computer and the screen saver appeared. Like any typical office worker, she had left it on.

  Within a minute I had keyed Gerald Peasil’s license into the vehicle registration site and come up with his address. Not quick enough to get out without notice, though. Special Agent in Charge Roger Morrison walked into the office just as I was backing out of the site.

  “Maisie said you were here to see me,” he said, and frowned at my hands hovering over the keyboard.

  I slowly pulled my hands into my lap but didn’t bother to come up with a reason for asking to see him. “I actually came to see Agent Coleman,” I said.

  “Why?”

  Deciding pretended ignorance was the best plan for getting the information I needed, “I wanted to ask her a couple questions about Floyd Lynch and his involvement in the Route 66 murders.”

  “You’ve been informed that Agent Coleman is off that case.”

  I knew I might be getting her into hotter water than she already was, but I couldn’t stop myself now that I was face-to-face with Morrison. “You’re on dangerous ground, Roger. You’re accepting Lynch’s confession without a thorough investigation. You got questions that need answering.”

  That pissed him off to a degree greater than his usual pissedness. He tried to make his chest big. “What information has Agent Coleman shared with you?”

  I didn’t say anything, just showed him my best what-the-hell-are-you-talking-about face.

  He paused, and his chest deflated a little. He was a little worried, I could tell by his hanging around and explaining. “I’m not sure why you’re asking or why I need to make this clear, but she violated protocol. I shifted her back to Fraud for the time being. She’s lucky I didn’t suspend her.”

  “You’re not concerned about where she is? Did she really go to see her mother?”

  Morrison scoffed. “Who gives a shit? Frankly I think she’s off licking her wounds, but this is the FBI, not group therapy. So take off your strap-on and get out of here before I have you arrested for using government property.”

  Talking to Morrison reminded me of one of the many reasons I’d taken early retirement. I resorted to the sort of thing you can only say when you’re retired on full pension, and then only if you smile when you say it.

  “I don’t need a strap-on, Roger. I took yours.”

  Twenty-nine

  What with the shooting incident during my hike, confronting Max at Peasil’s autopsy, and my run-in with Morrison, it had been a lousy day. On top of that I was getting to feel like I was undercover in my own house, trying to show Carlo that nothing was troubling me. I stopped at the grocery store on the way home and wandered down a few aisles, tossing random items into the basket so Carlo would know I went to the store.

  “Fresh ginger?” he questioned as he helped me put the groceries away.

  Is that what that was? “You never know,” I said and stared blinking at the rootish thing lying on the counter longer than I should have. He came up behind me and did that thing where his arms felt like a safety restraint in a carnival ride. I turned in his arms, gave him a kiss, and later snuck a box of baking soda into the pantry cupboard when he wasn’t looking. I don’t know what that’s used for, either.

  After dinner (Shake’n Bake chicken, microwaved frozen peas) I wandered out to the back fence with my glass of pinot gris to contemplate the mountains and the morass of deception into which I was sinking deeper and deeper. As I looked, a brown rabbit scampered by, its white tail failing to blend in with the landscape the way the rest of it did. Cruel evolutionary joke, that tail. It looks like a target. Then motion farther to the right caught my eye, and I watched a coyote trot across the ridge of an arroyo. It paid no attention to the rabbit. Like a big beige dog, this one seemed to be carrying a stick. It was too far away to see if it was the walking stick that I had buried out there when I realized I couldn’t get the blood off it.

  I ran back into the house, muttered, “roadrunner” to Carlo as he looked up from his book, grabbed the binoculars off the kitchen counter, and ran back out again. The coyote was gone.

  I decided not to think about it. All in all, at that point I thought I was holding it together pretty good, notwithstanding the fear of an animal digging up my bloodstained murder weapon from where I had buried it and leaving it on the side of the road where someone might find it and report it to the police.

  No, it wasn’t until the following day things really started to go bad.

  Thirty

  I had waited through the evening for Coleman to call me, e-mail me, but nothing. She could be licking her wounds over being dismissed from the case as Morrison suggested. She could be too embarrassed to tell me. She could be investigating some source that she didn’t want even me to know about. I couldn’t know any of these things, but at least I could find out where her parents lived and check that part of the story.

  Today Floyd Lynch would be making his guilty plea in court, and as far as I knew, we had nothing. I’d go to the hearing in time to see what was going on, but until then I h
ad time to cover my tracks before Max found out anything more about my involvement with Gerald Peasil.

  I told Carlo … I can’t remember now what I told him but I made up something and headed north to San Manuel, Peasil’s last known.

  Thinking while I drove, what if the guy was just talking out of his ass, Quinn? What if he was mentally ill? What if there are no victims? What if you killed an innocent man? Look at Floyd Lynch.

  I have to admit, part of my reason for going up there was to prove to myself that I hadn’t killed an innocent man.

  Repeating to myself that I had seen blood in the van, I drove as fast as I dared, taking a little over a half hour to drive up two-lane Route 77 and turn right on Tiger Mine Road past a decayed sign that almost welcomed me to San Manuel.

  San Manuel is a crummy little town about forty miles northeast of Tucson, off Route 77. A thriving copper mine there made the place quite attractive for a while, to the extent that they even put in a golf course. With the mine petering out, the town is pretty much abandoned, the golf course hardly green. The main road runs between depressed housing on the right and mine tailings on the left, which descend into a milky green lake extending for about a half mile between the town and the Galiuro Mountains farther to the east.

  I located Peasil’s address and, usual routine, parked my car down the street where it couldn’t be identified later. Then I donned a pink terry-cloth turban and my Jackie-O sunglasses, slipped on some three-inch wedgies to make me look taller, and walked to the kind of house that would rent a room to the likes of Gerald Peasil. I wondered for a moment what I would have done if I’d found Max’s car there, but there was no vehicle parked in front. A HOUSE FOR RENT sign stuck into the sparsely graveled yard gave me my in. A whiskered old woman who filled her howling-coyote-print caftan came to the door.

  Formal introductions were not required. But as we picked our way through drying lantana to the back of her property where a little adobe casita would have afforded Peasil the required privacy, she eyed my turban and the sunglasses.

  “You been sick?” she asked.

  I mumbled something in a southern accent.

  “I been through that, too.”

  I mumbled something else. Maybe she figured it was her hearing, because she didn’t ask me to repeat myself.

  “The last guy was here for some months but he hasn’t been around for a couple of weeks. He owes me back rent. He paid by the week,” she said.

  “It looks like the kind of place that would suit me,” I said, standing at the doorway of the single room building that looked like it had been trashed with no rhyme or deliberation. It smelled, too, and I closed my eyes, trying to detect whether it was simply old food and bad aim at the toilet or something worse.

  “Has to be cleaned up, I guess,” said the woman.

  “Doesn’t look like he did much entertaining,” I murmured as if talking to myself, seeing what else I could get from her.

  “Now and then I heard some noise, like he had girls in. Maybe a woman yelling once, a fight. None of my business.”

  For her it was gossip. For me it was crime scene reconstruction. I couldn’t pursue the line of thought and only hoped Max would. “Oh, I’ve seen worse. Would you mind … I’m looking for a place away from it all, to finish a book I’m writing.”

  The woman laughed. “One of those mem-was?”

  I looked at the old woman and wondered when Peasil would have made her his next victim. Just before he moved on? Go ahead and make fun of me, lady. I probably saved your life. “Would you mind leaving me alone here for fifteen minutes or so, just so I can see if I feel the inspiration of the place? I promise I won’t touch anything.”

  The prospective landlady grimaced and said, “I wouldn’t touch anything in here either.”

  Once alone, I stepped just inside the door and shut it. From my tote bag I moved aside my gun, which I had placed there prior to leaving the house that morning, extracted a pair of latex gloves, a shower cap, and paper booties for my feet. I put the shower cap back, remembering that the turban took care of keeping my hair from the place.

  The room I stood in was ten by ten and served as living room, kitchen, and bedroom all in one. The kitchen in one corner consisted of a hot plate on a card table and a two-foot-tall refrigerator on the floor next to it. A door at the far end looked like it led to a bathroom, which would have the only sink in the place. Even with the garbage tossed about, fast-food wrappers, and unwashed T-shirts, I was able to comb the place pretty thoroughly because I knew what I was looking for.

  Not bones, not here, not yet. The place was too small and a quick scan of the hard earth in the undisturbed yard as I walked up told me Peasil hadn’t used it as a graveyard. For now I was looking for other things, things that were obviously not Peasil.

  I let my fingers travel gently over a chair with faded upholstery that was worn down to the wood frame in the arms. Opened the greasy blinds to see if anything lay between them and the one window in the room. Felt under the metal TV tray that must have served as both desk and dining room table. Looked into the empty refrigerator. Searched quickly for any nook that might contain a laptop computer or cell phone with some incriminating evidence on it.

  Finally I found the non-Peasil things tucked under the grimy half-inflated pool float that he had used as a bed in one corner of the room. When he was here, he slept on his souvenirs. They were stuffed into a black plastic bag and used to pad the floor under the float.

  From inside the bag I pulled women’s clothing: socks with holes in the toes, a sweater more tattered than not, a dirty white blouse with a drawstring at the neck, a skirt with the ghost of what had been a geometric design before the repeated washings had made it fade away. Another skirt with what looked like a bloodstain. These victims had been poor women. Homeless? I thought. Was that what Peasil meant when he said he went after women who wouldn’t be missed?

  A couple of items had fallen to the bottom of the bag because of their weight. I spilled them onto the floor. A crucifix made of two popsicle sticks on a piece of string and a little laminated prayer card. On the front of the card a picture and the name of Saint Jude. The back contained a prayer in Spanish, which I can read, mostly. The prayer said, “Oh, Holy Saint Jude, Patron Saint of Lost Causes great in virtue and rich in miracles, faithful something of all who request your special something, help me in my present and urgent need.”

  Causas perdidas. Lost causes. I guess Saint Jude wasn’t of much use. Lots of women coming over the border this way, lots of hungry and thirsty women, weakened by the elements and their age, who would gladly accept a ride in a van and the promise of something to drink. A hundred square miles of serial killer smorgasbord.

  Peasil had been preying on these women.

  Crouching and ready to jump up at the sound of the woman returning, I squeezed the bag once more to see if anything had failed to drop out. I could feel something like a short length of rope through the two layers of the plastic bag and my latex gloves and reached in again to pull out a long gray braid, tied at both ends by twine. One end had bits of pale material stuck to it, bits that, when viewed under a microscope, would most likely be remnants of human scalp. I grimaced at the image of how that might have happened. When I looked closer, I could see that the three strands of the braid were slightly different from each other. One was near white, one a more silvery gray, and the other salt and pepper.

  The braid had been plaited after death, with the hair from at least three different women. I placed it with respect on top of the clothing. The gesture felt like leaving Max a note that said, “Look for the bodies.”

  I looked at my watch. I hadn’t dared ask Max when he was coming up this way. He could be right behind me. I stuffed everything back into the bag and replaced it under the pool float for the crime scene techs to find. Once Max discovered the clothing, the artifacts, and the hair that had been ripped from victims’ heads, his focus would turn away from me and toward investigating Peasil not a
s a victim but as a perpetrator.

  As I was turning to go, I happened to see a bit of black shine from under an edge of the pool float. Thinking it was the garbage bag, I touched it with my finger to tuck it out of sight and found a cell phone instead. I pulled it out and felt my heart start to bump as I opened it. Torn between whether to pocket it in order to check later for phone numbers or leave it here for Max to discover. A sound behind me made me jump, hold my hands close to hide the fact I was wearing latex gloves.

  “Finished in here?” I heard the woman say.

  Shit. “Almost.”

  She must have noticed that I was crouching in a corner, asked, “You being sick?”

  “I’m fine. I just dropped my cell phone. Give me a few more minutes.”

  I listened for the sound of her stepping out the door and screen creaking shut, and hoped she hadn’t noticed my paper booties. I clicked on the photo album.

  I saw the victims. Bodies. Close-ups of arms, legs, bones pushing up the flesh like tent pins. And faces. The faces, though unmarred, were worse. Mostly when I see victims they’re dead. It’s better that way. These women, not yet dead, were looking at me. You didn’t need to see what he’d done to their bodies; you only needed to see their eyes.

  There were several dozen photographs that I clicked through at speed before I found several more of me, likely sent to Peasil’s phone from someone else.

  I couldn’t leave the phone here. Even if I deleted the images of me they’d still be there for some techie to discover. I put the phone in my tote bag. Another crime, taking evidence from a crime scene, added to my running tab.

  I left without speaking to the old woman again, cutting across the back of another’s property to my car parked on the street behind. I had left behind enough evidence so Max could discover on his own that Gerald Peasil was the scumbag I knew him to be.