Rage Against the Dying Read online

  He didn’t ask why I was just bringing this up only now but kept his focus on the mundane, “You didn’t answer why you’re out here.”

  “I came by to keep an eye on him. We’re breaking up.”

  “I’m sorry. He told me you took off suddenly yesterday but I didn’t know it was permanent. Why did you leave?”

  “Why are you here?”

  “You didn’t return my call. I pulled up and saw you sitting out here watching the house, so I was watching you, wondering how long you’d stay. Except for when you got out of the car just then you’ve been here a long time.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  “Gerald Peasil.”

  I had some sense left even after my shock. “Who?”

  Max gave his head an impatient jerk. “Don’t pretend you don’t know who I’m talking about. I’m still waiting for the DNA analysis, but in the meantime I ran the prints we retrieved against your own, the ones you have on file with the Bureau.”

  “And?”

  “You didn’t match any of them.”

  “Of course not.” I cracked open my last bottle of water, buying time. “Want some?”

  He took a swig and put it in the cup holder between us. It reminded me of a lion and a gazelle at the watering hole. “So we went up to where he’d been staying. Found evidence of sexual violence, certainly rape, probably murder. At least three. They’re sending cadaver dogs up there on the chance he hid the bodies in the vicinity, in the mine-tailings ponds or somewhere. We found clothes so the dogs have a lot to go on.”

  “Is that good news?”

  “That the guy appears to be a serial killer or that he’s dead?”

  “You tell me,” I said.

  “No, you tell me. I still can’t think of more than one reason why you didn’t report it.”

  I took a drink from the bottle. We both had dry mouth from the tension of the conversation, and pretended it was simple thirst. “I told you, Max. I was going to call you; I would have called you; I just got scared.” I knew what was coming next. I wondered what I would say.

  “Scared, you. Did you kill him, Brigid?”

  There it was.

  “Not me.”

  “Let’s say you did.”

  “Let’s just say.”

  “How would—”

  “Ah, the classic interrogation question. You really think I’m going to do a hypothetical?”

  “It was worth a try.”

  It was a night for honesty all around. “You ever work a sexual homicide case, Max?”

  “Yes.”

  “Accidental, quick, or truly brutal?”

  “You know the answer to that. Somebody gets too rough, somebody dies. Somebody suffocates getting themself off.”

  I nodded in the dark. “But never serial sexual homicide with mutilation. Most people go through their whole career without seeing that. Those images you carry for the rest of your life.”

  “Oh, here we go. The great Brigid Quinn has seen it all. And I’m just a poor country sheriff’s deputy from Bumfuckaz where nothing ever happens except maybe cattle ruslin’. Give me a break.”

  “Well, I can tell you women’s breasts look a lot more attractive when they’re still attached to the body.”

  Max’s body twisted. “Jesus Christ, Brigid, do you joke about everything?”

  “Was that a joke? I’m sorry, sometimes I can’t tell the difference anymore.” I took another swig of water, and offered him the bottle, which he didn’t bother to acknowledge this time. “So now you’ve got Gerald Peasil,” I said. “A real serial killer … you say.”

  “And what a coincidence in this small town where there were only thirty-five homicides all last year that we have both Gerald Peasil and Floyd Lynch within weeks of each other, huh?”

  “I guess that’s a pretty big coincidence.”

  “You might think that. Only because it’s a small town where there were only thirty-five homicides last year, I started thinking about it. I got to thinking about all these dots we have.” Max leaned forward and started making dots in a row with his weiner finger on the dashboard as he listed each one. “There’s you not reporting the van in the wash, Gerald Peasil being a serial killer, Floyd Lynch being a serial killer. Then I got to thinking about this hair we found in Peasil’s apartment. It looked like hair from three different women, but all shades of gray, white, mixed, braided together. See, that’s another dot. I got to thinking about the color, awful lot of gray hair going around, you know, that maybe there’s no coincidence about Peasil attacking older women and you being an older woman and about two serial killers operating in the same area. And you being somehow connected to them both.” He drew an imaginary line connecting the imaginary dots. “Then I got to thinking about how the ME found that Peasil’s artery had been slashed and how you had that stick with a blade on the end. Carlo said you lost it.”

  “It broke.”

  “What did you do with it?”

  “I threw it away.” I paused. Max didn’t say anything. “In the garbage,” I added.

  I turned to see the moonlight shining off Max’s eyes. When someone has a temper, like my father for instance, you get used to the slamming and the shouting. It’s the calm and controlled people who unnerve you.

  Max didn’t avert his gaze. I could tell he was looking at what he was convinced was a rogue agent and it was useless to try to change his mind just now. He said, “Of course, right now I just got lots of dots. But I know your connection to Lynch, the Route 66 case. Next is finding out your connection to Peasil. Maybe it’s not through Lynch. I’m beginning to think maybe a chance encounter, you were trying to disable him, and things went out of control. You didn’t mean to jab his artery. We don’t have to call it murder, Brigid. We could call it self-defense.”

  While trying to act like he had my best interests at heart, Max was still fishing. That told me, for all that Carlo had professed to no longer know me, to no longer love me, he hadn’t yet told Max about finding the bloody clothes in the washing machine. If he had, Max would have taken me downtown. I didn’t even care anymore about being arrested, except I knew that once that happened Coleman would almost certainly be lost. And that reminded me I was wasting precious time. I needed to get out of this conversation.

  “You could call it self-defense? You and I both know you have no power to cut a deal on this, Max. If it happened like you’re suggesting, the DA would probably go more for involuntary manslaughter. And that’s if the defendant was lucky. Hard to argue that a trained agent with a shady past punctured an artery by accident. Especially with a subsequent cover-up. No, I bet that DA would go for at least murder two. But I didn’t do it, Max.” I tried to keep my voice steady, soft, noncombative. I needed to not push him over the edge, just out of my car. “If you took me in now, the most you’d get is hours of typing up a very long and complicated report. You don’t have any witnesses or forensic evidence. You don’t even have the murder weapon.”

  Max leaned close enough toward me that I could feel wet breath and smell the Whopper he had for dinner. I took it without flinching but without fighting back either. With the same calm tone he’d use for pointing out a cloud in the sky, “Carlo is good people. That’s why I want to be very careful before I do something that will ruin his life.”

  Forty-three

  Max wouldn’t get out of the car until I told him where I was staying. So I told him I was staying at the Sheraton on Speedway, room 174.

  Then I drove to the hotel, got my stuff, and left without checking out.

  As I loaded my garbage bag of belongings into the trunk I remembered the bloody clothes in the storage facility. Once Max turned this into a full-blown investigation, he would routinely track my credit card bills and find the monthly charge for the storage. I would need to take the clothes into the desert with some gasoline and a match pretty soon.

  In the meantime, Coleman’s house was the perfect hiding place for me. It had far more amenities than the
hotel. It had food. No one would go there because no one gave a damn about her. And if by some chance she made her way home I’d be the first to know.

  She also had a computer. I keyed in the word Password first, of course, and when that didn’t work, combinations of her first and last name. When that didn’t work, I tried to remember her pet’s name. Eighty percent of people use their pet’s name on their home computer, and she had told me hers in the bar. Then I remembered a miniature schnauzer. Duncan.

  That didn’t work either. I went through her desk again and this time found a list taped to the inside of a drawer. It had about two dozen different accounts, each with a different password made up of what appeared to be random numbers. Coleman and her experience in the fraud division, investigating identify theft. I should have figured.

  At the top was the password for booting her computer, 4597358. While I waited for the computer to fire up I took a look at the things on her desk and in the drawers that I had passed over when searching for her address book. There was a sheet of return-address labels courtesy of Alzheimer’s Research Fund. A box of androgynous note cards, the geometric design ambiguous enough to serve as both congratulations and condolence. A coaster from her trip to Cancun. That must have been a big deal, that trip.

  I went to her e-mail account next to see what messages had appeared in the last three days and whether any had been opened. Among the ads from Ann Taylor Loft and the daily news bulletin from the Bureau, I found two personal messages in her sent folder. The first was the one she had written to me early in the morning, BTW you were right! Sort of and one later in the afternoon telling Maisie she was spending time with her sick mom. If she wasn’t the one who sent that second message, I wondered what they did to her to get the password and send the message through her account.

  Incoming mail showed one other personal message, the one from me, giving her a bit of “what for,” and asking where the hell she was.

  My message had been opened and read.

  It would have been read by whoever was using her account to send messages to her office.

  If I was still with the Bureau and anyone trusted me it would be easy to find out the IP address of whoever sent the message to Maisie and read the one from me.

  I played out the various possible scenarios. Maybe whoever took Coleman disabled her and took the time to use her computer. Or he took her to another location where it was safer and accessed her account there from his own computer. Without a good techie I couldn’t know.

  Frustrated, I turned back to the desk and spotted the neat stack of three black binders I had passed over earlier that day because they weren’t what I was looking for. I hauled the one on top to the level of the desk. The three binders constituted the entire record of the Lynch case, not the scaled-down single-binder copy she had given me, but the complete original, including Lynch’s journals and all the crime scene photographs. Coleman hadn’t told me she had the whole thing, and she was in serious breach of protocol taking it out of the office.

  But if she was in the kind of trouble I thought she was in, protocol was the least of her concerns. What did Coleman and I know that was such a threat? I had to find out and confront Lynch. Then maybe he would give me something, anything, that would help lead me to her.

  The pad on which I’d made all the notes was still on my desk at home. But I had also sent them to Coleman as an e-mail, so I retrieved that message from her deleted file. I looked at the notes that seemed from a lifetime ago, when I was still a different person. I compared it to the reports in the original books, the crime scene processing, the lists of evidence, the personal effects. Only this time I had the photographs, too. Lots of photographs of victims, both on the scene and on the autopsy table, including the shots taken at the abandoned car site.

  If the case was an open one, if Lynch hadn’t made his deal so quickly, and if Morrison hadn’t been so hot to get the credit for what seemed to be an eight-time serial killer, there would have been more than just three binders; there would have been boxes.

  Still, so much here, I grabbed at the second binder and flipped through the pages, reading summaries of Lynch’s testimony. Not much on the woman Lynch had mummified other than his statement that she was a Mexican illegal. Like Manriquez had said, he had so many of those unidentified in a refrigerated truck in back of the medical examiner’s office, the numbers were overwhelming.

  Now the Route 66 victims: there were pages and pages on them, and Lynch had gotten all the details right, give or take a few memory lapses. Except for the one he called the lot lizard. The transcripts of his interviews didn’t reveal much about her or the night he killed her. I looked at the picture of what was left of her, photographed inside the car in a fetal position before they pulled her out and her head and leg fell off. I remembered Morrison at the courthouse had announced that all the American victims had been identified. But in the glow of his success, perhaps in the success of finally finding Jessica Robertson, he had forgotten about this one.

  “Who are you?” I asked her. “And why hasn’t anyone cared about you?”

  Maybe that was the right question, that this one victim maybe could help me, the only victim who had not been identified. Maybe the lot lizard was in the database Sig told me about, and I was asking the right question when I asked her who she was.

  I looked at my watch. Three hours later on the East Coast at this time of year because Arizona doesn’t do daylight saving time. Two thirty A.M. in DC. I called Sig. He picked up on the second ring and didn’t sound sleepy. It felt like old times.

  “Brigid. I got a question,” I said.

  “Hello, Stinger. How are you feeling?”

  He really wanted to know, but I was still smarting from his insinuation that I was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and refused to answer. “What’s that site you told me about for searching missing persons?”

  “I was going to call you tomorrow. I had Lynch’s interrogation video checked against the tapes from Jessica’s wire, to do a voice comparison, especially the part where both Lynch and the abductor raised the pitch of their voices to sound like women.”

  “And?”

  “Inconclusive, I’m afraid.”

  “Thanks. The site?”

  “NamUs. It was started about two years ago after you left the Bureau. One database compiles all known information about missing persons and matches it up to another database on unidentifieds. People can find out if a person found dead or alive matches a person they’re looking for. And they can provide information as well.”

  “What’s the URL?”

  “www.findthemissing.org. Is it Agent Coleman you’re still looking for? Because I don’t—”

  “No. You say it catalogs unidentified remains, too?”

  “Yes. I don’t know if the person you need is there, but it’s been growing exponentially, and anyone can access it. No special clearance needed. Stinger.”

  “What?”

  “You’re angry.”

  “You think?” I hung up. I wasn’t sure if NamUs could help me. I wasn’t even sure what “growing exponentially” means precisely, other than a shitload of information.

  Conscious that this could be just another dead end in less and less time, I keyed in the address.

  Once there, I entered what I knew about the lot lizard, which was precious little. Female. Caucasian (I guessed she wasn’t one of the illegals). Under twenty, change to under thirty to be on the safe side. Date range, the twelve months of the year prior to the first murder we knew about. Missing from … let’s try all of Arizona.

  A dozen different names came up, most with photographs. There was no time to follow up on all these women. I clicked back to the beginning to see what other options there were. Distinguishing marks. Could those still be seen on the mummified flesh? Had the ME even bothered to autopsy her body, or had he just bagged her and put her in the morgue for the time being?

  To see if the autopsy report was there, I grabbed the
third binder and opened the cover. Just inside was a cream-colored booklet about six inches by nine inches, bound at the smaller side, smudged with grease and soil, its corners dog-eared by repeated use. Part of the original material or something extra? I opened the book. Floyd Lynch’s name written on the first page, followed by pages and pages of information. Trucker logs, kept just in case he was audited.

  The box we had taken from the Lynch trailer was still resting on the floor beside the desk. I flipped open the cardboard top and saw more of the same logs. They must have been at the bottom of the box. Coleman had rearranged them, looked through them, selected one. I remembered her text message to me, about meeting at the jail and having found something she was excited about.

  The log she had pulled out was for 2004. Just seeing the year started my pulse to throbbing. The meticulous records showed everything, when the truck was weighed, when Lynch switched cargo, even the amount of time he spent eating and sleeping. Most important, it showed routes and the dates he traveled them. I flipped through the log that followed his route, day by day, from the start of the year to August, finding such detail it would have taken a genius to create so elaborate an alibi. I was convinced I was reading the truth.

  I finally got to the date I was looking for. On August 1, 2004, the night Jessica Robertson was killed somewhere between Tucumcari and Albuquerque, Floyd Lynch was nowhere near Route 66/Highway 40. He was in Texas at a Flying J on Route 10 near El Paso, five hundred miles to the south and west of the crime scene. Definitive proof that Floyd Lynch did not kill Jessica Robertson, was not the Route 66 killer.

  Forty-four

  During those years we hunted for the Route 66 killer, we always knew approximately where the victims would be nabbed, within several hundred miles of Route 66, or on some nearby cross-highway. And we knew approximately when they would be taken, sometime from the beginning of June to the end of August. Conceivably you could set up a perimeter and watch the whole area during that time, but that was absurd. Son of Sam couldn’t be captured within the vastly smaller area in which he operated. Instead, we tried to pinpoint different stretches of the road where we figured the killer would be passing through. We posted warnings not to hitchhike at all the local stops, including public rest areas. Our boy seemed to enjoy the challenge.