Rage Against the Dying Read online

  “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 fuckin’ 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 fa
r 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.

  Forty-six

  You have to get your priorities straight. What they boiled down to at this point was Coleman’s survival weighed against my liberty. Top priority was finding Coleman. The way I saw it I only had one option to get Max to believe me and help me. The odds were against it, but I had to try.

  I drove to Sabino Canyon Park in the northeast part of the city. You can park your car and take a tram that goes about three miles in and up. It’s beautiful: canyon walls on both sides and actual running water. At this time of year, during the monsoons, the water flowed right over the tramway in places where the road crossed the stream. I paid my ten bucks, got on the tram, and rode it up to the ninth stop, the last. There weren’t a lot of other people on the tram, the day being hot as hell.

  I fished around in my tote for the cell phone—not mine, the one I had taken from Peasil’s place. I got off the tram and sat on a low wall that overlooked a canyon and a cliff beyond it.

  When Max picked up, I said, “This is an anonymous tip.”

  “I recognize your voice, Brigid.”

  “I know, I’m fresh out of clever. Is Floyd Lynch dead?”

  “Yes. I was called to the scene because I originally brought him in.”

  “He was murdered,” I said.

  “I know. The guard described his mother. I knew it was you.”

  “It wasn’t me, Max.”

  “I’ve got you on motive: revenge. Opportunity: you were in the room when he died. So what was the means?”

  “I didn’t kill him, Max. Tell Manriquez to have a tox test done on the contents of his IV bag. Some sort of opiate. He was poisoned by the Route 66 killer.”

  “So you’re saying the means was poison.”

  “Goddamn it, Max, listen to me. The real killer’s gotten desperate, I think. Somehow he found out that Coleman and I were investigating the possibility that Floyd Lynch had made a false confession. We’ve been getting too close.” I quickly described how I knew, the nurse going in with a full bag, coming out with one half-empty. How Lynch complained about a burning sensation in his hand where the needle went into the vein. How Lynch appeared to be under the influence of a heavy narcotic just before he stopped breathing. How it had to be something slow acting so the murderer could get well away from the hospital before anyone noticed. I wondered if Max had started to have my call traced yet.

  Max said, “No one reported seeing a nurse go into the room. Not even the guard.”

  “If they did, they’ll deny it. Covering their asses, Max. The guard’s green and scared of losing his job. But that’s not the important thing. Lynch confessed to me, Max. A real confession this time. He didn’t commit the Route 66 murders but he was in contact with the guy who did them. And the more time goes by, the more I’m convinced the real killer has Agent Laura Coleman.”

  “And I should believe you why?”

  I sucked in a deep breath, knowing I was playing my last card. “Because I’m telling you I killed Gerald Peasil.”

  He was silent. I knew I had very little time until the trace pinpointed my location. He said, “Why?”

  “You were right. He attacked me in the wash. I let him take me into his van so I could find out how many women he might have raped and killed. The kind of thing it would take you days of interrogation to find out, if ever. We fought, and I accidentally killed him. Then I discovered he wasn’t just a serial killer. He was specifically sent to assassinate me.”

  “And why are you telling me this now?”

  “You’re not paying attention. It’s Coleman. Too many hours have gone by since anyone has seen Coleman. I don’t know how else to convince you of how serious this is except to tell you the truth about Peasil.”

  “You’ll tell us what you know. We’ll start a search.”

  “Right. First you’ll have to explain everything to your boss and spend about ten hours interrogating me and if my instincts are right we don’t have time for that. Start the search now. I’ll work it from my end. And I’ll turn myself in after she’s found.”

  Silence. “We’re at kind of a standoff, aren’t we, Brigid? I have no reason to propose we start a search for Laura Coleman, just your say-so. You don’t come in, and I have no choice but to kick this upstairs. I can’t keep it to myself any longer.” He didn’t sound triumphant, just sad.

  “I’m so sorry, Max. I’m sorry to put you in this position.”

  “Right.”

  “Really. Listen, if you won’t help find Coleman, do me the favor of just holding off the dogs until tomorrow morning. I promise you I won’t run. Can you believe that?”

  “No. I can’t.”

  I had hoped this would work, but that’s why I already had a plan B just in case. So I didn’t spend any more time trying to convince him. “Okay. I give up. I’m coming in.”

  The next tram was coming. Before Max had time to further voice his disbelief, I disconnected and leaned the cell phone against the back of the low wall where it would be unnoticed by hikers but found by Max. I knew Max wouldn’t trust me; he’d trace the phone instead and follow me here rather than wait for me to come to him.

  Once I knew he had the phone, I’d tell him to look for the deleted numbers. If something happened to me, maybe he would. But I wasn’t sure what he would do immediately. Would he have the phone traced on the QT? Or would he report our conversation up the line? Would they issue an APB on me? Probably. Possibly. Just to give me the eighteen hours or so that I asked for was playing fast and loose with procedure. With Max I couldn’t tell anymore what he’d do.

  But I had enough time to get back to Coleman’s place so I could find out if there was an autopsy report on the lot lizard that would narrow my search on NamUs. I wanted to see where it took me.

  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 t
he 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.