Rage Against the Dying Page 26

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 wo
uld 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.

  Forty-eight

  Again taking side streets and keeping an eye out for cops along the way, I pulled into a parking lot adjacent to the bar. Rather than risk being spotted in the car, I took my 1911 and a bottle of water and sat on a shaded bench at the end of the strip mall, pretending to ponder a real estate circular, to keep an eye on the entrance to the bar.

  As I watched, customers came and went, most of them cops. Emery wouldn’t do anything to Coleman while there were cops around. Neither could I. I wished I could enlist their help, but by this time there might be a warrant out for my arrest and they would hardly help me search the place. So I waited.

  By the time the small parking area in front of the bar indicated there were no more customers inside it was early evening, shortly after the dinner hour, which is about five P.M. in Tucson. There was one remaining car out front. It wasn’t the same car I had seen the day I came to fetch mine and Emery and Cheri had driven up. This was a nondescript black Subaru. Probably a rental. He was on the move.

  I got up from the bench and walked up to the car. Rapped on the trunk once, hard. There was no answering rap. If Coleman was in there, she was dead. Game over. I told myself she wasn’t in there.

  I stepped around the front of the car with my back against the wall of the building. The civilian traffic went on its way in the fading light of the summer evening, bent on its normal pursuits, without any idea of what was happening in this place.

  Rather than charge into an unknown, I first made my way around the perimeter of the building, quickly so I could enter before another customer walked in, a cop who would foil my search or a civilian who could be collateral damage if things got ugly. The windows of the place were all placed high, up by the roof, so there was no seeing in or out. A single door at the back must lead to the kitchen. When I tried it, quietly, I found it locked. Across a small patio a storage shed that appeared to belong to the bar was locked as well. I rapped lightly on that, too, but heard no moan or responding knock from within.

  With more urgency now, I made my way around the other side of the building and had no choice but to come in through the front door. I held my 1911 poised as with the other hand I pushed open the thick wooden door of the bar, glad that Emery hadn’t yet locked it. The doorjamb felt good against my back as I peered into the interior lit only by the lights over the bar. I locked the door behind me and flicked off the neon OPEN sign.

  If a law enforcement officer is seasoned enough, has witnessed enough violence, he can smell a crime scene. It’s not just the coppery smell of blood you read about, or the more obvious rotten-meat odor of decomposition. There are aromatic subtleties. Most homicide investigators will be able to say the same, that a homicide scene carries its own distinctive scent, the lingering aroma, something like a mix of asparagus urine and olive oil, the smell of the person knowing they’re about to die. They say it’s the smell of terror.

  No one coming into a crowded, noisy place, not even if they were a cop, would notice it. I did because I was there alone, in the dim light, with no sounds to distract me. Behind Emery’s signature scent of cherry-bourbon pipe tobacco, behind old fried onions, behind a thousand bodies, there was the smell of stale blood, too. And bowel. Somewhere there was also an odor of gasoline. Not your typical bar smells.

  There were three places that smell might be coming from: behind the bar, in the kitchen to the back, or in the office off to the right. I dropped down for a second to scan the floor underneath the tables, found nothing, and came back up to find some comfort again in the feel of the wall against my back. I was about to take a chance moving to my first target behind the bar when I heard whistling from the office area. Emery emerged looking genuinely startled to see me standing in the shadows with my weapon pointing at him.

  “Hello, Emery,” I said.

  Once he’d gotten over the initial surprise of seeing me standing in the dim light of the restaurant area with a drawn weapon, he didn’t seem surprised at all, and that was what made me certain. The sight of my weapon must have told him I knew everything. He nodded, apparently intending to work with that.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” he said. The light over the bar illuminated his face so I could see that one of his front teeth was missing.

  Without speaking, I moved a little closer, stumbling once with the stress and fatigue of recent days. My brain was sending my body instructions to recharge the muscles because my brain didn’t give a shit how out of shape I was.

  When he saw me fumble, Emery’s eyes gleamed in the light from the bar. He was taking my measure, whether I was really dangerous. I had my doubts as well. “Don’t go behind the bar,” I said. “Stay where you are, hands in view.”

  He lifted a calming hand and pushed himself an arm’s length from the far end of the bar so that he stood unguarded, midway between the bar and the door of his office.

  “Is Coleman alive?” I asked. I wanted to keep my eyes on him, but for a second I glanced at the jar of pickled pigs’ feet at the end of the counter.

  He noticed my shifting glance. “She’s right in here,” he said, and on the last word he ducked out of sight to his left, through the door of his office.

  “Shit,” I muttered for having lost my advantage, but I still had the gun. There was no sound from inside the office, but my quick search had told me there was no exit from it either. I had to move fast and hope he had left his shotgun behind the bar. Knowing the flimsy paneling between us was no cover at all, I crouched as low as I could and moved quietly to the door of the office.

  Standing just to the side of the entrance thinking, It’s so simple—stay alive, find Coleman. Spotting the far left of the office: no one there. Trying to slow my heart down with my breathing. Whipping around to the other side of the door, still no shots fired, scanning the other side of the room—desk, chair.

  My glance caught Coleman slumped in the chair, lots of blood.

  Anger taking control, I started to charge into the room to kill or be killed, and then I heard a moan. I turned, tunnel vision kicking in, and almost fired. Then I saw another Coleman.

  All the muscles in my body strained against the absolute imperative to press the trigger, the way they do to save yourself when you’re falling. At the same time my brain took a split second to process the second Coleman—which came at me like a puppet tossed across the room. Her body hit me hard across the legs without giving me time to brace myself. We both went down. The gun slipped out of my hand, and I watched with despair as a man’s hand picked it up. You don’t ever want to lose your gun.

  I hoped Max had put out that APB on me and that they were finding me, closing in. I could use a good cavalry charge about now.

  The man I knew now as a killer trained the gun on me. “Roll her over,” he said.

  Coleman had a piece of clear packing tape across her mouth, which mashed her lips in a grotesque way. I sat up and started to
help Coleman do the same, but she emitted a muffled roar from deep in her throat. She seemed out of it either from pain or drugs.

  I removed the tape as gently as I could and asked her, “Where are you hurt?”

  She whimpered and her hands moved between her knees, which she had drawn up to her chest in a fetal position. Then she passed out again. I noticed a little blood on the floor.

  “You cut her tendon,” I said.

  “Both of them,” he said, staying a safe enough distance away from me. Even with the benefit of a weapon, he was taking precautions.

  But Coleman was alive. And the one thing I would do is save her. Gently, with as little pain to her damaged legs as possible, I helped her out of the line of fire, to the far side of the room where she could rest against a battered gray metal storage cabinet. Her eyes silently pleaded with me, and I wanted to tell her my best lie ever, that there was nothing to worry about. I wanted to tell her whatever she’d believe, but I didn’t think that was much. Then still heedless of the gun in Emery’s hand, I turned my attention to the body I had first thought was Coleman.

  I saw now that it had been one of those disconnects when you’re imagining one thing so hard that’s what you see. I expected to see Coleman’s body there, and that’s what I saw. But the body was that of Cheri Maple, and she was just as dead as the smell that led me to her. She was sprawled in an old chair next to the desk, facing me. From the faded look of her pupils and the impossible tilt of her head, I could tell she was gone even if she hadn’t taken a frontal shotgun blast.

  “You need to be dead, man,” I whispered aloud. “You really need to be dead.”

  Emery didn’t respond as he moved behind me and patted my back for the presence of another weapon. He gestured with his free hand to another chair in front of the desk. The desk was very tidy, nothing but an old-fashioned landline, a stapler, a few menus, a humidor with pipe holder, and a pencil cup crammed with everything but pencils.

  Emery took the chair behind the desk for himself and said, “Sit.”