Rage Against the Dying Read online

“No.”

  I nodded, making a mental note to get more celery before I closed the refrigerator door. “Did he confess to killing her?”

  “Not at first. He said he had found the body just off the side of the road, that it had been dressed in shabby clothing, the shoes already stolen, an illegal alien who hadn’t made it across the desert. He said he was just using it.”

  “Using it. Nasty.” None of this explained why Max took this long to tell me, let alone why he was telling me at all. This should have been maybe a phone call in a bored moment, not a special visit. A nerve sparked on the side of my neck. I handed one of the Cokes to Max and popped open my own, but still couldn’t bring myself to sit down. “So far this isn’t a serial killer case, Max. You’ve got one victim and he denies killing her.” I didn’t have to tell Max that would only amount to a class 4 felony, desecration of a corpse. A little jail time. “Not to be all self-absorbed, Max, but what the hell does this have to do with me?” I sipped from the can.

  “When the techs went over the truck they found a compartment with scrapbooks and journals.” Here Max measured out his words more carefully than he had before, if that was possible. “And postcards.”

  Some soda splashed on Jane’s rug when my hand jerked. “Were they addressed?” I asked.

  He shook his head. I shrugged. “Lots of people buy postcards. Even truckers.”

  He took a deep breath and said, “The journals were all about the Route 66 murders.”

  Route 66, the biggest sexual homicide case in my career, and the case I had failed to close. The case where I lost a young agent who became the killer’s last-known victim. She was the only victim who was never found. I didn’t want to ask the obvious question, the one I’d wanted an answer to for seven years. So instead I said, “A groupie. This, this what’s his name?”

  “Floyd Lynch.”

  “He could be a groupie.” Even serial killers have fans. It’s celebrity reality at its most debased.

  “The journals really seemed to implicate him. He knew a lot, names of the victims.”

  “That was in the news.”

  “The writing was all, ‘I slashed her Achilles tendon so she couldn’t run, I raped her, I strangled her slowly and felt the bone in her throat give way’—”

  “That was all in the news, too. He could have been fantasizing, making it his own.”

  “—‘I sliced off her right ear.’”

  That blasted the story I was making up. No one but law enforcement knew what the killer’s trophy had been. No one had ever found any of the ears. “We withheld that,” I admitted.

  “That’s what they tell me.” Increasingly nervous, Max shifted on the couch and cleared his throat. His voice went soft and gentle to calm me. I hate it when people do that. It’s never a good sign. “Then, Brigid, when the techs told George Manriquez, the ME—”

  “I know the medical examiner.”

  “—about the journals he got the facts of the case and put them together with his examination of the body found in the truck. Despite the mummification he had detected a crushed hyoid bone, slashed Achilles tendon, missing right ear. It was all there, the whole MO.”

  “The mummy on the truck,” I said.

  Max nodded. “Just like the Route 66 victims.”

  Unable to come up with any other explanation, I finally asked the question, my heart pounding in anticipation of the answer. “Is it her? Is the mummy on the truck her, Max?”

  His answer was both relief and disappointment. “No. It’s not Jessica Robertson’s body. At least according to Lynch.”

  “Oh,” I breathed, a very small, empty nothing of an oh. So close to finding her after all this time, and yet she wasn’t there. I fumbled my way to the recliner that faced the couch, and folded into it when my knees gave way.

  And then he added more hurriedly than before, “But he says he can take us to her.”

  Even with this information I didn’t trust what I was hearing. “Just like that, he confessed?”

  “They had him boxed in and offered life.”

  “The fucker made a deal.” The violin string I hadn’t felt in a long time vibrated in my chest, and I felt my ire rise. “Where is she?” I was ready to grab my bag.

  “Allegedly, in an abandoned car. Off the old back road to Mount Lemmon.”

  “Has anyone informed her father yet?”

  Who knows how they all thought I’d react? His mission accomplished and observing my failure to freak, Max relaxed his spine and let himself get sucked a little into the overstuffed couch. “Don’t worry. We’re waiting for verification before we do that, but it was time to let you know. Your involvement in the case, I mean. I spoke with the special agent on the case, you know Laura Coleman?”

  “I met her while I was doing time in the Tucson office. I thought she worked fraud.”

  “She switched to homicide after you left. She thought we should tell you and bring David Weiss in.”

  “David Weiss knows already?”

  My tone must have gotten its edge back then, and Max struggled to extract himself from the back cushions, sit up a little straighter, and return to his soothing voice. “Yes. Since he was the profiler on the case he’s flying in tonight to do a competency test so we can make sure we’ve got all the ends tied up for life without parole.”

  “I want to come to the dump site,” I said.

  But before Max could respond, I heard the garage door go up and the Pugs both whisked off the couch to greet their master. Carlo’s deep voice of all things normal preceded him into the kitchen area. “Honey, the Tanqueray was ten dollars more than at Sam’s Club so I just got a few other things, Breath Busters for the dogs and a salami.” He stopped at the sight of Max and me staring back at him as if we’d been caught trying to hide something, which in a way we were.

  “Walgreens sells salamis?” I asked.

  “Hello, Max,” Carlo said.

  “Hey, Carlo.”

  “Is something wrong?” Carlo asked.

  Max opened his mouth to speak but I got there first, shifted to normal for Carlo’s sake. It was a knee-jerk reaction.

  “Everything’s fine, honey. Max was just saying he needs a poker and philosophy session.”

  Three

  The death toll on the day I talked to Max was officially six, if you didn’t count the new mummy found on the truck. There were five murders before Jessica, all girls from the ages of eighteen to twenty-three, their naked bodies left in degrading positions along or off State Road 40, what used to be called Route 66. A lot of travelers wanted to get their kicks hitchhiking the famous route from Chicago to LA, kind of like the Appalachian Trail, only paved. The girls who were killed over the course of five years never won their bragging rights.

  The killer operated between Amarillo, Texas, and Flagstaff, Arizona, and only killed one girl every summer. It was how he spent his summer vacation.

  You could tell the same guy murdered all five girls because his MO was very distinctive. Slash their Achilles tendon to prevent their escape, rape them (condom, no DNA), strangle them slowly, and remove their right ear postmortem, as a souvenir that would help him relive the event later. Then dump the body on a different road on a different night for us to find, sometimes a few miles from the supposed pickup spot, sometimes as much as a hundred miles away. We kept some of this from the media so we’d know a copycat or a false confession, someone who wanted to atone for another sin or get the fame without the wet work. There had been a few of those, but while they knew some of the details, they didn’t know all. That was why I asked Max all the questions about Lynch. No one had ever before told us about the ears.

  The car the killer used each time was always rented under a different name and abandoned somewhere distant from the body. When the car was found you could tell it was the primary crime scene from the blood on the floor of the passenger seat, where he slashed the victim’s tendon, and in the backseat, where he raped her and sliced off her ear.

  I
t became an obsession with me, these killings, as most serial cases do. After the second murder I had a hard time thinking about anything else all year, and as each summer approached I would look forward to the next hunt with an equal mixture of fear that another victim would be claimed and hope that the killer would be caught.

  You can talk all you want about professional detachment. But you never really know obsession until it’s one of your own that gets taken. You never really experience death until it’s someone you know.

  On top of the bad back that put me out of commission for the undercover game, I was now too old to make a convincing hitchhiker. But Jessica, fresh out of the academy, small like me, could pass for a fourteen-year-old runaway. I trained her myself. Weiss and I trained her. Between us she learned both how to tell a scumbag and defend herself against one. That summer I convinced myself she was ready to play with the bad dogs. Or was she? Did I just want to catch that guy too much?

  * * *

  Absurdly, the next morning I found myself putting on lipstick.

  I had told Carlo I was just going along for a ride at Max’s invitation. So when three very official vehicles stopped in front of the house to pick me up at six thirty, Carlo looked understandably speculative. I picked up my hiking stick and regulation southwestern tote bag, big enough to smuggle a Mexican but more often used to carry a couple bottles of water, gave Carlo a public peck, and headed down the drive to meet them.

  A tallish gal in the dark standard-issue FBI suit despite the already-scorching heat got out of the passenger side of the middle car like a praying mantis unfolding, introduced herself with a firm handshake and the kind of intense gaze that makes you suspect there’s something you still don’t know.

  “I’m the case agent, Laura Coleman,” she said. “I’m so pleased to see you again, Agent Quinn.” It was nice that she called me Agent Quinn even though I’d been decommissioned. As an additional gesture of respect or seeing I had the stick for going over the rough terrain, she opened the back door for me. Maybe because I’d chosen cargo khakis and a short-sleeved cotton blouse for the outing and because the temperature was already hovering in the nineties, she relented and took off her jacket before getting back in.

  The vehicle behind us was a crime scene van. The vehicle ahead of ours carried Floyd Lynch. I know I shouldn’t have, but before I got into the jeep I walked up to the vehicle in front where a U.S. marshal sat in the driver’s seat. The passenger seat window came down, a hand came out.

  “Royal Hughes, the public defender,” he said.

  “I guessed. Brigid Quinn.”

  Hughes flashed satisfied teeth in a metrosexual smile, toned down some for the occasion. “I know,” he said.

  What a cutie.

  In the back, behind a security screen, cuffed and wearing his orange jail garb, was Floyd Lynch. Slim but saggy body, curly brown hair, a ski nose, and little Bolshevik glasses. Late thirties, but hard-lived. More like an accountant than a serial killer, but that’s what they always say, don’t they? Except for those reptilian, affectless eyes that no amount of boyish charm can disguise if you know what to look for. He looked at me looking at him through the window as if he were a snake in a zoo, as curious about me as I about him. Then his mouth made a little self-effacing grimace and his head bobbed at me before he looked away. I was tempted to tap on the glass but sensed the two men in the front seat getting a little edgy at my nearness so I refrained.

  At that point I knew he had killed seven women altogether, including the one found in his truck. He had tortured and raped them and gazed into their eyes, letting them hope for life while he strangled them slowly, and now he was going to show us the last crime scene. Because of that small act, his taking us to the body dump site, there would be no fair retribution for all the pain he had caused the victims and those who loved them. Jessica Robertson was going to be used as his ticket out of the death penalty. The life she lost, this scumbag gained in trade; she would have hated that, and so did I.

  I wanted Floyd Lynch dead six times, and slow, and painful, but this trip was going to ensure the son of a bitch got a life sentence instead, and you could see he thought that was a fine deal. I imagined myself putting my pistol up to the window and watching the glass embed itself into his face with the bullet. I imagine things a lot. The fantasy temporarily eased my impotent rage at the injustice of our legal system.

  Max stuck his head out of the driver’s side of the jeep, gestured at the open back door. “Come on, Brigid, the AC is getting out.”

  I got in and there in the backseat beside me was Sigmund (aka Dr. David Weiss). We looked at each other. I don’t know what he saw, but over the last five years since I’d left the Washington Bureau the man had gotten a little old. Beard shot with gray, and his ears could have used a trim. His chest had become his belly and he needed to give in to a larger shirt size. He represented the best and worst of my time in the Bureau, all my nightmares, and the closest thing to a friend.

  Emotions in a jumble over what we would see this day, I wanted to hug him till the juice ran. But the circumstances and present company didn’t call for it, so instead I buckled my seat belt while I said, cool and soft, “So nice to see you again, Sig.”

  His eyes twinkled from a million light-years away, in that way that always made me think he was an extraterrestrial who found us all damn charming. I could tell he understood what I was feeling, but he was careful to express no sympathy or affection, knowing it was the only thing I couldn’t take.

  “Hello, Stinger,” he said, and the mere use of our nicknames for each other made me look away and then lean toward the front seat.

  “No Three-Piece?” I asked Max.

  “No cameras,” Max replied.

  The Tucson Bureau Special Agent in Charge Roger Morrison was named Three-Piece after his persistence in wearing a vest with his suits well into the nineties, not having gotten the memo that they went out with shoulder pads. Max’s “no cameras” comment referred to the man’s well-known ability to smell celluloid and only show up whenever the news crew did.

  I was sitting behind Coleman, so I couldn’t see if she reacted to the jibes tossed back and forth about her boss. Max put the car in gear and our macabre little caravan headed toward the Samaniego Ridge of the Catalina Mountains.

  Four

  From where we live, it’s an hour-and-a-half drive up to the summit of Mount Lemmon if you go the nice paved route on the south side. Our destination on the old back road approaching from the north, with bumps connected by ruts, takes longer. As we headed up Route 79 to get around the Samaniego Ridge on the way there, Coleman was quiet. I didn’t get sullen vibes, just tense and brittle. Sigmund was quiet, too, but more comfortably so, looking out the window at the harsh beauty of the high desert. I named what I could, mesquite and prickly pear, barrel cactus crowned with hot-pink flowers as big as your fist, green-leafed ocotillo sporting red coach-whip blossoms, and white-capped saguaros. I didn’t know the names of all these things a year ago—Carlo got me an Arizona field guide and binoculars for my last birthday.

  I tried to make a little small talk with Max and Laura Coleman, not very successfully, then steered the conversation in the direction of the crime scene, which is where we all wanted to be anyway. “So have you ever seen this car Lynch is talking about? How did it get there?” I asked Max.

  Unlike most of us, Max is not a transplant. “It was kind of a rite of passage when I was in high school, to go up here at night. No one knew when or how it was abandoned. Seems it crashed off the side of the road and slid about thirty feet into the arroyo without rolling over. The driver was never found. We sat around it telling ghost stories about the driver coming to take his car back, drinking beer, smoking a little dope. That’s all I know.”

  “And nobody ever looked inside?” I asked.

  “Sure we did. Sat inside, too. But that was over twenty years ago. Kids stopped going, got more interested in computer games. Easy to imagine nobody looking in that car i
n the past fifteen years.”

  “Who was the owner of record?”

  “I can’t remember his name, not an Arizona man, and, like I said, they never found him alive or dead. It’s a local mystery.”

  That’s when the road got bumpy. Coleman tried to say something about Floyd Lynch but had to stop for fear of biting her tongue. I wished I’d peed once more before leaving the house.

  We were all pretty much silent as we bounced our way up the mountain, where the climate grew more temperate and offered pine trees instead of the drought-hardy vegetation in the valley.

  About two-thirds of the way to the summit, Coleman pointed to the car ahead and said Lynch was lifting up his cuffed hands, gesturing. Within another second or two we had all pulled into a line on the narrow shoulder of the right side of the road.

  The crime scene techs behind us were all efficiency, getting some small pieces of equipment and two body bags out of the van, along with slings to bring them up from the arroyo into which the rest of us looked as we waited. Lynch was explaining to Coleman the configuration of a saguaro with eight long arms jutting in all directions and a rocky outcropping that helped him locate the spot.

  Max introduced me and Sigmund to U.S. Marshal Axel Phillips, all boots and a big gun. Phillips responded politely but without offering to shake our hands. You could tell he kept his attention on Lynch, doing his job. When the techs came up to us with their equipment, I recognized an older one I had seen before on a case, Benny Cassell, and a younger one guided by Benny, introduced as Ray Something. I had a hard time focusing on anyone but Lynch, but I could tell Sigmund kept his eye on me.

  The way down into the arroyo was steep and I was glad I brought my stick, which enabled me to gently shrug off Max’s offer of a hand down when I slipped on a pebble. Lynch asked if the marshal would undo his cuffs but was refused, while Phillips angled his shotgun just a little more conveniently to kill his man if he had to while keeping a precarious balance. I hoped he had his safety on.

  Max went first, followed by Floyd Lynch, his elbows jutting out for balance, followed by Phillips. Those three chose the way down, followed by Benny and Ray, followed by me and Coleman, all in more or less single file. Sigmund brought up the rear as if he wanted to watch all of us at once. One by one we stopped at the bottom to find a car that must have gone off the road at least three decades ago. Phillips echoed Max, said he’d known about the car, everyone who grew up in the area and had traveled this way more than once had, but probably no one had been around to look inside for a long time.