Rage Against the Dying Page 7

  “I saw you two talking yesterday. I just wondered if he had an opinion.”

  I felt like the lights went up. I knew now that she hadn’t gone around Morrison because she just forgot procedure. I knew that with Weiss having been dismissed I was the only one she could turn to, and I wondered why. I dipped my upper lip in my drink to indicate my control while I thought about how to respond. I didn’t tell her Sigmund refused to say much at all. “I don’t know, there were a few surprises. For starters, we would have expected a stronger guy who could lift a hundred pounds deadweight overhead into his cab. I always pictured Route 66 being smarter, too, but that’s all conjecture of course. Why are you asking me now?”

  Coleman took a deep breath. Her body clenched as if she was expecting me to reach over and wallop her. She reached into her satchel and pulled out a sizable report that she placed in front of me with the care of being in the presence of an explosive device. Then she finally spilled. “Because I think we have a false confession.”

  You don’t navigate Bureau politics for forty years without knowing what’s what. All the collegiality I’d been building for Coleman evaporated as I leapt to the implication of her words. It was all fucking bullshit and I told her so.

  Ten

  “So that’s why you did the end run on Morrison and called in me and Weiss without getting authorization. You went to Morrison first and he wasn’t buying it. Then you tried to get Weiss on your side early on, but he wouldn’t discuss the case without assessing Lynch first. Now Weiss is out of the picture so you’re trying to use me to back you up. Did you really think you could pull that shimmy on me?”

  “Please,” she said.

  I wasn’t finished. “Worst of all, you let me call the victim’s father and tell him we caught the guy.” I imagined Zachariah Robertson, how I had just left him in a hotel room with a laminated picture of his dead child. With that image fueling my anger, I leaned across the narrow table and lowered my voice. “You don’t, you do not bring a father in, show him the remains of his daughter who was tortured to death, tell him you finally found the killer, and then next day tell him never mind. Do you have any feeling at all for what that man has gone through and what it would be like to tell him sorry, our bad? Nuh-uh, Floyd Lynch is the man. He did it.”

  “Would you please just listen?”

  I was inclined to continue ranting, but couldn’t think of anything else to say at the moment without repeating myself. So I drained off my watered-down vodka and contented myself with glaring, while I put my hands under the table where no one could see me dig at my cuticles. I guess over the past couple of years I’d allowed myself to get a little too relaxed and I was no longer used to this crap.

  Coleman took my silence as temporary acquiescence. She began with an apology for insulting my intelligence, which was the least of my concerns, then opened the report on the table and turned to a page with two columns: on one side, under the heading “Route 66 Killer,” the profile of the Route 66 killer that Sigmund had compiled, and on the other side a profile of Floyd Lynch.

  “I found nineteen points,” she said. “I used this table David Weiss did as a template and found nineteen points that didn’t match.”

  I took the report from her and scanned the page, saw a few characteristics I’d already spotted in Lynch. “Okay, so he’s not as physically strong as we assumed. He doesn’t seem to be as well organized, and is less articulate than we imagined. Big deal, we were wrong. We’re not always on the money.” I threw the book on the table. “Besides, Weiss says himself in his book that profiles don’t get convictions. Only evidence gets convictions. And we’re up to our ass in evidence. Lynch kept journals with all the details. He took us to Jessica Robertson’s body.”

  Coleman squirmed a bit. “I know all this.”

  “The semen on her body matches him. He had a victim on his truck killed in the same way, with the same postmortem mutilation. He knows about the ears and that was our hold-out information. Nobody but those connected to the case knew about the ears.”

  Coleman looked about ready to leap across the table to physically shut me up. “He doesn’t know where the ears are,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Remember the point Weiss makes about the importance of trophies and souvenirs, how they’re priceless treasure to the killer? Floyd Lynch couldn’t tell me where he kept the ears. He says he forgot.”

  That gave me pause, but I had a counter. “He’s just not telling you.”

  “He told us everything else.”

  “He wants to keep them for himself forever. Even if he goes to prison for life he’ll always know where the ears are.”

  “That’s what they all said when I told them. Morrison, Adams Vance the prosecutor, even Royal.”

  “Royal…?”

  She was caught off guard. Sigmund was right. I hoped she’d never try to go undercover. She stuttered a bit, “Hughes … the public defender.”

  She recovered and went on. “They all say it’s a small point in a huge mass of damning evidence. They want this catch so bad. The publicity is enormous, the director himself called to congratulate Morrison, so he won’t back down. Remember there was that highway-serial-killer initiative the Bureau instituted a few years ago.”

  “So now you’re hoping I’ll do your work for you. You should have been a brave little soldier and forced Morrison to authorize a further investigation. You know, follow protocol.”

  Coleman looked away at that remark. “Look, we found Jessica’s body. As far as Mr. Robertson was concerned, that’s the main thing, isn’t it? That’s why Robertson was here, because he insisted on seeing it.”

  “You should go back to Fraud where you belong, dear.”

  “Please don’t call me dear—it’s condescending and I don’t deserve it.”

  She deserved it, all right. I ignored her and went on, “Sure, we honored Zach’s wish to see Jessica’s body. But it’s been seven years of wanting not only his daughter, but wanting justice. It’s bad enough that Lynch is going to escape the death penalty. Zachariah Robertson’s suffering is beyond anything you can imagine. You’re not going to make it worse because you didn’t have the guts to press a case you think is right.”

  “Can I get you anything else?”

  Coleman and I both jerked upright at the voice, as if we’d forgotten we were in a restaurant. I don’t know how long Cheri had been standing there. We slapped on smiles that from the waitress’s perspective might have looked more like snarls.

  “Just the check, please,” I said.

  Cheri picked up our plates and left.

  “You’re no better than Morrison,” Coleman said, crossing her arms and looking at me like that was the worst thing she could say.

  “Bullshit” was all I could come up with on the spot.

  But Coleman would not be distracted. “What about Floyd Lynch? What if he’s innocent of the Route 66 murders?”

  “Innocent? Coleman. The man fucks mummies.”

  Everyone in the room looked over and I realized I wasn’t using my indoor voice anymore.

  “There’s not even real evidence that he didn’t just find that body like he says he did. We can’t prove that he killed the woman on his truck. So you’re going to put a man in prison for life for desecration of a corpse? Being repulsive isn’t a capital offense,” Coleman said quietly.

  She was right. You convicted someone for their crimes, not their nature. I had said something similar more than once in my career. I looked at her posture, which managed to stay straight even when she was leaning over the table, and her naturally curly hair, and her professionally plain glasses, and I wondered if her analysis of the case showed the same perfection, the same attention to detail.

  “Did you coerce him? Feed him the information?” I asked.

  “I swear no. Morrison wanted nothing to go wrong, so we videotaped all the interrogations. You can see for yourself.”

  “Why do you think he would confess?” I a
sked, knowing from experience that it happened all the time for no damn good reason.

  “I don’t know that part yet,” she said.

  “Did you ask him?”

  She relaxed again now that I was asking questions instead of attacking. “He’s sticking to his story and he seems to know all the details. Seems, hell, he’s got it down cold. It’s all in here,” she said, tapping the report, pushing it part of the way toward me again with the tip of her well-manicured finger that I bet she never chewed. “It’s short, not the whole murder book, just what I thought was important for my analysis. Please look at it…” she paused, fixed me with a look and continued, “especially this video.” She opened the report and pointed to a DVD tucked into an envelope and pasted inside the cover. “This is the part of the interrogation I’m talking about, the part that I can’t get out of my head. Look at it before you tell me to fuck off.”

  When I hesitated a moment more, she said, her self-assurance slowly returning, “I know you don’t know me, and I’m asking a lot. But even if you don’t care about sending the wrong man to prison for life, look at it this way. If Lynch didn’t do the Route 66 murders, then the guy who did is still out there.” Coleman leaned across the table again. If I’d had lapels I think she might have grabbed them. “Don’t you see, Lynch knows the details of the case so well. If he didn’t do the killings I’ll bet he knows the man who did. Lynch could lead us to the man who really killed Jessica Robertson. A man who at any point might start killing again.”

  If she was right, she was absolutely right, and I really disliked that. I had one objection left. “Do you realize my being involved is not a benefit? Have I indicated that Morrison and I share anything but a mutual disgust?”

  She ignored that, her face allowing itself to finally reveal just how stricken she was by the load she’d been bearing by herself. “Agent Quinn, I wanted Floyd Lynch to be the Route 66 killer so bad. I want it as much as anybody does. It would make the rest of my career, being the one who interrogated him. But I just can’t get his expression out of my mind, when I asked him about the ears, I mean. I saw a different man. More pathetic than psychopathic. I think about it in the middle of the night. It’s like there’s this ton of evidence that says he’s guilty, but I can’t let go of the one piece of evidence that makes me doubt he really is. I’ll do anything to get to the truth and it’s driving me a little crazy. Has that ever happened to you?”

  I didn’t respond, and Coleman took it for yes. She said, “All I’m asking for is your expert opinion on whether the case deserves to remain open. That’s all. If you think I have a point, I’ll find the corroborating evidence and somehow force the issue, get Lynch to recant before he officially pleads guilty—I don’t know how.” She tried to give me a good hard stare, but her eyes drifted off. “And if you say I’m fucked up on this at least I’ll get some sleep again.”

  “You don’t have much time. Days?”

  Coleman nodded and pushed the report the rest of the way across the table. “Promise you won’t make up your mind until you’ve looked at the video.”

  Even in this case, the lure of the unknown was too much for me to resist. I put the report in my tote bag and told her I’d call her in a couple of days. All right, all right, the following day.

  Eleven

  I spent the drive back up to Catalina thinking about the day, about watching Zach hiding his grief, and standing over Jessica’s desiccated corpse, and how what I thought would be a nice unwinding at the bar threatened to reopen the wounds I thought could finally heal. My emotions had been jerked around considerably in the past several days.

  Carlo must have seen that I was preoccupied and offered to take me to Bubb’s Grubb for ribs. I didn’t want to tell him I’d already had the taco salad with Coleman so I wrenched my mind into the kitchen, bent on being that trifecta of Betty Crocker, Donna Reed, and last year’s centerfold. I could do it; while during my career I was all fast food and TV dinners, cooking had gotten easier, once I’d had the epiphany that spaghetti isn’t made with ketchup.

  I made another salad with shrimp, walnuts, dried cranberries, and crumbled blue cheese on it (mine a lot smaller than his) and we ate in front of TV, which turned out to be not such a good move. We watched part of a program on the History Channel about the Etruscans, which I never would have watched on my own but kind of enjoyed. Then Carlo toyed with the remote (Carlo may be a genius but he’s still a guy) and stopped at the local headline news: “A thirteen-year-old cold case solved in Tucson, Arizona. Serial killer confesses to bizarre string of murders.”

  Shit. “Want some pineapple sherbet?” I asked.

  “I’ll get it in a minute. Let me see this,” Carlo said.

  There it was, including Morrison preening at a podium, fielding questions from the press, the answers to which I already knew. Abducted girls. Torture. Death. Mummies in trucks. Belinda Meloy, the local anchor who was as close to Robin Meade as you could get without cloning, came on.

  “Have you noticed how female broadcasters are wearing skimpier clothes these days?” I asked, still trying to distract him. “That spangly thing looks like something I’d wear to a cocktail party.”

  Belinda said, “Floyd Lynch was arrested by the Pima County Sheriff’s Department seventy-five miles north of Nogales on Route 19 after being stopped for a routine check by Border Security officials nearly three weeks ago. Since that time Lynch has confessed to eight murders, all young females.” She turned and the camera went wide. “Special Agent in Charge of the Tucson Bureau of Investigation Office, Roger Morrison.”

  Morrison flashed a look that said he’d wanted to clear his throat but now there was no time for it. “Thank you, Belinda. The FBI Violent Crimes Task Force commends our agents operating in conjunction with county law enforcement under the highway serial murder initiative, which led to the arrest of Floyd Lynch without incident. The members of the FBI’s Violent Crime Task Force and Highway Serial Killer Initiative include the Pima County Sheriff’s Department, the Tucson Police Department, and the FBI. This cold case, approximately twelve years old, is now officially closed.”

  After Morrison’s carefully prepared statement a picture of me as the unsuccessful investigating agent all those years ago completed Belinda’s report. They didn’t have a problem with showing my face now that I wasn’t undercover anymore. It was the formal portrait taken upon the occasion of my retirement.

  “Look, that’s you,” Carlo said.

  “Was that thunder?” That was always a good distraction in a land where annual rainfall measures eleven inches.

  Carlo looked sideways at me where I sat in Jane’s matching armchair. “Is this where you went yesterday?” he asked as a shot from a news helicopter showed the abandoned car.

  “It’s nothing, Perfesser. Max just asked me to tie up some loose ends, you know, give my opinion on a cold case. I’m done now. You don’t want to talk about it.”

  That got a raised eyebrow but no further questions. We watched an episode of Law & Order because Carlo enjoys my telling him where they make mistakes. Then, “Let’s walk the Pugs, O’Hari.” he said. He calls me O’Hari (short for Mata O’Hari) because of my being Irish and having a mysterious past. I don’t mind that as long as we keep it light.

  We each took a Pug, leashed it, grabbed a poop bag, and walked around the block, the light barely dimmed in a long day. I introduced those nearly inconsequential topics that make up marriage. Whether to attend his grandniece’s baptism in Des Moines (no). How the back fence needed a coat of Rustoleum (yes). Whether the brief sprinkle that afternoon counted as rain (hell no). It was all really normal.

  When we got back there was a text message on my phone from Coleman, asking if I’d watched the video yet. It said, U wch vid?

  “Go away,” I laboriously texted back, not being comfortable yet with the common style.

  Then while I had the phone in my hand I checked in with Zach. He was watching a movie, he said. No, he hadn’t decided yet when
he was going home, he said.

  I looked out the back window at Jane’s life-size statue of Saint Francis that sat on a bench next to a birdbath, and beyond that the now-darkening silhouette of Mount Lemmon, the sight that in the past had rested my soul. From our window you couldn’t see the road we had taken up the northern slope, but just the same the mountain made me imagine mummies in abandoned cars and from now on always would.

  Shaking off that thought, I lured Carlo to bed early and thereby managed to stave off any return to questions. I wasn’t being manipulative. Truth is, even with the sadness, or maybe because of it, there’s something about criminal cases that makes me frisky. He still looked at me with unasked questions, but after a few moments got into the spirit.

  Afterward, while I listened to Carlo sleep, I thought I should get up and look at that video. Then I heard Sister Marie Theresa’s voice from fourth grade religion class, “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” When you’re ten years old that doesn’t make a lot of sense with or without the “unto” and “thereof.” But today I understood Sister Marie Theresa. Today there had been enough evil. The video could wait until the early morning, when I was strong enough to confront whatever awaited me in it. I got up, took a sleeping pill to dam up my brain, and went back to bed.

  Twelve

  At a decent hour the next morning I called Zach’s cell number and left a message. When he didn’t return that call I called his room number, thinking there might be something wrong with his phone. Then I called the front desk, where they told me he hadn’t checked out. Thinking about maybe having to tell Zach that Floyd Lynch wasn’t the killer and Carlo continuing to look at me funny made me nervous.

  But I still couldn’t bring myself to look at the video just yet. How to explain it? Like feeling a lump that was probably nothing, but not ready to show it to the doctor.