Rage Against the Dying

by Becky Masterman

  “I remember the place being filthy with all the trash we left behind,” Phillips said. “Looks like it’s been cleaned up.”

  I looked at the car, recognized it as a Dodge Dart from the seventies with the paint long removed by sandstorms and sun. I kept repeating to myself, it’s evidence, it’s only evidence, while another part of my mind whispered all these years you’ve been looking for her this is where she’s been.

  Even close up, through the filter of the dust covering the windows, you couldn’t see much. Benny removed a digital camera from his equipment bag and took shots from every angle. Then he and Ray donned latex gloves and, given a nod from Coleman, tried to open the driver’s-side door.

  Lynch pointed with one hand, which, cuffed, drew the other up like marionette’s arms connected by a single string. “She’s—”

  “Let the men do their work,” Coleman said.

  The door creaked open a couple inches, then stuck. Ordered around by Benny, and cursing under his breath, Ray scrambled quickly back up to the van and returned with a can of WD-40 while the rest of us waited, feeling useless.

  Ray sprayed the hinge through the gap, worked the door some, sprayed it some more. With a groan the door of the long-closed-up vehicle finally opened all the way. I could feel us all brace, but if we were expecting that overpowering smell of putrefaction, there was none. Instead, it smelled like grandma’s housecoat folded away unwashed after her death. Not unpleasant, just distinctly human.

  The front seat, the old kind from before bucket seats where the bench extended unbroken by the gear shift jutting out from the steering column, was largely filled with what looked like dry garbage. Old crumpled newspapers, rags, quite a few beer cans that added another aroma to the scene. Benny snapped more photos.

  “Now we know where all the trash went,” Max said.

  Benny and Ray pulled garbage bags out of their pockets and, while the rest of us waited, silently removed the trash out of the car with a care approaching that of archaeologists on a dig. Ray moved to the other side, slipping a bit down the steeper slope on which the car leaned and, with a little more effort, popped open the passenger door as well to get to that side more easily.

  While they worked Lynch stayed silent and apart, breathing only lightly, yet tensed, the way you expect a jack-in-the-box to look coiled in the dark while the music is still playing. His eyes drifted around the group without moving his head as if he didn’t want us to know he was looking. I watched his gaze come to rest on Sigmund, maybe wondering who he was and what he was doing here. Sigmund stared back at him, as he would at something smeared on a slide, before turning his attention back to the car.

  After a while Lynch lifted his cuffed hands to his face and stroked it with his nails going up and his fingertips going down. It must have been a habit; his cheek was slightly scabby with all the stroking. He was unable to stay silent.

  “I threw the trash in there so if some hikers came by and tried to look in, you couldn’t see,” Lynch said. He spoke in a careful monotone, but with an underlying current, an excited man trying to appear calm.

  When the trash on the front seat was nearly clear, I could see first a couple of planks that entered my consciousness as big logs of beef jerky and then morphed into naked legs. The whole body was naked and brown like that, dark leather curled up like a monster fetus. Benny looked at me, and then at Max, who nodded. Benny took photos of the body.

  I couldn’t find my voice to ask before Max did. “That’s her,” he said.

  “No.” Lynch had started breathing faster, out of sync with the rest of us who were holding ours. He stopped stroking his face. “I tried to tell you.” With the same flat tone as he had spoken about trash, no more no less, “That’s just the lot lizard. It’s been there a lot longer.”

  I hadn’t meant to speak to Lynch except through Coleman or Hughes, his lawyer, but seeing this other body that Lynch referred to as a lot lizard, a prostitute who hangs out at truck stops, this surprised me. “You mean you killed another woman and hid the body rather than posing it?”

  “Yeah, the first time,” he said.

  “When?” I asked.

  He paused. “Just before the second one,” he said, with no apparent sarcasm.

  Coleman said to me, “You didn’t know?”

  I shook my head. “How could I?”

  “Sorry, you’re right. It only came out in the interrogation. I should have mentioned on the way here.”

  “Eight victims, then,” I said. “Eight including the one on his truck.”

  Lynch nodded, “You want the one in the back.”

  Benny pushed the seat forward on hinges that had suffered from a fine dust that could get in anywhere, even a closed-up car. But he managed to expose the backseat, with trash like in the front. This was cleared as well, and, as if by prior agreement, trying not to appear all dramatic about it, the others stepped back to let me have the first look.

  At first glimpse the pain that I thought had finally eased up hit me in my gut, forcing me to bend and brace my hands on my knees, looking down until the blood came back to my head. Then I toughed up, because nobody, not Lynch not nobody, was going to see me react. It’s only evidence, I thought again, pretending I was bent over so I could better peer into the dusky interior of the Dodge.

  She, her body, that is, was naked like the one in the front. The flesh was rippled in some places, shiny at the tops and dull in the valleys. Instead of being carefully curled up she seemed to have been thrown more casually onto her back, her knees pushed up to get the door shut and her upper torso at an uncomfortable angle against the other door. The head was nearly detached from the rest of the body from the lack of support as the corpse aged.

  After Benny did his thing one more time with the camera I got a flashlight from him and shined its light on the face. The lips had lost their plumpness, making the teeth more prominent in the slightly open mouth. The lids had receded from the eyes, which were as dull as the surrounding flesh, like a clay statue. It didn’t much look like Jessica, it hardly looked human, but I wished I had something to cover her with just the same.

  The hair was dark straw, but not so long that you couldn’t see one of the ears was missing. That made me shine the flashlight at her ankles, and confirmed that at least one had been slashed at the back, at the Achilles tendon.

  “This is a Route 66 victim,” I said.

  “Can you tell it’s Jessica Robertson?” Coleman asked.

  “It’s Jessica Robertson, all right,” Lynch said. All attention turned to him again and you could tell he liked it that way.

  Again I spoke directly to Lynch. “Did you know this woman was an FBI agent?” That was another thing we kept from the media.

  Coleman started, “He said he knew, Agent Quinn, she told—”

  “She said so; she thought I’d let her go because of that,” Lynch interrupted, and he seemed for a moment to become a little more animated, shuffling his feet as if this would help him keep the floor. “This is what I get life for, bringing you out here. That’s what you call quid pro quo.”

  Royal Hughes, the PD, pressed his lips together and turned his head, trying not to show his distaste. “It’s probably better if—”

  I thought of this shmuck who had taken eight lives and thereby ruined those of everyone who loved them, while his only concern was escaping the consequences of his homicidal lust. “Quid pro quo,” I moved my lips and tongue slowly as if the words took up more space in my mouth than words usually do. “Do you know what that means?”

  Lynch said, “It means I show you the bodies and I get life.”

  “And where did you get that phrase, Floyd? It sounds vaguely like something I heard,” I snapped my fingers a couple times as if I was trying to remember, “in a movie once.”

  “Silence of the Lambs,” he offered eagerly.

  “That’s right!” My voice dipped near a whisper. “Because you sound like Hannibal Lecter talking to Clarice Starling. Do you think y
ou’re Anthony Hopkins?” I pointed to Coleman. “Do you think this is fuckin’ Jodie Foster and we’re making a movie here?” In retrospect I guess my voice might have started to grate. I guess maybe I looked like this is what they’d been waiting for, like I was going to go for him because Benny and Ray got still, Phillips looked edgier than before and glanced at Max, and Sigmund put his hand on my shoulder but removed it quickly when he felt the response of the muscle underneath.

  Royal Hughes clenched his abs and raised his palms like he was doing push-ups against the air. “It might be…” I could tell he pursed his lips to say “wise” but changed his mind, “… better if you didn’t speak to him.”

  It wasn’t Hughes’s words but the thought of Sigmund’s touch that grounded me again and I focused instead on keeping my head from trembling after the sudden adrenaline burst. Jessica deserved better than pissed-off grandstanding.

  Even Lynch had quailed at my reaction, and he was under armed guard who now looked ready to turn his weapon on me. “I’m just saying,” Lynch said, then shut himself off again and concentrated on gnawing a small wart on the back of his left hand.

  “I think you should stay quiet now, Floyd,” Coleman said.

  He nodded.

  I wasn’t conscious of it at the time, but in retrospect I remembered that was the moment when something felt wrong. Then the moment moved on.

  Coleman took me a few steps away as if to speak privately, though I knew it was partly to remove me farther from Lynch’s vicinity. “He does that a lot, quoting from movies and books,” she said. “The books in his truck had things underlined that he used in his interrogation.” Then, “Can you tell it’s her?” She asked me again.

  I studied the face again. “Enough to testify,” I said. “But the ME has the dental records already, I assume?”

  “You assume correctly, Agent Quinn. Do you want to be there for the autopsy?” she asked.

  “I should, preliminary tests should be ready, what, tomorrow afternoon?”

  Coleman nodded, her voice level to a fault, professional. “I’ll make sure they work on it tonight. Let’s say three unless I call you.”

  “Okay, I’ll be there. I know it’s not protocol but I think it’s best if I notify NOK.”

  Coleman nodded again. NOK, next of kin. My relationships with some of them were known in the Bureau because most agents avoided them, passing them off instead to professional victim’s advocates, passing out cards of therapists. When a case wasn’t closed, I remained the advocate for the victim.

  Benny and Ray put plastic bags on all four hands. Lynch asked why they did that. The techs didn’t respond.

  “In case there’s any tissue or blood under the nails,” Hughes told him.

  “Ouch,” Lynch said, but it wasn’t at the memory of Jessica having scratched him. He lifted the hand with the wart. There was blood on it. Careful not to make contact, Hughes handed him a Kleenex as if he was used to this happening.

  The techs first lifted the body from the front seat, inadvertently detaching the head in the process and leaving behind a layer of skin that had stuck to the upholstery. Some of the trash adhered to the body.

  “It’s been there a long time,” Coleman explained, glancing away. “Floyd told me thirteen years. She was twenty-three and he was twenty-five when he killed her.”

  “Is that in his journals?”

  “No, he told me. He only started keeping a record with the next victim, the one we think of as the first Route 66 kill.”

  I dipped my head at the body being placed in a black bag. “Does he at least know this victim’s name?”

  “He says no.”

  I turned and looked out across the arroyos that became a canyon leading into the heart of the mountain. I looked away not because I couldn’t take watching Benny and Ray delicately sorting the pieces and loading them into separate body bags and hoisting them up the side of the hill. I was wondering what was going to be worse, this or calling Jessica’s father.

  Five

  The rest of the group started up the hill in pretty much the same order they’d come down it, but Sigmund gave me a look and bent over to pick up a piece of trash the techs had left behind. “Sloppy,” he said. He straightened and handed it to me like a memento of the occasion, then tucked my hand in his arm, pretending to help me over the uneven ground and up the steep slope of the hill. “Ah Stinger, a sad triumph it is,” he said, as we slowly started after the others. The sound of his voice comforted me, but I didn’t feel a need to respond.

  Then, “That Agent Coleman is one smart cookie,” he said, when we were lagging far enough behind so no one could hear our conversation.

  We had worked so long together, him in profiling and me in undercover, that in the past it had always been the Sig and Stinger show. I felt a twinge of jealousy. Silly.

  “How can you tell?” I asked.

  “She was trying to interview me all the way from my hotel to your place. All about if I knew of any other case where a serial killer had switched his modus operandi from rape and strangulation to necrophilia.” Sigmund never said MO like the rest of us. I think he may be too proud for acronyms.

  “What did you tell her?” I asked.

  “That it was new to me, but that there was that other case where the killer went from simple execution-style killings with a .22 to mutilation with a knife and drinking his victim’s blood. She said she was familiar with that case. She asked, too, about my theories regarding trophies and souvenirs, that sort of thing. She had done her homework, and wanted my opinion of Floyd Lynch.”

  “Did you give it?”

  “You know I detest professionals who give an opinion without ever talking to the alleged perpetrator. In addition to that, in my case I have to be cautious because there’s bias, being so familiar with one of the victims.”

  One of the victims. I wanted to say that detachment was all well and good, but we were talking about Jessica here, not some generic victim, and it hurt not to say so. But agents didn’t talk about their feelings like that, even me and Sig. If he knew what I was thinking he didn’t let on but continued seamlessly, “I told Coleman I would not comment at all until after the full battery of competency tests and then only in a written report.”

  “And how did she react?”

  “She tried to disguise it, but she was frustrated. She seems ambitious. Wanted to move faster. She reminded me of you.”

  There was that twinge again. “Is that why she was a little stick-up-the-ass in the car?”

  “Possibly. And perhaps we both intimidate her a little, too. We are respected and famous, aren’t we?”

  “Absolutely, in a washed-up kind of way. So what do you think? Is he sane?”

  Sigmund pulled his glasses down and twinkled at me over the rims, declining to answer.

  “If you want my opinion, I think he’s skeevy in spades,” I said.

  He gave in with a nod. “An abomination of all things human. Yet for a sexual sadist, lacking in that certain psychopathic je ne sais quoi?”

  Only Sigmund could dig me out of the pit and lighten me up a little even at a time like this. “Yeah, that,” I admitted.

  “I picked up on it, too. And yet remember Harry Winthrop?”

  “A real twerp. It was hard to imagine him cutting off male organs and sewing them to female torsos.” But I wasn’t in the mood for reminiscing. “Come on, I won’t tell anyone what you tell me, what does your gut say?”

  “My gut, as you call it, is conflicted. He’s different from the man I expected to find. And yet it’s all there, the body on his truck killed in the same fashion as those of the Route 66 murders, the journals, the confession, knowing where the body is. I might have entertained the possibility of a copy cat, but he did know where the body was. If the dental records match, we’ll even be sure that, of the two bodies in the car, he identified Jessica’s body correctly. It’s cut-and-dried.”

  “Open and shut. How’s Greta?” I asked, changing the subject
in that kind of mental leap that only friends are capable of.

  “She divorced me shortly after you left.”

  “What the fuck?”

  “She said I was too introverted to feel strongly. While I never met her therapist I would suppose those were his words she was quoting.”

  Bullshit. Anyone who knew Sigmund, who knew what he had been through during his time crawling around in the muck and stench of killers’ minds, knew that he had done all the feeling there was and he was just all felt out.

  “How about you, have you married well?” he asked because he knew it would be the next line in small talk.

  “Gosh yes.” I smiled and felt my face go warmer at the mention of him. “I’m crazy about Carlo.”

  “Gosh? That is linguistically uncharacteristic of you.” He glanced at my face. “As is blushing.”

  “Stop profiling me,” I said, but couldn’t help but explain, “The man used to be a priest and I’m working at cleaning up my language.”

  He shook his head in disbelief as if this revelation was more bizarre than any encountered in his career. “Stinger Quinn, going Stepford.”

  “The name is DiForenza now,” I said, sounding as smug as I felt.

  We approached the lip of the hill where the cars were parked, and, once begun, I hated to stop talking with my old buddy. I asked him over for dinner, said I’d take him back to his hotel after.

  Even as I said it I thought about how with Sigmund, Carlo, and me, it could only be half a conversation, nobody saying what was really on their mind. At the time I thought I had divided my lives that successfully. I hoped he would say no. Sigmund knew that, too, and like a typical man didn’t try to make excuses for it.