Rage Against the Dying

by Becky Masterman

  “No,” he said.

  “Are you coming to the ME’s tomorrow?”

  “No again. I’ll visit Morrison because I haven’t spoken with him yet and I should have followed protocol, but Agent Coleman wanted me to be here this morning.”

  “Was she worried I’d go all ten-eight on Lynch?”

  “Of course not. We all knew you would maintain admirable restraint.” He lowered his voice as we got closer to the others. “Agent Coleman, on the other hand, could use a trifle more restraint. They might have ended it, but at some point I feel confident she and Hughes have had sexual relations. They’re trying so hard to not show it their body language makes them look like same-pole magnets.”

  “Good old Sig, I can always count on you for some profiling parlor tricks.”

  He disengaged my hand from the crook of his elbow and patted it in brotherly fashion before opening the door on my side of the car. “So tomorrow I’ll talk to Mr. Lynch. And this evening you, Stinger, have a phone call to make.”

  Six

  Max turned off on Golder Ranch Road to drop me off while the other two cars continued south on Oracle back into the city. As we pulled up to the house I thought of the man and two dogs who awaited me inside. While it had been great to see Sigmund again, and despite the pain of seeing Jessica’s body, maybe even because of the stress of coming face-to-face with that part of the past, as I walked back up the driveway I imagined myself pounding on the door and yelling, “Sanctuary!” That’s how good it felt when Carlo opened the front door and gave me his grin.

  For a second his look faded into what I imagined was my own before he said, “Couch time,” and we all moved to the living room where the Pugs could more easily get at my face. I was doubly glad then that Sigmund was not here to see the reunion of the pack.

  After an early dinner (pasta with pesto, spinach salad) and before it was time for the Pugs’ evening walk, I took the rest of my wine into the extra bedroom that had been Jane’s quilting and scrapbooking room and that Carlo had agreed could be my office when I told him I needed a space of my own the way men have their garage. I didn’t tell him it was because I couldn’t quite let go of that particular woman, Special Agent Brigid Quinn. Plus, one of these days after I learned how to be a better wife than Jane ever was, I planned to set up a little private-investigating business.

  I had my desk that I brought from my old apartment, cluttered with mostly magazines I meant to read and housewares catalogs with cooking utensils that mystified me, and my laptop. A swivel desk chair. Some banker’s boxes with old tax returns and other nonoffensive files. A metal cabinet with a lock, purchased after Paul left me, for the rest.

  There were a few pictures on the walls to remind me of my successes in foiling evildoers, like the one of President Reagan congratulating me for preventing a terrorist attack that no one will ever know about. Another frame held the award I got for bringing down the Thai slavery ring. Another for infiltrating the Palo Mayombe cult and in the nick of time saving a boy from being boiled alive in a cauldron. I had mixed emotions about that award because there was already another kid dead in the cauldron when we showed up; it was also the time I shot the unarmed perp.

  Jane’s quilting materials were in a box in the closet along with her sewing machine.

  I sat down in the desk chair, put my feet up on a nearby banker’s box, and stared at the cell phone I’d left on the desk. I thought about my outburst on the road to Mount Lemmon. If it was just a matter of dealing with Jessica, I probably would have been able to keep a better grip on my feelings. After all, she was dead and feeling no pain. But there was her father Zach Robertson to keep me ever mindful of that event.

  Zachariah Robertson had been a decent dentist in Santa Fe with a wife who loved him enough, a son who didn’t give him any trouble, and a daughter who had just joined the FBI. I never told him how much I regretted recommending Jessica for fieldwork too soon because I was eager to get her trained as my replacement. How I regretted I was a little too old to pose as a convincing teenage hitchhiker. As with all of my victims’ loved ones, I just told him to call anytime of the day or night.

  He did. After Jessica’s disappearance that night on Route 66, seventy-nine miles west of Tucumcari, New Mexico, his calls went from hopeful shortly after zero hour to despairing after six months. He started showing up at his dental practice still too drunk from the night before to keep his hands from rattling around in his patients’ mouths.

  Even after two years went by, he kept calling me. That’s how I found out Elena and his son Peter had left him, about three years sooner than it usually takes for the family of a murder victim to break apart. Then Elena got cancer and died without seeking treatment. Zach didn’t stay in touch with Peter much after her funeral.

  Last time I talked to him he was mostly a drunk hermit who seldom bathed in a cabin in the upper peninsula of Lake Michigan.

  I tossed off the remaining wine, took a deep breath, and called him.

  He answered on the first ring, just the way he had when all this first started. “You always wait for me to call you,” he said straight off, and then with a wobble in his voice, “You must have found her.”

  “We did.” I didn’t tell him everything right away, wanted first to gauge how much of it he’d remember in the morning.

  “What, what about who did it? Do you know?”

  “We do. We know everything now, Zach.” He sounded only moderately soused so I told him everything I knew, everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours, and in the time before that what I knew of it. I didn’t pull any punches, hadn’t in years. And he didn’t need to ask any questions because I anticipated all of them.

  When I finished speaking, I heard what I thought at first were ice cubes sloshing in his glass, but then realized he was typing on his computer while he listened to me.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Damn, you can’t get to Tucson direct from anywhere,” he said, after the typing finally went quiet. “American Airlines Flight 734 arriving at two P.M.”

  “No, Zach.”

  “If you’re not there I’ll take a taxi to the medical examiner’s office.”

  “Zach, listen.”

  “I won’t be any trouble. I never once, once blamed the Bureau, even right at the start, did I?”

  He had told me so many times how he never blamed the Bureau, by which he meant me. “No, Zach. You never did.”

  “Even that night, that night you spent with me.”

  It was more like forty-eight straight hours I spent talking him up from suicide when he called from halfway across the country and told me his sweating palms were stained white by the fistful of sleeping pills he was holding.

  “No, not even then. But you don’t want to see her, Zach. Not this way.”

  “Oh yes I do.” His courage failed him, finally, and he started to cry. I don’t have much respect for whiskey remorse, except when it comes to someone in Zach’s shoes, so I waited patiently until he was finished.

  Then, wiping my own nose on the palm of my hand, I said, “I swear to you, when this comes to trial you’ll get your day in court. You can read that statement you wrote such a long time ago. Remember that statement? Keep thinking about that. You still have it, don’t you?”

  He hung up.

  And that’s what happens to many victims’ loved ones, the part you never see after the media gets bored, or after the movie when the credits roll. When the bad guy is caught, the actors playing the family have Closure, knowing justice has been served. The actors playing the detectives turn their back and walk triumphantly off camera. People watching the show throw out their popcorn, wipe off their greasy fingers, and go home, maybe at the most feel a little tremble of fear imagining there’s someone hiding behind the other car when they pull into the garage after dark, but of course there isn’t and life goes on as before, tra la.

  When it’s real life they, some families of some victims, spend the re
st of their lives waiting to die. The end.

  Only suckers believe in Closure.

  Seven

  At two the next afternoon I picked Zach up at Tucson International (one terminal, two concourses, twenty gates). I watched him come down the escalator into the baggage claim area, his body slowly clearing a dip in the ceiling, coming into view from the bottom up, shoddy hiking boots to balding crown. He wasn’t much taller than me and was a lot skinnier. And though he was six years my junior, I don’t think it’s vanity to say he looked older than me.

  The moving staircase gave way abruptly to the stationary floor, making him falter into my embrace. So as not to face reality head-on, he whispered into my hair, “Yee-ha. That last bit was like riding a bronco.”

  “You come in between the mountain ranges, the wind funnel makes it choppy.” Besides being genuinely affectionate, the hug allowed me to give him a quick sniff. Last time I’d seen Zach personal hygiene had not been a priority. But he’d cleaned himself up for Jessica’s sake and even had a new short-sleeved blue shirt on. I could tell from the perpendicular creases in the denim that it hadn’t been out of the package long. I couldn’t smell alcohol either. He must not have had a drink on the plane and that may be why he pulled away quickly, so I couldn’t feel his fingers flutter like moths against my back.

  I let his body go but kept his hands still in mine a moment longer, let him look into my eyes without looking away from him the way so many others had. “Don’t do this, Zach. You don’t have to see her. We got the confirmation from the dental records.”

  “Did I ever tell you I thought of being a forensic dentist there for a while?”

  Yes, he had told me that, on four or five occasions, along with how he didn’t blame me for Jessica’s death. Zach retrieved a small canvas bag from the carousel and we walked from the terminal to the parking lot, where I got him situated in the car, handed him the bottle of water you always give to new arrivals in the desert, made him drink some, and headed up Palo Alto Drive, turned left onto Valencia, right on First, for the relatively short drive to the medical examiner’s office downtown.

  Max Coyote and Laura Coleman were already there, and Dr. George Manriquez met us almost instantly upon arrival in the lobby.

  “Dr. Manriquez,” I said, the situation calling for formality despite my having known him during my brief time with the Tucson Bureau, and stepped back to let him prepare Zach for what he was about to see.

  “Mr. Robertson,” he said, indicating a couple of small armchairs placed at an angle to each other in a far corner of the lobby, “Please sit here for a second.”

  Zach followed his instruction while the three of us, me, Max, and Coleman, faced each other pretending not to listen.

  “Mr. Robertson,” George said again, once they were both seated. “No one understands better than I do that this is real life, not drama, so I want to prepare you a little. We have no mystery here, no indirect lighting like in TV shows. You’re not going to see your daughter, that is, anything that looks like your daughter. This is some dark brown skin covering a skeleton. Have you ever seen a mummy?”

  “In books, yes,” Zach said, nodding. “We … we went to Pompeii once but I know those bodies aren’t the same.” The memory of some vacation bowed him like a weight.

  “Yes, those are plaster casts, but still, that’s something how the remains you’re about to view will appear. Do you have any questions you want to ask me? Anything at all.”

  Zach wiped the back of his hand across his mouth, seemed to decide not to ask, then asked. “Is there … is there any smell?”

  “Not really, or not that disagreeable one you may be thinking of. A little musty, perhaps, but you won’t be shocked by it. It’s the sight that is likely to be disturbing.”

  Zach’s head drooped and I noticed the knuckles of his laced fingers were white. I wanted to go to him but knew he was in good hands with the sweetheart Manriquez.

  After a long enough pause to show Zach that there wasn’t anything more important to him than this, George stood and put out his hand to help Zach up. Then he led us all down a corridor to the autopsy room.

  They could never get the smell out of a room like this, a combination of disinfectant and old diaper, like a government-run day care center. On a plastic gurney rested the body of Jessica Robertson covered with a sheet. It was all purposefully clinical, like Manriquez had said, no shadowy corners, no instruments suggestive of cutting flesh, no background music. Zach was placed on one side of the gurney flanked by me and an autopsy assistant burly enough to catch him if he dropped. George stood on the other side. Max and Coleman hung back.

  With a final glance at Zach for permission, George drew the sheet from the top of Jessica’s head so Zach could see her dried hair and a bit of dark brown flesh on her forehead. When Zach appeared to be able to take that much, George drew the sheet down to just below her chin.

  I had my head tilted enough to see Zach out of the corner of my eye but felt more than saw the tremor that passed through him like a private earthquake. There was a single soft groan. Other than that he was incredibly composed, worked through his own thoughts and memories without sharing. Then he lifted his index finger and delicately stroked the shriveled brown lobe of her left ear, still preserved over the years by the mummification process. He stroked her ear the way you would a thing that was terribly fragile but too amazingly beautiful not to touch. He couldn’t see the side of her head where the other ear had been cut away. Then he pulled his hand away and the medical examiner pulled the sheet back up.

  “I won’t see her again,” Zach said.

  “No,” agreed George, whether he understood or not. He looked at the assistant, who apparently had been given prior instructions, and then paused until Zach was led out to the waiting area. I was so proud of him.

  Even with the weight of the corpse still in the room, we all breathed a little deeper.

  As Max and Coleman came closer to the gurney, George said, “I moved here from Miami about ten years ago looking for a change of scene. Too many immigrants washing up on the beaches, I said. All that happened was I went from Haitian floaters to Mexican mummies. With the summer heat I’ve got a whole refrigerated truck out back full of unidentifieds that they picked up off the desert.”

  But then he went on with his job as he pulled the sheet off with less ceremony than before, this time all the way off the corpse. The body was in the fetal position as it had been when first placed in the car. The head was positioned where it would have been in life, though it was no longer attached to the torso. “This mummification happens quite a lot, naturally formed in the desert where the humidity is so low. You know, like the other body in the car.” He was referring to the prostitute who must have frequented truck-stop parking lots, who Floyd had dismissed as a lot lizard, his first victim.

  “I didn’t have much time to look at the other one,” I said. “Was it the same MO as the others?”

  “I concentrated on this one first. All I can tell you is that the other corpse has both its ears. I can give you a better report when I’ve done the autopsy on the other.”

  I asked, “What about the body found in Lynch’s truck? Are there any similarities of cause and manner of death?”

  “Like I said, Jessica Robertson’s body seems to have been naturally mummified. The one in Lynch’s truck had some help. It’s all in my report.”

  Coleman and Max nodded. “Help me out, Doc,” I said. “I’m trying to catch up.”

  Manriquez didn’t seem to mind at all, and started in eagerly, “He used something called Natron. It’s commercially available, a mixture of four kinds of sodium: carbonate, bicarbonate, chloride, and sulfate. You pack it in and around the body so it dehydrates and makes it inhospitable to the bacteria that would usually decompose the tissues. Plus he removed the organs, which accelerated the process. All that was left was the bones and dried soft tissue.”

  Like many medical examiners, it turned out there was nothing he
enjoyed talking about more than his work. I was aware of Zach waiting by himself and needed to get this over with, but my curiosity was piqued. “You say this Natron is commercially available?”

  “It’s used in those little desiccant packages they put in things to keep them dry. Mr. Lynch apparently isn’t stupid, and knows how to look things up on the Internet. That’s how he found out how to do it. Agent Coleman could confirm from her interrogation, but I would guess he put the body in a ventilated box out in the desert while it was drying. There was no evidence of predator scavenging.”

  “Lynch said it only took a few months until he could use the body without smelling up the truck,” Max said.

  “How long did Lynch have it in his truck?” I asked.

  “About a year and a half,” Max said.

  Manriquez nodded that it agreed with his findings on approximate time since death and added, “He didn’t try to move it so it stayed pretty intact. Of course once it gets that old you can hardly pinpoint a date, but I found enough dried semen on it to show he had it quite a while.”

  “Sure it’s his?” I asked.

  “We’ve had time to do the DNA analysis that matched it to Lynch.”

  “Back to Jessica,” I said. “Cause and manner of death?”

  “It’s hard to find ligature marks because the way the head was angled it had fallen off the body anyway. And of course with the eyes dried you can’t see the typical petechiae though it might show up in histopath. But no need to go that far, the hyoid bone is definitely crushed, the Achilles tendon slashed, and the ear removed on this side.” Manriquez shook his head. “After the confession I read the autopsy reports on the Route 66 murders. That’s when I discovered the body in the truck had the same mode associated with it. So I checked the body of Jessica Robertson for semen and found some on various parts, just like the mummy in the truck. Preliminary tests don’t exclude Lynch. We’ve put a priority on the DNA analysis to confirm.”