Rage Against the Dying

by Becky Masterman

  Twenty

  I knocked at the door of room 174 first, and when there was no answer, I used the second key I’d gotten when I checked Zach into the Sheraton. He hadn’t killed himself, but he wasn’t around. Where was he going, how was he getting there (even at his lowest Zach wouldn’t use a bus), and what was he doing? I took a brief pass over the room, nothing but his small canvas bag that contained a couple of shirts still in their plastic wrappers, another pair of chinos, and some underwear. Also the neatly laminated five by seven of Jessica balanced against the bed lamp. Electric razor, toothbrush, and travel-size toothpaste in the bathroom.

  I wrote a note on the hotel pad next to the phone on the desk, nothing long or heartfelt, just “I was here looking for you. Return call, you idiot.” And my cell phone number. I tore off the top sheet, rewrote it leaving out the you idiot and adding please. I was frustrated. What with Coleman pressuring me about Lynch, my fears that the body in the wash would be discovered, and my own intuition that someone would still try to kill me, I didn’t need this. But then I thought, suck it up, none of that is as bad as losing a child. Nothing is as bad as losing a child.

  Twenty-one

  Even with my stop at the hotel, I still arrived at Emery’s Cantina before Coleman and took a seat at the bar this time. I ordered a light beer while listening to the conversation around me. They were talking about teeth.

  A guy from the metro police who the others called Frank said he needed a root canal and did anybody know a good endodontist in the Northwest? Cliff, who I already knew, said he’d heard about root canals but didn’t know what they were. Emery said no, he had a jaw like a rock, couldn’t remember ever having been to a dentist. Looking superior, he added that he flossed twice a day. Cheri said she went to Gentle Dental because she liked the drugs.

  Then they all looked at me like someone my age would certainly know dental work. “I get all my dentures made in Costa Rica,” I said, a little resentfully. “They sound like castanets.” They laughed, but it sounded kind of polite, like they weren’t sure what part—castanets, Costa Rica, or dentures—was meant to be the joke.

  Cheri, who was standing near me at the bar, said, “I hear you’re famous.” Frank and Cliff looked at their food.

  My cell phone rang. The nerve sparked in my neck and I prepared my what-a-surprise voice for Max saying he’d found the body, which goes to show how it hung in the back of my mind like a nightmare. You know that nightmare where you kill someone and the worst part of it is knowing you can’t turn back the clock and make it not happen? No? Well never mind. I took a deep breath and opened the phone, gave a cautious hello.

  “Brigid, it’s Emily. Are you finished at the hotel?”

  “Yeah, I’m at the bar.”

  “How’s Mr. Robertson?”

  “Wasn’t there. Where are you?”

  “I just stopped in at the office for messages. I’m on my way.”

  While I waited for Coleman I did some quality brooding about how I wished I hadn’t done what I’d done. How I should have called Max right after it happened, and not covered it up. There was no going back on that. But how if I hadn’t done what I’d done I wouldn’t have found the DVD that suggested my assailant was targeting me, and that it might be connected somehow to Floyd Lynch. I might be dead. Hell, Carlo might be dead. I wished I could stop looping; it was getting me nowhere.

  Lynch. I went over the interview with Wilbur and Portobello Mike, pausing, backing up, but could not find a motive for their being involved. Rather, they seemed to distance themselves from their son and brother.

  Seemed.

  Round and round we go.

  Before I was totally brooded out, a slash of afternoon sun invaded the dark interior and I saw in the mirror that Coleman had arrived. I gestured for her to come join me at the bar. The conversation in the room dropped a notch while the men pretended not to watch her El Greco body glide across the room. Coleman looked uncomfortable and ran her fingers through her tight curls to disguise that she was passing her hand over that birthmark on her temple the way she did when we first met.

  “Is this okay, or would you prefer a table?” I asked.

  She shifted a little shift as if she was trying to get more comfortable with either her underwire or her side arm and sat down on the vinyl-padded stool next to mine. “No, this is fine,” she said. “It’s just my parents are Mormons and I’ve never gotten totally used to sitting at a bar.”

  She ordered an iced tea from Emery, who was hovering less like a good bartender and more like a man wondering what was underneath the linen blouse. He rested his palms on the surface of the bar and leaned, not quite leering, in her direction. Even Cheri passed by and skewered him on a wide-eyed look, the kind of watch-yourself-buddy warning that confirmed my guess that they were lovers.

  Emery put a basket of chips and a bowl of salsa on the bar in front of us. “On the house,” he said with his accent and a courtly flourish of his hand, both comically self-deprecating and elegantly European, before drifting away to serve someone else.

  “He must like you,” Coleman said, indicating the chips and sounding a little wistful at the thought of having a bartender of one’s very own.

  “He doesn’t know me. He’s flirting with you.”

  Emery brought her the iced tea, rested a spoon on top of a cloth napkin, and moved the container of sugar packets closer to her.

  Apparently feeling that the tea needed an excuse, “I’m still working,” Coleman said as she squeezed the lemon. She must have had Barky on her mind. “You have a dog?”

  “We have Pugs.”

  “Are Pugs good?”

  I wasn’t sure what that meant, never having had dogs before, but answered, “Sure, they work fine. How about you?”

  “We had a miniature schnauzer when I was little. Duncan. He used to sleep with me.” Then the small talk was done. She was too intense to have a knack for it. “That interview was a dead end. None of it is making much sense.”

  “Neither does lust killing. These people don’t think the way we do.”

  “Like you say, we need more.”

  “With interviews sometimes you can’t tell what’s important until later. You just keep as much of it inside your head as you can, and sometimes connections appear. It’s like we’re all garbage scows of information and sometimes your life can depend on the connections.”

  When Coleman rested her elbow on the bar and her chin on her hand, was it to cover a smile? She stared at me as if she was soaking up all the instruction I had to offer, but her eyes showed only a kind of bland patience. She may have admired me well enough, but she was no suck-up. So I pulled back on the patronizing. Lord knows Coleman had never played the over-the-hill card with me and she deserved the same respect. “Sorry, you already know all that. Your analysis really impressed Weiss, by the way.”

  “I still can’t believe I met David Weiss. He was huge like you, you know, like—”

  “Dinosaurs? Just kidding,” I said before she could attempt to shovel the words back into her mouth. But then I noticed she didn’t seem uncomfortable at all, so maybe I spoke too soon about the over-the-hill thing. I ignored it. “We joined the Bureau at the same time. He had already had his PhD in psych and was tapped for the new behavioral science unit. We called him Sigmund because—”

  “Freud. That’s so funny.”

  I hate when I repeat myself. They say it’s due to stress. I finished my beer, said no to a second when Emery swung by. “What do they call you?” I asked, to change the subject.

  “Snow. Only not to my face.”

  “As in…”

  “Pure as the driven.” She rolled her eyes while I kept my face carefully bland, remembering the suspicion Sigmund had about her and the public defender. “I heard Dr. Weiss call you Stinger. How come?”

  “Will they still call you Snow when Morrison finds out you’ve been working off the rez?”

  Rather than address the Morrison issue directly, she slipped
on an aphorism. “Sometimes you have to choose between following rules and doing the right thing.”

  Time to get her back for reminding me I’d repeated myself. “You sound like a refrigerator magnet. Nothing can fuck you up more than feeling noble.”

  She let that one pass, changed the subject again. “One thing I always wondered, Weiss spent so much time in his book on the Route 66 case but never mentioned Jessica Robertson.”

  “When he wrote the book she’d only been gone eight months. He’s a pretty cerebral guy, but I think even Sig was too close to her. A lot of people were.”

  “Why is that?”

  “She was childlike, could pass for thirteen at a distance. Never got on anybody’s bad side, which I’m sure you know is a quality unknown in an ego mill like the Bureau. One of those rare women who could be relentlessly perky and you didn’t want to bitch slap her. You wanted to take care of her.”

  And that’s enough about Jessica, I thought. Is that what the little bit of sharing about her dog and nickname had been about? Not small talk at all, but trying to get me to open up? Nice try, Coleman. I didn’t add that I called Jessica Rookie and she called me Coach.

  Coleman seemed to sense that I’d said all I was going to say and didn’t press further. “I brought a copy of the section of the murder book that covers Lynch. It’s in the car.”

  What she had given me the first time was her analysis of the case. The murder book itself was the sacred document and you weren’t allowed to remove it from the office without authorization. I lowered my voice and gestured to her to do the same. “You brought it outside the office?”

  She blushed. “Not the whole thing,” she said. “Just the part specifically about him, his confession, his truck, that kind of stuff. But it provides a little more than what I gave you before.”

  Coleman was becoming an enigma. Rigid in some ways, yet … “Why Snow, you really don’t operate by the book, do you?”

  She was also getting better and better at ignoring me. “I figured maybe we could go over it tonight at my place, and then we can interview Floyd again, say, tomorrow? Maybe we don’t need any more evidence. Maybe he’s been thinking about what he did. Maybe it will take less pressure than we think to make him tell us the truth. I’ve even been imagining, what if that body on his truck, what if the real killer gave it to him?”

  “Whoa, girl. Maybe we’re getting ahead of ourselves with this intuition business. Give me what you’ve got so I can take it home. I think better alone. I’ll see if there’s anything we can take to Floyd Lynch tomorrow that will make him change his story.”

  Twenty-two

  I had spent the rest of the afternoon bumming around with Carlo—Walmart, Home Depot, that sort of thing—and baked the meatloaf I had prepared that morning. For the rest of the evening I threw all my remaining energy into acting serene, aided by watching Schwarzenegger duke it out with Predator, which always relaxes me. Carlo had never seen the movie and he even confessed to enjoying it. So despite my wanting to get working on the material Coleman had given me, I wasn’t able to do so until I slammed awake around four the next morning, hot-flash hot, thinking about the dead guy in the van.

  Nothing to be done about that, so I quietly slipped out of bed, fired up the coffeepot, and headed into my office. With a pad beside me to jot down whatever action would be necessary, I poured through the slim binder, compelling enough reading to take my mind off the things I couldn’t control.

  Not even this was the whole thing. It was missing all the photographs, which Coleman had not taken the time to copy, and everything regarding the original series of Route 66 killings. This report went from Floyd Lynch’s capture at 11:19 P.M. July 26 on page 1 to his signed confession on page 268. Along the way there were crime-scene-processing reports, lists of physical evidence found on the truck and on his person: Plastic bags lining the cab where the mummy rested while he drove. Trace evidence of Natron, which had been used to mummify the body. Body hair (only his and the mummy’s) despite the plastic bags. A Jeffery Deaver novel, so worn it looked like he had read it over and over, not remembering the plot.

  A printout of an e-book called How to Kill Women and Get Away With It, by Anonymous. The copyright was 2009. Along with the printouts we had seen the day before, another odd choice for an already-successful serial killer. I wrote, “find out if the copyright is registered with the Library of Congress, if so under what name.”

  A small battery-powered video player with, unsurprisingly, a DVD called Zombie Strippers inside, the one he’d described in his interrogation. Cheap watch. Extra pair of jeans and several T-shirts. Socks and briefs. Small toiletries bag of the kind he could take into a truck stop to clean up. Road atlas. GPS device. Cell phone. Trucking logs.

  I stopped there. Truckers had to keep meticulous logs of all their activities and routes, I knew, even down to number of hours slept, since they could be stopped and checked at any time to determine if they were following safety rules. Find out the dates on the logs, I wrote on my pad. Find out how long a trucker is expected to keep his logs. Find out if he kept his old logs anywhere. Compare to company GPS records during the time he was working for a company, if they had GPS systems in place then.

  Sudden flash of inspiration: I got my tote bag and pulled the postcards out that Zach had given to me. Sure enough, the latest one was sent in June, not too long before Lynch was caught. It had a postmark of June 7, sent from Las Vegas with a picture of the strip at night. Bingo. Check current logs to see where Lynch was on June 7, I wrote.

  By eight in the morning my list had grown: check numbers programmed into his cell phone, find out trucking company Lynch had worked for from 2000 to 2007 when he bought his own truck, interview whoever he reported to during that time, talk to likely contacts at truck stops on his routes, get history of credit card purchases. I thought a little more, then added: go through trash found in car, check beer cans for prints and run against AFIS. The chances of anyone following through on that were really slim, since most of those cans had been drunk by local teenagers, but someone had picked those cans up from the ground and put them in the car. And remembering my last conversation with Sigmund, I wrote: find out more about “lot lizard,” the Jane Doe in the front seat of the Dodge.

  I sent the list as an attachment to Coleman’s private e-mail account so she could get started getting the information, along with a list of questions we could ask Floyd Lynch at an interview that afternoon. She responded immediately: Got it gotta run meet jail 3 BTW you were right! Sort of.

  I went back to the murder book, started on the summaries of the autopsy reports, beginning with the Jane Doe found on the truck. Mummification, blah blah, extensive hard tissue blah blah, postmortem mutilation blah blah. Nothing I didn’t already know.

  I was about to get a caffeine dose when, after a warning salvo from the Pugs, I could hear a recognizable voice talking to Carlo at the front door. Like a criminal, I hid the pad I was writing on in my tote bag. I came out of my office to find Max Coyote standing somewhat at attention in the middle of the great room, hat in hand, but still in uniform and looking ready for business.

  Like I said, Max and Carlo were friends. At any other time Max might have arrived for a game of cards or a discussion of existentialism. I would have fixed them sandwiches and listened to jokes that started with, “Sartre and a donkey go into a bar…”

  But Max’s presence here so soon after my experience in the wash could only mean one thing: someone had seen me—I’d been busted. Still, no use confessing outright. I forced the words around my heart, which had become lodged in my throat. “You coming to check up on me?” I joked.

  Max looked a little pale. “You should see what we found down in the wash a couple hours ago. I knew you lived close by, so I thought I’d stop in and tell you myself.”

  I was cautiously relieved; it didn’t sound as if he’d instantly connected me.

  “Sit down, Max,” Carlo said. “Can we get you some coffee?”
>
  Max took his time getting settled on the high wooden stool that Carlo directed him to, and slowly placed his hat on the breakfast counter without noticing the rocks that had been set there to dry. The same rocks I had picked up the day I killed the guy he was going to tell me about. The rocks I had forgotten to move into the yard like I usually did. Why did I leave them on the counter? I tried not to watch the rocks while trying to keep the carafe from knocking against Jane’s Bavarian china coffee cup as I poured his coffee. Instead, I watched him. Even at his most excited Max was so slow and somber your first inclination was to comfort him even if you were the one in trouble. He might have seemed a trifle intense just now, but with Max it was hard to tell. Despite his apparently not being here to arrest me, I nevertheless curled my fingers and imagined them black with fingerprint ink.

  He looked doubtfully at the cup and saucer I had given him, as if his only problem was whether he could get his wienerlike fingers through the handle. After some deliberation, he wrapped his whole hand around the cup and took a solemn sip, heightening the drama of what I hoped wouldn’t be bad news.

  Making a small show of bravely hiding chronic back pain, a woman incapable of committing homicide, let alone staging a vehicle crash, I pulled myself up onto the stool next to his.

  He ran his hand through his perfectly combed dusty-dark hair, as if the hat had mussed it, which it had not. “Wait till you hear this.”

  Before Carlo could profess curiosity, or I could force myself to breathe, Max spotted the rocks on the counter between us. “Did you get these from your usual place?”

  He knew I went down to that part of the wash. I’d often left him and Carlo at the dining room table for one of their poker and philosophy sessions and come back before he was gone. I had to answer the question honestly or Carlo would know I was lying. Pointing to the rocks, “You bet. Look at the new specimens for my rock garden.”