Rage Against the Dying

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.

It 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.