Rage Against the Dying

by Becky Masterman

  I thought again about Zach alone out in the waiting room and wanted to get back to him, but Coleman was talking now. “In his interrogation Lynch said he’d been using Jessica’s body for several years but got tired of driving up the mountain road and worried someone would spot him. So he started experimenting with animals and ended up with the body he had on his truck when we caught him.” She turned to Manriquez, “Would you send me both the reports, for Jessica and for the other body found in the car?”

  “Sure. I’ve got it over here.” Manriquez walked to the far end of the autopsy lab where the other body waited on a gurney, covered with another green cloth. Max and Coleman turned their attention to it as Manriquez withdrew the cloth. I saw the dark tissue that was speckled here and there with yellowed bits, pieces of trash that had stuck to it before it completely dried. I left the others gazing at the body, Manriquez enthusiastically waving his hands as if he was going to levitate it. He was saying, “This one was fairly intact, like that of Jessica Robertson.”

  Max said, “Intact? The heads came off when they took them out of the car and this one is in pieces.”

  Manriquez said, “I’m talking hard-tissue damage.”

  “Hey, I gotta go,” I said, still standing next to Jessica’s body, but no one heard me.

  Eight

  I took Zach to the Sheraton nearby, at the corner of Campbell and Speedway, got him situated in room 174, ordered him a Salisbury steak and mashed potatoes from room service, and made small talk until they arrived. I sat in the chair at the desk and he sat on the edge of the bed nearest me. I wanted to slip him one of the Valiums I kept in my tote, but thought better of it since I saw him looking at the liquor list on the room service menu. He didn’t seem to want to talk about his experience at the medical examiner’s office. He assured me he would be all right, preferred to be alone. I didn’t believe him, but what can you do? He was a grown man.

  “You shouldn’t have been there,” I said again, at the same time stalling and wanting to go, like the last friend at a wake.

  “No, you see, I had to do it. Kind of go to the bottom.”

  He didn’t have to explain about going to the bottom. I understood, and knew I couldn’t follow him there. I said, “I’ll make the arrangements for Jessica’s body myself. Will you be taking her back to Michigan?”

  “No, that was never her home. I guess she’s gotten used to this area. She should stay.”

  I could have mentioned my husband was an ex-priest and could assist with a memorial service, but neither Zach nor I had believed in that for a long time. “When are you planning to fly back?”

  “I don’t have a return ticket yet.” There was the same stoop to his bony shoulders I had seen when he arrived, but now his eyes had a kind of a glitter that unsettled me when he said, “Just leave me here for now, okay, Brigid?”

  “You’re not going to do anything stupid, are you?”

  “Like kill myself? There’s only a butter knife with that food you got me, and you put me on the first floor.” He almost smiled. “We’ve been through a lot together, haven’t we? You know me better than anyone I’ve ever known.”

  Yes. I knew Zach long enough not to try saying lame things like, “God never gives you anything you can’t handle.” So instead I said, which was nearly as foolish, “Will you sleep?”

  “No.” He smiled as if the question would have been meaningless at any point in the last seven years but now was utterly absurd. He pushed himself off the bed and went to the window and pulled aside the curtain to look out at the parking lot, spoke without turning.

  “Brigid?”

  “What, Zach.”

  “Lynch made a deal, didn’t he?”

  It was the one thing I hadn’t told him, and I should have known he’d notice the omission. I didn’t answer.

  “I want to see him, too,” he said.

  “No, Zach.” And this time I meant it. “I promise to call you when we get a date for sentencing, and you can read your statement in court.”

  He could tell I would hold firm, and turning from the window, he stared at me as if he had seen nothing but his daughter until this point. “It’s been a long time, but you look good. The sadness is still there underneath, but falling in love has given you a nice glow. And the desert climate has been easy on you.”

  “Maybe, but the cost of moisturizer is killing me,” I joked. I often joke when I feel awkward.

  “You need to go,” he said.

  “I really don’t,” I said, walking over to the tray that had been placed on the desk. “Look, I got you some coffee. I’ll pour you a cup. You like it black with fake sugar, right?”

  He shook his head, unable to hide his mild annoyance at my attentiveness. “If you won’t go away I’ve got something to show you.” He tottered—good lord, he tottered and he was only fifty-three—over to the bed where he had tossed his black carry-on. Unzipping a side pocket, he took out a picture of Jessica and handed it to me. It showed her next to a multicolored image that took up two-thirds of the photo, leaving her a small figure on the side. “This was the last picture I had of her, taken at the hot-air balloon festival in Albuquerque. It’s not the best picture, but it’s the most recent.”

  I studied the picture, a neatly laminated five by seven, without taking it from him, without knowing what to say. They say a woman is good at knowing what to say at moments like this, but that’s one of the women I’ve never been. After a few seconds he seemed to recognize that nothing more would be said or done about his photograph, and leaned it against the lamp next to the bed.

  I thought that was all, but he went into the same pocket and drew out a dozen postcards. Now this, this I knew before he said another word. Zach had been getting these postcards periodically throughout the months and years after Jessica’s disappearance. There had been four of them: a picture of a grinning alligator from Florida, a lone trumpet player in New Orleans, Hello from Carlsbad Caverns, a close-up of a scorpion—I remembered them all. And all had the same message, “Having a wonderful time with my new friend. Wish you were here. Love, Jessica.”

  I remembered all the time we lost with laboratory analysis and document examiners. Looking for fingerprints, hoping for DNA on the postage stamps that were always peel and stick, tracking down the post offices, interviewing the postal workers there, rushing off to the locations mentioned on the cards looking for clues. The text and address were printed out from a computer somewhere and attached to the card with clear tape. Yes, we checked both sides of that tape for trace and impression evidence, too.

  I had known some truly disgusting assholes in my career, but whoever sent these postcards after Jessica Robertson’s death was the worst I had ever known. It hadn’t been enough to torture, rape, and murder her. This killer, maybe because the victim was an FBI agent, was prolonging the horror by taunting and torturing the family as well.

  I thought about the man I had met the day before, who had confessed to the crimes. I could imagine him doing something like this, and I hated him with fresh hate.

  “You’ve still been getting these?” I asked, stupidly, holding them in my hand, not bothering to look at them individually.

  “I know I was supposed to send them to you as soon as I got them, Brigid. But it wasn’t doing you any good, was it?”

  “No. We were useless.”

  “And once Elena left, and there was no one around to cry, I sort of started to look forward to them.” Zach stared at me as if asking if I could understand how he felt. I said I did. That encouraged him. “This way, I got to pretending that they really were from Jessica.”

  “When did you get the last one?” I asked.

  He riffled through the cards and pulled one out, showed me the postmark. “This one. A couple of months ago.”

  “They…” I stopped, timing that to Floyd Lynch’s movements, knowing he would have mailed it more than a month before getting caught.

  Zach shushed me. “I love you, Brigid,” he said.
r />   “I love you, too, Zach,” I said. It was one of those knee-jerk moments when they say it and you say it and nobody knows what it actually means. But it can’t hurt.

  “Now get the hell out of here and leave me alone,” he said in his toughest guy voice, holding out his hand to take the cards back from me.

  After mentioning the mashed potatoes looked pretty good, I told him I’d check in with him in the morning and take care of any paperwork to release Jessica from the medical examiner. I also asked if he wouldn’t mind my taking the postcards.

  Apparently after seeing Jessica’s body they weren’t so important to him anymore, and he gave them up. I put them into the side pocket of my tote bag, handling them with the same respect as if they were from Jessica after all.

  I certainly didn’t prefer to be alone, but couldn’t face Carlo just yet, couldn’t pretend. On my way out of the hotel I called Sigmund on his cell phone to go out for a drink. He would know how it felt to be with Zach and Jessica after all that time, and I could hear about how the insanity tests were going.

  “They’re not going at all,” he said when I asked him. “Morrison said no need, insanity’s not even on the table, and if any assessment needs to be done he’ll call in someone local. He apologized for the miscommunication.”

  “He just sent you packing?”

  “It was his call, after all. He was very polite, and quite embarrassed. I didn’t know that Agent Coleman hadn’t cleared it with him. As a matter of fact, I inadvertently mentioned that you had attended the expedition yesterday, and Morrison was annoyed by that, too. Apparently he doesn’t want you in the picture either, so Coleman violated protocol on that count as well. She may be in some trouble.”

  “I hate Morrison.”

  “So you’ve often said.”

  “You could get involved anyway. You’ve got the clout.”

  “That was always one of your problems: you never played your assigned position, always running into left field.” Sigmund never watches sports but can speak it.

  “Still, you want to get together?”

  “I’m sorry, Stinger, I should have made it clear, I’m not there. I got home an hour ago. It’s seven thirty here. But let me know if I can help you out.”

  Nice to see you, too, Sig. We said good-bye without any of those empty promises of keeping in touch.

  More reluctantly I called the Bureau office and got Coleman. I was surprised at her eagerness to meet me, which was expressed as, “Agent Quinn. Oh my God, yes. Now?”

  “I just dropped Zachariah Robertson off at his hotel so I’m still in the city,” I said. “Want to meet at that Greek restaurant near your office?”

  “Can’t. That was the last fraud case I worked and I’m about to bust them for money laundering.”

  “I heard something about that, but the gyro platters are so good,” I said, but she wasn’t listening.

  “Larry?” Her voice turned away from the phone and I heard her ask someone for a place around Campbell and Speedway. I heard a man’s voice say, “Pretty sure it’s open now.” She gave me directions to a cop bar near the Sheraton and added, after listening again to whoever on her end of the line was giving directions, “It’s Emery’s Cantina. I’m leaving the office right now.”

  Nine

  There are designated cop spots, places where everybody might not know your name, but where you can be sure they’ll cover your back because there’s a shotgun behind the bar. The Naugahyde elbow rest on the bar is cracked in places, the lighting is bad, and you try not to think about the kitchen. People besides cops go to these places, of course, like silent elderly couples on fixed incomes who appear to have said everything they have to say to each other decades before. Everyone knows it’s a safe place with reliably standard fare and dollar happy hours. This one turned out to be close to the hotel, about a mile north from the Sheraton on Campbell in a freestanding old building close to the road, one of the few in Tucson that hadn’t yet been torn down for a strip mall.

  I got there first and recognized a couple deputies from the sheriff’s office, if only by first name. Wally and Cliff both stopped grinding their burgers just long enough to lift a greasy palm in greeting, as did the bartender, one of those cheerful lugs who look like an overweight baby.

  At the bartender’s direction I took a table against the wall that was painted to look like crumbling adobe. A waitress came up before I had a chance to unstick the little white band that kept my paper napkin folded around the silverware. The waitress was in her late twenties, I thought, though young people look younger the older I get. She had a runner’s build and was African American. If I was still living in DC that last thing wouldn’t be worthy of remark, but there aren’t many black people living in Arizona.

  I could have waited for Coleman to arrive so I didn’t seem in such urgent need but holding up my palms like two scales said, “Vodka in one glass, ice in another.” Customary maximum at cop bars is generally two light beers; the cops glanced over when they heard me order. I ignored them and looked around the place, noting the Special Olympics and Toys for Tots appreciation certificates on the far wall and the usual mass of photographs of customers mugging cheerfully. It felt good to get away from Zach and meet somebody for cop talk.

  Coleman must have been booking it because she showed up before my drink was gone, so I didn’t have a chance to order a second without her knowing. When she sat down and leaned her black satchel against a leg of the chair, she looked at my glass. Though I spooned some more of the ice into the vodka glass I didn’t feel as if I had to justify myself.

  After registering my alcohol she looked around at her surroundings, at the other cops in the bar, and didn’t seem entirely comfortable with it all, too low class or too barish for her.

  “So why did you leave Fraud for Homicide? Usually people go the other way,” I asked.

  “I just felt that was what I had to do.” She gave a mild shrug to go with her nonanswer and turned up one corner of her mouth. For someone so eager to get together she was evasive, her eyes pausing only in the vicinity of mine. Under the pretext of raking her fingers through her short curls she passed a hand over a pale copper birthmark on her right temple as if she considered that birthmark her only flaw and wanted to hide it. Other than that my only impression was that in high school she might have been the sort of girl who rode on floats.

  The waitress came back. “Do you know what else you want?” she asked, as if there was a statute of limitations on how many times she would come to the table. Funny how, after spending the past two days with a serial killer and assorted dead bodies, neither of us had the courage or energy to object to the pressure of an assertive waitress. We defaulted to taco salads. As Coleman closed her menu, I spotted the name on the cover. “Emery’s Cantina,” I remarked. “Is that ironic?”

  “No, why?” asked the waitress.

  “Cantina. Emery. Emery sounds about as Mexican as … Moishe,” I suggested, the vodka stimulating my creativity.

  “The Mexican theme is a common leitmotif in the Southwest,” she said with a carefully straight face as she extended one hand palm up toward the bartender. “That’s Emery, the owner. He’s Hungarian. I’m Cheri. I’m not.” Said Hungarian was leaning across the Formica bar comforting some clearly off-duty cop who was also not following the two-light-beer rule. I heard, “a taxi.”

  I raised my glass and clinked the remaining ice. Coleman asked, “Do you have any wine, Cheri?”

  “The house burgundy’s palatable after the first glass,” she said.

  “Iced tea, please.”

  “Oh come on,” I said. “Give it a little effort.”

  “Okay, a light beer. Any brand.”

  Cheri went off to put in our order.

  “Leitmotif?” I asked, not because I cared but to end a small uncomfortable silence that Coleman could fill only so long by arranging her jacket over the back of the chair, fussing with the napkin around her own silverware, and using the napkin to polis
h her glasses.

  “Everyone in Tucson is either getting a degree or writing a book,” Coleman said, and pointed back over to the end of the bar where Cheri, after bringing us the beer and a second vodka, now sat reading an introduction to criminal justice textbook propped against one of those jars of pickled pigs’ feet that no one ever eats.

  “I know that. What I meant was, what’s the difference between a leitmotif and a plain motif?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know,” she admitted and, for the first time since we’d met the day before, smiled. But she still wouldn’t quite look me in the eye, and passed her hand again over her birthmark.

  I guessed this had something to do with trouble over not getting authorization from Morrison for Sig’s and my involvement, but she wasn’t ready to tell me yet. We talked about the office some, people we both knew, drank a little more, talked a little more, ate our salads when they came, but Coleman took a while to get to the point of why she had agreed so eagerly to meet me, and it wasn’t to bask in my fame or apologize for her lapse in following procedure. There was a line being drawn and she wanted me on her side of it.

  “So what did you think of Lynch?” she asked. She seemed to pin me with her eyes, trying to catch my reaction before I spoke.

  The feeling I had at the scene after being with Lynch came back to me, but I tried to ignore it. I said, carefully, “Narcissistic, conscienceless, repulsive. Every inch a sociopath. Though not totally the one I expected.”

  “What did Dr. Weiss think of him? I read his profile of the Route 66 killer in Criminal Profiling. Did he think Lynch matched it?”

  I felt my first genuine smile of the day. “You have to say the whole title to get the full impact: Theory and Practice of Criminal Profiling: An Interdisciplinary Case Study Approach. Sigmund will be so tickled to know somebody read it.”

  “Sigmund? It is David, isn’t it?”

  “David, sure, we’ve known each other a long time, since he was brought in to help set up the Behavioral Science Unit in the seventies. We called him Sigmund for Freud; you know how everybody gets a nickname.”