Rage Against the Dying

by Becky Masterman

  “The fact is, Mr. Lynch, it may comfort you to know we’re here because we think that Floyd didn’t commit the crimes he confessed to,” Coleman said.

  Lynch turned his head away from us and stared at some buffle grass that hugged the side of the trailer. He looked like a man who expected little in the way of comfort, ever.

  “And we’re here trying to corroborate a few remaining questions,” I said. “Can you think of a reason why Floyd would take blame for something he didn’t do?”

  “Nope.” Lynch took a bitter drag off his cigarette, jerking his head as if his lungs alone weren’t strong enough to pull in all the smoke he craved. “Because I think he did,” he said after he exhaled it. “That boy always had bad blood.”

  “Bad blood?” I asked.

  “Evil seed, I think they call it. Look, I don’t know what you were expecting from me. Maybe somebody ashamed because his son is a serial killer. Maybe you’d like to see me wringing my hands and crying. Well, let me tell you something. I was glad when he finally left home and I didn’t have to worry about him killing anyone close by.” Lynch paused as if he were listening to an echo of his words, made the heh-heh sound again, and looked to us to laugh, too.

  Coleman and I could not bring ourselves to comply.

  “When was the last time you saw Floyd?” Coleman asked again.

  “He got his own rig about four years ago. Came around to show it off to us.”

  “Was your wife alive at the time?”

  “No. Why, you wanna pin that on him, instead?” Lynch laughed, louder this time but with as little mirth as before.

  “What did you think of Floyd’s truck? Did he take you inside, show it to you?”

  “Didn’t go inside. I was hopeful, though. It’s a big deal when a man can afford his own rig. I figured I could stop wondering when someone like you would show up with questions about him, heh-heh.”

  I could see now how the laughter was a cover, maybe had always been a cover, for the fears he had denied. Perhaps his son’s capture was, in some part, a release. Maybe he really looked forward to a time when his son was dead.

  Four years ago Floyd Lynch bought the truck. I did a mental calculation and figured at that point Lynch was tiring of going up the mountain to Jessica’s body. Maybe that was partly the motivation for buying his own rig, so he’d be more comfortable storing a body in it.

  “Did he just come to show you the truck? Is that all?”

  Lynch thought back a moment. “He told me how successful he was, how he was making a ton a money.”

  “He didn’t tell you anything about his life?”

  Wilbur Lynch glazed over a bit. Almost as if he didn’t realize he was speaking aloud, “Something.”

  “What’s that?”

  He seemed surprised to find us sitting there, had to go on. “A box that he asked me to keep.”

  “Do you still have it?” Coleman asked. Her tone was a little too eager and I hoped Lynch wouldn’t notice.

  “I never thought about that box until just now.”

  “Could we see it?”

  “He said it was just books.”

  “We’d still like to see it if you wouldn’t mind too much.”

  He considered, possibly, whether it would be more to his benefit if he agreed or refused. “I’ll see if it’s still there.” Lynch uncoiled himself from the chair and started into the trailer without speaking, apparently a little curious himself.

  “Would you mind if we came along?” Coleman asked.

  He didn’t say no, so we followed him in.

  The word “squalor” was invented for the interior of the trailer, ten feet wide and twenty feet long. Over time the dust had found its way in here, too, mixed with hair oil and thickened into a patina on the back of the shabby couch. Intersecting rings of various shade and depth where countless aluminum cans puckered the wood veneer coffee table. The kitchen area smelled like it was waiting to catch fire.

  Lynch led us down the right hallway to a bedroom, where the roar of the AC window unit in the living room was quieter. The desert-frosted windows there made me feel encased. “He and his brother used to share this room before he left,” Lynch said.

  Pretty much the only thing in the room was a mattress that must have become a little cramped for two growing boys. A sheet lay wadded up on top of it. Both the mattress and the sheet were the same shade of gray. A small pile of clothes in the corner presumably served as the closet. The only other thing in the room was a stack of five boxes towering nearly to the low ceiling in the far corner, each one smaller than the one underneath it, an empty pint bottle of Jack resting on the narrow ledge formed by the largest box at the bottom.

  Lynch pulled the boxes down and looked in each one, then handed them to Coleman, who gamely placed them in another stack in the other corner. When he got down to the last box he knelt down. This one was sealed.

  A mason jar filled with alcohol and ears. Or vacuum-sealed in a baggy. Or at least something that connected Lynch to the man who tried to kill me.

  He seemed to reconsider for a moment opening it, or at least opening it in front of us, but then took a Swiss Army knife from his right back jeans pocket and pulled out the blade. He wasn’t about to just give up something that may have been of value. He neatly sliced through the single strip of packing tape and lifted the cardboard flaps.

  The box was loosely packed enough so that Lynch could push the contents around with his blade. As the three of us leaned forward all we could see were some crime novels and porn and thriller DVDs.

  “I told you he was a reader,” Lynch said. He dug into the box, using the blade of his knife with a combination of curiosity and hesitation, like someone who doesn’t want to reach bare-handed into a dark hole. He pulled out a few of the items and put them on the floor next to the box while Coleman and I stood watching him to see what he would find and what his reaction would be.

  He drew out a DVD of a National Geographic program called The Mummy Roadshow, read the back of it still as if he were alone, and placed it on the floor next to the box. Then he found a manila folder, opened it, and paged through articles about serial killers that had been printed off a computer. I was standing just behind him, which allowed me to read some of the names over his shoulder: Ted Bundy, the Green River Killer, Jeffrey Dahmer, the BTK killer, Son of Sam, the Route 66 killer. Also a description of Natron, its uses, and how to order it. Also a printout of the home page of a site devoted to information and discussions about serial killers in general. Apparently unaffected by these things, Lynch put the folder on top of the video and looked back inside the box.

  A glimpse of something tucked down on one side between the cardboard and the books got his attention, and he hooked it with his knife, pulling it out of the box and staring. It was just a shabby old dog collar, brown with silver studs, the leash still attached.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “This collar. Had a dog. Barky. A good dog. The boys told me he ran away, but maybe I’m misrecalling.” Lynch seemed a little dazed. He didn’t say heh-heh.

  “Did you still have Barky when Floyd came with his truck to visit you?” I asked gently.

  That finally did it. He shed his careful façade as if he had been able to deny the unspeakable reality until this moment. “Oh fuck,” he breathed in the voice of a very old man, the indignity that was his son too much on display in this artifact.

  We were interrupted by the sound of boot heels ringing up the metal steps and the trailer door crashing open. “Hey Dad!” a voice called over the muffled roar of the AC unit. “You ready to hunt us some wetbacks?”

  “We got company,” Lynch called back, a little too quickly, from his kneeling position.

  I glanced at Coleman and saw she understood why I had told her not to park in the yard. You never know what you’ll hear if you don’t leave your car in the yard.

  The man who owned the voice skidded to a stop as he saw us, and stared.

  I eyed
Mike right back. His haircut, shaved to the scalp back and sides, with a longer patch on the top of his head, looked like a portobello mushroom cap. Largely due to the haircut combined with a menacing air, he was the kind of man who looks silly and scares you at the same time, the kind you doubt will someday grow out of his rage. I didn’t ask what Floyd’s brother might mean by “hunting some wetbacks” but felt confident he wasn’t recruiting migrant farm labor.

  He looked at his father rather than us when he said, “What are you doing back here?”

  “They’re from the Ef-Bee-Eye,” Lynch said as precisely, as meaningfully as he could, but there was no telling from Mike’s unchanged expression if he was able to spell. “They don’t think Floyd killed those girls.”

  Mike strode back down the hall, speaking without turning around. “Come on, Pop,” he said. “We’re losing daylight.”

  Lynch rose and shouted after Mike, “Hey, did Floyd take Barky with him?”

  I peered through the desert-frosted window where Mike had moved very quickly to saunter toward the dirt bike at the edge of the property. Lynch started after him.

  I picked up the box before he could think about selling the contents on eBay and asked, “Would you mind if we took the box along, Mr. Lynch? You don’t seem to have any use for this stuff.”

  “Mr. Lynch, what was in that box doesn’t necessarily prove your son is a serial killer,” Coleman said.

  Lynch started to turn away, snapping as he did, “Oh, just kill him and get it over with.”

  I saw us losing control of the interview, gave Coleman a hard look. This wasn’t an authorized visit and we needed to make the most of it. She stopped him and handed him a card, which he tucked in his shirt pocket without looking at it. “Mr. Lynch, do you know of anyone else who might have been associated with your son over the years?”

  “Can’t rightly say,” he said, heading quickly down the hall to the living room as if he couldn’t care less how long we stayed.

  “Is there anyone who might benefit from your son confessing to the Route 66 murders?” I called after him as he went out the front door. “Did he ever mention any name at all?”

  But Lynch had other things on his mind. Over the growl of the motorbike he set his feet wide apart and yelled at his son with raw fury, “You tell me, goddamit. You get off that fuckin’ bike and tell me if Floyd killed my dog.”

  As we stepped down the rickety metal steps of the trailer, between the shouting and the motor, I was able to come closer to Lynch, take off my sunglasses. I hoped to catch him off guard when I asked without Coleman hearing, “Did he ever mention the name Brigid Quinn?”

  All I was to him was an annoyance. He gripped me around the upper arm and his face came very close to mine. He tongued the groove in his lip.

  “It’s not my fault,” he said, his breath muddying the air with its shame. “You have a kid who turns out to be a monster. Doesn’t deserve to live. What do you do then? I shoulda drownded the little bastard when I had the chance.”

  Nineteen

  Coleman expertly turned on the ignition and the AC simultaneously. “Shit, we forgot to ask him if his wife was a fan of Kate Smith. That’s what Floyd said.”

  “Textbook interviews only happen in the textbooks,” I said. “Here’s to Barky. May he rest in peace.”

  She said, “I never said Floyd was a nice man. Did you know he said he experimented by mummifying animals?”

  “Yes, that was part of the video you gave me, but the family pet? I mean, come on.”

  “Still not a capital offense,” Coleman said. She deftly maneuvered her Prius out of the trailer park and onto the main street of Benson. “I’m going to stop at that Burger King we saw on the way in to get a Coke for the ride back. Want something?”

  “Yes. Don’t go through the drive-through, park so I can go inside and pee. And please get me a Coke, too.”

  I did, she did, and we were back on I-10 in short order heading west while slurping our sodas. It’s about an hour’s drive back to Tucson proper, so she got chitchatty the way people do on long automobile rides after interviewing a couple of jerkwads. It’s a way of assuring yourself you’re one of the normal people.

  “How did you get into the Bureau?” she asked.

  I slurped the remaining soda, jiggled the ice to make the most of it. “Family was a cop family, dad and brother in city police, sister joined the CIA. My sister Ariel and I played with Barbies, but they busted Ken for possession instead of going to the prom.” Coleman laughed, I assume because she thought I was kidding. “How about you?”

  “I joined right in the middle of the Route 66 killings,” Coleman said. “I thought you got lousy treatment, by the way, then and, and later.” “Later” would be code for when I shot the perp. “I thought you were one of the best,” she said.

  “I’m not dead yet,” I said. Time to change the focus: “Beyond the ears, that whole interrogation video was something to watch. Good work. You spent a lot of time with that guy. Pretty disgusting, huh?”

  “Not—” and stopped to clear her throat.

  I was rapidly coming to recognize that Coleman always had something on her mind and that she always started by talking about something trivial first, like how I came to join the Bureau. Facing straight ahead, I said, “Coleman, you may have heard things about the kind of person I am. One thing I’m not is a therapist. We don’t have limitless sessions to indulge in, so spit out what’s on your mind. I promise not to shriek with laughter or twitter it.”

  Coleman took a deep breath. In my peripheral vision I could see her grip the steering wheel a little more tightly. “I read all those books, like the one by David Weiss, to get ready for the interviews. Before I started them, I thought to myself, kind of excited, ‘ooh, here I am, I’m going into the mind of the monster’ like they say.

  “The scary thing is, it never happened. Like you said, I was expecting ‘disgusting.’ But after a while, I think it happened shortly after that session you saw, it felt like I was just talking to some guy, all right, some totally fucked up guy, but not the inhuman monster I was expecting.”

  “What did you expect, somebody who laughed evilly while twirling his mustaches?”

  “Couldn’t he have looked at least a little like Charles Manson?” Coleman finally laughed, and it eased us both. “Well, yeah, yeah, I kind of did expect him to look that way. It was almost like, he was too much like one of us, Brigid. Kind of a pathetic jerk, but I was unnerved because he was a human being and I was expecting something else.”

  “Let’s cut to the chase. He got you with the business about the popularity of vampire movies, how there’s something of a turn-on in combining sex and death.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “All right, yes.”

  “We’re a depraved race. To some extent, Lynch is right. We might as well admit it.”

  I turned to look at her. She had drawn her lips between her teeth and her eyes narrowed, as if her face was closing in on itself for protection. I wondered what she would say if I told her how I’d killed the guy in the wash. I pretended I was sucking wet air through a hose, joked to lighten the mood, “Luke. Come to the dark side.”

  She didn’t laugh that time, so I went for the more serious approach. “Hey, Coleman, don’t worry about it. Liking the Twilight series is a far cry from draining someone’s blood. We all embrace our inner serial killer at some point. Because, because,” I said, rapping my knuckles lightly on my window to make sure I had her attention and accentuate the point, “that’s precisely one of the things that will make you so good at this it will scare you.”

  Coleman gave a weak but semi-encouraged smile. “Except, how do you know if you’re empathizing with someone not because of the killer in you, but because they’re not a killer after all?”

  “Your intuition, you mean.”

  She nodded.

  “I’ve been there, Coleman. You said it yourself the other day. Sometimes you can
be so certain who the bad guy is you don’t sleep till you prove it, even if it takes decades. But every once in a while it works the other way, like now. After all that time you spent with Lynch, in your core you knew he wasn’t a killer. You couldn’t stop thinking about it. That was what made you ask about the ears, and that was why you noticed his reaction when no one else did.”

  She nodded again.

  “So I say you go with your intuition. Just don’t tell the men I said so.”

  Coleman grew quiet after that, maybe mulling over what we’d talked about for the rest of the drive. Thinking she might want to talk some more, I suggested we stop at Emery’s Cantina for lunch. She agreed, and pulled in to the space next to my car when we got back to the Bureau office. I told her I’d be there as soon as I checked up on Zach at the hotel.

  “How is he holding up?” Coleman asked, while scanning the parking lot like she was looking for someone, or hoping someone wouldn’t see us.

  I waggled my head. “That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

  “Are you going to tell him that Lynch’s confession is suspect?”

  “Hell no, I don’t want to tell him anything this time until I’m sure we have something solid to prove Lynch’s confession false. We need to find the physical evidence, and we need to present it to Lynch in such a way that he’ll tell the truth. Until we can do that, Morrison doesn’t have to listen.”

  Coleman gave a little grimace. “Lynch signed the confession this morning and his hearing is scheduled for Thursday.”

  “Three days to recant before it gets in the news and Morrison looks like an even bigger jerk. I remember the guy hates to look like a jerk worse than anything, and he comes by it so easily. Shit.”

  “And despite what you say about following my intuition, the evidence in that box makes him seem more guilty than ever.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” I said. “Why would you research other killers, go to the trouble to print their stories and store them, if you were a famous serial killer in your own right? It makes him seem more like a wannabe. See you.” I got out of her car.