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