unfocused, but I could tell I had his attention.
“This is your logbook that places you far away from the scene of Jessica Robertson’s murder. I’ve got all your logbooks. I didn’t take the time to match up all the Route 66 murders, but the chances are you weren’t there when they happened.
“That means you’re covering for someone. I think the someone you’re covering for tried to kill me and has kidnapped Agent Laura Coleman because we got suspicious about your confession. I want the answers to some questions and I know you can give them to me.”
He licked his lips again before he could speak. “Why do you think I know anything?”
“Let me ask the questions for now. How do you know Gerald Peasil?”
“I don’t know any Gerald Peasil.”
“Then try this one: who’s got the ears?”
He grew as pale as I remembered him in the interrogation video. He started picking at the IV in his hand the way he had picked at his wart. You could tell he didn’t want to talk, but the morphine might have been acting as a kind of truth serum. “He’ll kill me, man. He said he’d kill me if I went back on my confession.”
“He. You mean the real Route 66 killer.”
He shook his hand. “Goddamn thing burns. Feels like a bee sting.” He giggled again. “Aw shit man, all I wanted to do is get a life sentence. Live. Is that too much to fuckin’ ask?”
“Maybe not, but right now the chances are against it. You’re not safe. None of us is safe. Even if you go back to jail he can get you there because you can’t run. It’s easier to kill somebody in jail than on the outside.”
The giggling turned abruptly to blubbering. When faced with the truth they often blubber.
“You’re not a killer, are you, Floyd Lynch?” I said.
“No. I’m a loser.” He looked at me with big sad eyes, like he thought he should apologize. He went to grab my hand, which was resting on the pull-down metal side, but jerked back as if appalled to encounter live flesh. “You know how you want to be somebody else so bad. I thought I could go slow, build up to it. You know?”
I looked at him a moment, and then got back on track. “Tell me the truth now, Floyd.”
And this guy who felt sorry for himself because he didn’t have big enough balls to kill people started talking the way people do when they’re drinking, like he’d found in me a new best friend. “I met him, 66, in one of those Internet chat rooms. Then we went out of the room and started to write. I’d use the computers at truck stops. He was writing to just me. It was just me. He was like, you know, the real thing. At first I told him no way was he the Route 66 killer. He was pissed. He wanted to prove he was the one. He told me all kinds of details that weren’t in the news and it sounded right to me. I pretended I was killing women, too, but I wasn’t. I made up stuff. I was ashamed to tell him I was just … just … a little dizzy … whoa.”
As if it were too heavy for his neck, Lynch’s head lolled suddenly back onto the pillow. His eyelids flickered. When he felt me take the morphine pump out of his hand he came back to me. “I didn’t kill nobody, but that body I found … making it into a mummy, that was all my idea. I ordered that stuff off the Internet. That Natron business. Nobody else thought of that but me.”
“What about 66, what else do you know about him?”
“Nuthig.” It came out slurred. I hoped nobody would be coming in to adjust his pain meds until I was finished with him. “I jush needed a little more … time … to do it.”
“Come on, Floyd. He took you to the dump site to show you the bodies.”
He shook his head and looked like the act made him dizzy. “He shed he’d hidden ’em in this old abandoned Dodge on a mountain road. I knew about that car and went to see if … maybe that was the one.”
“So you’ve never seen his face.”
Floyd shook his head, more carefully this time. “I saw the bodies and I used ’em. But I got tired of going all the way up the mountain.” He walked