myself, it’s evidence, it’s only evidence, while another part of my mind whispered all these years you’ve been looking for her this is where she’s been.
Even close up, through the filter of the dust covering the windows, you couldn’t see much. Benny removed a digital camera from his equipment bag and took shots from every angle. Then he and Ray donned latex gloves and, given a nod from Coleman, tried to open the driver’s-side door.
Lynch pointed with one hand, which, cuffed, drew the other up like marionette’s arms connected by a single string. “She’s—”
“Let the men do their work,” Coleman said.
The door creaked open a couple inches, then stuck. Ordered around by Benny, and cursing under his breath, Ray scrambled quickly back up to the van and returned with a can of WD-40 while the rest of us waited, feeling useless.
Ray sprayed the hinge through the gap, worked the door some, sprayed it some more. With a groan the door of the long-closed-up vehicle finally opened all the way. I could feel us all brace, but if we were expecting that overpowering smell of putrefaction, there was none. Instead, it smelled like grandma’s housecoat folded away unwashed after her death. Not unpleasant, just distinctly human.
The front seat, the old kind from before bucket seats where the bench extended unbroken by the gear shift jutting out from the steering column, was largely filled with what looked like dry garbage. Old crumpled newspapers, rags, quite a few beer cans that added another aroma to the scene. Benny snapped more photos.
“Now we know where all the trash went,” Max said.
Benny and Ray pulled garbage bags out of their pockets and, while the rest of us waited, silently removed the trash out of the car with a care approaching that of archaeologists on a dig. Ray moved to the other side, slipping a bit down the steeper slope on which the car leaned and, with a little more effort, popped open the passenger door as well to get to that side more easily.
While they worked Lynch stayed silent and apart, breathing only lightly, yet tensed, the way you expect a jack-in-the-box to look coiled in the dark while the music is still playing. His eyes drifted around the group without moving his head as if he didn’t want us to know he was looking. I watched his gaze come to rest on Sigmund, maybe wondering who he was and what he was doing here. Sigmund stared back at him, as he would at something smeared on a slide, before turning his attention back to the car.
After a while Lynch lifted his cuffed hands to his face and stroked it with his nails going up and his fingertips going down. It must have been a habit; his cheek was slightly scabby with all the stroking. He was unable to stay silent.
“I threw the trash in there so if some hikers came by and tried to look in, you couldn’t see,” Lynch said. He spoke in a careful monotone, but with an underlying current, an excited man trying to appear calm.
When the trash on the front seat was nearly clear, I could see first a couple of planks that entered my consciousness as big logs of beef jerky and then morphed into naked legs. The whole body was naked and brown like that, dark leather curled up like a monster fetus. Benny looked at me, and then at Max, who nodded. Benny took photos of the body.
I couldn’t find my voice to ask before Max did. “That’s her,” he said.
“No.” Lynch had started breathing faster, out of sync with the rest of us who were holding ours. He stopped stroking his face. “I tried to tell you.” With the same flat tone as he had spoken about trash, no more no less, “That’s just the lot lizard. It’s been there a lot longer.”
I hadn’t meant to speak to Lynch except through Coleman or Hughes, his lawyer, but seeing this other body that Lynch referred to as a lot lizard, a prostitute who hangs out at truck stops, this surprised me. “You mean you killed another woman and hid the body rather than posing it?”
“Yeah, the first time,” he said.
“When?” I asked.
He paused. “Just before the second one,” he said, with no apparent sarcasm.
Coleman said to me, “You didn’t know?”
I shook my head. “How could I?”
“Sorry, you’re right. It only came out in the interrogation. I should have mentioned on the way here.”
“Eight victims, then,” I said.