“Eight including the one on his truck.”
Lynch nodded, “You want the one in the back.”
Benny pushed the seat forward on hinges that had suffered from a fine dust that could get in anywhere, even a closed-up car. But he managed to expose the backseat, with trash like in the front. This was cleared as well, and, as if by prior agreement, trying not to appear all dramatic about it, the others stepped back to let me have the first look.
At first glimpse the pain that I thought had finally eased up hit me in my gut, forcing me to bend and brace my hands on my knees, looking down until the blood came back to my head. Then I toughed up, because nobody, not Lynch not nobody, was going to see me react. It’s only evidence, I thought again, pretending I was bent over so I could better peer into the dusky interior of the Dodge.
She, her body, that is, was naked like the one in the front. The flesh was rippled in some places, shiny at the tops and dull in the valleys. Instead of being carefully curled up she seemed to have been thrown more casually onto her back, her knees pushed up to get the door shut and her upper torso at an uncomfortable angle against the other door. The head was nearly detached from the rest of the body from the lack of support as the corpse aged.
After Benny did his thing one more time with the camera I got a flashlight from him and shined its light on the face. The lips had lost their plumpness, making the teeth more prominent in the slightly open mouth. The lids had receded from the eyes, which were as dull as the surrounding flesh, like a clay statue. It didn’t much look like Jessica, it hardly looked human, but I wished I had something to cover her with just the same.
The hair was dark straw, but not so long that you couldn’t see one of the ears was missing. That made me shine the flashlight at her ankles, and confirmed that at least one had been slashed at the back, at the Achilles tendon.
“This is a Route 66 victim,” I said.
“Can you tell it’s Jessica Robertson?” Coleman asked.
“It’s Jessica Robertson, all right,” Lynch said. All attention turned to him again and you could tell he liked it that way.
Again I spoke directly to Lynch. “Did you know this woman was an FBI agent?” That was another thing we kept from the media.
Coleman started, “He said he knew, Agent Quinn, she told—”
“She said so; she thought I’d let her go because of that,” Lynch interrupted, and he seemed for a moment to become a little more animated, shuffling his feet as if this would help him keep the floor. “This is what I get life for, bringing you out here. That’s what you call quid pro quo.”
Royal Hughes, the PD, pressed his lips together and turned his head, trying not to show his distaste. “It’s probably better if—”
I thought of this shmuck who had taken eight lives and thereby ruined those of everyone who loved them, while his only concern was escaping the consequences of his homicidal lust. “Quid pro quo,” I moved my lips and tongue slowly as if the words took up more space in my mouth than words usually do. “Do you know what that means?”
Lynch said, “It means I show you the bodies and I get life.”
“And where did you get that phrase, Floyd? It sounds vaguely like something I heard,” I snapped my fingers a couple times as if I was trying to remember, “in a movie once.”
“Silence of the Lambs,” he offered eagerly.
“That’s right!” My voice dipped near a whisper. “Because you sound like Hannibal Lecter talking to Clarice Starling. Do you think you’re Anthony Hopkins?” I pointed to Coleman. “Do you think this is fuckin’ Jodie Foster and we’re making a movie here?” In retrospect I guess my voice might have started to grate. I guess maybe I looked like this is what they’d been waiting for, like I was going to go for him because Benny and Ray got still, Phillips looked edgier than before and glanced at Max, and Sigmund put his hand on my shoulder but removed it quickly when he felt the response of the muscle underneath.
Royal Hughes clenched his abs and raised his palms like he was doing push-ups against the air. “It might be…” I could