if there was a statute of limitations on how many times she would come to the table. Funny how, after spending the past two days with a serial killer and assorted dead bodies, neither of us had the courage or energy to object to the pressure of an assertive waitress. We defaulted to taco salads. As Coleman closed her menu, I spotted the name on the cover. “Emery’s Cantina,” I remarked. “Is that ironic?”
“No, why?” asked the waitress.
“Cantina. Emery. Emery sounds about as Mexican as … Moishe,” I suggested, the vodka stimulating my creativity.
“The Mexican theme is a common leitmotif in the Southwest,” she said with a carefully straight face as she extended one hand palm up toward the bartender. “That’s Emery, the owner. He’s Hungarian. I’m Cheri. I’m not.” Said Hungarian was leaning across the Formica bar comforting some clearly off-duty cop who was also not following the two-light-beer rule. I heard, “a taxi.”
I raised my glass and clinked the remaining ice. Coleman asked, “Do you have any wine, Cheri?”
“The house burgundy’s palatable after the first glass,” she said.
“Iced tea, please.”
“Oh come on,” I said. “Give it a little effort.”
“Okay, a light beer. Any brand.”
Cheri went off to put in our order.
“Leitmotif?” I asked, not because I cared but to end a small uncomfortable silence that Coleman could fill only so long by arranging her jacket over the back of the chair, fussing with the napkin around her own silverware, and using the napkin to polish her glasses.
“Everyone in Tucson is either getting a degree or writing a book,” Coleman said, and pointed back over to the end of the bar where Cheri, after bringing us the beer and a second vodka, now sat reading an introduction to criminal justice textbook propped against one of those jars of pickled pigs’ feet that no one ever eats.
“I know that. What I meant was, what’s the difference between a leitmotif and a plain motif?” I asked her.
“I don’t know,” she admitted and, for the first time since we’d met the day before, smiled. But she still wouldn’t quite look me in the eye, and passed her hand again over her birthmark.
I guessed this had something to do with trouble over not getting authorization from Morrison for Sig’s and my involvement, but she wasn’t ready to tell me yet. We talked about the office some, people we both knew, drank a little more, talked a little more, ate our salads when they came, but Coleman took a while to get to the point of why she had agreed so eagerly to meet me, and it wasn’t to bask in my fame or apologize for her lapse in following procedure. There was a line being drawn and she wanted me on her side of it.
“So what did you think of Lynch?” she asked. She seemed to pin me with her eyes, trying to catch my reaction before I spoke.
The feeling I had at the scene after being with Lynch came back to me, but I tried to ignore it. I said, carefully, “Narcissistic, conscienceless, repulsive. Every inch a sociopath. Though not totally the one I expected.”
“What did Dr. Weiss think of him? I read his profile of the Route 66 killer in Criminal Profiling. Did he think Lynch matched it?”
I felt my first genuine smile of the day. “You have to say the whole title to get the full impact: Theory and Practice of Criminal Profiling: An Interdisciplinary Case Study Approach. Sigmund will be so tickled to know somebody read it.”
“Sigmund? It is David, isn’t it?”
“David, sure, we’ve known each other a long time, since he was brought in to help set up the Behavioral Science Unit in the seventies. We called him Sigmund for Freud; you know how everybody gets a nickname.”
“I saw you two talking yesterday. I just wondered if he had an opinion.”
I felt like the lights went up. I knew now that she hadn’t gone around Morrison because she just forgot procedure. I knew that with Weiss having been dismissed I was the only one she could turn to, and I wondered why. I dipped my upper lip in my drink to indicate my control while I thought about how to respond. I didn’t tell her Sigmund refused to say much at all. “I don’t know, there were a few surprises. For starters, we would have expected a stronger guy who could lift a hundred pounds deadweight overhead into his cab. I always pictured Route 66 being smarter, too,