but that’s all conjecture of course. Why are you asking me now?”
Coleman took a deep breath. Her body clenched as if she was expecting me to reach over and wallop her. She reached into her satchel and pulled out a sizable report that she placed in front of me with the care of being in the presence of an explosive device. Then she finally spilled. “Because I think we have a false confession.”
You don’t navigate Bureau politics for forty years without knowing what’s what. All the collegiality I’d been building for Coleman evaporated as I leapt to the implication of her words. It was all fucking bullshit and I told her so.
Ten
“So that’s why you did the end run on Morrison and called in me and Weiss without getting authorization. You went to Morrison first and he wasn’t buying it. Then you tried to get Weiss on your side early on, but he wouldn’t discuss the case without assessing Lynch first. Now Weiss is out of the picture so you’re trying to use me to back you up. Did you really think you could pull that shimmy on me?”
“Please,” she said.
I wasn’t finished. “Worst of all, you let me call the victim’s father and tell him we caught the guy.” I imagined Zachariah Robertson, how I had just left him in a hotel room with a laminated picture of his dead child. With that image fueling my anger, I leaned across the narrow table and lowered my voice. “You don’t, you do not bring a father in, show him the remains of his daughter who was tortured to death, tell him you finally found the killer, and then next day tell him never mind. Do you have any feeling at all for what that man has gone through and what it would be like to tell him sorry, our bad? Nuh-uh, Floyd Lynch is the man. He did it.”
“Would you please just listen?”
I was inclined to continue ranting, but couldn’t think of anything else to say at the moment without repeating myself. So I drained off my watered-down vodka and contented myself with glaring, while I put my hands under the table where no one could see me dig at my cuticles. I guess over the past couple of years I’d allowed myself to get a little too relaxed and I was no longer used to this crap.
Coleman took my silence as temporary acquiescence. She began with an apology for insulting my intelligence, which was the least of my concerns, then opened the report on the table and turned to a page with two columns: on one side, under the heading “Route 66 Killer,” the profile of the Route 66 killer that Sigmund had compiled, and on the other side a profile of Floyd Lynch.
“I found nineteen points,” she said. “I used this table David Weiss did as a template and found nineteen points that didn’t match.”
I took the report from her and scanned the page, saw a few characteristics I’d already spotted in Lynch. “Okay, so he’s not as physically strong as we assumed. He doesn’t seem to be as well organized, and is less articulate than we imagined. Big deal, we were wrong. We’re not always on the money.” I threw the book on the table. “Besides, Weiss says himself in his book that profiles don’t get convictions. Only evidence gets convictions. And we’re up to our ass in evidence. Lynch kept journals with all the details. He took us to Jessica Robertson’s body.”
Coleman squirmed a bit. “I know all this.”
“The semen on her body matches him. He had a victim on his truck killed in the same way, with the same postmortem mutilation. He knows about the ears and that was our hold-out information. Nobody but those connected to the case knew about the ears.”
Coleman looked about ready to leap across the table to physically shut me up. “He doesn’t know where the ears are,” she said.
“What?”
“Remember the point Weiss makes about the importance of trophies and souvenirs, how they’re priceless treasure to the killer? Floyd Lynch couldn’t tell me where he kept the ears. He says he forgot.”
That gave me pause, but I had a counter. “He’s just not telling you.”
“He told us everything else.”
“He wants to keep them for himself forever. Even if he goes to prison for life he’ll always know where the ears are.”
“That’s what they all said when I told them. Morrison, Adams Vance the prosecutor, even Royal.”
“Royal…?”
She was caught off guard.