smiled at a thought. “We need to show Lynch the gun that isn’t smoking.”
Satisfied that for the time being she had Sigmund and me on her side, Coleman spent the rest of the trip briefing me on what she knew about Wilbur and Michael Lynch, Floyd’s father and brother, respectively:
“Wilbur works?”
“On disability.”
“Michael lives at home?”
“Yeah.”
“Employed?”
“Started paramedic training, but I don’t know if he ever finished.”
“Mother?”
“Unknown.”
“Call ahead?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Resistance?”
“Not much.”
And so on, with my thoughts half on Lynch and half on the dead guy in the wash, and whether this interview would help me discover a connection between them.
Coleman turned right on Palo Verde Drive into a trailer park, where I directed her to park a little ways off and we walked to the childhood home of Floyd Lynch. Dirt coated the roof of the trailer, its windows, a dirt bike with wheels the size of small blimps parked out front and the ragged umbrella with faded blue and white striping that tilted over a rusted metal patio table.
Wilbur Lynch stepped through the front screen door with his shotgun and did not invite us in. Tall and cowboy lean, his body belied the sixty-three years that Coleman had told me he had. His face, on the other hand, was lined with a lifetime of low humidity and Camel cigarettes, one of which fit a notch in his lower lip that looked like do-it-yourself cancer surgery.
Coleman flashed her badge while I put my hand on my tote as if I still had a badge to flash. “I’m Agent Laura Coleman,” she said, “And this—”
I was about to interrupt her, but my disguise, hair down and Jackie-O sunglasses, was preserved by Lynch’s own interruption.
“You don’t look like FBI,” he said, explaining his shotgun.
Privately I disagreed; I would have thought Coleman looked like FBI even if she wasn’t. But we both did that little side head tic that gets past the allusion to our not being male, and Coleman shot me an arch look that said, “I should have worn the black suit.”
“I wondered when you’d get here,” he said, sitting down on a rusted chair by the rusted umbrella table and gesturing to the other two. We cautiously took two of the other chairs, taking care not to get scratched. “I thought you’d all be over to see me right after you captured him. I thought I’d be on the news.” His drawl was easygoing, but he fixed his eye on us as if he wanted to make sure we noticed how much he didn’t care. He put out his cigarette on the table and casually brushed the ash off with the side of his hand.
“I’m sorry about your son,” Coleman said, without elaborating on the part she had played in putting him in jail.
Lynch smiled and took a packet of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket. “Well, good for you. I guess it’s good that somebody’s sorry.” He tapped the packet so a couple cigarettes slid out and offered us one with an excessively smooth gesture that told me he was concentrating on keeping his hands steady. We declined, so he lit one for himself.
Once the cigarette was fitted securely into the notch in his lip, Coleman said, “Can we take it from that that you didn’t have a good relationship with Floyd?”
“You could say that.”
I picked up the slack left by his comment. “He grew up here, though, right? Went to school, had friends?”
“I suppose. He always kept to himself, read a lot. He was a reader.” Lynch left his upper lip cocked in a snarl as he said the word, as if that was the first step on the road to sexual homicide. “So he confessed. Don’t send me the body.” He made a heh-heh sound that was supposed to be a laugh.
“The fact is, Mr. Lynch, it may comfort you to know we’re here because we think that Floyd didn’t commit the crimes he confessed to,” Coleman said.
Lynch turned his head away from us and stared at some buffle grass that hugged the side of the trailer. He looked like a man who expected little in the way of comfort, ever.
“And we’re here trying to corroborate a few remaining questions,” I said. “Can you think of a reason why Floyd would take blame for something he didn’t do?”
“Nope.” Lynch took a bitter drag off his cigarette, jerking his head as if his lungs alone weren’t strong enough to pull in all the smoke he craved. “Because I think he did,” he