said after he exhaled it. “That boy always had bad blood.”
“Bad blood?” I asked.
“Evil seed, I think they call it. Look, I don’t know what you were expecting from me. Maybe somebody ashamed because his son is a serial killer. Maybe you’d like to see me wringing my hands and crying. Well, let me tell you something. I was glad when he finally left home and I didn’t have to worry about him killing anyone close by.” Lynch paused as if he were listening to an echo of his words, made the heh-heh sound again, and looked to us to laugh, too.
Coleman and I could not bring ourselves to comply.
“When was the last time you saw Floyd?” Coleman asked again.
“He got his own rig about four years ago. Came around to show it off to us.”
“Was your wife alive at the time?”
“No. Why, you wanna pin that on him, instead?” Lynch laughed, louder this time but with as little mirth as before.
“What did you think of Floyd’s truck? Did he take you inside, show it to you?”
“Didn’t go inside. I was hopeful, though. It’s a big deal when a man can afford his own rig. I figured I could stop wondering when someone like you would show up with questions about him, heh-heh.”
I could see now how the laughter was a cover, maybe had always been a cover, for the fears he had denied. Perhaps his son’s capture was, in some part, a release. Maybe he really looked forward to a time when his son was dead.
Four years ago Floyd Lynch bought the truck. I did a mental calculation and figured at that point Lynch was tiring of going up the mountain to Jessica’s body. Maybe that was partly the motivation for buying his own rig, so he’d be more comfortable storing a body in it.
“Did he just come to show you the truck? Is that all?”
Lynch thought back a moment. “He told me how successful he was, how he was making a ton a money.”
“He didn’t tell you anything about his life?”
Wilbur Lynch glazed over a bit. Almost as if he didn’t realize he was speaking aloud, “Something.”
“What’s that?”
He seemed surprised to find us sitting there, had to go on. “A box that he asked me to keep.”
“Do you still have it?” Coleman asked. Her tone was a little too eager and I hoped Lynch wouldn’t notice.
“I never thought about that box until just now.”
“Could we see it?”
“He said it was just books.”
“We’d still like to see it if you wouldn’t mind too much.”
He considered, possibly, whether it would be more to his benefit if he agreed or refused. “I’ll see if it’s still there.” Lynch uncoiled himself from the chair and started into the trailer without speaking, apparently a little curious himself.
“Would you mind if we came along?” Coleman asked.
He didn’t say no, so we followed him in.
The word “squalor” was invented for the interior of the trailer, ten feet wide and twenty feet long. Over time the dust had found its way in here, too, mixed with hair oil and thickened into a patina on the back of the shabby couch. Intersecting rings of various shade and depth where countless aluminum cans puckered the wood veneer coffee table. The kitchen area smelled like it was waiting to catch fire.
Lynch led us down the right hallway to a bedroom, where the roar of the AC window unit in the living room was quieter. The desert-frosted windows there made me feel encased. “He and his brother used to share this room before he left,” Lynch said.
Pretty much the only thing in the room was a mattress that must have become a little cramped for two growing boys. A sheet lay wadded up on top of it. Both the mattress and the sheet were the same shade of gray. A small pile of clothes in the corner presumably served as the closet. The only other thing in the room was a stack of five boxes towering nearly to the low ceiling in the far corner, each one smaller than the one underneath it, an empty pint bottle of Jack resting on the narrow ledge formed by the largest box at the bottom.
Lynch pulled the boxes down and looked in each one, then handed them to Coleman, who gamely placed them in another stack in the other corner. When he got down to the last box he knelt down. This one was sealed.
A mason jar filled with alcohol and ears. Or