vacuum-sealed in a baggy. Or at least something that connected Lynch to the man who tried to kill me.
He seemed to reconsider for a moment opening it, or at least opening it in front of us, but then took a Swiss Army knife from his right back jeans pocket and pulled out the blade. He wasn’t about to just give up something that may have been of value. He neatly sliced through the single strip of packing tape and lifted the cardboard flaps.
The box was loosely packed enough so that Lynch could push the contents around with his blade. As the three of us leaned forward all we could see were some crime novels and porn and thriller DVDs.
“I told you he was a reader,” Lynch said. He dug into the box, using the blade of his knife with a combination of curiosity and hesitation, like someone who doesn’t want to reach bare-handed into a dark hole. He pulled out a few of the items and put them on the floor next to the box while Coleman and I stood watching him to see what he would find and what his reaction would be.
He drew out a DVD of a National Geographic program called The Mummy Roadshow, read the back of it still as if he were alone, and placed it on the floor next to the box. Then he found a manila folder, opened it, and paged through articles about serial killers that had been printed off a computer. I was standing just behind him, which allowed me to read some of the names over his shoulder: Ted Bundy, the Green River Killer, Jeffrey Dahmer, the BTK killer, Son of Sam, the Route 66 killer. Also a description of Natron, its uses, and how to order it. Also a printout of the home page of a site devoted to information and discussions about serial killers in general. Apparently unaffected by these things, Lynch put the folder on top of the video and looked back inside the box.
A glimpse of something tucked down on one side between the cardboard and the books got his attention, and he hooked it with his knife, pulling it out of the box and staring. It was just a shabby old dog collar, brown with silver studs, the leash still attached.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“This collar. Had a dog. Barky. A good dog. The boys told me he ran away, but maybe I’m misrecalling.” Lynch seemed a little dazed. He didn’t say heh-heh.
“Did you still have Barky when Floyd came with his truck to visit you?” I asked gently.
That finally did it. He shed his careful façade as if he had been able to deny the unspeakable reality until this moment. “Oh fuck,” he breathed in the voice of a very old man, the indignity that was his son too much on display in this artifact.
We were interrupted by the sound of boot heels ringing up the metal steps and the trailer door crashing open. “Hey Dad!” a voice called over the muffled roar of the AC unit. “You ready to hunt us some wetbacks?”
“We got company,” Lynch called back, a little too quickly, from his kneeling position.
I glanced at Coleman and saw she understood why I had told her not to park in the yard. You never know what you’ll hear if you don’t leave your car in the yard.
The man who owned the voice skidded to a stop as he saw us, and stared.
I eyed Mike right back. His haircut, shaved to the scalp back and sides, with a longer patch on the top of his head, looked like a portobello mushroom cap. Largely due to the haircut combined with a menacing air, he was the kind of man who looks silly and scares you at the same time, the kind you doubt will someday grow out of his rage. I didn’t ask what Floyd’s brother might mean by “hunting some wetbacks” but felt confident he wasn’t recruiting migrant farm labor.
He looked at his father rather than us when he said, “What are you doing back here?”
“They’re from the Ef-Bee-Eye,” Lynch said as precisely, as meaningfully as he could, but there was no telling from Mike’s unchanged expression if he was able to spell. “They don’t think Floyd killed those girls.”
Mike strode back down the hall, speaking without turning around. “Come on, Pop,” he said. “We’re losing daylight.”
Lynch rose and shouted after Mike, “Hey, did Floyd take Barky with him?”
I peered through the desert-frosted