asked, to change the subject.
“Snow. Only not to my face.”
“As in…”
“Pure as the driven.” She rolled her eyes while I kept my face carefully bland, remembering the suspicion Sigmund had about her and the public defender. “I heard Dr. Weiss call you Stinger. How come?”
“Will they still call you Snow when Morrison finds out you’ve been working off the rez?”
Rather than address the Morrison issue directly, she slipped on an aphorism. “Sometimes you have to choose between following rules and doing the right thing.”
Time to get her back for reminding me I’d repeated myself. “You sound like a refrigerator magnet. Nothing can fuck you up more than feeling noble.”
She let that one pass, changed the subject again. “One thing I always wondered, Weiss spent so much time in his book on the Route 66 case but never mentioned Jessica Robertson.”
“When he wrote the book she’d only been gone eight months. He’s a pretty cerebral guy, but I think even Sig was too close to her. A lot of people were.”
“Why is that?”
“She was childlike, could pass for thirteen at a distance. Never got on anybody’s bad side, which I’m sure you know is a quality unknown in an ego mill like the Bureau. One of those rare women who could be relentlessly perky and you didn’t want to bitch slap her. You wanted to take care of her.”
And that’s enough about Jessica, I thought. Is that what the little bit of sharing about her dog and nickname had been about? Not small talk at all, but trying to get me to open up? Nice try, Coleman. I didn’t add that I called Jessica Rookie and she called me Coach.
Coleman seemed to sense that I’d said all I was going to say and didn’t press further. “I brought a copy of the section of the murder book that covers Lynch. It’s in the car.”
What she had given me the first time was her analysis of the case. The murder book itself was the sacred document and you weren’t allowed to remove it from the office without authorization. I lowered my voice and gestured to her to do the same. “You brought it outside the office?”
She blushed. “Not the whole thing,” she said. “Just the part specifically about him, his confession, his truck, that kind of stuff. But it provides a little more than what I gave you before.”
Coleman was becoming an enigma. Rigid in some ways, yet … “Why Snow, you really don’t operate by the book, do you?”
She was also getting better and better at ignoring me. “I figured maybe we could go over it tonight at my place, and then we can interview Floyd again, say, tomorrow? Maybe we don’t need any more evidence. Maybe he’s been thinking about what he did. Maybe it will take less pressure than we think to make him tell us the truth. I’ve even been imagining, what if that body on his truck, what if the real killer gave it to him?”
“Whoa, girl. Maybe we’re getting ahead of ourselves with this intuition business. Give me what you’ve got so I can take it home. I think better alone. I’ll see if there’s anything we can take to Floyd Lynch tomorrow that will make him change his story.”
Twenty-two
I had spent the rest of the afternoon bumming around with Carlo—Walmart, Home Depot, that sort of thing—and baked the meatloaf I had prepared that morning. For the rest of the evening I threw all my remaining energy into acting serene, aided by watching Schwarzenegger duke it out with Predator, which always relaxes me. Carlo had never seen the movie and he even confessed to enjoying it. So despite my wanting to get working on the material Coleman had given me, I wasn’t able to do so until I slammed awake around four the next morning, hot-flash hot, thinking about the dead guy in the van.
Nothing to be done about that, so I quietly slipped out of bed, fired up the coffeepot, and headed into my office. With a pad beside me to jot down whatever action would be necessary, I poured through the slim binder, compelling enough reading to take my mind off the things I couldn’t control.
Not even this was the whole thing. It was missing all the photographs, which Coleman had not taken the time to copy, and everything regarding the original series of Route 66 killings. This report went from Floyd Lynch’s capture at 11:19 P.M. July 26 on page 1 to his