signed confession on page 268. Along the way there were crime-scene-processing reports, lists of physical evidence found on the truck and on his person: Plastic bags lining the cab where the mummy rested while he drove. Trace evidence of Natron, which had been used to mummify the body. Body hair (only his and the mummy’s) despite the plastic bags. A Jeffery Deaver novel, so worn it looked like he had read it over and over, not remembering the plot.
A printout of an e-book called How to Kill Women and Get Away With It, by Anonymous. The copyright was 2009. Along with the printouts we had seen the day before, another odd choice for an already-successful serial killer. I wrote, “find out if the copyright is registered with the Library of Congress, if so under what name.”
A small battery-powered video player with, unsurprisingly, a DVD called Zombie Strippers inside, the one he’d described in his interrogation. Cheap watch. Extra pair of jeans and several T-shirts. Socks and briefs. Small toiletries bag of the kind he could take into a truck stop to clean up. Road atlas. GPS device. Cell phone. Trucking logs.
I stopped there. Truckers had to keep meticulous logs of all their activities and routes, I knew, even down to number of hours slept, since they could be stopped and checked at any time to determine if they were following safety rules. Find out the dates on the logs, I wrote on my pad. Find out how long a trucker is expected to keep his logs. Find out if he kept his old logs anywhere. Compare to company GPS records during the time he was working for a company, if they had GPS systems in place then.
Sudden flash of inspiration: I got my tote bag and pulled the postcards out that Zach had given to me. Sure enough, the latest one was sent in June, not too long before Lynch was caught. It had a postmark of June 7, sent from Las Vegas with a picture of the strip at night. Bingo. Check current logs to see where Lynch was on June 7, I wrote.
By eight in the morning my list had grown: check numbers programmed into his cell phone, find out trucking company Lynch had worked for from 2000 to 2007 when he bought his own truck, interview whoever he reported to during that time, talk to likely contacts at truck stops on his routes, get history of credit card purchases. I thought a little more, then added: go through trash found in car, check beer cans for prints and run against AFIS. The chances of anyone following through on that were really slim, since most of those cans had been drunk by local teenagers, but someone had picked those cans up from the ground and put them in the car. And remembering my last conversation with Sigmund, I wrote: find out more about “lot lizard,” the Jane Doe in the front seat of the Dodge.
I sent the list as an attachment to Coleman’s private e-mail account so she could get started getting the information, along with a list of questions we could ask Floyd Lynch at an interview that afternoon. She responded immediately: Got it gotta run meet jail 3 BTW you were right! Sort of.
I went back to the murder book, started on the summaries of the autopsy reports, beginning with the Jane Doe found on the truck. Mummification, blah blah, extensive hard tissue blah blah, postmortem mutilation blah blah. Nothing I didn’t already know.
I was about to get a caffeine dose when, after a warning salvo from the Pugs, I could hear a recognizable voice talking to Carlo at the front door. Like a criminal, I hid the pad I was writing on in my tote bag. I came out of my office to find Max Coyote standing somewhat at attention in the middle of the great room, hat in hand, but still in uniform and looking ready for business.
Like I said, Max and Carlo were friends. At any other time Max might have arrived for a game of cards or a discussion of existentialism. I would have fixed them sandwiches and listened to jokes that started with, “Sartre and a donkey go into a bar…”
But Max’s presence here so soon after my experience in the wash could only mean one thing: someone had seen me—I’d been busted. Still, no use confessing outright. I forced the words around my heart, which had become lodged in my