Rage Against the Dying - By Becky Masterman Page 0,74

I placed it with respect on top of the clothing. The gesture felt like leaving Max a note that said, “Look for the bodies.”

I looked at my watch. I hadn’t dared ask Max when he was coming up this way. He could be right behind me. I stuffed everything back into the bag and replaced it under the pool float for the crime scene techs to find. Once Max discovered the clothing, the artifacts, and the hair that had been ripped from victims’ heads, his focus would turn away from me and toward investigating Peasil not as a victim but as a perpetrator.

As I was turning to go, I happened to see a bit of black shine from under an edge of the pool float. Thinking it was the garbage bag, I touched it with my finger to tuck it out of sight and found a cell phone instead. I pulled it out and felt my heart start to bump as I opened it. Torn between whether to pocket it in order to check later for phone numbers or leave it here for Max to discover. A sound behind me made me jump, hold my hands close to hide the fact I was wearing latex gloves.

“Finished in here?” I heard the woman say.

Shit. “Almost.”

She must have noticed that I was crouching in a corner, asked, “You being sick?”

“I’m fine. I just dropped my cell phone. Give me a few more minutes.”

I listened for the sound of her stepping out the door and screen creaking shut, and hoped she hadn’t noticed my paper booties. I clicked on the photo album.

I saw the victims. Bodies. Close-ups of arms, legs, bones pushing up the flesh like tent pins. And faces. The faces, though unmarred, were worse. Mostly when I see victims they’re dead. It’s better that way. These women, not yet dead, were looking at me. You didn’t need to see what he’d done to their bodies; you only needed to see their eyes.

There were several dozen photographs that I clicked through at speed before I found several more of me, likely sent to Peasil’s phone from someone else.

I couldn’t leave the phone here. Even if I deleted the images of me they’d still be there for some techie to discover. I put the phone in my tote bag. Another crime, taking evidence from a crime scene, added to my running tab.

I left without speaking to the old woman again, cutting across the back of another’s property to my car parked on the street behind. I had left behind enough evidence so Max could discover on his own that Gerald Peasil was the scumbag I knew him to be.

Thirty-one

Rather than going home and having to pretend, I drove straight down into the city, stopping at a Bruegger’s for black coffee and a plain bagel to absorb its acid. I tried Coleman’s phone again, still no answer, still no message. She had contacted the office just the day before, but why not me? Why was she avoiding me?

I flipped open the phone I had found at Peasil’s and checked for phone numbers he had called. I tried them all, and they were all on the level of food delivery. If he had spoken to anyone more sinister than Papa John’s Pizza, he had deleted that number. Yet I thought about how a deleted number could lead to the Route 66 killer. For an experienced digital technician the phone in my hand might hold both the identity of the real killer as well as the evidence to get me arrested for Peasil’s murder. I tucked it back in my tote, making a mental note to find a good hacker outside the Bureau.

I killed an hour calling all the numbers on the phone, getting more and more frustrated with a powerlessness I had never known when I had a badge. Feeling like a pressure cooker was getting me nowhere, so around ten thirty I headed over to the federal courthouse, where I knew Floyd Lynch was being brought to make his official plea.

Parking at the courthouse was a bitch, and so was finding a place to stand on the steps. Tucson hadn’t seen the likes of a serial killer since the sixties when an Elvis-looking young man dubbed the Pied Piper of Tucson was picking off high school girls. Everybody was at the courthouse, local and national news teams, and it was pretty funny to see Three-Piece Morrison; Adams Vance, the federal prosecutor; and Royal Hughes,