the odd sense he was prepared to use them for cover if I threw something at him. “We have a serial killer in custody,” he said.
I’d been in the business so long those words could still send a pleasant little reverb up the back of my skull. “Good job. Who?”
He spoke cautiously, like an actor still learning his lines. “Long-haul trucker, name Floyd Lynch. Border Patrol picked him up a couple weeks ago about seventy miles north of the border on Route 19, heading to Las Vegas with a load of video-poker machines. Routine stop, but there happened to be a cadaver dog at the checkpoint who alerted to a dead woman in his truck.”
“In the trailer?”
“No, the trailer with the poker machines was clean. The body was in his cab. Both the sheriff’s department and the FBI got called to the scene.”
“They ID the woman?”
“Not yet. The trucker says she was an illegal.”
They use dogs to locate aliens who don’t make it across the desert. My mind was rushing about trying to figure why he was here telling me this while I let him take his usual time. I said, “Now I’m remembering. I think I saw this on the news. It died fast.”
“The FBI kind of made that happen.”
“But that was two weeks ago.”
“The FBI took over the interrogation.”
“Priors?”
“None. He never got so much as a traffic ticket.”
“You want a Diet Coke?” I walked across the expanse of open room to the kitchen area and pulled two cans out of the fridge without waiting for his answer, talking as I did so. “I assume you’re here because the victim has some connection to me.”
He paused, and then didn’t answer my question. “You couldn’t tell much from the victim. The body was mummified.”
“Curiouser and curiouser. Smell much?”
“No.”
I nodded, making a mental note to get more celery before I closed the refrigerator door. “Did he confess to killing her?”
“Not at first. He said he had found the body just off the side of the road, that it had been dressed in shabby clothing, the shoes already stolen, an illegal alien who hadn’t made it across the desert. He said he was just using it.”
“Using it. Nasty.” None of this explained why Max took this long to tell me, let alone why he was telling me at all. This should have been maybe a phone call in a bored moment, not a special visit. A nerve sparked on the side of my neck. I handed one of the Cokes to Max and popped open my own, but still couldn’t bring myself to sit down. “So far this isn’t a serial killer case, Max. You’ve got one victim and he denies killing her.” I didn’t have to tell Max that would only amount to a class 4 felony, desecration of a corpse. A little jail time. “Not to be all self-absorbed, Max, but what the hell does this have to do with me?” I sipped from the can.
“When the techs went over the truck they found a compartment with scrapbooks and journals.” Here Max measured out his words more carefully than he had before, if that was possible. “And postcards.”
Some soda splashed on Jane’s rug when my hand jerked. “Were they addressed?” I asked.
He shook his head. I shrugged. “Lots of people buy postcards. Even truckers.”
He took a deep breath and said, “The journals were all about the Route 66 murders.”
Route 66, the biggest sexual homicide case in my career, and the case I had failed to close. The case where I lost a young agent who became the killer’s last-known victim. She was the only victim who was never found. I didn’t want to ask the obvious question, the one I’d wanted an answer to for seven years. So instead I said, “A groupie. This, this what’s his name?”
“Floyd Lynch.”
“He could be a groupie.” Even serial killers have fans. It’s celebrity reality at its most debased.
“The journals really seemed to implicate him. He knew a lot, names of the victims.”
“That was in the news.”
“The writing was all, ‘I slashed her Achilles tendon so she couldn’t run, I raped her, I strangled her slowly and felt the bone in her throat give way’—”
“That was all in the news, too. He could have been fantasizing, making it his own.”
“—‘I sliced off her right ear.’”
That blasted the story I was making up. No one but law enforcement knew what the killer’s trophy had been. No one had ever found any of the ears. “We