The Blue Hour (20 page)

• • •

Hess watched Rayborn come
toward him with thick blue notebooks under both arms and a newspaper propped
across the top of each armful. With her hair loose it framed her face. She
looked intent as always.

She set one stack of
binders on his desk, then the other, saving the two papers for herself.

'"T through 'Z',
and the crazies?" he asked.

"I got them from
Carla Fontana, the shrink for the SONAR team."

She plopped the newspapers
onto the desk beside Hess's, and swung herself into the swivel chair. "Let
me guess—you picked out Eichrod and Pule."

He smiled faintly and
tapped the photocopies with his knuckles. The skin across the bone felt like it
leaped into flames and Hess actually looked down at his hand.

She picked up one of the
papers, stripped off the plastic string and looked down at the front page.

Hess started in on
the "TV

Tabling. Tanaha.
Tenerife.

No. No. No.

For just a second he was
back inside that big churning cathedral of water at the Wedge, gliding through
it on his palms like a waterbug while the tonnage roared over. Then he had
Barbara over the dryer with her skirt up in the laundry room of their first
apartment with the windows fogged from humidity while outside it poured rain at
3 a.m., the moment being one of those delicious chances neither one of them
could pass up for the first five years they knew each other.

"What?"
asked Merci.

He looked up from the
Sex Offenders Registry.

"You
groaned," she said.

"Oh. Thinking
about dinner."

"I thought chemo
and radiation killed the appetite."

"It was supposed to
make my hair fall out, too. I'm really not that hungry."

"But hungry
enough to groan? Maybe you should eat."

It didn't take long to
finish the regular volumes, because the last six letters of the language don't
begin many names. The registry of recently released mental patients with histories
of sex offenses
was
fairly brief.

None of them
looked even generally similar to Merci's drawing. Hess thought that one had the
weepy dark eyes that
Kamala had
described, the look of remorse, but that was a real long shot. Nothing else
about him seemed right.

"Colesceau,"
he said. "Matamoros Colesceau."

Rayborn didn't look up.
"No. He likes older women, the real helpless ones. The eyes are
interesting, but there's no other facial similarities I can see. Plus, he's
castrated."

"Castrated?"

"Yeah, snipped him
under AB 3339, Chapter 596. He won't be hard to keep track of, either,"
said Merci. When Hess looked over she was standing by his desk. She was
smiling. She set a paper down in front of him.

There was this Colesceau
fellow, front page above the fold, looking not much like he did in the mug, his
hair thinner and shorter, his face wider and less defined. He was wearing a
short-sleeve shirt with his name over the pocket. It appeared that he was
leaving a vehicle and caught by surprise. His hand was on its way up—to cover
his face, Hess figured— and it made him look pathetic. Hess was disappointed,
because he still didn't look anything like Kamala Petersen's mystery man. Eyes,
maybe. But with a wig and a mustache... Well, with a wig and mustache a lot of
guys could look like Kamala's weepy boulevardier—blonds, redheads or the completely
bald, for that matter.

"We'll know every
move he makes now," Merci said. "The crazy, nutless sonofabitch.
Actually, they leave the nuts on. And the effects of the hormone wear off when
they stop shooting him with it, so the whole punishment is only
temporary."

Hess read the headline:

CASTRATED RAPIST

BRINGS TURMOIL TO OC COMMUNITY

While Hess read the
article he was aware of Merci dialing out on the desk phone. He read that
Colesceau would satisfy the terms of his parole the following Wednesday, at
which time his chemical castration would end. The SONAR team had decided to
notify his neighbors, thus the turmoil and the article. The neighbors were
already protesting.

Kamala, this is Merci over
at.. .

He read Sheriff Department
spokesman Wallace Houston's statement that the sheriffs "didn't reveal
this felon's whereabouts in order to run him out of town. It was a matter of
protecting the public safety. We believe people should know who he is and what
he's done, but we want them, basically, to leave the man alone."

Fat chance of that, Wally,
thought Hess. Wally the Weasel. There was a picture of protest organizer Trudy
Powers. She was blond and quite beautiful. The sign she held said

RAPISTS MAKE BAD NEIGHBORS.

..
. wanted to know if the picture in today's
Times
resembles the man you saw
at the mall. . .

Hess read that the
soon-to-be-free Colesceau had a full-time job in Costa Mesa and had lived in
the apartment at 12 Meadowlark for all of his three years since release from
Atascadero. He'd volunteered for the Depo-Provera treatment—one of only twelve
mental patients included in the protocol. He was injected and interviewed every
week. Depo-Provera was the brand name for the female hormone
medroxyprogesterone acetate, which causes breast enlargement, hair loss and
genital shrinkage when taken by males.

Then, a week before
completing his sentence we rat him out to his neighbors, Hess thought. I
thought I had problems.

...
so,
what are
you saying, Kamala, that it could be him, but probably not? Is that u/hat
you're saying?

Hess read that
Romanian-born Colesceau had been arrested and prosecuted in Los Angeles County.
It wasn't uncommon to release sex offenders into different jurisdictions
because of the controversy created if they were discovered. He made a note to
get the jacket from Sex Crimes and see if this pudgy, chemically castrated man
had a background involving hunting, meatpacking or embalming.

. . . realize that a person can
add a mustache or change

clothes any time he wants . . .

In fact, he'd have trudged
over to Records right then and asked the clerk for Colesceau's file but they
were closed by now. Hess suddenly felt as if he was part of the chair he sat
on. Like he'd painlessly melted to it and couldn't get out. Stuck. He sat back
and crossed his hands behind his head to mask the dizziness. Knuckles on fire
again, dipped in acid.

. . . and we'll
run
two others past you. Sunday morning is

good for me . . .

Hess wondered if it was
the radiation that had gotten him feeling so weird. He wasn't supposed to feel
the damage until later.

"Kamala doesn't think
so," said Merci. "She saw the paper. A whole different look. She
pointed out that her man was wearing fashionable-looking clothes, which tells
you something about Kamala. Anyway, she says no to this guy. We'll show her
Eichrod and Pule on Sunday morning."

He was aware of her
looking at him, setting back the phone. She stared at him frankly now, nothing
covert about it. Nothing like her glances in the rearview on their way to
Elsinore.

"Hess, what do you
think about when you stare at nothing?"

He shrugged. He felt sick
now, all the way down to the marrow of his bones, which was where, the doctors
had told him, the chemotherapy was most damaging. Because bone marrow made
white blood cells. And if you interfered with that production your cell count
could drop. You could become anemic. You could die from that. Or from a
thousand diseases that were easy to catch when your white cells got low. That's
why they did the blood work once a week, to keep the chemicals from doing to
you certainly what the cancer only might accomplish.

"Is that when you're
seeing things? Like the women hanging from the tree before you saw the rope
marks on the branch?"

"Well, no."

"I still want to
know how
you ..."

She either didn't finish
or he didn't hear it. There was a big silver passenger train bellowing through
his eardrums now. He could feel the tracks shaking in the bones of his legs.
Then a blast of hot steam against his face. Everything so goddamned loud.

Then quiet.

His heart was racing and
his face was still hot and when he looked at Merci she was outlined in
shimmering red.

"You put
everything out of your head, first," he said.

"You all
right?" "You forget what you think you know. All your assumptions. They
get in the way." "Yeah. Let's get into it some other time,
okay?" "You start off with what you know for sure. Out on the

Ortega, when I was looking down at the ground, I saw
how neat the blood was. It wasn't splashed out in a struggle. It didn't spurt
out in a fight. It came out slowly, and the source wasn't moving much, if at
all. So, she's restricted somehow as she bleeds. Okay. You know what I saw
first? A woman in a cocoon. Then I saw a woman in a spider web. Stillness.
Immobilization. I'm still wondering if he's poisoning them somehow. Anyway, I
know I've got a dead woman, bleeding. Then I see what's left of her when he's
done—nothing. Because he's taken her with him. That requires a lot of work and
energy and planning. I saw him walking back to his car with a suitcase in each
hand. Hard luggage, made out of plastic. Washable. Waterproof. Round edges,
gray. But that didn't make sense because she was too big and too heavy. And
according to what we found, he didn't cut her up. He took her. Because he
values her. He knows he values her. So, he'd planned to take her from the
start—and he didn't want to mess her up. He didn't want to spoil her but he
wanted her blood drained and he wanted her body? Why, of all the millions of
spots along the Ortega, did he bring her
here
? I looked up and saw the branch—low enough but strong. I remembered
a deer hanging, bleeding, after my father shot him out at my uncle's place in
Idaho. So I climbed up and found the notches."

She said nothing. Hess
wasn't sure if she'd heard. His voice sounded like it was coming from a canyon
twenty miles away.

Hess unlocked his fingers
from behind his head and picked up the newspaper again. He wanted to appear
strong and well. He tossed the newspaper aside as if it annoyed him and folded
his hands over his lap. His hands were shaky but he could feel his heart
slowing down now and Merci was no longer silhouetted in red neon. His face
still felt warm but the burning of his knuckles was over. He breathed in deeply
and it felt right.

"It's easy to
understand, on paper," she said. "But when I went out there and tried
it,
all I saw was what you had
seen."

"You need to do
it alone."

"It's hard,
eliminating the things you assume, because you need to assume
some
things. Like with the tree, you
had to assume that the body was there. When in fact, he could have bled her
somewhere else, contained the blood and just poured it out where we found it.
Right? You assumed the body and the blood were together."

"There's some of
that, yes."

He could feel the cadence
of his heartbeat slowing and his vision coming clear again. But it was still
like he had melted to the chair and he couldn't imagine getting out of it.

"Do you ever see
things that are wrong?"

"They're not as
clear as the right ones."

"I don't see
pictures. I see video, and it's blurred."

He looked at her. She was
sitting backward in the swivel chair, leaning forward, her feet spread. Her
arms were along the top of the backrest and she was resting her chin on her
wrist.

"Seeing a lot of bad
stuff helps. The older you get, the more of it you see."

Hess expected some comment
like
I don't need these pithy aphorisms
all the time,
and he really didn't blame her. Instead she was quiet
for a long beat.

"I've
worked thirty-eight homicide cases. How about your
"Eight hundred and fourteen."

"Bigger
library."

"Forty-three
years' worth. Plus Korea."

"How come people who
have been in wars always mention it?"

"We're
proud."

"Just in the
obvious ways?"

"Yeah, they're
obvious. Like coming out alive."

"I'll never be
in a war."

"That's not a
bad thing."

"It is, if I'm
building the library."

Hess thought about that.
It was a delicious feeling to get a clear thought, after his body had rebelled
like it just did.

"About that
library—you're a lifetime cardholder. The things you see don't go away. All the
cliches and stories about burnout and booze and depression and suicide. Well,
they're true."