The Blue Hour (25 page)

"What
thing?" asked Hess.

The driver thought a
moment. He was wiry and middle aged, looked to Hess to be of Latin American
blood. "They're fake. They're not real."

"Maybe the
mustache is fake," said Merci.

"I didn't notice
that," the driver said. "It's more to do with attitude. The whole
look. It seemed false. There's something else I noticed about him, too. I look
at my riders a lot. I talk to them."

"And?"
asked Hess.

"He was the kind of
guy who is always alone. There's no one in the world you can picture with him.
No one to be around him. Just a feeling, that's all."

Merci left him her card with her cell and work phones
on it, and carefully told the driver how critical it was to call if he ever saw
this man again, or remembered anything more about him.

• • •

At his desk, Hess listened
to his messages while Merci showed the Sex Offenders Registry mugs of Pule and
Eichrod to Kamala Petersen. It was late Sunday morning by then and headquarters
was dead. Hess looked over to see Kamala looking down at a picture on Merci's
desk, shaking her head.

Barbara had called to wish
him well and tell him it was good to talk to him. She wanted something, he
could tell, but he had no idea what.

Dr. Ramsinghani, the
radiation specialist, had called to inquire about his general feeling after the
first thoracic scorching. The doctor reminded him that the second treatment
would be Monday, same time and place.

Hess listened,
wishing that he wasn't the center of his own universe. Like you'd forget a date
like that. It would be nice to just blend in and be.

An old contact of his
at the DMV had been kind enough to return his call promptly, and with good
news: Hess's 1028 request for a list of panel vans registered in Orange County
would be coming through by Monday morning. Too bad DMV in California didn't
track vehicles by color. How many, he wondered. Two hundred, or fifteen? But
how many with mismatched tires? That was the wild card.

Word from Riverside
Sheriffs, too: LaLonde surveilled, no unusual activities, would continue
another forty-eight hours.

The phone rang. It
was Arnie Pickering of Arnie's Outdoors, following up on Hess's request of
earlier in the week. He was proud to announce that he had found in his computer
files just the kind of purchase record that Hess had asked him to find. The
talkative Arnie chattered on but finally got out the basic facts: a sale was
made in February, the off-season for deer hunting, Hess knew, but the month
that Lael Jillson was field dressed off the Ortega. The Arnie's Outdoors
customer had bought a device known as a Deer Sleigh'R, a gambrel for securing
game, a hoist for lifting it, two lengths of nylon rope, and an electric
lantern.

"Can you find the clerk who rang it
up?"

"It was Big
Matt, here at the Fountain Valley store. He's here right now if you want to
talk to him."

"Give me the fax
number there. I'm going to send over a sketch I want him to look at. See if he
can put the face with the sale."

Hess took the number and
faxed the artist's sketch to Big Matt at Arnie's Outdoors in Fountain Valley.

He collected the picture
as it groaned haltingly through the fax machine, then looked over at Merci. She
was just coming back into the room after escorting Kamala Petersen to the exit.
She shook her head disgustedly and came to his desk. She looked around, then
leaned forward toward him. He could see the anger on her face, in the hard set
of her jaw and in her cold brown eyes.

"Eichrod, Pule and
Colesceau all just flunked the Kamala Petersen romantic-vision test. None of
them has sad enough eyes. None is Mr. Remorse. She also let it drop that she'd
had three margaritas the first time she saw the sonofabitch, up in Brea. When
they
communicated unspoken language
with their eyes."

Hess thought about it.
"But the bus driver and Lee LaLonde all said the drawing was good. Kamala
saw our man, the genuine article, in person. If we haven't shown her his
picture yet, then we haven't shown her his picture yet. Maybe we don't have it.
Maybe Dalton Page is wrong. Maybe he's never even had a parking ticket."

Hess's phone rang. He put
his finger up to hold Merci in place, then picked it up. Big Matt from Arnie's
Outdoors said that the out-of-season purchase was his, he remembered it. It was
raining hard that day, and business was slow. But he remembered the buyer
because he was dressed up in a kind of gunslinger's outfit—vest and long
coat—with long blond hair and a mustache, not a typical Arnie's Outdoors
customer at all. The buyer looked similar to the guy in the sketch that he was
looking at.

"He asked me something
odd," Matt said. "He asked me how the gambrel held the ankles of the
deer. I showed him how the hooks go through the ankle tendons. He said he didn't
want his deer messed up. I said the gambrel just made a little hole in the
ankles. So he asks me if we sell pads to keep that from happening. I said we
didn't, nobody cared if the deer had little holes in its ankle because the feet
get cut off and thrown away anyhow. You know, unless you're going to save a
foot for a trophy or something. He was real certain about not damaging his
deer, though. So I showed him a cinch gambrel and he bought that."

Hess thought about
this. "It's got loops for a cord instead of hooks? The cord cinches over
the animal's feet?"

"That's right."

He wasn't sure why,
but this news didn't surprise him. Maybe something to do with his memories of
how difficult a deer hunt could be. He and his father and uncle packing big
bucks out of the deep country around Spirit Lake. It was hard work. If you were
hunting for the meat, you protected that meat. If you were hunting for
something else—whatever it might be—you'd protect it as best you could. No
holes in the body. It made sense. If the Purse Snatcher used some padding
between the gambrel cinch and the flesh, there wouldn't be any bruising or
abrasion, either. Especially if he worked fast.

"The Deer Sleigh'R is a carcass
sled?"

"Yeah, it's got
a rope to secure the game on it, then you use the rope to pull it."

Hess tried to picture
the Deer Sleigh'R in the back of the Purse Snatcher's silver panel van.
"So, there's no wheels on it—it's stiff and flat?"

"It's flat, but
it rolls up. That's one of the marketing things they're proud of. You can roll
it up like a sleeping bag.

Doesn't take up much room. And it's light, too, in
case you're packing in."

"No skinning
knives, cleaning tools?"

"Nothing like that.
Just something to move a body and something to hang it with."

Hess thanked Matt and hung
up. He looked at Merci. She was still hovering over his desk. He could see the
malice bumping around behind her clear brown eyes.

"A clerk at Arnie's
recognized the man in the sketch," he said. "He bought some hunting
equipment out of season. February—nine days before Lael Jillson disappeared.
Things you move bodies with. Hang them up with. Cash, of course."

The anger and the
stubborn resolve were still on her face.

"I should have had
this picture out there sooner. I should have had this asshole two days ago,
when Ronnie Stevens was still drawing breath."

"You didn't kill
Ronnie Stevens. Be kinder to yourself, Rayborn. You're stuck with you for about
another fifty years."

A very young uniformed
deputy worked his way through the pen toward them, a large cardboard box in his
arms. The look on his face said he had interesting bad news.

The deputy nodded at
Merci, then at Hess, setting the box down on Hess's desk. His mustache was
mostly fuzz.

"Excuse me, Sergeant
Rayborn, but CalTrans found these on 1-5 in Irvine about an hour and a half
ago. CHP got the call. I just pulled over because I was driving by, wanted to
see what was going on. When I saw these, I thought of you-know- what. They got
handled pretty good by the road guys and the patrolmen. But who knows.
⁷
"

Hess looked down into
the box at the three purses.

"One of them
must have broken open on the freeway," said the deputy. "The other
two, they've got ID, credit cards, personal items. No CDLs. No cash."

Merci looked at the
young man.

"Good work,
Casik."

"Sergeant, I want to
work with you in homicide someday. So I took the liberty of running the two
names through our missing persons files. Both of them vanished without leaving
any trace we could find. One had car problems on the 55, her car broke down and
she apparently went for help. That was twenty-six months ago. The other was
shopping at a mall here in Orange County, three months later. Riverside County
Sheriffs found her car in Lake Matthews a week after she disappeared. I've got
no idea where these purses have been since then, but I've got a hunch."

"I see you
do."

"And also, the
CalTrans guys shuffled through the purses a little, let some stuff fell out.
Then they just threw everything in this box. I couldn't help but notice the
newspaper clipping you'll find near the top of the black one."

Hess watched Merci use her
pen to lift the top of the stiff black purse, and he saw the folded newsprint.
He lifted it out with a couple of paper clips, then set it on the desk and
pried it open enough to see inside.

It was the
article and photos from the Orange County
Journal,
six days ago, when
Hess was brought back to help on the Purse Snatcher case. Mugs of Merci and
Hess, standard issue from Press Information, and apparently in
the
Journal
photo file. Hess hated it when they ran pictures of him.

In the shots, both his and
Merci's eyes were burned out, the paper browned around the holes like a kid's
pirate map.

Hess was still at his desk late that evening, on the phone with the head
of the mortuary sciences department of a local college, fishing for something
he couldn't articulate yet. Something to do with Deer Sleigh'R, formalin and
missing women.

Brighton, who rarely came
in on Sundays, appeared in the bullpen and waved him over. Hess made the
appointment with the mortuary sciences director, then hung up and followed
Brighton down a short hallway into his office. Brighton waited for him, then
shut the door.

"Three
more?"

"Two look real
likely. The third, probable."

"He's been at
this for two years?"

"Just over. The first
went missing twenty-six months ago. Car trouble. The next was last seen, guess
where—at a mall."

"Oh, good Christ. No
break this morning? Nothing?" He pointed to a chair in front of his desk.

"No." Hess
sat.

"He's thorough
and careful, isn't he?"

"I think he's using
chloroform to put them out. One of the CSIs recognized the smell from his vet.
It makes sense. There's been some struggle in the cars. But not a huge amount.
No blood."

"Can Gilliam
verify the gas?"

"Not with the blood
we've found. Chloroform metabolizes out real quick. But we think he's driving
a silver panel van with a set of mismatched tires. It's the best thing we've
got."

"Jesus, Tim.
Six."

Brighton sat back and
crossed his arms. He was a big man with a rural face and a cool intelligence in
his eyes. Hess had always liked the way Brighton made ambition for power look
easy and natural. He shared the spoils. He wasn't the kind of man always
looking around corners at you.

Then again, Hess had
little idea what the sheriff did with his spare time, though he did know that
like a lot of ranking law enforcement people in Southern California, Brighton
owned a house and property somewhere in Wyoming or Montana. Hess had rarely
visited Brighton's home, never dined there or associated with the sheriff
outside of department functions, never learned the names of his children.
Those intimacies had been shared over the decades with more family-oriented
men and women on the force—the ones who, like Brighton, had kids to raise.
Children and the raising of them seemed to adhere the parents to each other in
ways that didn't stick to Hess and his childless marriages, ugly divorces and
the long stretches of aloneness that separated them.

Hess was drawn
to people more like himself: on the make for something they might understand
but often didn't, either recovering from or searching out the next romantic
disaster. It always seemed to work out that way, but it was never how he
planned it. He saw that you needed to put aside that selfishness if you wanted
to fit in with the department pack, otherwise you were perceived as a danger
at some point. A family made you
understandable, declared your values and your
willingness to sacrifice.

Hess hadn't wanted
children with Barbara—who was willing—because he was young and hogging his
liberties. The world seemed huge then, though his place in it with Barbara—who
was insecure and jealous as time went on— seemed constricted. He was stupid to
leave her but only realized it later. His guilty conscience had left
everything of value to her and to this day he was thankful for that.