The Blue Hour (26 page)

He was willing and
interested with Lottie when he was in his thirties, but she was young and
enjoying
her
liberties. They drifted away from each other in the classic
fashion and parted with minimum drama and no rancor. What amazed Hess more than
the divorce was the way a decade could come and go so quickly.

Children hardly seemed to
matter until he was halfway through his forties and married to Joanna. His
paternal instincts crept up on him like a big cat: a bold but calm desire to
guide his blood into the world, to give life. He actually began looking at
other people's babies, thinking of names he liked, picturing himself with an
infant in his arms. Doted on his nephews and nieces. Thought a lot about his
father. And his mother. Something inside him was changing for the good.

Joanna was younger than
him by fifteen years, quite beautiful and willing to have a family. These were
three of the reasons he married her. Hess suspected a child would help keep
them together because they actually shared little in common outside the bed.
After five years of trying and failing to conceive, countless consultations and
tests, then three increasingly heartbreaking miscarriages, Joanna gave up on
doctors, children and Hess. On the dismal March night of his fifty-first
birthday, both of them drinking at high velocity, Joanna surprised him with a
tearful confession that she was in love with another man. With one of the
doctors who had failed to help her, in fact. It was with extreme and surprising
anger that Hess imagined this man with Joanna on his examination table. She
said he had his own children and with him she felt less like a failed breeder
and more like a successful woman. She took half of everything and dropped all
contact with Hess. He rented a room to a young deputy so he could keep the
house.

By the time he realized he
had pretty much missed his chance to be a father Hess was three times divorced
and pushing fifty-three years old. Did everyone know he was a fiickup? He felt
like an ostrich with nowhere to hide his head.

Now, sitting in Chuck
Brighton's office, Hess considered all of this to be nothing more than the
ancient history of an everyday life. His. And this is where it had led
him—semi-retired and sixty-seven years of age, alone again, afflicted by
cancer and by treatments for cancer, shadowing a murdering phantom through what
could have been one of Hess's golden years. So you don't always get what you
want. But grace grows in the cracks sometimes.

You
have work to
do.

"That must have
been bad this morning."

"I've never seen
anything quite like it, Bright. I mean, it was so... deliberate. Deliberate and
disgusting and just really mean. All at the same time. This guy's got some
snakes in his head."

"He'll make a
big mistake. You know that."

"When, is what
bothers me."

"Tell me about
Rayborn, Tim."

"There's not
much to tell. I think she's doing well."

"Good, good. Do
you get along with her?"

"She's honest
and to the point."

"Like you."

Brighton could be obtuse
and Hess figured it was his right.

"What about that
sketch of hers?"

Hess shrugged. "The
witness needed to be hypnotized. Merci got good results."

Brighton nodded. Old
news.

"It was her
call, Bright. That sketch is getting hits."

"What,
the bus driver, that car thief out in Elsinore?"

"And a sporting goods
store clerk said it looked like a guy who bought some hunting supplies out of
season."

"The question is,
why'd she wait so long to get it done— hypnosis or not?"

"Some time to consult
with the DA. A day to do the hypnosis and the sketch. She thought it over,
wanted to make the right move. More time to get copies, get them out to Press
Information."

Hess
understood that what kept Merci from acting quickly on the sketch was her doubt
about Kamala Petersen's reliability. She'd hesitated on instinct. The
margaritas seemed to have
justified that
doubt, but Hess said nothing. The booze was going to make Merci look bad.

"And Merci paid out
of her own pocket for that psychiatrist to hypnotize her, didn't she?"

"I really don't know.
But she told me she bought some Point Blank body armor with her own
money."

"What's wrong with
our PACAs? They're rated to threat-level Two-A."

"I guess she
thinks they could get her killed."

Brighton raised his
eyebrows. "She lost a potential witness."

"Yeah, she knows
that. She knows it was a gamble."

Hess suddenly felt his
tiredness slap up against him. It was like a big wave of cold water that sucked
the warmth right out of you. It usually happened when he was sitting down. Like
Friday, when Merci had to help him out of the chair. Maybe the secret of life
was to keep moving. Hop 'til you drop.

"How did she
miss those Jim marks on the car windowsV

"Well, they were
below the door frame."

"That's
absolutely not what I was asking."

"In that case,
it was Kemp who missed them."

"I'd taken Kemp
off the case by then, Tim. You were on

it."

"The damage was done.
She couldn't redo every bit of his work. Ike would have found them sooner or
later. Or she'd have thought it through and had a look for herself. Really, Bright,
that wasn't the kind of thing you'd think of unless you'd run across it
before."

Brighton nodded,
unconvinced. "It's basic car theft, is what it is."

"Well, she's
Homicide."

"Maybe that's what worries me. Besides, it took
you about thirty seconds." "I'm old."

"Tim, I'd like you to
document what you think of her performance on this case so far, just something
brief, in writing."

"What about
it?"

"How she's handled it—the privately funded
hypnosis, not taking the DA's advice about the legal fallout. The
carwindows—whose decision it was to remove the glass and have a real thorough,
old-fashioned look at it. Just a note for my files, nothing elaborate. A quick
and dirty."

Interesting use of words,
thought Hess. "I'm sure she'll put all that in her report," he said.

"Her reports are
evasive, partial and uninformative."

"The kind I
always wrote."

"Those were different
days, Tim. We were small and tight and we hung together. Anyway, I want your
angle on it."

"That wasn't
exactly in my job description, Bright."

"It is
now."

Hess said nothing.

"Is this LaLonde
creep a suspect or notr'

"Riverside is
watching him for us. So far, nothing unusual. My guts tell me no."

"How did Merci
handle him?"

"Well. He built this
override device for our man. It works on most car alarms, or so LaLonde says.
He can ID our guy if we can deliver him."

"Nice
work."

"Rayborn called
the shots. I just held up a wall."

"She really
carry a switchblade in her purser'

Hess looked at the sheriff,
then slowly shook his head. "I don't know," he said quietly.

"I'd be curious.
Look, Tim, I've got some problems here. Merci's lawsuit accuses Phil of
potty-mouth and grab-ass, but it accuses me—between the lines—of looking the
other way. In fact, if she wants some kind of monetary damages, she'll
eventually have to name the department, and probably me."

"Then she must
not want money, Chuck."

"You know me,
Tim. I don't look the other way. I've worked hard to make this a good place for
men, women, the best sheriff department in the state. Now Merci files this suit
out of the blue and three more women have come forward, talking to the press,
getting their own suits ready, I assume. One says Kemp raped her. Merci opened
the floodgates."

"Damn it, Bright. Maybe
you should be glad she spoke up. If you've got house to clean, you've got house
to clean."

"And I'll clean it.
But I feel like I got a gun to my head. And she never once came to me about any
of this."

A long silence then.

"What does she
want?" Brighton finally asked.

"How would I know?
She hasn't said one word about Phil Kemp to me."

"Find out."

"That in my job
description now, too?"

"Absolutely. Find out
what she wanes, Tim. I'll accommodate her if I can get this snowball
stopped."

Hess nodded. He felt
exhausted.

"Ever heard of a
friend of hers named Francisco?"

"She mentioned
him."

A long pause then, during
which Hess deduced he was supposed to make something of this friend. He sensed
the amount of brainpower necessary for such a formulation would be a lot more
than he wanted to spend.

"McNally told me
she'd mentioned a guy, is all. Never introduced them. I'm curious if she might
be sleeping with this man."

"I'm not."

"Find out about it
and let me know. You can add that and the switchblade to your job description
too, if you want to. Help me, Tim. I'm helping you."

Hess looked at him.

Brighton sat back. Hess
felt the resentment stirring inside—resentment that his own stupid cigarette
addictions had led him to this position, and resentment that Chuck Brighton had
allowed peevishness to bloom in his old age. I got cancer and Bright got petty.

"How are you
feeling, Tim?"

"Strong as an
ox. A little tired now and then."

"I admire
you."

"Thanks."

"And that has
nothing to do with feeling sorry for you."

"I hope not,"
said Hess, but in fact he knew it did, and it broke his heart in a minor way to
hear it from an old friend who was ordering him to piss on a fellow deputy half
his age.

Hess stood and shook
Brighton's hand.

Merci studied the two missing persons files that Casik had bird-dogged
for her, then hovered around the unbelievably slow clerk who processed the
purses into evidence. She estimated the guy had an IQ of about 50.

Six, she thought.
Six. The idea made her furious.

By the time she got to the
gym she was even more furious. And livid at Kamala for drinking on the night in
question— then not admitting it until later.

But Merci knew she was
primarily angry at herself for not hurrying up the hypnosis and the release of
the sketch. If it had been all over the newspapers and TV two days ago, like it
should have been, Ronnie Stevens might be working at Goldsmith's today. It was
a grinding guilt she felt, tangible, right there in her throat. And now, by the
looks of it, three more women had been taken by the Purse Snatcher.
Six.
Time to work off the rage.

The weight room was empty
on Sunday. She looked at herself in the mirror when she walked in—face in a
scowl, sweats disheveled, arms up, big hands twisting her hair into a wad and
applying an elastic band and thought:
Loser. You are a large dark-haired
loser who belongs in Traffic.

She humped the stationary
cycle for thirty minutes with the resistance up almost all the way. She was
dripping sweat and standing on the pedals to make them move after eight minutes
and the final twenty-two were actual torture. Blister time. Good, she thought.
Let the pain bring the gain. She got off the bike and wobbled to the ab
cruncher on legs that felt like petrified wood. Good again: hurt to learn,
learn to hurt.

She ran the Nautilus
circuit once light and once heavy, resting five seconds between each of the
three sets and thirty seconds between each station. Her heart was beating fast
and light as a bird's, fast as that wren's that was blown from its nest in a
Santa Ana wind one year. She'd found it in the grass and cradled it home in her
hands while its heart beat like some overcharged machine against the inside of
her middle finger. The bird had died overnight and Merci prepared a tissue box
to bury it, but her mother flushed it down the toilet. She'd never had luck
with animals: her dog chewed the hair off its own body; her cats ran away; her
parakeets died quick; her hamster bit her. Merci catalogued these failures as
she struggled on the chin-up bar—twelve was more than she could do so she set
her sights on fourteen and slid to a gasping heap on the ground after thirteen.

Up,
loser. You have work
to do.

Time for the free weights.
She had just settled under the bench press bar when she heard some commotion
near the door. She turned her head to the mirrored wall and watched in the
distorting glass as Mike McNally and three of his deputy friends swaggered in,
all muscles and mustaches and towels over their necks, smiles merry to the
point of insanity. The atmosphere of the room changed instantly. Suddenly she
was aware of herself, her body, her clothes, her sweat, what she might look
like, what they might do. It was like having 30 percent of your energy sucked
down some useless hole. Fucking great.