The Blue Hour (4 page)

"From
what?"

"A
Slim Jim."

"Thieves
quit using Slim Jims two decades ago."

"He's
not a thief."

She
turned and walked over to the BMW. She lifted away the plastic sheet. Hess helped
her lift one of the heavy window assemblies and angle it into the overhead
light. He looked down the gentle curve of the glass. The first two were clean.

Hess
found what he was looking for on the third window— rear, driver's side. The
jimmy tool had left three inches of dull scuff along the outer bend of the
glass, near the bottom. It was the kind of shallow abrasion made by a steel
tool as the operator moved it up and down, trying to hook the door release.
You couldn't see it when the window was in the door. It looked to Hess like
this one had taken a little time. He knew old-time car thieves who could hook a
latch in five seconds or less, depending on the make and model. The rub was
the alarm.

A few minutes later,
Ike, one of the lab techs, got the rear driver's side window assembly out of
Lael Jillson's black Infiniti. Black infinity, thought Hess, bending down to
see the Jim marks low on the glass.

Rayborn brushed her
fingertips against the mark and stood. "If he's forcing in with the Jim,
then he has to shut off the antitheft alarms."

"That's first.
If they're turned on to start with."

"I'll get Ike to
tear them apart wire by wire. Find out how he's doing it."

Hess
wondered how long a job Ike could make it, if you ordered him around like that.
Cooperation in a bureaucracy was never free. It wasn't really Hess's business,
but if something hurt the efficiency of the work,
then it
was
his business. Merci Rayborn was his immediate supervisor, but the Purse
Snatcher was running them both for now. He dropped the thought, something Hess
was learning to do after sixty-seven years on the planet.

"It's
all electronic now," he said. "On the later models."

Then Merci said
something that surprised Hess. His own thoughts were moving in the same
direction as hers, but she'd gotten there first.

"If he's not making them open up
the cars," she said, "maybe he's already waiting for them when they
get in. The backseat, behind the driver. That's why he's used outside parking
lots, at night."

Hess
looked down at the scratched window, then up at Rayborn, nodding.

"I
hate this bastard," she said quietly. Then, over her shoulder,
"Ike!"

Merci took Ike aside and told him to find out how the
antitheft system had been overridden, and to find it out priority. She liked
Ike because he was about her age—early thirties—and that meant he was the
future of the department. Like she was. It was good to be one of the
under-forties, knowing you would be running the place someday. At least some of
them would. Ike seemed willing to work hard for her, so when she was in charge,
she'd bump him up a pay level.

Ike
smiled as she left. Merci gave him an informal little salute. Walking past Lael
Jillson's car she imagined a man curled into the generous leg room of the
backseat, hunched in the darkness. She imagined getting into her car at night,
feeling secure and maybe a little tired from the long day, settling into the
nice leather seat, interior light on, sliding the key into the ignition. Then
what? She felt the hair on her neck rise.

Outside she slowed her pace to fit that of Tim Hess. Merci was
a fast and determined walker and it irritated her to adjust. The fact that he
was fighting cancer made everything twice as difficult as it should be. A murder
investigation was no place for unwieldy sympathies. She glanced over at him,
wondering how to project some kind of professional kinship with the new
partner. She looked at his pale blue eyes and the strong line of jaw, his thick
short hair with the little crest of white that rose up like a wave in front. In
his day, she thought, he must have been a decent-looking man.

"I'll
eat my lunch in the car," she said, surprised at how abrupt it sounded.
She was not socially graceful and she knew it. What she had meant was, I got
five calls here at work from reporters yesterday, all wanting to talk about the
lawsuit; and I had five more at home last night. She wondered if she should
have just said that.

She looked back at
him. His face looked intent. He seemed twice as large and vigorous as her
father but she could see the tiredness in his eyes.

"This is how you're going to spend the next four hours,"
she said. "The ATM runs should be in from the banks. If he used her card
for cash I'd like to know where. I want you to spend some time in their lives.
If he chose them beforehand you might get lucky and stub your toe on him. I've
got a call into the marketing and promotion departments for the two shopping
malls, trying to see if this guy's drawn by some event, some common happening,
some . . . you know, some bullshit they do to get business. When the lab work
on the BMW is done we'll set it against the Infiniti and see what matches up.
Gilliam told me noon on that. That's half an hour from now, and if he's good to
his promise, get started without me. He said he'd know by early afternoon how
much blood was lost at each site—using your samples. That's going to
mean something to us. Last, one of us should run the
bloodhounds in a bigger circle. If nothing pops, we'll have to dive or drag
that lagoon. I know you used to dive for us, so I'm going to leave that choice
to you—dive it or drag it. I also want you to see where the cars were found.
That can wait, but not forever. How does all that sound to you?"

"Good."

Merci thought as she
walked, not seeing the ground in front of her. "You're sure he's killed
them, aren't your

"Yes."

"Where
we found the blood?"

"I
think so."

"Why?"

"There was so much of
it. I didn't understand that until I saw it for myself."

"But
no clothes. No flesh, no fiber, no bones. Nothing but blood and purses. The
purses are for us and the CDLs are for him."

"Viscera,
too."

"But did you
read how much? The combined weight was less than a third of a gram. Gilliam's
not even positive it's human."

"What else would
it be?"

"Animals."

He
didn't answer or look at her.

"What
do you think he's doing with them out there?"

"Field
dressing them."

She asked him what
that meant and he told her. She felt the hair stand up on her neck again, and
she imagined the draining body of a young woman dangling from the branch of an
oak way back in the Ortega. She thought of steer carcasses, the way the extremities
were clipped and tied off, everything truncated, no waste.

"Then
why not more viscera, Hess, if he's disemboweling them?"

"Animals will
eat almost every scrap of it. They're hungry now, a hot summer like this."

"Then we're not
going to find anything in the lagoon or the woods around there," she said.
"Because if he's going to that much trouble, he's not just going to
abandon what's left of them."

"No.
But you're right—we need to work the dogs in a bigger radius, then dive the
lagoon."

Merci knew that to
assume and be found wrong was the single worst thing an investigator could do.
You spent a lot of time proving the obvious because you could never afford to
be wrong. "Are you on good terms with McNally?"

Hess
said they'd worked together.

"Line it
out," she said, relieved she wouldn't have to talk to Mike right now
herself.

"All
right."

She
saw the faint false frown on his face and felt the anger jump into her chest.
Anger was a fast and powerful thing and she had not learned to control it well.

"You
already have."

"That
was before our ground-rules talk. Anyway, he's ready when you are."

"I
wasn't kidding about any of that. None."

"It's a waste of
time if I can't think a thought until you approve it."

"Hess,
all substantive decisions will be made by the
lead investigator in counsel with his superiors and in keeping with the
procedures of this manual and the policies of this department."

"I know. I wrote
that section with Brighton, about a million years ago."

She
refused to stumble. "I can tell by the pronoun it was quite some time
back."

It
seemed to take him a moment to figure that out.

"Well," he
said. "I want both branches, where the rope burns are. There might be
fiber to test. I'd have cut them off myself when I was out there, but I didn't
have a saw."

"Fine.
Good."

She gave him her cell
phone number and told him not to use it unless he had to. "Calls are on my
dime because the department's too cheap to give us our own phones. I put a fax
machine in the car myself, too. Anyway, I'll take the lagoon and I'll get your
branches. I need to see the dump sites again, too."

He looked at her with
that hawk face and the sharp eyes and the jarhead haircut. This Hess was an odd
one.

"When do you
want McNally and the dogs?" he asked.

"Get them
started now. I'll be there later."

"One more thing.
Make the outside cut first. On the branches."

"I know."

• • •

She got a large coffee
with a lid and drove the big Impala into Costa Mesa. She set her Heckler &.
Koch 9mm on the seat beside her because it poked the inside of her left arm
when she drove. She liked to lower that arm to the rest and take the wheel at
twelve o'clock with her right and guide the car around with the effortless
power steering. She'd grown up watching her father drive the family car that
way. The only difference was that her father drove slow and Merci drove fast.

The
makeup girl's address turned out to be a nice little house on the west side,
butted up against Newport Beach but still affordable for young people on small
salaries. Her name was Kamala Petersen and she lived with two of the other cosmetic
consultants she worked with. She'd been at the same mall the night Janet Kane
vanished, and she'd seen someone who disturbed her. She'd come forward when
Janet Kane was listed as missing. Merci had interviewed her two days ago,
briefly, and found Kamala to be excitable, flighty, unable to focus. But there
was something inside that Kamala Petersen wasn't letting out. Merci thought she
knew what it was, and she was determined to get it.

Hypnosis
was a trade-off because you could get good results, but hypnotized subjects
can't testify in California criminal cases. Two of the district attorneys and
the undersheriff had advised against the session. Merci had weighed the risks
to her own satisfaction and decided that a suspect description outweighed the
loss of a possible witness. There would be other witnesses; she would locate
and subpoena them. She overruled. Merci mistrusted even the smallest of
democracies, which was why she wanted to be sheriff someday.

Kamala
was a big-bodied, unpretty girl, with brown tightly curled hair and a truly
beautiful complexion. Rayborn thought she wouldn't mind having skin like that
but the upkeep didn't interest her. Plus she had a ding in her forehead from a
coffee table when she was three, and another one up by her hairline from
falling off a fence when she was six. They weren't so bad but if she tried to
make them over they just looked worse in her opinion

Kamala couldn't shake
hands because her nail polish was drying. Merci said she'd rather not come
in—they'd better get going.

"I'm kind of
nervous," said the girl, moving her hands in front of her like she was
playing an accordion.

"It's
a snap."

"Last time I was
hypnotized was at Magic Mountain and I thought I was Michael Jackson? The weird
part was he hypnotized us to not remember any of it, so I didn't? My mom had
to tell me what an idiot I made out of myself."

"No
song and dance today, unless you feel compelled. Don't think about it. Pretend
we're going to the beach or something. I want your brain fresh and uncluttered
for Joan. Come on, let's go."

The medical towers
were next to a big-screen theater. There were plenty of parking places and
Merci steered the Chevy to take up two spots under a magnolia tree.

Dr. Joan Cash
welcomed them into her consultation room—a hug for Merci and a handshake for
Kamala. Merci had known Joan since college at Fullerton and considered her a
friend. She was a petite redhead with a spray of freckles across her nose and
cheeks. Five years ago Merci had recommended her to the department for
contract work, and the arrangement had been good for both parties: Joan got an
occasional job and the county got a good psychiatrist.

Joan introduced
Kamala to the sketch artist, Danielle Ruger. Merci had used her before and
thought she was the best she'd ever seen. Merci shook Danielle's small, soft
hand and smiled. It was nice to be doing work in a room with no men in it.