The Blue Hour (41 page)

You can't even serve out
your sentence without a TV show about it, he thought. America really is crazy.

He sidled down a busy side
street and found a pay phone behind the old courthouse, called the Sheriffs and
asked for Merci Rayborn. She answered. He used his American accent to introduce
himself as John Marshall over at Federal Airborne in Santa Ana with a package
for her they couldn't deliver. Similar to the accent he gave to the Bianchi
promotions fellow, but a bit of a Texas twang to it.

"Parcel got damp back
east, address smudged up in transit," he explained. "Your phone
numbers were still on the sticker."

"Who the hell's it
from?"

"Let's see
here... Bianchi International in—"

"—What's your
number there?"

He heard the rudeness in
her voice, the reflexive caution, the automatic defense.

He sighed and read her the
number off the phone. "You're going to need the parcel number."

He gave it to her and she
hung up. Thirty seconds later she called.

"Federal
Airborne, Marshall."

"Merci Rayborn
again."

"What do you
want us to do with this—"

She interrupted and
gave him her home address, hung

up.

Colesceau smiled, slid the
pen back into his pocket, firmed his clip-on necktie around his neck and tried
to put some resolve into his step. In the glass of a building front he saw
himself: dark Kmart slacks, short-sleeve white shirt, plump and unremarkable
body. He looked hunched and harried. He carried a brown paper grocery bag in
his right hand and a vinyl briefcase in his left. The bag had gifts for Holtz
and Carla Fontana, and the briefcase just a few pencils and paper clips. He
brought it because it made him feel as if he had something meaningful in
reserve.

They spotted him
crossing the street and they bristled with readiness. He was barely onto the
sidewalk when they were upon him, the reporters with their mikes brandished and
their questions popping, the shooters gunning him in silence, the protesters
yapping at him like toy breed dogs you could impale beautifully on a hat pin.

He stopped and looked
at them and tried to compose himself.

How does it feel
to be taking your last injection?

"I am pleased. It is an unhappy
experience."

How long until
the effects of this last injection wear off!

"I'm told it
will be months. It will take my body many months to recover its former
health." And when it does, he thought, I'd like to pay a call to every
last one of you...

Where are you
going to live next?

"Somewhere I can be forgotten."

Will you date
women?

"I have no desire for the company of
human beings."

What about employment—what kind of work will you be looking for?

"I would be good
as a lighthouse watchman, but there aren't any lighthouses left."

What will you do when your sexual desire returns? Will you turn violent
toward older women again?

"I have not had sexual or violent thoughts for
many years. I never intended violence, even as a confused young man. I will
never harm another person as long as I live. This is both a fact and a promise
to all of you."

SEND
the
MONster
BACK
to the PRISon

A1 Holtz barged outside,
waving his arms and shouting as he ushered Colesceau through the throng and
into the building. "Sonsofbitches have no respect at all," he said
as soon as they got through the door. He clapped a heavy hand onto Colesceau's
shoulders. "How you holding up?"

"With
difficulty, Al."

"I'm so
goddamned sorry it came down this way."

"I'm sure you
tried your best to avoid it."

"Just between
you and me, I wasn't the only vote."

"I expected no
mercy from the women."

"It's old news now,
Moros. But there's good news for you, too. You're ten minutes away from being a
free man."

Psychologist Carla Fontana
and Sgt. Paul Arnett, a deputy from the Sheriff's SONAR program, were waiting
in Holtz's little office. Carla extended her tanned and freckled arm, gave him
her 200-watt smile. She smelled like skin cream. Arnett shook his hand and
looked him steady in the eye.

On the desk were a small
round cake with frosting and a six-pack of root beer. Red napkins and white
forks. The cake said GOOD LUCK MOROS in a script so inept Colesceau knew it
could only belong to Holtz himself.

Holtz arranged the seats,
still jabbering about the media outside, then started cutting the cake with a
plastic knife. Colesceau wondered for the hundredth time how the PA saw
anything out of his grimy glasses, which slid down his nose as he peered at the
cake. Carla poured the root beer and the sergeant sat back against one wall
with his arms folded over his chest.

Colesceau
looked around the office—neat and small, that of an inconsequential
bureaucrat—and was happy to
think he was
seeing it for the last time. It was actually kind of pleasant to sit here and
realize he was finished. Except for the imminent visit from the nurse—a large
flabby matron who smelled of sterile dressings and worked the needle into his
vein each week with endless deliberation and satisfaction—it was exciting to
him to be sitting here, being processed out of the system. He half expected an
erection to begin, but none did.

"I have gifts for
you, and for you, Carla," he said. "Sergeant Arnett, I had no idea
you would be attending."

"Carry on."

He brought out a yellow
turkey egg for Holtz and a pink goose egg for Carla. The yellow egg had small
checkerboard flags on toothpicks protruding from each side near the top. It
wore a snug muslin vest trimmed in gold piping and festooned with gold sequins.
Thus a rococo high-performance racing egg or something. He shuddered at what
his mother must have been thinking when she did it. She made it for him right
after he got the job at Pratt. It was astonishing in its ugliness, and
Colesceau had happily chosen it for A1 Holtz. Fontana's was hung with tiny
strips of dangling frill, giving it the look of a rotund, headless flapper from
the '20s. Tiny silver slippers were affixed to its bottom. Pure Carla.

He presented them one at a
time. Holtz's eyes actually became misty behind his filthy glasses. Carla
Fontana smiled at him with a smile so pitying and genuine that Colesceau wished
he could smash her teeth out with a brick and make her swallow them.

He shook Holtz's hand and
then Carla's. Sergeant Arnett nodded to him.

man to me, Moros. You've abided by the
rules and maintained a sense of good humor and cooperation about it all.
Especially this last part. Good luck. And, I arranged with Corrections to send
you out of here today without that last injection. It's up to the Board
physicians and they took my advice. After three years of it you don't need any
more. And if you do, one more's not going to do you any good at all. So, to
you, my friend. Cheers, salud and godspeed."

He lifted his root
beer cup for a toast. Colesceau raised his own and drank.

"Drink up and
have some cake," said Holtz. "When you're done we'll sign the papers
and sneak you out the back."

Tim Hess sat in the mournful hush of the detective's
pen. He watched the fax machine print out Bart Young's list of embalming
machine buyers in Southern California over the last two years. It was arranged
by date of purchase. The addresses and phone numbers and signing purchaser were
conveniently listed, too. Mostly funeral homes and, presumably, their owners
or managers: Marv Locklear of Locklear Mortuary... Burton Browd of Maywood
Park... Peg Chester, Orange Tree Memorial Park and Cemetery...

Allen Bobb was on the
list, signing for the Cypress College Department of Mortuary Science. Most of
the sales were in Los Angeles County. There were nineteen in Orange, sixteen in
San Diego county, fourteen each in Riverside and San Bernardino.

Lots of dead people to
take care of, thought Hess. He was hoping for a match with the registered panel
van owners or the customer list from Arnie's Outdoors, one of which he flipped
through with each hand as the fax rolled out its own list. His head moved back
and forth as he went from one to the other.

He could feel the draft on
the back of his head whenever someone walked behind him. The air conditioner
coming on was like a freezer being opened. He was curious what the back of his
head looked like without hair in a way he was never curious when his head was
covered by it. At home, before coming in, he'd tried on half a dozen hats. They
called attention to what he was hiding, but he decided on an old felt fedora
that had been his rain hat for a couple of decades. He hadn't figured on every
little draft once he took it off indoors, however, or on the stares of the
other deputies who worked around him. He could actually feel their eyes on his
newborn skin. After an hour or two, he was getting a little irritated by them.

...
D.C. Simmons of Simmons Family Funeral Home ...
Barbara Braun at Sylvan Glen . . . William Wayne of Rose Garden Home in Lake
Elsinore...

Lake Elsinore, again,
thought Hess. The Ortega. Lael Jillson and Janet Kane. Murdered LaLonde. The
buyer of an electronic car alarm override, calling himself Bill. A Porti-Boy
embalming machine delivered November of last year, three months before Lael
Jillson, one month before the Deer Sleigh'R and rope purchased with cash at
Arnie's by a man who looked like the one described by Kamala Petersen.

But William Wayne wasn't
on the other lists. And no one else on Bart Young's list was either.

Too easy, Hess
thought, though easy things broke cases all the time. In fact, a surprising
number of high-profile murder investigations turned on something like
this—something simple and direct. Hess thought of the dead man sitting next to
Randy Kraft in his car; the Atlanta child killer tossing a body off the bridge
in view of the FBI; the bloody chainsaw returned to the rental yard by a killer
whose name Hess could not at the moment remember. But that kind of good luck
wasn't something you expected. And it only seemed to come late
in the game, when the casualties were high, when
everything else you'd tried hadn't worked.

. . . Vance Latham at
Trask Family Mortuary .. . Fran Devine for Willowbrook Memorial Park... Mark
Goldberg at Woodbridge Mortuary...

Claycamp came by to tell
him they were down to twenty-two panel vans registered to Orange County males.
Gilliam came by with the now moot blowups picturing Matamoros Colesceau as he
watched TV, courtesy of concerned citizen Rick Hjorth. Hess looked at them anyway.
They were less definite than the originals, as he knew they would be. He shook
his head and slipped them into his side coat pocket. Maybe see them later, in a
different light.

Ray Dunbar, Jerry Kirby's
partner, stopped to thank Hess for being there the night before, for doing what
he'd done, for trying what he'd tried to do.

Brighton came over for a
casual debriefing on the Jerry Kirby aftermath. The sheriff set a hand on
Hess's shoulder, thanked him, then walked away. Hess had always hated hands on
his shoulders—condescension, pride of ownership, false assurance. Brighton's hand
made his skin start burning again. And his heart sank a little when he finally
realized that word of his new head had leaked out, and his friendly visitors
were coming to see it for themselves.

"Nice head,"
said Merci, passing him for the first time at work, acting her part. She had a
thick stack of papers in one hand. Hess saw Phil Kemp look over at her, then
away. "When did you shave it?"

"Last
night."

He was aware of the other
homicide detectives, all men, watching him.

She appeared to study his
new hairstyle for the first time. "I like it," she said with a smile.
"It shows off your face."

She had said the same
thing the night before, as Hess dried himself after the shower. He couldn't
remember the last time he'd taken a shower with a woman just because he wanted
to be close to her some more. Or the last time he had held for a long while and
really looked at his lover after they were done. It had been decades since he'd
been with someone Merci's age and this made him feel as if he were somehow not
himself. Like he'd gone back in time.

Merci looked down at him.
There was a brightness in her eyes. She was wearing a different scent than
usual. She took hold of the still lengthening fax transmission.
"Bart?"

Hess nodded.

"Anything
good?" she asked.

"There's an Elsinore
buyer. William Wayne of the Rose Garden Home."

"William as in Bill?
LaLonde's customer? It's worth the call. After that, we drench the three malls
one more time with these."

She held up the
papers—color copies of Kamala Petersen's Purse Snatcher. Hess was disappointed
because he thought that TV and newspapers were a better way to broadcast a
suspect sketch than walking malls, giving them away hand to hand. Deputies had
already done it. This felt like they were going backward.