The Blue Hour (48 page)

Trudy turned back again
but Stork kept looking east. "We were going to pray with a friend but he
didn't make it. Care to join us?"

She was just ten feet away
now. He could see her watching him, see the back of her husband's capped head
in the middle of the brightening sky. She had the same sense of holy mandate
about her that Colesceau had described, but also a trace of uncertainty in her
face.

"Wherever three are
gathered in my name," he said. "Isn't that how it goes?"

She took her husband's
arm. "Honey, Jonathan? This guy would like to pray with us."

"Fine," said the
Stork. He turned to face Bill and Bill smiled at him. "What's your
name?"

"Big Bill
Wayne."

Stork offered his hand.
Big Bill brought the ice pick from his pocket and slammed it into Stork's
chest. Bill used every bit of strength he had, starting down in his legs. The
crack of bone, then instant depth. He hung on it with both hands for a split
second. Then he let go.

Stork arched skyward like
he was yanked by wires. He rose up on his tiptoes with his arms out and the
handle profiled against the gray-orange sky. Trying to fly, thought Bill. His
beak was wide open but nothing came out but a brief dry gasp. Bill could tell
by his eyes he wasn't seeing anything. Stork dropped to the grass with a
hmmfff.

Trudy had stopped in
place, her hands out toward her husband but suddenly frozen midair, the Bible
already on the ground at her feet.

It seemed to Bill he had
waited a lifetime to see the expression on her face: helplessness,
powerlessness, fear. Worth the wait.

There was a sudden
eruption from Stork, a sound like a cough and a sneeze and a retch all put
together. It had the ring of the final. Trudy's white dress caught red mist.
Bill waved to clear the air in front of him, like shooing off a fly.

Then he pulled out the
derringer and put it to Trudy Powers's temple.

"Just me and you now, little darlin'."

• • •

Merci clambered up through
incomprehensible morning dreams and got the phone. It was 6:22 A.M., she saw,
and

Hess's urgent voice startled her from the other end.

"Helena Spurlea is
Colesceau's mother," she heard him say. "Colesceau used Billy Wayne
as a front to buy the machine. She's renting the apartment behind her son's.
That's where we'll find it, and God knows what else."

It took her maybe two
seconds to process the information.

"We'll need warrants
for the Porti-Boy. Alvarez might be willing—"

"—I've already
got them."

"Wait for me,
Hess. I'll be there as fast as I can."

"I'm already
waiting."

Merci turned up both
radios full blast, slapped on a T-shirt and her body armor, a loose blouse and
sport coat, pants and duty boots. She strapped the ankle cannon over her sock,
then the shoulder rig with the loose snap and the H&X nine. Where was that
"select law enforcement" freebie, anyway? Hair up, then on with a
Sheriffs Department cap. She grabbed the charging cell phone off the bathroom
counter and put it in her purse, making sure the cheap stiletto was still
there, too.

She glanced at Hess's note
on the kitchen table, still there from the morning before. Sonofabitch was
right about Colesceau! Her heart was beating hard and strong as she trotted
across the drive toward her car.

She got in and turned the
key just as the smell hit her, then something cold and wet locked over her
face.

At first she was
baffled; then she understood.

She jammed her boots
against the pedals and slammed her body and head back. She threw her elbows and
twisted at the waist, first one way, then the other, then back again. She told
herself not to inhale one drop of anything but he'd caught her somehow on the
exhale and she was starved for air even as she realized she'd better not
breathe.

And through all of
that she kept thinking she'd break the guy's grip on her face but she couldn't.
His hands, and the smell she couldn't get away from, just rode her thrashing
head like a rodeo cowboy on a bull.

She willed the man's
grip to give. She focused all of her power on making his arms relax.
His
arms are weak
now
. . .

Then she noticed the
roof liner of the Impala was a very

interesting smoke gray color.

• • •

Hess waited in his
car at the entrance to the Quail Creek Apartment Homes for Merci's Chevy to
come charging down the street, but by seven o'clock she still wasn't there.

He drove over and parked
across from Colesceau's apartment at 7:05. He didn't want to tip their plan
but Colesceau wasn't going anywhere now, with Hess watching. He noted the
plates on the black Caddy parked in front of him and checked the numbers
against the ones in his blue notebook: Helena Spurlea's. He radioed Dispatch,
told them to get Rayborn to Quail Creek ASAP but Dispatch said she wasn't
responding to the call.

Hess got out of the
car and approached the crowd. He adjusted his hat to cover as much of his face
as he could. There were only half a dozen protesters this early. They were
sharing a box of donuts and coffee from a couple of thermoses. The CNB shooter
was there, but the big networks had packed up and left. He talked one of the
coffee drinkers into letting him use his cell phone. He called Merci direct and
got plenty of ringing but no answer. Not at home, he thought. Not at
headquarters. Not en route to headquarters. Not on the cell either, and she
carried the damned cell everywhere.

He went to the apartment window
and looked through the crack in the blinds. The TV was on, but he couldn't see
anyone watching it. He went back to his car and tried Dispatch again but
Dispatch couldn't raise Merci Rayborn any more than Hess could calm the worry
starting to work itself into him. It made his nerves feel brittle and jumpy.
Things felt wrong. It was 7:11, and he gave her four more minutes to show.

Then another three.

Then he lumbered across
the street again, past the little crowd of demonstrators, and asked the CNB shooter
to come with him, please.

He was a young man of
maybe twenty-five, Hess guessed, sleepy after a long night's vigil and probably
disappointed that his shift had yielded nothing compared to yesterday's circus
at the Corrections Building. Mark. Hess got him away from the others and laid
it out: don't shoot the next five minutes for CNB and Hess would make sure he
got into the house first, ahead of the other cameras. If he didn't want first
access then he'd get none at all, and he could explain that to his bosses
however he wanted.

Mark said fine and Hess
shook his hand and looked him in the eye while he did it. Whatever threat Hess
was trying to convey seemed to hit home, because the guy looked away, nodding
quickly.

He went to the porch and
knocked. No answer. He tried the door but it was locked. He looked back at
Mark, who was standing with the protesters, his camera at his side.

Hess stepped back, turned
his left shoulder to the door and summoned the strength of his legs. It wasn't
a stout door but it took him three assaults to get the thing open. That was the
most any door had ever taken, he thought, as he pushed it back and stepped
inside. He was breathing hard and his thighs were shaking. He looked back at
the CNB shooter, who was still with the protesters, watching him, good to his
word. The neighbors stood still and silent.

Hess closed the door
behind him and stopped in the short entryway, waiting. No sounds from upstairs,
no response from a heavy sleeper awakened by a splintering door. There was a
faint smell of cooking in the air and he could see the dishes and pots and
skillet from last night's dinner piled into the left sink. Enough for two, he
noted. The refrigerator cycled on with a hum. He checked the living room and
the little bathroom downstairs. He drew his .45, chambered a round and started
up.

On the landing he stopped
and listened to the silence. He tried not to think about how heavy his legs
felt, how short of breath a little stairway had made him.

Helena Spurlea was lying
on the floor in Colesceau's bedroom, her legs twisted in covers. She'd fought.
Her nightshirt was a bloody rag. She was on her back with her eyes open and her
mouth agape. Hess had never seen more stab wounds on a corpse, not even a
satanic ritual murder he'd been called out on back in '69, where three people
had gone at it. Sixty or eighty, he guessed, hard to say because they were so
small. Colesceau and his ice pick. He moved back out, then across the hallway
to the guest room. The bed was neatly made: no Colesceau, no body, nothing he
hadn't seen here a week ago when something inside him knew that things here
weren't adding up.

Except that one entire
panel of mirror on one wall was removed, neatly propped to the side to reveal the
framing. Stuck to the glass were two devices with thick handles and black
rubber suctions the size of salad plates.
Wood's Power Grips,
Hess read.
Behind the glass a big rectangle of insulation had been cut away, making a
passageway through to the other side.

Resting on one of the
exposed horizontal studs of the wall frame were two Styrofoam heads. They were
facing him. One was bald, the other had some dark hair attached, eyebrows, too.
A hit of adrenaline shot through Hess: one to hold a human hair wig, and the
other to watch TV? Through the opening he could see into the apartment behind.
A faint bad smell wafted through to him and Hess understood now what he had
come so close to understanding before.

He stepped through. The
cold hit him first and he could hear the hiss of the air conditioner. The room
was empty except for a change of clothes—pants, shirt, shoes—arranged neatly on
the floor of the closet.

He heard the faint mutter
of a TV and followed it. With his sidearm up and ready he turned into the second
upstairs bedroom and stared past the sights. What had once been Lael Jillson
reclined in the bed wearing provocative lingerie, facing a morning talk show.
Hess recognized her by her hair and by the general shape of her skull and face.
Her skin was rippled and gray and looked rigid. She wore sunglasses, like she
was hiding a bruise.

Downstairs he met Janet
Kane, who was seated at the breakfast bar with a book in her hands, wearing a
white blouse, a short black skirt, nylons and black high heels. Her legs were
crossed. She dangled one shoe from her toes, as women will sometimes do. Her
hair was up. Again, the general shape of her head and face was enough like her
photographs for Hess to tell who she was. Her skin wasn't as dark as Lael
Jillson's, but it had the same hard rippling, like swells on an ocean frozen
solid. Sunglasses, too.

Veronica Stevens lay on
her front on the living room couch, head resting on her hands, looking into the
room. She wore red lingerie. One calf was raised at the knee, like a forties
pinup girl. In the half light of the draped living room she looked almost
alive.

Hess stood among the women
with his gun at his side, his hat covering his naked head, looking down. His
shame matched his anger but he still couldn't quite believe what he had seen.

For no real reason he
walked across to the front windows, moved the drapes and looked out: suburban
Orange County, citizens on their ways to work, the lazy hot haze of summer
already rising up from the earth. Nothing special. Nothing different. Business
as usual.

Business as usual for
Colesceau, he thought.

He checked the garage for
the van but there was no vehicle. No Porti-Boy. He lifted the sheet off a
waist-high object to reveal an aluminum table with blood gutters and drains at
each end.

He used the kitchen phone
to request deputies to 12 Meadowlark, 28 Covey Run and to Merci Rayborn's home
in the orange grove. Then an APB on Spurlea's van. He read the plate numbers
slowly and clearly but he could feel his heart racing.

Back in the garage he
pressed the automatic door opener and waited. When it was up he pressed it
again, ducked under the lowering door and ran back to his car. The protesters
and the cameraman watched as he turned the key, yanked the shifter into drive
and gunned it hard.

• • •

He skidded up Merci's
circular drive and stopped short of her Impala. The driver's side door was
swung open and he half expected to see her but there was no Merci, no body, no
nothing but the squelch of the radio and the cats lounging in the morning
sunlight on the porch. He slammed through the front door and ran through the
house but it was empty as he knew it would be. So was the garage.

Except for a disappearing
rat and the body of a young woman, naked and hung by her ankles from one of the
rafter beams. Arms loose and fingers nearly touching the floor. Hair down,
filled with golden light admitted by the garage window, glittering and
ornamental in her slow rotation.

Hess moved in closer to
see the shiny stainless steel object stuck up against her clavicle. He
recognized it from the mortuary science department, an insertion tube for tying
off one end of a severed jugular and pumping fluid into the open other. The
floor was a pond of red-black blood and the woman—Hess thought she looked like
the protester spokeswoman he'd seen on CNB—appeared blanched and lifeless in
the dusty morning light. Her purse sat in the middle of the gruesome lake.