THE BLUE HOUR Read online

  BLUE HOUR

  T. JEFFERSON PARKER

  For Robert and Claudia Parker, still showing the way.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six …

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Other Books by T Jefferson Parker

  Credits

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Sunday evening Tim Hess lumbered down the sidewalk to the snack stand at 15th Street. The skaters parted but paid him no attention. It was cool for August and the red flag on the lifeguard house pointed stiff to the east. The air smelled of the Pacific and ketchup.

  Hess got coffee and headed across the sand. He sat down on the picnic bench and squinted out at the waves. A big south swell was coming and the sea looked lazy and dangerous.

  A minute later Chuck Brighton joined him at the table. His tie flapped in the breeze and his white hair flared up on one side then lay down again. He set a briefcase onto the bench and sat down beside it facing Hess. He tore open a pack of sugar.

  "Hello, boss," said Hess. "Tim, how are you feeling?"

  "I feel damned good, considering. Just look at me." Brighton looked at him and said nothing. Then he leaned forward on his elbows. He was a big man and when he shifted his weight on the wooden bench Hess could feel the table move because the benches and the table were connected with steel pipe. Hess looked at the angry waves again. He had lived his childhood here in Newport Beach, well over half a century ago.

  "You'll have to feel damn good for something like this. I haven't seen anything like it since Kraft. It would have to happen now, six months after my best detective retires."

  Hess didn't acknowledge the compliment. Brighton had always been as generous with his praise as he was with his punishments. They'd worked together for over forty years and they were friends.

  "We can put you back on payroll as a consultant. Full time, and you get all the medical. Forget the Medicare runaround." "That's what I'm after."

  Brighton smiled in a minor key. "I think you're after more than that, Tim. I think you need a way to stay busy, keep your hand in things."

  "There is that."

  "He's got to be some kind of psychopath. There really isn't much to go on yet. This kinda guy makes me sick."

  Hess had suspected but now he knew. "The National Forest dumps."

  "Dump isn't really the word. But you saw the news. They both went missing from shopping malls, at night. Cops waited the usual forty-eight to take the missing persons reports. The first was half a year ago, the Newport woman. We found her purse and the blood. That was a month after she bought nylons at Neiman-Marcus, walked out and disappeared forever." Brighton squared his briefcase, fingered the latches, then sighed and folded his hands on it. "Then yesterday late, the Laguna one. A week ago she went to the Laguna Hills Mall and vanished from sight. Hikers found her purse. The ground near it was soaked in blood again—like the first. It'll hit the news tomorrow— repeat this, serial that. More mayhem on the Ortega Highway. Both the victims—apparent victims—were good people, Tim. Young, attractive, bright women. People loved them. One married, one not."

  Hess remembered the newspaper picture. One of those women who seems to have it all, then has nothing at all.

  He looked up the crowded sidewalk toward his apartment and drank more coffee. It made his teeth ache but his teeth ached most of the time now anyway.

  "So, it's two sites off the Ortega in Cleveland National Forest, about a hundred yards apart. They're eight miles this side of the county line. Two patches of bloodstained ground. Blood-drenched is how the crime scene investigator described it. Scraps of human viscera likely at the second one. Lab's working up the specimens. No bodies. No clothing. No bones. Nothing. Just the purses left behind, with the credit cards still in them, no cash, no driver's licenses. Some kind of fetish or signature, I guess. They're half a year apart, but it's got to be the same guy."

  "Everyday women's purses!"

  "If bloodstained and chewed by animals is everyday."

  "What kind of animals?"

  "Hell, Tim. I don't know."

  Hess didn't expect an answer. It was not the kind of answer the sheriff-coroner of a county of 2.7 million needed to have. But he asked because scavengers have differing tastes and habits, and if you can establish what did the eating you can estimate how fresh it was. You could build a time line, confirm or dispute one. It was the kind of knowledge that you got from forty-two years as a deputy, thirty in homicide.

  We are old men, Hess thought. The years have become hours and this is what we do with our lives.

  He looked at the sheriff. Brighton wore the brown wool-mix off-the-rack sport coats that always make cops look like cops. Hess wore one too, though he was almost half a year off the force.

  "Who's got it?" asked Hess.

  "Well, Phil Kemp and Merci Rayborn got the call for the Newport Beach woman. Her name was Lael Jillson. That was back in February. So this should be theirs, too, but there's been some problems."

  Hess knew something of the problems. "Kemp and Rayborn. I thought that was a bad combination."

  "I know. We thought two opposites would make one whole, and we were wrong. I split them up a couple of months ago. Phil's fine with that. I wasn't sure who to put her with, to tell you the truth. Until now."

  Hess knew something of Merci Rayborn. Her father was a longtime Sheriff Department investigator—burg/theft, fraud, then administration. Hess never knew him well. He had accepted a pink-labeled cigar when Merci was born, and he had followed her life through brief conversations with her father. To Hess she was more a topic than a person, in the way that children of co-workers often are.

  At first she was a department favorite, but the novelty of a second-generation deputy wore off fast. There were a half dozen of them. Hess had found her to be aggressive, bright and a little arrogant. She'd told him she expected to run the homicide detail by age forty, the crimes against persons section by fifty, then be elected sheriff-coroner at fifty-eight. She was twenty-four at the time, working the jail as all Sheriff Department yearlings do. In the decade since then, she had not become widely liked. She seemed the opposite of her soft-spoken, modest father.

  Hess thought it amusing how generations alternated traits so nimbly—he had seen it in his own nieces and nephews.
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  "Tim, she filed that lawsuit Friday afternoon. Went after Kemp for sexual harassment going back almost ten years. Physical stuff, she says. Well, by close of the workday two more female deputies had told the papers they were going to join in, file suits too. The lawyer's talking class action. So we've got a lot of deputies taking sides, the usual battle lines. 1 was sorry Rayborn did it, because basically she's a good investigator for being that young. I don't know what to make of those complaints. No one's ever complained about Phil before, except for him being Phil. Maybe that's enough these days. I don't know."

  Hess saw the disappointment. For a public figure Brighton was a private man, and he bore his department's troubles as if they sprung from his own heart. He had always avoided conflict and wanted to be liked.

  "I'll try to fly under all that."

  "Good luck."

  "What did the dogs find?" he asked.

  "They worked a couple of trails between the sites and a fire road about a hundred yards south of the highway. The two trails were real close to each other—a hundred yards or so. He parked and carried them through the brush. Did whatever he does. Carried them back out, apparently. Besides that, nothing."

  "How much blood?"

  "We'll run saturation tests on soil from the new scene. Janet Kane was her name. With the first, most of it's dried up and decomposed. The lab might get some useful DNA. They're trying."

  "I thought you'd find them buried out there."

  "So did I. Dogs, methane probe, chopper, zip. A pea-sized part of my brain says they still might be alive."

  Hess paused a moment to register his opinion on the subject of this hope. Then, "We might want to draw a bigger circle."

  "That's up to you and Merci. Merci and you, to be exact. Her show, you know."

  Hess turned and stared out at the riptides lacing the pale green ocean. He could feel Brighton's eyes on him.

  "You do look good," said the sheriff. The breeze brought his words back toward Hess.

  "I feel good."

  "You're tougher than a boiled owl, Tim."

  Hess could hear the sympathy in Brighton's voice. He knew that Brighton loved him but the tone pricked his pride and his anger, too.

  The two men stood and shook hands.

  "Thanks, Bright."

  The sheriff opened his briefcase and handed Hess two green cardboard files secured by a thick rubber band. The top cover was stamped COPY in red.

  "There's some real ugly in this one, Tim."

  "Absolutely."

  "Stop by Personnel soon as you can. Marge will have the paperwork ready."

  CHAPTER TWO

  The sun had just come up over the hills of Ortega and invisible birds were chattering in the brush.

  Hess stood under a large oak, near the place where Janet Kane's purse had been found. He looked down at the bloodstained earth. The crime scene investigator had dug out a patch that Hess now measured with his tape—twenty by twenty inches square and three deep. He scooped out the dead oak leaves and placed his palm against the earth, working it against the soil and debris. Then he held it up to the sunshine, trying to see if the blood had soaked down this for. No. His fingers smelled of oak and earth.

  The tree itself marked the western edge of the blood spill. Hess hadn't realized how large the area was. It was roughly triangular, with the peak about six feet from the tree trunk and the sides spreading down the gentle decline caused by the roots beneath the ground. The sides were just under five feet long and the base measured at its widest exactly seventy-four inches across—as long as Hess was tall. The CSI had taken his baking-dish-sized sample way down at the base where the soil was looser and deeper and less involved with roots.

  Turning slowly back through the pages of the file, Hess studied the deputy's first-call report and sketches. He compared them with the CSI's photographs, then, using fist-sized rocks, he marked the outline of the bloodstain, where the "unidentified body matter" and the purse were found. The bits of human insides had been scattered within a thirty-foot diameter of the tree, in all directions. Coyotes, he thought. Raccoons, skunks, twenty kinds of birds and a thousand insects. The steady buzz of flies filled the morning. Hess could not reconcile the idea that a fully grown human being had been here a week ago but now not a bone, not a tooth, not a single scrap of flesh or clothing was left. The contents of the victim's purse had been strewn about, according to a numbered legend on the CSI's site sketch.

  The scene reminded him of something. He knew what it was but he put it out of his mind.

  He set out to follow the trail the bloodhounds had worked. It led up a swale studded by small oaks and yellowed foxtails, then across a dirt road—old tire tracks, faint. Beyond the road was a gentle decline where the ground was softer, thick with cattails and pampas grass growing high and thick. He lowered his head and parted the stalks, pressing through. A moment later he could see the lagoon before him, a dark oval ringed by foliage and dappled with the rings of waterbugs. The air smelled sweet. He stood there for a moment, breathing hard and feeling the sweat run down his face. The dive boys have their work cut out, he thought: ten feet of mud to wade through before you hit the water, then two feet of visibility if you're lucky. It had been thirty years since he'd made dives himself. He'd always enjoyed them.

  Back at the tree he took a knee and breathed hard. They weren't kidding about physical fatigue and weakness. The top

  two lobes of his left lung were gone as of two months ago.

  He stood. The old oak had V-ed early in life and spread wide like oak trees will. The lower half of the trunk began only four feet off the ground. He set the files under the rock that marked the purse.

  Hess climbed up and rested again, one foot braced on the main trunk and the other on the diverging limb. Slowly he walked it out toward the end, grabbing the sharp leaves overhead for balance. When he was over the place where Janet Kane had apparently been drained, he stopped and felt the branch above his head. His fingers found a smooth notch in the bark but it was hard to confirm what he felt without seeing it. In better days a simple pull-up would have gotten his chin over the branch and he could have seen what he needed to see.

  One lousy pull-up, he thought. He remembered yanking off a hundred of them at the L.A. Sheriff Department Academy training course when he was a cadet. Then climbing a twenty-foot rope. Hess had begun to wonder lately if memory was supposed to be a comfort or torment.

  He pulled himself up. Straining, he looked down on the notch in the bark and liked what he saw. It was just what he had imagined. The bark was worn about an inch across, all the way down to the pale living meat of the tree. His shoulder ached and his arms quivered. Then the limb suddenly shot up past his eyes and he was nowhere on earth for a moment. He lay flat on his back in the middle of the bloodstained ground.

  • • •

  Ten minutes later he was standing under the second tree, where Lael Jillson's purse had been found six months back. The big oak was part of a larger stand that blotted out the daylight and kept the ground in eternal shade. The trunk twisted up from the earth and the gnarled arms reached skyward.

  He took his time making the climb. Using the foliage overhead for support, he walked out on a sturdy branch and found what he was hoping to find, the inch-wide abrasion where the bark had sloughed off. In the last six months scar tissue had formed and a surface of gray grain now covered the wound.

  He saw her: ankles tied, head down, the rope looped over the branch. Hair swinging, fingertips a few inches from the dirt.

  Hess trudged back to his car and got the folding shovel and two buckets from the trunk. It took him ten minutes and two rests to fill one bucket with unsoaked soil from near the Kane tree. It was important to get a control sample if you wanted to run a good saturation test. He finished, breathing fast. His palms burned like embers but when he looked down at them they were just a little red.

  Then a quick sitting snooze during which he almost fell over. He finally filled the other bucke
t with clean soil from the clean side of Lael Jillson's tree.

  When he got back to his car with the folding shovel balanced over one of the heavy buckets, he wondered if his fingers might actually break off. Dr. Cho had said nothing about loss of digits but that's what it felt like was happening. When he looked at them they were dented deeply by the bucket handles but otherwise fine.

  The sun hurt his eyes and his kneecaps felt like they had rusted. He took another little nap—about two minutes— before heading back down the Ortega.

  It was good to be working again.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Hess took the file to the hospital with him for his three o'clock appointment. Last month's program hadn't been so bad, although the cumulative effects by month number four could be devastating, depending on the patient. So said Dr. Cho.

  He settled into the recliner, squared the file on his lap and listened to Liz the nurse talk about her new car. She slipped the big needle into the back of his wrist and Hess felt the stiff presence of steel in his vein. Liz taped it down and connected the intravenous drip line.

  "How's that feel, Tim?"

  "Foreign."

  "Got some reading, there? Good. This is right here if you need it." She rolled the wheeled table closer and lifted the little blue vomit trough. It was curved to fit around your chin, Hess had noted, but it didn't look wide or deep enough to accommodate a truly upset stomach. Maybe you were supposed to get too sick to puke right.