THE BLUE HOUR Read online

  "I think you forgot something."

  "No, I did not."

  "On the cars. We need to see the bottom of the window glass. All four panels. Both cars."

  She was still standing in front of him with her head cocked just slightly to her right. She was surprisingly tall. Hess could see the anger in her eyes, and the suspicion.

  "Kemp requested the car work," he said. Hess wasn't trying to blame Kemp on her behalf, but it sounded that way.

  He watched as she forced her reason to override her emotion.

  "Why dust the glass below the door liner' she asked. "Nobody can touch it down there unless the window's off to start with."

  "Not for prints. For marks."

  "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!"

  CHAPTER FIVE

  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 f
alse 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.

  Merci thought very briefly of Phil Kemp's endless and asinine comments, his touches and gestures and jokes. It wasn't like she hadn't warned him a million times. It was simply that he wouldn't listen and she'd gotten tired of putting up with him. Tired of him getting away with it. It said right in the rules you couldn't do that. Now two other deputies—women she barely knew—had come forward with similar complaints. Had she started some ugly movement? Which was worse, putting up with Kemp or standing up to him? Merci willed away those thoughts because they were counterproductive and troubling. It was good to be here, where none of that mattered.

  The doctor explained the procedure. Merci and Danielle would stay in the waiting room while Kamala was put into a deep hypnotic state. Then they would be allowed back in and Merci could take part in the conversation, make notes or tape-record it. Danielle would say nothing: more than two interlocutors might confuse Kamala, or even break down the hypnosis. Kamala would be brought out feeling relaxed and remembering what was said and done while she was under. It would take twenty to thirty minutes at the most. Merci sat in the waiting room, made brief small talk with Danielle, then read through the last entries in the notebook where she kept a running log of her investigations. A lot of her initial-contact work was recorded in the little floppy books with the blue covers, and when she had a few minutes of down time she'd review, ruminate and brainstorm, hoping to chip something loose, see something she hadn't seen before, or see it in a new way. She liked that the notebook was not department issue, but rather a personal item she chose. She had twenty-six of them at home, filled with her writing. She always carried one in a right-side pocket—coat, shirt, even pants, it didn't matter—a companion to the Heckler & Koch so heavily invested on her left.

  She took a minute to make notes on her conversation with Hess in the impound yard, following them with a sentence that she underlined: Stubborn old guy and dying of cancer. She looked at it and lined through it with the black pen, deciding that it wasn't up to her if he was dying or not, and it probably wasn't good policy to assume so.

  She'd heard through the grapevine that he was doing chemo and radiation and that one of his lungs had been cut out. The last thing the old cop needed was his partner treating him like he was good as dead. Plus, Brighton had put him there to watch her as well as help her. Any fool could see that. Hess was Brighton's eyes and ears, so why aggravate them any more than you had to? Joan appeared in the doorway and waved them in. "She's down good and deep."

  Merci followed her into the consultation room. The lights had been turned down and the blinds angled to admit little sun. There was a desk in one corner, bookshelves on two walls. In the middle of the room was a couch with three recliner chairs facing it across a coffee table. Kamala Petersen sat in the middle chair, tilted back like a man getting a shave, her hands crossed peacefully over her stomach, nails perfect, eyes closed. With her fla
wless makeup and attitude of repose she could be the newly dead, Merci thought.

  "Kamala, Merci and Danielle are back with us now," said Joan Cash.

  "Hi, guys," said Kamala, her voice faint but clear.

  "Kamala and I were talking about waves just now. It didn't take us long to find out we both love waves. Long, gentle never-ending Pacific waves. We've both bodysurfed."

  "They scare the daylight out of me," said Merci.

  "I think they're groovy," said the makeup artist.

  "They can be very relaxing to contemplate," said Joan.

  "Ah, Merci... would you like to talk about a week ago? Last Tuesday night? That would be August third. Kamala, I'll be right here but you can go ahead and talk to Merci just like you were talking to me. Okay?"

  "Sure."

  Merci took out her notebook and pen. "Kamala, you told me last Friday that you worked at the Laguna Hills Mall the week before. Why did you call me?"

  "I saw on TV that a woman had disappeared from the mall? She disappeared the same night I was working there. It really like bothered me. And I remembered that I'd seen a...a... rememberable man the night she vanished. And that was why I called you.

  "Merci looked at Joan, who mouthed to her: go slow...

  "So you saw this man Tuesday night of last week. Tell me why you thought of him when you learned that Janet Kane had disappeared."

  A few seconds passed before Kamala spoke. "He was kind of... strange looking. I would use the word startling. He was standing in the parking lot when I left. It was dark but I saw him in my headlights. He was looking at his car in a very interesting way. Now, I saw him only for maybe two seconds or three? As long as it takes to see someone in your lights? And then again for maybe two seconds right when my car went by him. And he made an impression on me. But I forgot all that until I heard about the woman."