THE BLUE HOUR Read online

  "Urn," said Page. It was between a grunt and something more thoughtful.

  Hess knew Page was already disagreeing with him, and that was fine. That was why he was here.

  Page looked through the glossies of the dump sites. He wore a homely pair of black reading glasses. Hess remembered Page bragging he had 20/15 vision because that's what Hess had.

  Hess listened to the swish of the photographs and the mockingbird in the pine. "Tim, tell me what you know about the victims. While I read through this."

  Hess told Dr. Page about beautiful, confident and occasionally lonely Janet Kane. Then about the very spoiled though very decent Lael Jillson.

  "The pictures in there don't capture how beautiful they both were," he offered.

  Dr. Page, with a curious smile: "And what have you seen that does?" "Other pictures. Family. How they lived." "How was that?"

  He told the doctor about Janet Kane's bulk hair products and Lael Jillson's enthusiasm for private hours without her husband and children around. He mentioned Kane's interest in art and Jillson's thoughtful diary. He didn't say anything about the leather playthings in Janet Kane's closet or Lael

  Jillson's weakness for marijuana and gin. As he talked about the two women he'd never seen Hess felt protective of them, like he owed their memories a simple kindness that their bodies, at the end, were not offered.

  "That print on the fuse may be your miracle," said the doctor. "Because you're right, Tim—if that's what you were assuming, anyway—he's been printed before. He's got a sheet and he's spooked and he knows what pressure feels like. You've run across him somewhere. Could be way upstream in juvenile court, but somewhere he's felt the lash."

  "That's why he's careful."

  "You're damned right it is. But what an ego. I mean, what an astonishing arrogance by leaving those purses."

  "Do you think they're more for us or more for the public?"

  "For you. Funny, the media calls him the Purse Snatcher, but he's the opposite of a purse snatcher. He leaves the purse and takes everything else. It's all he leaves. That and the blood."

  Page looked up at the sky like it might have something to say. Hess liked the way Page could draw sense out of something that seemed only evil. Hess took the pieces and made his own picture.

  "It would be easy for him to take the purses," Hess said. "But if he did, we'd have to keep the women in the missing persons' files forever. In an investigative sense, there would be no murder."

  "He needs someone to hear the tree fall—you."

  "He's experienced, isn't he?"

  "He's practiced, but not necessarily experienced. From the time and distance between the dumps I'd say Jillson and Kane were his first actual homicides. Plenty of time to let the first one blow over, but not enough confidence to vary the routine very much. Nobody starts with something of this magnitude. You work up to it. If nothing else, you work up to the how of it. And like most builders he's never really satisfied with what he makes. It's always got to get bigger, better, more elaborate. Riskier. More complex. So, you may have two purses sitting in evidence right now, but when he goes again, he might just give you more to work with. It's part of escalating the risk, and the risk is a major stimulant to him."

  "He'll go again."

  "Absolutely. He's abducted and murdered twice. And we understand that this is a sex killing, of course. So, there won't be any more half measures for the Purse Snatcher. No more of the things that he practiced, the scenarios he created to get him to this point. He's graduated. He's big time. He might move halfway across the country, he might win the lottery, but he won't stop."

  "Any chance at all that he's keeping them alive?"

  "None whatsoever."

  "Why?"

  "For one, it's totally impractical. But more importantly, he prefers them dead, Tim."

  "How do you know that?"

  Dr. Page smiled, a little ashamedly, thought Hess. "Tim, he's taking them with him. His fantasy doesn't climax in a rape-kill scenario. It begins with one. What is interesting to this man—what is essential about him—happens after he's killed and raped them. Note the order there—not rape and kill."

  Hess thought about this.

  "How old is he?" "Twenty-five to thirty. That's enough time to see his vision and learn his methods. But not enough to leave twenty or thirty women dead behind him—because that's how many you'll have ten years from now if you don't catch him. Actually, I'd guess he'd leave the area before he got that many. Any hits through VICAP?"

  "Nothing hot. I talked to Lyle Hazlitt back in Washington early this morning. He says there's a Michigan case open, two women kept in a cabin after they were killed. Wife and mother-in-law, though. They're chasing the husband down in south Horida now."

  "No," said Dr. Page.

  "There's a guy breaking into funeral homes in New Orleans, taking the corpses. They don't know where or why."

  "No. But that's an interesting case. That kind of protracted necrophilia is extremely rare. There's very little even written on it."

  "Maybe he's holding the corpses for ransom, waiting for the furor to die down before he calls their families."

  Page smiled. "You're such a Pollyanna sometimes."

  They laughed at this.

  "I'd love to interview this guy, Tim."

  "I'd like to stop him."

  Page nodded and looked through the photographs again.

  "He thinks he's repellent to women, so he blitzes them. But if he was truly physically hideous someone would remember him hanging around the malls. No, he sees himself as unworthy of engaging a live woman. Takes the whole woman. A corpse is reusable, Tim. Look for a freezer or a large cooler, possibly in a storage unit somewhere close to where he lives. It's possible he's cut them into refrigerator-sized parts, but I don't think so. No evidence of flesh rent or bones sawed, no easy way to use power tools out in those woods... no. I think they're whole. The formalin near the bleeding ground makes me think of embalming or preserving, too. I see from your notes here that you thought of that, already. The question is why would he lug embalming fluid and the requisite needles and tubes around with him if he could just do that all at his place a little later? He takes tremendous risk out there in the Ortega."

  "Efficiency. Blood out, fluid in. Done."

  "I guess. Nothing to hose off. Interesting how neat he is, isn't it? Hang and bleed them like deer. Now, that's a direction you can go if you want to."

  "I want to."

  "It's too obvious to ignore. A hunter. Someone with experience dressing animals in the field. An outdoorsman. Likewise a butcher or slaughterhouse employee. Certainly someone with the rudiments of human biology and a knack for the mechanical. I mean, he's getting into those cars without tripping the alarms—that isn't easy. So, throw some electronics know-how into the profile. He's also got to be pretty strong, to hoist them up like that with the rope. White male, of course. I don't have to say that. How do you think he's subduing them, Tim?"

  "I have no idea."

  "He may strangle them right there in their cars. Dark parking lots. It could be over pretty quick if he's strong."

  "True. But wouldn't he want to damage them as little as possible?"

  "Correct. Just like plums in the market."

  "And if he can get them to the woods under their own power, it saves a lot of hard work," said Hess. Lately, he had become acutely aware of what it was to be tired and to save energy. It was hard for him to imagine carrying a human body even the hundred feet or so from the dirt road to the oak trees. Not to mention hoisting them up with a rope. Check the hunting and camping stores, he thought: see what new gadgets they've got for hanging a carcass.

  "Of course," said Dr. Page, "he has to drive a vehicle large enough to carry a body in. Trunk, most likely. Maybe a van or a pickup truck with a camper on it."

  "Physically, what can we look for?"

  "Compact and muscular. He wouldn't even think about waiting in the backseat of a car if he was large. Note
, however, that he's picked out fairly spacious cars."

  "What else can I use for parameters? That partial print is all we've really got. I want to send it through CAL-ID with all the blessings we can give it."

  Page nodded curtly, folded his fingers under his chin and shut his eyes. The sunshine came through the lattice in little rectangles and landed on his face. Hess saw the Mandevilla blossoms nodding in the breeze like they were talking to each other. Between the doctor's elbows were photographs of ground soaked in at least two quarts of human female blood and the words of a young man currently employed in the shoe department of a major department store: anyway, when someone that beautiful smiles at you, you remember. At least I remember. .

  "Tim, a man who has reached this level of specialization has had a long and ... thorough journey to this point. Look for a juvenile record of academic failure, truancy, exposure, peeping, breaking and entering to take underwear or other fetish items, or perhaps a masturbator, urinator, defecator. Fire setting, of course. If he's got the sheet I think he does, look at the sex crimes. No matter how far off the mark they might seem, remember that he's grown, changed. Anything but pedophilia, that's its own world. I honestly believe you will have run across him before. You, meaning law enforcement. His need for risk will be his undoing, if you get him He'll have to give you more and more. And forget your stooges and snitches and jailhouse songbirds—the Purse Snatcher will have told exactly nobody on earth about his deeds. That's why he has to tell you about them. That's why he left the purses."

  Dr. Page set his hands on the table top. His fingers looked seventy and his face looked fifty. He was staring down at the pictures still lying between his arms.

  "No one's had a look at this guy? Not one single eyewitness at the malls? Someone lurking, following, checking out the cars, anything out of the ordinary?"

  Hess considered. "Rumor has it we've got some kind of witness. I guess I'm not supposed to know. Rayborn hypnotized her for the sketch artist, but I haven't seen the results."

  "Then a witness is what you don't have. In court."

  "Right. Dalton, do you see the Purse Snatcher trying to get himself close to the investigation?"

  "I doubt it. He's not that naive. He would be more likely to send you a body part, UPS."

  "Something from the inside, though."

  "Correct. Something from the inside. He doesn't want to spoil her appearance."

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  It angered her to pose for a rapist but she knew Hess was right: if Izma got interested he might talk to impress her.

  Hess talked to the manager while Merci stood in the lobby and read the LA PALOMA HOTEL RULES sign:

  1. No checks

  2. No overnight guests

  3. No loud music after 10 P.M.

  4. No hot plates

  5. No solicitors

  6. No kidding!

  "Three-o-seven," said Hess.

  "How come I haven't seen this creep's name on the SONAR lists?"

  "He's not considered high risk."

  "A low-risk rape-kidnapper."

  "That's what they say."

  They took the stairs to the third floor and walked down the hall. Merci touched the gun that was snugged against her ribs the way a Catholic might touch a medallion of St. Christopher. It was for luck and for something more than luck: it was for peace. Her last qualifier was her best in ten years, putting her fifteenth overall in a big department that had a lot of good shots.

  Mercy had drawn down only once in her life and didn't have to fire, but she was steady on target in a Weaver stance and would have hit him clean if she'd pulled. She liked what she'd said to the creep, something unrehearsed, something that just came out and worked real well, at least on this guy: Hey Jack, you gonna be just another dead asshole?

  That had done it. Luck. Peace. The nine.

  Before they got to the door Hess said, "Let me lead it. I know a little about him."

  "Just stand there and look my best?"

  Hess stopped outside 307 and turned to her. "It would be better if you sat. He liked them small and helpless."

  "I'm five-eleven."

  "He's six-ten."

  When Ed Izma opened the door Merci's heart gave a startled flutter, then settled uncomfortably. Part of the reason was the size of the man, his head coming almost to the top of the seven-foot door frame. She leaned back reflexively to look up at him. She could feel the willingness of her right hand to move up under her coat, so she made a point to keep it at her side.

  He was not an ugly man at all, in fact his face had an economy of line that was interesting, and his eyes were a placid and unthreatening gray. He was smiling and his teeth were large and even. Merci thought his head looked small.

  "Sorry to upset you," he said. "But nice to meet you. I'm Ed."

  He offered his hand. Merci took it and understood instantly that he had her now, could easily force her any direction he wanted, or snap her into the room and right out the third-story window if he wanted. It seemed an awful long way to his eyes or balls, and she doubted she had the speed and strength to damage them.

  "Sergeant Rayborn, OCSD."

  He smiled down on her and let her hand go. His eyes had light in them. "You know, I haven't committed one serious crime in the last thirty-five years, Hess. In fact, I've only committed one serious crime in my entire life."

  "It was kind of a whopper."

  Merci, in the center of the room now, turning to her left, saw Ed Izma's gaze bearing down on her. Hess had told her Izma raped his victim a dozen times in the two days he had her. The cold of the freezer had actually helped keep her alive; that and Izma constantly putting her in and yanking her right back out for various reasons. She'd had the luck to be put in an old freezer with bad wiring, a poorly fitting top and a shot gasket. She'd needed a blood transfusion when they got her to the hospital.

  "By today's standards? I don't think so. I never took another life.'

  "One that we know about, anyway," said Hess.

  Merci was suddenly aware of multiple facts: hot room, thick air, useless air freshener, a fen oscillating to her right; Hess and Izma to her left, five hundred plus pounds of antagonistic male bulk. There was a large bed that took up most of the room. It was made. She felt like she was looking at things through a hot fog. Dizzying. Another room behind: bath and bedroom but too small for the bed? She was aware of being stared at. Didn't the room smell like air freshener and semen? Where was the real air in here, anyway?

  "Something to drink, Merci?"

  "Water. Ice if you have it."

  "I'm sorry, I don't have either."

  "What do you have?"

  "Nothing, actually."

  "Thanks anyway, shitbird."

  "I really dislike foul language from a woman."

  "She doesn't care what you like, Ed. She doesn't want to date you."

  Merci, breathing deeply and letting the anger clear her head, caught the flash of meanness and pride in Ed Izma's gray eyes.

  "Something like that, though—right, Hess? A little temptation?"

  "She's my partner."

  "You're a lucky man, then. Sit. Please. I wiped these chairs off just for you."

  The chairs in question were two white plastic patio chairs. Merci looked hard at the seat, wondering what the giant had had to wipe off.

  Izma lumbered into the other room and she heard the suck of air and gasket, then water running. Tricky bastard, she thought. He wore a white singlet and a pair of very tight shorts, a swimsuit probably, that made him seem even bigger than he was. The swimsuit was yellow with white piping. His legs were trunklike and pale and mostly smooth, with an occasional patch of very dark hair. His feet looked enormous. He wore the kind of cheap rubber thongs that click when they hit the bottom of a heel.

  Merci felt the hair on her neck rise.

  Luck. Peace. The nine.

  She took a deep breath, then another.

  Hess was seated well away from her but close to t
he huge bed that sat against the wall. He was looking at the bed. His legs were crossed and his hands were folded over one knee, and Merci saw him for the first time as a calm and strong man, a man you wouldn't want to mess with, and she was happy to see him this way. He looked at her but said nothing and his eyes asked the same of her.

  She felt trapped in the dismal room and her palms were still damp but she could feel her reason coming back. Hess's level stare helped. She nodded, gazed around. There were indentations on the carpet at the midway point along each wall. They looked to Merci about twenty by twenty inches, the size a TV set might make, or a small nightstand, or a file cabinet. They were a darker shade of yellow than the carpet around them—no sun on them.

  What had been there, and why had Izma moved them?

  The light diminished as a body darkened the doorway and moved toward her with a glass of ice water.

  "Just kidding," he said.

  "You're a crack-up." She took the glass.

  He chuckled quietly and moved away. He sat at the foot of his bed.

  Then he arched his back and hiked up his feet and walked himself backward across the bedspread on feet and hands. His legs were spread and his hips raised high. His genitals slopped out from behind the mesh liner of his bathing suit, and he smiled at her over his groin—a bloated, four-legged, upside-down spider dragging melons across a web.

  It only took about three seconds. It was the single most vulgar thing Merci Rayborn had witnessed in her thirty-four years. She had no idea if Hess saw it because she refused to look anywhere but back into Ed Izma's happy gray eyes.

  "Now," he said. "What can I do for law enforcement?'

  He was sitting cross-legged on the mattress with the pillows behind his back and his back against the wall. His hands were in his lap and Merci could see that he could move his trunks aside and flash her whenever he wanted.

  She looked to Hess in appeal. He was already looking at her, with a bland, admonishing expression on his face.

  Up both of yours, she thought.

  "We've got a guy who's taken two women, Ed. He's got them somewhere—home on ice, preserved in a storage unit— we're not sure where."