The Blue Hour

Ten

“First off, the canning jar lid didn’t hold any prints. We’ve got smudges consistent with fingers inside rubber or latex gloves, but no prints.”

It was early Thursday morning, two days after Hess had found the Slim Jim marks on the car windows. He stood in the crime lab and felt the tips of his fingers burning. Next to him was Merci Rayborn, with her hair back in a ponytail and a tight set of lines at each side of her mouth.

James Gilliam, the director of Forensic Services, looked at her, then at Hess. To Hess he looked uncustomarily perplexed.

“Now, based on the stain size and the perc rates I can tell you that at least two liters of blood went onto that ground. I can’t tell you how much ran off. An adult human female contains just over four liters. So the chances are excellent that whoever lost this blood is dead. Given the circumstances, the chances are overwhelmingly good. I don’t think our victim was in the presence of a lifesaver, a do-gooder or an ER nurse.”

They were looking down at a bench on which sat a collection of plastic pet litter boxes and plastic food containers filled with earth. Gilliam had aerated the boxes with a narrow-bit drill to replicate natural porosity before adding the soil. The food containers had the original dump site earth, collected by the CSIs. He had gotten plenty of older, soon-to-be-discarded blood units from the UCI Medical Center to see what the blood would do in the dirt.

“You answered what we needed answered,” said Merci.

Hess watched Gilliam peer toward her over the top of his reading glasses. The lab director was a soft-spoken, deliberate man who took his time and never forgot the difference between a scientist and a cop. You couldn’t hook him into seeing what wasn’t there. He was almost a head shorter than Merci Rayborn.

“I found something else,” he said. “Kind of interesting, really.”

Hess’s pulse rose a blip — he knew from experience that “kind of interesting, really,” was James Gilliam’s way of saying hold onto your hat.

Merci knew it, too.

Gilliam said, “Those soil samples you brought me in the buckets, Tim — good thing. That was the only way to replicate the conditions in Ortega closely. But you brought me more than just soil samples. I’ll bet you didn’t know that.”

Hess shook his head.

“I set a little from each bucket aside, just as a precaution. When the perc tests worked out I thought I’d run the extra through the mass spec, just have a look. I tried the Kane soil first and got unusually high amounts of some unusual things — trioxane, formic acid, methanol, and CH O. When I ran the Jillson dirt I got nothing like that.”

Gilliam stopped here, as Hess knew he would. The man was a scientist and saw no reason to explain his own punch lines.

“Well, Jim, what is it?” Hess prompted.

“Oh, sorry. Formaldehyde — simplest of the aldehydes, highly reactive. In the soil samples, it was dehydrating to form the trioxane, oxidizing to make the formic acid and reducing to simple methanol. But it started as formaldehyde — there was enough of the unreacted CH₂O left to determine that. Actually it was probably formalin, which is formaldehyde in a 37 percent aqueous solution. Pure formaldehyde is just a gas.”

“How did it get there?” asked Merci.

He looked at Hess but he answered Rayborn: “Someone put it there. Or, more likely maybe — spilled it.”

“Just the Kane site?”

“Just the Kane site. But remember, six months of weather and rain would have washed out the Jillson ground.”

Hess had already pulled down Remington’s Practice of Pharmacy from one of the crime lab shelves. It was a large book and punishingly heavy — he’d never noticed how heavy until today. It was the same 1961 edition, priced then at $22.95. Hess had used it a hundred times over the decades to look up answers that Gilliam had in his head. There was something of the educator in James Gilliam and Hess had never minded it.

He glanced at Merci and saw the quick look of irritation she gave the lab director. Gilliam missed it, lost as he was to the mass spectrometer. He hovered over the machine, bent at the waist with his hands behind his back like a helpful valet.

“Uh, James?” she asked. “Maybe you could spare us some heavy lifting here and tell us what formalin is used for. I mean, all I know is that’s what the frogs were pickled in for biology class.”

Gilliam was still bent over his machine. “Usage: a preservative. A solvent. A tanning agent for leather. Mix it with ammonia and you get a urinary tract antiseptic. It’s a big part of two different and powerful explosives — cyclonite and PETN. It combines eagerly, so it’s used to make everything from resins and disinfectants to embalming agents, plastics to polyvinyls. It’s also used as a soil sterilant. Which is interesting, since that’s exactly where Tim found it.”

“A preservative,” said Merci. “And the lid of a pickling jar. Do the jar and the formalin go together?”

Gilliam straightened and rubbed his chin. He sighed. His pale eyes were turned up to Merci but looked to Hess like they were focused somewhere past her head. A little odd, Hess thought: Gilliam distracted, Gilliam nervous, Gilliam not looking the woman in the face. It took Hess another moment to get it: she’s attractive to him and he doesn’t know how to act.

“They don’t have to go together, though I see what you’re getting at,” Gilliam said quietly. “Formalin will evaporate quickly, but you can transport it in any jar, really. And, maybe he didn’t bring the jar. We only found the lid. I guess the larger question is—”

“—Yeah — what the hell is he dumping formalin into the ground for in the first place?”

“Yes, of course.”

“While a body hangs from a tree, eviscerated and bleeding,” she said.

A moment of silence while three imaginations tugged at their respective tethers.

Until Gilliam cleared his throat. “I had a case where a rape-killer would wash off his victim with isopropyl alcohol before he... coupled with her. Something about germs and religion gone pathological, is what the prosecution said. He had to have her pure, clean, clinically... worthy.”

Rayborn was nodding. “I had one where the prick washed her out with bleach after he raped her. He wanted his seminal fluid destroyed.”

“Maybe he’s preserving parts of her,” said the director.

“As keepsakes,” said Merci. “Eyes. Hearts. Whatever in God’s name turns him on.”

“And when the meat hits the jar, the formalin spills out.”

Quiet again.

Another meditative pause.

Merci next: “If formalin is used in tanning leather, you could use it to tan human skin, right?”

“I guess you could. But if all he wants is their skin, where’s the rest of them? Even the coyotes and vultures can’t completely consume a full human skeleton in one week.”

Hess reentered the room after a brief mental departure. He was still looking down at The Practice of Pharmacy.

“Maybe he’s preserving the bodies,” he said. He set the Remington’s back on the shelf. “Taking the whole woman.”

Merci and Gilliam both looked at him — two mouths slightly open, four eyes intent.

Hess continued, “It would account for us finding nothing but lots of blood, scraps of innards, and the primary ingredient embalming fluid. He’s taking everything but fluids and viscera with him.”

“Okay,” said Merci. “Then what about the canning jar?”

“Maybe he was just using it for the obvious.”

“And what’s that, Tim?” asked Gilliam.

“To carry something to eat. All that work must make him hungry.”

“He ought to apply for a job here with the ME,” said Merci, with a small smile for Gilliam. “If he can eat while he carves.”

Gilliam smiled too but looked away from her. Then he was moving toward the door. “I found some other things from the cars. Kind of interesting, really.”

Merci held open the door for the director and looked over his head at Hess.

“I love this part of the job,” she said.

The comparison scopes were ready. Gilliam’s voice carried through the hush of the Hair &. Fiber room as Hess and Rayborn looked at two different hairs magnified one thousand times by the phase contrast microscope. Then they traded places.

“We were able to get the Jillson hair because her husband knew something was very wrong,” said the director. “So when he got Lael’s car out of impound he kept it exactly like it was. It sat under a cover in his garage for a month before we saw it. Never washed, never vacuumed. Sharp guy, Mr. Jillson. He was stubborn enough to leave the car untouched again after we examined it, in case we wanted a second look. We did. And I’m glad we did.

“The hair on the left is likely from a Caucasian. It’s blond, long, with some wave to it. We found it in the Jillson car yesterday. It was caught on the lap belt buckle — the plastic housing that the tongue goes into. I don’t know why they didn’t find it the first time. I don’t care, so long as it isn’t Ike’s or one of his workers’ — which it’s not. And it’s not a likely match with the victim or anyone in her family. We’ve eliminated them as donors, too, based on their scale counts and pigmentation. They all used the same hair conditioner as the victim. This hair wasn’t washed or conditioned with the same product. We found completely different pharmacological traces on it. Nothing we can identify yet, by the way. But the scale count is higher than any of the Jillson clan we tested. I’m going to say it’s possible, very possible, that this hair came from your man.”

“Which seat?” asked Merci.

“The one behind the driver.”

“I think he waits there.”

“That’s very interesting. Now, on the right-hand scope is a hair that very likely came from the same person as the hair I just showed you. We pulled it from the Kane car yesterday morning. It was caught up in a mesh netting attached to the back of the driver’s seat. You know, one of those things to secure personal items in a car — maps, tissue, maybe a flashlight or magazines for a long trip. This certainly suggests that the hair’s owner was behind the front seat himself. Maybe even crouching down at some point, resting his head against the back of the seat and the mesh. Waiting for her? Who knows? You both do know that match is a bad word in hair analysis — we can’t say it in court — but what we have here is as close to a match as two hairs are likely to come.”

“I smell the creep,” said Merci.

“There’s more,” said Gilliam.

He led them around the microscope stations to a counter that ran along the wall. Hess followed. Sunlight came through the narrow vertical slots of the windows. The slots had always made him think of hidden archers. The heavy book had left a scalding outline on his thighs.

Gilliam brought a small plastic box from one drawer of an old steel tool chest that sat on the counter. He opened it, snugged the lid onto the bottom and handed it to Hess.

The old man looked down, then reached in with a thick fingertip and poked the item in question. It was a standard 20-amp automotive fuse, the kind you’d find by the dozen under any dashboard. The color of the glass was good and Hess could see no break in the filament inside.

“I already checked, and it’s good,” said Gilliam. “More to the point, there’s no fuse like it used anywhere in Janet Kane’s BMW. The car is only seven months old, so all the German-made factory fuses are still in it. They’re a different design. This one must have come from somewhere else, been intended for use somewhere else. Some other car. Some other piece of equipment. I don’t know. But I’d like to know what it was doing in Janet Kane’s car.”

Rayborn asked him exactly where they’d found it and Hess asked if they’d printed it, at the same time.

Gilliam looked from one to the other.

“Behind the driver’s seat. Sitting right in the middle of the floor. And yes, Tim, there was a print on the glass of it. Just a partial but we’ve got some ridge endings and bifurcations to work with. I eliminated Janet Kane myself. I’ve made up an AHS card for CAL–ID and WIN, but the specifying parameters will be up to you two. If he’s got a thumb on file, we’ve got a shot at him.”

“Write up the parameters, Tim,” said Merci.

“I want to talk to Dalton Page first. And to an old rapist I busted. They know what we’re looking for.”

Merci ignored him, looking instead at Gilliam with what Hess was beginning to think of as her customary suspicion. “Anything else, Mr. Gilliam?”

“That’s the bulk of it.”

“Good work.” Then she turned her dark, adamant eyes on Hess. “Tim, go see your profiler and your rapist now. Because I want those parameters ready by the end of the workday and I want those prints on their way.”

“You’ll have them. I can talk to Dalton alone. But I think you should see the creep with me.”

“I’ll consider it.”

Hess turned and started across the room. He heard the conversation without seeing it and wondered if that’s how it was when you were dead, hearing things without seeing them, aware of a world going on without you. He looked back at them with something like longing.

“What about my oak branches, Mr. Gilliam?” asked Merci. “I sawed hard to get them. Outside cut first.”

She looked over at him with a humored expression and Hess realized she’d cut the branch the hard way.

“Oh, standard nylon rope, Sergeant. Safety orange in color — something you might find in a camping or hunting or surplus store. Judging from the depth of the notches and the strands that wore through and stayed for us to see, it was bearing some weight. The same rope — or very similar — used on each tree.”