The Blue Hour

Eleven

Dr. Dalton Page asked Hess to meet him at his home. They had talked there, on his patio, several times over the years. The house was up on Harbor Ridge in Newport, an older tract in the city, where rambling ranch-style homes sat on terraces in the hills with views of the ocean. If you stood on the beach at sunset and looked up at them, a hillside of orange reflections looked back at you.

Driving out Hess recalled that Page had bought the place twenty years ago, anticipating retirement from the faculty of Johns Hopkins medical school. Hess had asked his help the first summer Page came to vacation in California, and they had kept in touch after that. Friends at the FBI had recommended Page as one of the best forensic psychiatrists in the country. He lectured at the Bureau regularly and had testified often as an expert witness.

Hess had helped organize a little party — mostly law enforcement and DA officers — to welcome Dalton and Wynn Page to Orange County. That was a decade ago, when the doctor retired and they moved here year round. Wynn had grown up in Newport and Hess remembered her seeming happy to be back home. Page himself had been wry about living in la-la land, but he had quite a suntan. After that the Pages had made little effort to include Hess in their social world, but he knew from department talk that they kept an extremely busy, bicoastal lecture and appearance schedule. Page had written a bestseller about criminal personality types.

The back patio was bathed in sunshine and looked out over the bright blue Pacific. Dr. Page sat at a glass table in the perforated shade of a lattice awning. Mandevilla vines snaked their way through the lattice and the pink blooms hung in the air.

He was wearing tennis whites and a white vest, which set off the darkness of his skin. His face was taut from surgery. There was a box of small weights and a jump rope sitting off under a Norfolk Island pine. Hess shook his hand and his grip was strong and dry.

Wynn brought them iced tea and set her hand on Hess’s shoulder as she poured his.

“Carry on, crimebusters,” she said, then headed back into the darkness of the house.

Not for the first time in his life Hess wished he was still married to his first wife, Barbara. It was a hypothetical longing based on what he thought he saw in some long marriages: trust, comfort, mutual respect. Two hearts seemed to beat slower than one. Couples like the Pages made him feel it. He guessed if he was still married to Barbara he’d have a lot less to worry about. He wouldn’t be broke, for one thing. Children would have given him a firmer grip on the future. A grip, he just now realized, that would have been easier to relinquish when it was time.

Beat this tumor and you’ve got ten more years, he thought, possibly fifteen. You can turn around a lot of things with that much time.

“The Ortega sites, Tim?”

“I brought the files. We don’t have a lot to go on, but we’ve got a partial print. If you and I can get the parameters right we might get lucky with it. If not, we’ll wait until he does it again and hope he gets careless.”

“Um,” 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 Florida 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.”