The Blue Hour

Seventeen

That afternoon Hess sat in an empty conference room at Sheriff headquarters and studied the pages in the fat blue binders, comparing the mugs with Merci’s sketch. She had already gone through the registry once, then asked Hess to do it, separately. Something about “comparing independent data,” which was fine with Hess. He felt an odd roiling in his blood, like it was hot, like it was starting to bubble inside.

Of the 3,700 sex offenders then registered in Orange County, 335 lived in areas patrolled by the Sheriff Department. Some 259 were considered “serious,” 11 others, “high risk.” High risk is three or more violent sexual attacks. Serious is two or less. Sex Offenders Notification and Registration — SONAR — was instituted to keep track of them all.

He’d already eliminated the 11 high-risk offenders. He was now at “D” in the serious category. He was surprised that a two-time rapist, recently released at the age of thirty-six, for instance, could be considered less than high risk.

D’Amato. Darcet. Davis. Deckard.

Too fat. No. Too old. No.

According to the sign-out sheet, four of the thirty-five binders were checked out to the SONAR team, who were transferring most of the information onto compact disc for public release. New state law required that agencies make their sex offender registries available to the public in areas of high population. SONAR was deleting addresses — but not zip codes — from the files before making them public so as not to encourage trouble from neighbors. The SONAR deputies were finishing up the last three books, “T” through “Z”, and also a supplemental registry for the criminally insane.

He studied the artist’s drawing again. Kamala Petersen’s man was mustachioed. Wavy blond hair. He’d never seen a composite wearing a coat and a vest. The artist had given something sad — perhaps even something damp — to the man’s eyes. Or was it Kamala’s “hyperromantic vision,” as Rayborn had put it?

An interesting face, Hess thought: handsome, groomed, unusual. Unusual in what way? Not typically Southern Californian. Mustaches are out. Long hair is out. The appearance wasn’t simple or casual, or offhand. It was formal. Created. A “look.” A look of what? What are you supposed to be? A model, like Kamala said? Actor? Celebrity? Quick now, describe him in three words: intelligent, secretive, regretful.

Regretful. In forty years of law enforcement Hess couldn’t remember describing a sketched suspect as regretful. Later, in court, maybe. Maybe.

Could be way upstream in juvenile court, but somewhere he’s felt the lash.

Regret, thought Hess. You regret what you’ve done. You regret who you are. Or is that part of your look — the appearance of sorrow?

Personally, thought Hess, if I had taken two people from their cars, hung them in trees and bled them, I would feel sorrow indeed. But not everyone would, and that was what made the worst people in the world different from the rest of us — no regret, no remorse, no feeling for anyone but themselves, no conscience. The tricky part was that Hess knew a lot of people like that who weren’t criminal. Some of them were cops and deputies. Some were accountants and mechanics. Some were teachers and housewives, though if the truth be told, most of them were men.

Delano. Dickerson. Diderot.

No. No. No.

Then there was Eichrod. Hess popped open the rings and worked it out. Eichrod, Kurt; 32 years old; 5’10", 185, brown and brown. Hair long and wavy. Mustache. Possession of obscene material; solicitation; indecent acts; peeping; battery; assault with intent to rape. Two of the sexual assault raps got him a total of four years served. Released on parole in 1995, parole satisfied late last year.

Hess set Merci’s sketch beside the binder page and considered. They were close but not close, alike but different. Something more in the attitude than the physical.

What disturbed Hess was Eichrod’s rising line of intensity, from porn to sexual assault in a six-year span.

You don’t just go out and start with something of this magnitude. You work up to it. If nothing else, you work up to the how of it.

The how of it, Hess thought: hunter, butcher, packinghouse worker? Embalmer?

Eichrod’s jacket would tell. He set aside the binder page to copy later.

Gilbert. Greers. Gustin. Gutierrez. No.

It was amazing how many sexual criminals were out there. And these were only the ones who had been caught, convicted and registered. Police scientists said the realistic number would be more like quadruple what the registry held. Hess was ashamed of some of his gender for failing to mate legitimately, then turning furtive or brutal. Desire for sex was at the center of almost everything that went wrong in a guy’s head. That, and desire for money.

He turned to Ed Izma’s page and looked at the picture of the huge man. Reduced to a three-by-four image, Izma lost all of his panoramic menace.

Jackson. James. Jerrol.

Mickler, Mondessa, Mumford.

No. No. No.

Then there was Pule, Ronald E. Abductor, rapist, torturer. A user of pliers. Fourteen years back in Georgia. That was ten years ago. His only offense. High risk, due to special circumstances — abduction and forcible sodomy. He was forty years old, which put him out of Dr. Page’s profile age. He wasn’t a builder, apparently. He just exploded on the scene, skilled beyond his years, fully formed. He was big and probably strong enough to hoist a full grown woman over the branch of a tree: 6’3", 220 lbs. Too big for the backseat of a car? Maybe. Long blond-brown hair, mustache. And there was that something different in his eyes, too, the thing that Merci’s artist had tried to capture. Remorse? Self-pity?

Hess put Pule on top of Eichrod and continued.

An hour later he was at his desk in the investigators’ bullpen with the arrest files for Eichrod and Pule. It was almost seven and Hess was the only one there. He looked at his watch and saw that it was Friday, the thirteenth. He had already photocopied their registry sheets and made a note to get “S” through “Z” and the supplemental volume from the SONAR team when they came to work the next day, first thing. He realized now that the next workday was three days off. As a young investigator it had angered him that people could be hard to get on weekends. It threatened to anger him now, but he sighed and told himself that “T” through “Z” and all the psychopaths would just have to wait.

There was nothing in either file that suggested Eichrod or Pule were experienced as meat cutters, packinghouse workers or embalmers, anyway. Hess hadn’t expected anything.

He stared at Ronald Pule’s registry picture again, then compared it to the sketch. Promising. But his arrest mugs didn’t look like the sketch at all — his face was wider, his eyes smaller, his tight mouth nothing like the full-lipped man that had stirred Kamala Petersen’s interest.

Of course, Kamala had probably exaggerated his virtues.

Hess watched Rayborn come toward him with thick blue notebooks under both arms and a newspaper propped across the top of each armful. With her hair loose it framed her face. She looked intent as always.

She set one stack of binders on his desk, then the other, saving the two papers for herself.

“‘T’ through ‘Z’, and the crazies?” he asked.

“I got them from Carla Fontana, the shrink for the SONAR team.”

She plopped the newspapers onto the desk beside Hess’s, and swung herself into the swivel chair. “Let me guess — you picked out Eichrod and Pule.”

He smiled faintly and tapped the photocopies with his knuckles. The skin across the bone felt like it leaped into flames and Hess actually looked down at his hand.

She picked up one of the papers, stripped off the plastic string and looked down at the front page.

Hess started in on the “t’s.”

Tabling. Tanaha. Tenerife.

No. No. No.

For just a second he was back inside that big churning cathedral of water at the Wedge, gliding through it on his palms like a waterbug while the tonnage roared over. Then he had Barbara over the dryer with her skirt up in the laundry room of their first apartment with the windows fogged from humidity while outside it poured rain at 3 A.M., the moment being one of those delicious chances neither one of them could pass up for the first five years they knew each other.

“What?” asked Merci.

He looked up from the Sex Offenders Registry.

“You groaned,” she said.

“Oh. Thinking about dinner.”

“I thought chemo and radiation killed the appetite.”

“It was supposed to make my hair fall out, too. I’m really not that hungry.”

“But hungry enough to groan? Maybe you should eat.”

It didn’t take long to finish the regular volumes, because the last six letters of the language don’t begin many names. The registry of recently released mental patients with histories of sex offenses was fairly brief.

None of them looked even generally similar to Merci’s drawing. Hess thought that one had the weepy dark eyes that Kamala had described, the look of remorse, but that was a real long shot. Nothing else about him seemed right.

“Colesceau,” he said. “Matamoros Colesceau.”

Rayborn didn’t look up. “No. He likes older women, the real helpless ones. The eyes are interesting, but there’s no other facial similarities I can see. Plus, he’s castrated.”

“Castrated?”

“Yeah, snipped him under AB 3339, Chapter 596. He won’t be hard to keep track of, either,” said Merci. When Hess looked over she was standing by his desk. She was smiling. She set a paper down in front of him.

There was this Colesceau fellow, front page above the fold, looking not much like he did in the mug, his hair thinner and shorter, his face wider and less defined. He was wearing a short-sleeve shirt with his name over the pocket. It appeared that he was leaving a vehicle and caught by surprise. His hand was on its way up — to cover his face, Hess figured — and it made him look pathetic. Hess was disappointed, because he still didn’t look anything like Kamala Petersen’s mystery man. Eyes, maybe. But with a wig and a mustache... Well, with a wig and mustache a lot of guys could look like Kamala’s weepy boulevardier — blonds, redheads or the completely bald, for that matter.

“We’ll know every move he makes now,” Merci said. “The crazy, nutless sonofabitch. Actually, they leave the nuts on. And the effects of the hormone wear off when they stop shooting him with it, so the whole punishment is only temporary.”

Hess read the headline:

While Hess read the article he was aware of Merci dialing out on the desk phone. He read that Colesceau would satisfy the terms of his parole the following Wednesday, at which time his chemical castration would end. The SONAR team had decided to notify his neighbors, thus the turmoil and the article. The neighbors were already protesting.

Kamala, this is Merci over at...

He read Sheriff Department spokesman Wallace Houston’s statement that the sheriffs “didn’t reveal this felon’s whereabouts in order to run him out of town. It was a matter of protecting the public safety. We believe people should know who he is and what he’s done, but we want them, basically, to leave the man alone.”

Fat chance of that, Wally, thought Hess. Wally the Weasel. There was a picture of protest organizer Trudy Powers. She was blond and quite beautiful. The sign she held said RAPISTS MAKE BAD NEIGHBORS.

... wanted to know if the picture in today’s Times resembles the man you saw at the mall...

Hess read that the soon-to-be-free Colesceau had a full-time job in Costa Mesa and had lived in the apartment at 12 Meadowlark for all of his three years since release from Atascadero. He’d volunteered for the Depo-Provera treatment — one of only twelve mental patients included in the protocol. He was injected and interviewed every week. Depo-Provera was the brand name for the female hormone medroxyprogesterone acetate, which causes breast enlargement, hair loss and genital shrinkage when taken by males.

Then, a week before completing his sentence we rat him out to his neighbors, Hess thought. I thought I had problems.

... so, what are you saying, Kamala, that it could be him, but probably not? Is that what you’re saying?

Hess read that Romanian-born Colesceau had been arrested and prosecuted in Los Angeles County. It wasn’t uncommon to release sex offenders into different jurisdictions because of the controversy created if they were discovered. He made a note to get the jacket from Sex Crimes and see if this pudgy, chemically castrated man had a background involving hunting, meatpacking or embalming.

... realize that a person can add a mustache or change clothes any time he wants...

In fact, he’d have trudged over to Records right then and asked the clerk for Colesceau’s file but they were closed by now. Hess suddenly felt as if he was part of the chair he sat on. Like he’d painlessly melted to it and couldn’t get out. Stuck. He sat back and crossed his hands behind his head to mask the dizziness. Knuckles on fire again, dipped in acid.

... and we’ll run two others past you. Sunday morning is good for me...

Hess wondered if it was the radiation that had gotten him feeling so weird. He wasn’t supposed to feel the damage until later.

“Kamala doesn’t think so,” said Merci. “She saw the paper. A whole different look. She pointed out that her man was wearing fashionable-looking clothes, which tells you something about Kamala. Anyway, she says no to this guy. We’ll show her Eichrod and Pule on Sunday morning.”

He was aware of her looking at him, setting back the phone. She stared at him frankly now, nothing covert about it. Nothing like her glances in the rearview on their way to Elsinore.

“Hess, what do you think about when you stare at nothing?”

He shrugged. He felt sick now, all the way down to the marrow of his bones, which was where, the doctors had told him, the chemotherapy was most damaging. Because bone marrow made white blood cells. And if you interfered with that production your cell count could drop. You could become anemic. You could die from that. Or from a thousand diseases that were easy to catch when your white cells got low. That’s why they did the blood work once a week, to keep the chemicals from doing to you certainly what the cancer only might accomplish.

“Is that when you’re seeing things? Like the women hanging from the tree before you saw the rope marks on the branch?”

“Well, no.”

“I still want to know how you...”

She either didn’t finish or he didn’t hear it. There was a big silver passenger train bellowing through his eardrums now. He could feel the tracks shaking in the bones of his legs. Then a blast of hot steam against his face. Everything so goddamned loud.

Then quiet.

His heart was racing and his face was still hot and when he looked at Merci she was outlined in shimmering red.

“You put everything out of your head, first,” he said.

“You all right?”

“You forget what you think you know. All your assumptions. They get in the way.”

“Yeah. Let’s get into it some other time, okay?”

“You start off with what you know for sure. Out on the Ortega, when I was looking down at the ground, I saw how neat the blood was. It wasn’t splashed out in a struggle. It didn’t spurt out in a fight. It came out slowly, and the source wasn’t moving much, if at all. So, she’s restricted somehow as she bleeds. Okay. You know what I saw first? A woman in a cocoon. Then I saw a woman in a spider web. Stillness. Immobilization. I’m still wondering if he’s poisoning them somehow. Anyway, I know I’ve got a dead woman, bleeding. Then I see what’s left of her when he’s done — nothing. Because he’s taken her with him. That requires a lot of work and energy and planning. I saw him walking back to his car with a suitcase in each hand. Hard luggage, made out of plastic. Washable. Waterproof. Round edges, gray. But that didn’t make sense because she was too big and too heavy. And according to what we found, he didn’t cut her up. He took her. Because he values her. He knows he values her. So, he’d planned to take her from the start — and he didn’t want to mess her up. He didn’t want to spoil her but he wanted her blood drained and he wanted her body? Why, of all the millions of spots along the Ortega, did he bring her here? I looked up and saw the branch — low enough but strong. I remembered a deer hanging, bleeding, after my father shot him out at my uncle’s place in Idaho. So I climbed up and found the notches.”

She said nothing. Hess wasn’t sure if she’d heard. His voice sounded like it was coming from a canyon twenty miles away.

Hess unlocked his fingers from behind his head and picked up the newspaper again. He wanted to appear strong and well. He tossed the newspaper aside as if it annoyed him and folded his hands over his lap. His hands were shaky but he could feel his heart slowing down now and Merci was no longer silhouetted in red neon. His face still felt warm but the burning of his knuckles was over. He breathed in deeply and it felt right.

“It’s easy to understand, on paper,” she said. “But when I went out there and tried it, all I saw was what you had seen.”

“You need to do it alone.”

“It’s hard, eliminating the things you assume, because you need to assume some things. Like with the tree, you had to assume that the body was there. When in fact, he could have bled her somewhere else, contained the blood and just poured it out where we found it. Right? You assumed the body and the blood were together.”

“There’s some of that, yes.”

He could feel the cadence of his heartbeat slowing and his vision coming clear again. But it was still like he had melted to the chair and he couldn’t imagine getting out of it.

“Do you ever see things that are wrong?”

“They’re not as clear as the right ones.”

“I don’t see pictures. I see video, and it’s blurred.”

He looked at her. She was sitting backward in the swivel chair, leaning forward, her feet spread. Her arms were along the top of the backrest and she was resting her chin on her wrist.

“Seeing a lot of bad stuff helps. The older you get, the more of it you see.”

Hess expected some comment like I don’t need these pithy aphorisms all the time, and he really didn’t blame her. Instead she was quiet for a long beat.

“I’ve worked thirty-eight homicide cases. How about your?”

“Eight hundred and fourteen.”

“Bigger library.”

“Forty-three years’ worth. Plus Korea.”

“How come people who have been in wars always mention it?”

“We’re proud.”

“Just in the obvious ways?”

“Yeah, they’re obvious. Like coming out alive.”

“I’ll never be in a war.”

“That’s not a bad thing.”

“It is, if I’m building the library.”

Hess thought about that. It was a delicious feeling to get a clear thought, after his body had rebelled like it just did.

“About that library — you’re a lifetime cardholder. The things you see don’t go away. All the clichés and stories about burnout and booze and depression and suicide. Well, they’re true.”

“But they don’t always have to be true.”

He looked at her and smiled. It was half because he enjoyed her optimism and half to portray a heartiness that he didn’t feel. She was quiet again. Her chin was still on her wrist and she was looking at him with an expression of frank thoughtfulness and curiosity, like a boy might examine a new green bug found under the porch light.

“This is a hard one, Hess.”

“They’re the worst. A guy who doesn’t regret it in the morning. Just starts planning the next one.”

“But isn’t that a weird look in the sketch? In his eyes, like he’s sorry or sad or something?”

He nodded. He was proud of her in that moment and wished there was a way to say so without making her feel small.

“I’ve never seen a look like that,” she said. “I wonder if Kamala Petersen might have added it.”

She stood then and slid the chair under the desk with a push of her foot. She put her hands on her hips and looked down at him uncertainly. “Well, it’s Friday evening, Lieutenant. Want to get something to eat?”

Hess said fine with me before reminding himself that it was going to take considerable effort to leave his chair.

Too late now, he thought. He lay his arms along the rests and set his feet squarely and looked at Merci again to see if she was registering his weakness. She was standing close by with one of her large hands out and he took it before he realized everything that taking it would mean.

He glided upward on her strength.