The Blue Hour

Two

The sun had just come up over the hills of Ortega and invisible birds were chattering in the brush.

Hess stood under a large oak, near the place where Janet Kane’s purse had been found. He looked down at the bloodstained earth. The crime scene investigator had dug out a patch that Hess now measured with his tape — twenty by twenty inches square and three deep. He scooped out the dead oak leaves and placed his palm against the earth, working it against the soil and debris. Then he held it up to the sunshine, trying to see if the blood had soaked down this for. No. His fingers smelled of oak and earth.

The tree itself marked the western edge of the blood spill. Hess hadn’t realized how large the area was. It was roughly triangular, with the peak about six feet from the tree trunk and the sides spreading down the gentle decline caused by the roots beneath the ground. The sides were just under five feet long and the base measured at its widest exactly seventy-four inches across — as long as Hess was tall. The CSI had taken his baking-dish-sized sample way down at the base where the soil was looser and deeper and less involved with roots.

Turning slowly back through the pages of the file, Hess studied the deputy’s first-call report and sketches. He compared them with the CSi’s photographs, then, using fist-sized rocks, he marked the outline of the bloodstain, where the “unidentified body matter” and the purse were found. The bits of human insides had been scattered within a thirty-foot diameter of the tree, in all directions. Coyotes, he thought. Raccoons, skunks, twenty kinds of birds and a thousand insects. The steady buzz of flies filled the morning. Hess could not reconcile the idea that a fully grown human being had been here a week ago but now not a bone, not a tooth, not a single scrap of flesh or clothing was left. The contents of the victim’s purse had been strewn about, according to a numbered legend on the CSi’s site sketch.

The scene reminded him of something. He knew what it was but he put it out of his mind.

He set out to follow the trail the bloodhounds had worked. It led up a swale studded by small oaks and yellowed foxtails, then across a dirt road — old tire tracks, faint. Beyond the road was a gentle decline where the ground was softer, thick with cattails and pampas grass growing high and thick. He lowered his head and parted the stalks, pressing through. A moment later he could see the lagoon before him, a dark oval ringed by foliage and dappled with the rings of waterbugs. The air smelled sweet. He stood there for a moment, breathing hard and feeling the sweat run down his face. The dive boys have their work cut out, he thought: ten feet of mud to wade through before you hit the water, then two feet of visibility if you’re lucky. It had been thirty years since he’d made dives himself. He’d always enjoyed them.

Back at the tree he took a knee and breathed hard. They weren’t kidding about physical fatigue and weakness. The top two lobes of his left lung were gone as of two months ago.

He stood. The old oak had V-ed early in life and spread wide like oak trees will. The lower half of the trunk began only four feet off the ground. He set the files under the rock that marked the purse.

Hess climbed up and rested again, one foot braced on the main trunk and the other on the diverging limb. Slowly he walked it out toward the end, grabbing the sharp leaves overhead for balance. When he was over the place where Janet Kane had apparently been drained, he stopped and felt the branch above his head. His fingers found a smooth notch in the bark but it was hard to confirm what he felt without seeing it. In better days a simple pull-up would have gotten his chin over the branch and he could have seen what he needed to see.

One lousy pull-up, he thought. He remembered yanking off a hundred of them at the L.A. Sheriff Department Academy training course when he was a cadet. Then climbing a twenty-foot rope. Hess had begun to wonder lately if memory was supposed to be a comfort or torment.

He pulled himself up. Straining, he looked down on the notch in the bark and liked what he saw. It was just what he had imagined. The bark was worn about an inch across, all the way down to the pale living meat of the tree. His shoulder ached and his arms quivered.

Then the limb suddenly shot up past his eyes and he was nowhere on earth for a moment. He lay flat on his back in the middle of the bloodstained ground.

Ten minutes later he was standing under the second tree, where Lael Jillson’s purse had been found six months back. The big oak was part of a larger stand that blotted out the daylight and kept the ground in eternal shade. The trunk twisted up from the earth and the gnarled arms reached skyward.

He took his time making the climb. Using the foliage overhead for support, he walked out on a sturdy branch and found what he was hoping to find, the inch-wide abrasion where the bark had sloughed off. In the last six months scar tissue had formed and a surface of gray grain now covered the wound.

He saw her: ankles tied, head down, the rope looped over the branch. Hair swinging, fingertips a few inches from the dirt.

Hess trudged back to his car and got the folding shovel and two buckets from the trunk. It took him ten minutes and two rests to fill one bucket with unsoaked soil from near the Kane tree. It was important to get a control sample if you wanted to run a good saturation test. He finished, breathing fast. His palms burned like embers but when he looked down at them they were just a little red.

Then a quick sitting snooze during which he almost fell over. He finally filled the other bucket with clean soil from the clean side of Lael Jillson’s tree.

When he got back to his car with the folding shovel balanced over one of the heavy buckets, he wondered if his fingers might actually break off. Dr. Cho had said nothing about loss of digits but that’s what it felt like was happening. When he looked at them they were dented deeply by the bucket handles but otherwise fine.

The sun hurt his eyes and his kneecaps felt like they had rusted. He took another little nap — about two minutes — before heading back down the Ortega.

It was good to be working again.