The Blue Hour

Twenty-One

Hess stood beside Merci near the CAT D6 and looked at the tire tracks left by the vehicle that had carried Veronica “Ronnie” Stevens’s body into the night.

Kneeling and pointing with his pen, he commented on the tracks of the mismatched tires. They were some of the best tire prints he’d seen at a crime scene because of the soil here in the construction yard — oily, damp and loosely packed.

Hess had been awakened by Merci’s call at 6 A.M. He was a little groggy then, but unfettered by chemotherapy, radiation and the stout scotches he’d drunk before bed. Now his mind felt sharp and clear, though his fingers were oddly heavy, like saps at the ends of his hands.

“I hate this man,” said Merci, quietly, slowly. “I want to commit mayhem on him.”

This was one of the most dismal scenes Hess had ever run across: the big slick of blood that had spread over soil that was already oil stained and packed by heavy machinery; the splash of it against the CAT track; the forlorn Chevrolet with the keys still in the ignition and the purse sitting upright and open on the hood, overflowing with multicolored vitals that spilled out and sent up heat waves from the paint.

Hess had never seen such a gruesome thing. He had stood there for a moment in the early sunlight in disbelief.

Merci had stared in silence with him.

He’d be more likely to send you something UPS.

After that, as always, work to do.

“He must not know,” he said. Hess had been wondering if the Purse Snatcher knew about his tires and now had to guess he didn’t. Either doesn’t know or doesn’t care, he thought: and so far he’s been very careful. He slipped the pen back in his pocket, his fingers thick and imprecise. He glanced at Merci but she was still looking at the bloody ground.

“Not know how much I hate him?”

“That he’s riding on two different tires.”

“He’d change them.”

“He hasn’t.”

“He thinks we’re as stupid as I feel. I wish I had one of those drinks from dinner right now.”

She’d insisted on joining him in Scotch at dinner on Friday. This had not surprised Hess. They had gone to Cancun, a deputy’s hangout in Santa Ana. The food was good and cheap and they made the drinks strong if you appreciated them that way. He could feel the disdain when they walked into the place and he knew it was for Merci and not for himself. Kemp was there, unfortunately, with a table of his friends, and the drunken tension in him had leaked into the atmosphere like a gas. It had been too late to back out and go someplace else, so Merci had downed the drinks.

“It wouldn’t do you any good, Merci.”

“This girl was nineteen years old, Tim. That’s just unforgivable. There ought to be special circumstances for victims under twenty-one. You do somebody under twenty-one, any reason, you get the fucking guillotine.”

The patrolmen had taped off the scene and kept the construction workers out of the yard as best they could. A foreman had found the car and purse, seen the blood and guts and called it in. He’d heard about the Purse Snatcher, seen Merci on TV, knew what he was looking at. He got her to autograph a piece of paper for his kid.

Hess watched the CSIs working the purse and the door handles of the car. The hood was smeared and murky where the innards and purse had been. Goddamned flies. He wondered if the Purse Snatcher had picked a woman in an older, alarmless car because Lee LaLonde’s electronic override box had lost a fuse in Janet Kane’s BMW and failed. Maybe he just liked her. Maybe she had her hair up. Two hunts in two weeks.

Building. Growing. Speeding up.

Would he get his alarm override back to LaLonde for repair?

Hess recalled the statement. LaLonde was selling his inventions at the Marina Park swap meet in Elsinore on a Sunday in late August of last year. A medium-height, medium-build male Caucasian, blond/ brown, had approached his table. Around thirty years old. “Bill” wore his hair long. Bill asked how LaLonde knew electronics; LaLonde told him of father, schooling, aptitude. Suspect asked if LaLonde knew how to build a small device that would override the alarm system on cars. LaLonde said there were too many combinations on door locks and keyless entry chips to make a universal unlock device feasible — it would be too slow and possibly too large. Suspect then said he didn’t care about the locks, he cared about the alarms. LaLonde said that both the lock and the disarm combinations were frequencies digitally registered by a microchip in the keyless entry module — and constantly emitted by the alarm system of a vehicle. He told Bill he could configure a universal override if he had the manufacturer’s specs on the frequencies. The suspect had shown him several sheets of paper that “looked like computer printouts” by nine of the major carmakers, containing the information. The suspect said he had a friend in the business. Three weeks later, LaLonde had sold Bill a working override device housed in a cell phone body, for $3,000, and given Bill back the printouts.

With the fear that Merci had put into LaLonde, Hess bet the young man would call them if his customer contacted him for a repair. Then again, he might not, because the override box could convict them both. Merci had made this clear, that LaLonde was staring at a murder conspiracy rap if he didn’t cooperate. It was hard to know which way a person would lean.

LaLonde had sketched his device for them, and Hess now turned to the drawing and noted where the fuse would go.

But you lost it in Janet Kane’s car, thought Hess. You opened the cell phone body and the fuse fell out and you didn’t notice in the dark. And the override hasn’t worked since. Why open it? Was it failing? Unreliable? Did it open accidentally?

Thus a 1978 Chevrolet Malibu belonging to Veronica Stevens of Orange, California.

Hess could see the wavy-haired, mustached suspect wheeling a vehicle with mismatched tires into this yard in the dark last night, pulling up between the CATs. He knows this place because he scouted it early. Ditto the last two places he’s used to hide the van and later transfer the woman.

He could see Ronnie Stevens inverted from a rope tied to the top of the CAt’s hydraulic blade — about seven feet off the ground. Like the oak branches, strong, but easier to get to.

But, question: How does he get from where he parks to where he hunts?

Hess cursed himself for not thinking of this before. Then he searched his memory for the pertinent distances: between the Jillson abduction site and where her car was found — 5.3 miles. Between the Kane abduction site and where her car was found — 3.3 miles. Between the Stevens abduction site — if it was indeed the nearby mall — and where her car was found, well, how far was the mall from here, maybe a mile?

You don’t walk five miles unless you have to. Or three. Or even one.

Then how does he get from where he leaves the van or truck or station wagon to where he hunts the women?

A bike? Too clumsy and hard to handle. Hard to stash in the victim’s car.

A friend? Hess had hoped that they weren’t up against a pair. You didn’t see it much in sex crimes, but two were twice as hard to catch, not twice as easy. None of their evidence, until now, had suggested that possibility. For the time being, he let it go.

Hitchhike? Too conspicuous.

Taxi? The same.

The OCTA bus? Well, he thought, check the routes. Should have done that two days ago. Goddamnit, anyway.

Merci was talking to the foreman again. He pointed to the car, then, presumably, to the route he’d driven in.

Hess walked the mismatched tread tracks until they came to an end near Main Street. The ground trembled from the vibrations of the freeway the same way the beach trembled from the waves at the Wedge.

The van had gone right, which was the shortest way back to I-5. This part of Main was light commercial and residential, or had been at one time. Now the buildings were either razed or awaiting demolition to make room for a new bend in the interstate and a fat new on-and-off ramp. Hess trudged back to his car and got out some plastic bags, into which he spooned soil samples from every twenty yards or so of the dirt drive. He spread the samples against the insides of the bags. He knew that all the various oils and fuels and sand and gravel dropped to the dirt and ground in by construction machinery might help an analyst match up samples taken from the tires of any given van. He wiped his forehead with his shirtsleeve. Give me the truck or van, he thought. Give me the truck or van with the odd tire.

Back at the Chevy he watched the CSIs dusting the window exteriors. The purse was already gone, bagged up and secure inside the CSI van. Hess stepped over the crime scene tape and looked through the dust on the driver’s side window.

“Are you done with the door handle?” he asked.

“Yes, sir, Lieutenant.”

“I’m going to open it.”

“It’s all yours, sir.”

Hess swung open the door, bent over and put his hands on his knees, looking in. The interior was alive compared to the Jillson and Kane cars, he thought: recent players; recent events. It was just a feeling. He thought he smelled something sweet and not unpleasant — Ronnie’s perfume, perhaps. Or maybe a man’s cologne. He remembered what Robbie Jillson had told him about smelling his wife’s tormentor when he got into her Infiniti a full day after she went missing. How did he describe it? Faint. Cologne or aftershave maybe. Real faint. But I smelled him.

He leaned further in, hoping for a more definitive whiff but getting none. A woman’s scent lay underneath it all, he thought, but something else?

A woman’s shoe lay on the floor, down by the pedals. It was a black sandal with a thick sole like the young people were wearing these days. Hess leaned in and confirmed that the shoe came up fairly high — above the ankle — and that it fastened with a buckle at the top. The buckle was burst open and the perforated length of leather, bent from hours of use, had sprung free of the broken buckle. He could see her fighting. He looked back up toward the headrest of her seat. One long dark hair caught in the stitching of the pad. Because you were being pulled back? Because he’s behind you with, what? A cord? A club? Just his strong hands? No chance, really, with him coming from behind in the dark. You could have a .45 in your purse but it wouldn’t help. It wouldn’t help you, anyway. No warning. No purchase. Nothing but your fists and your nails. He could see her unlocking the door, swinging her purse in, dropping herself to the seat and closing the door at the same time. She’s just about to put the keys in the ignition when he moves. After the door closes; before the engine starts. Keys still in her hand.

Keys. We always say to use the keys as a weapon.

Hess saw that they were still in the ignition, a fat bunch and a small flashlight on a ring. The flashlight had a good surface for prints. The Snatcher had touched at least one of those keys, for certain. Hess used his pen and a pocketknife to guide the ignition key almost free but keep it from falling out. In the smoggy morning light he did not see what he hoped he’d see: darkened blood in the slot and on the teeth of the key. He saw nothing but the clean old metal of well-used metal.

It made him angry and Hess thought, Sonofabitch, I’m going to find you. And if Merci Rayborn takes target practice on your face I might look the other way.

It was easy to get worked up about what had happened to a young woman like this, when you were close enough in time and space to smell her.

Hess backed out, gently shut the front door and opened the rear one. There you were, he thought. Your place. Not much room, really. Hess wondered if he just sat on the seat, unmoving and dressed in dark clothing — maybe a dark ski mask pulled down — and let darkness, reflections on glass and people’s general inattentiveness be his cover. Maybe.

You find the woman and you know her car, which means you must have seen her in it. You are on foot now, in the parking lot, where Kamala Petersen first saw you. You walk purposefully and deliberately: a gentleman going to or from the mall, to or from his car. Alert. Observant.

You override her alarm if she has one; jimmy the door lock; get in. You carry the Jim where? Down your pants? In a bag or box? Along with the “cell phone” override? Along with your choke cord or sap?

You wait in the back; overpower; take the keys and drive away.

Hess tried to picture the Purse Snatcher slugging his victims unconscious with a sap or a club. But he couldn’t see it happening — the headrests kept getting in the way.

He shut the back door and looked at one of the CSIs. “Do your best.”

The CSI nodded. “We’ve already got a lot of prints, sir. But cars are traps — you know that. Can I mention something? Did you notice a smell in the car?”

“Yeah, I can’t place it.”

“I think I can. My cat was operated on a few months ago. They let me watch because the vet’s an old family friend. Typically they put the animal under with a ketamine and Valium shot, then keep it down with halothane gas. But last time, my cat got real sick with either the ketamine, the Valium or the halothane. He’s old. Almost died. Anyway, they tried chloroform. The vet’s an old guy — he used it decades ago and he was good with it. But I got that same smell, sweet and kind of nice, when I opened the door of this car.”

It made the kind of sense that sent a little shiver of recognition to Hess’s heart.

“It knocked out that cat in about two seconds. And you know how uptight and nervous a cat at the vet is?”