The Blue Hour

Twenty-Two

They found Ronnie Stevens’s Santa Ana address and parked right out front. It was a fifties’ suburban home in a tract that looked well tended and peaceful. A big acacia tree bloomed purple in the middle of the front yard. An older Chevy — a model once driven by Sheriff Department deputies, Hess noted — sat in the driveway.

“I hate these,” Merci said. “Maybe you can do the talking.”

Ronnie Stevens’s mother was tall and dark-haired, an aging beauty, Hess saw. He wondered that a sixty-seven-year-old man with ten-pound fingers would consider a fifty-year-old woman aging. She’d been cleaning the house.

Hess stumbled through his lines as best he could. He felt his face flushing and heard his voice crack as he told her that her daughter was missing and presumed dead. He hated these moments, too: tragedy revealed, and irrefutable evidence of his own failure. Of the failure of his entire profession.

Eve Stevens received the news with a small nod, an uncertain wobble of chin and eyes filling quickly with tears.

“We’re going to get this guy, Mrs. Stevens,” Merci said.

Eve Stevens excused herself and left the living room. Merci was standing by a cabinet that housed family photographs and mementos. Hess saw the eager shine of trophies and the twinkle of keepsakes.

“Brothers,” said Merci. “Baseball and archery. The girl, Veronica, she was a swimmer.”

Hess heard a toilet flush. He heard the low keening from the bathroom, then the toilet flush again. When Eve returned her face was a sagging mask of tragedy and her eyes looked like they’d been burned.

Eve could only talk about Ronnie for a few minutes. She sobbed steadily the whole time, but Hess was impressed by her courage. Ronnie was a conscientious young woman, had been a good student and reliable worker since she was sixteen. She had graduated from high school a semester early to go full time at the jewelry store. She had no ambitions other than to travel and see some of the world. She saved her money, had a few friends, stayed out late on Fridays and Saturdays. No steady guys. Eve didn’t think Ronnie had much interest in drugs, had never found any or seen her intoxicated or overheard her talking about them with friends.

Then she stood, and Hess knew the expression on her face.

“May I?” she asked.

“Please.”

With this, Hess went to her and hugged her, very lightly, almost formally, and not for very long. He let her break it off when she wanted to.

“Thank you,” she said.

Hess just nodded, then handed her the sketch of the Purse Snatcher suspect. He watched her tears hit the paper.

“No. She liked the clean-cut type. At least, I think she did.”

Hess asked if Veronica had remarked anything unusual about a man lately — any man — a stranger, an acquaintance, a customer, a new or old friend.

Eve nodded. “Two nights ago, Thursday, we talked when she came home from work. We talked late. We talked about men, how funny they could act. Because this man had blocked her from getting out of the parking lot, then asked her for a date. Odd.”

Merci exhaled with some disgust. “This guy’s odd for more reasons than that.”

Hess looked at her but it was too late. Rayborn was thick as a post sometimes. “Did she describe him?”

“No.”

“He just parked his car right behind her?” he asked, anything to get Merci’s last implication out of the air.

“His van. Ronnie said it was a silver panel van.”

The OCTA bus driver on the Saturday evening route recognized the sketch immediately. It had taken Hess about two minutes and the transit district schedule to see that there were bus routes proximate to all three sites where the cars had been abandoned.

“Last night, late, after eight-thirty,” he said. “He got on at Main and 17th, got off at the Main Place Mall. What did he do?”

“We think he killed a woman,” said Merci.

The driver looked at Hess, then back to Merci. “He sat on the right, up near the front of the bus. I remember that he wore cologne. Kind of a funny smell. Strong. Had a shopping bag — the ones with the handles on them. He had a book out. Fodor’s Los Angeles. So I thought he was a tourist. Nice clothes, country and western style. Long coat. Mustache and long hair, like the picture. But some guys, they’ve got this thing about them, you notice it.”

“What thing?” asked Hess.

The driver thought a moment. He was wiry and middle aged, looked to Hess to be of Latin American blood. “They’re fake. They’re not real.”

“Maybe the mustache is fake,” said Merci.

“I didn’t notice that,” the driver said. “It’s more to do with attitude. The whole look. It seemed false. There’s something else I noticed about him, too. I look at my riders a lot. I talk to them.”

“And?” asked Hess.

“He was the kind of guy who is always alone. There’s no one in the world you can picture with him. No one to be around him. Just a feeling, that’s all.”

Merci left him her card with her cell and work phones on it, and carefully told the driver how critical it was to call if he ever saw this man again, or remembered anything more about him.

At his desk, Hess listened to his messages while Merci showed the Sex Offenders Registry mugs of Pule and Eichrod to Kamala Petersen. It was late Sunday morning by then and headquarters was dead. Hess looked over to see Kamala looking down at a picture on Merci’s desk, shaking her head.

Barbara had called to wish him well and tell him it was good to talk to him. She wanted something, he could tell, but he had no idea what.

Dr. Ramsinghani, the radiation specialist, had called to inquire about his general feeling after the first thoracic scorching. The doctor reminded him that the second treatment would be Monday, same time and place.

Hess listened, wishing that he wasn’t the center of his own universe. Like you’d forget a date like that. It would be nice to just blend in and be.

An old contact of his at the DMV had been kind enough to return his call promptly, and with good news: Hess’s 1028 request for a list of panel vans registered in Orange County would be coming through by Monday morning. Too bad DMV in California didn’t track vehicles by color. How many, he wondered. Two hundred, or fifteen? But how many with mismatched tires? That was the wild card.

Word from Riverside Sheriffs, too: LaLonde surveilled, no unusual activities, would continue another forty-eight hours.

The phone rang. It was Arnie Pickering of Arnie’s Outdoors, following up on Hess’s request of earlier in the week. He was proud to announce that he had found in his computer files just the kind of purchase record that Hess had asked him to find. The talkative Arnie chattered on but finally got out the basic facts: a sale was made in February, the off-season for deer hunting, Hess knew, but the month that Lael Jillson was field dressed off the Ortega. The Arnie’s Outdoors customer had bought a device known as a Deer Sleigh’R, a gambrel for securing game, a hoist for lifting it, two lengths of nylon rope, and an electric lantern.

“Can you find the clerk who rang it up?”

“It was Big Matt, here at the Fountain Valley store. He’s here right now if you want to talk to him.”

“Give me the fax number there. I’m going to send over a sketch I want him to look at. See if he can put the face with the sale.”

Hess took the number and faxed the artist’s sketch to Big Matt at Arnie’s Outdoors in Fountain Valley.

He collected the picture as it groaned haltingly through the fax machine, then looked over at Merci. She was just coming back into the room after escorting Kamala Petersen to the exit. She shook her head disgustedly and came to his desk. She looked around, then leaned forward toward him. He could see the anger on her face, in the hard set of her jaw and in her cold brown eyes.

“Eichrod, Pule and Colesceau all just flunked the Kamala Petersen romantic-vision test. None of them has sad enough eyes. None is Mr. Remorse. She also let it drop that she’d had three margaritas the first time she saw the sonofabitch, up in Brea. When they communicated unspoken language with their eyes.”

Hess thought about it. “But the bus driver and Lee LaLonde all said the drawing was good. Kamala saw our man, the genuine article, in person. If we haven’t shown her his picture yet, then we haven’t shown her his picture yet. Maybe we don’t have it. Maybe Dalton Page is wrong. Maybe he’s never even had a parking ticket.”

Hess’s phone rang. He put his finger up to hold Merci in place, then picked it up. Big Matt from Arnie’s Outdoors said that the out-of-season purchase was his, he remembered it. It was raining hard that day, and business was slow. But he remembered the buyer because he was dressed up in a kind of gunslinger’s outfit — vest and long coat — with long blond hair and a mustache, not a typical Arnie’s Outdoors customer at all. The buyer looked similar to the guy in the sketch that he was looking at.

“He asked me something odd,” Matt said. “He asked me how the gambrel held the ankles of the deer. I showed him how the hooks go through the ankle tendons. He said he didn’t want his deer messed up. I said the gambrel just made a little hole in the ankles. So he asks me if we sell pads to keep that from happening. I said we didn’t, nobody cared if the deer had little holes in its ankle because the feet get cut off and thrown away anyhow. You know, unless you’re going to save a foot for a trophy or something. He was real certain about not damaging his deer, though. So I showed him a cinch gambrel and he bought that.”

Hess thought about this. “It’s got loops for a cord instead of hooks? The cord cinches over the animal’s feet?”

“That’s right.”

He wasn’t sure why, but this news didn’t surprise him. Maybe something to do with his memories of how difficult a deer hunt could be. He and his father and uncle packing big bucks out of the deep country around Spirit Lake. It was hard work. If you were hunting for the meat, you protected that meat. If you were hunting for something else — whatever it might be — you’d protect it as best you could. No holes in the body. It made sense. If the Purse Snatcher used some padding between the gambrel cinch and the flesh, there wouldn’t be any bruising or abrasion, either. Especially if he worked fast.

“The Deer Sleigh’R is a carcass sled?”

“Yeah, it’s got a rope to secure the game on it, then you use the rope to pull it.”

Hess tried to picture the Deer Sleigh’R in the back of the Purse Snatcher’s silver panel van. “So, there’s no wheels on it — it’s stiff and flat?”

“It’s flat, but it rolls up. That’s one of the marketing things they’re proud of. You can roll it up like a sleeping bag. Doesn’t take up much room. And it’s light, too, in case you’re packing in.”

“No skinning knives, cleaning tools?”

“Nothing like that. Just something to move a body and something to hang it with.”

Hess thanked Matt and hung up. He looked at Merci. She was still hovering over his desk. He could see the malice bumping around behind her clear brown eyes.

“A clerk at Arnie’s recognized the man in the sketch,” he said. “He bought some hunting equipment out of season. February — nine days before Lael Jillson disappeared. Things you move bodies with. Hang them up with. Cash, of course.”

The anger and the stubborn resolve were still on her face. “I should have had this picture out there sooner. I should have had this asshole two days ago, when Ronnie Stevens was still drawing breath.”

“You didn’t kill Ronnie Stevens. Be kinder to yourself, Rayborn. You’re stuck with you for about another fifty years.”

A very young uniformed deputy worked his way through the pen toward them, a large cardboard box in his arms. The look on his face said he had interesting bad news.

The deputy nodded at Merci, then at Hess, setting the box down on Hess’s desk. His mustache was mostly fuzz.

“Excuse me, Sergeant Rayborn, but CalTrans found these on I-5 in Irvine about an hour and a half ago. CHP got the call. I just pulled over because I was driving by, wanted to see what was going on. When I saw these, I thought of you-know-what. They got handled pretty good by the road guys and the patrolmen. But who knows?”

Hess looked down into the box at the three purses.

“One of them must have broken open on the freeway,” said the deputy. “The other two, they’ve got ID, credit cards, personal items. No CDLs. No cash.”

Merci looked at the young man.

“Good work, Casik.”

“Sergeant, I want to work with you in homicide someday. So I took the liberty of running the two names through our missing persons files. Both of them vanished without leaving any trace we could find. One had car problems on the 55, her car broke down and she apparently went for help. That was twenty-six months ago. The other was shopping at a mall here in Orange County, three months later. Riverside County Sheriffs found her car in Lake Matthews a week after she disappeared. I’ve got no idea where these purses have been since then, but I’ve got a hunch.”

“I see you do.”

“And also, the CalTrans guys shuffled through the purses a little, let some stuff fell out. Then they just threw everything in this box. I couldn’t help but notice the newspaper clipping you’ll find near the top of the black one.”

Hess watched Merci use her pen to lift the top of the stiff black purse, and he saw the folded newsprint. He lifted it out with a couple of paper clips, then set it on the desk and pried it open enough to see inside.

It was the article and photos from the Orange County Journal, six days ago, when Hess was brought back to help on the Purse Snatcher case. Mugs of Merci and Hess, standard issue from Press Information, and apparently in the Journal photo file. Hess hated it when they ran pictures of him.

In the shots, both his and Merci’s eyes were burned out, the paper browned around the holes like a kid’s pirate map.