The Blue Hour

Three

Hess took the file to the hospital with him for his three o’clock appointment. Last month’s program hadn’t been so bad, although the cumulative effects by month number four could be devastating, depending on the patient. So said Dr. Cho.

He settled into the recliner, squared the file on his lap and listened to Liz the nurse talk about her new car. She slipped the big needle into the back of his wrist and Hess felt the stiff presence of steel in his vein. Liz taped it down and connected the intravenous drip line.

“How’s that feel, Tim?”

“Foreign.”

“Got some reading, there? Good. This is right here if you need it.”

She rolled the wheeled table closer and lifted the little blue vomit trough. It was curved to fit around your chin, Hess had noted, but it didn’t look wide or deep enough to accommodate a truly upset stomach. Maybe you were supposed to get too sick to puke right.

“You didn’t even need this last time, did you?”

“I did okay.”

“Good man.”

“Blanket?”

“Please.”

She lay it over his legs and feet.

“Try to relax now, and picture good things. I’ll be in the next room.”

Hess settled in. He looked down at the blanket. It was kind of like when he was a boy in his uncle’s lodge up in Spirit Lake, Idaho, after the hunt. You were tired and fed, and the only thing you had to do through the long black night was read and sleep. The fireplace was so hot you had to move your sleeping bag to a cot on the far side of the room. Actually, this was nothing like the lodge at all.

Now, fifty-something years later, he could feel the cisplatin burning its way into his vein as he slid his free hand through the rubber band and opened the file on his lap.

Detectives Kemp and Rayborn had procured two photographs of Lael Jillson: a snapshot taken out-of-doors, and a photocopied picture from her wedding. The snapshot showed her standing on a boulder with her arms crossed, dressed in shorts and hiking boots and a sleeveless denim blouse. She was smiling. Her blond hair was pulled back into a ponytail that shone in the sun. On her wedding day that same blond hair was swept up and detailed with tiny white flowers that looked like stars. Hess blinked and refocused on her. A slender face, a firm jawline, even white teeth and dark brown eyes. She was radiant. The picture was black and white with a sepia overtone. It reminded him of his own mother’s wedding picture, taken in 1928.

Of Lael Genevieve Jillson: age 31, 5'8", 130 lbs., blond/brown, Caucasian, married, born Orange, CA, maiden name Lawrence, distinguishing marks or characteristics — none.

None, thought Hess. As if being lovely was not distinguishing. Just another human female chewed up and spit into the dirt like a piece of gristle.

Most likely, he thought. Almost certainly, in spite of the pea-sized spot of hope in Chuck Brighton’s brain.

Hess looked up at the mirror behind the counter in front of him. The chemotherapy room looked like a beauty salon, with four reclining chairs facing the mirror and the counter littered with jars and bottles. Televisions hung in two corners. The IV drip trolleys were pushed back against the wall. There were plastic curtains attached to the ceiling on runners, but none was in use. Hess was the only customer today.

In the mirror a pale man looked at him with steady blue eyes and a face that had not enjoyed a privileged passage through the years. It was sharp and unsentimental. The dark gray hair was brushed back like a World War II general’s, with an upright peak in the front. The peak had gone to white years ago. Now the whole face was outlined in a shimmering line of red. Hess felt dizzy and he saw the head waver. He sighed and closed his eyes. He told himself he was too old for this, something men say only when they don’t believe it.

You have work to do.

The Laguna Beach woman was reported missing six days ago, a Tuesday, from a shopping mall in Laguna Hills.

Age 32, 5'6", 120 lbs., brown/brown, Caucasian, single, born Syracuse, N.Y., orthoscopic surgery scar right knee.

Hess held up the photocopy of her picture. It was a studio portrait, the kind of picture you might have commissioned for a sweetheart, or your family. “Sanderville Studios” was visible in the lower right corner. Janet Kane was a genuine beauty, too: a good-humored smile, long dark hair with bangs parted over a high forehead, eyes that looked playful and assured. Her blouse was black and sleeveless, revealing graceful arms.

Beauty in both of them, Hess thought.

Lael Jillson, last seen in Neiman-Marcus, 8:10 P.M., according to the register receipt, purchasing pantyhose.

Janet Kane, last seen in a suburban mall, at approximately 8:45 P.M., according to a shoe salesman at Macy’s, who had watched her walk out.

And their purses recovered in remote Cleveland National Forest sites accessible only by Ortega Highway or, less so, by a network of dirt roads that overlay the vast and rugged terrain. Lael Jillson’s breath mints and birth control pills partially eaten by scavengers. ATM, credit and insurance cards intact. No California driver’s license. No cash recovered.

Who always takes your license?

A clerk. A cop.

And what would make a more concise and informative souvenir of someone you wanted to remember clearly?

A CDL. Vital stats and an image of her, collect them all.

Hess leafed through the files one page at a time. The detectives had included quadrants of a U.S. Government Survey topo map of the dump sites. Kemp/Rayborn had marked the spots with red stars. Hess looked down at the swirling contours of the map. There was a freshwater lagoon — Laguna Mosquitoes — just a quarter mile to the west. He’d been there twenty-two years ago as part of the investigation into the killing of a second-tier drug supplier named Eddie Fowler, injected with a fatal dose of Mexican black and dumped by the highway side. The Ortega Highway — State 74 — had been a popular place for body disposal for all of the five decades that Hess had been a deputy. Sixteen dumps, he thought, counting back. Yes, sixteen, counting Fowler. Kraft had used it. Suff had used it. Most of them unsolved.

Hess had an infallible memory for such facts, though lately he had begun wondering if it was a good use of brain space. The older he got the more he understood the finite nature of things, the finite nature, in fact, of everything.

He felt a wave of nausea rise up. He breathed deeply. He closed his eyes for a moment and imagined the poison killing the cells. The bad cells only. Though he understood that the poison was killing good and bad cells, indiscriminately, like a gunman loose in a fast-food place. Liz had suggested the “positive mental imaging” before the first round while Dr. Cho had stood by in silence, smiling enigmatically.

He opened his eyes and forced his thoughts into order.

He looked at the topo map. The Ortega Highway was a long, winding road that led over the Santa Ana Mountains through two county jurisdictions, from San Juan Capistrano to Lake Elsinore. The curves were blind and people drove it fast. Traffic fatalities were commonplace. At one end was Capistrano, a quaint, sleepy little town marked by a Franciscan mission and expensive homes with acreage. Horse country: women in jodhpurs, Chevy Suburbans. Twenty-five miles away, at the other end of the Ortega, was the poor city of Lake Elsinore, built around its namesake lake. The water level used to rise and fall with the rains, which often left it little more than a polluted little slick of water with houses stranded back in dried mud. Bullthorns and ravens were what Hess thought of first, when he thought about Lake Elsinore. Then, hookers on Main, meth-racket bikers and coke-trade middlemen.

The highway ran between the cities, tethering the sunlight to the shade, the prosperity to the toil, connecting them in the way that such things are always connected, climbing past dark stands of oak, looping through miles of dense sage and chaparral, cutting along deep rock canyons and lazy spring-fed creeks that nourished wildlife and sprayed the valleys with wildflowers every April. Hess had hiked and hunted it as a boy. He had always considered the Ortega to be a little haunted, and for this, he was drawn to it.

He turned the map and leafed through the pages of the files. It was frustrating how little information they had. He’d never seen thinner files on two assumed abduction/homicides where they had identified the victim so quickly. Of course, the complete lab work on Janet Kane would take time. And would add a few more pages. But nature’s skill as a contaminator of crime scenes was considerable.

The cars were the key. If they were going to recover — or had already recovered — anything useful, it would be in the cars. Each was found parked and unlocked, miles from the stores where the women had shopped, on no likely route to their homes. The keys were still in the ignitions.

Then, the women had gotten into other vehicles.

Kemp and Rayborn had realized this, too. Hess read Kemp’s notes. Then he turned to the CSI checklist of Lael Jillson’s Infiniti Q45 and ran his finger down the page. The evidence techs had pulled up hair and fiber, of course, a fair amount of it. Human hair probably belonging to four or perhaps five different people. Based on specimens supplied by her husband, the lab had made likely matches with Lael and two family members — her husband and son. The fourth was Caucasian, dark brown, with some bend in it. The fifth was a red pubic hair that didn’t fit with any of the others. Interesting, he thought.

But Hess knew the uncertainties of hair identification. Alone among the forensic sciences it was still practically unchanged in the latter half of the century. It was really done by eye, and was often inconclusive. The fact of the matter was that you could get a wide variety of colors and textures from one donor. And a hair could blow in from almost anywhere. Sometimes you’d get lucky with hair processing or pharmacological residue that would help narrow the players. Not often.

Hess read in Merci Rayborn’s handwriting that Robbie Jillson had “purposely not washed the car” when his wife went missing because he immediately “knew” there was foul play, “whether you cops would take a missing person report or not.” Good man, thought Hess. So the lab had gotten it in reasonably good condition, the inside at least.

Fingerprints were lifted from the interiors and exteriors of both cars. The lab had easily eliminated the victim and family members but a thumbprint in the Jillson Infiniti was still unidentified. The print had scored no hit from CAL–ID, the FBI or the regional registry in Tucson. The print results on Janet Kane’s BMW were pending.

Soil specimens were taken from the interiors, good.

Not taken from the exteriors, however. Bad.

Hess had once caught a creep because of decorative gravel caught in a tire tread. That was thirty years back. Since then he checked tire treads assiduously, because Hess believed that when something worked you did it again. And Lael and Janet had been somewhere between the time they left the shops and the time they pulled — or someone else pulled — their cars over for the last time. Sometimes tire treads had good memories.

Hess was disappointed to see that neither Kemp nor Rayborn had had the cars examined for basic mechanical problems. It was a rapist’s trick old as the tire itself to let some of the air out, follow the driver and wait for her to pull over.

And no mention of the cars’ alarm systems. Overridden, disabled or functional? It was an obvious question, and Hess had seen it left unasked a thousand times.

Always check the alarm.

Nowhere in the notes on the cars was there any mention or indication of a struggle.

On the back of the Kane Automobile Impound Order Hess wrote:

That evening Hess watched the sunset from his deck. He snoozed through some of it, listening to the 13th Street surf rolling in and the voices of kids and tourists on the sidewalk below. He remembered what it was like to be a child and how he’d been mostly happy here, zooming through the alleys of the Newport peninsula on his bike, riding the waves with a pair of oversized swim fins that propelled him through the water like a dolphin.

His apartment was an upstairs unit with the garage underneath. It was big and furnished as a summer rental — turquoise Naugahyde couches sitting on bold black-and-white checked floors, a chrome dinette with a yellow tabletop stained by half a century of coffee cups. He liked the jarring cheapness of the place. When he came home at night and turned on the lights it seemed to jump at him. It was oceanfront and almost free for Hess because it was owned by a rich man he had helped once.

An uneaten plate of spaghetti lay on the table beside his patio chaise, an untouched tumbler of Scotch and melted ice beside it. They said he’d lose his appetite during the sessions and he did. They also said his hair would probably fall out and it hadn’t. Hess felt a secret pride in this. The sessions were three days in a row, one session per month, for four months if you could take it. If it killed off too many blood cells you had to stop. Two sessions down as of today, two to go.

He left a message on Merci Rayborn’s machine at work. He said he had started with the Kane site this morning, had some thoughts, hoped he could help her with the investigation. He wanted to get off on the right foot, the fewer surprises the better. He wondered if Merci was still gunning for head of homicide by forty.

Then he called Robbie Jillson, who agreed to deliver his wife’s car to the county impound yard at eight the next morning. He sounded drunk. According to the file, Janet Kane’s car was still being worked over by the lab.

By nine he was in bed. It felt good to set the alarm for 5 A.M. and know you had a reason to get up for it. All Hess asked of life was to be required. He turned off the light.

He thought of his wives as he often did and realized that he wanted to say some things to them, a few things that needed saying. He listened to the ocean across the sand and wondered why waves can sound like cars but cars can never sound like waves.

The last thing he wondered was what the shoe clerk at Macy’s was thinking while he watched Janet Kane leave his store.