The Blue Hour

Thirty-Two

She gunned the big four-door down the avenue and made the right onto Warren, another onto Hale, then a quick skidding left at Orangewood. The back tires let go, the car swung sideways into the curb and Hess felt his head rattle. Up ahead he saw the flashing lights of a Sheriff’s unit and a group of people gathered to one side of it. Then he saw a silver van parked in a driveway and he thought, good God we got him. He fingered open his holster catch and jumped out as soon as Merci had braked the car to a stop beside the prowl car.

He looked at the faces in the flashing light and saw their stunned resentment. He walked toward the van, toward the lit garage, the lights slapping red and blue and yellow against the scene: a uniformed deputy face up on the driveway between the van and the garage, another uniform bent over him with his arms stiff and hands locked pumping at his chest. And past them, lying in the garage doorway leading to the house, a big man not moving but a young woman screaming and shaking him. Halfway between the two down men was a stainless automatic handgun that Hess picked up by the barrel and moved away from the screaming woman, who had just begun crawling over the prostrate man on her way to the gun.

“No,” he ordered her. “Go back to him.”

Hess set the gun high up on a shelf and went to the big man in the doorway. He could hear Merci behind him, outside the patrol car, talking on the radio, then the rising pitch of distant sirens. He knelt. The guy looked fifty, maybe, balding and powerfully built. Jeans and boots, no shirt. Black tattoos up both arms, one of the central county gangs Hess recognized. He had two holes in his bare chest, close together at the heart. Hess felt the neck for a pulse and when the girl saw his expression she attacked, coming over the body at him, her nails raking at his face. He moved sideways and used her motion to take her lengthwise onto the garage floor and get her wrists back. He snugged the plastic tie tight and walked her at arm’s length to Merci’s car with one hand on her arm and one in her hair while she snapped her head back trying to bite him.

Merci pumped at the deputy and Hess got the look he didn’t want: chest covered with blood and a pool of it under him, his head nodding back and forth with Merci’s efforts, eyes open and feet splayed as only dead feet splay. Merci was talking while she did the chest compressions, demanding that the deputy respond, refusing to let him check out.

“You hang in here with us, Jerry,” Hess heard her say, not much more than a hoarse whisper. “You stay here with me... you just keep breathing... I’m giving you the power to do that, so do that... just do it, Jerry...”

The kid looked about twenty-five. His gun was still in his holster. His partner was maybe forty, blood on him as he leaned down and kept talking to the kid, we’re with you now, Jerold, come on Jerry, we gotta get you back to Cathy in good shape or she’s gonna have my hide... come on, Jerry, I’m gonna keep talking and you just keep listening, we’re going to get you out of this, partner, don’t you fade on me now, kid, I need you here...

Merci kept pumping but she looked up at Hess with a devastated expression and shook her head. Her forearms were heavy with blood and she was kneeling in a pool of it. Hess checked the van tires — an older but uniform set — then looked over at the crowd. He saw their fear of him. It was one of those moments — Hess had experienced them before — when the killing was done and lives suddenly gone and all you could do was nothing at all.

He went back to Merci.

“I can take over there,” he said to her.

“I got him, man, move over,” said the partner. His name plate said Dunbar. “All right, Jerry, I’m back now...”

The sirens whooped and stopped behind him. Two city units and one Sheriff, Hess saw. The paramedic van came tilting around the corner where Merci had almost lost it. The sound and the new flashing lights and the slamming doors and weapons-drawn officers all seemed to reanimate the tragedy, or to make possible a new one. Dunbar was blubbering and pumping too fast. Merci walked slowly toward the arriving troops, her hands out from her sides, as if unsure of how to carry them or herself.

Hess opened the back van doors and looked in. It was carpeted and had a small table and two bench chairs instead of seats. On the table was a freezer bag half filled with light brown powder. A pound at the most, probably less. Hess poked it with his finger — heroin — Mexican by the color. There was a scale, a box of smaller plastic bags, a couple of teaspoons, two open beers and a bag of some kind of powder to plump up the smack and create profit.

They had walked straight into the cutting and packaging, he thought. Like stepping on a scorpion in the dark. Jerry’s life for a pound of poppy dust. The Purse Snatcher’s seventh victim.

He made sure the arriving crime scene investigators knew where the stainless automatic was stashed.

Then he walked the inside of the house, touching nothing, just looking. It was predictable and soulless, heavy on black leather, chrome and electronics. A new computer in boxes. Plenty of guns. He came into the kitchen just as Merci turned from the sink with her hands clean and wet, looking for a paper towel. Finding none, she dried her hands on a cotton one folded on the countertop.

“Jerry Kirby’s dead,” she said quietly, “and so’s the creep. Let’s get the bitch out of my car and get out of here.”

She tossed the towel into the sink and walked out.

They sat in silence outside Colesceau’s apartment on 12 Meadowlark. Hess leaned back in the seat and peered out between heavy eyelids. He could feel the blood surging inside him and it felt hot. The rads? His brain felt sluggish.

It was after ten and he counted only six protesters. The CNB van was still there — ‘round the clock coverage for “Rape Watch, Irvine” — but Lauren Diamond was nowhere to be seen. The neighbors sat in lawn chairs with their signs on the ground and votive candles burning in holders beside them. Hess looked at the south-facing kitchen window and knew with certainty that nobody could get in and out of it without being seen.

“It was worth checking,” he said. “But there’s no way he could get in and out of that window. None whatsoever.”

“I told you.”

“I needed to see it.”

“Tim, this pathetic little troll isn’t our guy. He looks wrong, the parole officers have been on him for three years, his own neighbors won’t let him fart without taking his picture. I mean, we’ve got actual photographs of him at home taken while Ronnie Stevens bought it. It just isn’t him. But I respect your instincts. I absolutely do.”

“I don’t care about my instincts. I care about getting this guy before he takes another girl.”

“That’s why we need to run with what we’ve got. The artist’s sketch with the hair is the one that’s popping for us, Hess. Kamala guided it, LaLonde endorsed it, the bus driver and store clerk recognized it. Sure, it could be a wig, but what are the chances? Nobody sees him do what he does, right? So why go to all that trouble, parade around in a well-lit mall with somebody else’s hair on? It’s real. It’s his. We’re looking for a long-haired, blond, beach-god type. A guy good-looking enough to catch Kamala Petersen’s eye. So we’ve got to get the sketch out there more, get it seen. Maybe do a billboard like we did on that Horridus guy last year. Maybe get Lauren Diamond to put it on the TV more. Maybe circulate them by hand at the malls. We could get some rookies or cadets to do the canvas. Hell, we could do it ourselves if Brighton won’t authorize the manpower, which he probably won’t.”

He nodded, wishing he could get his head clear. It was harder to keep everything straight later in the night. He just wanted things to add up. He listened to his voice.

“We’ve got the graduates of the Cypress College program,” he said. “We’ve got all the licensed undertakers in Southern California. We’ve got 224 owners of panel vans. We’ve got a mailing list from Arnie’s Outdoors — the biggest hunting/fishing chain in the county. We need the connection, Merci. If we could just find one name on two lists we’d be onto something. Until then, things are spreading, getting bigger but not tighter.”

“And don’t forget the embalming machine purchasers, as of tomorrow morning.”

In fact, he had forgotten them.

“Right, and them.”

“How many vans left?”

“We’d done ninety-four when I talked to Claycamp this evening. The night shift is going to be real slow after what just happened. But they ought to make that one twenty or thirty by morning. Those tires are our best physical evidence. If we find the van, we find the Purse Snatcher. When we’re down to ten, I’d say start in on the ones registered to females, maybe do the commercial ones.”

“What about road blocks or checkpoints?”

Hess was positive that he had covered this angle, but it took him just a second to recall how. When he did, he felt more relieved than he should have.

“I did a radius plot from the abduction sites to the dump sites, tried to narrow down his home base. But it didn’t tell me much. The Ortega screws up the parameters because it’s the only way to get to where Jillson and Kane were. That means his point of departure could be anywhere this side of the mountains. What I’m saying is, we’d need checkpoints all over the county for a decent shot at intercepting that van.”

“Brighton won’t approve that kind of manpower. Not on one of my cases, he won’t.”

Hess suspected she was right, but said nothing. He could feel his blood boiling again.

“Say it, Hess, I don’t care.”

“He’s prepared to see you fail,” he answered.

“You going to help me do that? Or just submit the paperwork when it happens?”

“Neither, I hope.”

“I’m just a goddamned woman, not the antichrist. I don’t see what makes all you guys so afraid.”

Hess looked out the window, felt his vision blurring.

“Well, what is it, Hess? How come we make you guys so afraid?”

“We’re old.”

“No, it’s more than that. It’s because we’re women.”

“We think you want to bottle our seed and kill us all.”

She laughed. “Sounds good to me.”

“Then there you have it.”

“I wasn’t serious. But, to be serious, why? Why would we want to do that?”

“Maybe that’s what we’d do if we were you.”

“No, you like our bodies too much. Just the pleasure of them.”

“You’re right. What we’re afraid of is that you’d run the world in your favor if you could. I mean, we run it in ours.”

“You’re right, we would. I would, anyway.”

“Well, Brighton knows that.”

Merci was quiet for a long while then, and Hess was aware of her looking out the window toward Colesceau’s apartment. A couple of new faces arrived by car for the vigil — a young couple with a cooler and an electric lantern. The CNB news crew shot video of the arriving couple, then turned their lenses toward 12 Meadowlark.

Hess watched as two of the protesters stood and walked off with their arms around each other. The guy carried his sign at his side, no audience for him now. A middle-aged couple with a conscience and an evening to kill, Hess thought. Probably protested the war in college for reasons similar. He could hear their voices in the warm night but not their words. It was nice to see that it wasn’t all battlefield between human beings, that a man and a woman could choose to be together and make a go of it.

But his mind eddied back to the task at hand and the task lay in darker waters.

“I think he’s saving them, customizing them. Their bodies. Because, like you said, there’s pleasure in them. But he’s afraid of the life inside them. He’s afraid you’re going to bottle his seed and kill him. That’s why I thought Colesceau was a good bet, at first. The physical evidence? Wrong. The situation he lives in? Wrong, too. I know that. But I felt something I didn’t understand, in there, with him. I wish I could know what it was. We’re looking for a guy whose insides are a lot like Colesceau’s. I mean, imagine what comes into his nightmares after he’s injected with female hormone, once a week. Can you imagine what he dreams?”

“No. Can you?”

“I’ve tried. And it keeps coming back, fury.”

“Keep talking.”

“One, we know he translates rage into lust. He’s probably done it all his life, or most of his life. He rapes. Two, rage equals erection equals blunt instrument that gives pleasure to him and pain to another.”

“Okay.”

“So when he gets caught and castrated, we’re taking away his expression of those things — rage and lust. But we’re not taking away the basic feelings themselves. Rage now equals no erection, no blunt instrument, no pleasure to himself, no pain to another.”

He watched her consider. “He needs new ways to express.”

“I assumed so at first. But what if he just wants the old ways back? And he can’t have them right now. All he can have now is something... ready. So, why not just kill them and keep them for the day when he’s ready to express the lust again?”

“Okay. It makes sense.” Hess caught an odd tone in her voice, like she was trying to hurry him past this part of things.

“Now, in those pictures, the back of Colesceau’s head doesn’t convince me,” he said. “I want Gilliam to enhance them for us. And I think we should bring him in and hit him hard. Tell him it’s his print on the fuse. Line the purses up right where he can see them. Tell him we’ve got a witness. Really get inside his head and throw knives.”

She was quiet again, then her voice seemed to come from for away, soft but urgent.

She held his sleeve, and what she said surprised him. “Tim, it isn’t him. We’ve got photographs of him watching TV when it happened. We’ve got dozens of witnesses. We’ve got videotape. He can’t get out of there without the world knowing it. You know? Tim? It... isn’t... him.”

She looked at him and he saw the disappointment in her face. He also saw some of the devastation that had filled her expression as she pumped away on the deceased young Jerry Kirby. But this was different. Back in the garage in El Modena there was outrage and fury in her, too. Now, the outrage and fury were gone. And in their place was a sympathy that Hess found intolerable because he knew he was the target. She turned away and looked out the window toward the crowd. Hess could see her eyes in profile, focused down toward the steering wheel.

He knew that someday his reason would leave him and he had hoped it wouldn’t get someone killed. He always knew it was going to feel bad. He had imagined looking foolish and old and useless and spent in front of his partner and himself. But he would manage this because it would mean one part of his life was over and he could feel good about that. It would just mean he was too old, was all. He had imagined that this would be the day he’d turn in his badge and gun, head out to the acreage in Idaho or Oregon with his wife, start fishing, let the grandkids visit and stay as long as they wanted. Yes, he had told himself, he was going to feel okay about it all when he finally slowed down.

But that moment was here right now, and what he felt was shame. He was thankful for the darkness that hid his face from her.

“Okay, blow up the pictures, Tim. But wait on the interrogation. That’s a half-day setup and a half day of bracing him and I don’t want to spend that kind of time right now. I got the art people to meet with Kamala Petersen today so they could colorize the sketch. Let’s hope it came out well. We’ll hit the county with it tomorrow, plaster it everywhere there’s a space, shove it into every face at every mall he’s struck and every one he hasn’t. We’ll say our prayers tonight that Bart Young’s list will hit a match for us. Or the tire-kickers find a mismatched set of tires on a silver panel van and don’t lose another kid’s life.”

“Okay. Solid.”

She set a hand on his shoulder. “Help me find him, Hess. I need you to help me find him.”

“I’m doing everything I can.”

“I know you are.”

Colesceau came to his porch. Hess watched him, bathed in the yellow bug light to his right, looking passively out at the crowd of six. He was wearing a green robe and a pair of white socks, and he held a tray of steaming mugs in front of him.

The protesters got to their feet and the signs came up. The CNB shooter moved in.

“We ought to pop him just for being such a dweeb,” said Merci. “What’s he got, hot chocolate?”

Hess watched as Colesceau walked toward his tormentors, set the tray down before them, then straightened and looked at them. He looked over their heads toward Merci’s car but Hess saw no recognition in the dark. The cameraman stayed low and tight for a good shot of his subject.

Colesceau spoke with his neighbors but Hess couldn’t hear a word of it. Then the small dark-haired man gave the crowd a little bow and walked slowly back into his apartment.

A while later the downstairs lights went off and an upstairs light went on. Hess could see through the half-drawn curtain upstairs the faintest of figures, the shadow of a shadow, moving on the ceiling. For a brief second someone looked out.

Then the upstairs window darkened and the living room blinds were illuminated again by the blue light of a TV screen.

“He watches TV all the goddamn time,” said Merci. “What a life. Hess, don’t do what I think you’re going to do.”

But he pushed out the door and plodded across the street to the living room window. The evening had cooled and there was a faint smell of citrus and smog in the air. His legs felt wrong. For Jerry Kirby, he thought.

He looked through a crack in the blinds and saw what Rick Hjorth’s camera had seen the night before. Colesceau was slumped down in the couch, his back to Hess, just his head visible, tuned into CNB’s “Rape Watch: Irvine,” which showed a live shot of the front of Colesceau’s apartment, a real-time clock running in the lower right corner and Hess at the window.

He watched Colesceau turn just a little and look over his shoulder, then again to the TV. On his way back Hess waved to the camera then stopped at the little crowd and asked them what Colesceau had said to them.

“He said, tell Tim and Merci they can have some hot cider, too. There it is, if that’s who you are.”