The Blue Hour

Thirty-Seven

Tim Hess sat in the mournful hush of the detective’s pen. He watched the fax machine print out Bart Young’s list of embalming machine buyers in Southern California over the last two years. It was arranged by date of purchase. The addresses and phone numbers and signing purchaser were conveniently listed, too. Mostly funeral homes and, presumably, their owners or managers: Marv Locklear of Locklear Mortuary... Burton Browd of Maywood Park... Peg Chester, Orange Tree Memorial Park and Cemetery...

Allen Bobb was on the list, signing for the Cypress College Department of Mortuary Science. Most of the sales were in Los Angeles County. There were nineteen in Orange, sixteen in San Diego county, fourteen each in Riverside and San Bernardino.

Lots of dead people to take care of, thought Hess. He was hoping for a match with the registered panel van owners or the customer list from Arnie’s Outdoors, one of which he flipped through with each hand as the fax rolled out its own list. His head moved back and forth as he went from one to the other.

He could feel the draft on the back of his head whenever someone walked behind him. The air conditioner coming on was like a freezer being opened. He was curious what the back of his head looked like without hair in a way he was never curious when his head was covered by it. At home, before coming in, he’d tried on half a dozen hats. They called attention to what he was hiding, but he decided on an old felt fedora that had been his rain hat for a couple of decades. He hadn’t figured on every little draft once he took it off indoors, however, or on the stares of the other deputies who worked around him. He could actually feel their eyes on his newborn skin. After an hour or two, he was getting a little irritated by them.

... D.C. Simmons of Simmons Family Funeral Home... Barbara Braun at Sylvan Glen... William Wayne of Rose Garden Home in Lake Elsinore...

Lake Elsinore, again, thought Hess. The Ortega. Lael Jillson and Janet Kane. Murdered LaLonde. The buyer of an electronic car alarm override, calling himself Bill. A Porti-Boy embalming machine delivered November of last year, three months before Lael Jillson, one month before the Deer Sleigh’R and rope purchased with cash at Arnie’s by a man who looked like the one described by Kamala Petersen.

But William Wayne wasn’t on the other lists. And no one else on Bart Young’s list was either.

Too easy, Hess thought, though easy things broke cases all the time. In fact, a surprising number of high-profile murder investigations turned on something like this — something simple and direct. Hess thought of the dead man sitting next to Randy Kraft in his car; the Atlanta child killer tossing a body off the bridge in view of the FBI; the bloody chainsaw returned to the rental yard by a killer whose name Hess could not at the moment remember. But that kind of good luck wasn’t something you expected. And it only seemed to come late in the game, when the casualties were high, when everything else you’d tried hadn’t worked.

... Vance Latham at Trask Family Mortuary... Fran Devine for Willowbrook Memorial Park... Mark Goldberg at Woodbridge Mortuary...

Claycamp came by to tell him they were down to twenty-two panel vans registered to Orange County males. Gilliam came by with the now moot blowups picturing Matamoros Colesceau as he watched TV, courtesy of concerned citizen Rick Hjorth. Hess looked at them anyway. They were less definite than the originals, as he knew they would be. He shook his head and slipped them into his side coat pocket. Maybe see them later, in a different light.

Ray Dunbar, Jerry Kirby’s partner, stopped to thank Hess for being there the night before, for doing what he’d done, for trying what he’d tried to do.

Brighton came over for a casual debriefing on the Jerry Kirby aftermath. The sheriff set a hand on Hess’s shoulder, thanked him, then walked away. Hess had always hated hands on his shoulders — condescension, pride of ownership, false assurance. Brighton’s hand made his skin start burning again. And his heart sank a little when he finally realized that word of his new head had leaked out, and his friendly visitors were coming to see it for themselves.

“Nice head,” said Merci, passing him for the first time at work, acting her part. She had a thick stack of papers in one hand. Hess saw Phil Kemp look over at her, then away. “When did you shave it?”

“Last night.”

He was aware of the other homicide detectives, all men, watching him.

She appeared to study his new hairstyle for the first time. “I like it,” she said with a smile. “It shows off your face.”

She had said the same thing the night before, as Hess dried himself after the shower. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d taken a shower with a woman just because he wanted to be close to her some more. Or the last time he had held for a long while and really looked at his lover after they were done. It had been decades since he’d been with someone Merci’s age and this made him feel as if he were somehow not himself. Like he’d gone back in time.

Merci looked down at him. There was a brightness in her eyes. She was wearing a different scent than usual. She took hold of the still lengthening fax transmission. “Bart?”

Hess nodded.

“Anything good?” she asked.

“There’s an Elsinore buyer. William Wayne of the Rose Garden Home.”

“William as in Bill? LaLonde’s customer? It’s worth the call. After that, we drench the three malls one more time with these.”

She held up the papers — color copies of Kamala Petersen’s Purse Snatcher. Hess was disappointed because he thought that TV and newspapers were a better way to broadcast a suspect sketch than walking malls, giving them away hand to hand. Deputies had already done it. This felt like they were going backward.

But, as if she had read his mind, Merci continued, “Look, I called that Lauren Diamond and said I’d talk to her about the Purse Snatcher case. I even kind of apologized a little. Anyway, she’s down here at the Corrections building anyway for that Colesceau thing, so she’s squeezing us in. She’s just doing a bullet on our progress, she said, not a news feature.”

“Good work.”

She looked down at him with a gently bemused expression, but said nothing.

A moment later he pivoted in his chair to see her before she was out of the pen, acting like he was checking the wall clock.

Claycamp came through just then, almost bumping into her. He said something to Merci, then at Hess he flashed his right-hand fingers, three times.

Down to fifteen, thought Hess: the panel vans with mismatched tires are going to be a bust.

He sold it.

He stole it.

He got new tires.

His girlfriend, wife, sister, mother, company, church holds the paper on it. Run the women.

It cost Jerry Kirby his life to find that out.

He dialed the Rose Garden Home in Lake Elsinore and got a recording that said it was open during regular business hours, but failed to say what those were. The voice was a man’s, a clear baritone that spoke of sympathy and efficiency. Hess entered the address, the purchase order information and William Wayne’s name to his blue notepad.

His fax machine came alive again. He read the transmission upside down: a list of male buyers of blond, human hair wigs from Lifestylers of Irvine:

There were three other buyers, the fax stated, who paid with cash.

He ran them past the other lists and came up with nothing.

Bald Hess, trudging the storefronts in his fedora, offered the color sketch of the Purse Snatcher to hundreds of shoppers at all three target malls.

Most were indifferent, hadn’t heard that much about the Purse Snatcher. Some were frightened of Hess and his pale, sharp, old face. The kids on summer break were wiseasses as usual. And although Hess and Merci had tried four days ago to make sure that every employee of every store in all three of the malls had a copy of the drawing, it was made difficult by unresponsive personnel departments and sluggish mall security companies. So he went to all the first floor stores again. Merci took the ones on the second story. They divided up the big department stores that took up both.

In an electronics showroom he watched one of ten big screens with stereo that were tuned to CNB. He saw the recorded news bulletin featuring Merci, recorded outside the Sheriff’s Department. She looked larger but quite beautiful on the TV and Hess felt an irrational pride. She told Lauren Diamond that the Purse Snatcher investigation was “progressing well on several fronts,” but she wasn’t free to discuss details at this time. She couldn’t predict an arrest. She couldn’t say when they expected an arrest. She did say they expected an arrest. Yes, Veronica Stevens was considered a victim. And the two missing women whose purses had been found along I-5 were considered victims, too, with a possible sixth unconfirmed at this time. Merci emphasized the word sixth. Hess could tell she was getting angry — Merci could go from zero to pissed off in about three seconds. She called the Purse Snatcher “an animal and a coward” for the way he chose only unarmed, defenseless, unsuspecting women. Hess shook his head when she said “creeps like this aren’t usually too bright,” because it was just the kind of statement that could motivate the Purse Snatcher. Which was what Merci intended. Lauren Diamond nodded along intently, like she was getting directions.

A moment later Lauren was live outside the Corrections building, at a demonstration outside the Parole Department. Colesceau’s last injection, thought Hess. The crowd was big and the stereo broadcast was faithful to its volume and emotion. It was like the protesters were all around you, Hess thought. Like you were Colesceau. He watched the strange, round little man make his way toward the crowd with a resolve that Hess found admirable. He could tell by looking at him that Colesceau was anxious, perhaps afraid. Hess recognized the parole agent, Holtz, when he came through the door with an angry expression on his face and tried to usher his charge through the crowd.

Lauren Diamond got a mike into Colesceau’s face but Holtz pushed it away. The front door of the building shut with a flash of reflected sunlight and Colesceau was gone.

Hess watched for a while, listened to the protesters, then went back out and gave away another fifty sketches.

Nothing.

Half an hour later he was back in the electronics store. On the ten identical screens Holtz was hustling Colesceau out a back door of the building — Hess recognized it immediately because he had used it himself. They’d ditched the demonstrators but Lauren Diamond’s CNB shooters were waiting. Colesceau turned to Holtz after he came through the door. “What a fine idea, Al. Send me through the looking glass again.” He raised his eyebrows and smiled and nodded his head in an exaggerated way.

“Something like that,” said Holtz, shrugging with fake modesty.

Colesceau complimenting Holtz on his cleverness, thought Hess. Why bother? They must have used that back door more than once before.

In Hess’s mind, Colesceau was like a shadow that never quite faded. Hess drew a deep breath into his lung and a third and wondered if fixation was a sign of senescence. He was pretty sure it was.

Hess found a bench, took out the blowups and looked at them in the oddly bright but unrevealing mall light. Colesceau’s head, larger and less clear with die pixels loosened to expand the image, looked neither more nor less convincing than before. The ambient light was still poor Colesceau’s TV screen still hogged the auto-focus. The shadows were still large and indistinct. The crack in the blinds still framed the shot with horizontal bands of black. What appeared above the back of the couch could be a mannequin’s head — something like Ed Izma would have in his closet.

Or, the head could be Colesceau’s as he watched TV.

Send me through the looking glass again.

Hess knew the hardest time to trust your instincts was when you needed them most.

They sat in the food court, on purple plastic chairs around a green table. The foods of several nations were offered from kitchens around the perimeter of the room, each trying to lure customers with free samples and dazzlingly uniformed employees. Hess was hungry and everything smelled good mixed together like it was.

Merci studied him. “Do we need to get some things straight about last night?”

“If you want to.”

“Like what?” She blushed.

He smiled. “Well, that would be up to you.”

“Okay. It happened. It was what it was. It doesn’t mean anything except what it means.”

“A-okay, Merci.”

They said nothing for a long moment. Hess committed himself to Nikki’s Tandoori Express.

“I really do like you, Hess.”

“I absolutely love you, Merci.”

Her breath caught slightly. “That’s what I meant. I love you, too.”

Hess smiled and touched her hand.

She gulped, exhaled loudly, then laughed. “Goddamned glad that’s out of the way.”

He laughed, too, and it felt like something he hadn’t done in centuries. “Thank you,” he said.

“And Hess? Live forever. Direct orders. Please?”

“I’m going to.”

Hess looked at her and thought again that she really did have a lovely face, just about any way you cut it.

Merci, still flushed, stirred her coffee. Hess could see her retreating from the moment, leaving well enough alone, which was all right with him.

“Gilliam pulled three latents off the purses — one CalTrans sweeper and two CHP officers. He’s working the hair and fiber, but none of it’s pointing at our creep. I’m disappointed about Bart Young’s list. All my charm and patience on Bart for nothing.”

“There’s the funeral home out in Elsinore — the Rose Garden. Owner or manager is one William Wayne. Elsinore puts us close to the Ortega, close to Janet Kane and Lael Jillson. Close to Lee LaLonde, the security system override, the swap meet at the marina. It’s an outside shot, but I think we should look at it. I called — a man’s voice, just a recording.”

Merci considered. “It really frosted my butt when I had to admit we’re not that close. On TV. We’re not that close to him yet, Hess. And I had to tell the county that. And six. You know how hard it was to say he’s killed six women on my watch?”

Hess nodded but said nothing. He knew you weren’t always close just because you thought you were close, weren’t always far just because it felt that way. Cases had their own secret length, their own surprise endings. But you could only see them when they were over.

“Tim, I called Claycamp a few minutes ago and we’re down to eight vans. I took four of them. I’m starting to feel lucky again. Man, I can feel it,” she said. Then, as a consolation she tried to sound enthused about: “And after that, we can hit the Rose Garden Home in Elsinore, if you want to.”

Hess’s heart sank a little: his own partner was throwing him a bone. “All right.”

“These unmatched tires still smell right.”

“That’s good enough for me, Merci. What if we run the women on the DMV list? The women with late-model panel vans?”

Merci looked at him sharply. “That’s a lot of man-hours if you—”

“—No, just run the names against the other lists. Maybe the Purse Snatcher’s got someone who loves him, too. Like Colesceau. A relative. A girlfriend. Maybe she’s got money. Maybe she’s old and he can use her as a front and she doesn’t know it It’s worth looking at.”

She studied him for a moment. She looked at the TV screen. She nodded and took the cell phone out of her pocket. “I’ll get Claycamp on that,” she said, dialing. “Maybe he can get someone to run the lists while we hit the last four vans and Lake Elsinore.”

It took them almost three hours to find the vehicles, with all the traffic, driving from one end of the smog-choked county to the other, wrecks all over the place. One of the vans wasn’t operable; one had been stolen the day before. The other two were family vehicles. None of them was silver, or had mismatched tires or embalming machines hooked up to generators in the back.

Midway through the fruitless expedition they stopped to get coffee and for Hess to get his radiation treatment.

He came out with a strange feeling in his face. Like it was numb and cold, packed in mint. The back of his hand hurt because the nurse took five stabs to find his “shy” vein when she took blood. Dr. Ramsinghani said yesterday’s white cell count was very low, and he might need a transfusion if it hadn’t come back up by today. He was borderline anemic. They’d know tomorrow. Until then, get plenty of rest. Eat well. Lots of water. Relaxation, meditation. Don’t even consider going to work.