The Blue Hour

Forty-One

In the grainy half light preceding dawn, Big Bill Wayne sat in his van and sipped a Bloody Mary from a mason jar. He wondered where the top had gotten to, probably out in the Ortega somewhere. No worries. He stared as Trudy Powers and her husband got out of their Volvo wagon, shut the doors, joined hands and walked together slowly across the park toward the rise. It was 5:14.

Trudy had a Bible in her right hand and the same purse slung over her shoulder as the day before. She was wearing a white dress and sandals. To Big Bill’s satisfaction, her hair was up. Her husband, Jonathan, tall and bearded and stork-like, wore shorts and a T-shirt and a baseball cap. He looked like something that would propagate only in wetlands.

Colesceau had said that Trudy Powers would be good to her word, and she had been. He had thanked her for the pie, arranged to pray early the next morning in the park just east of the Quail Creek Apartment Homes. Colesceau had told her the sunrise was beautiful from there — that he’d often gotten up early and gone alone there to see it and pray. Bill hoped she’d honor her commitment.

In fact, Colesceau had never prayed from the park, but Bill had been there twice before, unable to sleep and looking for a place he could dump Lael or Janet if they got to be too much of a problem. He’d covered half the county looking into places for occasions like that. Which was how he found the hanging trees in Ortega. And how the bodies of his first three completely botched preservation attempts had ended up deep in the bottom of Black Star Canyon, in a forgotten mine shaft half a mile beyond the DO NOT ENTER BY ORDER OF THE FIRE MARSHAL sign. It was so deep he never heard them hit.

Bill felt his heart speed up. He checked himself in the mirror, then got out, locked up and walked into the park. Looking ahead he saw Trudy and her husband disappear over a gentle rise. It was an ideal place because the condos all around were hidden by trees to give park users the illusion of privacy. And in this near-dark, no one could see much anyway.

He walked down the swale and started up the rise. The park was empty and he could feel his things in the pockets of his long denim coat. One for Stork and one for Trudy.

He was really surprised that he was this close. Colesceau had been fantasizing about this for months, he knew. Bill had always liked the idea but hadn’t seen a reasonable way to implement it. But when it became clear to him what he needed to do, it also became clear how it could be done. And Trudy’s invitation to pray with Colesceau, slipped into the Psalms of her Revised Standard Version of the Holy Bible, was the opening Bill needed.

Coming over the hillock he looked down across the next gentle swale: a picnic table with attached benches, a built-in barbecue nearby, a Norfolk Island pine alone in a sea of Bermuda grass and a couple standing arm in arm in the grass looking toward the lightening eastern sky.

He breathed in deeply and exhaled fully. He lowered his voice as far as it would comfortably go. “Gonna be beautiful this morning, isn’t it?”

They both turned. They had to disengage each other to do it. Stork smiled and looked back toward the sunrise.

Trudy looked at him. “I’m sure it will be. God’s new morning.”

“So true.”

She turned away. Bill watched a pair of doves whisk by on squeaky wings. The sky beyond them was tinged with orange now. His heart was beating fast but steady and his body felt young and strong, especially his hands and his eyes.

He breathed in deeply and exhaled fully again, then started down the hillock toward them. The grass was damp and soft under his boots and he could smell it. The sky registered another octave of light, an orange glow that seemed warm and fertile and unhurried.

“Is that the Bible you’ve got there?”

Trudy turned back again but Stork kept looking east. “We were going to pray with a friend but he didn’t make it. Care to join us?”

She was just ten feet away now. He could see her watching him, see the back of her husband’s capped head in the middle of the brightening sky. She had the same sense of holy mandate about her that Colesceau had described, but also a trace of uncertainty in her face.

“Wherever three are gathered in my name,” he said. “Isn’t that how it goes?”

She took her husband’s arm. “Honey, Jonathan? This guy would like to pray with us.”

“Fine,” said the Stork. He turned to face Bill and Bill smiled at him. “What’s your name?”

“Big Bill Wayne.”

Stork offered his hand. Big Bill brought the ice pick from his pocket and slammed it into Stork’s chest. Bill used every bit of strength he had, starting down in his legs. The crack of bone, then instant depth. He hung on it with both hands for a split second. Then he let go.

Stork arched skyward like he was yanked by wires. He rose up on his tiptoes with his arms out and the handle profiled against the gray-orange sky. Trying to fly, thought Bill. His beak was wide open but nothing came out but a brief dry gasp. Bill could tell by his eyes he wasn’t seeing anything. Stork dropped to the grass with a hmmfff.

Trudy had stopped in place, her hands out toward her husband but suddenly frozen midair, the Bible already on the ground at her feet.

It seemed to Bill he had waited a lifetime to see the expression on her face: helplessness, powerlessness, fear. Worth the wait.

There was a sudden eruption from Stork, a sound like a cough and a sneeze and a retch all put together. It had the ring of the final. Trudy’s white dress caught red mist. Bill waved to clear the air in front of him, like shooing off a fly.

Then he pulled out the derringer and put it to Trudy Powers’s temple.

“Just me and you now, little darlin’.”

Merci clambered up through incomprehensible morning dreams and got the phone. It was 6:22 A.M., she saw, and Hess’s urgent voice startled her from the other end.

“Helena Spurlea is Colesceau’s mother,” she heard him say. “Colesceau used Billy Wayne as a front to buy the machine. She’s renting the apartment behind her son’s. That’s where we’ll find it, and God knows what else.”

It took her maybe two seconds to process the information.

“We’ll need warrants for the Porti-Boy. Alvarez might be willing—”

“—I’ve already got them.”

“Wait for me, Hess. I’ll be there as fast as I can.”

“I’m already waiting.”

Merci turned up both radios full blast, slapped on a T-shirt and her body armor, a loose blouse and sport coat, pants and duty boots. She strapped the ankle cannon over her sock, then the shoulder rig with the loose snap and the H&X nine. Where was that “select law enforcement” freebie, anyway? Hair up, then on with a Sheriffs Department cap. She grabbed the charging cell phone off the bathroom counter and put it in her purse, making sure the cheap stiletto was still there, too.

She glanced at Hess’s note on the kitchen table, still there from the morning before. Sonofabitch was right about Colesceau! Her heart was beating hard and strong as she trotted across the drive toward her car.

She got in and turned the key just as the smell hit her, then something cold and wet locked over her face.

At first she was baffled; then she understood.

She jammed her boots against the pedals and slammed her body and head back. She threw her elbows and twisted at the waist, first one way, then the other, then back again. She told herself not to inhale one drop of anything but he’d caught her somehow on the exhale and she was starved for air even as she realized she’d better not breathe.

And through all of that she kept thinking she’d break the guy’s grip on her face but she couldn’t. His hands, and the smell she couldn’t get away from, just rode her thrashing head like a rodeo cowboy on a bull.

She willed the man’s grip to give. She focused all of her power on making his arms relax. His arms are weak now...

Then she noticed the roof liner of the Impala was a very interesting smoke gray color.

Hess waited in his car at the entrance to the Quail Creek Apartment Homes for Merci’s Chevy to come charging down the street, but by seven o’clock she still wasn’t there.

He drove over and parked across from Colesceau’s apartment at 7:05. He didn’t want to tip their plan but Colesceau wasn’t going anywhere now, with Hess watching. He noted the plates on the black Caddy parked in front of him and checked the numbers against the ones in his blue notebook: Helena Spurlea’s. He radioed Dispatch, told them to get Rayborn to Quail Creek ASAP but Dispatch said she wasn’t responding to the call.

Hess got out of the car and approached the crowd. He adjusted his hat to cover as much of his face as he could. There were only half a dozen protesters this early. They were sharing a box of donuts and coffee from a couple of thermoses. The CNB shooter was there, but the big networks had packed up and left. He talked one of the coffee drinkers into letting him use his cell phone. He called Merci direct and got plenty of ringing but no answer. Not at home, he thought. Not at headquarters. Not en route to headquarters. Not on the cell either, and she carried the damned cell everywhere.

He went to the apartment window and looked through the crack in the blinds. The TV was on, but he couldn’t see anyone watching it. He went back to his car and tried Dispatch again but Dispatch couldn’t raise Merci Rayborn any more than Hess could calm the worry starting to work itself into him. It made his nerves feel brittle and jumpy. Things felt wrong. It was 7:11, and he gave her four more minutes to show.

Then another three.

Then he lumbered across the street again, past the little crowd of demonstrators, and asked the CNB shooter to come with him, please.

He was a young man of maybe twenty-five, Hess guessed, sleepy after a long night’s vigil and probably disappointed that his shift had yielded nothing compared to yesterday’s circus at the Corrections Building. Mark. Hess got him away from the others and laid it out: don’t shoot the next five minutes for CNB and Hess would make sure he got into the house first, ahead of the other cameras. If he didn’t want first access then he’d get none at all, and he could explain that to his bosses however he wanted.

Mark said fine and Hess shook his hand and looked him in the eye while he did it. Whatever threat Hess was trying to convey seemed to hit home, because the guy looked away, nodding quickly.

He went to the porch and knocked. No answer. He tried the door but it was locked. He looked back at Mark, who was standing with the protesters, his camera at his side.

Hess stepped back, turned his left shoulder to the door and summoned the strength of his legs. It wasn’t a stout door but it took him three assaults to get the thing open. That was the most any door had ever taken, he thought, as he pushed it back and stepped inside. He was breathing hard and his thighs were shaking. He looked back at the CNB shooter, who was still with the protesters, watching him, good to his word. The neighbors stood still and silent.

Hess closed the door behind him and stopped in the short entryway, waiting. No sounds from upstairs, no response from a heavy sleeper awakened by a splintering door. There was a faint smell of cooking in the air and he could see the dishes and pots and skillet from last night’s dinner piled into the left sink. Enough for two, he noted. The refrigerator cycled on with a hum. He checked the living room and the little bathroom downstairs. He drew his .45, chambered a round and started up.

On the landing he stopped and listened to the silence. He tried not to think about how heavy his legs felt, how short of breath a little stairway had made him.

Helena Spurlea was lying on the floor in Colesceau’s bedroom, her legs twisted in covers. She’d fought. Her nightshirt was a bloody rag. She was on her back with her eyes open and her mouth agape. Hess had never seen more stab wounds on a corpse, not even a satanic ritual murder he’d been called out on back in ’69, where three people had gone at it. Sixty or eighty, he guessed, hard to say because they were so small. Colesceau and his ice pick.

He moved back out, then across the hallway to the guest room. The bed was neatly made: no Colesceau, no body, nothing he hadn’t seen here a week ago when something inside him knew that things here weren’t adding up.

Except that one entire panel of mirror on one wall was removed, neatly propped to the side to reveal the framing. Stuck to the glass were two devices with thick handles and black rubber suctions the size of salad plates. Wood’s Power Grips, Hess read. Behind the glass a big rectangle of insulation had been cut away, making a passageway through to the other side.

Resting on one of the exposed horizontal studs of the wall frame were two Styrofoam heads. They were facing him. One was bald, the other had some dark hair attached, eyebrows, too. A hit of adrenaline shot through Hess: one to hold a human hair wig, and the other to watch TV? Through the opening he could see into the apartment behind. A faint bad smell wafted through to him and Hess understood now what he had come so close to understanding before.

He stepped through. The cold hit him first and he could hear the hiss of the air conditioner. The room was empty except for a change of clothes — pants, shirt, shoes — arranged neatly on the floor of the closet.

He heard the faint mutter of a TV and followed it. With his sidearm up and ready he turned into the second upstairs bedroom and stared past the sights. What had once been Lael Jillson reclined in the bed wearing provocative lingerie, facing a morning talk show. Hess recognized her by her hair and by the general shape of her skull and face. Her skin was rippled and gray and looked rigid. She wore sunglasses, like she was hiding a bruise.

Downstairs he met Janet Kane, who was seated at the breakfast bar with a book in her hands, wearing a white blouse, a short black skirt, nylons and black high heels. Her legs were crossed. She dangled one shoe from her toes, as women will sometimes do. Her hair was up. Again, the general shape of her head and face was enough like her photographs for Hess to tell who she was. Her skin wasn’t as dark as Lael Jillson’s, but it had the same hard rippling, like swells on an ocean frozen solid. Sunglasses, too.

Veronica Stevens lay on her front on the living room couch, head resting on her hands, looking into the room. She wore red lingerie. One calf was raised at the knee, like a forties pinup girl. In the half light of the draped living room she looked almost alive.

Hess stood among the women with his gun at his side, his hat covering his naked head, looking down. His shame matched his anger but he still couldn’t quite believe what he had seen.

For no real reason he walked across to the front windows, moved the drapes and looked out: suburban Orange County, citizens on their ways to work, the lazy hot haze of summer already rising up from the earth. Nothing special. Nothing different. Business as usual.

Business as usual for Colesceau, he thought.

He checked the garage for the van but there was no vehicle. No Porti-Boy. He lifted the sheet off a waist-high object to reveal an aluminum table with blood gutters and drains at each end.

He used the kitchen phone to request deputies to 12 Meadowlark, 28 Covey Run and to Merci Rayborn’s home in the orange grove. Then an APB on Spurlea’s van. He read the plate numbers slowly and clearly but he could feel his heart racing.

Back in the garage he pressed the automatic door opener and waited. When it was up he pressed it again, ducked under the lowering door and ran back to his car. The protesters and the cameraman watched as he turned the key, yanked the shifter into drive and gunned it hard.

He skidded up Merci’s circular drive and stopped short of her Impala. The driver’s side door was swung open and he half expected to see her but there was no Merci, no body, no nothing but the squelch of the radio and the cats lounging in the morning sunlight on the porch. He slammed through the front door and ran through the house but it was empty as he knew it would be. So was the garage.

Except for a disappearing rat and the body of a young woman, naked and hung by her ankles from one of the rafter beams. Arms loose and fingers nearly touching the floor. Hair down, filled with golden light admitted by the garage window, glittering and ornamental in her slow rotation.

Hess moved in closer to see the shiny stainless steel object stuck up against her clavicle. He recognized it from the mortuary science department, an insertion tube for tying off one end of a severed jugular and pumping fluid into the open other. The floor was a pond of red-black blood and the woman — Hess thought she looked like the protester spokeswoman he’d seen on CNB — appeared blanched and lifeless in the dusty morning light. Her purse sat in the middle of the gruesome lake.

Hess tried to think and to think clearly. He left her unfinished, he thought, he did all the work and left her for us to see. Because he’s got Merci, and two are too many to handle. He traded this one for Merci, and he’s going to start in on her next.

Where?

He needs privacy. He needs somewhere to hang her. He needs electricity to run the Porti-Boy.

Back in his car he got Dispatch to patch him through to Brighton. When he got the sheriff he requested a helicopter search of the Ortega Highway for the silver panel van or a man on foot; Riverside County units to the Rose Garden Home and Lee LaLonde’s old address in Lake Elsinore; and the coroner to Merci Rayborn’s home.

“Christ, Tim. We’ve got another homicide in Irvine, just came in. Goddamn county park.”

“Look, can we get Mike McNally and the dogs out here to Rayborn’s house? It’s a long shot but the scent’s fresh.”

“They can’t track someone in a vehicle.”

“They can’t track someone in a kennel. It’s worth a try.”

“You’ve got it.”

He sat there in his car for a moment, the morning heat coming through the windows at him. He lifted the hat, wiped the sweat off his head. Through the dusty garage window he could see the pale shape of Trudy Powers suspended in the air.

Somewhere to hang her. Privacy. Electricity.

The Ortega was too obvious, no outlets, and covered. The Rose Garden Home was covered. LaLonde’s place was covered. Colesceau had figured someone would look here for Merci, so he left in a hurry.

Somewhere close. Somewhere private. Somewhere familiar.

He thought of the high bay at Pratt’s, where the old cars come here dogs and leave here dolls, and started up the car at the same time.

The heavy sedan fishtailed around the driveway, straightening out on the dirt road leading to the street. The ruts crunched the shocks and threw the tires up. Hess clamped the wheel like a captain in a storm.

He was calling dispatch for a Costa Mesa PD assist when he got the Chevy airborne over a rise, landed hard and cranked a turn onto the asphalt.