The Blue Hour

Five

Merci took Ike aside and told him to find out how the antitheft system had been overridden, and to find it out priority. She liked Ike because he was about her age — early thirties — and that meant he was the future of the department. Like she was. It was good to be one of the under-forties, knowing you would be running the place someday. At least some of them would. Ike seemed willing to work hard for her, so when she was in charge, she’d bump him up a pay level.

Ike smiled as she left. Merci gave him an informal little salute. Walking past Lael Jillson’s car she imagined a man curled into the generous leg room of the backseat, hunched in the darkness. She imagined getting into her car at night, feeling secure and maybe a little tired from the long day, settling into the nice leather seat, interior light on, sliding the key into the ignition. Then what? She felt the hair on her neck rise.

Outside she slowed her pace to fit that of Tim Hess. Merci was a fast and determined walker and it irritated her to adjust. The fact that he was fighting cancer made everything twice as difficult as it should be. A murder investigation was no place for unwieldy sympathies. She glanced over at him, wondering how to project some kind of professional kinship with the new partner. She looked at his pale blue eyes and the strong line of jaw, his thick short hair with the little crest of white that rose up like a wave in front. In his day, she thought, he must have been a decent-looking man.

“I’ll eat my lunch in the car,” she said, surprised at how abrupt it sounded. She was not socially graceful and she knew it. What she had meant was, I got five calls here at work from reporters yesterday, all wanting to talk about the lawsuit; and I had five more at home last night. She wondered if she should have just said that.

She looked back at him. His face looked intent. He seemed twice as large and vigorous as her father but she could see the tiredness in his eyes.

“This is how you’re going to spend the next four hours,” she said. “The ATM runs should be in from the banks. If he used her card for cash I’d like to know where. I want you to spend some time in their lives. If he chose them beforehand you might get lucky and stub your toe on him. I’ve got a call into the marketing and promotion departments for the two shopping malls, trying to see if this guy’s drawn by some event, some common happening, some... you know, some bullshit they do to get business. When the lab work on the BMW is done we’ll set it against the Infiniti and see what matches up. Gilliam told me noon on that. That’s half an hour from now, and if he’s good to his promise, get started without me. He said he’d know by early afternoon how much blood was lost at each site — using your samples. That’s going to mean something to us. Last, one of us should run the bloodhounds in a bigger circle. If nothing pops, we’ll have to dive or drag that lagoon. I know you used to dive for us, so I’m going to leave that choice to you — dive it or drag it. I also want you to see where the cars were found. That can wait, but not forever. How does all that sound to you?”

“Good.”

Merci thought as she walked, not seeing the ground in front of her. “You’re sure he’s killed them, aren’t your?”

“Yes.”

“Where we found the blood?”

“I think so.”

“Why?”

“There was so much of it. I didn’t understand that until I saw it for myself.”

“But no clothes. No flesh, no fiber, no bones. Nothing but blood and purses. The purses are for us and the CDLs are for him.”

“Viscera, too.”

“But did you read how much? The combined weight was less than a third of a gram. Gilliam’s not even positive it’s human.”

“What else would it be?”

“Animals.”

He didn’t answer or look at her.

“What do you think he’s doing with them out there?”

“Field dressing them.”

She asked him what that meant and he told her. She felt the hair stand up on her neck again, and she imagined the draining body of a young woman dangling from the branch of an oak way back in the Ortega. She thought of steer carcasses, the way the extremities were clipped and tied off, everything truncated, no waste.

“Then why not more viscera, Hess, if he’s disemboweling them?”

“Animals will eat almost every scrap of it. They’re hungry now, a hot summer like this.”

“Then we’re not going to find anything in the lagoon or the woods around there,” she said. “Because if he’s going to that much trouble, he’s not just going to abandon what’s left of them.”

“No. But you’re right — we need to work the dogs in a bigger radius, then dive the lagoon.”

Merci knew that to assume and be found wrong was the single worst thing an investigator could do. You spent a lot of time proving the obvious because you could never afford to be wrong. “Are you on good terms with McNally?”

Hess said they’d worked together.

“Line it out,” she said, relieved she wouldn’t have to talk to Mike right now herself.

“All right.”

She saw the faint false frown on his face and felt the anger jump into her chest. Anger was a fast and powerful thing and she had not learned to control it well.

“You already have.”

“That was before our ground-rules talk. Anyway, he’s ready when you are.”

“I wasn’t kidding about any of that. None.”

“It’s a waste of time if I can’t think a thought until you approve it.”

“Hess, all substantive decisions will be made by the lead investigator in counsel with his superiors and in keeping with the procedures of this manual and the policies of this department.”

“I know. I wrote that section with Brighton, about a million years ago.”

She refused to stumble. “I can tell by the pronoun it was quite some time back.”

It seemed to take him a moment to figure that out.

“Well,” he said. “I want both branches, where the rope burns are. There might be fiber to test. I’d have cut them off myself when I was out there, but I didn’t have a saw.”

“Fine. Good.”

She gave him her cell phone number and told him not to use it unless he had to. “Calls are on my dime because the department’s too cheap to give us our own phones. I put a fax machine in the car myself, too. Anyway, I’ll take the lagoon and I’ll get your branches. I need to see the dump sites again, too.”

He looked at her with that hawk face and the sharp eyes and the jarhead haircut. This Hess was an odd one.

“When do you want McNally and the dogs?” he asked.

“Get them started now. I’ll be there later.”

“One more thing. Make the outside cut first. On the branches.”

“I know.”

She got a large coffee with a lid and drove the big Impala into Costa Mesa. She set her Heckler &. Koch 9mm on the seat beside her because it poked the inside of her left arm when she drove. She liked to lower that arm to the rest and take the wheel at twelve o’clock with her right and guide the car around with the effortless power steering. She’d grown up watching her father drive the family car that way. The only difference was that her father drove slow and Merci drove fast.

The makeup girl’s address turned out to be a nice little house on the west side, butted up against Newport Beach but still affordable for young people on small salaries. Her name was Kamala Petersen and she lived with two of the other cosmetic consultants she worked with. She’d been at the same mall the night Janet Kane vanished, and she’d seen someone who disturbed her. She’d come forward when Janet Kane was listed as missing. Merci had interviewed her two days ago, briefly, and found Kamala to be excitable, flighty, unable to focus. But there was something inside that Kamala Petersen wasn’t letting out. Merci thought she knew what it was, and she was determined to get it.

Hypnosis was a trade-off because you could get good results, but hypnotized subjects can’t testify in California criminal cases. Two of the district attorneys and the undersheriff had advised against the session. Merci had weighed the risks to her own satisfaction and decided that a suspect description outweighed the loss of a possible witness. There would be other witnesses; she would locate and subpoena them. She overruled. Merci mistrusted even the smallest of democracies, which was why she wanted to be sheriff someday.

Kamala was a big-bodied, unpretty girl, with brown tightly curled hair and a truly beautiful complexion. Rayborn thought she wouldn’t mind having skin like that but the upkeep didn’t interest her. Plus she had a ding in her forehead from a coffee table when she was three, and another one up by her hairline from falling off a fence when she was six. They weren’t so bad but if she tried to make them over they just looked worse in her opinion.

Kamala couldn’t shake hands because her nail polish was drying. Merci said she’d rather not come in — they’d better get going.

“I’m kind of nervous,” said the girl, moving her hands in front of her like she was playing an accordion.

“It’s a snap.”

“Last time I was hypnotized was at Magic Mountain and I thought I was Michael Jackson? The weird part was he hypnotized us to not remember any of it, so I didn’t? My mom had to tell me what an idiot I made out of myself.”

“No song and dance today, unless you feel compelled. Don’t think about it. Pretend we’re going to the beach or something. I want your brain fresh and uncluttered for Joan. Come on, let’s go.”

The medical towers were next to a big-screen theater. There were plenty of parking places and Merci steered the Chevy to take up two spots under a magnolia tree.

Dr. Joan Cash welcomed them into her consultation room — a hug for Merci and a handshake for Kamala. Merci had known Joan since college at Fullerton and considered her a friend. She was a petite redhead with a spray of freckles across her nose and cheeks. Five years ago Merci had recommended her to the department for contract work, and the arrangement had been good for both parties: Joan got an occasional job and the county got a good psychiatrist.

Joan introduced Kamala to the sketch artist, Danielle Ruger. Merci had used her before and thought she was the best she’d ever seen. Merci shook Danielle’s small, soft hand and smiled. It was nice to be doing work in a room with no men in it.

Merci thought very briefly of Phil Kemp’s endless and asinine comments, his touches and gestures and jokes. It wasn’t like she hadn’t warned him a million times. It was simply that he wouldn’t listen and she’d gotten tired of putting up with him. Tired of him getting away with it. It said right in the rules you couldn’t do that. Now two other deputies — women she barely knew — had come forward with similar complaints. Had she started some ugly movement? Which was worse, putting up with Kemp or standing up to him? Merci willed away those thoughts because they were counterproductive and troubling. It was good to be here, where none of that mattered.

The doctor explained the procedure. Merci and Danielle would stay in the waiting room while Kamala was put into a deep hypnotic state. Then they would be allowed back in and Merci could take part in the conversation, make notes or tape-record it. Danielle would say nothing: more than two interlocutors might confuse Kamala, or even break down the hypnosis. Kamala would be brought out feeling relaxed and remembering what was said and done while she was under. It would take twenty to thirty minutes at the most.

Merci sat in the waiting room, made brief small talk with Danielle, then read through the last entries in the notebook where she kept a running log of her investigations. A lot of her initial-contact work was recorded in the little floppy books with the blue covers, and when she had a few minutes of down time she’d review, ruminate and brainstorm, hoping to chip something loose, see something she hadn’t seen before, or see it in a new way. She liked that the notebook was not department issue, but rather a personal item she chose. She had twenty-six of them at home, filled with her writing. She always carried one in a right-side pocket — coat, shirt, even pants, it didn’t matter — a companion to the Heckler & Koch so heavily invested on her left.

She took a minute to make notes on her conversation with Hess in the impound yard, following them with a sentence that she underlined: Stubborn old guy and dying of cancer. She looked at it and lined through it with the black pen, deciding that it wasn’t up to her if he was dying or not, and it probably wasn’t good policy to assume so.

She’d heard through the grapevine that he was doing chemo and radiation and that one of his lungs had been cut out. The last thing the old cop needed was his partner treating him like he was good as dead. Plus, Brighton had put him there to watch her as well as help her. Any fool could see that. Hess was Brighton’s eyes and ears, so why aggravate them any more than you had to?

Joan appeared in the doorway and waved them in. “She’s down good and deep.”

Merci followed her into the consultation room. The lights had been turned down and the blinds angled to admit little sun. There was a desk in one corner, bookshelves on two walls. In the middle of the room was a couch with three recliner chairs facing it across a coffee table. Kamala Petersen sat in the middle chair, tilted back like a man getting a shave, her hands crossed peacefully over her stomach, nails perfect, eyes closed. With her flawless makeup and attitude of repose she could be the newly dead, Merci thought.

“Kamala, Merci and Danielle are back with us now,” said Joan Cash.

“Hi, guys,” said Kamala, her voice faint but clear.

“Kamala and I were talking about waves just now. It didn’t take us long to find out we both love waves. Long, gentle never-ending Pacific waves. We’ve both bodysurfed.”

“They scare the daylight out of me,” said Merci.

“I think they’re groovy,” said the makeup artist.

“They can be very relaxing to contemplate,” said Joan. “Ah, Merci... would you like to talk about a week ago? Last Tuesday night? That would be August third. Kamala, I’ll be right here but you can go ahead and talk to Merci just like you were talking to me. Okay?”

“Sure.”

Merci took out her notebook and pen. “Kamala, you told me last Friday that you worked at the Laguna Hills Mall the week before. Why did you call me?”

“I saw on TV that a woman had disappeared from the mall? She disappeared the same night I was working there. It really like bothered me. And I remembered that I’d seen a...a... rememberable man the night she vanished. And that was why I called you.”

Merci looked at Joan, who mouthed to her: go slow...

“So you saw this man Tuesday night of last week. Tell me why you thought of him when you learned that Janet Kane had disappeared.”

A few seconds passed before Kamala spoke. “He was kind of... strange looking. I would use the word startling. He was standing in the parking lot when I left. It was dark but I saw him in my headlights. He was looking at his car in a very interesting way. Now, I saw him only for maybe two seconds or three? As long as it takes to see someone in your lights? And then again for maybe two seconds right when my car went by him. And he made an impression on me. But I forgot all that until I heard about the woman.”

“What time did you see him?”

“It was about nine.”

“All right. Now, you said this man was strange looking. You said he was startling. Describe him to me now, in as much detail as you can.”

Kamala exhaled. “Blond hair, long. Golden. Goldilocks. Dark eyes. Mustache. Neither tall nor short. Average build. He was wearing a full-length coat, like a duster. A light one, cotton, probably. Like a cowboy would wear.”

Merci pictured the long-haired, long-coated man. A long beat. “Age.”

“Twenties, maybe early thirties. And his eyes, when I got up closer? Because I could see them in the headlights? They looked wet and sad. He looked like a model. I mean a male model, not a female. He looked like a model that was my first impression. I notice faces. And it seemed strange to me that I could notice this much about him when I was driving past him. But I think things happen for a reason, and so I noticed him for a reason.”

Merci didn’t comment on Kamala’s cosmic outlook. To Merci, the only reasons things happened were the ones you supplied on your own. She also noted on her pad the apparent contradiction in Kamala Petersen’s story: how could she see his “wet and sad” eyes when she was driving her car past him at night and he wasn’t even looking at her? “So the strangeness was more in the way you reacted to him than the way he looked?”

“Well, maybe. Now that you put it that way, somewhat.”

“What was startling about him?”

“It was partly his appearance. But it was something else.” Kamala lay still and silent for a long minute. Then she exhaled rather loudly and shook her head. “This is just amazing. You guys aren’t going to believe what I just thought of. What I just remembered. Oh my God.”

I think I will, Merci thought. Because I think you liked what you saw, and I think you had a moment with him, a little something, a look, a glance, maybe even a word...

She glanced at Joan but the doctor was staring intently at her subject.

“You see, well... you know... I didn’t realize it until just a minute ago, but the reason he seemed so strange and startling to me is because this wasn’t the first time I saw him.”

Merci thought holy shit and looked at Joan. The psychiatrist’s eyebrows were raised and a smile was forming on her lips.

“I mean, like the first time was about a month before, at a mall in Brea. He was walking past the pet store. The girls and I were on our way to set up. And there he was, walking by alone, just like I saw him last week. He even had on the same coat. God... that’s very weird I just thought of it now. This hypnosis is like really strong.”

Merci’s heart sped up at the word mall and she looked at Joan. The doctor was looking over her tented fingers at Kamala, and she lowered her expression for a long even stare at the detective. She mouthed, wow!

“You just brought a repressed memory into your conscious mind,” said Joan, matter-of-factly. She was making notes in a book of her own now. “That memory was bothering you, and it was part of the reason you called Merci.”

“I understand that now. You’re right. God, this is weird.”

“So, you had seen him before, Kamala,” said Merci, betraying no enthusiasm in her voice. She had in her heart a cold and efficient place from which to work, and she always knew where to find it. “Now, the first time you saw him, in Brea, was he just walking by?”

“By the pet store. He was walking slowly and he looked at me.”

Of course he did, thought Merci. And you looked back. “Did he say anything?”

“No.”

“What was his expression?”

“It was like he thought something was funny. Me.”

The psychiatrist motioned Merci to silence. “Because of the way you looked at him?”

“That’s right.”

Joan looked at Merci and nodded.

“And how did you look at him?” Merci asked.

A pause. “I don’t know, really. But I thought he was very handsome, like a model, and he must have seen this on my face. And thought it was funny.”

“Did you turn around and look again, after you had passed each other?”

“Yes. And he did too, and he had the same look.”

“But you didn’t go up to him?” “No.” Merci dug in. “Did any of your friends go up to him?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

“Way sure.”

Merci considered. “Kamala, what was he doing the second time, when you saw him that Tuesday night? You said he was looking at his car in, quote: a very interesting way. What did you mean by that?”

“He had his hands on his hips and he was looking at the car like it had... misbehaved. Or like he was unhappy at it.”

“Did you see any obvious problem with it? Like a flat tire or the emergency flashers on or the hood up?”

“No.”

“What kind of car was it?”

“I think it was either a Mercedes or a BMW, but I’m not sure. It was white? Kind of square in the back?”

Merci made a note and thought for a moment. “How did you know it was his car?”

“I... don’t. I didn’t. I assumed it was, until just now. I guess it could have been anyone’s. He was just looking at it like there was a problem he was trying to figure out.”

Like whether or not it had an alarm.

Merci glanced at Joan, who was studying her with a grave expression.

“If we went back to the Laguna Hills Mall together, could you show me were he was, and where the white car was?”

“It was about in the middle of the lot, in front of the food court. But I could show you, sure.”

Merci wrote and thought. “Kamala, did this man see you at Laguna Hills Mall, the second time you saw him?”

“No.”

“You didn’t slow down and roll down your window, ask if you could help, something like—”

“—I did not.”

Dr. Cash was shaking her head.

“Okay. Okay, Kamala. Now, could you help one of our artists draw a picture of this man?”

“Yes. His face is mostly clear to me now. Anytime you want”