The Blue Hour

Nine

Merci could hear the dogs yapping in the distance, deep in the Ortega brush. She pictured Mike McNally in hot pursuit like some flummoxed jockey in charge of three horses at the same time. By the sound of the dogs they were half a mile away from the Kane site.

She looked at the hole in the ground where Hess had taken out his bucket of earth. She pictured Janet Kane dangling from the oak branch as Hess had described.

How did he see that before discovering the notch marks on the tree? She meant to find out and learn to do it herself.

It took her a few minutes to get positioned for a good view of the branch and she almost fell off for her trouble. But she found what the old man was talking about, the shallow groove worn through the bark into the softer pulp of the living tree, eroded away by rope — or perhaps chain. She hadn’t done a pull-up since the Academy.

She had also forgotten how tiring it is to operate a handsaw. Standing on her toes she huffed away at the first branch, realizing she’d probably bought the wrong kind of tool. Wasn’t this big flat-bladed thing for boards? It had run her $18 at the hardware store — still another expense she’d be hassled over by Payroll. There was already the car fax. And the good body armor. And the “Italian” stiletto made in China she carried in her purse. And the dozens of swap-meet admission fees she accumulated on Saturday and Sunday mornings when she roamed for bargains and stolen merchandise rather than develop what Joan Cash would call a meaningful social life.

The new saw seemed to cut about one-one-thousandth of an inch deeper with every labored cycle of her arm. Five minutes later her coat was on the ground, her rolled-up shirtsleeves were collecting pulp dust, her hair was stuck to her face with sweat and she was still less than halfway through.

By the time it cracked and splintered and finally crashed to the ground, Merci had the idea that she could barely handle the Heckler & Koch right now, let alone shoot a tight group at fifty feet in less than ten seconds.

She looked down at the branch and realized with some anger that she’d made the cut nearest the trunk first, instead of the cut farthest from it. Now, in order to cut the section she needed, she’d have to climb down and try to hold the branch still with one hand, or stand on the damn thing, while sawing it with the other. Unless she wanted to bring the entire twenty-foot branch to the lab with her.

That’s what Hess was talking about, you stupid bitch.

Things like this — little things like this — revealed to Merci her true character. Your stupidity could fill volumes. It made her wish she could change everything about herself, totally reinvent her personality, her IQ, her looks, her voice, her name. Her only consolation now was that nobody — especially wiseass McNally or the old fart Hess or her quietly disapproving father — was here to see this act of total, unconscionable and absolute stupidity.

“You will do dumber things than this in your life,” she muttered. “If you’re lucky.”

She dropped to the ground on the uphill side, her duty boots sinking into the bouncy layer of leaves.

And that was when the sunshine jumped off something in front of her. Stepping forward and bending, she saw a shiny disc apparently dislodged from the leaves by her crashing, ill-cut branch.

It sat balanced against the limb now, as if placed there. Nothing, really. Just a metal jar lid, made of a common alloy of some type, gold hued, the kind with the red rubber gasket built within the threaded circumference.

For pickling. Preserving. Storing over time.

Lost in the sharp oak leaves; found by stupidity.

She got down on her hands and knees and hovered over it like an entomologist over a bug. She stabbed her hair back behind her ears. The dry oak leaves bit into her knees and forearms. The metal was not oxidized. The rubber was not cracked.

Seeing this object sent a wild little shiver up her back because the best feeling in the world to Merci was finding evidence she could use. Because it was always evidence of more than just a crime. It was evidence of herself, too. It let her know she was good, lucky and prepared. It showed that she was not so stupid after all.

She went to her coat and got out a paper bag. She knelt and pushed in the lid with her pen.

She worked out concentrically from the log, bag in hand, kicking through the prickly detritus and soil and stiff roots.

Ants. Acorns. A thin layer of mulch. Hornets buzzed nearby and the sun was low enough to shine through the oak branches and paint the ground with spots of light and shadow. She kept waiting for her toe to hit something hard but hollow, for a ray of sunlight to bounce off glass and into her eyes.

She didn’t find the jar the lid fit and she hadn’t expected to. You could lose a lid in the leaves at night, under pressure, in a hurry. Not a whole jar. But what, exactly, in the hell would you be doing with it in the first place? In the woods? While a beautiful young woman dangled dead (and naked?) in the tree and her blood flooded downhill like something released from a dam?

She had imagined Janet Kane’s throat laid open ear-to-ear when Hess had told her what field dressing was. It sickened her a little and made her angry. It frightened her too, to be so close to where he had been. Where he had done what he did. Because she was the kind of person — she was just thinking generally of her appearance now — that he would truss up and hang from a branch just like he did to Janet Kane. If he could.

One of the many advantages, she thought, of a nine millimeter at your side and a two-shot .40 cal derringer and fake Italian stiletto in your purse. As long as you have the nerve and skill to use them.

You could learn those things — the skill more easily than the nerve — and she had.

Still, she would slide into her car seat like any other person...

She wouldn’t look in the seat behind her, nor into the space behind her seat. She wouldn’t have her hand near the butt of the H&K — in fact, she’d probably be holding the keys in her right hand. Check handedness for Kane and Jillson. She would already have unslung the purse and set it on the passenger seat. So the derringer and knife were useless. She might even have lifted her eyes into the rearview for a quick vanity check — not that she was likely to do this, but a lot of women did: she’d seen them. And yes, to be honest, she herself had done it more than once.

Then what? How was he subduing them? Choking? A gun to the skull? Some kind of drug or stun gun?

A cool tingle issued across her scalp as she thought about how easily he had taken them. She stood under the tree now and looked up into the sun-shot branches. She realized that their field dresser might not have had anything to do with a jar lid at all.

But if he was the one who lost it, he wouldn’t have wiped off his fingerprints first, now would he?

Pray for prints.

Praying, Merci Rayborn sawed her heart out for the next ten minutes. Done. It took another twenty to find the Jillson site, get arranged on the tree and make the two cuts — outside cut first — then load the branches into the trunk of her car. She examined the abraded notches with a magnifying glass. She could see the orange and black fibers attached to the broken edges of the bark and to the meatier fiber beneath it. She taped some newspaper over the notches. Gilliam, she thought: I’m bringing you the bacon and you’re going to fry it.

The sun was almost behind the hills and the evening was cool and pink on the water. She stood on the shore of the lagoon and watched the bubbles of the divers mark their slow paths across the bottom. One by one the men surfaced on the far side and struggled through the cattails to the black muddy shore. They waved at her in their absurd gear, shaking their heads, wobbling on their swimfins.

She heard one of their voices carry across the water:

Sorry, Sergeant — all we found was mud!

We mucked up!

Mucking fud all over the place!

And mucking fosquito larvas!

She shouted back: Hey, you tucking fried!

She watched as one of them got pushed into the water by his buddies, then struggled up and dragged another down with him. Their laughing and curses came off the surface at her and she wondered why men could so easily become friends with each other, whereas they distrusted most women while still wanting to fuck them.

I just don’t get you guys. But sometimes it looks like a lot of fun.

She waved again and turned back toward the dirt road. Halfway to her car she saw Mike McNally trudging toward her with a bag in his hand. His handlers were around him with their dogs dragging tongues in the dust. For a mean-spirited moment she hoped that McNally hadn’t found anything useful so she wouldn’t have to thank him for it or seem impressed. Then she hoped he’d found the Purse Snatcher’s severed penis and testicles and had collected them in his Food for Less bag.

She fell in with them because it was clear this army of tired men and panting dogs was not going to come to an easy stop even though she outranked them all but McNally, who was her level. He was tall and square jawed and had the plain good looks of a surfer without the simpleton cool.

“Same as last time,” he said.

“We had to check,” she said.

“Three terminuses — the two sites and the place on the road where they lost the scent. It’s where his car was. Has to be.”

She knew the Purse Snatcher wasn’t going to this much trouble to leave his kills in shallow graves. It didn’t take Hess to convince her of that.

“Wish they could track a car scent on command.”

She wasn’t trying to be hurtful, but such was the tone of Merci Rayborn’s voice, the history of her attempts at light comedy.

She saw the anger in his face. “They can. But it’s too goddamned dusty for that here.”

Last year McNally testified that one of his dogs had followed the trail of a kid who was picked up in a park, transported in a car to another site, molested, then let go. His dog had followed the in-car part of the trail for two and a half miles. As it turned out the dog had been exactly on trail, but the defense attorney had sunk McNally in court because he couldn’t explain exactly how the dog had done it. They’d canned the perv anyway, but McNally had been embarrassed and bitter. He wasn’t good on the stand because Mike wasn’t a people person, he was a dog person.

A month later a judge had thrown out evidence that McNally had gotten with a “scent box” that one of his teachers invented. They used the box to pull a suspect’s scent from a shirt that had been in a refrigerator for three years. The dog had trailed the scent straight to their murder suspect, and the jury had bought this one — explanation or not. But this time, it was the judge who’d overturned McNally and his dogs.

All this at a time when Mike was trying to get more budget for the scent dogs — a program he administered above and beyond his usual duties on vice. Two high-profile convictions would have helped, but he got neither.

She thought he might be over it, but she should have known that McNally tended not to get over things very quickly, if at all. He was stubborn and sensitive at the same time, possessed of an ego both huge and brittle, something Merci had decided was common to the male sex. He was a second-generation deputy, too, and Merci wondered how much of Mike’s energy came from trying to outdo his father.

“Thanks, Mike.”

“Welcome, Sergeant.”

“What’s in the bag?”

Without breaking stride he opened the bag and held it down. A little brown-and-white banded snake lay on the bottom, vibrating with McNally’s footsteps.

“For Danny.”

“He’ll love it, Mike.”

“He’ll probably be scared of it.”

Danny was McNally’s five-year-old. He was moody and glum and intensely serious about all things. She’d always secretly liked him. Liked him the same way you’d like an exquisite little pet, maybe, or a tremendously valuable classic automobile. Liking him wasn’t the problem. But how did you show it? How did you touch something like that, so small and fragile and utterly priceless? What did you say to it?

The kid had actively reviled her, which she understood, but it made things kind of tough. Not my mother, not my mother, you’re not my mother! Yeah, yeah, yeah.

A few months later she had stopped sleeping with Mike but wouldn’t have minded seeing him some more. Just slow things down, unstick a little. He said all or nothing. The mandate was his and she’d known it was coming. She’d slept with a man out of a sense of obligation before, but that was back in college when the world was simpler and less permanent. She’d lost a friend and gained nothing.

Mike had acted caustic and amused. Some angry crap about her being a control freak, afraid to let go. It really didn’t surprise her — that was his way. Then she heard the dyke quip one day in the cafeteria and it hurt her in a place she never knew was vulnerable. It had flabbergasted her to be thought of in that way. It made her wonder about men, too, how they’d indulge an instinct for cruelty they should have outgrown in high school.

So she had sued for a truce, but with no definite result. She hadn’t heard any fresh talk about herself for a while, so maybe that was her answer. He’d talked to her about it just once, something about the humiliation of being dropped like a hot match in front of all the people he worked with, something about keeping him in the loop, something about treating people the same way you’d want them to treat you. Incredibly, something about taking little Danny’s heart. It was a bad fight. It was one of those arguments that blew truth into little bits, then scattered it all over the place like a round of exploding ammunition. When you were done, there was nothing illuminated or resolved, no clarity, just a lot of shrapnel stuck in your face.

Now Kemp. She’d either survive Kemp or she wouldn’t. She put it out of her mind.

“What’s in your bag?” he asked.

She showed him the lid and explained how she found it. He nodded but said nothing.

Merci turned to behold Daisy, a 100-pound female, her favorite. The heavy thing waddled along with her teammates, ears and tongue out, jowls loose, saliva dangling. Merci knew better than to try to touch her right now — the hounds were always temperamental, more so when they were tired.

Mike’s cohorts stopped to look at a hawk eating a rabbit atop a huge sycamore.

“I hear Hess is your new partner.”

“Until I get a permanent one.”

“He was my favorite, of the old farts. Phil Kemp didn’t deserve you.”

“So far, so good.”

“You’ve got in almost eight full hours together.”

“About that.”

“He’ll try to get you between the sheets, you know. He was married something like four times.”

She looked at his face and saw his smile. Hard with him to tell an authentic one from a mean one. But one of the things she liked about McNally was that he walked fast like she did, so you didn’t have to keep adjusting your speed.

“I’ll just turn down his pacemaker,” she said.

“Yeah, pull the plug on him if he doesn’t mind himself.”

She nodded, feeling bad about dissing Hess behind his back, uncertain how far she should take a joke with Mike NcNally anyway. Because if he wanted to let it out that Merci was talking about her new partner’s pacemaker, that would make things tough with Hess. On the other hand, a joke is just a joke, right? Hess was a big boy, she thought; she just wasn’t sure if Mike was.

McNally looked at her, then away. “What do you think about those other women filing suit? Kemp’s got it coming from four directions now.”

“Four?”

“Well, Stratmeyer in records was talking to some reporters this morning. What I heard was, she’s accused Kemp of raping her. At his house.”

“Oh, Christ, I hadn’t heard that.”

“Ugly stuff. I never had Kemp measured as that big an asshole.”

Merci kept up her brisk pace beside McNally. She shook her head and felt that tightness in her chest. She willed away the tightness, willed away thoughts of Kemp and Stratmeyer.

Mike seemed to know what she was doing, because he changed the topic completely.

“So, he’s bled at least two women out here. Then what? How come there’s nothing else left of them?”

“We think the animals have... cleaned up.”

“Maybe they’re still alive.”

“If Gilliam ever finishes the saturation test, we’ll have a better idea if that’s even possible.”

“Well, they’re not around here anywhere, except for those three points and the lines in between. What about the lagoon?”

“The dive team is finishing up. We won’t find them in the lagoon.”

They continued down the dusty road. She could hear the others catching up.

“We should talk about things sometime, Merci.”

“Can’t we just not?”

“Fine. Hey, why knock my head against your wall?”

“Please stop. It doesn’t help either of us.”

“Okay. Sure. I’ll just see you around.”

He sped up. Merci stepped to the side of the dirt road and let the handlers and their panting bloodhounds shuffle past.