THE BLUE HOUR

by T. Jefferson Parker

Eight minutes and fifteen seconds from the time the call came through. Down from her last one, which was just over nine, but that had just been her weekly drill to stay loose.

  She left on the radios and living room light and slammed the front door behind her.

  One single thought about Phil Kemp entered her mind and she banished it like a sick dog.

  • • •

  Hess got in with two mugs of coffee and shut the door without spilling any. With the interior light on she could see his hair was brushed back as always with the little white wave out front and she wondered if it just grew that way. His face looked old and lined and tired. But the blue eyes, which he trained on her for the first time as he quietly closed the door with his right hand while offering her a cup of coffee with the other, were clear and bright as the moon.

  "My heart's really going," she said.

  "Mine, too. This is great."

  Merci gunned the car down the empty avenue and heard the tires swish through a sprinkler slick.

  "You still feel that way, Hess? That this is great?"

  "Absolutely."

  She hit sixty and looked for a speed sign: thirty-five, the coffee jacking her up a notch, Hess telling her to make a U-turn at the next stop.

  "What about the ferry?"

  "It quit running five hours ago."

  "Right. Hey, I'll settle in, don't worry. I know this old guy named Francisco? Used to live near me. I mean, he's really old. When I look at him I realize I shouldn't get all worked up like I do. I should try to step back and settle in. Just go with it.”

  "I'll drive if you want."

  She looked at him in the passing bars of light cast by the streetlamps. I’ll drive."

  "Stay inside."

  "Inside what?'

  "Yourself."

  She looked at him with a little more offense than she actually took, but he wasn't looking at her so it didn't matter.

  "Hess, I don't need pithy aphorisms all the time. How to drive my car. How to feel what damned Ed Izma is feeling. I mean, I appreciate it, but I'm really not a six-year-old."

  "Ignore me. I mean that."

  "I know you're coming from the right place."

  "It's just part of getting old. I want to blab everything I think I know to someone I think might use it. Like giving away your hunting gun or your first baseball mitt or something. You'll do it too someday."

  "I hope so," she muttered, feeling the V-8 downshift and gather force as she guided them down the Newport peninsula. When she got past city hall she flogged it and set the flasher up on the hood. She had never given her life expectancy more than a moment's thought, and she didn't feel like giving it any more than that now.

  It was after five-thirty and the first blush of light was in the sky. When she got onto the freeway she used the carpool lane and held the Impala at ninety. The airport whizzed by then the strawberry fields covered with plastic that shone like water then the Santa Ana Mountains then the marine base. She felt just exactly right at this moment, speeding forward through the blue hour in her unmarked with a good partner beside her and a suspect to engage.

  "Yeah, okay, Hess. I'm going to stay inside myself."

  "I told you to ignore me and I meant it."

  "No, I wasn't chewing on you. I meant it—and thanks for a good word. I may be kind of a bitch sometimes but I'm not too dumb to take good advice."

  She was aware of him studying her. She glanced up at the rearview to change lanes and could see his face in the periphery.

  "You say what's on your mind and that's mostly good."

  "But?"

  "Nice to hide your cards sometimes."

  "It's more cunning, I know."

  "Well, it gives you more time to figure things out. Like yesterday, if you'd have kept cool at Izma he'd have heated up more. He might have given us something. He needed to get a rise out of you. And you knew it. But you gave it to him too easy."

  "It goes against my principles to watch some gigantic moron drag his balls all over the room and try to make me watch."

  "Leave your principles at home."

  Even with guys like Kemp? "You don't."

  "I do. A lot. It works."

  "Explain that one."

  "Let other people do the talking. Then, when you understand what they're doing, take them down. Or out. Or up, or any place you want to take them."

  "Thanks, dad."

  "It's like ..." Hess lifted both his hands out in front of him, one with the coffee cup still hooked on a finger, the other with the fingers open in a gesture of emphasis.

  Merci looked at him. She'd never seen him animated before. His raptor's face had something puzzled in it.

  "... It's like you're a fort," he continued, "and your head's the tower and your eyes are the holes for sharpshooters and your ears are where the spies live. You're this... this... living..."

  "Fort?"

  "Yeah. See? You stay inside yourself and look out of yourself, like looking out of a fort."

  "I can see it. If I look real hard."

  "You're right. That's not very good. Cancel it."

  She could feel the coffee and adrenaline working to make an odd joy in her heart. "I do see it, though. It's not exactly elegant, but I see it."

  "I'll shut up. I'm feeling pretty good right now, for being full of chemicals and radiation."

  She made the Ortega Highway turnoff and headed inland. She looked in the rearview again and noted that Hess was staring out the window while the gas station lights colored his face.

  Then he turned to her and she wondered if he knew she was looking at him in the mirror.

  "Tell me about Lee LaLonde," he said.

  "A speed freak and a car thief," she said. "Down twice for grand theft auto, twice for selling stolen parts. Four years, two bounces—Honor Farm and Riverside County. Released and paroled two years ago."

  "A thief, not a carjacker?"

  "Just a thief, so far."

  "No sex crimes?"

  "None."

  Hess said nothing.

  "He's a little creep of a guy—perfect size for the backseat of a car. Five-eight, one-twenty, blond and blue. Twenty-five years old. Last scrape with Riverside Sheriffs was a year ago— questioned in a burglary of a plant where he worked. Nothing filed. They fired him."

  "What's the plant make?"

  "Irrigation supplies. Cloudburst is the name of the outfit. His jacket says he runs his own business now—retail sales at the weekly swap meet here at the lake."

  "Sales of what?"

  "Doesn't even say what. Anyway, that's the last thing in his file. He's got a barb-wire chain tattooed around his left biceps and knife puncture scar on his stomach. Grew up in Northern California, Oakland."

  They were past the city and the big houses now and the highway was dark and beginning to climb. The traffic was light now, still early for the commuters who worked in Riverside County.

  "Who stabbed him?" Hess asked.

  "His dad."

  When she looked at him he was already nodding, as if he'd expected the answer. Maybe he saw it ahead of time, Merci thought. She was about to ask him how he saw things in advance, but she didn't and she didn't know why.

  She reached into the folder on the seat and handed Hess the artist's sketch. Hess took it and angled the lamp on the dash over, clicking it on.

  "It's lifelike," he said.

  "Whose life is the question."

  "How come you waited so long to show it to me?"

  "I not sure how solid it is. See, this Kamala Petersen lives on TV and fashion magazines. Everybody looks like somebody she's seen before. I had to hypnotize her to cut through all her bullshit. And get a load of this—she's seen the guy twice. Once the night Janet Kane disappeared, and once the week before, at a mall, walking around, checking things out."

  "Checking out Kamala?"

  "Correct. She'd stuffed that down deep. That's what we got through to."

  "This is valuable. This is good."

>   "Unfortunately, I lost a court witness. Hess, I'm praying it's worth the trade. I spent the last two days worrying about that sketch. Is it close? Is Kamala reliable? I'm not going to go public with something that's way off—gets people confused. But I'm going to release it to Press Information when I go in today. I took the gamble, now I'm going to stick with it. I'm trusting me."

  Hess continued to stare down at the paper. Merci saw the light in his face, the uncluttered intensity of his gaze.

  Hess, again: "LaLonde doesn't fit the profile. Page says he'll be a known sex offender."

  "So. What's a profile really mean anyway?" she asked.

  "Dalton's good. What do you think of them?"

  "I've only had first-hand experience with two. One was right on, the other was pretty far off. Dalton did the one that was off. The Bureau did the one that worked. In general, I prefer evidence that's actual evidence. I don't like trying to figure out if something applies or not."

  "Well, we'd all take a blood sample or a fingerprint over a piece of speculative thinking."

  "You asked what I thought."

  No reply. She guided the Impala up the grade and through the swerving turns of the Ortega. She thought of all the wrecks on this highway, a bloody stretch of road if there ever was one. A prime dumpsite, too—the Purse Snatcher wasn't the first creep to bring his victims out here. She looked out at the sycamores now just barely visible on the hillsides, the way their branches jagged out like dislocated arms and gave the trees a look of eternal agony.

  They were near the top of the grade now and Merci could see the oaks in profile against the blue-black sky.

  "I always thought this was a spooky old highway," she said.

  She looked at his face in the rearview again and thought it looked pale, but maybe it was just the parsimonious light offered by the east. He looked old and tired, but that's exactly what he was. She wondered what it felt like to sit there with cancer growing in your lung, watching the sky get light. She had no idea because she wasn't used to figuring what other people were thinking. Hess was right about that. So she tried to feel what he might feel, pretending she had the cancer too and she was heading down into Lake Elsinore to interview a speed freak who might be a murderer. But it was hard to feel what Hess felt because what she felt was already there. It was right in the way. So she sent her thoughts out around her own feelings, like birds flying around trees.

  What she came up with was, if she was in the same position, every waking moment would scare the living piss out of her.

  "Me too," he said. "A spooky old highway."

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The sun was low over the hills when they dropped down into Lake Elsinore. The water was plated in bronze. Merci gave Hess the paper with the address on it and Hess got the map out of the console.

  "Take Main south to Pine," he said. "East to Lakeview."

  At the corner was the entrance to Elsinore Shores trailer park. Merci sized up the place as she made the turn: old trailers, failed dreams and broken lives. It was the kind of place she used to see as a kid and feel afraid that was where she'd end up.

  Until she realized, many years later, how powerful she was, how she could make things go the way she wanted simply by using her will. Will. She had created that power herself, bit by bit and over time, but it still astonished her to know how large it was. Once she had understood it, she knew she'd never end up in a spot like this. But it still made her think of all the people who didn't have the juice to get what they needed out of the world. A lot of them ended up taking it away from someone else and those were the kind of people she threw in jail, which is where they belonged.

  Hess aimed a thick finger to the right. "That's his building, there. He must live in his shop."

  She slowed and studied the little complex as she drove past. Two long cinder-block buildings faced each other across a concrete alleyway. The buildings were divided into workshops. Their doors were all the same aqua blue color, the kind that slide up, wide and high enough to get a small truck in or out.

  She came back around and parked a block short of the entrance. She took the H&K nine off the seat and holstered it.

  The blue door to Lee LaLonde's space 12 was closed all the way down. Merci glanced at Hess, then rapped the backs of her knuckles against the metal. She waited a moment and did it again, harder.

  "Second," said a thin voice. "Comin'. Who is it?"

  "Deputies Rayborn and Hess. Open the door, Lee."

  "AH right."

  "You alone in there?"

  "Yeah. Second. The runner on the door's rusty."

  There was a moment of quiet, but none of the drug addict's usual scuffle to hide stash, Merci thought. Nowhere for him to go but out the window. Then the clang of metal on metal inside. A padlock. The door began its screeching way up. Merci got her badge holder ready in her left hand and rested the other inside her jacket, on the butt of the nine.

  LaLonde manifested, bottom to top. Bare white feet. Baggy, dirty jeans slung low enough to fall off. The bunched elastic of boxer shorts sprouted just above the waistband. Flat stomach with a knife scar on it, narrow chest, thin arms. His face was odd but not particularly unpleasant. His hair long, blond, wavy.

  She badged him quickly. "Step back from the door, please. Now."

  "Okay, lady. I'm steppin'."

  Stop right where you are and turn around," said Merci. He started his turn. When his back was to her she stopped him with a strong take of his right wrist, a firm twist to bring his arm out with the elbow down. She stepped up behind him and braced the back of his shoulder with her left hand so it was easy to see down the extended arm or to break the elbow. She felt him comply because he'd complied a thousand times before.

  "Staying off the meth, Lee?"

  She ran her fingers over the veins in his forearm, snapped her nails against them, then angled his elbow into the weak light for a view down the muscles.

  "I never did shoot it," he said slowly.

  "Just smoked it by the ton."

  "Yeah."

  "I can tell. It kills brain cells."

  LaLonde stood back. He was shorter and thinner than she'd expected. Speed freaks tend to stay skinny in life and LaLonde looked the part. His long blond hair hung over his forehead. His face was narrow and all of its features seemed crowded down into the lower half. Big mouth, goofy teeth.

  "Lead the way." She let ten feet open up behind him, then followed. The shop was big—sixty feet deep and thirty wide, she guessed. It was lit by fluorescent tubes hung from the ceiling by chains.

  There were workbenches along each of the two side walls. Vices. Spools of wire. Indeterminate projects in indeterminate stages of completion or repair. Bench vices, an electric grinder and polisher, a benchtop drill press. Toolboxes. More tools were neatly hung on the Peg-Boarded wall behind the benches.

  Merci walked and studied. In the right back corner was a sleeping area, and behind that a bathroom. There was a counter, a two-burner stove and a small refrigerator. LaLonde stood beside a dilapidated plaid couch and gestured for Merci to sit.

  "I'll stand. You'll sit. Tim, make yourself comfortable."

  Hess waited for LaLonde to take one end of the couch, then he sat in the middle. Merci crossed her arms and stared down at LaLonde without comment. LaLonde looked at his hands. She let a long moment pass.

  "Lee, look at me," she said. He did. She thought he looked like a parrot fish. She remained standing a few feet away from him, leaving some slack to take up if she needed to.

  "Janet Kane was murdered week before last. We know you knew her. We got your prints out of the back of the BMW. Those are facts. Now, we can talk about her here or we can take you back to Orange County with us. If we talk here and you lie to me I'll have you cuffed and stuffed in about thirty seconds."

  He looked at Merci, then at Hess, then at Merci again. She watched his face hard because that first denial was sometimes the hardest one a creep would make. Half the fuckers couldn't even
lie right. They giggled or blushed or started crying. The better ones broke a sweat or their faces twitched and if you saw it you had them. The rest could tell you a lie you might believe the rest of your life if you didn't know better. She saw no trace of guilt or dishonesty in LaLonde's face yet.

  "I got no idea what you're talking about."

  "Get one."

  "If I knew a woman who'd let me in her BMW, I'd marry her, not kill her."

  He grinned, lips spreading tight, teeth amok.

  "What were you doing in her car?" she asked.

  "I don't even know her."

  "I don't care if you knew her. I care if you killed her."

  "I didn't."

  Where were you last Tuesday night? Don't think, just tell me."

  "My girlfriend was here."

  "What did you do?"

  "Watched TV. Ate. She drank some beers."

  "Name and address."

  LaLonde gave her name; didn't know her address.

  "Then what about the fuse—the little 20-amp auto fuse that had your thumb and index prints on it? The one we found in Janet Kane's car."

  He looked at her with deep suspicion and his eyes gave him away. Something wrong. Scrolling back. A hit He looked away with a nonchalant shrug and she knew she had him. Hess glanced up at her with a questioning expression on his face. He missed it, she thought—but I didn't.

  "I've worked with fuses in my life, Sergeant. I use them in my inventions sometimes. I used to do some electrical stuff down at the marina here. Yeah, I've worked with 20-amp fuses, but I never killed anybody."

  "When's the last time you touched one?"

  "The last time? I wouldn't know the last time exactly."

  "When? When's the last time you personally touched an automobile fuse, that you can remember, Lee?"

  "That would have been about... maybe... three months ago." He was ad-libbing now, and she knew it.

  "You're shittin' me, Lee. You sit there and think about what lockup's going to feel like again. All the boyfriends you can make. Maybe think of a way to stay out of it. I'm going to take a tour of this shitheap you call a shop."

  She looked over the kitchen and little bathroom, checking the magazine rack by the head because she'd found an automatic in a rack once before, hidden between the curling covers of nudie magazines. Hobby Magazine. Arts & Crafts. American Inventor. No automatic. LaLonde didn't strike her as violent and his sheet wasn't violent, but that didn't mean a thing to Rayborn because there was a first time for everything and a creep was a creep pure and simple.