THE BLUE HOUR

by T. Jefferson Parker

  She toured the workbenches. The closer she studied what she found on them, the less sense they made. For instance: umbrellas with inverted domes and hollow tubing that led to detachable plastic bags. A collection of mouthpieces with rubber teeth protruding. And an odd contraption involving a small gyroscope and a large outdoor patio lamp. A set of large concave plastic circles, like giant contact lenses, connected with what looked like a headband. And a collection of wooden cigar boxes with metal antenna protruding from their backs. She opened one and looked at the bird's nest of batteries and chips and solder and circuitry inside. No fuses that she could see.

  "What are these for?" She waved one of the cigar boxes.

  "Those are for jamming eavesdroppers on a cell phone."

  She turned and studied him. From a distance he looked less like a fish and more like a regular guy with a not-very- good face.

  "You can buy 'em new for a hundred bucks," she said.

  "Mine go for twenty-five. I do okay with them."

  "Where is it that you do okay with them?"

  "Swap meet out here. Sundays, at the Marina Park."

  "Where did you learn electronics?"

  "High school. My dad was an engineer. I've got a knack."

  "Got a knack for stealing cars?"

  "Cars are easy."

  "What about the alarm systems?"

  She turned and looked at him again. LaLonde shrugged.

  "I didn't mess with those. If you work with a partner you can pry and clip pretty quick, or use a code cutter."

  "Well, did you or did you not work with a goddamned partner?"

  "Right. No. I worked alone, used a slapper."

  She set the cigar box down.

  "What do these upside-down umbrellas do?"

  "Collect rainwater. It runs down the line into the bag. You clip the bag on your belt or pants."

  Merci picked up an inverted umbrella and looked at the way Lee LaLonde had reconfigured the ribs and nylon. She looked back at him again. "What, because we live in a desert or something?"

  "Yeah," said LaLonde. "We're supposed to get less water from the Colorado River soon."

  "They say that same goddamned thing every year."

  He shrugged.

  She picked up a tooth-studded mouthpiece. The gums were soft and the teeth were firm. "What's with the mouthpieces?"

  "Protect the teeth while eating. Abrasion wears out more enamel than cavities."

  "You chew with these things on?"

  "That idea started out as a way to make your own false teeth. Cheap. Different styles. You know, so you could change them around like clothes. Like, different teeth for different occasions. I called them Occasional Smiles. It was one of those good ideas that aren't so good when you do them."

  She looked at LaLonde, considered his dentition, then dropped the rubbery gums to the bench.

  "You're a real loser, Lee."

  LaLonde said nothing.

  "Where's Janet Kane's body?"

  "I don't know. I honestly don't."

  "We know about Lael Jillson, too."

  "I don't."

  She nodded. "Tim, please handcuff this dirtbag."

  Hess looked at her, then stood and helped LaLonde off the couch. Merci watched as he handcuffed LaLonde's wrists behind his back. Hess guided him back down to the couch.

  "Thank you," said Merci. "Lieutenant Hess, why don't you step outside, pull that door shut behind you. Have a look around out there."

  She waited by the bench as Hess plodded across the shop. He looked at her once on his way past but she couldn't read the expression. He pulled the door down behind him and Merci listened to the metallic echo.

  "Sounds like lockup," she said.

  "It don't sound like lockup when you can open it anytime you want."

  "They treat you bad inside?'

  "What do you expect, a guy like me?"

  "I expect bad."

  He nodded, not looking at her.

  "You're always working on something, aren't you?"

  He nodded again. She could feel his irritation rising, just what she expected in the absence of Hess.

  "I don't think you killed her."

  "I didn't."

  "Get up."

  He stood and Merci turned him around by one shoulder. She was surprised how light he was. With her arm extended she guided him into the bathroom with the tip of her left index finger.

  "Kneel down in front of the toilet. Do it."

  LaLonde knelt and looked back and up at her. Merci looked inside the bowl: pretty bad. The lid was already up.

  "Stick your head inside and put your neck on the lip."

  He did.

  "Knees together."

  He did that, too.

  "Here's the deal, Lee. You seem like a pretty nice guy to me. I'd hate to arrest you for the murder of Janet Kane, but with your prints on that fuse I don't have much choice. So spill it—tell me how your prints got on that little glass tube and how the tube got into Janet's BMW. The reason you're looking at the toilet is because I want you to think about spending the rest of your life in one. That's exactly where you'll be in about one hour if I don't get the answers I want."

  His head shook back and forth. "I can't explain it."

  "Broaden your horizons."

  She squatted and used her weight to push his face into the water. He sucked in before he went under, then tried to wait her out. He lasted about half a minute then struggled. She actually imagined Kemp's head in there, almost smiled. She let him up for one breath then pushed his face back in.

  "Lee, you got to tell what you know. I know you're lying because it was written all over your face."

  He shook his head again then tried to back out. She used his hair this time, a good wad of it, sitting forward and sitting down hard on him. She wanted to flush it but couldn't without letting go. When she felt the panic of drowning hit him, she let him up again.

  He gulped down a big swallow of air. Then another. But no words.

  Down again. She kept her knees pushed up tight against his shoulders and her arms extended and her hands locked hard on his neck. It was easy to keep her weight forward and down.

  Next came a long one. His neck was wiry and hot. She felt the panic in him, and the strength the panic gave him. Then she let him up.

  He was gasping now. The big overlapping breaths came too fast for a full lungful of air to get in. When they started coming one at a time she waited for him to say something and when he didn't she drove him back under again.

  "Next air's about sixty miles down the road, Lee."

  He writhed hard but her weight was up over his shoulders and she wasn't about to let go of his neck. He tried to splay his knees and slide out under her, but her legs kept his arms pinned close and the cuffs kept the wrists tight. His voice echoed up from the water but it was just a kind of scream and no words. She looked back and saw his fingers reaching up for her like a hand in a horror movie. It felt good to dominate a creep this totally.

  When she let him up he drew a huge breath and blew it out and took another, then another. "I was at. At the swap

  meet. Marina Park. This guy said could I. Could I build him a thing. A thing that got around car alarms. Because I had. I had the cigar boxes. For die phones. I said I could. Probably. Figure that out. I made him one. Used two 20-amps. He came two weeks. Later and picked it up. Don't send me back. Back to prison for his. Lady. Lady, I don't know what he did with. With it. But he came back again about three. Or four months ago. To see me at the swap meet. I'll tell you what. He looks like. And I'll help you get him. Just lemme breathe and don't send me back."

  Merci let go of him and stepped away. Lee LaLonde slumped to the dirty tile.

  She went outside and found Hess leaning against the cinder block.

  "Interesting sound effects," he said.

  "Maybe there's an award in it for me."

  From the car she retrieved the artist's sketch of Kamala Petersen's heartthrob at the mall
.

  Back in LaLonde's bathroom the young man was sitting on the floor, dazed. Hess stood with one foot braced against the wall and his arms crossed, looking down.

  She showed LaLonde the drawing. He stared at it for a long moment. Hess looked at it, then at her, and she saw the look of disappointment cross his sharp face.

  LaLonde nodded. "That's him."

  "Name, Lee."

  "Bill Something. He never said his last name."

  "Clean up," said Merci. "You smell like a sewer. Then we'll have a talk. Then I'm going to trash this place and find your little gadget. Because I don't think you made it for some guy named Bill. I think you made it for you."

  Hess helped him up.

  Three hours later Merci called off the search. She'd found out more than she wanted to know about Lee LaLonde—his work, his diet, his old clothes, his piles of magazines about inventing.

  The mystery girlfriend even came over, unannounced, at 10 a.m., and unhesitatingly repeated LaLonde's story about them being together, right here, the night Janet Kane left the living. She gave Merci her sister's number because her sister sat with the kid while Mom was over here.

  Hess ran a sheet on her while Merci interrogated her: two pops for drug possession, two drunk-in-publics, one prostitution charge she pled down to loitering.

  He took her aside. "The girlfriend's got narco and prostitution."

  "I'll get Riverside to surveil them."

  "Merci, if that fuse is really the one our boy used, what's that tell us?'

  "Tells us the gadget isn't working."

  Merci went back to the inventor and his girlfriend, now seated side by side on the old couch.

  "I'm going to leave you here for now," Merci told him. "You see Bill, you call me. You remember anything about Bill, you call me. You dream about Bill, you call me. Bill shows up here, wanting you to fix his toy, you call me faster than you've ever called anyone in your life. That goes for you too, hot pants."

  She wrote her home and cell phone numbers on the back of a business card and set it on one of the benches.

  "I expect to hear from you, Jack."

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  That afternoon Hess sat in an empty conference room at Sheriff headquarters and studied the pages in the fat blue binders, comparing the mugs with Merci's sketch. She had already gone through the registry once, then asked Hess to do it, separately. Something about "comparing independent data," which was fine with Hess. He felt an odd roiling in his blood, like it was hot, like it was starting to bubble inside.

  Of the 3,700 sex offenders then registered in Orange County, 335 lived in areas patrolled by the Sheriff Department. Some 259 were considered "serious," 11 others, "high risk." High risk is three or more violent sexual attacks. Serious is two or less. Sex Offenders Notification and Registration—SONAR—was instituted to keep track of them all.

  He'd already eliminated the 11 high-risk offenders. He was now at "D" in the serious category. He was surprised that a two-time rapist, recently released at the age of thirty-six, for instance, could be considered less than high risk.

  D'Amato. Darcet. Davis. Deckard.

  Too fat. No. Too old. No.

  According to the sign-out sheet, four of the thirty-five binders were checked out to the SONAR team, who were transferring most of the information onto compact disc for public release. New state law required that agencies make their sex offender registries available to the public in areas of high population. SONAR was deleting addresses—but not zip codes—from the files before making them public so as not to encourage trouble from neighbors. The SONAR deputies were finishing up the last three books, "T" through "Z", and also a supplemental registry for the criminally insane.

  He studied the artist's drawing again. Kamala Petersen's man was mustachioed. Wavy blond hair. He'd never seen a composite wearing a coat and a vest. The artist had given something sad—perhaps even something damp—to the man's eyes. Or was it Kamala's "hyperromantic vision," as Rayborn had put it?

  An interesting face, Hess thought: handsome, groomed, unusual. Unusual in what way? Not typically Southern Californian. Mustaches are out. Long hair is out. The appearance wasn't simple or casual, or offhand. It was formal. Created. A "look." A look of what? What are you supposed to be? A model, like Kamala said? Actor? Celebrity? Quick now, describe him in three words: intelligent, secretive, regretful.

  Regretful. In forty years of law enforcement Hess couldn't remember describing a sketched suspect as regretful. Later, in court, maybe. Maybe.

  Could be way upstream in juvenile court, but somewhere he's felt the lash.

  Regret, thought Hess. You regret what you've done. You regret who you are. Or is that part of your look—the appearance of sorrow?

  Personally, thought Hess, if I had taken two people from their cars, hung them in trees and bled them, I would feel sorrow indeed. But not everyone would, and that was what made the worst people in the world different from the rest of us—no regret, no remorse, no feeling for anyone but themselves, no conscience. The tricky part was that Hess knew a lot of people like that who weren't criminal. Some of them were cops and deputies. Some were accountants and mechanics. Some were teachers and housewives, though if the truth be told, most of them were men.

  Delano. Dickerson. Diderot.

  No. No. No.

  Then there was Eichrod. Hess popped open the rings and worked it out. Eichrod, Kurt; 32 years old; 5'10", 185, brown and brown. Hair long and wavy. Mustache. Possession of obscene material; solicitation; indecent acts; peeping; battery; assault with intent to rape. Two of the sexual assault raps got him a total of four years served. Released on parole in 1995, parole satisfied late last year.

  Hess set Merci's sketch beside the binder page and considered. They were close but not close, alike but different. Something more in the attitude than the physical.

  What disturbed Hess was Eichrod's rising line of intensity, from porn to sexual assault in a six-year span.

  You don't just go out and start with something of this magnitude. You work up to it. If nothing else, you work up to the how of it.

  The how of it, Hess thought: hunter, butcher, packinghouse worker? Embalmer?

  Eichrod's jacket would tell. He set aside the binder page to copy later.

  Gilbert. Greers. Gustin. Gutierrez. No.

  It was amazing how many sexual criminals were out there. And these were only the ones who had been caught, convicted and registered. Police scientists said the realistic number would be more like quadruple what the registry held. Hess was ashamed of some of his gender for failing to mate legitimately, then turning furtive or brutal. Desire for sex was at the center of almost everything that went wrong in a guy's head. That, and desire for money.

  He turned to Ed Izma's page and looked at the picture of the huge man. Reduced to a three-by-four image, Izma lost all of his panoramic menace.

  Jackson. James. Jerrol.

  Mickler, Mondessa, Mumford.

  No. No. No.

  Then there was Pule, Ronald E. Abductor, rapist, torturer. A user of pliers. Fourteen years back in Georgia. That was ten years ago. His only offense. High risk, due to special circumstances—abduction and forcible sodomy. He was forty years old, which put him out of Dr. Page's profile age. He wasn't a builder, apparently. He just exploded on the scene, skilled beyond his years, fully formed. He was big and probably strong enough to hoist a full grown woman over the branch of a tree: 6'3", 220 lbs. Too big for the backseat of a car? Maybe. Long blond-brown hair, mustache. And there was that something different in his eyes, too, the thing that Merci's artist had tried to capture. Remorse? Self-pity?

  Hess put Pule on top of Eichrod and continued.

  An hour later he was at his desk in the investigators' bullpen with the arrest files for Eichrod and Pule. It was almost seven and Hess was the only one there. He looked at his watch and saw that it was Friday, the thirteenth. He had already photocopied their registry sheets and made a note to get "S" through "Z"
and the supplemental volume from the SONAR team when they came to work the next day, first thing. He realized now that the next workday was three days off. As a young investigator it had angered him that people could be hard to get on weekends. It threatened to anger him now, but he sighed and told himself that "T" through "Z" and all the psychopaths would just have to wait.

  There was nothing in either file that suggested Eichrod or Pule were experienced as meat cutters, packinghouse workers or embalmers, anyway. Hess hadn't expected anything.

  He stared at Ronald Pule's registry picture again, then compared it to the sketch. Promising. But his arrest mugs didn't look like the sketch at all—his face was wider, his eyes smaller, his tight mouth nothing like the full-lipped man that had stirred Kamala Petersen's interest. Of course, Kamala had probably exaggerated his virtues.

  • • •

  Hess watched Rayborn come toward him with thick blue notebooks under both arms and a newspaper propped across the top of each armful. With her hair loose it framed her face. She looked intent as always.

  She set one stack of binders on his desk, then the other, saving the two papers for herself.

  '"T through 'Z', and the crazies?" he asked.

  "I got them from Carla Fontana, the shrink for the SONAR team."

  She plopped the newspapers onto the desk beside Hess's, and swung herself into the swivel chair. "Let me guess—you picked out Eichrod and Pule."

  He smiled faintly and tapped the photocopies with his knuckles. The skin across the bone felt like it leaped into flames and Hess actually looked down at his hand.

  She picked up one of the papers, stripped off the plastic string and looked down at the front page.

  Hess started in on the "TV

  Tabling. Tanaha. Tenerife.

  No. No. No.

  For just a second he was back inside that big churning cathedral of water at the Wedge, gliding through it on his palms like a waterbug while the tonnage roared over. Then he had Barbara over the dryer with her skirt up in the laundry room of their first apartment with the windows fogged from humidity while outside it poured rain at 3 a.m., the moment being one of those delicious chances neither one of them could pass up for the first five years they knew each other.