Hess felt like a thousand faceless women were staring at him. He also felt the walls waver in and out just a little, like they were leaning in for a closer look.
He identified himself and gathered what he could about human hair wigs: they were available, typically 10 to 20 percent more expensive than synthetics, the upside was they looked good, the downside was that you had to shampoo, condition and set them just like you would your own hair—often.
He asked if they'd ever sold a long, blond, human hair wig to a man. The two women consulted in their native tongue, and the young one told Hess yes, several over the years. Sometimes, she said, men will buy for their wives. Sometimes for themselves. She exchanged glances with her mother and smiled very demurely at Hess.
The old woman stood and took up a long wooden pole with a metal V at the end. She shuffled along the wall behind the counter, stopped, reached and hooked a head off its platform. The hair was blond and wavy.
"Human hair," the old woman said. "Eighty-nine. You try."
"It's not for me."
"Okay. Sit. You try."
The younger held open a little swinging door and Hess stepped behind the counter. He sat in the styling chair, facing a mirror surrounded by lights. The older woman displayed the wig for his inspection, then lifted it and snapped it over his head. Hess was surprised how tight it was. She snugged it into place, brought up a wide-toothed plastic brush and started picking the hairline locks down over Hess's forehead. Thirty seconds later he looked like a signer of the Declaration.
He looked at the women behind him in the mirror in front of him.
"Good," said the older. "Human hair. Eighty-nine."
Somewhat amazingly to Hess, it was good. It looked like it could be his hair. If he just squinted a little and glanced at himself—as he did just now—he could believe this image in front of him was a man with long, wavy blond hair. Absurd, yes, but still... unified, credible.
He sat there for a moment in the wig, offering a deal with the younger: eighty-nine for the wig, copies of all receipts for blond human hair wigs sold to men for as far back as they had them, and a home phone number for each woman.
The old woman listened, then nodded and smiled cagily at Hess, who smiled and blushed.
"This isn't for me," he said.
Both women were smiling and nodding.
Old one: "Deal. Receipts come later."
• • •
He used a pay phone to call Brighton's direct number.
The sheriff picked up himself.
"She wants an apology and she wants Kemp to stop," said Hess. "She's sorry she brought the suit."
Brighton was silent for a moment. "Why couldn't she tell me that herself?"
"She didn't want to rat out a friend of yours. You're her boss, Bright. She wanted to be a stand-up deputy."
More silence. Then, "Thanks."
• • •
Hess and Merci caught the one-fifty flight from Orange County to Sacramento. They rented a car at the airport and Hess drove them toward the city. The afternoon was bright and ferociously hot, with the rice fields wavering in the sunlight.
Hess felt light-headed and he watched the shimmering mirage of interstate before him with particular attention. A bird hit the windshield and he flinched. All it left was a clear patch of something wet and a ring of small gray feathers. Hess looked through it but didn't look at it: part of him was still in Matamoros Colesceau's apartment.
He used Merci's cell phone to call Bart Young, the president of the Southern California Embalming Supply Company, again, hoping to pry loose the list of recent buyers. The pleasant sounding president was hesitant at first, then firm again in his decision not to give Hess the list. Hess could tell he felt bad.
He thanked him and hung up. "He's close. Maybe if you called him back and said something about the victims, he'd cave in. He's a decent sort, but he doesn't want to betray his customers. Why don't you try him? Get him to feel bad about the women? Men have a harder time saying no to women sometimes."
Five minutes later Merci was castigating the man for his noncooperation and gutless mercantile behavior. Apparently he hung up because Merci pushed a button, cursed and slapped the mouthpiece back over the keypad.
"I've never once been able to sweet-talk anybody in my life," she said. When Hess looked over she was actually scowling. Her hair was pulled back and her ears were red. "I'm the wrong one to get guilt or sympathy out of anybody. I made Mike cry once. And the way I look at it is, if he won't cough up the names, then this embalming machine pusher'll get a hotter place in hell for himself. It's out of my hands. I wash 'em."
Hess used the phone to run a records check on Rick Hjorth of Fullerton. He was intrigued that Hjorth was so eager to help. It was a fact of life that a high percentage of thrill killers liked to get close to the investigation of their crimes and Hess had detected something of morbid interest in the photographer's attitude.
Hjorth came back clean.
Hess called Undersheriff Claycamp for an update on the panel vans: seventy-five done, nothing yet, another team ready for 5 P.M.
The Morticians' Licensing Board was housed in a stately building near the capitol grounds. They were given an unused office, two chairs, a table and a pot of coffee. Two maintenance men wheeled in the file cabinets on dollies. Hess worked for a straight hour, then went to the men's room and vomited. It was the twelfth time in the last three days, and Hess had no idea why he was counting. He brushed his teeth with a travel brush that had a small tube of toothpaste in the handle, purchased after his first round of chemo, just in case. He looked at himself in the mirror and thought he saw shadows under his skin.
Three hours later they sat on the return flight, leafing again through the fifty-seven mugs they'd printed.
Bernai, Butkis, Camahan ... no Colesceau . . .
"The more I think about what he does, the more I think he's off the grid," said Hess. "He's not a professional. Undertakers don't even remove the things he's removing."
"Then why is he?”
"So they'll last longer, is my guess."
She looked at him. "But if he's doing what we think he's doing, he learned the skills somewhere."
"I wish we could get a list of all the people who took mortuary science and flunked out. But junior colleges don't keep records of who flunks, drops or fades out. They're too big, too busy, too disorganized. "Hess noted a woman across the aisle looking his way, then quickly somewhere eke.
"Well, dream on, Hess. I'm starting to think he just keeps them in the freezer, or down in the basement. Here, I'm going to try that supply guy again."
Drascia, Dumont, Eberk, Eccle, Edmondson . . .
She pulled out the phone from the seat back in front of her and read the directions. Hess shook his head, blinked, tried to concentrate on copies of the mug shots. The Licensing Board had let them use a good-quality copier/enlarger, but the reproductions were one more step removed from reality. And when you figured a guy might be wearing a wig and fake mustaches it took the sharpness out of your eye. It could be just about any of them. The sky was the limit.
"Hi, Mr. Young, this is Sergeant Rayborn again, from the Orange County Sheriffs? Look, I really want to apologize for what I said earlier—I'm just really involved in this case, the sheriff is leaning on me hard, my partner's screaming at me all the time, I'm at thirty-three thousand feet with no leg room and I'm just... frustrated."
She looked at Hess with an exaggerated grin. She was nodding and holding up her free hand, yapping with her fingers and thumb.
"I know ... I really do understand. It's just that these women—well, he got another one Saturday night. She was nineteen years old and living with her mom and just a heck of a great gal from what I've gathered. Her name was Ronnie. I never met her. In fact, all I ever saw of her was a couple of pictures and a pile of her intestines and organs on the hood of her car... I'm serious, that's what this guy's doing. Plus, we've got two more assumed victims from a couple of
years ago, possibly three. Uh-huh, yeah... well, sure, I can wait."
Hess looked out the window. Below was a vivid grid of green and yellow stretching all the way to the tan hills in the east. Clouds whisked by, torn by the jet. He watched the engine housing vibrate. Colesceau came out of his apartment Saturday at six and nine, or rune-thirty. Gilliam said the heart in the purse stopped beating between 7 and 11 P.M. Indications are she was abducted after work. But what if he got her later1 After the snooping photographer took his last shot? What if Hjorth or Gilliam are both off a half hour each way1 That would give Colesceau an hour and a half to do what he did to Ronnie Stevens. Possible. Not probable . . . How would he get out of the apartment without anyone seeing?
No Pule ... no Eichrod . . .
He closed his eyes and saw the layout of the place again: the living room, kitchen and downstairs bath; the upstairs bedrooms and bathroom. Colesceau's place was an end unit, so there were downstairs windows on the south wall, which was the kitchen. Ditto the west, which faced the street. Hess remembered the kitchen: a small cooking area and an alcove with a dinette in it, pushed up near the windows. Salt and pepper shakers on the dinette table, a stack of newspapers. He pictured the alcove and remembered green outside, with some color in it—bougainvillea maybe. Could you see the kitchen windows from the street, at night?
But how does he get the truck past the crowd without them knowing? It's impossible. Then . . . another vehicle. Out of the apartment, on foot to another car .. . silver van, mismatched tires .. .no ...
He made a note to canvas Colesceau's neighborhood for the silver van, check Colesceau's DMV records for a second vehicle registration, ditto his employers at Pratt Automotive—maybe they loaned him a vehicle to get him through the hard times. Also, get back to the apartment for a look at the south window by the kitchen, and talk to more of the neighbors. He wondered if there was any space under the structure, a crawl area for electrical conduit or vents, something he could wriggle into and out of without being seen.
Hess pondered the time line and it held up: Colesceau had been released from Atascadero on the castration protocol three years ago. Six months later, the first woman disappeared.
"—Okay. All right. Well, I sure thank you, Mr. Young. Bart, I mean. You're doing the right thing."
Merci hung up and looked at Hess. "I did it. Young's going to fox us the customer list of all the embalming machines sold in Southern California in the last two years. By noon tomorrow."
Hess could see the mixture of pride and surprise in Merci Rayborn's face.
"Nice work."
"It was hard. I feel lucky now. See what's popped at headquarters."
So she called her work phone for messages. Hess watched her shrug, then hang up.
"Well?"
"Nothing. But the Western Region rep for Bianchi sent me a pigskin shoulder rig. Free for 'select law enforcement individuals.' You know, the cops on the beat see I'm using a Bianchi, then make head of homicide by forty, they all buy one, too."
"I'd rush right out myself."
"I should have bought a Bianchi in the first place, because the snap on this one keeps popping off. I enjoy talking about weapons and gear. Do you?"
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The developed exposures from Rick Hjorth's film were on Hess's desk when he got back that evening. They were printed four by six and most of them were in focus. The ones taken after dark weren't very good because the automatic flash was too weak for much distance. Hess was pleased that Hjorth had used the date/time feature on the camera, which marked each print in the upper right comer. He slid the pictures of him and Merci into his coat pocket.
Hess looked at the image of Colesceau's apartment with the mob outside, picket signs and candles, even though it was still daylight—5:01 P.M., August 14. Saturday. And Colesceau looking through the cracked door—6:11 P.M. Colesceau on his porch—6:12 P.M. Then Colesceau and the pretty neighbor, Trudy, apparently exchanging something near his porch—6:14 P.M. A close-up of Trudy Powers after, smiling dreamily into Rick Hjorth's lens—6:22 P.M. Next, a picture of a young man holding a sign that said NEXT TIME CUT THE DAMNED THINGS OFF and flipping off the photographer while he smiled at the camera—6:25 P.M.
And so on.
"Anything good?" Merci called over. She was at her desk with the phone pressed to one ear and a notepad open in front of her. Hess knew she was hassling Bart Young of the Embalming Supply Company once again, trying to get him to hurry the customer list. Hess had to hand it to her: she was obsessive enough to be a good investigator someday. Head of homicide? Maybe. Sheriff by fifty-eight? We'll see, he thought. On the plus side, she's got twenty-five years to figure it out.
"Nothing yet," he called back.
Next time cut the damned things off.
He looked at the picture of the smiling flipper-offer, then sat back. It helped to laugh when you could, but sometimes there wasn't a chuckle anywhere in your heart.
Hess looked out at the near-empty investigations room—it was almost seven o'clock—and wondered about the behavior of his own species. He was done being shocked by it at twenty-two. He was finished being disgusted by it at thirty. It was too grim and hopeless to be amusing and too amusing to be grim and hopeless. It made him want to be somewhere people didn't murder and gut one another for thrills, where you didn't carry around a sign calling for your neighbor's nuts on a platter, where people had other things to do than stand around taking pictures of each other. Hess had spent too many of his sixty-seven years contemplating the grimace of his race, and he knew it. You could end up looking just like it. That was why when he made love to a woman he always made it last as long as he could because when he was doing that he wasn't quite himself anymore, he was just a little better, a notch above the bullshit, temporarily upgraded.
Make it last, he thought. Make it last just a little longer.
Hess looked at the pictures that Rick Hjorth had snapped through a crack in the blinds of Matamoros Colesceau's apartment.
They were taken from the same general angle as the view that Hess had of Colesceau that morning while he conferred with Merci in the downstairs bathroom. The couch, the wall opposite the front window, the TV. They were dark and the image small—reduced by distance as well as the top and bottom of the crack through which it was shot. Hess held the picture away and squinted at what looked like the back of Colesceau's head. It was just visible above the back of the couch. Thinning hair over the dull patina of a scalp. It was somebody's head, Hess concluded. Past it, the TV screen held the blurred picture of an actor walking down the hallway of a hospital set. The snapshot said, August 14, 8:12 P.M.
The time Ronnie Stevens's heart was being removed, thought Hess. But Colesceau's watching TV.
He got a loupe from the desk drawer and bent down for a better look. The image got bigger but more blurred. He breathed deeply and fogged the loupe. For a second it was like watching Colesceau through a window in a snowstorm. Sure, he thought, the TV watcher could really be a pillow or a stuffed bag or a doll or a cantaloupe on a stick with Magic Marker hair drawn on. It could be a holographic projection, swamp gas, or Lael Jillson's severed head with the hair cropped short. He tossed the loupe back in the drawer and flipped the photograph toward the stack. The back of Colesceau's head is the back of Colesceau's fucking head and he was sitting there watching TV while someone bled and gutted Veronica Stevens in the Main Street construction site.
Deal with it.
The photographs proved it. And they also proved that nobody could crawl out of the kitchen alcove window and not be seen. The angle was wrong. The neighbor's porch light shone upon the glass. It would be as obvious as someone pinned on concertina wire with a searchlight bearing down him.
Using the date/time numbers, he arranged all the shots in chronological order. Everything was so clear, right there in living color. But something wasn't quite right. He stared, unfocused his vision a little, rearranged them according to subject: Colesceau, crowd, whole ap
artment, lower story, upper story. It wouldn't come to him. It was like getting brushed by the wing of a bird you never saw. He asked Merci to come over for a look.
She stood beside his desk, hands on her hips, lips pursed. "I don't see it."
"Something touched me, then it left."
She gave him a look. "Let me try the loupe."
She bent, taking her time "The only thing I can think of is, when he watches TV, doesn't he even move? I mean, it's like he's frozen. Mike's kid is like that, though. He gets in front of the tube and goes hypnotic."
"Well."
"No?"
"That's true, what you said, but it's something about the exteriors, I think. Not Colesceau himself."
"Time and date are right there. I'm not seeing it, Hess. I don't see the problem."
He looked at the pictures again. "Right now, I don't sense anything odd there at all. It's gone."
"Damned creep is what he is, though."
Hess sighed and flipped the pictures over. Try again later. "Colesceau can get that car alarm stuff at work, you know."
"Any idiot with a computer can get car alarm stuff."
Hess called Undersheriff Claycamp for an update on the search for the panel van, and to change the assignments just a little. Nothing had popped and Hess needed a little something for himself.
Then he told Merci goodnight and headed down to his car.
• • •
He drove to the medical center with his mind back in the haunted oaks of the Ortega. Then in the high bay of Pratt Automotive, seeing that black-and-yellow Shelby Cobra again. Then Allen Bobb's mortuary sciences class. Then it was in Matamoros Colesceau's garage, where he found nothing he'd hoped to find. Big waves kept shouldering their way into his thoughts, too, but he banished them as distractions. He allowed himself to be inside just one, however, speeding and swaddled in the cold blue Pacific, happy as a bullet in a barrel.
THE BLUE HOUR Page 24