THE BLUE HOUR

by T. Jefferson Parker

  During his radiation treatment Hess suddenly broke out in a scalding sweat. It evaporated off his skin immediately and left him feeling as if he'd been purged by fire. He lay there wondering if they'd turned up the rads too high. Maybe it was punishment for having to stay open late for him on a Tuesday. Dr. Ramsinghani told him "the heavy sweat is an occasional side effect," and smiled at him like he'd just bought a fine casket for himself.

  He buttoned his shirt over his newly purified skin and walked back out to the waiting room.

  Merci looked up from a magazine. "I tailed you."

  "I got four of the panel vans to check myself."

  "I heard you stealing them from Claycamp. Figured you might need your partner for it. Plus there's goddamned reporters waiting for me at work. I'll drive."

  "Then let's get out of here."

  "You've got a nice glow to you, Hess."

  "Funny."

  "No, I meant it... you look... oh, hell. Okay. All right. That's the stupidest thing I've ever said. Ever."

  She looked at him with a guilty acquiescence on her face—but it was really only a minor guilt—and Hess smiled. Her slow shrug said sorry, this is what you get, don't expect me to improve all that much, I'll try.

  "And Hess, they say if you laugh a lot you live longer."

  He just looked at her.

  "I give up," she said. "Put me out of my misery."

  "Put me out of mine?"

  "Deal. I feel lucky tonight. Where's that first van?"

  • • •

  Hess was thankful that Merci kept the Sheriff radio down low. It was a quiet night so far, calls for disturbing the peace, drunk in public, a car theft in Santa Ana. A bank thermometer read 81 degrees and the sun set through a bank of smog that spread the light into a red blanket low in the west.

  They checked two vans in an hour—one in Mission Viejo and one in San Clemente. The registered owners had come up clean on records checks and all the tires were matched. None were new. Hess figured if the Purse Snatcherhad caught on to his own identifying flaw, it would be a new right front, maybe a new set all around.

  Vern Jackson, the third van owner, wasn't home. He came up with assault and concealed weapon raps in '79 and '85. The vehicle wasn't parked in the driveway or the street, so Hess stood watch while Merci went through a side gate. A few minutes later she was back out again, shaking her head.

  The last van was registered to Brian Castor of Anaheim. He came back clean on the record check. The van sat in the driveway of an older tract home with a neat yard and a mailbox in the shape of a shark. It was red. They drove past, U-turned and parked along the curb in front.

  The front door of the house was a dutch door with the top open. A large man with long blond hair stood just inside, watching them get out. Hess waved and pointed at the van.

  Castor met them next to it, his hands on his hips, his "Gone Fishin'" T-shirt tight over his chest and arms.

  "What's up?"

  "We're checking a few vehicles—part of an ongoing investigation. Do you mind if we look at the outside?"

  "Why mine?"

  "Panel vans in the county."

  "Go ahead."

  But Merci had already gone ahead. She rounded the front of the van behind Castor, walked past him to check the right rear. She shook her head. Hess could see that the two right-side tires were not new.

  "We need a look inside," said Merci.

  "Nice to meet you, too," said Castor. "Go for it. It's unlocked."

  Hess looked at the fisherman while Merci swung open

  the back door. A moment later she slammed it shut. "Nix."

  Hess thanked Castor and apologized for interrupting his evening.

  "Whatever, man. See you later, sweetheart." "Dream on, fish eyes," said Merci, already moving toward the car.

  Castor looked at Hess and smiled. "Spicy."

  A few minutes later Hess heard the words that he had learned to dread when he was twenty-two years old, just starting off, and had dreaded more with every passing year.

  "Deputy down, eighteen-twelve Orangewood, El Modena off Chapman! Deputy down and it's bad. Suspect down, too. Need paramedics and need 'em now."

  The words shot through Hess's body like electricity. He realized they were half a mile away, told Merci the quickest way in.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  She gunned the big four-door down the avenue and made the right onto Warren, another onto Hale, then a quick skidding left at Orangewood. The back tires let go, the car swung sideways into the curb and Hess felt his head rattle. Up ahead he saw the flashing lights of a Sheriff's unit and a group of people gathered to one side of it. Then he saw a silver van parked in a driveway and he thought, good God we got him. He fingered open his holster catch and jumped out as soon as Merci had braked the car to a stop beside the prowl car.

  He looked at the faces in the flashing light and saw their stunned resentment. He walked toward the van, toward the lit garage, the lights slapping red and blue and yellow against the scene: a uniformed deputy face up on the driveway between the van and the garage, another uniform bent over him with his arms stiff and hands locked pumping at his chest. And past them, lying in the garage doorway leading to the house, a big man not moving but a young woman screaming and shaking him. Halfway between the two down men was a stainless automatic handgun that Hess picked up by the barrel and moved away from the screaming woman, who had just begun crawling over the prostrate man on her way to the gun.

  "No," he ordered her. "Go back to him."

  Hess set the gun high up on a shelf and went to the big man in the doorway. He could hear Merci behind him, outside the patrol car, talking on the radio, then the rising pitch of distant sirens. He knelt. The guy looked fifty, maybe, balding and powerfully built. Jeans and boots, no shirt. Black tattoos up both arms, one of the central county gangs Hess recognized. He had two holes in his bare chest, close together at the heart. Hess felt the neck for a pulse and when the girl saw his expression she attacked, coming over the body at him, her nails raking at his face. He moved sideways and used her motion to take her lengthwise onto the garage floor and get her wrists back. He snugged the plastic tie tight and walked her at arm's length to Merci's car with one hand on her arm and one in her hair while she snapped her head back trying to bite him.

  Merci pumped at the deputy and Hess got the look he didn't want: chest covered with blood and a pool of it under him, his head nodding back and forth with Merci's efforts, eyes open and feet splayed as only dead feet splay. Merci was talking while she did the chest compressions, demanding that the deputy respond, refusing to let him check out.

  "You hang in here with us, Jerry," Hess heard her say, not much more than a hoarse whisper. "You stay here withme ... you just keep breathing . .. I'm giving you the power to do that, so do that... just do it, Jerry..."

  The kid looked about twenty-five. His gun was still in his holster. His partner was maybe forty, blood on him as he leaned down and kept talking to the kid, we're with you now, Jerold, come on Jerry, we gotta get you back to Cathy in good shape or she's gonna have my hide . . . come on, Jerry, I'm gonna keep talking and you just keep listening, we're going to get you out of this, partner, don't you fade on me now, kid, I need you here . . .

  Merci kept pumping but she looked up at Hess with a devastated expression and shook her head. Her forearms were heavy with blood and she was kneeling in a pool of it. Hess checked the van tires—an older but uniform set—then looked over at the crowd. He saw their fear of him. It was one of those moments—Hess had experienced them before— when the killing was done and lives suddenly gone and all you could do was nothing at all.

  He went back to Merci.

  "I can take over there," he said to her.

  "I got him, man, move over," said the partner. His name plate said Dunbar. "AH right, Jerry, I'm back now ..."

  The sirens whooped and stopped behind him. Two city units and one Sheriff, Hess saw. The paramedic van came tilting around the
corner where Merci had almost lost it. The sound and the new flashing lights and the slamming doors and weapons-drawn officers all seemed to reanimate the tragedy, or to make possible a new one. Dunbar was blubbering and pumping too fast. Merci walked slowly toward the arriving troops, her hands out from her sides, as if unsure of how to carry them or herself.

  Hess opened the back van doors and looked in. It was carpeted and had a small table and two bench chairs instead of seats. On the table was a freezer bag half filled with light brown powder. A pound at the most, probably less. Hess poked it with his finger—heroin—Mexican by the color. There was a scale, a box of smaller plastic bags, a couple of teaspoons, two open beers and a bag of some kind of powder to plump up the smack and create profit.

  They had walked straight into the cutting and packaging, he thought. Like stepping on a scorpion in the dark. Jerry's life for a pound of poppy dust. The Purse Snatcher's seventh victim.

  He made sure the arriving crime scene investigators knew where the stainless automatic was stashed.

  Then he walked the inside of the house, touching nothing, just looking. It was predictable and soulless, heavy on black leather, chrome and electronics. A new computer in boxes. Plenty of guns. He came into the kitchen just as Merci turned from the sink with her hands clean and wet, looking for a paper towel. Finding none, she dried her hands on a cotton one folded on the countertop.

  "Jerry Kirby's dead," she said quietly, "and so's the creep. Let's get the bitch out of my car and get out of here."

  She tossed the towel into the sink and walked out.

  They sat in silence outside Colesceau's apartment on 12 Meadowlark. Hess leaned back in the seat and peered out between heavy eyelids. He could feel the blood surging inside him and it felt hot. The rads? His brain felt sluggish. It was after ten and he counted only six protesters. The CNB van was still there—'round the clock coverage for "Rape Watch, Irvine"—but Lauren Diamond was nowhere to be seen. The neighbors sat in lawn chairs with their signs on the ground and votive candles burning in holders beside them. Hess looked at the south-facing kitchen window and knew with certainty that nobody could get in and out of it without being seen.

  "It was worth checking," he said. "But there's no way he could get in and out of that window. None whatsoever."

  "I told you."

  "I needed to see it."

  "Tim, this pathetic little troll isn't our guy. He looks wrong, the parole officers have been on him for three years, his own neighbors won't let him fart without taking his picture. I mean, we've got actual photographs of him at home taken while Ronnie Stevens bought it. It just isn't him. But I respect your instincts. I absolutely do."

  "I don't care about my instincts. I care about getting this guy before he takes another girl."

  "That's why we need to run with what we've got. The artist's sketch with the hair is the one that's popping for us, Hess. Kamala guided it, LaLonde endorsed it, the bus driver and store clerk recognized it. Sure, it could be a wig, but what are the chances? Nobody sees him do what he does, right? So why go to all that trouble, parade around in a well-lit mall with somebody else's hair on? It's real. It's his. We're looking for a long-haired, blond, beach-god type. A guy good-looking enough to catch Kamala Petersen's eye. So we've got to get the sketch out there more, get it seen. Maybe do a billboard like we did on that Horridus guy last year. Maybe get Lauren Diamond to put it on the TV more. Maybe circulate them by hand at the malls. We could get some rookies or cadets to do the canvas. Hell, we could do it ourselves if Brighton won't authorize the manpower, which he probably won't."

  He nodded, wishing he could get his head clear. It was harder to keep everything straight later in the night. He just wanted things to add up. He listened to his voice.

  "We've got the graduates of the Cypress College program," he said. "We've got all the licensed undertakers in Southern California. We've got 224 owners of panel vans. We've got a mailing list from Arnie's Outdoors—the biggest hunting/fishing chain in the county. We need the connection, Merci. If we could just find one name on two lists we'd be onto something. Until then, things are spreading, getting bigger but not tighter."

  "And don't forget the embalming machine purchasers, as of tomorrow morning."

  In fact, he had forgotten them.

  "Right, and them."

  "How many vans left?"

  "We'd done ninety-four when I talked to Claycamp this evening. The night shift is going to be real slow after what just happened. But they ought to make that one twenty or thirty by morning. Those tires are our best physical evidence. If we find the van, we find the Purse Snatcher. When we're down to ten, I'd say start in on the ones registered to females, maybe do the commercial ones."

  "What about road blocks or checkpoints?"

  Hess was positive that he had covered this angle, but it took him just a second to recall how. When he did, he felt more relieved than he should have.

  "I did a radius plot from the abduction sites to the dump sites, tried to narrow down his home base. But it didn't tell me much. The Ortega screws up the parameters because it's the only way to get to where Jillson and Kane were. That means his point of departure could be anywhere this side of the mountains. What I'm saying is, we'd need checkpoints all over the county for a decent shot at intercepting that van."

  "Brighton won't approve that kind of manpower. Not on one of my cases, he won't."

  Hess suspected she was right, but said nothing. He could feel his blood boiling again.

  "Say it, Hess, I don't care."

  "He's prepared to see you fail," he answered.

  "You going to help me do that? Or just submit the paperwork when it happens?"

  "Neither, I hope."

  "I'm just a damned woman, not the antichrist. I don't see what makes all you guys so afraid."

  Hess looked out the window, felt his vision blurring.

  "Well, what is it, Hess? How come we make you guys so afraid?'

  "We're old."

  "No, it's more than that. It's because we're women."

  "We think you want to bottle our seed and kill us all."

  She laughed. "Sounds good to me."

  "Then there you have it."

  "I wasn't serious. But, to be serious, why? Why would we want to do that?"

  "Maybe that's what we'd do if we were you."

  "No, you like our bodies too much. Just the pleasure of them."

  "You're right. What we're afraid of is that you'd run the world in your favor if you could. I mean, we run it in ours."

  "You're right, we would. I would, anyway."

  "Well, Brighton knows that."

  Merci was quiet for a long while then, and Hess was aware of her looking out the window toward Colesceau's apartment. A couple of new faces arrived by car for the vigil— a young couple with a cooler and an electric lantern. The CNB news crew shot video of the arriving couple, then turned their lenses toward 12 Meadowlark.

  Hess watched as two of the protesters stood and walked off with their arms around each other. The guy carried his sign at his side, no audience for him now. A middle-aged couple with a conscience and an evening to kill, Hess thought. Probably protested the war in college for reasons similar. He could hear their voices in the warm night but not their words. It was nice to see that it wasn't all battlefield between human beings, that a man and a woman could choose to be together and make a go of it.

  But his mind eddied back to the task at hand and the task lay in darker waters.

  "I think he's saving them, customizing them. Their bodies. Because, like you said, there's pleasure in them. But he's afraid of the life inside them. He's afraid you're going to bottle his seed and kill him. That's why I thought Colesceau was a good bet, at first. The physical evidence? Wrong. The situation he lives in? Wrong, too. I know that. But I felt something I didn't understand, in there, with him. I wish I could know what it was. We're looking for a guy whose insides are a lot like Colesceau's. I mean, imagine what comes into his nig
htmares after he's injected with female hormone, once a week. Can you imagine what he dreams?"

  "No. Can you?"

  "I've tried. And it keeps coming back, fury."

  "Keep talking."

  "One, we know he translates rage into lust. He's probably done it all his life, or most of his life. He rapes. Two, rage equals erection equals blunt instrument that gives pleasure to him and pain to another."

  "Okay."

  "So when he gets caught and castrated, we're taking away his expression of those things—rage and lust. But we're not taking away the basic feelings themselves. Rage now equals no erection, no blunt instrument, no pleasure to himself, no pain to another."

  He watched her consider. "He needs new ways to express." "I assumed so at first. But what if he just wants the old ways back? And he can't have them right now. All he can have now is something . . . ready. So, why not just kill them and keep them for the day when he's ready to express the lust again?"

  "Okay. It makes sense." Hess caught an odd tone in her voice, like she was trying to hurry him past this part of things.

  "Now, in those pictures, the back of Colesceau's head doesn't convince me," he said. "I want Gilliam to enhance them for us. And I think we should bring him in and hit him hard. Tell him it's his print on the fuse. Line the purses up right where he can see them. Tell him we've got a witness. Really get inside his head and throw knives."

  She was quiet again, then her voice seemed to come from for away, soft but urgent.

  She held his sleeve, and what she said surprised him. "Tim, it isn't him. We've got photographs of him watching TV when it happened. We've got dozens of witnesses. We've got videotape. He can't get out of there without the world knowing it. You know? Tim? It. . . isn't. . . him."

  She looked at him and he saw the disappointment in her face. He also saw some of the devastation that had filled her expression as she pumped away on the deceased young Jerry Kirby. But this was different. Back in the garage in El Modena there was outrage and fury in her, too. Now, the outrage and fury were gone. And in their place was a sympathy that Hess found intolerable because he knew he was the target. She turned away and looked out the window toward the crowd. Hess could see her eyes in profile, focused down toward the steering wheel.