The Blue Hour (10 page)

Sometimes it would only
last ten seconds. Sometimes a few minutes. Nothing like before, when he could
sustain himself at peak levels for hours at a time then go again with only a
little rest.

But that was all right,
because Wednesday he'd be through with this hell on earth and on to the next
destination, whatever that might be.

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?