The Blue Hour (2 page)

Turning slowly back
through the pages of the file, Hess studied the deputy's first-call report and
sketches. He compared them with the CSI's photographs, then, using fist-sized
rocks, he marked the outline of the bloodstain, where the "unidentified
body matter" and the purse were found. The bits of human insides had been
scattered within a thirty-foot diameter of the tree, in all directions.
Coyotes, he thought. Raccoons, skunks, twenty kinds of birds and a thousand
insects. The steady buzz of flies filled the morning. Hess could not reconcile
the idea that a fully grown human being had been here a week ago but now not a
bone, not a tooth, not a single scrap of flesh or clothing was left. The
contents of the victim's purse had been strewn about, according to a numbered
legend on the CSI's site sketch.

The scene reminded
him of something. He knew what it was but he put it out of his mind.

He
set out to follow the trail the bloodhounds had worked. It led up a swale
studded by small oaks and yellowed foxtails, then across a dirt road—old tire
tracks, faint. Beyond the road was a gentle decline where the ground was
softer, thick with cattails and pampas grass growing high and thick. He lowered
his head and parted the stalks, pressing through. A moment later he could see
the lagoon before him, a dark oval ringed by foliage and dappled with the rings
of waterbugs. The air smelled sweet. He stood there for a moment, breathing
hard and feeling the sweat run down his face. The dive boys have their work cut
out, he thought: ten feet of mud to wade through before you hit the water, then
two feet of visibility if you're lucky. It had been thirty years since he'd made
dives himself. He'd always enjoyed them.

Back at the tree he
took a knee and breathed hard. They weren't kidding about physical fatigue and
weakness. The top

two lobes of his left lung were gone as of two months
ago.

He stood. The old oak
had V-ed early in life and spread wide like oak trees will. The lower half of
the trunk began only four feet off the ground. He set the files under the rock
that marked the purse.

Hess climbed up and
rested again, one foot braced on the main trunk and the other on the diverging
limb. Slowly he walked it out toward the end, grabbing the sharp leaves overhead
for balance. When he was over the place where Janet Kane had apparently been
drained, he stopped and felt the branch above his head. His fingers found a
smooth notch in the bark but it was hard to confirm what he felt without seeing
it. In better days a simple pull-up would have gotten his chin over the branch
and he could have seen what he needed to see.

One lousy pull-up, he
thought. He remembered yanking off a hundred of them at the L.A. Sheriff
Department Academy training course when he was a cadet. Then climbing a
twenty-foot rope. Hess had begun to wonder lately if memory was supposed to be
a comfort or torment.

He pulled himself up.
Straining, he looked down on the notch in the bark and liked what he saw. It
was just what he had imagined. The bark was worn about an inch across, all the
way down to the pale living meat of the tree. His shoulder ached and his arms
quivered. Then the limb suddenly shot up past his eyes and he was nowhere on
earth for a moment. He lay flat on his back in the middle of the bloodstained
ground.

• • •

Ten minutes later he
was standing under the second tree, where Lael Jillson's purse had been found
six months back. The big oak was part of a larger stand that blotted out the
daylight and kept the ground in eternal shade. The trunk twisted up from the
earth and the gnarled arms reached skyward.

He
took his time making the climb. Using the foliage overhead for support, he
walked out on a sturdy branch and found what he was hoping to find, the
inch-wide abrasion where the bark had sloughed off. In the last six months scar
tissue had formed and a surface of gray grain now covered the wound.

He
saw her: ankles tied, head down, the rope looped over the branch. Hair
swinging, fingertips a few inches from the dirt.

Hess
trudged back to his car and got the folding shovel and two buckets from the
trunk. It took him ten minutes and two rests to fill one bucket with unsoaked
soil from near the Kane tree. It was important to get a control sample if you
wanted to run a good saturation test. He finished, breathing fast. His palms
burned like embers but when he looked down at them they were just a little red.

Then
a quick sitting snooze during which he almost fell over. He finally filled the
other bucket with clean soil from the clean side of Lael Jillson's tree.

When he got back to his car with the folding shovel balanced over
one of the heavy buckets, he wondered if
his
fingers might actually break off. Dr. Cho had said nothing about loss of
digits but that's what it felt like was happening. When he looked at them they
were dented deeply by the bucket handles but otherwise fine.

The
sun hurt his eyes and his kneecaps felt like they had rusted. He took another
little nap—about two minutes— before heading back down the Ortega.

It was good to be
working again.

Hess took the file to
the hospital with him for his three o'clock appointment. Last month's program
hadn't been so bad, although the cumulative effects by month number four could
be devastating, depending on the patient. So said Dr. Cho.

He
settled into the recliner, squared the file on his lap and listened to Liz the
nurse talk about her new car. She slipped the big needle into the back of his
wrist and Hess felt the stiff presence of steel in his vein. Liz taped it down
and connected the intravenous drip line.

"How's that
feel, Tim?"

"Foreign."

"Got
some reading, there? Good. This is right here if you need it." She rolled
the wheeled table closer and lifted the little blue vomit trough. It was curved
to fit around your chin, Hess had noted, but it didn't look wide or deep enough
to accommodate a truly upset stomach. Maybe you were supposed to get too sick
to puke right.

"You didn't even
need this last time, did you?"

"I did
okay."

"Good man."

"Blanket?"

"
Please."

She lay it over his
legs and feet.

"Try to relax
now, and picture good things. I'll be in the next room."

Hess
settled in. He looked down at the blanket. It was kind of like when he was a
boy in his uncle's lodge up in Spirit Lake, Idaho, after the hunt. You were
tired and fed, and the only thing you had to do through the long black night
was read and sleep. The fireplace was so hot you had to move your sleeping bag
to a cot on the far side of the room. Actually, this was nothing like the lodge
at all.

Now, fifty-something years
later, he could feel the Cisplatin burning its way into his vein as he slid his
free hand through the rubber band and opened the file on his lap.

Case
#99063375

Jillson, Lael

Detectives
Kemp and Rayborn had procured two photographs of Lael Jillson: a snapshot
taken out-of-doors, and a photocopied picture from her wedding. The snapshot
showed her standing on a boulder with her arms crossed, dressed in shorts and
hiking boots and a sleeveless denim blouse. She was smiling. Her blond hair was
pulled back into a ponytail that shone in the sun. On her wedding day that same
blond hair was swept up and detailed with tiny white flowers that looked like
stars. Hess blinked and refocused on her. A slender face, a firm jawline, even
white teeth and dark brown eyes. She was radiant. The picture was black and
white with a sepia overtone. It reminded him of his own mother's wedding
picture, taken in 1928.

Of Lael Genevieve
Jillson: age 31, 5'8", 130 lbs., blond/brown, Caucasian, married, born
Orange, CA, maiden name Lawrence, distinguishing marks or characteristics—none.

None, thought Hess.
As if being lovely was not distinguishing. Just another human female chewed up
and spit into the dirt like a piece of gristle.

Most likely, he
thought. Almost certainly, in spite of the pea-sized spot of hope in Chuck
Brighton's brain.

Hess
looked up at the mirror behind the counter in front of him. The chemotherapy
room looked like a beauty salon, with four reclining chairs facing the mirror
and the counter littered with jars and bottles. Televisions hung in two
corners. The IV drip trolleys were pushed back against the wall. There were
plastic curtains attached to
the ceiling
on runners, but none was in use. Hess was the only customer today.

In
the mirror a pale man looked at him with steady blue eyes and a face that had
not enjoyed a privileged passage through the years. It was sharp and
unsentimental. The dark gray hair was brushed back like a World War II
general's, with an upright peak in the front. The peak had gone to white years
ago. Now the whole face was outlined in a shimmering line of red. Hess felt
dizzy and he saw the head waver. He sighed and closed his eyes. He told himself
he was too old for this, something men say only when they don't believe it.
You
have work to do.

The Laguna Beach woman was
reported missing six days ago, a Tuesday, from a shopping mall in Laguna Hills.

Case #99075545

Kane, Janet

Age
32, 5'6\ 120 lbs., brown/brown, Caucasian, single, born Syracuse, N.Y.,
orthoscopic surgery scar right knee.

Hess
held up the photocopy of her picture. It was a studio portrait, the kind of
picture you might have commissioned for a sweetheart, or your family.
"Sanderville Studios" was visible in the lower right corner. Janet
Kane was a genuine beauty, too: a good-humored smile, long dark hair with bangs
parted over a high forehead, eyes that looked playful and assured. Her blouse
was black and sleeveless, revealing graceful arms.

Beauty
in both of them, Hess thought.

Lael
Jillson, last seen in Neiman-Marcus, 8:10
P.M.,
according to the register receipt, purchasing pantyhose.

Janet
Kane, last seen in a suburban mall, at approximately 8:45
P.M.,
according to a shoe salesman at Macy's, who had watched her walk out.

And their purses recovered
in remote Cleveland National Forest sites accessible only by Ortega Highway or,
less so, by a network of dirt roads that overlay the vast and rugged terrain.
Lael Jillson's breath mints and birth control pills partially eaten by
scavengers. ATM, credit and insurance cards intact. No California driver's
license. No cash recovered.

Who always takes your
license? A clerk. A cop.

And
what would make a more concise and informative souvenir of someone you wanted
to remember clearly?

A
CDL. Vital stats and an image of her, collect them all.

Hess
leafed through the files one page at a time. The detectives had included
quadrants of a U.S. Government Survey topo map of the dump sites. Kemp/Rayborn
had marked the spots with red stars. Hess looked down at the swirling contours
of the map. There was a freshwater lagoon—Laguna Mosquitoes—just a quarter mile
to the west. He'd been there twenty-two years ago as part of the investigation
into the killing of a second-tier drug supplier named Eddie Fowler, injected
with a fatal dose of Mexican black and dumped by the highway side. The Ortega
Highway—State 74—had been a popular place for body disposal for all of the five
decades that Hess had been a deputy. Sixteen dumps, he thought, counting back.
Yes, sixteen, counting Fowler. Kraft had used it. Suff had used it. Most of
them unsolved.

Hess
had an infallible memory for such facts, though lately he had begun wondering
if it was a good use of brain space. The older he got the more he understood
the finite nature of things, the finite nature, in fact, of everything.

He
felt a wave of nausea rise up. He breathed deeply. He closed his eyes for a
moment and imagined the poison killing the cells. The bad cells only. Though he
understood that the poison was killing good and bad cells, indiscriminately,
like a gunman loose in a fast-food place. Liz had suggested the "positive
mental imaging" before the first round while Dr. Cho had stood by in
silence, smiling enigmatically.

He opened his eyes and forced his thoughts into order.
He looked at the topo map. The Ortega Highway was a
long, winding road that led over the Santa Ana Mountains through two county
jurisdictions, from San Juan Capistrano to Lake Elsinore. The curves were blind
and people drove it fast. Traffic fatalities were commonplace. At one end was
Capistrano, a quaint, sleepy little town marked by a Franciscan mission and
expensive homes with acreage. Horse country: women in jodhpurs, Chevy
Suburbans. Twenty-five miles away, at the other end of the Ortega, was the poor
city of Lake Elsinore, built around its namesake lake. The water level used to
rise and fall with the rains, which often left it little more than a polluted
little slick of water with houses stranded back in dried mud. Bullthorns and
ravens were what Hess thought of first, when he thought about Lake Elsinore.
Then, hookers on Main, meth-racket bikers and coke-trade middlemen.