The Blue Hour (3 page)

The
highway ran between the cities, tethering the sunlight to the shade, the
prosperity to the toil, connecting them in the way that such things are always
connected, climbing past dark stands of oak, looping through miles of dense
sage and chaparral, cutting along deep rock canyons and lazy spring-fed creeks
that nourished wildlife and sprayed the valleys with wildflowers every April.
Hess had hiked and hunted it as a boy. He had always considered the Ortega to
be a little haunted, and for this, he was drawn to it.

He
turned the map and leafed through the pages of the files. It was frustrating
how little information they had. He'd never seen thinner files on two assumed
abduction/homicides where they had identified the victim so quickly. Of course,
the complete lab work on Janet Kane would take time. And would add a few more
pages. But nature's skill as a contaminator of crime scenes was considerable.

The
cars were the key. If they were going to recover—or had already
recovered—anything useful, it would be in the cars. Each was found parked and
unlocked, miles from the stores where the women had shopped, on no likely route
to their homes. The keys were still in the ignitions.

Then,
the women had gotten into other vehicles.

Kemp
and Rayborn had realized this, too. Hess read Kemp's notes. Then he turned to
the CS1 checklist of Lael Jillson's

Infiniti Q45 and ran his
finger down the page. The evidence techs had pulled up hair and fiber, of
course, a fair amount of it. Human hair probably belonging to four or perhaps
five different people. Based on specimens supplied by her husband, the lab had
made likely matches with Lael and two family members— her husband and son. The
fourth was Caucasian, dark brown, with some bend in it. The fifth was a red
pubic hair that didn't fit with any of the others. Interesting, he thought.

But Hess knew the
uncertainties of hair identification. Alone among the forensic sciences it was
still practically unchanged in the latter half of the century. It was really
done by eye, and was often inconclusive. The fact of the matter was that you
could get a wide variety of colors and textures from one donor. And a hair
could blow in from almost anywhere. Sometimes you'd get lucky with hair
processing or pharmacological residue that would help narrow the players. Not
often.

Hess read
in Merci Rayborn's handwriting that Robbie Jillson had "purposely not
washed the car" when his wife
went
missing because he immediately "knew" there was foul play,
"whether you cops would take a missing person report or not." Good
man, thought Hess. So the lab had gotten it in reasonably good condition, the
inside at least.

Fingerprints were
lifted from the interiors and exteriors of both cars. The lab had easily
eliminated the victim and family members but a thumbprint in the Jillson
Infiniti was still unidentified. The print had scored no hit from CAL-1D, the
FBI or the regional registry in Tucson. The print results on Janet Kane's BMW
were pending. Soil specimens were taken from the interiors, good. Not taken
from the exteriors, however. Bad. Hess had once caught a creep because of
decorative gravel caught in a tire tread. That was thirty years back. Since
then he checked tire treads assiduously, because Hess believed that when
something worked you did it again. And Lael and Janet had been
somewhere
between the time they left
the shops and the time they pulled—or someone else pulled—their cars over for
the last time. Sometimes tire treads had good memories.

Hess
was disappointed to see that neither Kemp nor Rayborn had had the cars examined
for basic mechanical problems. It was a rapist's trick old as the tire itself
to let some of the air out, follow the driver and wait for her to pull over.

And
no mention of the cars' alarm systems. Overridden, disabled or functional? It
was an obvious question, and Hess had seen it left unasked a thousand times.

Always
check the alarm.

Nowhere in the notes on
the cars was there any mention

or indication of a
struggle.

On the back of the
Kane Automobile Impound Order Hess wrote:

See dump sites, check
Mary's
clerk who saw Janet, check cars for window
marks—alarms/problems, ASAP lab on
Kane car and CS1 results, check
ATMs
for cash withdraw post abducts, Kane purchase/how
paid; where first contact made—in store,
in
lot, where vehicles found? Ways to get victim to
trust/comply: badge, force, weapon, threat reprisal, security guard,
impersonating PO, law enforce background or reject? Pure opportunity or victims
chosen for specific reasons? Blood checked for drugs or specimen ruined?—How
much
blood at each site? Saturation tests done with same soil or lab dirt? What
viscera exactly ? Creep/s organized, efficient . . . how finding, what doing
between abduct and I dump site, what doing at dump site, what doing after? Run
blood' I hounds in wider radius, drag or dive pond . . .

That evening Hess
watched the sunset from his deck. He snoozed through some of it, listening to
the 13th Street surf rolling in and the voices of kids and tourists on the
sidewalk below. He remembered what it was like to be a child and how he'd been
mostly happy here, zooming through the alleys of the Newport peninsula on his bike,
riding the waves with a pair of oversized swim fins that propelled him through
the water like a dolphin.

His apartment was an
upstairs unit with the garage underneath. It was big and furnished as a summer
rental—turquoise Naugahyde couches sitting on bold black-and-white checked
floors, a chrome dinette with a yellow tabletop stained by half a century of
coffee cups. He liked the jarring cheapness of the place. When he came home at
night and turned on the lights it seemed to jump at him. It was oceanfront and
almost free for Hess because it was owned by a rich man he had helped once.

An
uneaten plate of spaghetti lay on the table beside his patio chaise, an
untouched tumbler of Scotch and
melted
ice beside it. They said he'd lose his appetite during the sessions and he
did. They also said his hair would probably fall out and it hadn't. Hess felt a
secret pride in this. The sessions were three days in a row, one session per
month, for four months if you could take it. If it killed off too many blood
cells you had to stop. Two sessions down as of today, two to go. He left a
message on Merci Rayborn's machine at work. He said he had started with the
Kane site this morning, had some thoughts, hoped he could help her with the
investigation. He wanted to get off on the right foot, the fewer surprises the
better. He wondered if Merci was still gunning for head of homicide by forty.

Then he called Robbie
Jillson, who agreed to deliver his wife's car to the county impound yard at
eight the next morning. He sounded drunk. According to the file, Janet Kane's
car was still being worked over by the lab.

By nine he was in bed. It felt good to set the alarm for
5 A.M. and know you had a reason to get up for it. All Hess asked of life was
to be required. He turned off the light.

He thought of his wives as
he often did and realized that he wanted to say some things to them, a few
things that needed saying. He listened to the ocean across the sand and
wondered why waves can sound like cars but cars can never sound like waves. The
last thing he wondered was what the shoe clerk at
Macy's
was thinking while he watched Janet Kane leave his store.

"We need to get some
ground rules straight," said Merci Rayborn. She walked half a step ahead
of Hess, her hands on her hips and a pair of aviator shades on. This was their
first time out of the building and earshot of other deputies.

They
moved across the impound yard, past cars last driven by drunkards, thieves,
batterers, killers or more moderate citizens who had simply neglected to pay
traffic fines. The late morning sun was hot and the sky was dusted with smog.
The dirty windshields held the sunlight in opaque planes.

"First
of all, this is my case," she continued. Her voice was clear and certain
but not loud. She was tall and big boned, dressed in chinos, a sport shirt and
one of the ubiquitous black windbreakers of law enforcement, OCSD on the back
in orange block letters. Black duty boots. Her hair was dark and pulled back.

She
slowed a step and looked directly at Hess. "So I make the calls. If you've
got a problem with that, you should probably excuse yourself from this
one."

"I
need the benefits."

"I
heard."

She was just ahead of him
again and they continued walking. Merci Rayborn’s head turned and her glaze
fixed on her new partner. Hess wondered if he'd lost half a step or if Merci
was just fast. His neck was stiff from his fall out of the oak tree.

"Here's
my wish list," she said. "One, don't smoke in my car. I quit again
two months ago and I'm prone to recidivism. Two, don't bother asking me to
lunch because I don't take lunch hours. I eat fast food in the car or cafeteria
food at my desk. Don't talk to the media about Jillson or Kane. I'll handle
all media, or else leave it to Wally the Weasel in press information. We're
walking a tightrope here. You saw the
Journal
this morning so you know how it's going to be. 'The Purse Snatcher'—isn't that
cute? They're on this and they'll stay on it until something better comes
along. This is real middle-class fright-night stuff—not drive-bys in the
barrio, not white trash, not narco. If women in this county stop going to malls
it's going to ruin the local economy. So just let me control the temperature,
okay?'

"Okay."

"If you have
things to say, just say them. I'm a big girl. But I don't owe you any favors,
no matter how many mastodons you slew with my father. I don't need any action
behind my back, the way things are around here."

"That's
concise. I understand."

She
stopped and guided Hess to a halt with a hand on his shoulder. "Last, if
you want to play grab-ass and titty-pinch I'll have your dick on a plate
immediately. There, that's my wish list. Now, can we all just get along?"

Hess
watched the small smile lines form at the corners of the woman's mouth, but
with her eyes lost behind the glasses he didn't know if they were born of humor
or something else. The something else was what concerned him.

Hess
understood now why Brighton had kept her on the case—a case that would surely
get hot. He was trying to force either her triumph or her defeat. And his own
role would be as witness to one or the other, depending on how it went.

She
had to know it too. He nodded and shook her offered hand: dry, strong, smooth.

"I'm really not
that hard to work with," she said. It sounded to Hess like something she
wanted to believe.

They came into the
high bay where the impounds are processed. An old Toyota being examined by one
of the lab techs featured a bloody head-sized impression on its roof and two
smaller ones high on the hood. Hess guessed kneecaps for the hood dents and
guessed the impact speed at over 30 mph. A tech turned to them with no
expression at all and a pair of tweezers clamped around a human tooth.

Janet Kane's BMW
stood at the far end. It was still partially disassembled—doors off, side
windows removed, seats pulled and now sitting against the bay wall. A loose
tent of clear plastic had been taped over it.

Nearby was Lael
Jillson's Infiniti, as promised by Robbie Jillson, shining black in the
fluorescent light. The driver's door was open and one of the techs was lifting
the window assembly from the side panel. "What's this car doing here
again?" she asked. "We did the processing months ago." "I
talked to her husband last night."

She
moved between Hess and the cars, then turned to face him. She pulled off her
glasses. Hess could see absolutely nothing patient or forgiving. "No.
Hess, no. Do not conduct interviews without clearing them with me first.
Do not
request impounds, lab procedures
or anything else without clearing them with me first.
Do
not reexamine crime scenes without
talking to me first. I am the lead investigator. You are a retired, part-time
consultant. You do not follow hunches or make arrangements in private. We move
forward as a team. Do you understand?"

"I
think you forgot something."

"No,
I did not."

"On the cars. We
need to see the bottom of the window glass. All four panels. Both cars."

She
was still standing in front of him with her head cocked just slightly to her
right. She was surprisingly tall. Hess could see the anger in her eyes, and the
suspicion.

"Kemp
requested the car work," he said. Hess wasn't trying to blame Kemp on her
behalf, but it sounded that way.

He watched as she
forced her reason to override her emotion.

"Why dust the
glass below the door liner' she asked. "Nobody can touch it down there
unless the window's off to start with."

"Not
for prints. For marks."