The Blue Hour

T. JEFFERSON PARKER

For
Robert and Claudia Parker, still showing the way.

Chapter
Twenty-Six
…

Author’s
Note

About the
Author

Other Books
by T Jefferson Parker

Credits

Copyright

The Sunday evening Tim Hess lumbered down the
sidewalk to the snack stand at 15th Street. The skaters parted but paid him no
attention. It was cool for August and the red flag on the lifeguard house
pointed stiff to the east. The air smelled of the Pacific and ketchup.

Hess
got coffee and headed across the sand. He sat down on the picnic bench and
squinted out at the waves. A big south swell was coming and the sea looked lazy
and dangerous.

A
minute later Chuck Brighton joined him at the table. His tie flapped in the
breeze and his white hair flared up on one side then lay down again. He set a
briefcase onto the bench and sat down beside it facing Hess. He tore open a
pack of sugar.

"Hello,
boss," said Hess. "Tim, how are you feeling?"

"I
feel damned good, considering. Just look at me." Brighton looked at him
and said nothing. Then he leaned forward on his elbows. He was a big man and
when he shifted his weight on the wooden bench Hess could feel the table move
because the benches and the table were connected with steel pipe. Hess looked
at the angry waves again. He had lived his childhood here in Newport Beach,
well over half a century ago.

"You'll have to
feel damn good for something like this. I haven't seen anything like it since
Kraft. It would have to happen now, six months after my best detective
retires."

Hess didn't
acknowledge the compliment. Brighton had always been as generous with his
praise as he was with his punishments. They'd worked together for over forty
years and they were friends.

"We can put you
back on payroll as a consultant. Full time, and you get all the medical. Forget
the Medicare runaround." "That's what I'm after."

Brighton
smiled in a minor key. "I think you're after more than that, Tim. I think
you need a way to stay busy, keep your hand in things."

"There
is that."

"He's
got to be some kind of psychopath. There really isn't much to go on yet. This
kinda guy makes me sick."

Hess
had suspected but now he knew. "The National Forest dumps."

"Dump
isn't really the
word. But you saw the news. They both went missing from shopping malls, at
night. Cops waited the usual forty-eight to take the missing persons reports.
The first was half a year ago, the Newport woman. We found her purse and the
blood. That was a month after she bought nylons at Neiman-Marcus, walked out
and disappeared forever." Brighton squared his briefcase, fingered the
latches, then sighed and folded his hands on it. "Then yesterday late, the
Laguna one. A week ago she went to the Laguna Hills Mall and vanished from
sight. Hikers found her purse. The ground near it was soaked in blood
again—like the first. It'll hit the news tomorrow— repeat this, serial that.
More mayhem on the Ortega Highway. Both the victims—apparent victims—were good
people, Tim. Young, attractive, bright women. People loved them. One married,
one not."

Hess
remembered the newspaper picture. One of those women who seems to have it all,
then has nothing at all.

He
looked up the crowded sidewalk toward his apartment and drank more coffee. It
made his teeth ache but his teeth ached most of the time now anyway.

"So,
it's two sites off the Ortega in Cleveland National Forest, about a hundred
yards apart. They're eight miles this side of the county line. Two patches of
bloodstained ground. Blood-drenched is how the crime scene investigator described
it. Scraps of human viscera likely at the second one. Lab's working up the
specimens. No bodies. No clothing. No bones. Nothing. Just the purses left
behind, with the credit cards still in them, no cash, no driver's licenses.
Some kind of fetish or signature, I guess. They're half a year apart, but it's
got to be the same guy."

"Everyday
women's purses!"

"If
bloodstained and chewed by animals is everyday."

"What
kind of animals?"

"Hell,
Tim. I don't know."

Hess didn't expect an
answer. It was not the kind of answer the sheriff-coroner of a county of 2.7
million needed to have. But he asked because scavengers have differing tastes
and habits, and if you can establish what did the eating you can estimate how
fresh it was. You could build a time line, confirm or dispute one. It was the
kind of knowledge that you got from forty-two years as a deputy, thirty in
homicide.

We
are old men, Hess thought. The years have become hours and this is what we do
with our lives.

He
looked at the sheriff. Brighton wore the brown wool-mix off-the-rack sport
coats that always make cops look like cops. Hess wore one too, though he was
almost half a year off the force.

"Who's
got it?" asked Hess.

"Well,
Phil Kemp and Merci Rayborn got the call for the Newport Beach woman. Her name
was Lael Jillson. That was back in February. So this should be theirs, too, but
there's been some problems."

Hess
knew something of the problems. "Kemp and Rayborn. I thought that was a
bad combination."

"I
know. We thought two opposites would make one whole, and we were wrong. I split
them up a couple of months ago. Phil's fine with that. I wasn't sure who to put
her with, to tell you the truth. Until now."

Hess
knew something of Merci Rayborn. Her father was a longtime Sheriff Department
investigator—burg/theft, fraud, then administration. Hess never knew him well.
He had accepted a pink-labeled cigar when Merci was born, and he had followed
her life through brief conversations with her father. To Hess she was more a
topic than a person, in the way that children of co-workers often are.

At
first she was a department favorite, but the novelty of a second-generation
deputy wore off fast. There were a half dozen of them. Hess had found her to be
aggressive, bright and a little arrogant. She'd told him she expected to run
the homicide detail by age forty, the crimes against persons section by fifty,
then be elected sheriff-coroner at fifty-eight. She was twenty-four at the
time, working the jail as all Sheriff Department yearlings do. In the decade
since then, she had not become widely liked. She seemed the opposite of her
soft-spoken, modest father.

Hess
thought it amusing how generations alternated traits so nimbly—he had seen it
in his own nieces and nephews.

"Tim,
she filed that lawsuit Friday afternoon. Went after Kemp for sexual harassment
going back almost ten years. Physical stuff, she says. Well, by close of the
workday two more female deputies had told the papers they were going to join
in, file suits too. The lawyer's talking class action. So we've got a lot of
deputies taking sides, the usual battle lines. 1 was sorry Rayborn did it,
because basically she's a good investigator for being that young. I don't know
what to make of those complaints. No one's ever complained about Phil before,
except for him being Phil. Maybe that's enough these days. I don't know."

Hess
saw the disappointment. For a public figure Brighton was a private man, and he
bore his department's troubles as if they sprung from his own heart. He had
always avoided conflict and wanted to be liked.

"I'll
try to fly under all that."

"Good
luck."

"What
did the dogs find?" he asked.

"They
worked a couple of trails between the sites and a fire road about a hundred
yards south of the highway. The two trails were real close to each other—a
hundred yards or so. He parked and carried them through the brush. Did whatever
he does. Carried them back out, apparently. Besides that, nothing."

"How
much blood?"

"We'll
run saturation tests on soil from the new scene. Janet Kane was her name. With
the first, most of it's dried up and decomposed. The lab might get some useful
DNA. They're trying."

"I
thought you'd find them buried out there."

"So
did I. Dogs, methane probe, chopper, zip. A pea-sized part of my brain says
they still might be alive."

Hess
paused a moment to register his opinion on the subject of this hope. Then,
"We might want to draw a bigger circle."

"That's
up to you and Merci. Merci and you, to be exact. Her show, you know."

Hess
turned and stared out at the riptides lacing the pale green ocean. He could
feel Brighton's eyes on him.

"You
do look good," said the sheriff. The breeze brought his words back toward
Hess.

"I
feel good."

"You're
tougher than a boiled owl, Tim."

Hess
could hear the sympathy in Brighton's voice. He knew that Brighton loved him
but the tone pricked his pride and his anger, too.

The
two men stood and shook hands.

"Thanks,
Bright."

The
sheriff opened his briefcase and handed Hess two green cardboard files secured
by a thick rubber band. The top cover was stamped
copy
in red.

"There's
some real ugly in this one, Tim."

"Absolutely."

"Stop
by Personnel soon as you can. Marge will have the paperwork ready."

The sun had just come
up over the hills of Ortega and invisible birds were chattering in the brush.

Hess
stood under a large oak, near the place where Janet Kane's purse had been
found. He looked down at the bloodstained earth. The crime scene investigator
had dug out a patch that Hess now measured with his tape—twenty by twenty
inches square and three deep. He scooped out the dead oak leaves and placed his
palm against the earth, working it against the soil and debris. Then he held
it up to the sunshine, trying to see if the blood had soaked down this for. No.
His fingers smelled of oak and earth.

The
tree itself marked the western edge of the blood spill. Hess hadn't realized
how large the area was. It was roughly triangular, with the peak about six
feet from the tree trunk and the sides spreading down the gentle decline caused
by the roots beneath the ground. The sides were just under five feet long and
the base measured at its widest exactly seventy-four inches across—as long as
Hess was tall. The CSI had taken his baking-dish-sized sample way down at the
base where the soil was looser and deeper and less involved with roots.