The Blue Hour (12 page)

"Maybe he was
just using it for the obvious."

"And what's
that, Tim?" asked Gilliam.

"To
carry something to eat. All that work must make him hungry."

"He
ought to apply for a job here with the ME," said Merci, with a small smile
for Gilliam. "If he can eat while he carves."

Gilliam
smiled too but looked away from her. Then he was moving toward the door.
"I found some other things from the cars. Kind of interesting,
really."

Merci
held open the door for the director and looked over his head at Hess.

"I
love
this part of
the job," she said.

• • •

The
comparison scopes were ready. Gilliam's voice carried through the hush of the
Hair &. Fiber room as Hess and Rayborn looked at two different hairs
magnified one thousand times by the phase contrast microscope. Then they
traded places.

"We
were able to get the Jillson hair because her husband knew something was very
wrong," said the director. "So when he got Lael's car out of impound
he kept it exactly like it was. It sat under a cover in his garage for a month
before we saw it. Never washed, never vacuumed. Sharp guy, Mr. Jillson. He was
stubborn enough to leave the car untouched again
after
we examined it,
in case we wanted a second look. We did. And I'm glad we did.

"The
hair on the left is likely from a Caucasian. It's blond, long, with some wave
to it. We found it in the Jillson car yesterday. It was caught on the lap belt
buckle—the plastic housing that the tongue goes into. I don't know why they
didn't find it the first time. I don't care, so long as it isn't Ike's or one
of his workers'—which it's not. And it's not a likely match with the victim or
anyone in her family. We've eliminated them as donors, too, based on their scale
counts and pigmentation. They all used the same hair conditioner as the victim.
This hair wasn't washed or conditioned with the same product. We found
completely different pharmacological traces on it. Nothing we can identify yet,
by the way. But the scale count is higher than any of the Jillson clan we
tested. I'm going to say it's possible, very possible, that this hair came from
your man."

"Which
seat?" asked Merci.

"The
one behind the driver."

"I
think he waits there."

"That's
very interesting. Now, on the right-hand scope is a hair that very likely came
from the same person as the hair I just showed you. We pulled it from the Kane
car yesterday morning. It was caught up in a mesh netting attached to the back
of the driver's seat. You know, one of those things to secure personal items in
a car—maps, tissue, maybe a flashlight or magazines for a long trip. This
certainly suggests that the hair's owner was behind the front seat himself.
Maybe even crouching down at some point, resting his head against the back of
the seat and the mesh. Waiting for her? Who knows? You both do know that
match
is a bad word in hair analysis—we can't say it in court—but what we
have here is as close to a match as two hairs are likely to come."

"I
smell the creep," said Merci.

"There's
more," said Gilliam.

He
led them around the microscope stations to a counter that ran along the wall.
Hess followed. Sunlight came through the narrow vertical slots of the windows.
The slots had always made him think of hidden archers. The heavy book had left
a scalding outline on his thighs.

Gilliam
brought a small plastic box from one drawer of an old steel tool chest that sat
on the counter. He opened it, snugged the lid onto the bottom and handed it to
Hess.

The
old man looked down, then reached in with a thick fingertip and poked the item
in question. It was a standard 20-amp automotive fuse, the kind you'd find by
the dozen under any dashboard. The color of the glass was good and Hess could
see no break in the filament inside.

"I
already checked, and it's good," said Gilliam. "More to the point,
there's no fuse like it used anywhere in Janet Kane's BMW. The car is only
seven months old, so all the German-made factory fuses are still in it. They're
a different design. This one must have come from somewhere else, been
intended
for use somewhere else. Some other car. Some other piece of equipment. I don't
know. But I'd like to know what it was doing in Janet Kane's car."

Rayborn
asked him exactly where they'd found it and Hess asked if they'd printed it, at
the same time.

Gilliam
looked from one to the other.

"Behind
the driver's seat. Sitting right in the middle of the floor. And yes, Tim,
there was a print on the glass of it. Just a partial but we've got some ridge
endings and bifurcations to work with. I eliminated Janet Kane myself. I've
made up an AHS card for CAL-ID and WIN, but the specifying parameters will be
up to you two. If he's got a thumb on file, we've got a shot at him."

"Write
up the parameters, Tim," said Merci.

"I
want to talk to Dalton Page first. And to an old rapist I busted. They know
what we're looking for."

Merci
ignored him, looking instead at Gilliam with what Hess was beginning to think
of as her customary suspicion. "Anything else, Mr. Gilliam?"

"That's
the bulk of it."

"Good
work." Then she turned her dark, adamant eyes on Hess. "Tim, go see
your profiler and your rapist now. Because I want those parameters ready by the
end of the workday and I want those prints on their way."

"You'll
have them. I can talk to Dalton alone. But I think you should see the creep
with me."

"I'll
consider it."

Hess
turned and started across the room. He heard the conversation without seeing it
and wondered if that's how it was when you were dead, hearing things without
seeing them, aware of a world going on without you. He looked back at them with
something like longing.

"What
about my oak branches, Mr. Gilliam?" asked Merci. "I sawed hard to
get them. Outside cut first."

She
looked over at him with a humored expression and Hess realized she'd cut the
branch the hard way.

"Oh,
standard nylon rope, Sergeant. Safety orange in color—something you might find
in a camping or hunting or surplus store. Judging from the depth of the notches
and the strands that wore through and stayed for us to see, it was bearing
some weight. The same rope—or very similar—used on each tree."

Dr. Dalton Page asked Hess to
meet him at his home. They had talked there, on his patio, several times over
the years. The house was up on Harbor Ridge in Newport, an older tract in the
city, where rambling ranch-style homes sat on terraces in the hills with views
of the ocean. If you stood on the beach at sunset and looked up at them, a
hillside of orange reflections looked back at you.

Driving
out Hess recalled that Page had bought the place twenty years ago, anticipating
retirement from the faculty of Johns Hopkins medical school. Hess had asked his
help the first summer Page came to vacation in California, and they had kept in
touch after that. Friends at the FBI had recommended Page as one of the best
forensic psychiatrists in the country. He lectured at the Bureau regularly and
had testified often as an expert witness.

Hess
had helped organize a little party—mostly law enforcement and DA officers—to
welcome Dalton and Wynn Page to Orange County. That was a decade ago, when the
doctor retired and they moved here year round. Wynn had grown up in Newport and
Hess remembered her seeming happy to be back home. Page himself had been wry
about living in la-la land, but he had quite a suntan. After that the

Pages had made
little effort to include Hess in their social world, but he knew from
department talk that they kept an extremely busy, bicoastal lecture and
appearance schedule. Page had written a bestseller about criminal personality
types.

The
back patio was bathed in sunshine and looked out over the bright blue Pacific.
Dr. Page sat at a glass table in the perforated shade of a lattice awning.
Mandevilla vines snaked their way through the lattice and the pink blooms hung
in the air.

He
was wearing tennis whites and a white vest, which set off the darkness of his
skin. His face was taut from surgery. There was a box of small weights and a
jump rope sitting off under a Norfolk Island pine. Hess shook his hand and his
grip was strong and dry.

Wynn
brought them iced tea and set her hand on Hess's shoulder as she poured his.

'Carry
on, crimebusters," she said, then headed back into the darkness of the
house.

Not
for the first time in his life Hess wished he was still married to his first
wife, Barbara. It was a hypothetical longing based on what he thought he saw
in some long marriages: trust, comfort, mutual respect. Two hearts seemed to
beat slower than one. Couples like the Pages made him feel it. He guessed if he
was still married to Barbara he'd have a lot less to worry about. He wouldn't
be broke, for one thing. Children would have given him a firmer grip on the
future. A grip, he just now realized, that would have been easier to relinquish
when it was time.

Beat
this tumor and you've got ten more years, he thought, possibly fifteen. You can
turn around a lot of things with that much time.
"The Ortega sites, Tim?"

"I brought the files.
We don't have a lot to go on, but we've got a partial print. If you and I can
get the parameters right we might get lucky with it. If not, we'll wait until
he does it again and hope he gets careless."

"Urn," said
Page. It was between a grunt and something more thoughtful.

Hess knew Page was already
disagreeing with him, and that was fine. That was why he was here.

Page looked through the
glossies of the dump sites. He wore a homely pair of black reading glasses.
Hess remembered Page bragging he had 20/15 vision because that's what Hess had.

Hess listened to the swish
of the photographs and the mockingbird in the pine. "Tim, tell me what you
know about the victims. While I read through this."

Hess told Dr. Page about
beautiful, confident and occasionally lonely Janet Kane. Then about the very
spoiled though very decent Lael Jillson.

"The pictures in
there don't capture how beautiful they both were," he offered.

Dr. Page, with a curious
smile: "And what have you seen that does?" "Other pictures.
Family. How they lived." "How was that?"

He told the doctor about
Janet Kane's bulk hair products and Lael Jillson's enthusiasm for private hours
without her husband and children around. He mentioned Kane's interest in art
and Jillson's thoughtful diary. He didn't say anything about the leather
playthings in Janet Kane's closet or Lael

Jillson's weakness for marijuana and gin. As he
talked about the two women he'd never seen Hess felt protective of them, like
he owed their memories a simple kindness that their bodies, at the end, were
not offered.

"That print on the
fuse may be your miracle," said the doctor. "Because you're right,
Tim—if that's what you were assuming, anyway—he's been printed before. He's got
a sheet and he's spooked and he knows what pressure feels like. You've run
across him somewhere. Could be way upstream in juvenile court, but somewhere
he's felt the lash."

"That's why he's
careful."

"You're damned right
it is. But what an ego. I mean, what an astonishing arrogance by leaving those
purses."

"Do you think
they're more for us or more for the public?"

"For you. Funny, the
media calls him the Purse Snatcher, but he's the opposite of a purse snatcher.
He leaves the purse and takes everything else. It's all he leaves. That and the
blood."

Page looked up at the sky
like it might have something to say. Hess liked the way Page could draw sense
out of something that seemed only evil. Hess took the pieces and made his own
picture.

"It would be easy for
him to take the purses," Hess said. "But if he did, we'd have to keep
the women in the missing persons' files forever. In an investigative sense,
there would be no murder."

"He needs
someone to hear the tree fall—you."

"He's
experienced, isn't he?"

"He's
practiced,
but not necessarily
experienced. From the time and distance between the dumps I'd say Jillson and
Kane were his first actual homicides. Plenty of time to let the first one blow
over, but not enough confidence to vary the routine very much. Nobody starts
with something of this magnitude. You work up to it. If nothing else, you work
up to the
how
of it. And like
most builders he's never really satisfied with what he makes. It's always got
to get bigger, better, more elaborate. Riskier. More complex. So, you may have
two purses sitting in evidence right now, but when he goes again, he might just
give
you more to work with. It's part
of escalating the risk, and the risk is a major stimulant to him."