The Blue Hour (17 page)

She tied
her hair back in a scrunchie, pulled on trousers and boots, cinched her
SpectraFlex Point Blank armor vest over a T-shirt and holstered up. The old
shoulder rig fit like silk but the snap came loose sometimes: time for a visit
to the leathersmith, or maybe to get a new one. The Point Blank was a composite
formulated to take multiple hits, angled impacts and high-velocity ammo. Five
pounds, black. It ran her $650 from a catalog because the county wouldn't
spring for anything but the old Kevlar lls. Another beef with accounting, she
thought, Damned bean counters anyway. No Sig-alerts according to the news from
the dresser—good. The bathroom radio was playing something fast and brainless.
Her dad had always played jazz. She tossed one extra clip on the bed and put
the other in the front pocket of her pants. Badge holder in the rear right.
Flashlight, handcuffs and mace onto the duty belt. Finished off with the
Sheriff Department windbreaker. She got the clip off the bed and put it in the
left jacket pocket. She made sure the double-barreled .40 caliber derringer in
her purse was loaded, even though she wouldn't carry the purse into Lee
LaLonde's domicile. She realized she needed a calf holster for the little
cannon, made a note to price them at a store where she could find hunter's
cleaning kits, ropes, pulleys for sale. She made sure the stiletto was in her
purse, too, for reasons no more clear in her mind than general notions of
security and excitement.

Purse
Snatcher, dirtbag, shitbird, she thought: try getting this stuff away from me.

Eight
minutes and fifteen seconds from the time the call came through. Down from her
last one, which was just over nine, but that had just been her weekly drill to
stay loose.

She left
on the radios and living room light and slammed the front door behind her.

One
single thought about Phil Kemp entered her mind and she banished it like a sick
dog.

• • •

Hess got
in with two mugs of coffee and shut the door without spilling any. With the
interior light on she could see his hair was brushed back as always with the
little white wave out front and she wondered if it just grew that way. His face
looked old and lined and tired. But the blue eyes, which he trained on her for
the first time as he quietly closed the door with his right hand while offering
her a cup of coffee with the other, were clear and bright as the moon.

"My
heart's really going," she said.

"Mine,
too. This is great."

Merci
gunned the car down the empty avenue and heard the tires swish through a
sprinkler slick.

"You
still feel that way, Hess? That this is great?"

"Absolutely."

She hit
sixty and looked for a speed sign: thirty-five, the coffee jacking her up a
notch, Hess telling her to make a U-turn at the next stop.

"What
about the ferry?"

"It
quit running five hours ago."

"Right. Hey, I'll settle in,
don't worry. I know this old guy named Francisco? Used to live near me. I mean,
he's really old. When I look at him I realize I shouldn't get all worked up
like I do. I should try to step back and settle in. Just go with it.”

"I'll
drive if you want."

She looked at him in the passing
bars of light cast by the streetlamps. I’ll drive."

"Stay
inside."

"Inside
what?'

"Yourself."

She
looked at him with a little more offense than she actually took, but he wasn't
looking at her so it didn't matter.

"Hess,
I don't need pithy aphorisms all the time. How to drive my car. How to feel
what damned Ed Izma is feeling. I mean, I appreciate it, but I'm really not a
six-year-old."

"Ignore
me. I mean that."

"I
know you're coming from the right place."

"It's
just part of getting old. I want to blab everything I think I know to someone I
think might use it. Like giving away your hunting gun or your first baseball
mitt or something. You'll do it too someday."

"I
hope so," she muttered, feeling the V-8 downshift and gather force as she
guided them down the Newport peninsula. When she got past city hall she flogged
it and set the flasher up on the hood. She had never given her life expectancy
more than a moment's thought, and she didn't feel like giving it any more than that
now.

It was
after five-thirty and the first blush of light was in the sky. When she got
onto the freeway she used the carpool lane and held the Impala at ninety. The
airport whizzed by then the strawberry fields covered with plastic that shone
like water then the Santa Ana Mountains then the marine base. She felt just
exactly right at this moment, speeding forward through the blue hour in her
unmarked with a good partner beside her and a suspect to engage.

"Yeah,
okay, Hess. I'm going to stay inside myself."

"I
told you to ignore me and I meant it."

"No,
I wasn't chewing on you. I meant it—and thanks for a good word. I may be kind
of a bitch sometimes but I'm not too dumb to take good advice."

She was
aware of him studying her. She glanced up at the rearview to change lanes and
could see his face in the periphery.

"You
say what's on your mind and that's mostly good."

"But?"

"Nice
to hide your cards sometimes."

"It's
more cunning, I know."

"Well,
it gives you more time to figure things out. Like yesterday, if you'd have kept
cool at Izma he'd have heated up more. He might have given us something. He
needed to get a rise out of you. And you knew it. But you gave it to him too
easy."

"It
goes against my principles to watch some gigantic moron drag his balls all over
the room and try to make me watch."

"Leave
your principles at home."

Even
with guys like Kemp? "You don't."

"I
do. A lot. It works."

"Explain
that one."

"Let
other people do the talking. Then, when you understand what they're doing,
take them down. Or out. Or up, or any place you want to take them."

"Thanks, dad."

"It's
like ..."
Hess lifted both his
hands out in front of him, one with the coffee cup still hooked on a finger,
the other with the fingers open in a gesture of emphasis.

Merci
looked at him. She'd never seen him animated before. His raptor's face had
something puzzled in it.

"...
It's like you're a fort," he continued, "and your head's the tower
and your eyes are the holes for sharpshooters and your ears are where the spies
live. You're
this... this... living..."

"Fort?"

"Yeah.
See? You stay inside yourself and look out of yourself, like looking out of a
fort."

"I
can see it. If I look real hard."

"You're
right. That's not very good. Cancel it."

She could
feel the coffee and adrenaline working to make an odd joy in her heart. "I
do see it, though. It's not exactly elegant, but I see it."

"I'll
shut up. I'm feeling pretty good right now, for being full of chemicals and
radiation."

She made
the Ortega Highway turnoff and headed inland. She looked in the rearview again
and noted that Hess was staring out the window while the gas station lights colored
his face.

Then he
turned to her and she wondered if he knew she was looking at him in the mirror.

"Tell
me about Lee LaLonde," he said.

"A
speed freak and a car thief," she said. "Down twice for grand theft
auto, twice for selling stolen parts. Four years, two bounces—Honor Farm and
Riverside County. Released and paroled two years ago."

"A
thief, not a carjacker?"

"Just
a thief, so far."

"No
sex crimes?"

"None."

Hess
said nothing.

"He's
a little creep of a guy—perfect size for the backseat of a car. Five-eight,
one-twenty, blond and blue. Twenty-five years old. Last scrape with Riverside
Sheriffs was a year ago— questioned in a burglary of a plant where he worked.
Nothing filed. They fired him."

"What's
the plant make?"

"Irrigation
supplies. Cloudburst is the name of the outfit. His jacket says he runs his own
business now—retail sales at the weekly swap meet here at the lake."

"Sales
of what?"

"Doesn't
even say what. Anyway, that's the last thing in his file. He's got a barb-wire
chain tattooed around his left biceps and knife puncture scar on his stomach.
Grew up in Northern California, Oakland."

They were
past the city and the big houses now and the highway was dark and beginning to
climb. The traffic was light now, still early for the commuters who worked in
Riverside County.

"Who
stabbed him?" Hess asked.

"His
dad."

When she
looked at him he was already nodding, as if he'd expected the answer. Maybe he
saw it ahead of time, Merci thought. She was about to ask him how he saw things
in advance, but she didn't and she didn't know why.

She
reached into the folder on the seat and handed Hess the artist's sketch. Hess
took it and angled the lamp on the dash over, clicking it on.

"It's
lifelike," he said.

"Whose
life is the question."

"How
come you waited so long to show it to me?"

"I
not sure how solid it is. See, this Kamala Petersen lives on TV and fashion
magazines. Everybody looks like somebody she's seen before. I had to hypnotize
her to cut through all her bullshit. And get a load of this—she's seen the guy
twice. Once the night Janet Kane disappeared, and once the week before, at a
mall, walking around, checking things out."

"Checking
out Kamala?"

"Correct.
She'd stuffed that down deep. That's what we got through to."

"This
is valuable. This is good."

"Unfortunately,
I lost a court witness. Hess, I'm praying it's worth the trade. I spent the
last two days worrying about that sketch. Is it close? Is Kamala reliable? I'm
not going to go public with something that's way off—gets people confused. But
I'm going to release it to Press Information when I go in today. I took the
gamble, now I'm going to stick with it. I'm trusting me."

Hess
continued to stare down at the paper. Merci saw the light in his face, the
uncluttered intensity of his gaze.

Hess,
again: "LaLonde doesn't fit the profile. Page says he'll be a known sex
offender."

"So.
What's a profile really mean anyway?" she asked.

"Dalton's
good. What do you think of them?"

"I've
only had first-hand experience with two. One was right on, the other was pretty
far off. Dalton did the one that was off. The Bureau did the one that worked.
In general, I prefer evidence that's actual evidence. I don't like trying to
figure out if something applies or not."

"Well,
we'd all take a blood sample or a fingerprint over a piece of speculative
thinking."

"You
asked what I thought."

No reply.
She guided the Impala up the grade and through the swerving turns of the
Ortega. She thought of all the wrecks on this highway, a bloody stretch of road
if there ever was one. A prime dumpsite, too—the Purse Snatcher wasn't the
first creep to bring his victims out here. She looked out at the sycamores now
just barely visible on the hillsides, the way their branches jagged out like
dislocated arms and gave the trees a look of eternal agony.

They were
near the top of the grade now and Merci could see the oaks in profile against
the blue-black sky.

"I
always thought this was a spooky old highway," she said.

She
looked at his face in the rearview again and thought it looked pale, but maybe
it was just the parsimonious light offered by the east. He looked old and
tired, but that's exactly what he was. She wondered what it felt like to sit
there with cancer growing in your lung, watching the sky get light. She had no
idea because she wasn't used to figuring what other people were thinking. Hess
was right about that. So she tried to feel what he might feel, pretending she
had the cancer too and she was heading down into Lake Elsinore to interview a
speed freak who might be a murderer. But it was hard to feel what Hess felt
because what she felt was already there. It was right in the way. So she sent
her thoughts out around her own feelings, like birds flying around trees.

What she
came up with was, if she was in the same position, every waking moment would
scare the living piss out of her.

"Me
too," he said. "A spooky old highway."

The sun was low over the hills when they dropped down
into Lake Elsinore. The water was plated in bronze. Merci gave Hess the paper
with the address on it and Hess got the map out of the console.