Authors: T. Jefferson Parker
Hess used the phone to run
a records check on Rick Hjorth of Fullerton. He was intrigued that Hjorth was
so eager to help. It was a fact of life that a high percentage of thrill killers
liked to get close to the investigation of their crimes and Hess had detected
something of morbid interest in the photographer's attitude.
Hjorth came back
clean.
Hess called Undersheriff
Claycamp for an update on the panel vans: seventy-five done, nothing yet,
another team ready for 5
P.M.
The Morticians' Licensing
Board was housed in a stately building near the capitol grounds. They were
given an unused office, two chairs, a table and a pot of coffee. Two maintenance
men wheeled in the file cabinets on dollies. Hess worked for a straight hour,
then went to the men's room and vomited. It was the twelfth time in the last
three days, and Hess had no idea why he was counting. He brushed his teeth with
a travel brush that had a small tube of toothpaste in the handle, purchased
after his first round of chemo, just in case. He looked at himself in the
mirror and thought he saw shadows under his skin.
Three hours later they sat
on the return flight, leafing again through the fifty-seven mugs they'd
printed.
Bernai, Butkis, Camahan
... no
Colesceau . . .
"The more I think
about what he does, the more I think he's off the grid," said Hess.
"He's not a professional. Undertakers don't even remove the things he's
removing."
"Then why is
he?”
"So they'll last
longer, is my guess."
She looked at him.
"But if he's doing what we think he's doing, he learned the skills
somewhere."
"I wish we could get
a list of all the people who took mortuary science and flunked out. But junior
colleges don't keep records of who flunks, drops or fades out. They're too big,
too busy, too disorganized. "Hess noted a woman across the aisle looking
his way, then quickly somewhere eke.
"Well, dream on, Hess.
I'm starting to think he just keeps them in the freezer, or down in the
basement. Here, I'm going to try that supply guy again."
Drascia, Dumont, Eberk, Eccle, Edmondson . . .
She pulled out the phone
from the seat back in front of her and read the directions. Hess shook his
head, blinked, tried to concentrate on copies of the mug shots. The Licensing
Board had let them use a good-quality copier/enlarger, but the reproductions
were one more step removed from reality. And when you figured a guy might be
wearing a wig and fake mustaches it took the sharpness out of your eye. It
could be just about any of them. The sky was the limit.
"Hi, Mr. Young, this
is Sergeant Rayborn again, from the Orange County Sheriffs? Look, I really want
to apologize for what I said earlier—I'm just really involved in this case, the
sheriff is leaning on me hard, my partner's screaming at me all the time, I'm
at thirty-three thousand feet with no leg room and I'm
just...
frustrated."
She looked at Hess with an
exaggerated grin. She was nodding and holding up her free hand, yapping with
her fingers and thumb.
"I
know ...
I really do understand. It's
just that these women—well, he got another one Saturday night. She was nineteen
years old and living with her mom and just a heck of a great gal from what I've
gathered. Her name was Ronnie. I never met her. In fact, all I ever saw of her
was a couple of pictures and a pile of her intestines and organs on the hood
of her
car...
I'm serious, that's
what this guy's doing. Plus, we've got two more assumed victims from a couple
of years ago, possibly three. Uh-huh,
yeah...
well, sure, I can wait."
Hess looked out the
window. Below was a vivid grid of green and yellow stretching all the way to
the tan hills in the east. Clouds whisked by, torn by the jet. He watched the
engine housing vibrate.
Colesceau came
out of his apartment Saturday at six and nine, or
rune-thirty.
Gilliam said the heart in the purse stopped
beating between
7
and 11
P.M.
Indications are she was abducted after
work. But what if he got her later1 After the snooping photographer took his
last shot? What if Hjorth or Gilliam are both
off
a half hour each way1 That
would give Colesceau an hour and a half to do what he did to Ronnie Stevens.
Possible. Not probable . . . How would he get out of the apartment without
anyone seeing?
No
Pule
... no
Eichrod . . .
He closed his eyes and saw
the layout of the place again: the living room, kitchen and downstairs bath;
the upstairs bedrooms and bathroom. Colesceau's place was an end unit, so there
were downstairs windows on the south wall, which was the kitchen. Ditto the
west, which faced the street. Hess remembered the kitchen: a small cooking area
and an alcove with a dinette in it, pushed up near the windows. Salt and pepper
shakers on the dinette table, a stack of newspapers. He pictured the alcove and
remembered green outside, with some color in it—bougainvillea maybe. Could you
see the kitchen windows from the street, at night?
But
how does he get the truck past the crowd without them knowing? It's impossible.
Then . . . another vehicle. Out of the apartment, on foot to another
car .. .
silver van, mismatched tires
.. .no ...
He made a note to canvas
Colesceau's neighborhood for the silver van, check Colesceau's DMV records for
a second vehicle registration, ditto his employers at Pratt Automotive—maybe
they loaned him a vehicle to get him through the hard times. Also, get back to
the apartment for a look at the south window by the kitchen, and talk to more
of the neighbors. He wondered if there was any space under the structure, a
crawl area for electrical conduit or vents, something he could wriggle into and
out of without being seen.
Hess pondered the time
line and it held up: Colesceau had been released from Atascadero on the
castration protocol three years ago. Six months later, the first woman disappeared.
"—Okay. All right.
Well, I sure thank you, Mr. Young. Bart, I mean. You're doing the right
thing."
Merci hung up and looked
at Hess. "I did it. Young's going to fox us the customer list of all the
embalming machines sold in Southern California in the last two years. By noon
tomorrow."
Hess could see the mixture
of pride and surprise in Merci Rayborn's face.
"Nice
work."
"It was hard. I feel
lucky now. See what's popped at headquarters."
So she called her work
phone for messages. Hess watched her shrug, then hang up.
"Well?"
"Nothing. But the
Western Region rep for Bianchi sent me a pigskin shoulder rig. Free for 'select
law enforcement individuals.' You know, the cops on the beat see I'm using a
Bianchi, then make head of homicide by forty, they all buy one, too."
"I'd rush right out myself."
"I
should
have bought a Bianchi in the first place, because the snap on this one keeps
popping off. I enjoy talking about weapons and gear. Do you?"
The developed exposures from Rick Hjorth's film were
on Hess's desk when he got back that evening. They were printed four by six and
most of them were in focus. The ones taken after dark weren't very good because
the automatic flash was too weak for much distance. Hess was pleased that Hjorth
had used the date/time feature on the camera, which marked each print in the
upper right comer. He slid the pictures of him and Merci into his coat pocket.
Hess looked at the image
of Colesceau's apartment with the mob outside, picket signs and candles, even
though it was still daylight—5:01 P.M., August 14. Saturday. And Colesceau
looking through the cracked door—6:11 P.M. Colesceau on his porch—6:12 P.M. Then
Colesceau and the pretty neighbor, Trudy, apparently exchanging something near
his porch—6:14 P.M. A close-up of Trudy Powers after, smiling dreamily into
Rick Hjorth's lens—6:22 P.M. Next, a picture of a young man holding a sign that
said
NEXT TIME CUT THE DAMNED THINGS OFF
and flipping off the
photographer while he smiled at the camera—6:25 P.M.
And so on.
"Anything good?"
Merci called over. She was at her desk with the phone pressed to one ear and a
notepad open in front of her. Hess knew she was hassling Bart Young of the
Embalming Supply Company once again, trying to get him to hurry the customer
list. Hess had to hand it to her: she was obsessive enough to be a good
investigator someday. Head of homicide? Maybe. Sheriff by fifty-eight? We'll
see, he thought. On the plus side, she's got twenty-five years to figure it
out.
"Nothing
yet," he called back.
Next time cut the damned things
off.
He looked at the picture
of the smiling flipper-offer, then sat back. It helped to laugh when you could,
but sometimes there wasn't a chuckle anywhere in your heart.
Hess looked out at the
near-empty investigations room—it was almost seven o'clock—and wondered about
the behavior of his own species. He was done being shocked by it at twenty-two.
He was finished being disgusted by it at thirty. It was too grim and hopeless
to be amusing and too amusing to be grim and hopeless. It made him want to be
somewhere people didn't murder and gut one another for thrills, where you
didn't carry around a sign calling for your neighbor's nuts on a platter, where
people had other things to do than stand around taking pictures of each other.
Hess had spent too many of his sixty-seven years contemplating the grimace of
his race, and he knew it. You could end up looking just like it. That was why
when he made love to a woman he always made it last as long as he could because
when he was doing that he wasn't quite himself anymore, he was just a little
better, a notch above the bullshit, temporarily upgraded.
Make it last, he
thought. Make it last just a little longer.
Hess looked at the pictures that Rick
Hjorth had snapped
through a crack in
the blinds of Matamoros Colesceau's apartment.
They were taken from the
same general angle as the view that Hess had of Colesceau that morning while he
conferred with Merci in the downstairs bathroom. The couch, the wall opposite
the front window, the TV. They were dark and the image small—reduced by
distance as well as the top and bottom of the crack through which it was shot.
Hess held the picture away and squinted at what looked like the back of
Colesceau's head. It was just visible above the back of the couch. Thinning
hair over the dull patina of a scalp. It was
somebody's
head, Hess concluded. Past it, the TV screen held
the blurred picture of an actor walking down the hallway of a hospital set. The
snapshot said, August 14, 8:12 P.M.
The
time Ronnie Stevens's heart was being removed, thought Hess. But Colesceau's
watching TV.
He got a loupe from the
desk drawer and bent down for a better look. The image got bigger but more
blurred. He breathed deeply and fogged the loupe. For a second it was like
watching Colesceau through a window in a snowstorm. Sure, he thought, the TV
watcher could really be a pillow or a stuffed bag or a doll or a cantaloupe on
a stick with Magic Marker hair drawn on. It could be a holographic projection,
swamp gas, or Lael Jillson's severed head with the hair cropped short. He
tossed the loupe back in the drawer and flipped the photograph toward the
stack.
The back of Colesceau's head is
the back of Colesceau's fucking head and he was sitting there watching TV while
someone bled and gutted Veronica Stevens
in
the Main Street construction site.
Deal with it.
The photographs proved it.
And they also proved that nobody could crawl out of the kitchen alcove window
and not be seen. The angle was wrong. The neighbor's porch light shone upon the
glass. It would be as obvious as someone pinned on concertina wire with a
searchlight bearing down him.
Using the date/time
numbers, he arranged all the shots in chronological order. Everything was so
clear, right there in living color. But something wasn't quite right. He
stared, unfocused his vision a little, rearranged them according to subject:
Colesceau, crowd, whole apartment, lower story, upper story. It wouldn't come
to him. It was like getting brushed by the wing of a bird you never saw. He
asked Merci to come over for a look.
She stood beside his desk,
hands on her hips, lips pursed. "I don't see it."
"Something
touched me, then it left."
She gave him a look.
"Let me try the loupe."
She bent, taking her time
"The only thing I can think of is, when he watches TV, doesn't he even
move? I mean, it's like he's frozen. Mike's kid is like that, though. He gets
in front of the tube and goes hypnotic."
"Well."
"No?"