Authors: T. Jefferson Parker
"That's true, what
you said, but it's something about the exteriors, I think. Not Colesceau
himself."
"Time and date are
right there. I'm not seeing it, Hess. I don't see the problem."
He looked at the pictures
again. "Right now, I don't sense anything odd there at all. It's
gone."
"Damned creep is
what he is, though."
Hess sighed and flipped
the pictures over. Try again later. "Colesceau can get that car alarm
stuff at work, you know."
"Any idiot with
a computer can get car alarm stuff."
Hess called Undersheriff
Claycamp for an update on the search for the panel van, and to change the
assignments just a little. Nothing had popped and Hess needed a little something
for himself.
Then he told Merci goodnight
and headed down to his car.
• • •
He drove to the medical
center with his mind back in the haunted oaks of the Ortega. Then in the high
bay of Pratt Automotive, seeing that black-and-yellow Shelby Cobra again. Then
Allen Bobb's mortuary sciences class. Then it was in Matamoros Colesceau's
garage, where he found nothing he'd hoped to find. Big waves kept shouldering
their way into his thoughts, too, but he banished them as distractions. He
allowed himself to be inside just one, however, speeding and swaddled in the
cold blue Pacific, happy as a bullet in a barrel.
During his radiation
treatment Hess suddenly broke out in a scalding sweat. It evaporated off his
skin immediately and left him feeling as if he'd been purged by fire. He lay
there wondering if they'd turned up the rads too high. Maybe it was punishment
for having to stay open late for him on a Tuesday. Dr. Ramsinghani told him
"the heavy sweat is an occasional side effect," and smiled at him
like he'd just bought a fine casket for himself.
He buttoned his shirt over
his newly purified skin and walked back out to the waiting room.
Merci looked up from
a magazine. "I tailed you."
"I got four of
the panel vans to check myself."
"I heard you stealing
them from Claycamp. Figured you might need your partner for it. Plus there's
goddamned reporters waiting for me at work. I'll drive."
"Then let's get
out of here."
"You've got a
nice glow to you, Hess."
"Funny."
"No, I
meant
it...
you
look...
oh,
hell. Okay. All right. That's the stupidest thing I've ever said. Ever."
She looked at him with a
guilty acquiescence on her face—but it was really only a minor guilt—and Hess
smiled. Her slow shrug said sorry, this is what you get, don't expect me to
improve all that much, I'll try.
"And Hess, they
say if you laugh a lot you live longer."
He just looked at
her.
"I give
up," she said. "Put me out of my misery."
"Put me out of
mine?"
"Deal. I feel
lucky tonight. Where's that first van?"
• • •
Hess was thankful that
Merci kept the Sheriff radio down low. It was a quiet night so far, calls for
disturbing the peace, drunk in public, a car theft in Santa Ana. A bank
thermometer read 81 degrees and the sun set through a bank of smog that spread
the light into a red blanket low in the west.
They checked two vans in an hour—one in Mission Viejo
and one in San Clemente. The registered owners had come up clean on records
checks and all the tires were matched. None were new. Hess figured if the Purse
Snatcherhad caught on to his own identifying flaw, it would be a new right
front, maybe a new set all around.
Vern Jackson, the third
van owner, wasn't home. He came up with assault and concealed weapon raps in
'79 and '85. The vehicle wasn't parked in the driveway or the street, so Hess
stood watch while Merci went through a side gate. A few minutes later she was
back out again, shaking her head.
The last van was
registered to Brian Castor of Anaheim. He came back clean on the record check.
The van sat in the driveway of an older tract home with a neat yard and a mailbox
in the shape of a shark. It was red. They drove past, U-turned and parked along
the curb in front.
The front door of the
house was a dutch door with the top open. A large man with long blond hair
stood just inside, watching them get out. Hess waved and pointed at the van.
Castor met them next to
it, his hands on his hips, his "Gone Fishin'" T-shirt tight over his
chest and arms.
"What's
up?"
"We're checking a few
vehicles—part of an ongoing investigation. Do you mind if we look at the
outside?"
"Why mine?"
"Panel vans in
the county."
"Go ahead."
But Merci had already gone
ahead. She rounded the front of the van behind Castor, walked past him to check
the right rear. She shook her head. Hess could see that the two right-side
tires were not new.
"We need a look
inside," said Merci.
"Nice to meet you,
too," said Castor. "Go for it. It's unlocked."
Hess looked at the
fisherman while Merci swung open
the back door. A moment later she slammed
it shut. "Nix."
Hess thanked Castor and
apologized for interrupting his evening.
"Whatever, man. See you later, sweetheart."
"Dream on, fish eyes," said Merci, already moving toward the car.
Castor looked at Hess and smiled. "Spicy."
A few minutes later Hess
heard the words that he had learned to dread when he was twenty-two years old,
just starting off, and had dreaded more with every passing year.
"Deputy down,
eighteen-twelve Orangewood, El Modena off Chapman!
Deputy down and it's bad. Suspect down, too. Need paramedics and need
'em now."
The words shot through
Hess's body like electricity. He realized they were half a mile away, told
Merci the quickest way in.
She gunned the big four-door down the avenue and made
the right onto Warren, another onto Hale, then a quick skidding left at
Orangewood. The back tires let go, the car swung sideways into the curb and
Hess felt his head rattle. Up ahead he saw the flashing lights of a Sheriff's
unit and a group of people gathered to one side of it. Then he saw a silver van
parked in a driveway and he thought, good God we got him. He fingered open his
holster catch and jumped out as soon as Merci had braked the car to a stop
beside the prowl car.
He looked at the faces in
the flashing light and saw their stunned resentment. He walked toward the van,
toward the lit garage, the lights slapping red and blue and yellow against the
scene: a uniformed deputy face up on the driveway between the van and the
garage, another uniform bent over him with his arms stiff and hands locked
pumping at his chest. And past them, lying in the garage doorway leading to the
house, a big man not moving but a young woman screaming and shaking him.
Halfway between the two down men was a stainless automatic handgun that Hess
picked up by the barrel and moved away from the screaming woman, who had just
begun crawling over the prostrate man on her way to the gun.
"No," he
ordered her. "Go back to him."
Hess set the gun high up
on a shelf and went to the big man in the doorway. He could hear Merci behind
him, outside the patrol car, talking on the radio, then the rising pitch of
distant sirens. He knelt. The guy looked fifty, maybe, balding and powerfully
built. Jeans and boots, no shirt. Black tattoos up both arms, one of the
central county gangs Hess recognized. He had two holes in his bare chest,
close together at the heart. Hess felt the neck for a pulse and when the girl
saw his expression she attacked, coming over the body at him, her nails raking
at his face. He moved sideways and used her motion to take her lengthwise onto
the garage floor and get her wrists back. He snugged the plastic tie tight and
walked her at arm's length to Merci's car with one hand on her arm and one in
her hair while she snapped her head back trying to bite him.
Merci pumped at the deputy
and Hess got the look he didn't want: chest covered with blood and a pool of it
under him, his head nodding back and forth with Merci's efforts, eyes open and
feet splayed as only dead feet splay. Merci was talking while she did the chest
compressions, demanding that the deputy respond, refusing to let him check out.
"You hang in here
with us, Jerry," Hess heard her say, not much more than a hoarse whisper.
"You stay
here
with
me ...
you
just keep breathing . .. I'm giving you the power to do that, so do
that...
just
do
it,
Jerry..."
The kid looked about twenty-five. His gun
was still in his holster. His partner was maybe forty, blood on him as he
leaned down and kept talking to the kid,
we're with you now, Jerold, come on Jerry, we gotta get you
back to Cathy
in
good shape or she's gonna have my hide . . . come
on,
Jerry,
I'm
gonna keep talking and you just keep listening, we're going
to get
you out
of this, partner, don't you fade on me now, kid, I need you here . . .
Merci kept pumping but she
looked up at Hess with a devastated expression and shook her head. Her forearms
were heavy with blood and she was kneeling in a pool of it. Hess checked the
van tires—an older but uniform set—then looked over at the crowd. He saw their
fear of him. It was one of those moments—Hess had experienced them before— when
the killing was done and lives suddenly gone and all you could do was nothing
at all.
He went back to
Merci.
"I can take over
there," he said to her.
"I got him, man, move
over," said the partner. His name plate said Dunbar.
"AH right, Jerry, I'm back
now ..."
The sirens whooped and
stopped behind him. Two city units and one Sheriff, Hess saw. The paramedic van
came tilting around the corner where Merci had almost lost it. The sound and
the new flashing lights and the slamming doors and weapons-drawn officers all
seemed to reanimate the tragedy, or to make possible a new one. Dunbar was
blubbering and pumping too fast. Merci walked slowly toward the arriving
troops, her hands out from her sides, as if unsure of how to carry them or
herself.
Hess opened the back van
doors and looked in. It was carpeted and had a small table and two bench
chairs instead of seats. On the table was a freezer bag half filled with light
brown powder. A pound at the most, probably less. Hess poked it with his
finger—heroin—Mexican by the color. There was a scale, a box of smaller plastic
bags, a couple of teaspoons, two open beers and a bag of some kind of powder to
plump up the smack and create profit.
They had walked straight
into the cutting and packaging, he thought. Like stepping on a scorpion in the
dark. Jerry's life for a pound of poppy dust. The Purse Snatcher's seventh victim.
He made sure the arriving
crime scene investigators knew where the stainless automatic was stashed.
Then he walked the inside
of the house, touching nothing, just looking. It was predictable and soulless,
heavy on black leather, chrome and electronics. A new computer in boxes. Plenty
of guns. He came into the kitchen just as Merci turned from the sink with her
hands clean and wet, looking for a paper towel. Finding none, she dried her
hands on a cotton one folded on the countertop.
"Jerry Kirby's
dead," she said quietly, "and so's the creep. Let's get the bitch out
of my car and get out of here."
She tossed the towel into the sink and walked out.
They sat in silence
outside Colesceau's apartment on 12 Meadowlark. Hess leaned back in the seat
and peered out between heavy eyelids. He could feel the blood surging inside
him and it felt hot. The rads? His brain felt sluggish.
It was after ten and he counted only six protesters. The
CNB van was still there—'round the clock coverage for "Rape Watch,
Irvine"—but Lauren Diamond was nowhere to be seen. The neighbors sat in
lawn chairs with their
signs on the ground and votive candles burning in
holders beside them. Hess looked at the south-facing kitchen window and knew
with certainty that nobody could get in and out of it without being seen.
"It was worth
checking," he said. "But there's no way he could get in and out of
that window. None whatsoever."
"I told
you."
"I needed to see
it."
"Tim, this pathetic
little troll isn't our guy. He looks wrong, the parole officers have been on
him for three years, his own neighbors won't let him fart without taking his
picture. I mean, we've got actual photographs of him at home taken while
Ronnie Stevens bought it. It just isn't him. But I respect your instincts. I
absolutely do."
"I don't care about
my instincts. I care about getting this guy before he takes another girl."
"That's why we need
to run with what we've got. The artist's sketch with the hair is the one that's
popping for us, Hess. Kamala guided it, LaLonde endorsed it, the bus driver and
store clerk recognized it. Sure, it could be a wig, but what are the chances?
Nobody sees him do what he does, right? So why go to all that trouble, parade
around in a well-lit mall with somebody else's hair on? It's real. It's his.
We're looking for a long-haired, blond, beach-god type. A guy good-looking
enough to catch Kamala Petersen's eye. So we've got to get the sketch out there
more, get it seen. Maybe do a billboard like we did on that Horridus guy last
year. Maybe get Lauren Diamond to put it on the TV more. Maybe circulate them
by hand at the malls. We could get some rookies or cadets to do the canvas.
Hell, we could do it ourselves if Brighton won't authorize the manpower, which
he probably won't."