Authors: T. Jefferson Parker
He nodded, wishing he
could get his head clear. It was harder to keep everything straight later in
the night. He just wanted things to add up. He listened to his voice.
"We've got the
graduates of the Cypress College program," he said. "We've got all
the licensed undertakers in Southern California. We've got 224 owners of panel
vans. We've got a mailing list from Arnie's Outdoors—the biggest
hunting/fishing chain in the county. We need the connection, Merci. If we
could just find one name on two lists we'd be onto something. Until then,
things are spreading, getting bigger but not tighter."
"And don't forget the
embalming machine purchasers, as of tomorrow morning."
In fact, he had
forgotten them.
"Right, and
them."
"How many vans
left?"
"We'd done
ninety-four when I talked to Claycamp this evening. The night shift is going to
be real slow after what just happened. But they ought to make that one twenty
or thirty by morning. Those tires are our best physical evidence. If we find
the van, we find the Purse Snatcher. When we're down to ten, I'd say start in
on the ones registered to females, maybe do the commercial ones."
"What about road
blocks or checkpoints?"
Hess was positive that he
had covered this angle, but it took him just a second to recall how. When he
did, he felt more relieved than he should have.
"I did a radius plot
from the abduction sites to the dump sites, tried to narrow down his home base.
But it didn't tell me much. The Ortega screws up the parameters because it's
the only way to get to where Jillson and Kane were. That means his point of departure
could be anywhere this side of the mountains. What I'm saying is, we'd need
checkpoints all over the county for a decent shot at intercepting that
van."
"Brighton won't
approve that kind of manpower. Not on one of my cases, he won't."
Hess suspected she was
right, but said nothing. He could feel his blood boiling again.
"Say it, Hess, I
don't care."
"He's prepared
to see you fail," he answered.
"You going to help me
do that? Or just submit the paperwork when it happens?"
"Neither, I
hope."
"I'm just a damned
woman, not the antichrist. I don't see what makes all you guys so afraid."
Hess looked out the
window, felt his vision blurring.
"Well, what is it,
Hess? How come we make you guys so afraid?'
"We're
old."
"No, it's more
than that. It's because we're women."
"We think you
want to bottle our seed and kill us all."
She laughed.
"Sounds good to me."
"Then there you
have it."
"I wasn't serious.
But, to be serious, why? Why would we want to do that?"
"Maybe that's
what we'd do if we were you."
"No, you like our
bodies too much. Just the pleasure of them."
"You're right. What
we're afraid of is that you'd run the world in your favor if you could. I mean,
we run it in ours."
"You're right,
we would. I would, anyway."
"Well, Brighton
knows that."
Merci was quiet for a long
while then, and Hess was aware of her looking out the window toward Colesceau's
apartment. A couple of new faces arrived by car for the vigil— a young couple
with a cooler and an electric lantern. The CNB news crew shot video of the
arriving couple, then turned their lenses toward 12 Meadowlark.
Hess watched as two of the
protesters stood and walked off with their arms around each other. The guy
carried his sign at his side, no audience for him now. A middle-aged couple
with a conscience and an evening to kill, Hess thought. Probably protested the
war in college for reasons similar. He could hear their voices in the warm
night but not their words. It was nice to see that it wasn't all battlefield
between human beings, that a man and a woman could choose to be together and
make a go of it.
But his mind eddied back
to the task at hand and the task lay in darker waters.
"I think he's saving
them, customizing them. Their bodies. Because, like you said, there's pleasure
in them. But he's afraid of the life inside them. He's afraid you're going to
bottle his seed and kill him. That's why I thought Colesceau was a good bet, at
first. The physical evidence? Wrong. The situation he lives in? Wrong, too. I
know that. But I felt something I didn't understand, in there, with him. I wish
I could know what it was. We're looking for a guy whose insides are a lot like
Colesceau's. I mean, imagine what comes into his nightmares after he's injected
with female hormone, once a week. Can you imagine what he dreams?"
"No. Can
you?"
"I've tried. And
it keeps coming back,
fury."
"Keep
talking."
"One, we know he
translates rage into lust. He's probably done it all his life, or most of his
life. He rapes. Two, rage equals erection equals blunt instrument that gives
pleasure to him and pain to another."
"Okay."
"So when he gets
caught and castrated, we're taking away his expression of those things—rage and
lust. But we're not taking away the basic feelings themselves. Rage now equals
no erection, no blunt instrument, no pleasure to himself, no pain to
another."
He watched her consider.
"He needs new ways to express." "I assumed so at first. But what
if he just wants the old ways back? And he can't have them right now. All he
can have now is something . . . ready. So, why not just kill them and keep them
for the day when he's ready to express the lust again?"
"Okay. It makes
sense." Hess caught an odd tone in her voice, like she was trying to hurry
him past this part of things.
"Now, in those
pictures, the back of Colesceau's head doesn't convince me," he said.
"I want Gilliam to enhance them for us. And I think we should bring him in
and hit him hard. Tell him it's
his
print on the fuse. Line the purses up right where he can see them. Tell him
we've got a witness. Really get inside his head and throw knives."
She was quiet again, then
her voice seemed to come from for away, soft but urgent.
She held his sleeve, and
what she said surprised him. "Tim, it isn't
him.
We've got photographs of him watching TV when it happened.
We've got dozens of witnesses. We've got videotape. He can't get out of there
without the world knowing it. You know? Tim?
It
. . . isn't. . .
him."
She looked at him and he
saw the disappointment in her face. He also saw some of the devastation that
had filled her expression as she pumped away on the deceased young Jerry Kirby.
But this was different. Back in the garage in El Modena there was outrage and
fury in her, too. Now, the outrage and fury were gone. And in their place was a
sympathy that Hess found intolerable because he knew he was the target. She
turned away and looked out the window toward the crowd. Hess could see her eyes
in profile, focused down toward the steering wheel.
He knew that someday his
reason would leave him and he had hoped it wouldn't get someone killed. He
always knew it was going to feel bad. He had imagined looking foolish and old
and useless and spent in front of his partner and himself. But he would manage
this because it would mean one part of his life was over and he could feel good
about that. It would just mean he was too old, was all. He had imagined that
this would be the day he'd turn in his badge and gun, head out to the acreage
in Idaho or Oregon with his wife, start fishing, let the grandkids visit and
stay as long as they wanted. Yes, he had told himself, he was going to feel
okay about it all when he finally slowed down.
But that moment was here
right now, and what he felt was shame. He was thankful for the darkness that
hid his face from her.
"Okay, blow up the pictures, Tim.
But wait on the interrogation. That's a half-day setup and a half day of
bracing him and I don't want to spend that kind of time right now. I got the
art people to meet with Kamala Petersen today so they could colorize the
sketch. Let's hope it came out well. We'll hit the county with it tomorrow,
plaster it everywhere there's a space, shove it into every face at every mall
he's struck and every one he hasn't. We'll say our prayers tonight that Bart.
Young's list will hit a match for us. Or the
tire-kickers find a mismatched set of tires on a silver panel van and don't
lose another kid's life."
"Okay.
Solid."
She set a hand on his
shoulder. "Help me find him, Hess. I need you to help me find him."
"I'm doing
everything I can."
"I know you
are."
Colesceau came to his
porch. Hess watched him, bathed in the yellow bug light to his right, looking
passively out at the crowd of six. He was wearing a green robe and a pair of
white socks, and he held a tray of steaming mugs in front of him.
The protesters got to
their feet and the signs came up. The CNB shooter moved in.
"We ought to pop him
just for being such a dweeb," said Merci. "What's he got, hot
chocolate?"
Hess watched as Colesceau
walked toward his tormentors, set the tray down before them, then straightened
and looked at them. He looked over their heads toward Merci's car but Hess saw
no recognition in the dark. The cameraman stayed low and tight for a good shot
of his subject. '
Colesceau spoke with his
neighbors but Hess couldn't hear a word of it. Then the small dark-haired man
gave the crowd a little bow and walked slowly back into his apartment.
A while later the
downstairs lights went off and an upstairs light went on. Hess could see
through the half-drawn curtain upstairs the faintest of figures, the shadow of
a shadow, moving on the ceiling. For a brief second someone looked out.
Then the upstairs window
darkened and the living room blinds were illuminated again by the blue light of
a TV screen.
"He watches TV all
the goddamn time," said Merci. "What a life. Hess, don't do what I
think you're going to do."
But he pushed out the door
and plodded across the street to the living room window. The evening had cooled
and there was a faint smell of citrus and smog in the air. His legs felt wrong.
For Jerry Kirby, he thought.
He looked through a crack
in the blinds and saw what Rick Hjorth's camera had seen the night before.
Colesceau was slumped down in the couch, his back to Hess, just his head
visible, tuned into CNB's "Rape Watch: Irvine," which showed a live
shot of the front of Colesceau's apartment, a real-time clock running in the
lower right corner and Hess at the window.
He watched Colesceau turn
just a little and look over his shoulder, then again to the TV. On his way back
Hess waved to the camera then stopped at the little crowd and asked them what
Colesceau had said to them.
"He said, tell Tim and Merci they can have some
hot cider, too. There it is, if that's who you are."
Eight minutes later Big Bill Wayne backed the silver van
out of the garage and accelerated crisply down the street. He was breathing
fast and perspiring heavily. This was a record time for getting out. What a
help, to watch the cops come and go at Colesceau's, live on TV!
He drove steadily and
within the speed limit. He hit the serene darkness of the Ortega and followed
the moonlit highway through the hills. He thought of his favorite poem.
The road was a ribbon of
moonlight
over the purple moorland the highwayman came
riding, riding, riding/The highwayman came riding/Up to the old inn door.
He found LaLonde's place.
It was what you'd expect for an ex-con inventor with no job—a commercial space,
rented cheap. Someone began raising the door after three knocks. Up it went,
like it was letting him into a castle. Except the door was blue steel and Lee
LaLonde was no nobleman. Bill stood there in his black suit and western tie and
his golden hair, with Pandora's Box in his shopping bag, sniffing the inside of
LaLonde's cave for danger or opportunity.
"Hi, Bill,"
said Lee LaLonde.
"Fix this,
partner."
The toothy young man
nodded and smiled. Bill could tell he'd been asleep. So he swept in without an
invitation, turned on his boot heels and stared at LaLonde.
"It failed. I
figured you'd know why."
"Okay, sure.
Wanna beer or something?"
"Nope. I'm in a
hurry."
"Not a problem.
I'll check it out."
Bill gave the kid the bag
and watched him go to one of his workbenches. LaLonde pulled the string and an
overhead fluorescent light flickered on.
"You can sit down if
you want. I wondered if I'd see you again. How's it hanging?"
"How's what
hanging?"
Bill didn't like the
furtive look that LaLonde gave him, or the seemingly genial talk. He didn't
feel like sitting on LaLonde's couch.