Authors: T. Jefferson Parker
Another 8:25 exterior
showed the upstairs light
off again.
Still all right.
But the next interior
shot, taken at 8:25, showed Colesceau watching TV.
Why hadn't Hjorth taken a
picture as Colesceau came back to the couch? Every shooter's prize: a picture
of his subject's face? Why had he waited until Colesceau turned his back to
him and sat back down? He'd already shot the back of Colesceau's head, at 8:22.
Why again?
He flipped his blue
notebook open to Rick Hjorth's number, and dialed it.
He got an answering
machine, but identified himself and waited. Sure enough, Hjorth picked up.
"Man, it's
early, Detective."
"It's quarter to
six."
"Did my pictures
help?"
"Maybe. I want to
know why you don't have a picture of Colesceau's face. I mean, after he turned
off the upstairs lights and came back to the couch to watch TV. You let him
turn his back, sit down and get settled. I know you got to the window fast because
both of your outside shots
and
the Colesceau shot were all taken at 8:25. You were fast."
"Well, not fast
enough. See, I can't tell you the times but the light upstairs was pretty much
off all night. Then it went on and I thought I'd document it. And I liked the
way the lit window showed up against the sky. Then the light went off real
fast—it was only on for a second, like he just wanted to check his watch or
something—so I figured he was done upstairs and he'd come down to the TV again.
And I realized I could get a face shot. So I
ran
to the window, to shoot through the crack. But he was
already sitting there. I was totally bummed. It was like he never even
moved."
Like he never even
moved, thought Hess.
Like someone other than
Colesceau had turned the light on and off again.
Like someone upstairs had
made a mistake with the light, caught himself, switched it back off in a hurry
while Colesceau watched TV.
"Thank you," he
said, and hung up. He checked his watch against the softening darkness beyond the
window glass. It was 5:48.
Hess stood then, his heart
chugging a little faster, his mind alert. He looked at the wig, touched it. He
went to the window and looked toward the ocean but what he saw was the inside
of Colesceau's house: the beige carpet, the white walls, the rough acoustic
ceiling, lawyer's bookshelves filled with painted eggs, the TV, the stairway
leading up. Then, upstairs, Hess pictured the main bedroom on the left:
Colesceau's narrow bed neatly made with its brown spread, the bright yellow
Shelby Cobra poster from Pratt Automotive on the wall, the dresser top littered
with change and movie ticket stubs, the framed poster of the castle on the
mountaintop. Next Hess pictured the spare bedroom, the lonely black plastic
crucifix hanging on the wall opposite the bed with the Jesus who, facing his
own image in mirrored glass, had struck Hess as the loneliest savior he'd ever
seen.
Mirrored walls. Jesus
in glass. Lonely and black.
Who's in there with Colesceau? Who turned out the lights for him? Maybe
this friend plays the role of Colesceau so Colesceau can go out. Idiot Billy
Wayne?
But
how could Colesceau go out, or anyone get in, with the crowd right there?
Something that Hess had
just seen drew him back to his own bathroom. He looked at himself in the
medicine cabinet mirror again. He opened the door and looked at the
manufacturer's sticker. He closed the cabinet door and watched his face
reappear. He opened it and watched it vanish into a shelf of shave gear and
medicine bottles.
Glass. Glass, a hole
in the world.
Sending me through the looking glass again.
Again.
Hess felt a funny little
rush in his head and got his blue notebook. He found the home phone number for
Quail Creek Apartment Homes manager Art Ledbetter and dialed it while he looked
out the window. He answered on the second ring. Hess told him who he was and
told Ledbetter he had a simple question.
"All right,
Detective."
"Do any of the
smaller bedrooms in the Quail Creek apartments have mirrored walls?"
"No, sir. None of the
Quail Creek units do. We don't use glass on the closet doors, either. It's too
expensive."
"So a tenant would
have to put up mirrored walls at his own expense?"
"We wouldn't allow
it. But it would be easy enough to do without us knowing."
Hess considered. He
thought of his dream, a huge bird crashing through a mirror, then changing into
something else on the other side. A Porti-Boy.
Was
the bird an ostrich? Hold that thought.
"Can you give me the
name and phone number of the tenant who lives directly behind 12 Meadowlark?
That address would
be ...
I have that
complex map in my file here..."
"It's 28 Covey Run.
And the tenant is one of the ghost people I hardly ever see—I told you about
her—a single woman. Anyway, I'd have to call you from the office with her name
and number. I don't have it here."
Hess asked Art to call
both his office and home numbers as soon as he had them.
Next he dialed New West
Farms, hoping that someone might be there an hour before the start of business.
Farmers could be like that, he thought, up before the sun. But he got a
recording and left a message, identifying himself and saying a return call was
important.
What
was it about the big bird breaking through the
mirror?
What was it about Spurlea buying ostrich and emu meat?
Hess was hot now and he
knew it, and he knew the luck was with him and he thought—for the first time in
days—that he should trust his instincts again.
He was starting to
understand. He saw the picture: a big bird crashing through the mirror, a big
bird hatching from a big egg.
Hold that thought.
He called the station and
got the watch commander to have someone check his fax machine. A moment later the
watch commander called back.
"Hess, you've got
some document with a signature on it. A UPS delivery receipt, I think."
"Who took the
delivery?"
"Looks like
William Wayne."
"No doubt?"
"The writing's
good and clear."
"Look like an
eleven-year-old did it?"
"No. I'd guess man's
writing, slant forward, low, heavy, kind of rushed A grown-up."
"Put it in the
top drawer of my desk, will you?"
"Okay. Anything
else?"
"That's
all."
"How you feeling
these days?"
"Better by the second."
Hess hung up and went to
the window again. Dawn was breaking behind him, to the east, and the first
faint line of the horizon was coalescing above the gray ocean.
The phone rang.
The owner of New West
Farms told him that Helena Spurlea had never bought so much as one ounce of
ostrich meat from him.
Hess understood why.
"She only buys
the eggs, correct?"
"That's right. She
doesn't eat the goddamned things. She paints them."
"Can you give me
the delivery address?"
The owner was happy
to.
It was Wheeler
Greenfield's place in Lake Elsinore, just like Hess knew it would be. Of
course, she rents from him —
Hold that thought.
Spurlea is
Colesceau's mother.
Hold that thought.
He called Art
Ledbetter again.
"Just heading
out the door, Detective."
"Is the woman who
rents 28 Covey Run named Helena Spurlea?"
Ledbetter was quiet for a
beat. "I don't know. Like I said before, I don't collect the rent—I just
oversee maintenance and sec—"
Hess exhaled and felt his
heart thumping in his throat. "Where do the rent checks go?"
"Schaff Property
Management in Newport Beach."
Monthly checks of $875 for storage to Schaff. . .
Hess hung up and dug into
his miscellany file, where he had kept the documents relating to Matamoros
Colesceau. At the bottom of the second page of Colesceau's protocol agreement
with the State of California, the document specifying the terms of his parole
and his chemical castration, was Colesceau's signature.
It was slant forward,
low and heavy.
Mother and
son, he thought.
He got Judge Ernest
Alvarez's home number from his black book and dialed.
Ten minutes later he was granted phone warrants to
search the apartments of Matamoros Colesceau and Helena Spurlea for a Porti-Boy
embalming machine, formaldehyde-based solution, a homemade car alarm override,
a Deer Sleigh'R, chloroform and a blond wig.
In the grainy half light preceding dawn, Big Bill
Wayne sat in his van and sipped a Bloody Mary from a mason jar. He wondered
where the top had gotten to, probably out in the Ortega somewhere. No worries.
He stared as Trudy Powers and her husband got out of their Volvo wagon, shut
the doors, joined hands and walked together slowly across the park toward the
rise. It was 5:14.
Trudy had a Bible in her
right hand and the same purse slung over her shoulder as the day before. She
was wearing a white dress and sandals. To Big Bill's satisfaction, her hair was
up. Her husband, Jonathan, tall and bearded and storklike, wore shorts and a
T-shirt and a baseball cap. He looked like something that would propagate only
in wetlands.
Colesceau had said that
Trudy Powers would be good to her word, and she had been. He had thanked her
for the pie, arranged to pray early the next morning in the park just east of
the Quail Creek Apartment Homes. Colesceau had told her the sunrise was
beautiful from there—that he'd often gotten up early and gone alone there to
see it and pray. Bill hoped she'd honor her commitment.
In fact, Colesceau had
never prayed from the park, but Bill had been there twice before, unable to
sleep and looking for a place he could dump Lael or Janet if they got to be too
much of a problem. He'd covered half the county looking into places for
occasions like that. Which was how he found the hanging trees in Ortega. And
how the bodies of his first three completely botched preservation attempts had
ended up deep in the bottom of Black Star Canyon, in a forgotten mine shaft
half a mile beyond the
DO NOT ENTER BY ORDER OF THE FIRE MARSHAL
sign.
It was so
deep he never heard them hit.
Bill felt his heart speed
up. He checked himself in the mirror, then got out, locked up and walked into
the park. Looking ahead he saw Trudy and her husband disappear over a gentle rise.
It was an ideal place because the condos all around were hidden by trees to
give park users the illusion of privacy. And in this near-dark, no one could
see much anyway.
He walked down the swale
and started up the rise. The park was empty and he could feel his things in the
pockets of his long denim coat. One for Stork and one for Trudy.
He was really surprised
that he was this close. Colesceau had been fantasizing about this for months,
he knew. Bill had always liked the idea but hadn't seen a reasonable way to
implement it. But when it became clear to him what he needed to do, it also
became clear how it could be done. And Trudy's invitation to pray with
Colesceau, slipped into the Psalms of her Revised Standard Version of the Holy
Bible, was the opening Bill needed.
Coming over
the hillock he looked down across the next gentle swale: a picnic table with
attached benches, a built-in barbecue nearby, a Norfolk Island pine alone in a
sea of Bermuda grass and a couple standing arm in arm in the grass looking
toward the lightening eastern sky.
He breathed in deeply and
exhaled fully. He lowered his voice as far as it would comfortably go.
"Gonna be beautiful this morning, isn't it?"
They both turned. They had
to disengage each other to do it. Stork smiled and looked back toward the
sunrise.
Trudy looked at him.
"I'm sure it will be. God's new morning."
"So true."
She turned away. Bill
watched a pair of doves whisk by on squeaky wings. The sky beyond them was
tinged with orange now. His heart was beating fast but steady and his body felt
young and strong, especially his hands and his eyes.
He breathed in deeply and
exhaled fully again, then started down the hillock toward them. The grass was
damp and soft under his boots and he could smell it. The sky registered
another octave of light, an orange glow that seemed warm and fertile and
unhurried.
"Is that the
Bible you've got there?"