The Blue Hour (11 page)

The kid had actively
reviled her, which she understood, but it made things kind of tough. Not my
mother, not my mother,
you're not my
mother!
Yeah, yeah,
yeah.

A few months later she had
stopped sleeping with Mike but wouldn't have minded seeing him some more. Just
slow things down, unstick a little. He said all or nothing. The mandate was
his and she'd known it was coming. She'd slept with a man out of a sense of
obligation before, but that was back in college when the world was simpler and
less permanent. She'd lost a friend and gained nothing.

Mike had acted caustic and
amused. Some angry crap about her being a control freak, afraid to let go. It
really didn't surprise her—that was his way. Then she heard the dyke quip one
day in the cafeteria and it hurt her in a place she never knew was vulnerable.
It had flabbergasted her to be thought of in that way. It made her wonder about
men, too, how they'd indulge an instinct for cruelty they should have outgrown
in high school.

So she had sued for a
truce, but with no definite result. She hadn't heard any fresh talk about
herself for a while, so maybe that was her answer. He'd talked to her about it
just once, something about the humiliation of being dropped like a hot match in
front of all the people he worked with, something about keeping him in the
loop, something about treating people the same way you'd want them to treat
you. Incredibly, something about taking little Danny's heart. It was a bad
fight. It was one of those arguments that blew truth into little bits, then
scattered it all over the place like a round of exploding ammunition. When
you were done, there was nothing illuminated or resolved, no clarity, just a
lot of shrapnel stuck in your face.

Now Kemp. She'd either
survive Kemp or she wouldn't. She put it out of her mind.

"What's in
your
bag?" he asked.

She showed him the lid and
explained how she found it. He nodded but said nothing.

Merci turned to behold
Daisy, a 100-pound female, her favorite. The heavy thing waddled along with her
teammates, ears and tongue out, jowls loose, saliva dangling. Merci knew better
than to try to touch her right now—the hounds were always temperamental, more
so when they were tired.

Mike's cohorts stopped to
look at a hawk eating a rabbit atop a huge sycamore.

"I hear Hess is your
new partner."

"Until I get a
permanent one."

"He was my favorite,
of the old farts. Phil Kemp didn't deserve you."

"So far, so
good."

"You've got in almost
eight full hours together."

"About that."

"He'll try to get you
between the sheets, you know. He was married something like four times."

She looked at his face and
saw his smile. Hard with him to tell an authentic one from a mean one. But one
of the things she liked about McNally was that he walked fast like she did, so
you didn't have to keep adjusting your speed.

"I'll just turn down
his pacemaker," she said.

"Yeah, pull the plug
on him if he doesn't mind himself."

She nodded, feeling bad
about dissing Hess behind his back, uncertain how far she should take a joke
with Mike NcNally anyway. Because if he wanted to let it out that Merci was talking
about her new partner's pacemaker, that would make things tough with Hess. On
the other hand, a joke is just a joke, right? Hess was a big boy, she thought;
she just wasn't sure if Mike was.

McNally looked at
her, then away. "What do you think about those other women filing suit?
Kemp's got it coming from four directions now."

"Four?"

"Well,
Stratmeyer in records was talking to some reporters this morning. What I heard
was, she's accused Kemp of raping her. At his house."

"Oh, Christ, I hadn't heard
that."

"Ugly stuff. I
never had Kemp measured as that big an asshole."

Merci kept up her
brisk pace beside McNally. She shook her head and felt that tightness in her
chest. She willed away the tightness, willed away thoughts of Kemp and
Stratmeyer.

Mike seemed to know
what she was doing, because he changed the topic completely.

"So, he's bled
at least two women out here. Then what? How come there's nothing else left of
them?"

"We think the animals have ...
cleaned up."

"Maybe they're still alive."

"If Gilliam ever
finishes the saturation test, we'll have a better idea if that's even
possible."

"Well, they're
not around here anywhere, except for those three points and the lines in
between. What about the lagoon?"

"The dive team
is finishing up. We won't find them in the lagoon."

They continued down the dusty road. She could hear the others catching
up.

"We should talk about things sometime, Merci."

"Can't we just not?"

"Fine. Hey, why knock my head against your wall?"

"Please stop. It doesn't help either of us."

"Okay. Sure. I'll just see you around."

He sped up. Merci stepped to the side of the dirt road and let the
handlers and their panting bloodhounds shuffle past.

"First off, the canning jar lid didn't hold any prints. We've got
smudges consistent with fingers inside rubber or latex gloves, but no
prints."

It was early Thursday
morning, two days after Hess had found the Slim Jim marks on the car windows.
He stood in the crime lab and felt the tips of his fingers burning. Next to him
was Merci Rayborn, with her hair back in a ponytail and a tight set of lines at
each side of her mouth.

James Gilliam, the
director of Forensic Services, looked at her, then at Hess. To Hess he looked
uncustomarily perplexed.

"Now, based on the
stain size and the perc rates I can tell you that at least two liters of blood
went onto that ground. I can't tell you how much ran off. An adult human female
contains just over four liters. So the chances are excellent that whoever lost
this blood is dead. Given the circumstances, the chances are overwhelmingly
good. I don't think our victim was in the presence of a lifesaver, a do-gooder
or an ER nurse."

They were looking down at a bench on
which sat a collection of plastic pet litter boxes and plastic food containers
filled with earth. Gilliam had aerated
the boxes with a narrow-bit drill to replicate natural porosity before adding
the
soil. The food containers had the
original dump site earth, collected by the CSIs. He had gotten plenty of older,
soon-to-be-discarded blood units from the UCI Medical Center to see what the
blood would do in the dirt.

“You answered what we needed answered," said Merci.

Hess
watched Gilliam peer toward her over the top of his reading glasses. The lab
director was a soft-spoken, deliberate man who took his time and never forgot
the difference between a scientist and a cop. You couldn't hook him into seeing
what wasn't there. He was almost a head shorter than Merci Rayborn. "I
found something else," he said. "Kind of interesting, really."

Hess's
pulse rose a blip—he knew from experience that "kind of interesting,
really," was James Gilliam's way of saying hold onto your hat. Merci knew
it, too.

Gilliam
said, "Those soil samples you brought me in the buckets, Tim—good thing.
That was the only way to replicate the conditions in Ortega closely. But you brought
me more than just soil samples. I'll bet you didn't know that."

Hess
shook his head.

"I
set a little from each bucket aside, just as a precaution. When the perc tests
worked out I thought I'd run the extra through the mass spec, just have a look.
I tried the Kane soil first and got unusually high amounts of some unusual
things—trioxane, formic acid, methanol, and CH O. When I ran the Jillson dirt I
got nothing like that."

Gilliam
stopped here, as Hess knew he would. The man was a scientist and saw no reason
to explain his own punch lines.

"Well,
Jim, what is it?" Hess prompted.

"Oh,
sorry. Formaldehyde—simplest of the aldehydes, highly reactive. In the soil
samples, it was dehydrating to form the trioxane, oxidizing to make the formic
acid and reducing to simple methanol. But it started as formaldehyde—there was
enough of the unreacted CH O left to determine that. Actually it was probably
formalin, which is formaldehyde in a 37 percent aqueous solution. Pure
formaldehyde is just a gas."

"How
did it get there?" asked Merci.

He
looked at Hess but he answered Rayborn: "Someone put it there. Or, more
likely maybe—spilled it."

"Just
the Kane site?"

"Just
the Kane site. But remember, six months of weather and rain would have washed
out the Jillson ground."

Hess
had already pulled down
Remington's Practice of Pharmacy
from one of the
crime lab shelves. It was a large book and punishingly heavy—he'd never noticed
how heavy until today. It was the same 1961 edition, priced then at $22.95.
Hess had used it a hundred times over the decades to look up answers that
Gilliam had in his head. There was something of the educator in James Gilliam
and Hess had never minded it.

He
glanced at Merci and saw the quick look of irritation she gave the lab
director. Gilliam missed it, lost as he was to the mass spectrometer. He
hovered over the machine, bent at the waist with his hands behind his back like
a helpful valet.

"Uh,
James?" she asked. "Maybe you could spare us some heavy lifting here
and tell us what formalin is used for. I mean, all I know is that's what the
frogs were pickled in for biology class."

Gilliam was
still bent over his machine. "Usage: a preservative. A solvent. A tanning
agent for leather. Mix it with
ammonia and you get a urinary tract antiseptic. It's a
big part of two different and powerful explosives—cyclonite and PETN. It
combines eagerly, so it's used to make everything from resins and disinfectants
to embalming agents, plastics to polyvinyls. It's also used as a soil
sterilant. Which is interesting, since that's exactly where Tim found
it."

"A
preservative," said Merci. "And the lid of a pickling jar. Do the jar
and the formalin go together?"

Gilliam
straightened and rubbed his chin. He sighed. His pale eyes were turned up to
Merci but looked to Hess like they were focused somewhere past her head. A
little odd, Hess thought: Gilliam distracted, Gilliam nervous, Gilliam not
looking the woman in the face. It took Hess another moment to get it: she's
attractive to him and he doesn't know how to act.

"They
don't have to go together, though I see what you're getting at," Gilliam
said quietly. "Formalin will evaporate quickly, but you can transport it
in any jar, really. And, maybe he didn't bring the jar. We only found the lid.
I guess the larger question is—"

"—Yeah—what
the hell is he dumping formalin into the ground for in the first placer

"Yes,
of course."

"While
a body hangs from a tree, eviscerated and bleeding," she said.

A
moment of silence while three imaginations tugged at their respective tethers.

Until
Gilliam cleared his throat. "1 had a case where a rape-killer would wash
off his victim with isopropyl alcohol before he
...
coupled with her. Something about germs and religion
gone pathological, is what the prosecution said. He had to have her pure,
clean, clinically... worthy."

Rayborn
was nodding. "I had one where the prick washed her out with bleach
after
he raped her. He wanted his seminal fluid destroyed."

"Maybe he's
preserving
parts
of her," said the director.

"As
keepsakes," said Merci. "Eyes. Hearts. Whatever in God's name turns
him on."

"And when the
meat hits the jar, the formalin spills out."

Quiet again.

Another meditative
pause.

Merci
next: "If formalin is used in tanning leather, you could use it to tan
human skin, right?"

"I
guess you could. But if all he wants is their skin, where's the rest of them?
Even the coyotes and vultures can't completely consume a fiill human skeleton
in one week."

Hess
reentered the room after a brief mental departure. He was still looking down at
The Practice of Pharmacy.

"Maybe
he's preserving the bodies," he said. He set the
Remington's
back
on the shelf. "Taking the whole woman."

Merci
and Gilliam both looked at him—two mouths slightly open, four eyes intent.

Hess
continued, "It would account for us finding nothing but lots of blood,
scraps of innards, and the primary ingredient embalming fluid. He's taking
everything but fluids and viscera with him."

"Okay,"
said Merci. "Then what about the canning jar?"