The Blue Hour (19 page)

LaLonde knelt and looked
back and up at her. Merci looked inside the bowl: pretty bad. The lid was
already up.

"Stick your head
inside and put your neck on the lip."

He did.

"Knees
together."

He did that, too.

"Here's the deal,
Lee. You seem like a pretty nice guy to me. I'd hate to arrest you for the
murder of Janet Kane, but with your prints on that fuse I don't have much
choice. So spill it—tell me how your prints got on that little glass tube and
how the tube got into Janet's BMW. The reason you're looking at the toilet is
because I want you to think about spending the rest of your life in one. That's
exactly where you'll be in about one hour if I don't get the answers I
want."

His head shook back
and forth. "I can't explain it."

"Broaden your
horizons."

She squatted and used her
weight to push his face into the water. He sucked in before he went under, then
tried to wait her out. He lasted about half a minute then struggled. She
actually imagined Kemp's head in there, almost smiled. She let him up for one
breath then pushed his face back in.

"Lee, you got to
tell what you know. I know you're lying because it was written all over your
face."

He shook his head
again then tried to back out. She used his hair this time, a good wad of it,
sitting forward and sitting down hard on him. She wanted to flush it but
couldn't without letting go. When she felt the panic of drowning hit him, she
let him up again.

He gulped down a big
swallow of air. Then another. But no words.

Down again. She kept
her knees pushed up tight against his shoulders and her arms extended and her
hands locked hard on his neck. It was easy to keep her weight forward and down.

Next came a long one.
His neck was wiry and hot. She felt the panic in him, and the strength the
panic gave him. Then she let him up.

He was gasping now.
The big overlapping breaths came too fast for a full lungful of air to get in.
When they started coming one at a time she waited for him to say something and
when he didn't she drove him back under again.

"Next air's about sixty miles down
the road, Lee."

He writhed hard but
her weight was up over his shoulders and she wasn't about to let go of his
neck. He tried to splay his knees and slide out under her, but her legs kept
his arms pinned close and the cuffs kept the wrists tight. His voice echoed up
from the water but it was just a kind of scream and no words. She looked back
and saw his fingers reaching up for her like a hand in a horror movie. It felt
good to dominate a creep this totally.

When she let him up
he drew a huge breath and blew it out and took another, then another.
"I was at. At the swap

meet. Marina Park. This guy said
could I. Could I build him a thing.
A
thing that got around car alarms.
Because I had. I had the cigar boxes. For die phones. I said I could. Probably.
Figure that out. I made him one. Used two 20-amps. He came two weeks. Later and
picked it up. Don't send me back. Back to prison for his. Lady. Lady, I don't
know what he did with. With it. But he came back again about three. Or four
months
ago. To
see me at the
swap meet. I'll tell you what. He looks like. And I'll help you get him. Just
lemme breathe and don't send me back."

Merci let go of him and
stepped away. Lee LaLonde slumped to the dirty tile.

She went outside and found
Hess leaning against the cinder block.

"Interesting
sound effects," he said.

"Maybe there's
an award in it for me."

From the car she retrieved
the artist's sketch of Kamala Petersen's heartthrob at the mall.

Back in LaLonde's bathroom
the young man was sitting on the floor, dazed. Hess stood with one foot braced
against the wall and his arms crossed, looking down.

She showed LaLonde the
drawing. He stared at it for a long moment. Hess looked at it, then at her, and
she saw the look of disappointment cross his sharp face.

LaLonde nodded.
"That's him."

"Name, Lee."

"Bill Something.
He never said his last name."

"Clean up," said
Merci. "You smell like a sewer. Then we'll have a talk. Then I'm going to
trash this place and find your little gadget. Because I don't think you made it
for some guy named Bill. I think you made it for you."

Hess helped him up.

Three hours later
Merci called off the search. She'd found out more than she wanted to know about
Lee LaLonde—his work, his diet, his old clothes, his piles of magazines about
inventing.

The mystery
girlfriend even came over, unannounced, at 10 a.m., and unhesitatingly repeated
LaLonde's story about them being together, right here, the night Janet Kane
left the living. She gave Merci her sister's number because her sister sat with
the kid while Mom was over here.

Hess ran a sheet on
her while Merci interrogated her: two pops for drug possession, two
drunk-in-publics, one prostitution charge she pled down to loitering.

He took her aside.
"The girlfriend's got narco and prostitution."

"I'll get
Riverside to surveil them."

"Merci, if that
fuse is really the one our boy used, what's that tell us?'

"Tells us the
gadget isn't working."

Merci went back to
the inventor and his girlfriend, now seated side by side on the old couch.

"I'm going to
leave you here for now," Merci told him. "You see Bill, you call me.
You remember anything about Bill, you call me. You dream about Bill, you call
me. Bill shows up here, wanting you to fix his toy, you call me faster than
you've ever called anyone in your life. That goes for you too, hot pants."

She wrote her home
and cell phone numbers on the back of a business card and set it on one of the
benches.

"I
expect to hear from you, Jack."

That afternoon Hess sat in an empty conference room at Sheriff headquarters
and studied the pages in the fat blue binders, comparing the mugs with Merci's
sketch. She had already gone through the registry once, then asked Hess to do
it, separately. Something about "comparing independent data," which
was fine with Hess. He felt an odd roiling in his blood, like it was hot, like
it was starting to bubble inside.

Of the 3,700 sex offenders
then registered in Orange County, 335 lived in areas patrolled by the Sheriff
Department. Some 259 were considered "serious," 11 others, "high
risk." High risk is three or more violent sexual attacks. Serious is two
or less. Sex Offenders Notification and Registration—SONAR—was instituted to
keep track of them all.

He'd already eliminated
the 11 high-risk offenders. He was now at "D" in the serious
category. He was surprised that a two-time rapist, recently released at the age
of thirty-six, for instance, could be considered less than high risk.

D'Amato. Darcet.
Davis. Deckard.

Too fat. No. Too old.
No.

According to the sign-out
sheet, four of the thirty-five binders were checked out to the SONAR team, who
were transferring most of the information onto compact disc for public release.
New state law required that agencies make their sex offender registries
available to the public in areas of high population. SONAR was deleting
addresses—but not zip codes—from the files before making them public so as not
to encourage trouble from neighbors. The SONAR deputies were finishing up the
last three books, "T" through "Z", and also a supplemental
registry for the criminally insane.

He studied the
artist's drawing again. Kamala Petersen's man was mustachioed. Wavy blond hair.
He'd never seen a composite wearing a coat and a vest. The artist had given
something sad—perhaps even something damp—to the man's eyes. Or was it Kamala's
"hyperromantic vision," as Rayborn had put it?

An interesting face,
Hess thought: handsome, groomed, unusual. Unusual in what way? Not typically
Southern Californian. Mustaches are out. Long hair is out. The appearance
wasn't simple or casual, or offhand. It was formal. Created. A
"look." A look of what? What are you supposed to be? A model, like
Kamala said? Actor? Celebrity? Quick now, describe him in three words:
intelligent, secretive, regretful.

Regretful. In forty
years of law enforcement Hess couldn't remember describing a sketched suspect
as regretful. Later, in court, maybe. Maybe.

Could be way upstream
in juvenile court, but somewhere he's felt the lash.

Regret, thought Hess. You regret what you've done.
You regret who you are. Or is that part of your look—the appearance of sorrow?

Personally, thought Hess, if I had taken two people from their cars,
hung them in trees and bled them, I would feel sorrow indeed. But not everyone
would, and that was what made the worst people in the world different from the
rest of us—no regret, no remorse, no feeling for anyone but themselves, no
conscience. The tricky part was that Hess knew a lot of people like that who
weren't criminal. Some of them were cops and deputies. Some were accountants
and mechanics. Some were teachers and housewives, though if the truth be told,
most of them were men.

Delano. Dickerson.
Diderot.

No. No. No.

Then there was Eichrod.
Hess popped open the rings and worked it out. Eichrod, Kurt; 32 years old; 5'10",
185, brown and brown. Hair long and wavy. Mustache. Possession of obscene
material; solicitation; indecent acts; peeping; battery; assault with intent
to rape. Two of the sexual assault raps got him a total of four years served.
Released on parole in 1995, parole satisfied late last year.

Hess set Merci's sketch
beside the binder page and considered. They were close but not close, alike
but different. Something more in the attitude than the physical.

What disturbed Hess was
Eichrod's rising line of intensity, from porn to sexual assault in a six-year
span.

You
don't just go out and start with something of this magnitude. You work up to
it. If nothing else, you work up to the
how
of it.

The
how
of it, Hess thought: hunter,
butcher, packinghouse worker? Embalmer?

Eichrod's jacket would
tell. He set aside the binder page to copy later.

Gilbert. Greers. Gustin. Gutierrez. No.

It was amazing how
many sexual criminals were out there. And these were only the ones who had been
caught, convicted and registered. Police scientists said the realistic number
would be more like quadruple what the registry held. Hess was ashamed of some
of his gender for failing to mate legitimately, then turning furtive or brutal.
Desire for sex was at the center of almost everything that went wrong in a
guy's head. That, and desire for money.

He turned to Ed
Izma's page and looked at the picture of the huge man. Reduced to a
three-by-four image, Izma lost all of his panoramic menace.

Jackson. James. Jerrol.

Mickler, Mondessa, Mumford.

No. No. No.

Then there was Pule,
Ronald E. Abductor, rapist, torturer. A user of pliers. Fourteen years back in
Georgia. That was ten years ago. His only offense. High risk, due to special
circumstances—abduction and forcible sodomy. He was forty years old, which put
him out of Dr. Page's profile age. He wasn't a builder, apparently. He just
exploded on the scene, skilled beyond his years, fully formed. He was big and
probably strong enough to hoist a full grown woman over the branch of a tree:
6'3", 220 lbs. Too big for the backseat of a car? Maybe. Long blond-brown
hair, mustache. And there was that something different in his eyes, too, the
thing that Merci's artist had tried to capture. Remorse? Self-pity?

Hess put Pule on top of Eichrod and
continued.

An hour
later he was at his desk in the investigators' bullpen with the arrest files
for Eichrod and Pule. It was almost seven and Hess was the only one there. He
looked at his watch and saw that it was Friday, the thirteenth. He had already
photocopied their registry sheets and made a note to get "S" through
"Z" and the supplemental volume from the
SONAR team when they came to work the next day, first
thing. He realized now that the next workday was three days off. As a young
investigator it had angered him that people could be hard to get on weekends.
It threatened to anger him now, but he sighed and told himself that
"T" through "Z" and all the psychopaths would just have to
wait.

There was nothing in
either file that suggested Eichrod or Pule were experienced as meat cutters,
packinghouse workers or embalmers, anyway. Hess hadn't expected anything.

He stared at Ronald Pule's
registry picture again, then compared it to the sketch. Promising. But his
arrest mugs didn't look like the sketch at all—his face was wider, his eyes
smaller, his tight mouth nothing like the full-lipped man that had stirred
Kamala Petersen's interest. Of course, Kamala had probably exaggerated his
virtues.