The Blue Hour (42 page)

But, as if she had read
his mind, Merci continued, "Look, I called that Lauren Diamond and said
I'd talk to her about the Purse Snatcher case. I even kind of apologized a
little. Anyway, she's down here at the Corrections building anyway for that
Colesceau thing, so she's squeezing us in. She's just

doing a
bullet
on our
progress, she said, not a news
feature."

"Good
work."

She looked down at him
with a gently bemused expression, but said nothing.

A moment later he pivoted
in his chair to see her before she was out of the pen, acting like he was
checking the wall clock.

Claycamp came through just
then, almost bumping into her. He said something to Merci, then at Hess he
flashed his right-hand fingers, three times.

Down to fifteen, thought
Hess: the panel vans with mismatched tires are going to be a bust.

He sold it.

He stole it.

He got new tires.

His girlfriend, wife,
sister, mother, company, church holds the paper on it. Run the women.

It cost Jerry Kirby
his life to find that out.

He dialed the Rose Garden
Home in Lake Elsinore and got a recording that said it was open during regular
business hours, but failed to say what those were. The voice was a man's, a
clear baritone that spoke of sympathy and efficiency. Hess entered the address,
the purchase order information and William Wayne's name to his blue notepad.

His fax machine came alive again. He read the
transmission upside down: a list of male buyers of blond, human hair wigs from
Lifestylers of Irvine:

Burt Coombs

Lance Jahrner

Roger Rampling

There were three
other buyers, the fax stated, who paid with cash.

He ran them past the other lists and came up with
nothing.

• • •

Bald Hess, trudging
the storefronts in his fedora, offered the color sketch of the Purse Snatcher
to hundreds of shoppers at all three target malls.

Most were
indifferent, hadn't heard that much about the Purse Snatcher. Some were
frightened of Hess and his pale, sharp, old face. The kids on summer break were
wiseasses as usual. And although Hess and Merci had tried four days ago to make
sure that every employee of every store in all three of the malls had a copy of
the drawing, it was made difficult by unresponsive personnel departments and
sluggish mall security companies. So he went to all the first floor stores
again. Merci took the ones on the second story. They divided up the big
department stores that took up both.

In an electronics
showroom he watched one of ten big screens with stereo that were tuned to CNB.
He saw the recorded news bulletin featuring Merci, recorded outside the
Sheriff's Department. She looked larger but quite beautiful on the TV and Hess
felt an irrational pride. She told Lauren Diamond that the Purse Snatcher
investigation was "progressing well on several fronts," but she
wasn't free to discuss details at this time. She couldn't predict an arrest.
She couldn't say when they expected an arrest. She did say they
expected
an arrest. Yes, Veronica
Stevens was considered a victim. And the two missing women whose purses had
been found along 1-5 were considered victims, too, with a possible sixth
unconfirmed at this time. Merci emphasized the word sixth. Hess could tell she
was getting angry—Merci could go from zero to pissed off in about three
seconds. She called the Purse Snatcher "an animal and a coward" for
the way he chose only unarmed, defenseless, unsuspecting women. Hess shook his
head when she said "creeps like this aren't usually too bright,"
because it was just the kind of statement that could motivate the Purse
Snatcher. Which was what Merci intended. Lauren Diamond nodded along intently,
like she was getting directions.

A moment later Lauren was
live outside the Corrections building, at a demonstration outside the Parole
Department. Colesceau's last injection, thought Hess. The crowd was big and the
stereo broadcast was faithful to its volume and emotion. It was like the
protesters were all around you, Hess thought. Like you were Colesceau. He
watched the strange, round little man make his way toward the crowd with a
resolve that Hess found admirable. He could tell by looking at him that
Colesceau was anxious, perhaps afraid. Hess recognized the parole agent,
Holtz, when he came through the door with an angry expression on his face and
tried to usher his charge through the crowd.

Lauren Diamond got a mike
into Colesceau's face but Holtz pushed it away. The front door of the building
shut with a flash of reflected sunlight and Colesceau was gone.

Hess watched for a while,
listened to the protesters, then went back out and gave away another fifty
sketches.

Nothing.

Half an hour later he was
back in the electronics store. On the ten identical screens Holtz was hustling
Colesceau out a back door of the building—Hess recognized it immediately
because he had used it himself. They'd ditched the demonstrators but Lauren
Diamond's CNB shooters were waiting. Colesceau turned to Holtz after he came
through the door. "What a fine idea, Al. Send me through the looking glass
again." He raised his eyebrows and smiled and nodded his head in an
exaggerated way.

"Something like
that," said Holtz, shrugging with fake modesty.

Colesceau complimenting
Holtz on his cleverness, thought Hess. Why bother? They must have used that
back door more than once before.

In Hess's mind, Colesceau
was like a shadow that never quite faded. Hess drew a deep breath into his lung
and a third and wondered if fixation was a sign of senescence. He was pretty
sure it was.

Hess found a
bench, took out the blowups and looked at them in the oddly bright but
unrevealing mall light.
Colesceau's
head, larger and less clear with die pixels loosened to expand the image,
looked neither more nor less convincing than before. The ambient light was
still poor Colesceau's TV screen still hogged the auto-focus. The shadows were
still large and indistinct. The crack in the blinds still framed the shot with
horizontal bands of black. What appeared above the back of the couch could be a
mannequin's head—something like Ed Izma would have in his closet.

Or, the head could be
Colesceau's as he watched TV.

Send me through the looking glass again.

Hess knew the hardest
time to trust your instincts was

when you needed them most.

• • •

They sat in the food
court, on purple plastic chairs around a green table. The foods of several
nations were offered from kitchens around the perimeter of the room, each
trying to lure customers with free samples and dazzlingly uniformed employees.
Hess was hungry and everything smelled good mixed together like it was.

Merci studied him.
"Do we need to get some things straight about last night?"

"If you want
to."

"Like
what?" She blushed.

He smiled.
"Well, that would be up to you."

"Okay. It happened.
It was what it was. It doesn't mean anything except what it means."

"A-okay,
Merci."

They said nothing for a
long moment. Hess committed himself to Nikki's Tandoori Express.

"I really do
like you, Hess."

"I absolutely
love you, Merci."

Her breath caught slightly.
"That's what I meant. I love you, too."

Hess smiled and
touched her hand.

She gulped, exhaled
loudly, then laughed. "Goddamned glad
that's
out of the way."

He laughed, too, and it
felt like something he hadn't done in centuries. "Thank you," he
said.

"And Hess? Live
forever. Direct orders. Please?"

"I'm going
to."

Hess looked at her and
thought again that she really did have a lovely face, just about any way you
cut it.

Merci, still flushed,
stirred her coffee. Hess could see her retreating from the moment, leaving well
enough alone, which was all right with him.

"Gilliam pulled
three latents off the purses—one

CalTrans sweeper and two CHP officers. He's working
the hair and fiber, but none of it's pointing at our creep. I'm disappointed
about Bart Young's list. All my charm and patience on Bart for nothing."

"There's the funeral
home out in Elsinore—the Rose Garden. Owner or manager is one William Wayne.
Elsinore puts us close to the Ortega, close to Janet Kane and Lael Jillson.
Close to Lee LaLonde, the security system override, the swap meet at the
marina. It's an outside shot, but I think we should look at it. I called—a
man's voice, just a recording."

Merci considered. "It
really frosted my butt when I had to admit we're not that close. On TV. We're
not that close to him yet, Hess. And I had to tell the county that. And six.
You know how hard it was to say he's killed six women on my watch?"

Hess nodded but said
nothing. He knew you weren't always close just because you thought you were
close, weren't always far just because it felt that way. Cases had their own
secret length, their own surprise endings. But you could only see them when
they were over.

"Tim, I called
Claycamp a few minutes ago and we're down to eight vans. I took four of them.
I'm starting to feel lucky again. Man, I can feel it," she said. Then, as
a consolation she tried to sound enthused about: "And after that, we can
hit the Rose Garden Home in Elsinore, if you want to."

Hess's heart sank a
little: his own partner was throwing him a bone. "All right."

"These unmatched
tires still smell right."

"That's good enough
for me, Merci. What if we run the women on the DMV list? The women with
late-model panel vans?"

Merci looked at him
sharply. "That's a lot of man-hours if you—"

"—No, just run the
names against the other lists. Maybe the Purse Snatcher's got someone who loves
him, too. Like Colesceau. A relative. A girlfriend. Maybe she's got money.
Maybe she's old and he can use her as a front and she doesn't know it It's
worth looking at."

She studied him for a
moment. She looked at the TV screen. She nodded and took the cell phone out of
her pocket. "I'll get Claycamp on that," she said, dialing.
"Maybe he can get someone to run the lists while we hit the last four vans
and Lake Elsinore."

It took them almost three
hours to find the vehicles, with all the traffic, driving from one end of the
smog-choked county to the other, wrecks all over the place. One of the vans
wasn't operable; one had been stolen the day before. The other two were family
vehicles. None of them was silver, or had mismatched tires or embalming
machines hooked up to generators in the back.

Midway through the
fruitless expedition they stopped to get coffee and for Hess to get his
radiation treatment.

He came out with a strange
feeling in his face. Like it was numb and cold, packed in mint. The back of his
hand hurt because the nurse took five stabs to find his "shy" vein
when she took blood. Dr. Ramsinghani said yesterday's white cell count was very
low, and he might need a transfusion if it hadn't come back up by today. He
was borderline anemic. They'd know tomorrow. Until then, get plenty of rest.
Eat well. Lots of water. Relaxation, meditation. Don't even consider going to
work.

To his authentic horror, Matamoros Colesceau glanced
at the TV in his living room to see his mother making her way through the crowd
toward his door.

He watched her barrel through the demonstrators. She
threw one arm up to cover her face and peered over it like a leper from a cave.
The mob parted for her.

MAKE
our NElGHborhood

SAFE for the CHlLdren!

She was dressed, as
always, in her long loose black skirt and black v-necked shawl. The lapels of
the shawl were embroidered with white crosses of her own design, but the effect
was far more pagan than Christian. From any kind of distance the crosses
looked like rows of teeth closing in on her throat. She was a strong woman,
thick as a lumberjack. Her face was round and white. Her mouth was open even
when she wasn't speaking, the heavy, dry lips parted over posts of misshapen
teeth that were separated by spaces suggesting violence. She wore the thick
oval sunglasses favored by dictators and a black knit babushka over her head.
Even to Colesceau she looked like the witch in some fairy tale illustrated with
woodcuts. He opened the door and let her in.

"Moros, I am
saddened and furious."

"I am, too,
Mother."

She looked at him. Even after
twenty-six years his first instinct on being close to his mother was to run.

She took his wrists and
pulled him down so he could kiss her. He did. He could smell the breath from
her never-closed mouth: a red American mouthwash she used by the gallon.