She looked at him. “But if he’s doing what we think he’s doing, he learned the skills somewhere.”
“I wish we could get a list of all the people who took mortuary science and flunked out. But junior colleges don’t keep records of who flunks, drops or fades out. They’re too big, too busy, too disorganized.”
Hess noted a woman across the aisle looking his way, then quickly somewhere eke.
“Well, dream on, Hess. I’m starting to think he just keeps them in the freezer, or down in the basement. Here, I’m going to try that supply guy again.”
Drascia, Dumont, Eberle, Eccle, Edmondson...
She pulled out the phone from the seat back in front of her and read the directions. Hess shook his head, blinked, tried to concentrate on copies of the mug shots. The Licensing Board had let them use a good-quality copier/enlarger, but the reproductions were one more step removed from reality. And when you figured a guy might be wearing a wig and fake mustaches it took the sharpness out of your eye. It could be just about any of them. The sky was the limit.
“Hi, Mr. Young, this is Sergeant Rayborn again, from the Orange County Sheriffs? Look, I really want to apologize for what I said earlier — I’m just really involved in this case, the sheriff is leaning on me hard, my partner’s screaming at me all the time, I’m at thirty-three thousand feet with no leg room and I’m just... frustrated.”
She looked at Hess with an exaggerated grin. She was nodding and holding up her free hand, yapping with her fingers and thumb.
“I know... I really do understand. It’s just that these women — well, he got another one Saturday night. She was nineteen years old and living with her mom and just a heck of a great gal from what I’ve gathered. Her name was Ronnie. I never met her. In fact, all I ever saw of her was a couple of pictures and a pile of her intestines and organs on the hood of her car... I’m serious, that’s what this guy’s doing. Plus, we’ve got two more assumed victims from a couple of years ago, possibly three. Uh-huh, yeah... well, sure, I can wait.”
Hess looked out the window. Below was a vivid grid of green and yellow stretching all the way to the tan hills in the east. Clouds whisked by, torn by the jet. He watched the engine housing vibrate.Colesceau came out of his apartment Saturday at six and nine, or nine-thirty. Gilliam said the heart in the purse stopped beating between 7 and 11 P.M. Indications are she was abducted after work. But what if he got her later? After the snooping photographer took his last shot? What if Hjorth or Gilliam are both off a half hour each way? That would give Colesceau an hour and a half to do what he did to Ronnie Stevens. Possible. Not probable... How would he get out of the apartment without anyone seeing?
No Pule... no Eichrod...
He closed his eyes and saw the layout of the place again: the living room, kitchen and downstairs bath; the upstairs bedrooms and bathroom. Colesceau’s place was an end unit, so there were downstairs windows on the south wall, which was the kitchen. Ditto the west, which faced the street. Hess remembered the kitchen: a small cooking area and an alcove with a dinette in it, pushed up near the windows. Salt and pepper shakers on the dinette table, a stack of newspapers. He pictured the alcove and remembered green outside, with some color in it — bougainvillea maybe. Could you see the kitchen windows from the street, at night?
But how does he get the truck past the crowd without them knowing? It’s impossible. Then... another vehicle. Out of the apartment, on foot to another car... silver van, mismatched tires... no...
He made a note to canvas Colesceau’s neighborhood for the silver van, check Colesceau’s DMV records for a second vehicle registration, ditto his employers at Pratt Automotive — maybe they loaned him a vehicle to get him through the hard times. Also, get back to the apartment for a look at the south window by the kitchen, and talk to more of the neighbors. He wondered if there was any space under the structure, a crawl area for electrical conduit or vents, something he could wriggle into and out of without being seen.
Hess pondered the time line and it held up: Colesceau had been released from Atascadero on the castration protocol three years ago. Six months later, the first woman disappeared.
“—Okay. All right. Well, I sure thank you, Mr. Young. Bart, I mean. You’re doing the right thing.”
Merci hung up and looked at Hess. “I did it. Young’s going to fox us the customer list of all the embalming machines sold in Southern California in the last two years. By noon tomorrow.”
Hess could see the mixture of pride and surprise in Merci Rayborn’s face.
“Nice work.”
“It was hard. I feel lucky now. See what’s popped at headquarters.”
So she called her work phone for messages. Hess watched her shrug, then hang up.
“Well?”
“Nothing. But the Western Region rep for Bianchi sent me a pigskin shoulder rig. Free for ‘select law enforcement individuals.’ You know, the cops on the beat see I’m using a Bianchi, then make head of homicide by forty, they all buy one, too.”
“I’d rush right out myself.”
“I should have bought a Bianchi in the first place, because the snap on this one keeps popping off. I enjoy talking about weapons and gear. Do you?”
Thirty-One
The developed exposures from Rick Hjorth’s film were on Hess’s desk when he got back that evening. They were printed four by six and most of them were in focus. The ones taken after dark weren’t very good because the automatic flash was too weak for much distance. Hess was pleased that Hjorth had used the date/time feature on the camera, which marked each print in the upper right comer. He slid the pictures of him and Merci into his coat pocket.
Hess looked at the image of Colesceau’s apartment with the mob outside, picket signs and candles, even though it was still daylight — 5:01 P.M., August 14. Saturday. And Colesceau looking through the cracked door — 6:11 P.M. Colesceau on his porch — 6:12 P.M. Then Colesceau and the pretty neighbor, Trudy, apparently exchanging something near his porch — 6:14 P.M. A close-up of Trudy Powers after, smiling dreamily into Rick Hjorth’s lens — 6:22 P.M. Next, a picture of a young man holding a sign that said NEXT TIME CUT THE DAMNED THINGS OFF and flipping off the photographer while he smiled at the camera — 6:25 P.M.
And so on.
“Anything good?” Merci called over. She was at her desk with the phone pressed to one ear and a notepad open in front of her. Hess knew she was hassling Bart Young of the Embalming Supply Company once again, trying to get him to hurry the customer list. Hess had to hand it to her: she was obsessive enough to be a good investigator someday. Head of homicide? Maybe. Sheriff by fifty-eight? We’ll see, he thought. On the plus side, she’s got twenty-five years to figure it out.
“Nothing yet,” he called back.
Next time cut the damned things off.
He looked at the picture of the smiling flipper-offer, then sat back. It helped to laugh when you could, but sometimes there wasn’t a chuckle anywhere in your heart.
Hess looked out at the near-empty investigations room — it was almost seven o’clock — and wondered about the behavior of his own species. He was done being shocked by it at twenty-two. He was finished being disgusted by it at thirty. It was too grim and hopeless to be amusing and too amusing to be grim and hopeless. It made him want to be somewhere people didn’t murder and gut one another for thrills, where you didn’t carry around a sign calling for your neighbor’s nuts on a platter, where people had other things to do than stand around taking pictures of each other. Hess had spent too many of his sixty-seven years contemplating the grimace of his race, and he knew it. You could end up looking just like it. That was why when he made love to a woman he always made it last as long as he could because when he was doing that he wasn’t quite himself anymore, he was just a little better, a notch above the bullshit, temporarily upgraded.