“I don’t care about my instincts. I care about getting this guy before he takes another girl.”
“That’s why we need to run with what we’ve got. The artist’s sketch with the hair is the one that’s popping for us, Hess. Kamala guided it, LaLonde endorsed it, the bus driver and store clerk recognized it. Sure, it could be a wig, but what are the chances? Nobody sees him do what he does, right? So why go to all that trouble, parade around in a well-lit mall with somebody else’s hair on? It’s real. It’s his. We’re looking for a long-haired, blond, beach-god type. A guy good-looking enough to catch Kamala Petersen’s eye. So we’ve got to get the sketch out there more, get it seen. Maybe do a billboard like we did on that Horridus guy last year. Maybe get Lauren Diamond to put it on the TV more. Maybe circulate them by hand at the malls. We could get some rookies or cadets to do the canvas. Hell, we could do it ourselves if Brighton won’t authorize the manpower, which he probably won’t.”
He nodded, wishing he could get his head clear. It was harder to keep everything straight later in the night. He just wanted things to add up. He listened to his voice.
“We’ve got the graduates of the Cypress College program,” he said. “We’ve got all the licensed undertakers in Southern California. We’ve got 224 owners of panel vans. We’ve got a mailing list from Arnie’s Outdoors — the biggest hunting/fishing chain in the county. We need the connection, Merci. If we could just find one name on two lists we’d be onto something. Until then, things are spreading, getting bigger but not tighter.”
“And don’t forget the embalming machine purchasers, as of tomorrow morning.”
In fact, he had forgotten them.
“Right, and them.”
“How many vans left?”
“We’d done ninety-four when I talked to Claycamp this evening. The night shift is going to be real slow after what just happened. But they ought to make that one twenty or thirty by morning. Those tires are our best physical evidence. If we find the van, we find the Purse Snatcher. When we’re down to ten, I’d say start in on the ones registered to females, maybe do the commercial ones.”
“What about road blocks or checkpoints?”
Hess was positive that he had covered this angle, but it took him just a second to recall how. When he did, he felt more relieved than he should have.
“I did a radius plot from the abduction sites to the dump sites, tried to narrow down his home base. But it didn’t tell me much. The Ortega screws up the parameters because it’s the only way to get to where Jillson and Kane were. That means his point of departure could be anywhere this side of the mountains. What I’m saying is, we’d need checkpoints all over the county for a decent shot at intercepting that van.”
“Brighton won’t approve that kind of manpower. Not on one of my cases, he won’t.”
Hess suspected she was right, but said nothing. He could feel his blood boiling again.
“Say it, Hess, I don’t care.”
“He’s prepared to see you fail,” he answered.
“You going to help me do that? Or just submit the paperwork when it happens?”
“Neither, I hope.”
“I’m just a goddamned woman, not the antichrist. I don’t see what makes all you guys so afraid.”
Hess looked out the window, felt his vision blurring.
“Well, what is it, Hess? How come we make you guys so afraid?”
“We’re old.”
“No, it’s more than that. It’s because we’re women.”
“We think you want to bottle our seed and kill us all.”
She laughed. “Sounds good to me.”
“Then there you have it.”
“I wasn’t serious. But, to be serious, why? Why would we want to do that?”
“Maybe that’s what we’d do if we were you.”
“No, you like our bodies too much. Just the pleasure of them.”
“You’re right. What we’re afraid of is that you’d run the world in your favor if you could. I mean, we run it in ours.”
“You’re right, we would. I would, anyway.”
“Well, Brighton knows that.”
Merci was quiet for a long while then, and Hess was aware of her looking out the window toward Colesceau’s apartment. A couple of new faces arrived by car for the vigil — a young couple with a cooler and an electric lantern. The CNB news crew shot video of the arriving couple, then turned their lenses toward 12 Meadowlark.
Hess watched as two of the protesters stood and walked off with their arms around each other. The guy carried his sign at his side, no audience for him now. A middle-aged couple with a conscience and an evening to kill, Hess thought. Probably protested the war in college for reasons similar. He could hear their voices in the warm night but not their words. It was nice to see that it wasn’t all battlefield between human beings, that a man and a woman could choose to be together and make a go of it.
But his mind eddied back to the task at hand and the task lay in darker waters.
“I think he’s saving them, customizing them. Their bodies. Because, like you said, there’s pleasure in them. But he’s afraid of the life inside them. He’s afraid you’re going to bottle his seed and kill him. That’s why I thought Colesceau was a good bet, at first. The physical evidence? Wrong. The situation he lives in? Wrong, too. I know that. But I felt something I didn’t understand, in there, with him. I wish I could know what it was. We’re looking for a guy whose insides are a lot like Colesceau’s. I mean, imagine what comes into his nightmares after he’s injected with female hormone, once a week. Can you imagine what he dreams?”
“No. Can you?”
“I’ve tried. And it keeps coming back, fury.”
“Keep talking.”
“One, we know he translates rage into lust. He’s probably done it all his life, or most of his life. He rapes. Two, rage equals erection equals blunt instrument that gives pleasure to him and pain to another.”
“Okay.”
“So when he gets caught and castrated, we’re taking away his expression of those things — rage and lust. But we’re not taking away the basic feelings themselves. Rage now equals no erection, no blunt instrument, no pleasure to himself, no pain to another.”
He watched her consider. “He needs new ways to express.”
“I assumed so at first. But what if he just wants the old ways back? And he can’t have them right now. All he can have now is something... ready. So, why not just kill them and keep them for the day when he’s ready to express the lust again?”
“Okay. It makes sense.” Hess caught an odd tone in her voice, like she was trying to hurry him past this part of things.
“Now, in those pictures, the back of Colesceau’s head doesn’t convince me,” he said. “I want Gilliam to enhance them for us. And I think we should bring him in and hit him hard. Tell him it’s his print on the fuse. Line the purses up right where he can see them. Tell him we’ve got a witness. Really get inside his head and throw knives.”
She was quiet again, then her voice seemed to come from for away, soft but urgent.
She held his sleeve, and what she said surprised him. “Tim, it isn’t him. We’ve got photographs of him watching TV when it happened. We’ve got dozens of witnesses. We’ve got videotape. He can’t get out of there without the world knowing it. You know? Tim? It... isn’t... him.”
She looked at him and he saw the disappointment in her face. He also saw some of the devastation that had filled her expression as she pumped away on the deceased young Jerry Kirby. But this was different. Back in the garage in El Modena there was outrage and fury in her, too. Now, the outrage and fury were gone. And in their place was a sympathy that Hess found intolerable because he knew he was the target. She turned away and looked out the window toward the crowd. Hess could see her eyes in profile, focused down toward the steering wheel.