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.
Thirty-Eight
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.”