Hess closed the book and tapped his thick fingers on the leather cover. His desire for a cigarette was suddenly strong, but he’d had to stop them when they took out the upper two-thirds of his lung. The first two weeks without the smokes had been almost intolerable but he’d been pretty much alone so he hadn’t taken it out on anyone. Every time he wanted a smoke he touched the scar running from the back of his shoulder to the bottom of his ribs. Fifty years of cigarettes were enough — Hess had started when he was fifteen because his older brothers did. He knew that if he’d stopped thirty years ago it might have saved him some considerable pain and maybe some years of life, but there was no profit in this knowledge, no one to pass it along to.
Hess felt the scar through his shirt and looked at Lael Jillson’s picture in front of him. He saw her hanging upside down from a rope slung over the branch of the Ortega oak. He saw the slow twist of her body. At first her arms dangled down, then he saw them tied up behind the small of her back. He saw the blood running from her neck and pooling on the ground. Hess wondered if they had been chosen with their hair up to save someone the trouble of doing it himself. No, he wanted these particular women more than that He wanted them very badly. The hair up meant something else. Hess saw a similar scene with Janet Kane. He saw the scenes again.
Terrible sights. Hess had learned to forgive himself for them. Sometimes it made him sad to know he was like this. It was part of what made him good at what he did — the detective’s version of the athlete’s positive imaging. But he never got to see home runs or three-pointers. And he could never unimagine what he saw. The memory was part of the price he paid for a skill he had purposefully worked to develop, a useful part of his portfolio.
In the larger sense Hess believed that most of life’s givens were just that — given. He had yet to meet a man who had created himself, and this is why he thought he understood the nature of evil.
Robbie showed Hess into his bedroom. It was half the upper floor, with magnificent views to the west and south. The wall opposite the windows was mirrored glass, which offered the same view, inverted. Hess saw Catalina Island far offshore caught on Robbie Jillson’s wall.
“You want to know her, don’t you?” asked Robbie. “But I can’t contain her for you. I can’t, like, present her in a few words or with a few pictures and give you an idea of what she is.”
Is, thought Hess: her husband still hasn’t accepted it. Hess supposed that if he were in Robbie Jillson’s position he wouldn’t either. He would love to be wrong about her and Janet Kane.
They stood outside on a deck off the bedroom. Hess felt the afternoon breeze in his bones.
“I’m trying to see how your wife’s life might overlap with the Laguna woman. Janet Kane. Why they were chosen.”
“It’s because they’re beautiful.”
“How, specifically?”
“Her face. Her posture.”
“What about insider?”
“Her happiness. She... was a happy person, and it showed. She was a happy woman, Lieutenant. I mean I was really lucky. She was like that when I met her. It’s just the way she... was. She loved her life, and if you were around her it made you appreciate your life, too. She always knew it would end, though. She wasn’t shallow or stupid. But she wasn’t morbid and she wasn’t cynical and she didn’t look for the dark side of things. If there was something good or joyful to be found, she’d find it.”
Hess thought about this. He watched Robbie looking out the window. Six months and the man still couldn’t decide whether to speak of his wife in the past or present tense. It was the uncertainty that broke people down, he thought, and he’d seen it happen a lot. When you had a body you had the end, and people could work with endings. But without a body all you have is a mystery that eats the soul like acid.
Jillson turned and looked at Hess. The expression on his face didn’t match the face — it was like a guy in a surfboard ad ready to shoot somebody.
“I smelled him.”
Hess’s heart seemed to speed up a beat.
“I didn’t tell the other cops because the other cops didn’t ask. Some guy named Kemp? He’s the reason some people hate cops. Anyway, Lael disappeared on a Thursday night. Friday morning her car was found and towed I was called to get it out of hock. When I let myself in to drive it away, I could smell him.”
“And?”
“Faint. Cologne or aftershave maybe. Real faint. But I smelled him. If I ever see him I’ll kill him.”
Hess nodded. There wasn’t much you could say to that, except to be practical. “I’d like to, too. But don’t. You wouldn’t like prison very much.”
“It would be worth it, just to punch a few holes in his face with my magnum.”
“It’s a better thing to dream about than do.”
Hess looked out to the west. There were other mansions, acres of rolling yellow foothills, clean asphalt roads and the sharp blue Pacific rising up to the sky. Robbie was still stuck in paradise, his Eve departed.
Hess could say it wasn’t fair but he’d already said it a million times in his life. In spite of its truth, the idea counted far less than it should.
Eight
Colesceau sat on his stool behind the counter and looked out the dusty window. He read the words 
off the glass for the billionth time in his life and looked at his watch. Twenty minutes. He could hear Pratt and Garry out back with the Shelby Cobra, and the occasional cackle of Pratt’s wife, Lydia. Every day, half an hour before closing they’d start drinking beer and Colesceau would hear the rising pitch of their conversation punctuated by the cchht, cchht, cchht of the cans popping open. All Pratt and Garry talked about was cars and the body parts of women.
His job was to count and bag the money at closing, so he counted and bagged it. There was $14 in cash and $220 in checks. He noted the amounts and check numbers on the deposit slip and added the subtotals twice before writing down the total.
“Hey, hey, Matty.”
It was Lydia, sneaking up behind him again, hanging her hand over his shoulder like they were on the same football team or something. She took liberties with his first name, which he had clearly explained was Matamoros or Moros for short. But Lydia was always playing with words and had called him Matamata for a while. According to a library encyclopedia that Colesceau had consulted, the matamata was a “grotesque” river turtle of South America that caught prey by distending its huge lower jaw and sucking unwary animals down its gullet along with the water. He had asked her not to call him that any longer and she had not.
“How did your interview go?”
“Very well.”
“They’re not going to rat you out to your neighbors, are they?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well,” she said, hand resting on his shoulder again, “I hope they don’t. It’s hard enough to get on in this life without the cops stirring up the water every place a man tries to go.”
He wondered if this water metaphor was a veiled reference to the grotesque matamata, but with Lydia you couldn’t say for sure. “I hope for the best.”
“You’re an optimist. I admire that. You carry the weight for yourself. You’re the only one around here isn’t always complaining.”
“You don’t.”
She rolled her eyes and shook her head. “I can keep my own counsel.”
With Lydia, it was always between you and her. She would be vague and playful, then pointed and prying, all in one minute. But she had never betrayed a confidence to her husband or Garry, at least Colesceau had never caught her at it She had this way of pairing off, of making you think that somehow she was in this with you.