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“Which seat?” asked Merci.

“The one behind the driver.”

“I think he waits there.”

“That’s very interesting. Now, on the right-hand scope is a hair that very likely came from the same person as the hair I just showed you. We pulled it from the Kane car yesterday morning. It was caught up in a mesh netting attached to the back of the driver’s seat. You know, one of those things to secure personal items in a car — maps, tissue, maybe a flashlight or magazines for a long trip. This certainly suggests that the hair’s owner was behind the front seat himself. Maybe even crouching down at some point, resting his head against the back of the seat and the mesh. Waiting for her? Who knows? You both do know that match is a bad word in hair analysis — we can’t say it in court — but what we have here is as close to a match as two hairs are likely to come.”

“I smell the creep,” said Merci.

“There’s more,” said Gilliam.

He led them around the microscope stations to a counter that ran along the wall. Hess followed. Sunlight came through the narrow vertical slots of the windows. The slots had always made him think of hidden archers. The heavy book had left a scalding outline on his thighs.

Gilliam brought a small plastic box from one drawer of an old steel tool chest that sat on the counter. He opened it, snugged the lid onto the bottom and handed it to Hess.

The old man looked down, then reached in with a thick fingertip and poked the item in question. It was a standard 20-amp automotive fuse, the kind you’d find by the dozen under any dashboard. The color of the glass was good and Hess could see no break in the filament inside.

“I already checked, and it’s good,” said Gilliam. “More to the point, there’s no fuse like it used anywhere in Janet Kane’s BMW. The car is only seven months old, so all the German-made factory fuses are still in it. They’re a different design. This one must have come from somewhere else, been intended for use somewhere else. Some other car. Some other piece of equipment. I don’t know. But I’d like to know what it was doing in Janet Kane’s car.”

Rayborn asked him exactly where they’d found it and Hess asked if they’d printed it, at the same time.

Gilliam looked from one to the other.

“Behind the driver’s seat. Sitting right in the middle of the floor. And yes, Tim, there was a print on the glass of it. Just a partial but we’ve got some ridge endings and bifurcations to work with. I eliminated Janet Kane myself. I’ve made up an AHS card for CAL–ID and WIN, but the specifying parameters will be up to you two. If he’s got a thumb on file, we’ve got a shot at him.”

“Write up the parameters, Tim,” said Merci.

“I want to talk to Dalton Page first. And to an old rapist I busted. They know what we’re looking for.”

Merci ignored him, looking instead at Gilliam with what Hess was beginning to think of as her customary suspicion. “Anything else, Mr. Gilliam?”

“That’s the bulk of it.”

“Good work.” Then she turned her dark, adamant eyes on Hess. “Tim, go see your profiler and your rapist now. Because I want those parameters ready by the end of the workday and I want those prints on their way.”

“You’ll have them. I can talk to Dalton alone. But I think you should see the creep with me.”

“I’ll consider it.”

Hess turned and started across the room. He heard the conversation without seeing it and wondered if that’s how it was when you were dead, hearing things without seeing them, aware of a world going on without you. He looked back at them with something like longing.

“What about my oak branches, Mr. Gilliam?” asked Merci. “I sawed hard to get them. Outside cut first.”

She looked over at him with a humored expression and Hess realized she’d cut the branch the hard way.

“Oh, standard nylon rope, Sergeant. Safety orange in color — something you might find in a camping or hunting or surplus store. Judging from the depth of the notches and the strands that wore through and stayed for us to see, it was bearing some weight. The same rope — or very similar — used on each tree.”

Eleven

Dr. Dalton Page asked Hess to meet him at his home. They had talked there, on his patio, several times over the years. The house was up on Harbor Ridge in Newport, an older tract in the city, where rambling ranch-style homes sat on terraces in the hills with views of the ocean. If you stood on the beach at sunset and looked up at them, a hillside of orange reflections looked back at you.

Driving out Hess recalled that Page had bought the place twenty years ago, anticipating retirement from the faculty of Johns Hopkins medical school. Hess had asked his help the first summer Page came to vacation in California, and they had kept in touch after that. Friends at the FBI had recommended Page as one of the best forensic psychiatrists in the country. He lectured at the Bureau regularly and had testified often as an expert witness.

Hess had helped organize a little party — mostly law enforcement and DA officers — to welcome Dalton and Wynn Page to Orange County. That was a decade ago, when the doctor retired and they moved here year round. Wynn had grown up in Newport and Hess remembered her seeming happy to be back home. Page himself had been wry about living in la-la land, but he had quite a suntan. After that the Pages had made little effort to include Hess in their social world, but he knew from department talk that they kept an extremely busy, bicoastal lecture and appearance schedule. Page had written a bestseller about criminal personality types.

The back patio was bathed in sunshine and looked out over the bright blue Pacific. Dr. Page sat at a glass table in the perforated shade of a lattice awning. Mandevilla vines snaked their way through the lattice and the pink blooms hung in the air.

He was wearing tennis whites and a white vest, which set off the darkness of his skin. His face was taut from surgery. There was a box of small weights and a jump rope sitting off under a Norfolk Island pine. Hess shook his hand and his grip was strong and dry.

Wynn brought them iced tea and set her hand on Hess’s shoulder as she poured his.

“Carry on, crimebusters,” she said, then headed back into the darkness of the house.

Not for the first time in his life Hess wished he was still married to his first wife, Barbara. It was a hypothetical longing based on what he thought he saw in some long marriages: trust, comfort, mutual respect. Two hearts seemed to beat slower than one. Couples like the Pages made him feel it. He guessed if he was still married to Barbara he’d have a lot less to worry about. He wouldn’t be broke, for one thing. Children would have given him a firmer grip on the future. A grip, he just now realized, that would have been easier to relinquish when it was time.

Beat this tumor and you’ve got ten more years, he thought, possibly fifteen. You can turn around a lot of things with that much time.

“The Ortega sites, Tim?”

“I brought the files. We don’t have a lot to go on, but we’ve got a partial print. If you and I can get the parameters right we might get lucky with it. If not, we’ll wait until he does it again and hope he gets careless.”