“A thief, not a carjacker?”
“Just a thief, so far.”
“No sex crimes?”
“None.”
Hess said nothing.
“He’s a little creep of a guy — perfect size for the backseat of a car. Five-eight, one-twenty, blond and blue. Twenty-five years old. Last scrape with Riverside Sheriffs was a year ago — questioned in a burglary of a plant where he worked. Nothing filed. They fired him.”
“What’s the plant make?”
“Irrigation supplies. Cloudburst is the name of the outfit. His jacket says he runs his own business now — retail sales at the weekly swap meet here at the lake.”
“Sales of what?”
“Doesn’t even say what. Anyway, that’s the last thing in his file. He’s got a barb-wire chain tattooed around his left biceps and knife puncture scar on his stomach. Grew up in Northern California, Oakland.”
They were past the city and the big houses now and the highway was dark and beginning to climb. The traffic was light now, still early for the commuters who worked in Riverside County.
“Who stabbed him?” Hess asked.
“His dad.”
When she looked at him he was already nodding, as if he’d expected the answer. Maybe he saw it ahead of time, Merci thought. She was about to ask him how he saw things in advance, but she didn’t and she didn’t know why.
She reached into the folder on the seat and handed Hess the artist’s sketch. Hess took it and angled the lamp on the dash over, clicking it on.
“It’s lifelike,” he said.
“Whose life is the question.”
“How come you waited so long to show it to me?”
“I not sure how solid it is. See, this Kamala Petersen lives on TV and fashion magazines. Everybody looks like somebody she’s seen before. I had to hypnotize her to cut through all her bullshit. And get a load of this — she’s seen the guy twice. Once the night Janet Kane disappeared, and once the week before, at a mall, walking around, checking things out.”
“Checking out Kamala?”
“Correct. She’d stuffed that down deep. That’s what we got through to.”
“This is valuable. This is good.”
“Unfortunately, I lost a court witness. Hess, I’m praying it’s worth the trade. I spent the last two days worrying about that sketch. Is it close? Is Kamala reliable? I’m not going to go public with something that’s way off — gets people confused. But I’m going to release it to Press Information when I go in today. I took the gamble, now I’m going to stick with it. I’m trusting me.”
Hess continued to stare down at the paper. Merci saw the light in his face, the uncluttered intensity of his gaze.
Hess, again: “LaLonde doesn’t fit the profile. Page says he’ll be a known sex offender.”
“So. What’s a profile really mean anyway?” she asked.
“Dalton’s good. What do you think of them?”
“I’ve only had first-hand experience with two. One was right on, the other was pretty far off. Dalton did the one that was off. The Bureau did the one that worked. In general, I prefer evidence that’s actual evidence. I don’t like trying to figure out if something applies or not.”
“Well, we’d all take a blood sample or a fingerprint over a piece of speculative thinking.”
“You asked what I thought.”
No reply. She guided the Impala up the grade and through the swerving turns of the Ortega. She thought of all the wrecks on this highway, a bloody stretch of road if there ever was one. A prime dump site, too — the Purse Snatcher wasn’t the first creep to bring his victims out here. She looked out at the sycamores now just barely visible on the hillsides, the way their branches jagged out like dislocated arms and gave the trees a look of eternal agony.
They were near the top of the grade now and Merci could see the oaks in profile against the blue-black sky.
“I always thought this was a spooky old highway,” she said.
She looked at his face in the rearview again and thought it looked pale, but maybe it was just the parsimonious light offered by the east. He looked old and tired, but that’s exactly what he was. She wondered what it felt like to sit there with cancer growing in your lung, watching the sky get light. She had no idea because she wasn’t used to figuring what other people were thinking. Hess was right about that. So she tried to feel what he might feel, pretending she had the cancer too and she was heading down into Lake Elsinore to interview a speed freak who might be a murderer. But it was hard to feel what Hess felt because what she felt was already there. It was right in the way. So she sent her thoughts out around her own feelings, like birds flying around trees.
What she came up with was, if she was in the same position, every waking moment would scare the living piss out of her.
“Me too,” he said. “A spooky old highway.”
Sixteen
The sun was low over the hills when they dropped down into Lake Elsinore. The water was plated in bronze. Merci gave Hess the paper with the address on it and Hess got the map out of the console.
“Take Main south to Pine,” he said. “East to Lakeview.”
At the corner was the entrance to Elsinore Shores trailer park. Merci sized up the place as she made the turn: old trailers, failed dreams and broken lives. It was the kind of place she used to see as a kid and feel afraid that was where she’d end up.
Until she realized, many years later, how powerful she was, how she could make things go the way she wanted simply by using her will. Will. She had created that power herself, bit by bit and over time, but it still astonished her to know how large it was. Once she had understood it, she knew she’d never end up in a spot like this. But it still made her think of all the people who didn’t have the juice to get what they needed out of the world. A lot of them ended up taking it away from someone else and those were the kind of people she threw in jail, which is where they belonged.
Hess aimed a thick finger to the right. “That’s his building, there. He must live in his shop.”
She slowed and studied the little complex as she drove past. Two long cinder-block buildings faced each other across a concrete alleyway. The buildings were divided into workshops. Their doors were all the same aqua blue color, the kind that slide up, wide and high enough to get a small truck in or out.
She came back around and parked a block short of the entrance. She took the H&K nine off the seat and holstered it.
The blue door to Lee LaLonde’s space 12 was closed all the way down. Merci glanced at Hess, then rapped the backs of her knuckles against the metal. She waited a moment and did it again, harder.
“Second,” said a thin voice. “Comin’. Who is it?”
“Deputies Rayborn and Hess. Open the door, Lee.”
“All right.”
“You alone in there?”
“Yeah. Second. The runner on the door’s rusty.”
There was a moment of quiet, but none of the drug addict’s usual scuffle to hide stash, Merci thought. Nowhere for him to go but out the window. Then the clang of metal on metal inside. A padlock. The door began its screeching way up. Merci got her badge holder ready in her left hand and rested the other inside her jacket, on the butt of the nine.
LaLonde manifested, bottom to top. Bare white feet. Baggy, dirty jeans slung low enough to fall off. The bunched elastic of boxer shorts sprouted just above the waistband. Flat stomach with a knife scar on it, narrow chest, thin arms. His face was odd but not particularly unpleasant. His hair long, blond, wavy.
She badged him quickly. “Step back from the door, please. Now.”