He smiled faintly and tapped the photocopies with his knuckles. The skin across the bone felt like it leaped into flames and Hess actually looked down at his hand.
She picked up one of the papers, stripped off the plastic string and looked down at the front page.
Hess started in on the “t’s.”
Tabling. Tanaha. Tenerife.
No. No. No.
For just a second he was back inside that big churning cathedral of water at the Wedge, gliding through it on his palms like a waterbug while the tonnage roared over. Then he had Barbara over the dryer with her skirt up in the laundry room of their first apartment with the windows fogged from humidity while outside it poured rain at 3 A.M., the moment being one of those delicious chances neither one of them could pass up for the first five years they knew each other.
“What?” asked Merci.
He looked up from the Sex Offenders Registry.
“You groaned,” she said.
“Oh. Thinking about dinner.”
“I thought chemo and radiation killed the appetite.”
“It was supposed to make my hair fall out, too. I’m really not that hungry.”
“But hungry enough to groan? Maybe you should eat.”
It didn’t take long to finish the regular volumes, because the last six letters of the language don’t begin many names. The registry of recently released mental patients with histories of sex offenses was fairly brief.
None of them looked even generally similar to Merci’s drawing. Hess thought that one had the weepy dark eyes that Kamala had described, the look of remorse, but that was a real long shot. Nothing else about him seemed right.
“Colesceau,” he said. “Matamoros Colesceau.”
Rayborn didn’t look up. “No. He likes older women, the real helpless ones. The eyes are interesting, but there’s no other facial similarities I can see. Plus, he’s castrated.”
“Castrated?”
“Yeah, snipped him under AB 3339, Chapter 596. He won’t be hard to keep track of, either,” said Merci. When Hess looked over she was standing by his desk. She was smiling. She set a paper down in front of him.
There was this Colesceau fellow, front page above the fold, looking not much like he did in the mug, his hair thinner and shorter, his face wider and less defined. He was wearing a short-sleeve shirt with his name over the pocket. It appeared that he was leaving a vehicle and caught by surprise. His hand was on its way up — to cover his face, Hess figured — and it made him look pathetic. Hess was disappointed, because he still didn’t look anything like Kamala Petersen’s mystery man. Eyes, maybe. But with a wig and a mustache... Well, with a wig and mustache a lot of guys could look like Kamala’s weepy boulevardier — blonds, redheads or the completely bald, for that matter.
“We’ll know every move he makes now,” Merci said. “The crazy, nutless sonofabitch. Actually, they leave the nuts on. And the effects of the hormone wear off when they stop shooting him with it, so the whole punishment is only temporary.”
Hess read the headline:
While Hess read the article he was aware of Merci dialing out on the desk phone. He read that Colesceau would satisfy the terms of his parole the following Wednesday, at which time his chemical castration would end. The SONAR team had decided to notify his neighbors, thus the turmoil and the article. The neighbors were already protesting.
Kamala, this is Merci over at...
He read Sheriff Department spokesman Wallace Houston’s statement that the sheriffs “didn’t reveal this felon’s whereabouts in order to run him out of town. It was a matter of protecting the public safety. We believe people should know who he is and what he’s done, but we want them, basically, to leave the man alone.”
Fat chance of that, Wally, thought Hess. Wally the Weasel. There was a picture of protest organizer Trudy Powers. She was blond and quite beautiful. The sign she held said RAPISTS MAKE BAD NEIGHBORS.
... wanted to know if the picture in today’s Times resembles the man you saw at the mall...
Hess read that the soon-to-be-free Colesceau had a full-time job in Costa Mesa and had lived in the apartment at 12 Meadowlark for all of his three years since release from Atascadero. He’d volunteered for the Depo-Provera treatment — one of only twelve mental patients included in the protocol. He was injected and interviewed every week. Depo-Provera was the brand name for the female hormone medroxyprogesterone acetate, which causes breast enlargement, hair loss and genital shrinkage when taken by males.
Then, a week before completing his sentence we rat him out to his neighbors, Hess thought. I thought I had problems.
... so, what are you saying, Kamala, that it could be him, but probably not? Is that what you’re saying?
Hess read that Romanian-born Colesceau had been arrested and prosecuted in Los Angeles County. It wasn’t uncommon to release sex offenders into different jurisdictions because of the controversy created if they were discovered. He made a note to get the jacket from Sex Crimes and see if this pudgy, chemically castrated man had a background involving hunting, meatpacking or embalming.
... realize that a person can add a mustache or change clothes any time he wants...
In fact, he’d have trudged over to Records right then and asked the clerk for Colesceau’s file but they were closed by now. Hess suddenly felt as if he was part of the chair he sat on. Like he’d painlessly melted to it and couldn’t get out. Stuck. He sat back and crossed his hands behind his head to mask the dizziness. Knuckles on fire again, dipped in acid.
... and we’ll run two others past you. Sunday morning is good for me...
Hess wondered if it was the radiation that had gotten him feeling so weird. He wasn’t supposed to feel the damage until later.
“Kamala doesn’t think so,” said Merci. “She saw the paper. A whole different look. She pointed out that her man was wearing fashionable-looking clothes, which tells you something about Kamala. Anyway, she says no to this guy. We’ll show her Eichrod and Pule on Sunday morning.”
He was aware of her looking at him, setting back the phone. She stared at him frankly now, nothing covert about it. Nothing like her glances in the rearview on their way to Elsinore.
“Hess, what do you think about when you stare at nothing?”
He shrugged. He felt sick now, all the way down to the marrow of his bones, which was where, the doctors had told him, the chemotherapy was most damaging. Because bone marrow made white blood cells. And if you interfered with that production your cell count could drop. You could become anemic. You could die from that. Or from a thousand diseases that were easy to catch when your white cells got low. That’s why they did the blood work once a week, to keep the chemicals from doing to you certainly what the cancer only might accomplish.
“Is that when you’re seeing things? Like the women hanging from the tree before you saw the rope marks on the branch?”
“Well, no.”
“I still want to know how you...”
She either didn’t finish or he didn’t hear it. There was a big silver passenger train bellowing through his eardrums now. He could feel the tracks shaking in the bones of his legs. Then a blast of hot steam against his face. Everything so goddamned loud.
Then quiet.
His heart was racing and his face was still hot and when he looked at Merci she was outlined in shimmering red.
“You put everything out of your head, first,” he said.
“You all right?”
“You forget what you think you know. All your assumptions. They get in the way.”