The color returned to his face. Hess didn’t notice it by the degrees by which it surely had come, but rather he saw it all at once: the gray skin turned natural again, the stony complexion become flushed and natural, the lips swelling with color. It was like a switch had been thrown.
“Oh,” said Bonnie. “There we are.” She worked the hollows of his cheeks and his temples, his forehead and chin, under the eyes, his ears and nose and mouth. Then down the neck to the shoulders and arms and chest.
Hess stared. He was suddenly dizzy. It was easy to see Janet Kane or Lael Jillson in front of him now, easy to imagine that Bonnie was the Purse Snatcher and a beautiful young woman was coming to life beneath his patient and expert hands. Then Hess blinked, and the body before him was simply a dead old man’s. But a second later it was Lael Jillson. He looked at Bonnie and she was a handsome man with long blond hair and a mustache and remorseful eyes. Then she was Bonnie again and Hess suddenly felt something very strong for her, a desire to defend and enhance and help her in a sometimes violent world. He wanted to see her triumph. It was a surprisingly powerful feeling. He knew it was absolutely inappropriate but there it was anyhow, filling his body like something pumped in. It made his heart beat fast and his muscles feel strong and urgent. It had as much to do with Bonnie and his impulse to love as it had to do with the Purse Snatcher and the old man supine in front of him and his own certain but unscheduled death. When he looked down at the man again it was Merci Rayborn and he was doing Bonnie’s job, with caring, desiring hands. Her dark nipples rose after his fingers passed over them.
“I’m going outside,” he said.
“I’ll go with you,” said Bobb.
“Don’t bother.”
“Let me show you where the door is...”
Outside Hess bent in the shade of a big pepper tree, his hands on his knees and his head up like an umpire but breathing hard and sweating coldly. His shirt felt wet under his sport coat and his shoulder strap slid on the damp fabric. He looked back at the campus buildings shimmering as if in a heat wave, outlined in a blue light that grew brighter until he blinked, then got brighter until he blinked again. He closed them and thought of where he had just come from and saw this time that the lifeless body back there was his and the hands bringing him back from the dead belonged to Merci.
He felt the air going in and out of his lung and a third, filling them up and purging fully, but it was like he wasn’t getting the right thing, like the air was mixed wrong, or maybe there just wasn’t enough of it getting in. He asked himself what he expected from fifty fucking years of smoking like there was no tomorrow. Help me get through this, he thought: just help me beat this thing and I’ll be good forever. Forever. I honestly do swear I’ll do whatever you want.
He opened his eyes and looked down at the grass but there were naked gray bodies upon it. He saw Lael and Janet and Ronnie and Merci and Bonnie and himself. And the old man and his father and Barbara and Lottie and Joanna. There was a kid in a cowboy shirt standing beside them with a blank look on his face: Tim Hess, age eight. Lightning cracked blue and rain splattered down on them all with drops bright and heavy as mercury. Young Tim had a green garden hose in his hand, gushing water. He rinsed everybody off then gave the hose to himself fifty-nine years later and the old once-dead Hess rose and drank from it and said he was going to give everyone else a drink, too.
Then Hess saw nothing but the green Bermuda grass beneath the tree and the pink pepper hulls lying by the trunk and his own bent shadow leaning away from the sun. His heart was way up in his throat somewhere and he could feel hot drops of something running down his cheeks and see them splat against the pepper shells where they fell. He heard himself panting. He felt an erection in his briefs, something that seemed no more related to this moment than the north rim of the Grand Canyon or UFOs. He smelled himself — a blend of man, chemicals, death and terror of death that he’d never smelled before.
“Detective? Mr. Hess? Al told me to come out and check on you. You okay? It’s the chemicals. One time I was setting features on this lady and then I was just lying there looking up at the lights. You okay?”
“Sure I am.”
“You’re white and trembling.”
“Breakfast. Skipped it, I mean.”
“Ah, come on. Quit being such a tough guy. Here, sit down in the shade. Just breathe even and keep your eyes up on the horizon. Think about your wife or your grandkids or someone you love.”
Hess took a knee. His eyes were burning still but he couldn’t let himself wipe them. He was confused by his arousal and ashamed of it and happy to hide it from the girl. Bonnie squatted across from him.
“Don’t,” Hess heard himself say.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t ever.”
“Ever what?”
“Let anything bad happen to you.”
Twenty-Seven
Two hours later Hess was still in the Department of Mortuary Science, setting aside the last file. He was exhausted and his neck felt like cold metal and the words he had been reading sometimes blurred and jumped off the pages. He thought to pick a word off the desk and put it back on the paper before he understood how spent he was.
For two hours Hess had looked at every photograph and name of every Department of Mortuary Science student graduated from Cypress College in the last decade. Four hundred and fourteen.
Based on age and appearance Hess came up with eighteen maybes, but nothing hot. None of the maybes wore long hair and a mustache. Bobb explained that they had a professional dress code the students had to follow when they were here. And few homes would hire an embalmer with a less than conventional appearance. Hess gathered that the college had screened all students for felony records before admission, so he knew his chances of stubbing his toe on a creep who’d been looking to learn a trade weren’t great. But, he thought, cracks were there to be slipped through.
Bobb was also kind enough to call a friend at the state Morticians’ Licensing Board, who agreed to supply Hess with a complete listing of Southern California undertakers. It would be on Hess’s fax machine by the end of the workday. If he wanted faces, he’d have to come up to Sacramento — the black-and-white two-by-twos didn’t transmit well at all.
The DMV 1028 list was on his desk when Hess got in that afternoon. He checked the names against their possibles from the Sex Offenders Registry, the department graduates and the outstanding warrants listing kept by the Sheriff’s Department.
Nothing added up. He wondered if he could get a list of embalming machine buyers, tick them off against the van owners, maybe get a hit.
What he had for sure was 312 panel vans registered in Orange County. This didn’t include the commercial ones. He circled the males, which left 224. If he could get Brighton to cut loose twenty-two deputies to run down ten vans each and check the tires, they could have it nailed in two shifts if they went fast — three if it went slowly.
Brighton’s secretary said he’d be in a meeting for the next hour.
Hess phoned Southern California Embalming Supply Company, the regional dealer for the Porti-Boy, Sawyer and several other embalming machines. In fact, they carried every major brand and some minor ones. He asked the president for a list of embalming machine buyers in the last year in Southern California. He explained that he wanted to run the names against the state board licensees.
The president was a pleasant sounding man who seemed to listen carefully to what Hess was saying. His name was Bart Young. He very politely refused Hess’s request for a customer list reaching back one year. Young said it would be a violation of trust. In the end all Hess could do was press his home and office phone numbers upon the fellow, and ask to have Young’s home number in return. If you framed the request right, giving a home phone became a small atonement for not giving something better. Hess believed in home phones because he did some of his best thinking at night, and he wasn’t afraid to intrude so long as he had a reason. He made a note on his desk calendar to call Young every day until he gave up the names.