Ike smiled as she left. Merci gave him an informal little salute. Walking past Lael Jillson’s car she imagined a man curled into the generous leg room of the backseat, hunched in the darkness. She imagined getting into her car at night, feeling secure and maybe a little tired from the long day, settling into the nice leather seat, interior light on, sliding the key into the ignition. Then what? She felt the hair on her neck rise.
Outside she slowed her pace to fit that of Tim Hess. Merci was a fast and determined walker and it irritated her to adjust. The fact that he was fighting cancer made everything twice as difficult as it should be. A murder investigation was no place for unwieldy sympathies. She glanced over at him, wondering how to project some kind of professional kinship with the new partner. She looked at his pale blue eyes and the strong line of jaw, his thick short hair with the little crest of white that rose up like a wave in front. In his day, she thought, he must have been a decent-looking man.
“I’ll eat my lunch in the car,” she said, surprised at how abrupt it sounded. She was not socially graceful and she knew it. What she had meant was, I got five calls here at work from reporters yesterday, all wanting to talk about the lawsuit; and I had five more at home last night. She wondered if she should have just said that.
She looked back at him. His face looked intent. He seemed twice as large and vigorous as her father but she could see the tiredness in his eyes.
“This is how you’re going to spend the next four hours,” she said. “The ATM runs should be in from the banks. If he used her card for cash I’d like to know where. I want you to spend some time in their lives. If he chose them beforehand you might get lucky and stub your toe on him. I’ve got a call into the marketing and promotion departments for the two shopping malls, trying to see if this guy’s drawn by some event, some common happening, some... you know, some bullshit they do to get business. When the lab work on the BMW is done we’ll set it against the Infiniti and see what matches up. Gilliam told me noon on that. That’s half an hour from now, and if he’s good to his promise, get started without me. He said he’d know by early afternoon how much blood was lost at each site — using your samples. That’s going to mean something to us. Last, one of us should run the bloodhounds in a bigger circle. If nothing pops, we’ll have to dive or drag that lagoon. I know you used to dive for us, so I’m going to leave that choice to you — dive it or drag it. I also want you to see where the cars were found. That can wait, but not forever. How does all that sound to you?”
“Good.”
Merci thought as she walked, not seeing the ground in front of her. “You’re sure he’s killed them, aren’t your?”
“Yes.”
“Where we found the blood?”
“I think so.”
“Why?”
“There was so much of it. I didn’t understand that until I saw it for myself.”
“But no clothes. No flesh, no fiber, no bones. Nothing but blood and purses. The purses are for us and the CDLs are for him.”
“Viscera, too.”
“But did you read how much? The combined weight was less than a third of a gram. Gilliam’s not even positive it’s human.”
“What else would it be?”
“Animals.”
He didn’t answer or look at her.
“What do you think he’s doing with them out there?”
“Field dressing them.”
She asked him what that meant and he told her. She felt the hair stand up on her neck again, and she imagined the draining body of a young woman dangling from the branch of an oak way back in the Ortega. She thought of steer carcasses, the way the extremities were clipped and tied off, everything truncated, no waste.
“Then why not more viscera, Hess, if he’s disemboweling them?”
“Animals will eat almost every scrap of it. They’re hungry now, a hot summer like this.”
“Then we’re not going to find anything in the lagoon or the woods around there,” she said. “Because if he’s going to that much trouble, he’s not just going to abandon what’s left of them.”
“No. But you’re right — we need to work the dogs in a bigger radius, then dive the lagoon.”
Merci knew that to assume and be found wrong was the single worst thing an investigator could do. You spent a lot of time proving the obvious because you could never afford to be wrong. “Are you on good terms with McNally?”
Hess said they’d worked together.
“Line it out,” she said, relieved she wouldn’t have to talk to Mike right now herself.
“All right.”
She saw the faint false frown on his face and felt the anger jump into her chest. Anger was a fast and powerful thing and she had not learned to control it well.
“You already have.”
“That was before our ground-rules talk. Anyway, he’s ready when you are.”
“I wasn’t kidding about any of that. None.”
“It’s a waste of time if I can’t think a thought until you approve it.”
“Hess, all substantive decisions will be made by the lead investigator in counsel with his superiors and in keeping with the procedures of this manual and the policies of this department.”
“I know. I wrote that section with Brighton, about a million years ago.”
She refused to stumble. “I can tell by the pronoun it was quite some time back.”
It seemed to take him a moment to figure that out.
“Well,” he said. “I want both branches, where the rope burns are. There might be fiber to test. I’d have cut them off myself when I was out there, but I didn’t have a saw.”
“Fine. Good.”
She gave him her cell phone number and told him not to use it unless he had to. “Calls are on my dime because the department’s too cheap to give us our own phones. I put a fax machine in the car myself, too. Anyway, I’ll take the lagoon and I’ll get your branches. I need to see the dump sites again, too.”
He looked at her with that hawk face and the sharp eyes and the jarhead haircut. This Hess was an odd one.
“When do you want McNally and the dogs?” he asked.
“Get them started now. I’ll be there later.”
“One more thing. Make the outside cut first. On the branches.”
“I know.”
She got a large coffee with a lid and drove the big Impala into Costa Mesa. She set her Heckler &. Koch 9mm on the seat beside her because it poked the inside of her left arm when she drove. She liked to lower that arm to the rest and take the wheel at twelve o’clock with her right and guide the car around with the effortless power steering. She’d grown up watching her father drive the family car that way. The only difference was that her father drove slow and Merci drove fast.
The makeup girl’s address turned out to be a nice little house on the west side, butted up against Newport Beach but still affordable for young people on small salaries. Her name was Kamala Petersen and she lived with two of the other cosmetic consultants she worked with. She’d been at the same mall the night Janet Kane vanished, and she’d seen someone who disturbed her. She’d come forward when Janet Kane was listed as missing. Merci had interviewed her two days ago, briefly, and found Kamala to be excitable, flighty, unable to focus. But there was something inside that Kamala Petersen wasn’t letting out. Merci thought she knew what it was, and she was determined to get it.
Hypnosis was a trade-off because you could get good results, but hypnotized subjects can’t testify in California criminal cases. Two of the district attorneys and the undersheriff had advised against the session. Merci had weighed the risks to her own satisfaction and decided that a suspect description outweighed the loss of a possible witness. There would be other witnesses; she would locate and subpoena them. She overruled. Merci mistrusted even the smallest of democracies, which was why she wanted to be sheriff someday.