Hess stepped back, turned his left shoulder to the door and summoned the strength of his legs. It wasn’t a stout door but it took him three assaults to get the thing open. That was the most any door had ever taken, he thought, as he pushed it back and stepped inside. He was breathing hard and his thighs were shaking. He looked back at the CNB shooter, who was still with the protesters, watching him, good to his word. The neighbors stood still and silent.
Hess closed the door behind him and stopped in the short entryway, waiting. No sounds from upstairs, no response from a heavy sleeper awakened by a splintering door. There was a faint smell of cooking in the air and he could see the dishes and pots and skillet from last night’s dinner piled into the left sink. Enough for two, he noted. The refrigerator cycled on with a hum. He checked the living room and the little bathroom downstairs. He drew his .45, chambered a round and started up.
On the landing he stopped and listened to the silence. He tried not to think about how heavy his legs felt, how short of breath a little stairway had made him.
Helena Spurlea was lying on the floor in Colesceau’s bedroom, her legs twisted in covers. She’d fought. Her nightshirt was a bloody rag. She was on her back with her eyes open and her mouth agape. Hess had never seen more stab wounds on a corpse, not even a satanic ritual murder he’d been called out on back in ’69, where three people had gone at it. Sixty or eighty, he guessed, hard to say because they were so small. Colesceau and his ice pick.
He moved back out, then across the hallway to the guest room. The bed was neatly made: no Colesceau, no body, nothing he hadn’t seen here a week ago when something inside him knew that things here weren’t adding up.
Except that one entire panel of mirror on one wall was removed, neatly propped to the side to reveal the framing. Stuck to the glass were two devices with thick handles and black rubber suctions the size of salad plates. Wood’s Power Grips, Hess read. Behind the glass a big rectangle of insulation had been cut away, making a passageway through to the other side.
Resting on one of the exposed horizontal studs of the wall frame were two Styrofoam heads. They were facing him. One was bald, the other had some dark hair attached, eyebrows, too. A hit of adrenaline shot through Hess: one to hold a human hair wig, and the other to watch TV? Through the opening he could see into the apartment behind. A faint bad smell wafted through to him and Hess understood now what he had come so close to understanding before.
He stepped through. The cold hit him first and he could hear the hiss of the air conditioner. The room was empty except for a change of clothes — pants, shirt, shoes — arranged neatly on the floor of the closet.
He heard the faint mutter of a TV and followed it. With his sidearm up and ready he turned into the second upstairs bedroom and stared past the sights. What had once been Lael Jillson reclined in the bed wearing provocative lingerie, facing a morning talk show. Hess recognized her by her hair and by the general shape of her skull and face. Her skin was rippled and gray and looked rigid. She wore sunglasses, like she was hiding a bruise.
Downstairs he met Janet Kane, who was seated at the breakfast bar with a book in her hands, wearing a white blouse, a short black skirt, nylons and black high heels. Her legs were crossed. She dangled one shoe from her toes, as women will sometimes do. Her hair was up. Again, the general shape of her head and face was enough like her photographs for Hess to tell who she was. Her skin wasn’t as dark as Lael Jillson’s, but it had the same hard rippling, like swells on an ocean frozen solid. Sunglasses, too.
Veronica Stevens lay on her front on the living room couch, head resting on her hands, looking into the room. She wore red lingerie. One calf was raised at the knee, like a forties pinup girl. In the half light of the draped living room she looked almost alive.
Hess stood among the women with his gun at his side, his hat covering his naked head, looking down. His shame matched his anger but he still couldn’t quite believe what he had seen.
For no real reason he walked across to the front windows, moved the drapes and looked out: suburban Orange County, citizens on their ways to work, the lazy hot haze of summer already rising up from the earth. Nothing special. Nothing different. Business as usual.
Business as usual for Colesceau, he thought.
He checked the garage for the van but there was no vehicle. No Porti-Boy. He lifted the sheet off a waist-high object to reveal an aluminum table with blood gutters and drains at each end.
He used the kitchen phone to request deputies to 12 Meadowlark, 28 Covey Run and to Merci Rayborn’s home in the orange grove. Then an APB on Spurlea’s van. He read the plate numbers slowly and clearly but he could feel his heart racing.
Back in the garage he pressed the automatic door opener and waited. When it was up he pressed it again, ducked under the lowering door and ran back to his car. The protesters and the cameraman watched as he turned the key, yanked the shifter into drive and gunned it hard.
He skidded up Merci’s circular drive and stopped short of her Impala. The driver’s side door was swung open and he half expected to see her but there was no Merci, no body, no nothing but the squelch of the radio and the cats lounging in the morning sunlight on the porch. He slammed through the front door and ran through the house but it was empty as he knew it would be. So was the garage.
Except for a disappearing rat and the body of a young woman, naked and hung by her ankles from one of the rafter beams. Arms loose and fingers nearly touching the floor. Hair down, filled with golden light admitted by the garage window, glittering and ornamental in her slow rotation.
Hess moved in closer to see the shiny stainless steel object stuck up against her clavicle. He recognized it from the mortuary science department, an insertion tube for tying off one end of a severed jugular and pumping fluid into the open other. The floor was a pond of red-black blood and the woman — Hess thought she looked like the protester spokeswoman he’d seen on CNB — appeared blanched and lifeless in the dusty morning light. Her purse sat in the middle of the gruesome lake.
Hess tried to think and to think clearly. He left her unfinished, he thought, he did all the work and left her for us to see. Because he’s got Merci, and two are too many to handle. He traded this one for Merci, and he’s going to start in on her next.
Where?
He needs privacy. He needs somewhere to hang her. He needs electricity to run the Porti-Boy.
Back in his car he got Dispatch to patch him through to Brighton. When he got the sheriff he requested a helicopter search of the Ortega Highway for the silver panel van or a man on foot; Riverside County units to the Rose Garden Home and Lee LaLonde’s old address in Lake Elsinore; and the coroner to Merci Rayborn’s home.
“Christ, Tim. We’ve got another homicide in Irvine, just came in. Goddamn county park.”
“Look, can we get Mike McNally and the dogs out here to Rayborn’s house? It’s a long shot but the scent’s fresh.”
“They can’t track someone in a vehicle.”
“They can’t track someone in a kennel. It’s worth a try.”
“You’ve got it.”
He sat there in his car for a moment, the morning heat coming through the windows at him. He lifted the hat, wiped the sweat off his head. Through the dusty garage window he could see the pale shape of Trudy Powers suspended in the air.
Somewhere to hang her. Privacy. Electricity.
The Ortega was too obvious, no outlets, and covered. The Rose Garden Home was covered. LaLonde’s place was covered. Colesceau had figured someone would look here for Merci, so he left in a hurry.