The Blue Hour Read Free Page A

overlay the vast and rugged terrain.
Lael Jillson's breath mints and birth control pills partially eaten by
scavengers. ATM, credit and insurance cards intact. No California driver's
license. No cash recovered.
    Who always takes your
license? A clerk. A cop.
    And
what would make a more concise and informative souvenir of someone you wanted
to remember clearly?
    A
CDL. Vital stats and an image of her, collect them all.
    Hess
leafed through the files one page at a time. The detectives had included
quadrants of a U.S. Government Survey topo map of the dump sites. Kemp/Rayborn
had marked the spots with red stars. Hess looked down at the swirling contours
of the map. There was a freshwater lagoon—Laguna Mosquitoes—just a quarter mile
to the west. He'd been there twenty-two years ago as part of the investigation
into the killing of a second-tier drug supplier named Eddie Fowler, injected
with a fatal dose of Mexican black and dumped by the highway side. The Ortega
Highway—State 74—had been a popular place for body disposal for all of the five
decades that Hess had been a deputy. Sixteen dumps, he thought, counting back.
Yes, sixteen, counting Fowler. Kraft had used it. Suff had used it. Most of
them unsolved.
    Hess
had an infallible memory for such facts, though lately he had begun wondering
if it was a good use of brain space. The older he got the more he understood
the finite nature of things, the finite nature, in fact, of everything.
    He
felt a wave of nausea rise up. He breathed deeply. He closed his eyes for a
moment and imagined the poison killing the cells. The bad cells only. Though he
understood that the poison was killing good and bad cells, indiscriminately,
like a gunman loose in a fast-food place. Liz had suggested the "positive
mental imaging" before the first round while Dr. Cho had stood by in
silence, smiling enigmatically.
    He opened his eyes and forced his thoughts into order. He looked at the topo map. The Ortega Highway was a
long, winding road that led over the Santa Ana Mountains through two county
jurisdictions, from San Juan Capistrano to Lake Elsinore. The curves were blind
and people drove it fast. Traffic fatalities were commonplace. At one end was
Capistrano, a quaint, sleepy little town marked by a Franciscan mission and
expensive homes with acreage. Horse country: women in jodhpurs, Chevy
Suburbans. Twenty-five miles away, at the other end of the Ortega, was the poor
city of Lake Elsinore, built around its namesake lake. The water level used to
rise and fall with the rains, which often left it little more than a polluted
little slick of water with houses stranded back in dried mud. Bullthorns and
ravens were what Hess thought of first, when he thought about Lake Elsinore.
Then, hookers on Main, meth-racket bikers and coke-trade middlemen.
    The
highway ran between the cities, tethering the sunlight to the shade, the
prosperity to the toil, connecting them in the way that such things are always
connected, climbing past dark stands of oak, looping through miles of dense
sage and chaparral, cutting along deep rock canyons and lazy spring-fed creeks
that nourished wildlife and sprayed the valleys with wildflowers every April.
Hess had hiked and hunted it as a boy. He had always considered the Ortega to
be a little haunted, and for this, he was drawn to it.
    He
turned the map and leafed through the pages of the files. It was frustrating
how little information they had. He'd never seen thinner files on two assumed
abduction/homicides where they had identified the victim so quickly. Of course,
the complete lab work on Janet Kane would take time. And would add a few more
pages. But nature's skill as a contaminator of crime scenes was considerable.
    The
cars were the key. If they were going to recover—or had already
recovered—anything useful, it would be in the cars. Each was found parked and
unlocked, miles from the stores where the women had shopped, on no likely route
to their homes. The keys