The Blue Hour Read Online Free PDF Page A

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