Blood Work (1998)

by Michael Connelly

  "It's Jaye."

  "Where are you?"

  "The federal cafeteria. A pay phone."

  McCaleb immediately envisioned her location, in an a cove with vending machines off to the side of the cafeteria dining room. It was private enough,

  "What's going on, Jaye?"

  "It's not good. They're putting the finishing touches on the package they're going to take to the DA's office tonight. They'll take it to the grand jury tomorrow morning. They're going to seek one murder charge for Gloria Torres. After that's in the pipeline, they'll take their time before adding on Cordell and Kenyon."

  "Okay," McCaleb said, not sure how to respond. He decided there was no sense in continuing to curse out loud.

  "My advice is that you come in, Terry. You tell them what you told me and convince them. I'll be on your side but right now I'm handcuffed. I have information about the Good Samaritan I shouldn't have. If I reveal it, I'll go into the shitter with you. "

  "What about the list? Nothing at all?"

  "Look, that much I did talk about with them. So I would have the time to work the list. I came in this morning and told them in order to be ready to counter your defense, we needed to investigate the other recipients of the organs from Gloria Torres. I said I had a source who would slip us the list of names without us having to get a search warrant, etcetera, etcetera, and they said great. They gave me the day. But nothing, Terry. I'm sorry but I checked out every name. I got nothing."

  "Tell me."

  "Well, I don't have the list with me but-"

  "Hold on."

  McCaleb walked into Graciela's bedroom, where he had seen the copy of the list he had given her on the bureau. He grabbed it and read the first name to Winston.

  "J. B. Dickey-he got the liver."

  "Right, okay, he didn't make it. He got the transplant but there were complications and he died three weeks after surgery."

  "But that doesn't mean it wasn't him."

  "I know that. But I talked to the surgeon at St. Joseph's. It was a charity case. The guy was on MediCal and the hospital picked up the rest. This wasn't a guy with money or connections to a hit man, Terry. Come on."

  "Okay, next. Tammy Domike, one of the kidneys."

  "Right. She's a schoolteacher. She's twenty-eight, married to a carpenter and has two kids. She doesn't fit either It just wasn't-"

  "William Farley, the other kidney."

  "Retired Chippie from Bakersfield. He's been in a wheelchair for twelve years-since he took a bullet in the spine during a routine traffic pullover on the grapevine. They never caught the guy, either."

  "California Highway Patrol," McCaleb mused out loud. "He could have friends who could have pulled this off for him."

  Winston was silent for a long moment before responding.

  "It seems unlikely, Terry. I mean, listen to what you're-"

  "I know, I know, never mind. What about the eyes? Christine Foye got the corneas."

  "Right. She sells books for a living and just got out of college. It's not her, either. Look, Terry, we were hoping that one of these people would be some millionaire or a politician or anybody with the juice to do this. Somebody obvious. But it's just not there. I'm sorry."

  "So I'm still the best and only suspect."

  "Unfortunately."

  "Thanks, Jaye, you've been a big help. I've got to go."

  "Wait! And don't get mad at me. I've been the only one who has listened to you. Remember?"

  "I know, I'm sorry."

  "Well, there was one other thing, I was thinking. I wasn't going to tell you until I had some time to check it out. I'm going to start on it tomorrow. I'm working on a warrant for information right now."

  "What? Tell me. I need something now."

  "Well, you were only thinking in terms of who got the organs that became available after the death of Gloria Torres, right?"

  "Right. Cordell's and Kenyon's were not harvested."

  "I know. I'm not talking about that. But there is always a waiting list, right?"

  "Yeah, always. I waited almost two years because of the blood type."

  "Well, maybe someone just wanted to move up the list."

  "Move up?"

  "You know, they were like you, waiting, and they knew it would be a long wait. Maybe even a fatal wait. Weren't you told that with your blood type there was no telling when a heart would become available?"

  "Yeah, they told me not to get my hopes up."

  "Okay, so maybe our guy is still waiting but by taking out Gloria Torres, he has in effect moved up one notch on the list. Improved his chances."

  McCaleb thought about this. He saw the possibility. He suddenly remembered Bonnie Fox telling him that there was another patient on the ward who was in the same situation McCaleb had been in. He wondered now if she meant literally the same situation, waiting for a heart that was type AB with CMV negative. He thought of the boy he had seen in the hospital bed. Could he be the patient Fox meant?

  McCaleb thought about what a parent would be willing to do to save a child. Could it be possible?

  "It could work," he said, his adrenaline returning and the monotonal quality of his voice gone now. "What you're saying is that it could be somebody still waiting."

  "Right. And I am going to go to BOPRA with a warrant to get all their waiting lists and their blood donor records. It should be interesting to see how they respond."

  McCaleb nodded but his mind was skipping ahead.

  "Wait a minute, wait a minute," he said. "It's too complicated."

  "What is?"

  "The whole thing. If somebody wanted to move up on the list, why take out donors? Why not just knock people off the list?"

  "Because that might be too obvious. If two or three people needing heart or liver transplants in a row get hit, it's bound to raise a question somewhere. But by hitting the donors, it's more obscure. No one noticed it until you came along."

  "I guess," McCaleb said, still not sure he was convinced. "Then if you're right, it could even mean the shooter's going to hit again. You've got to go down the list of AB donors. You've got to warn them, protect them."

  That possibility brought the excitement back. It was jangling in his veins.

  "I know," Winston said. "When I get the warrant, I'm going to have to tell Nevins and Uhlig, all of them, what I am doing. That's why you have to come in, Terry. It's the only way. You have to come in with a lawyer and lay this all out, then take your chances. Nevins, Uhlig, these are smart people. They'll see where they went wrong."

  McCaleb didn't respond. He saw the logic in what she was saying but was hesitant to agree because it would be putting his fate in the hands of others. He would rather rely on himself.

  "Do you have a lawyer, Terry?"

  "No, I don't have a lawyer. Why would I have a lawyer? I haven't done anything wrong."

  He cringed. He had heard countless guilty individuals make the same statement before. Winston probably had, too.

  "I meant do you know a lawyer who could help you?" she said. "If you don't, then I can suggest a few. Michael Haller, Jr. would be a good choice."

  "I know lawyers in case I need one. I have to think about this."

  "Well, call me. I can bring you in, make sure everything is handled right."

  McCaleb's mind wandered and he was inside a holding cell at the county jail. He had been in the lockup on interviews as a bureau agent. He knew how loud jails were and how dangerous. He knew that innocent or not, he would never surrender himself to that.

  "Terry, you there?"

  "Yeah, sorry. I was just thinking about something. How can I reach you to arrange this?"

  "I'll give you my pager and my home. I'll be here until probably six but after that I'm heading home. Call me anywhere, any time."

  She gave him the numbers and McCaleb wrote them down in his notebook. He then put it away and shook his head.

  "I can't believe this. I'm sitting here talking about turning myself in for something I
didn't do."

  "I know that. But the truth is a powerful thing. It will work out. Just make sure you call me, Terry. When you decide."

  "I'll call you."

  He hung up.

  39

  BONNIE FOX'S RECEPTIONIST, the frowner, told McCaleb that the doctor had been in transplant surgery all afternoon and would probably not be available for another two to three hours. McCaleb almost cursed out loud but instead left Graciela's number and told the frowner to write down that he needed Fox to call back as soon as possible no matter what the hour. He was about to hang up when he thought of something.

  "Hey, who is getting the heart?"

  "What?"

  "You said she was in surgery. Which patient? Was it the boy?"

  "I'm sorry, I'm not at liberty to discuss other patients with you," said the frowner.

  "Fine," he said. "Then just make sure you tell her to call me."

  McCaleb spent the next fifteen minutes pacing between the living room and kitchen, hoping unrealistically that the phone would ring and Fox would be on the line.

  He finally managed to shoehorn the anxiety into a side compartment of his brain and started thinking about the larger problems at hand. McCaleb knew he had to start making decisions, chief of which was to decide whether to get a lawyer. He knew Winston was right; it was the smart move to get legal protection. But McCaleb couldn't bring himself to make the call to Michael Haller, Jr. or anybody else, to give up on his own skills and rely on another's.

  In the living room, there were no documents left on the coffee table. As he had gone through the pages, he had returned them to the leather bag until all that was on the table was the stack of videotapes.

  Desperate for a diversion from his thoughts about what exactly Fox had said to him about the other patient, he picked up the videocassette on top of the stack and walked it over to the television. He popped it into the VCR without looking to see which tape it was. It didn't matter. He just wanted something else to think about for a while.

  But as he dropped back onto the couch, he immediately ignored the tape that was playing. Michael Haller, Jr., he thought. Yes, he would be a good attorney. Not as good as his old man, the legendary Mickey Haller. But the legend was long dead and Junior had taken his place as one of the most visible and successful defense attorneys in Los Angeles. Junior would get him out of this, McCaleb knew. But, of course, that would be after the reputation-destroying media blitz, the looting of his savings and the selling of The Following Sea. And even when it was over and he was clear, he would still carry the stigma of suspicion and guilt with him.

  Forever.

  McCaleb squinted his eyes and wondered what it was he was staring at on the TV. The camera was focused on the legs and feet of someone standing on a table. Then he recognized his own walking boots and placed what he was seeing. The hypnosis session. The camera had been running when McCaleb climbed onto the table to remove some of the overhead lighting tubes. James Noone appeared in the frame and reached up as one of the long fluorescent light tubes was handed down to him.

  McCaleb grabbed the TV remote off the arm of the couch and hit the fast forward button. Interested because he had forgotten to review the hypnosis session as he had promised Captain Hitchens he would, McCaleb decided to skip through the preliminaries. He moved the tape past the initial interview and relaxation exercises to the actual questioning of Noone under hypnosis. He wanted to hear James Noone's recounting of the details of the shooting and the killer's getaway.

  McCaleb watched with total concentration and quickly found himself suffering the same physical effects of frustration he had felt during the actual session. Noone had been a perfect subject. It was rare that he had hypnotized a witness who could recall such detail. The cutting frustration was that he simply hadn't gotten a good look at the driver and the Cherokee's license plates had been covered.

  "Damn," McCaleb cursed out loud as the taped session drew to a close.

  He reached for the remote, deciding to rewind and run the interview again, when he suddenly froze, his finger poised over the remote button.

  McCaleb had just seen something that did not fit, something he had missed during the actual session because he was distracted by Winston, who had been sitting in. He rewound the tape but only briefly, then replayed the last few questions that were asked.

  On the tape, McCaleb was wrapping it up, asking a scatter of leftover and wishful-thinking questions. They were long shots, thrown at Noone out of frustration. He had asked about any stickers on the Cherokee's windshield. Noone said no and then McCaleb was out of questions. He turned to Winston and asked her, "Anything else?"

  Even though McCaleb had broken his own rules by asking a question of a nonparticipant, Winston followed the rules and did not answer verbally. Instead, she shook her head in the negative.

  "You sure?" McCaleb asked.

  Again she shook her head no. McCaleb then began bringing Noone out of the trance.

  But that was wrong and McCaleb had missed it at the time. Now he came around the coffee table, remote in hand, and leaned closer to the screen. He rewound the tape one more time to watch the sequence again.

  "Son of a bitch," he whispered after the play-through. "You should've answered me, Noone. You should have answered!"

  He punched the eject button and turned to grab another tape. He knocked the short stack across the coffee table and then quickly scrabbled through the plastic cassettes until he found the tape with the label marked Sherman Market. He put the tape into the machine, started playing it on fast forward and then paused the image when the Good Samaritan was on the screen.

  The VCR could not hold the image still and McCaleb guessed the machine was an inexpensive model with only two tape heads. He ejected the tape and looked at his watch. It was four-forty. He slapped the remote down on top of the television and went to the kitchen for the phone.

  Tony Banks agreed to stay once again after closing at Video GraFX Consultants until McCaleb could get there. Crossing the floor of the Valley on the 101, he initially made good time. Most of the rush-hour traffic was going the other way, the workforce of the city returning to the bedroom communities of the Valley. But when he dipped south on the freeway to go through the Cahuenga Pass into Hollywood, the brake lights were flared for as far as he could see and he got bogged down. He finally pulled Buddy Lockridge's Taurus into the small employee lot at VGC at five after six. Once again, Tony Banks answered the door after McCaleb had pushed the night bell.

  "Tony, thanks," McCaleb said to the man's back as he was led down the hallway once again to one of the tech rooms. "You are really helping me out here."

  "No problem."

  But McCaleb noted that there wasn't as much enthusiasm in the "No problem" this time. They entered the same room they had sat in the week before. McCaleb handed Banks the two tapes he had brought with him.

  "On each of these tapes there is a man," he said. "I want to see if they are the same man."

  "You mean, like, you can't tell."

  "Not for sure. They look different. But I think it's a disguise. I think they're the same man but I want to be sure."

  Banks put the first tape into the player on the left side of the console, turned it on and the Sherman Market robbery and shooting began playing on the corresponding overhead video display tube.

  "This guy?" Banks said.

  "Right. Freeze it when there's a good look."

  Banks froze the image at the moment the so-called Good Samaritan was looking off camera in right profile.

  "How is that? I need the profile. It's hard to do a comparison front-on."

  "You're the boss."

  He handed Banks the second tape, which was placed in the righthand player, and soon the hypnosis session was playing on the right VDT screen.

  "Back it up," McCaleb said. "I think there's a profile before he sits down."

  Banks reversed the tape.

  "What are you doing to him on this?"

  "H
ypnosis."

  "Really?"

  "I thought so at the time. But now I think he was playing me the whole-there."

  Banks paused the tape. James Noone was looking to his right, most likely at the door to the interview room. Banks played with the dials and the computer mouse and expanded the picture, then sharpened it. He did the same with the image on the left screen. He then leaned back and looked at the side-by-side profiles. After a few moments he spoke as he unclipped an infrared pointer from his pocket and turned it on.