Blood Work

by Michael Connelly

  “You can start it,” he said without turning his attention from his task.

  “What are you doing?”

  He pulled out the Cordell autopsy.

  “I’m looking for-shit, this is just the preliminary report.”

  He flipped through the protocol to make sure. It was incomplete.

  “No toxicology and blood.”

  He shoved the autopsy report back into the bag and then the gun. He straightened up.

  “We’ve got to find a phone. I’ll call his wife.”

  Graciela started the car.

  “Fine,” she said. “We will-we’ll go to my house. But you have to tell me what it is you’re thinking, Terry.”

  “Okay, just give me a minute to think first.”

  He slowed the jumble of thoughts streaming through his mind and tried to analyze the jump he had just made.

  “I’m talking about the match,” he said. “The link.”

  “What link?”

  “What have we been missing? What have we been looking for? The link between these cases. At first the connection was simply the randomness of crime. That’s what the cops thought. That’s what I thought when I first started looking at it. We had two holdup victims-no connection other than the killer and the chance crossing of his path with the paths of these individuals. This is L.A., this sort of thing happens all the time. The capital of random violence, right?”

  Graciela turned onto Sherman Way. They were just a couple of minutes from her home.

  “Right.”

  “Wrong. Because then we read more into it. We discover a killer who takes personal icons and this suggests something more involved than random collisions of shooter and victim. This suggests a deeper relationship-the targeting, stalking and acquisition of each victim.”

  McCaleb stopped. They were passing the Sherman Market and they both wordlessly looked at the store as they went by. McCaleb waited a moment longer before continuing.

  “Then all of a sudden we get another wrinkle, another layer of the onion is peeled back. We get the ballistics and it’s a whole new ball game. Now we have another murder and what looks like a professional running through this. A hitter. Why? What could possibly be the connection between your sister, James Cordell and Donald Kenyon?”

  Graciela didn’t answer. She was coming up on Alabama now and moved the car into the left-turn lane.

  “Blood,” he said. “Blood has got to be the link.”

  She pulled into the driveway of her home. She turned the engine off.

  “Blood,” she said.

  McCaleb stared straight ahead at the closed garage door. He spoke slowly, the dread finally catching up with him.

  “All this time I’ve been thinking, What did she see, what did she know? Whose path could she have crossed that would have gotten her killed? You see, I looked at her life and made a judgment. I decided that she didn’t have anything that anyone would want to take, so the reason had to be elsewhere. But I missed it. Missed it completely. Your sister was a good mother, a good sister, good employee and friend. But the one thing she had that made her almost unique was her blood. That made what she had inside her so very valuable… to someone.”

  He waited a beat. He still didn’t look at her.

  “Someone like me.”

  He heard her breath leaving her body and he felt as though it was the hope going out of him. His hope of redemption.

  “You’re saying she was… taken for her organs. You look at a poster back there and can say that?”

  He finally looked over at her.

  “I just knew it. That’s all.”

  He opened his door.

  “We call Mrs. Cordell. She’ll tell us her husband’s blood type. It will be AB with CMV negative. Perfect match. Then we get Kenyon’s blood. It, too, will match. I’d bet on it.”

  He turned his body to get out.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” she said. “Because you told me Mr. Cordell died right there. At the bank. His heart wasn’t taken. His organs. It’s not the same. And Kenyon. Kenyon died at his house.”

  He got out and then leaned down and looked in at her. She was looking out through the windshield now.

  “Cordell and Kenyon didn’t work out,” he said. “The shooter learned from them. He finally got it right with your sister.”

  McCaleb shut the door and walked toward the house. It was a while before Graciela caught up to him.

  Inside, McCaleb sat down on a sectional couch in the living room and Graciela brought him the phone from the kitchen. He realized he had left Amelia Cordell’s number in his bag in the car. He also realized that the car was unlocked and his gun was in the bag as well.

  As he stepped back outside and approached the car, his eyes casually swept the street. He was looking for the car from the night before at the marina. He saw nothing that remotely matched and no other cars parked along the curb with occupants inside.

  Back in the house again, he sat on the couch and punched Amelia Cordell’s number into the phone while Graciela sat down in the far corner of the couch and watched him with a distant look on her face. The phone rang five times before a machine picked up. McCaleb left his name, number and the message that he needed James Cordell’s blood type as soon as she could get it to him. He clicked off the phone and looked at Graciela.

  “Do you know if she works?” she asked.

  “No, she doesn’t. She could be anywhere.”

  He clicked the phone back on and called his own machine to check for messages. There were nine, the machine having accumulated them unplayed since Saturday. He listened to four messages from Jaye Winston and two from Vernon Carruthers that were outdated by events. There was also Graciela’s message that she would be coming to the boat Monday. Of the two remaining messages, the first was from Tony Banks, the video tech. He told McCaleb that he had completed the job on the video he had dropped off. The other message was from Jaye Winston again. She had called that morning to tell McCaleb that his prediction had come true. The bureau was increasing its involvement in the investigations of the murders. Hitchens had not only promised full cooperation but was abdicating lead status to agents Nevins and Uhlig. She was frustrated. McCaleb could easily read it in her voice. But so was he. He clicked off and blew out his breath.

  “Now what?” Graciela asked.

  “I don’t know. I need to confirm this… this idea before I take the next step.”

  “What about the sheriff’s detective? She should have the complete autopsy. She’d know the blood type.”

  “No.”

  He didn’t say anything else by way of explanation. He looked around what he could see of the house from the couch. It was small, neatly furnished and kept. There was a large framed photo of Gloria Torres on the top shelf of a china cabinet in the adjoining dining room.

  “Why don’t you want to call her?” Graciela asked.

  “I’m not sure. I just… I want to figure things out a little bit before I talk to her. I think I should wait a little while and see if I hear from Mrs. Cordell.”

  “What about calling the coroner’s office directly?”

  “No, I don’t think that would work, either.”

  What he was leaving unsaid was the fact that if he confirmed his theory, it would mean that anyone who benefited from Glory’s death would rightly have to be considered a suspect. That included him. Therefore, he did not want to make any inquiry to authorities that might set that into motion. Not until he was ready with a few more answers with which to defend himself.

  “I know!” Graciela suddenly said. “The computer in the blood lab-I can probably confirm it there. Unless his name’s been deleted. But I doubt that. I remember coming across the name of a donor who had been dead four years and he was still on there.”

  What she was saying made little sense to McCaleb.

  “What are you talking about?” he asked.

  She looked at her watch and jumped up from her chair.

  “Let me chan
ge and then we have to hurry. I’ll explain everything on the way.”

  She then disappeared down a hallway and McCaleb heard a bedroom door close.

  29

  THEY GOT TO HOLY CROSS shortly before noon. Graciela parked in the front lot and they went into the hospital through the general admissions entrance. She did not want to go through the emergency room, since that was where she worked. She explained on the way over that she had been taking a lot of personal days off with little notice to be with Raymond since Gloria’s death. But the patience of her supervisors was wearing thin. She didn’t think it would be wise to take the day off on one day’s notice and flaunt it by walking through the emergency room. Besides, what they were about to do could get her fired. The fewer people who saw her the better.

  Once inside the hospital, Graciela, her nurse’s uniform and her familiar face, got them where they needed to go. She was like an ambassador for whom all barriers were lifted. No one stopped them. No one questioned them. They took a staff elevator to the fourth floor, arriving a few minutes past twelve.

  Graciela had told McCaleb her plan on the way over. She figured they could count on having fifteen minutes to do what they had to do. That was the maximum-just the time it would take for the blood supplies coordinator to go down to the hospital cafeteria, get her lunch and then bring it back up to the pathology lab. The BSC actually had an hour lunch break but it was routine in that job to eat lunch at your desk because there was no replacement while you were gone. The BSC was a nursing position but because the job did not involve direct patient care, no one filled in the spot when the BSC went on break.

  As Graciela expected, they got to the path lab at 12:05 and found the BSC desk empty. McCaleb felt his pulse quicken a little bit as he looked at the flying toasters floating across the screen of the computer sitting on the desk. However, the desk sat in a large open lab station. About ten feet from the computer desk was another desk where a woman in a nurse’s uniform sat. Graciela showed nothing but ease with the situation.

  “Hey, Patrice, what’s the haps?” she said cheerfully.

  The woman turned from the files she was dealing with in front of her and smiled. She glanced at McCaleb but then looked back at Graciela.

  “Graciela,” she said, drawing each syllable out and overdoing the Latin inflection like a television news anchor. “Nothing’s happening, girl. How ’bout you?”

  “Nada. Who’s the BSC and where’s the BSC?”

  “It’s Patty Kirk for a few days. She went down to get a sandwich a couple minutes ago.”

  “Hmmmm,” Graciela said as if it had just dawned on her. “Well, I’m going to make a quick connect.”

  She came around the counter and headed toward the computer.

  “We’ve got an SCW down in emergency with rare blood. I have a feeling this guy’s going to run through everything we got and I want to see what’s out there.”

  “You could’ve just called up. I would’ve run it for you.”

  “I know but I’m showing my friend, Terry, how we do things around here. Terry, this is Patrice. Patrice, Terry. He’s pre-med, UCLA. I’m seeing if I can’t talk him out of it.”

  Patrice looked at McCaleb and smiled again, then her eyes studied him in an appraising way. He knew what she was thinking.

  “I know, it’s kind of late,” he said. “It’s a midlife crisis sort of thing.”

  “I should say so. Good luck during residency. I’ve seen twenty-five-year-olds come out of that looking like they were fifty.”

  “I know. I’ll be ready.”

  They smiled at each other and the conversation was finally over. Patrice went back to her files and McCaleb looked at Graciela, who was seated in front of the computer. The toasters were gone and the screen was awake. There was some sort of template with white boxes on it.

  “You can come around,” she said. “Patrice won’t bite you.”

  Patrice laughed but didn’t say anything. McCaleb came around and stood behind her chair. She looked up at him and winked, knowing that he was blocking any view Patrice had of her. He winked back and smiled. Her coolness was impressive. He looked at his watch and then held his arm down so she could see it was now seven after twelve. She turned her attention to the computer.

  “Now, we’re looking for type AB blood, okay. So what we do is log on here and connect with BOPRA. That’s short for Blood and Organ Procurement and Request Agency. That’s the big regional blood bank we deal with. Most hospitals around here do.”

  “Right.”

  She reached up and ran her finger beneath a small piece of paper taped to the monitor above the screen. There was a six-digit number written on it. McCaleb knew this was the access code. On the drive over Graciela had explained how little security was attached to the BOPRA system. The code to access the computer was changed monthly. But the BSC position at Holy Cross was not a full-time position, meaning that nurses assigned to it were put through on rotation. This rotation was also routinely disrupted because nurses who had colds, viruses and any other maladies that did not require them to miss work but required that they be kept away from patients were often assigned to the BSC desk. Because of the high number of people working in the slot, the BOPRA code was simply taped to the monitor each month when it was changed. In eight years as a nurse, Graciela had worked at two other hospitals in Los Angeles. She had said that this practice was the same at each of those hospitals as well. BOPRA had a security system in place that was circumvented in probably every hospital it served.

  Graciela typed in the code number followed by the modem command and McCaleb heard the computer dial and then connect to the BOPRA computer.

  “Connecting to the mother station,” Graciela said.

  McCaleb looked at his watch. They had eight minutes at the most left. The screen went through some welcome templates before settling on an identification and request checklist. Graciela quickly typed in the needed information and continued to describe what she was doing.

  “Now we go to the blood request page. We type in what we are looking for and then… hocus pocus, we wait.”

  She held her hands in front of the screen and wiggled her fingers.

  “Graciela, how’s Raymond doing?” Patrice asked from behind them. McCaleb turned and looked back but Patrice was still working with her back to them.

  “He’s good,” Graciela answered. “It still breaks my heart but he’s doing good.”

  “Ah, that’s good. You gotta bring him in again.”

  “I will but he has school. Maybe spring break.”

  The screen started printing out an inventory of the availability of type AB blood and the hospital or blood bank location of each pint. While BOPRA was a blood bank itself, it also served as a coordinating agency for smaller banks and hospitals throughout the West.

  “Okay,” Graciela said. “So now we see that there is a pretty good supply of this around. The doctor wants to have at least six units on standby in case our patient with the sucking chest wound needs more surgery. So we click on the order window and put the hold on six. A hold only lasts twenty-four hours. If it’s not updated by this time tomorrow, that blood is up for grabs.”

  “Okay,” McCaleb said, acting like the student he was supposed to be.

  “I’ll have to remember to tell Patty to update this tomorrow.”

  “What if you called this up and there was no blood?”

  On the drive over she had told him to ask the question if there was anyone else in the nurses’ station when they connected to BOPRA.

  “Good question,” she said as she began moving the computer mouse. “This is what we do. We go to this icon with the blood droplet on it. We click and that gets us to the donors file. We wait again.”

  A few seconds went by and then the screen began filling with names, addresses, phone numbers and other information.

  “These are all blood donors with type AB. It shows where they are, how they can be contacted and this other information shows when
they gave blood last. You don’t want to keep going to the same person all the time. You try to spread it out and you try to find someone either near to us, so they can just come in here, or near to a blood bank. You want it to be convenient for them.”

  As she spoke she ran her finger down the list of names. There were about twenty-five of them, from all over the West. She stopped at her sister’s name and tapped the screen with her fingernail. Then she kept going. Her finger reached the bottom without coming across the names James Cordell or Donald Kenyon.

  McCaleb loudly let out his breath in disappointment but Graciela raised her finger in a one-moment gesture. She then hit the screen up key and a new screen of names appeared. There were maybe fifteen more. The name James Cordell sat on top of the new list. She ran her finger down the screen and found Donald Kenyon’s name second from the last.

  This time McCaleb’s breath caught and he just nodded. Graciela looked up at him, the somber look of confirmation in her eyes. McCaleb leaned close to the screen and read the information that followed the names. Cordell hadn’t given blood for nine months and it had been more than six years since Kenyon had spared a drop. McCaleb noticed that the final notation after each name was the letter D followed by an asterisk. Other names had one or the other but only a few had the combination of both. McCaleb reached down and tapped the screen below the letter.

  “What’s that? Deceased?”

  “No,” Graciela said in a quiet voice. “The D means donor. Organ donor. They signed papers, put it on their driver’s licenses, all of that, so that if the time comes that they come into a hospital and die, they can take the organs.”

  She looked at him the whole time she said this and McCaleb found it hard to look back at her. He knew what the confirmation meant.

  “And the asterisk?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  She scrolled the screen until she got back to the legend at the top. She ran her finger along the symbols until she got to the asterisk.

  “It means CMV negative,” she said. “Most people carry a non-threatening blood virus called CMV. It’s short for some big word. About a quarter of the population doesn’t have it. It’s something that has to be known to make a complete blood work match between donors and recipients.”