“Graciela,” he said, “I don’t know if you were expecting somebody to just come in and solve this like turning a key in a lock but it’s not realistic to believe that. That’s movies. This is real. In all my years in the bureau, most of the cases turned on some little detail, some little thing that was missed or didn’t seem important at first. But then it comes back around to being the key to the whole thing. It just takes time to get there sometimes, to find that little detail.”
“I know. I know. It just frustrates me that more wasn’t done sooner.”
“Yes, when the…”
He was going to say when the blood was fresh.
“What?”
“Nothing. It’s just that with most cases the more time goes by, the harder it gets.”
He knew he wasn’t helping her any by telling her the reality of the situation. But he wanted her to be prepared for his eventual failure. He had been good in his day but not that good. He now realized that by agreeing to take the case he had only set Graciela Rivers up for disappointment. His selfish dream of redemption would be another painful dose of reality for her.
“Those men just didn’t care,” she said.
He studied her downcast eyes. He knew she was talking about Arrango and Walters.
“Well, I do.”
They finished eating in silence. After McCaleb pushed his plate aside, he watched her as she gazed out the window. Even in her white polyester nurse’s uniform with her hair pinned back, Graciela Rivers stirred something in him. She had a kind of sadness about her that he wished somehow to soothe. He wondered if it had been there before her sister died. With most people it is. McCaleb had even seen it in the faces of babies-the sadness already there. The events of their lives seemed only to confirm the sadness they already carried.
“Was this where she died?” he asked.
She nodded and looked back at him.
“She was first taken to Northridge, stabilized and then transferred here. I was here when life support was terminated. I was with her.”
He shook his head.
“It must have been very hard.”
“I see people dying every day in the ER. We joke about it to relieve the stress, say they are ‘Three-D.’ Definitely Done Dancing. But when it’s your own… I don’t joke about it anymore.”
He watched her face as she shook it off, shifted gears and moved on, away from the trouble spot. Some people have that fifth gear that they can drop into, to get away.
“Tell me about her,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“That’s really why I came. Tell me things about her. It will help me. The better feel that I have for her, the better I’ll be at this.”
She was quiet a moment, her mouth curled in a frown as she thought about how to sum her sister up in a few words.
“Is there a kitchen on that boat of yours?” she finally asked.
Her question caught him off guard.
“What?”
“A kitchen. On your boat.”
“Uh, it’s actually called a galley.”
“Then galley. Is it big enough to cook real meals?”
“Sure. Why are you asking me about my boat?”
“You want to know my sister?”
“Yes.”
“Then you have to meet her son. Everything that was good about my sister is in Raymond. He’s all you have to know.”
McCaleb nodded slowly as he understood.
“So how about I bring Raymond down to your boat tonight and we make you dinner. I already told him about you and about the boat. He wants to see it.”
He thought a moment and said, “Tell you what. How about we wait until tomorrow. That way I can tell you about how my visit to the Sheriff’s Department went. Maybe I’ll have something more positive to report.”
“Tomorrow will be fine.”
“And don’t worry about cooking dinner. Dinner will be my job.”
“You’re turning this all around. I wanted to-”
“I know, I know. But you can save that for one night at your home. You’re coming to my home tomorrow and I’ll take care of dinner, okay?”
“Okay,” she said, still frowning but realizing he wouldn’t be budged. Then she smiled. “We’ll be there.”
Traffic south on the 405 was intense and the cab didn’t drop him off at the marina in San Pedro until after two. The cab was not air-conditioned and he caught a slight headache from the mixture of freeway exhaust fumes and the driver’s body odor.
After he got inside the boat, he checked his phone machine and found the only message he had was a hang- up call. He felt out of sync because his travels that day had involved more physical activity than he’d had for a long while. His leg muscles were sore and his back was aching. He went down to the head and checked his temperature but there was no fever. Blood pressure and pulse also checked out fine. He logged it all on the clipboard, then went to his stateroom, stripped off his clothes and crawled into the unmade bed.
Despite his physical depletion he had insomnia and lay wide awake on the pillow. His mind churned with the thoughts of the day and images from the video. After an hour of fooling himself, he got up and went up to the salon. He dug the notebook out of the jacket he had draped over a chair and read through the notes he had taken earlier. Nothing stood out but he felt comforted in some way at having started a record of his investigation.
On a fresh page he jotted down some additional thoughts about the video and a couple of questions he wanted to be sure to cover with Jaye Winston the next day. Assuming that the investigators had linked the cases, he wanted to know how solid the connection was and whether the three hundred dollars taken from James Cordell in the first case was actually taken from the victim or from the ATM’s cash tray.
He put the notebook aside when he realized he was hungry. He got up, scrambled three egg whites in a skillet, mixed in some Tabasco sauce and salsa and made a sandwich with white toast. After two bites he put on more Tabasco.
When he had cleaned up the galley, he felt the fatigue coming back and finally closing him down. He knew he could sleep now. He took a quick shower, another temperature reading and the evening batch of medications. In the mirror he saw he had what looked like a two-day growth of beard even though he had shaved that morning. It was a side effect of one of the drugs he was taking. Prednisone helped fight organ rejection and stimulated hair growth at the same time. He smiled at his reflection, thinking that the day before he should have told Bonnie Fox that he felt like a werewolf, not Frankenstein. He was getting his monsters mixed up. He went to bed.
His dream was in black and white. They all were now but they had not been before the operation. He didn’t know what this meant. He had told Dr. Fox about it and she had just shrugged.
In this dream he was in the market. He was a player in the video he had been shown by Arrango and Walters. He was at the counter smiling at Chan Ho Kang. The store owner smiled back in an unfriendly way and said something.
“What?” McCaleb asked.
“You don’t deserve it,” Mr. Kang said.
McCaleb looked down at the counter at his purchase but before he could see what it was he felt the cold ring of steel against his temple. He quickly turned and there was the masked man with a gun. McCaleb knew in the way knowledge and logic accompany dreams that the man was smiling behind the mask. The robber lowered the gun and fired into McCaleb’s chest, his bullet hitting the ten ring-the circle of the heart. The bullet went through McCaleb as if he were a paper target. But the impact forced him backward a step and then in slow motion he was
