Blood Work

“You watched it?”

McCaleb nodded. He disengaged from Graciela and sat on the side of the bed, his back to her.

“He had a rifle. They did what he wanted. All sorts of things… the two sisters… together. Other things. And he killed them anyway. He-ah, shit…”

He shook his head and rubbed his hands harshly over his face. He felt her warm hand on his back.

“The blocks he tied them to weren’t enough to take them right down. They struggled, you know, on the surface. He watched and taped it. It got him aroused. He was masturbating while he watched them drown.”

He heard Graciela crying quietly. He lay back down and put an arm around her.

“The tape was the last we ever heard from him,” he said. “He’s out there somewhere. Another one.”

He looked at her in the darkness, not sure if she could see him.

“That’s the story.”

“I’m sorry you have that to carry around.”

“And now you have it. I’m sorry, too.”

She rubbed the tears away from her eyes.

“That’s when you stopped believing in angels, isn’t it?”

He nodded.

An hour or so before dawn McCaleb got up and went back to his uncomfortable bed in the salon. They had spent the night until that point talking in whispers, holding and kissing, but never making love. Once back in his sleeping bag, sleep still did not come to him. McCaleb’s mind kept running over the details of the hours he had just spent with Graciela, the touch of her warm hands on his skin, the softness of her breasts against his lips, the taste of her lips. And during moments when his mind wandered from these sensual memories, he also thought about the story he had told her and the way she had reacted.

In the morning they did not talk about what had happened in the stateroom or what had been said, even when Raymond had gone out to the stern to look into the live well and was out of earshot. Graciela seemed to act as if there had been no rendezvous, consummated or not, and McCaleb acted in kind. The first thing he spoke of while he scrambled eggs for the three of them was the case.

“I want you to do something for me when you get home today,” he said, checking over his shoulder to make sure Raymond was still outside. “I want you to think about your sister and write down as much as you can about her routines. I mean like places she would go, friends she would see. Anything you can think of she did between the first of the year and the night she went into that store. Also, I want to talk to her friends and boss at the Times. It might be better if you set that up.”

“All right. How come?”

“Because things are changing about the case. Remember I asked you about the earring?”

McCaleb told her his belief that it had been the shooter who had taken the earring. He also told her how he had found out late Friday that something of a personal nature had been taken from the victim in the first shooting as well.

“What was it?”

“A photo of his wife and kids.”

“What do you think it means?”

“That maybe these weren’t robberies. That maybe this man at the ATM and then your sister were picked for some other reason. There’s a chance they might have had some prior interaction with the man who shot them. You know, crossed paths with him somewhere. That’s why I want you to do this. The wife of the first victim is doing it for me with her husband. I’ll look at the two of them together and see if there are any commonalities.”

Graciela folded her arms and leaned against the galley counter.

“You mean like they did something to this man to cause this?”

“No. I mean that they crossed paths and something about them attracted him to them. There’s no valid reason. I think we’re looking for a psychopath. There is no telling what caught his eye. Why he chose these two people out of the nine million others who live in this county.”

She slowly shook her head in disbelief.

“What do the police say about all of this?”

“I don’t think the LAPD even knows yet. And the sheriff’s investigator is not sure whether or not she sees it the way I do. We’re all going to talk about it tomorrow morning.”

“What about the man?”

“What man?”

“The store owner. Maybe he was the one who crossed the path. Maybe Glory had nothing to do with it.”

McCaleb shook his head and said, “No. If he was the target, the shooter would have just gone in and shot him when nobody else was in the store. It was your sister. Your sister and the first man up in Lancaster. There is some connection. We have to find it.”

McCaleb reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out a photo Amelia Cordell had given him. It showed James Cordell in close-up, a bright smile on his face. He showed the photo to Graciela.

“Do you recognize this man? Is he someone that your sister might have known?”

She took the photo from him and studied it but then shook her head.

“Not that I know of. Is he… the man from Lancaster?”

McCaleb nodded and took the photo back. He put it in his pocket, then told Graciela to go get Raymond to come inside for his breakfast. As she got to the sliding door, he stopped her.

“Graciela, do you trust me?”

She looked back at him.

“Of course.”

“Then trust me about this. I don’t care if the LAPD and the sheriffs don’t believe me, but I know what I know. With or without them, I’m going to keep pushing on this.”

She nodded and turned back to the door and the boy out in the stern.

23

THE DETECTIVE BUREAU at the Sheriff’s Department’s Star Center was crowded with detectives when McCaleb entered at eight o’clock on Monday morning. However, the receptionist who had let him walk back to homicide on his own just three days earlier told him he had to wait for the captain. This puzzled McCaleb but before he could ask about it, the receptionist was on the phone making a call. As soon as she hung up, McCaleb saw Captain Hitchens emerge from the meeting room he had sat in with Jaye Winston on Friday. He closed the door behind him and headed toward McCaleb. Terry noticed that the blinds over the meeting room’s glass window were drawn and closed. Hitchens beckoned him to follow.

“Terry, come on back with me.”

McCaleb followed him to his office and Hitchens told him to have a seat. McCaleb was getting a bad feeling about the overly cordial treatment. Hitchens sat behind his desk, folded his arms and leaned forward on the calendar blotter with a smile on his face.

“So, where have you been?”

McCaleb looked at his watch.

“What do you mean? Jaye Winston set the meeting for eight. It’s two minutes after.”

“I mean Sunday, Saturday. Jaye’s been calling.”

McCaleb immediately knew what had happened. On Saturday, when he had been cleaning up the boat, he had taken the phone and the answer machine and placed them in a cabinet next to the chart table. He had then forgotten about it. Calls to the boat and messages left while they had been out on the jetty fishing both days would have been missed. The phone and machine were still in the cabinet.

“Damn,” he now said to Hitchens. “I haven’t checked my machine.”