Blood Work

27

ON THE DRIVE up to the Times plant in the Valley, McCaleb sat in the passenger seat of Graciela’s Volkswagen and was mostly silent. His mind moved over the activities of the night like an anchor dragging across a sandy bottom, seeking but finding no purchase, nothing to grip.

After he had noticed the wet spot on the carpet, he had retraced the chase to the parking lot and found the dock also was wet. It was a cool, crisp night and too early for the morning moisture to have formed. The intruder had clearly been wet when he had broken into the boat. The shine of light on his body indicated he had probably been wearing a wetsuit. The question McCaleb could not answer now was why?

Before they had left, McCaleb had gone over to Buddy Lockridge’s boat to see if his neighbor was there. He found Buddy, looking disheveled as usual, sitting in the cockpit reading a book called Hocus. McCaleb asked him if he had spent the night on the boat and he said he had. When asked why he hadn’t answered the phone, Buddy insisted that it was because it hadn’t rung. McCaleb let it go, thinking either Lockridge had simply been passed out and hadn’t heard his call or McCaleb had pushed the wrong speed-dial button.

He told Lockridge that he didn’t need him as a driver for the day, but that he wanted to hire him as a diver.

“You want me to scrape your hull?”

“No. I want you to search the hull. And the bottom. And all the piers around the boat.”

“Search? Search for what?”

“I don’t know. You’ll know it when you see it.”

“Whatever you say. But I ripped my wetsuit again doing that Bertram. As soon as I sew it up, I’ll go over and check it out.”

“Thanks. Put it on my tab.”

“You got it. Hey, is your lady friend going to be driving you now?”

He was looking past McCaleb at Graciela standing in the stern of The Following Sea. McCaleb looked at her and then back at Lockridge.

“No, Buddy. Just today. She’s got to introduce me to some people. That okay?”

“Sure. It’s okay.”

In the car McCaleb sipped from the mug of coffee he had brought with him and looked out the window, still bothered by Lockridge not having answered his call for help. They were in the Sepulveda pass, going over the Santa Monica Mountains. Most of the traffic on the 405 was going the other way.

“What are you thinking about?” Graciela asked.

“Last night, I guess,” he said. “Trying to figure it out. Buddy is going to take a dive under the boat today, maybe find out what the guy was doing.”

“Well, are you sure you want to see this Times guy now? We could reschedule it.”

“No, we’re already on our way. It can’t hurt to talk to as many people as we can. We still don’t know what any of this stuff from yesterday means. Until we do, we should keep plugging away.”

“Sounds good. He said we could talk to some of her friends who worked there, too.”

McCaleb nodded and reached down to the leather bag on the floor. It had grown fat with all the documents and tapes he had accumulated. He had decided to leave nothing from the case behind on the boat, in case of another break-in. And adding to the bag’s weight was his gun, a Sig-Sauer P-228. Other than at his interview with Bolotov, he hadn’t carried the weapon since he had retired from the bureau. But when Graciela went into the shower, he had removed it from its drawer again and slid the clip into it. He did not chamber a round-following the same safety precaution he had always practiced while with the bureau. He then made room for the pistol in his bag by jettisoning his medical kit. His plan was to be back at the boat before it was time for him to take more pills.

He dug through the stacks of paperwork in the bag until he found his legal pad and he opened it to the timeline he had constructed from the reports in the LAPD murder book. He read the top and found what he wanted.

“Annette Stapleton,” he said.

“What about her?”

“You know her? I want to talk to her.”

“She was Glory’s friend. She came over once to meet Raymond. And then she was at the funeral. How do you know about her?”

“Her name is in the LAPD stuff. She and your sister talked in the parking lot that night. I want to talk to her about other nights. You know, see if your sister was worried about anything. The LAPD never spent much time with Stapleton. Remember, they were running the random-holdup angle from the start.”

“Bozos.”

“I don’t know. It’s hard to blame them. They carry a lot of cases and this one looked the way it was set up to look.”

“Still no excuse.”

McCaleb let it go and turned silent. He didn’t particularly feel the need to defend Arrango and Walters anyway. He returned to his thoughts on the events of the night and came to one positive conclusion: he was apparently making enough waves to engage a response from someone, though he didn’t know what exactly that response had been.

They got to the L.A. Times plant ten minutes before their appointment with Glory’s supervisor, a man named Clint Neff. The Times plant was a huge property at the corner of Winnetka and Prairie in Chatsworth in the northwest corner of Los Angeles. It was a neighborhood of slick office buildings, warehouses and upper-middle-class neighborhoods. The Times building looked as though it were made of smoked glass and white plastic. They stopped at a guard station and had to wait while a man in uniform called in to confirm their appointment before lifting the gate. After they parked, McCaleb took the legal pad from his bag to take in with him. The bag itself had become too cumbersome to lug around. He made sure Graciela locked the car before they left it.

Through automatic sliding doors they stepped into a two-story lobby of black marble and terra-cotta tile. Their steps echoed on the floor. It was cold and austere, and not unlike the paper’s coverage of the community, some critics would say.

A white-haired man in a uniform of matching blue pants and shirt came down a hallway and greeted them. The oval patch above the pocket of his shirt said his name was Clint before he got a chance to say it. A set of professional ear protectors like those worn by ground crews at airports was around his neck. Graciela introduced herself and then McCaleb.

“Miss Rivers, all I can say is that we’re all real sorry here,” Neff said. “Your sister was a good gal. A fine worker and a good friend to us.”

“Thank you. She was.”

“If you want to come back, we can sit down for a minute and I can help you as best I can.”

He led the way back down the hall, walking in front of them and throwing conversation over his shoulder.

“Your sister probably told you, but this is where we print all the papers for the Valley edition and then most of the specials we insert in all the editions. You know, the TV magazine and whatnot.”

“Yes, I know,” Graciela said.

“You know, I don’t know what good I’ll be to you. I told some of the crew you might want to talk to them, too. They said it would be fine.”

They came to a set of stairs and went up.

“Is Annette Stapleton still on the night shift?” McCaleb asked.