“No, it’s not that,” he said.
“Is there a problem?” Neff chimed in.
“No,” McCaleb said, a little too loudly. “We just have to go. I need to get to the car.”
“Is everything all right?”
“Yes,” McCaleb said, again too loudly. “I’m sorry, but everything’s fine. We just have to go.”
McCaleb nodded his thanks to Annette Stapleton and headed down the hallway toward what he believed was the entrance lobby. Graciela followed and Neff called after them, telling them to take their first left.
McCaleb was walking quickly toward the car. He felt that maintaining velocity would somehow help keep the growing dread he was feeling from entirely overtaking his thoughts. Graciela had to trot to keep up.
“The blood.”
“The blood?”
“They both gave blood. Your sister and Cordell. It was right there in front of me all the-I saw that poster and I remembered I saw a letter at Cordell’s house… and I just knew. Do you have your keys?”
“Listen, slow down, Terry. Slow down.”
He reluctantly slowed his pace and she came up next to him, digging the car keys out of her purse.
“Now tell me what you are talking about.”
“Open the car and I’ll show you.”
They reached the car. She unlocked his door first and started around to her side. He slipped in and reached across to open her door. He then leaned forward and started going through the bag on the floor. It was so jammed with paperwork, he had to pull the gun out and place it on the floor mat just so there was room to look through the documents. Graciela got in the car and started watching.
“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.”
