“Hey, who is getting the heart?”
“What?”
“You said she was in surgery. Which patient? Was it the boy?”
“I’m sorry, I’m not at liberty to discuss other patients with you,” said the frowner.
“Fine,” he said. “Then just make sure you tell her to call me.”
McCaleb spent the next fifteen minutes pacing between the living room and kitchen, hoping unrealistically that the phone would ring and Fox would be on the line.
He finally managed to shoehorn the anxiety into a side compartment of his brain and started thinking about the larger problems at hand. McCaleb knew he had to start making decisions, chief of which was to decide whether to get a lawyer. He knew Winston was right; it was the smart move to get legal protection. But McCaleb couldn’t bring himself to make the call to Michael Haller, Jr. or anybody else, to give up on his own skills and rely on another’s.
In the living room, there were no documents left on the coffee table. As he had gone through the pages, he had returned them to the leather bag until all that was on the table was the stack of videotapes.
Desperate for a diversion from his thoughts about what exactly Fox had said to him about the other patient, he picked up the videocassette on top of the stack and walked it over to the television. He popped it into the VCR without looking to see which tape it was. It didn’t matter. He just wanted something else to think about for a while.
But as he dropped back onto the couch, he immediately ignored the tape that was playing. Michael Haller, Jr., he thought. Yes, he would be a good attorney. Not as good as his old man, the legendary Mickey Haller. But the legend was long dead and Junior had taken his place as one of the most visible and successful defense attorneys in Los Angeles. Junior would get him out of this, McCaleb knew. But, of course, that would be after the reputation-destroying media blitz, the looting of his savings and the selling of
Forever.
McCaleb squinted his eyes and wondered what it was he was staring at on the TV. The camera was focused on the legs and feet of someone standing on a table. Then he recognized his own walking boots and placed what he was seeing. The hypnosis session. The camera had been running when McCaleb climbed onto the table to remove some of the overhead lighting tubes. James Noone appeared in the frame and reached up as one of the long fluorescent light tubes was handed down to him.
McCaleb grabbed the TV remote off the arm of the couch and hit the fast forward button. Interested because he had forgotten to review the hypnosis session as he had promised Captain Hitchens he would, McCaleb decided to skip through the preliminaries. He moved the tape past the initial interview and relaxation exercises to the actual questioning of Noone under hypnosis. He wanted to hear James Noone’s recounting of the details of the shooting and the killer’s getaway.
McCaleb watched with total concentration and quickly found himself suffering the same physical effects of frustration he had felt during the actual session. Noone had been a perfect subject. It was rare that he had hypnotized a witness who could recall such detail. The cutting frustration was that he simply hadn’t gotten a good look at the driver and the Cherokee’s license plates had been covered.
“Damn,” McCaleb cursed out loud as the taped session drew to a close.
He reached for the remote, deciding to rewind and run the interview again, when he suddenly froze, his finger poised over the remote button.
McCaleb had just seen something that did not fit, something he had missed during the actual session because he was distracted by Winston, who had been sitting in. He rewound the tape but only briefly, then replayed the last few questions that were asked.
On the tape, McCaleb was wrapping it up, asking a scatter of leftover and wishful-thinking questions. They were long shots, thrown at Noone out of frustration. He had asked about any stickers on the Cherokee’s windshield. Noone said no and then McCaleb was out of questions. He turned to Winston and asked her, “Anything else?”
Even though McCaleb had broken his own rules by asking a question of a nonparticipant, Winston followed the rules and did not answer verbally. Instead, she shook her head in the negative.
“You sure?” McCaleb asked.
Again she shook her head no. McCaleb then began bringing Noone out of the trance.
But that was wrong and McCaleb had missed it at the time. Now he came around the coffee table, remote in hand, and leaned closer to the screen. He rewound the tape one more time to watch the sequence again.
“Son of a bitch,” he whispered after the play-through. “You should’ve answered me, Noone. You should have answered!”
He punched the eject button and turned to grab another tape. He knocked the short stack across the coffee table and then quickly scrabbled through the plastic cassettes until he found the tape with the label marked Sherman Market. He put the tape into the machine, started playing it on fast forward and then paused the image when the Good Samaritan was on the screen.
The VCR could not hold the image still and McCaleb guessed the machine was an inexpensive model with only two tape heads. He ejected the tape and looked at his watch. It was four-forty. He slapped the remote down on top of the television and went to the kitchen for the phone.
Tony Banks agreed to stay once again after closing at Video GraFX Consultants until McCaleb could get there. Crossing the floor of the Valley on the 101, he initially made good time. Most of the rush-hour traffic was going the other way, the workforce of the city returning to the bedroom communities of the Valley. But when he dipped south on the freeway to go through the Cahuenga Pass into Hollywood, the brake lights were flared for as far as he could see and he got bogged down. He finally pulled Buddy Lockridge’s Taurus into the small employee lot at VGC at five after six. Once again, Tony Banks answered the door after McCaleb had pushed the night bell.
“Tony, thanks,” McCaleb said to the man’s back as he was led down the hallway once again to one of the tech rooms. “You are really helping me out here.”
“No problem.”
But McCaleb noted that there wasn’t as much enthusiasm in the “No problem” this time. They entered the same room they had sat in the week before. McCaleb handed Banks the two tapes he had brought with him.
“On each of these tapes there is a man,” he said. “I want to see if they are the same man.”
“You mean, like, you can’t tell.”
“Not for sure. They look different. But I think it’s a disguise. I think they’re the same man but I want to be sure.”
Banks put the first tape into the player on the left side of the console, turned it on and the Sherman Market robbery and shooting began playing on the corresponding overhead video display tube.
“This guy?” Banks said.
“Right. Freeze it when there’s a good look.”
Banks froze the image at the moment the so-called Good Samaritan was looking off camera in right profile.
“How is that? I need the profile. It’s hard to do a comparison front-on.”
“You’re the boss.”
