Blood Work

inflection, that I was talking to you instead of him. He shouldn’t have known that. Not in a true trance. He should have answered every question spoken in that room unless it was specifically addressed to someone else. I never used your name.”

“He was faking.”

“Right. And if he was faking it, then his answers were bogus. It meant he was part of the setup. I had the videos compared before I came here. There are hard copies in my car. James Noone and the Good Samaritan are the same guy. The shooter.”

Winston shook her head as if to signal brain overload. Her eyes scanned the room for a place to sit down. There was only the cot.

“You want to sit here,” McCaleb said, standing up.

“I want to sit down but not in here. We have to back out of here, Terry. I need to call Captain Hitchens and then the others, LAPD and the bureau. I better put out a pickup on Noone, too.”

McCaleb was amazed that she still didn’t have all the pieces together.

“Aren’t you listening? There is no Noone. He doesn’t exist.”

“What do you mean?”

“The name. It goes with everything else, Noone. Break it down and you get no one. I am no one. The pieces were there all the time…”

He shook his head and dropped back into the chair. He put his face in his hands.

“How am I… I can’t live with this.”

Again Winston put her hand on his neck but this time he didn’t startle.

“Come on, Terry, let’s not think about that. Let’s go out to the car and wait. I have to get a crime scene crew in here, maybe get some prints so we can ID this guy.”

McCaleb stood up and walked around the desk and out toward the door. He spoke without looking back at her.

“He never left a print anywhere else before. I doubt he started now.”

Two hours later McCaleb was sitting in the Taurus, parked out on Atoll behind the yellow police lines that had been strung between the rows of garage warehouses. A hundred yards down the drive he could see the cluster of activity in and around Noone’s brightly lit garage. There were several detectives-some McCaleb recognized from the Code Killer task force, technicians, videographers from at least two of the agencies involved, and a half dozen uniformed officers standing by.

Moths to the flame, he thought. He watched it all with a strange detachment. His thoughts were on other things. Graciela and Raymond. And Noone. He couldn’t stop thinking about the man who called himself Noone. He had been in the same room with him. He had been that close.

He needed a drink, wanted the burning taste of whiskey in his throat, but he knew to take that taste would be the same as putting a gun to his head. He knew that despite the pain cutting through him, he would not give Noone, or whoever he was, that satisfaction. He decided in the darkness of the car that he would live. Despite it all he would live.

He didn’t notice the men walking down the drive toward him until they were almost to the Taurus. He flicked on the lights and identified them as Nevins and Uhlig and Arrango. He turned the lights off and waited. They opened the doors of the car and got in, Nevins in the front, the other two in the back, with Arrango directly behind McCaleb.

“Got any heat in this thing?” Nevins asked. “It’s getting cold out here.”

McCaleb started the car but waited to turn the heater on until the engine got warm. He looked in the rearview mirror at Arrango. It was too dark to see if he had a toothpick in his mouth.

“Where’s Walters?”

“Busy.”

“Okay,” Nevins said. “Uh, we came down to tell you it looks like we were wrong about you, McCaleb. I’m sorry. We’re sorry. Looks like Noone is the guy. You did good work.”

McCaleb only nodded. It was a half-assed apology but he didn’t care about that. What he had found out in order to clear his name would be harder to live with than if he had been publicly accused of the murders. Apologies meant nothing to him.

“We know it’s been a long night for you and we want to get you on your way. I was thinking we could just kind of get your rundown on how all of this shakes out and then maybe tomorrow you come in and give a formal statement. What do you think?”

“Fine. As far as the formal statement goes, I’ll give it to Winston. Not you guys.”

“Fair enough. I can understand that. But for now, why don’t you tell us how, in your view, how this whole thing works. Can you do that?”

McCaleb leaned forward and switched on the heater. He composed his thoughts for a few moments before beginning.

“I’ll call him Noone because that’s all we have and maybe all we’ll ever have. It begins with the Code Killer. That was Noone. At that time I was the bureau’s point man on the task force. By agreement with the LAPD, I became the media spokesman on the case. I led the briefings, requests for interviews went to me. For ten months my face became synonymous on TV with the Code Killer. And so Noone fixated on me. As we got closer to him he fixated on me. He sent letters to me. In his mind, I was the nemesis. I was the embodiment of the task force that was hunting him.”

“Aren’t you taking a lot of the credit for yourself?” Arrango asked. “I mean, you weren’t the only-”

“Shut up and listen, Arrango. You might learn something.”

McCaleb stared at him in the rearview and Arrango stared back. McCaleb saw Nevins hold a hand up in a calming motion directed at Arrango.

“ He gave me the credit,” McCaleb said. “I didn’t take it. Eventually, when he knew the risks were too great, he dropped out. The killings stopped. The Code Killer disappeared. About that same time I went down with… with my problems. I needed the transplant and it became news because I had been a face in the news. Noone saw this. He could have easily been aware of this. And he hatched what he would consider his grandest scheme.”

“He decided that rather than kill you, he would save you,” Uhlig said.

McCaleb nodded.

“It would give him the ultimate victory because it would last and last. To simply eliminate me, kill me, would bring only a fleeting sense of fulfillment. But by saving me… now there was something unique, something that would get him into the hall of fame. And he’d always have me around as a reminder of how smart and powerful he is. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” Nevins said. “But that’s the psychological side. What I want to know is how he did it? How’d he get the names? How did he know about Kenyon and Cordell and then Torres?”

“His computer. Your techs are going to have to take that thing apart.”

“We’ve got Bob Clearmountain coming in,” Nevins said. “You remember him?”

McCaleb nodded. Clearmountain was the L.A. field office’s resident computer expert. A hacker extraordinary in his own right.

“Good. Then he’ll be able to answer that question better than me. Eventually. My guess is that you’ll find a hacking program in that computer. Noone got into BOPRA and from there got the names. He chose his targets based on age, physical fitness and proximity. And he went to work. With Kenyon and Cordell things went wrong. They went right with Torres. That is, according to Noone’s view.”

“And he planned all along to lay it on you?”

“All I think is that he wanted me to follow the trail and find out for myself what he had done. He knew that would happen if I became a suspect. Because then I would have to look into it myself. But then that didn’t happen at first because the case investigators missed the clues.”

He looked at Arrango in the mirror as he said this. He could see the detective’s eyes turn dark with anger. He was about to explode.

“Arrango, the fact is, you treated it as an everyday stop-and-rob with the addition of shots fired, nothing more and nothing less. You missed it. So Noone jump-started the whole thing.”