Michael Connelly - Blood Work

“What are you, police?”

McCaleb looked away from the window and over the seat at the rearview mirror. The driver’s eyes were on him.

“What?”

“Are you policeman or something?”

McCaleb shook his head.

“No, I’m no one. “

He looked back out the window as the cab labored up a freeway on-ramp. They passed a woman who was holding a sign asking for money. Another victim waiting to be victimized again.

He sat in the waiting room on a plastic chair across from an injured woman and her husband. The woman had internal pain and kept her arms folded across her midsection. She was hunched over, protecting the hurt. Her husband was being attentive, repeatedly asking how she felt and going to the intake window to ask when she would be taken back for examination. But twice McCaleb heard him quietly ask her, “What are you going to tell them?”

And each time the woman turned her face away.

At quarter to twelve Graciela Rivers came through the double doors of the ER ward. She suggested that they just go to the hospital cafeteria because she had only an hour. McCaleb didn’t mind because his taste for food had still not come back since the transplant. Eating at the hospital would be no different to him than eating at Jozu on Melrose. Most days he didn’t care what he ate and sometimes he forgot about meals until a headache reminded him that he needed to refuel.

The cafeteria was almost empty. They took their trays to a table next to a window, which looked out on a huge green lawn surrounding a large white cross.

“This is my one chance to look at daylight,” Graciela said. “Back in the ER rooms there are no windows. So I always try to get a window.”

McCaleb nodded that he understood.

“Way back when I worked in Quantico, our offices were below ground. The basement. No windows, always damp, freezing in the winter even with the heat on. I never saw the sun. It wears on you after a while.”

“Is that why you moved out here?”

“No. Other reasons. But I did figure I’d get a window. I was wrong. They stuck me in a storage closet at the FO. Seventeen floors up but no windows. I think that’s why I live on the boat now. I like having the sky close by.”

“What’s the FO?”

“Sorry. Field office. It was in Westwood. In the big federal building near the veterans cemetery.”

She nodded.

“So, did you really grow up on Catalina like the paper said?”

“Until I was sixteen,” he said. “Then I lived with my mother in Chicago… It’s funny, I spent all the time I was growing up on that island just wanting to get off it. Now I’m just trying to get back there.”

“What will you do there?”

“I don’t know. I’ve got a mooring over there my father left me. Maybe I won’t do anything. Maybe I’ll just drop a line and sit in the sun with a beer in my hand.”

He smiled and she smiled back.

“If you already have a mooring, why can’t you go now?”

“The boat’s not ready. Neither am I yet.”

She nodded.

“It was your father’s boat?”

Another detail from the newspaper. He had obviously said too much about himself to Keisha Russell. He didn’t like people knowing so much about him so easily.

“He lived on it over there. When he died, it came to me. I let it sit in dry dock for years. Now it needs a lot of work.”

“Did he name it or was that you?”

“His name.”

She frowned and squinted her eyes as if something was sour.

“Why did he call it The Following Sea instead of just Following Sea ? It doesn’t make sense with The in front of Following Sea. ”

“No, it makes sense. It doesn’t refer to the act of following behind the sea. There is something known as the following sea, or a following sea.”

“Oh. What is it?”

“A sea is a wave. You know, how you hear on surf reports that the seas are two to four feet or whatever?”

“Right.”

“Okay, well a following sea is the one you have to watch out for. It’s the one that comes up behind a vessel. You don’t see it coming. It hits you from behind and swamps you. Sinks you. The rule is that if you’re running in following seas, you’ve just got to be moving faster than they are. Stay ahead of them. He named the boat that because it was like a reminder. You know, always watch over your shoulder. It was something he always said to me when I was growing up. Even when I went over town.”

“Over town?”

“When I left the island. He told me always to watch out for the following sea, even on land.”

She smiled.

“Now that I know the story, I like the name. Do you miss him?”

He nodded but offered nothing else. The conversation drifted away and they began to eat their sandwiches. McCaleb hadn’t planned on the meeting being about him. After a few bites he started filling her in on the morning’s lack of solid accomplishment. He didn’t tell her about watching her sister being murdered on the videotape but he told her about his hunch that the Torres-Kang slayings were connected to at least one other incident. He told her how he was further guessing that that other incident might be the ATM robbery and shooting recounted in the stories Keisha Russell had read him.

“What will you do next?” she asked when he was done.

“Take a nap.”

She looked at him curiously.

“I’m beat,” he said. “I haven’t been running around and doing as much thinking as this for a long time. I’m going back to my boat and resting up. Tomorrow I’ll start again.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, you’re not,” he said with a smile. “You were looking for somebody with a reason to get involved in this. I’ve got the reason and I’m involved, but I’ve got to take it slow at first. You being a nurse, I hope you understand.”

“I do. I don’t want you to hurt yourself. That would make Glory’s dying even more…”

“I understand.”

They were silent for a few moments before he picked up the conversation again.

“Your take on the LAPD was right on. I think they’re in a holding pattern, waiting for something to happen-probably for this guy to hit again. They’re definitely not working it. It’s a cold case until something happens to warm it up.”

She shook her head.

“They’re not working it but they don’t want you to have a try at it. That makes a lot of sense.”

“It’s a territorial thing. It’s the way the game is played.”

“It’s not a game.”

“I know.”

He wished he had chosen a better word.

“Then what can you do?”

“Well, in the morning, when I’m fresh, I’ll try the Sheriff’s Department on this other case, the one I think is connected. I know the lead on it. Jaye Winston. We worked a case once a long time ago. It went well and I’m hoping that will get me in the door. At least further in than I got with the L.A. people.”

She nodded but she wasn’t all that good at masking her disappointment.

“Graciela,” he said, “I don’t know if you were expecting somebody to just come in and solve this like turning a key in a lock but it’s not realistic to believe that. That’s movies. This is real. In all my years in the bureau, most of the cases turned on some little detail, some little thing that was missed or didn’t seem important at first. But then it comes back around to being the key to the whole thing. It just takes time to get there sometimes, to find that little detail.”

“I know. I know. It just frustrates me that more wasn’t done sooner.”

“Yes, when the…”

He was going to say when the blood was fresh.

“What?”

“Nothing. It’s just that with most cases the more time goes by, the harder it gets.”