Michael Connelly - Blood Work

The hatch was still open but McCaleb saw and heard no activity. He called out and waited. It was bad marina etiquette to step onto a boat uninvited.

Eventually, Buddy Lockridge’s head and shoulders came up through the hatch. His hair was combed and he was dressed now.

“Buddy, what do you have going for today?”

“Whaddaya mean? The same thing I’ve always got going. A big goose egg. What’d you think, I was going to Kinko’s to update my résumé?”

“Well, look, I need a driver for the next few days, maybe more. You want to do it, the job’s yours. I’m paying ten bucks an hour plus any meals. You’d have to bring a book or something because there will be a lot of sitting around waiting for me.”

Buddy climbed all the way up into the cockpit.

“Where’re you drivin’ to?”

“I’ve got to go out to Whittier. I need to leave in fifteen minutes. After that, I don’t know.”

“What is it, some kind of investigation?”

McCaleb could see the excitement building in Buddy’s eyes. He spent a lot of time reading crime novels and often recounted their plots to McCaleb. This would be the real thing.

“Yeah, I’m looking into something for somebody. But I’m not looking for a partner, Buddy, just a driver.”

“That’s okay. I’m in. Whose car?”

“We take yours, I pay for gas. We take my Cherokee, I sit in the back. It’s got a passenger side air bag. You decide. Either way is fine with me.”

Driving had been forbidden for McCaleb by Bonnie Fox until at least his ninth month. His chest was still closing. The skin was healed but beneath the scarred exterior the sternum was still open. An impact on a steering wheel or from an air bag could be fatal, even in a low-speed accident.

“Well, I like the Cherokee but let’s take mine,” Buddy said. “I’d feel like too much of a chauffeur with you in the back.”

IN THE SUMMER of 1993 the body of a woman had been found in a large outcropping of sandstone known as Vasquez Rocks in the Antelope Valley in northern Los Angeles County. The body had been there several days. Decomposition prevented determination of sexual assault but it was assumed. The body was clothed but the panties were inside out and the blouse misbuttoned-a clear indication that the woman had not dressed herself or had done so only under severe duress. Cause of death was manual strangulation, the means of death in most sexual homicides.

Sheriff’s detective Jaye Winston drew the Vasquez Rocks killing as lead investigator. When the case didn’t break quickly with an arrest, Winston settled in for the long haul. Ambitious but not burdened by an unchecked ego, she contacted the FBI for help as one of her first moves. Her request was relayed to the serial killer unit and she eventually filled out a case survey for the unit’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program.

The VICAP survey was the means by which McCaleb first became acquainted with Winston. The case package she had sent to Quantico was forwarded to McCaleb’s storage room office at the Los Angeles FO. In typical bureaucratic fashion, the package had gone all the way across the country only to be sent back nearly to its origin for follow-up.

Through the VICAP data base computer-which compares an eighty-question survey about an individual killing with those on file-and study of the crime scene and autopsy photos, McCaleb matched the Vasquez Rocks case to another killing a year earlier in the Sepulveda Pass area of Los Angeles. A similar killing method, the dumping of the clothed body on an embankment, other small details and nuances-all matched up. McCaleb believed they had another serial killer working the L.A. basin. In both of the cases it was determined that the woman had been missing two or three days longer than she had been dead. This meant the killer had held her captive and alive during that period, probably to serve in his ghastly fantasies.

Connecting the cases was only one step. Identifying and capturing the killer were the obvious following steps. However, there was nothing to go on. McCaleb was curious about the lengthy interval between the two murders. The Unknown Subject, as the killer was formally called in FBI documents, had gone eleven months before the urges overtook him and he acted out on his fantasies by abducting the second woman. To McCaleb, this meant that the event was so strongly implanted in the killer’s mind that his fantasy life could essentially live off it or be fueled by it for almost a year. The bureau’s serial killer profiling program showed that this interval would grow shorter and shorter each time and the killer would have to seek fresh prey sooner.

McCaleb worked up a profile for Winston but it wasn’t much help and they both knew it. White male, twenty to thirty, with a menial job and existence, the Unknown Subject would also have a prior history of sexual crimes or aberrational behavior. If this history included incarceration for any lengthy periods, it could skew the profiled age span of the subject.

It was the same old story. The VICAP profiles were usually dead-on accurate but they rarely led to the acquisition of a suspect. The profile given to Winston could match hundreds, maybe thousands of men in the Los Angeles area. So after all investigative leads were played out, there was nothing to do but wait. McCaleb made a note of the case on his calendar and went on to other cases.

In March of the following year-eight months from the last murder-McCaleb came across the note, reread the file and gave Winston a call. Nothing much had changed. There still were no leads or suspects. McCaleb urged the sheriff’s investigator to begin a surveillance of the two body disposal sites and the graves of the two victims. He explained that the killer was near the end of his cycle. His fantasies would be running dry. The urge to freshly recreate the sensation of power and control over another human would be growing and increasingly hard to control. The fact that the Unknown Subject had apparently dressed the bodies after each of the first two murders was a clear sign of the battle raging inside his mind. One part of him was ashamed of what he had done-he sought in a subconscious way to cover it up by replacing each victim’s clothes. This suggested that eight months into the cycle the killer would be engulfed in tremendous psychological turmoil. The urge to act out his fantasy again and the shame the act would bring were the two sides in a battle for control. One way to temporarily placate the urge to kill would be to revisit the sites of his previous crimes in an effort to bring new fuel to the fantasy. McCaleb’s hunch was that the killer would return to one of the disposal spots or visit the graves. It would bring him closer to his victims and help him stave off the need to kill again.

Winston was reluctant to instigate a multiple point surveillance operation on the basis of an FBI agent’s hunch. But McCaleb had already received approval for himself and two other agents for stake-out duty. He also played upon Winston’s professionalism, telling her that if she didn’t do it, she would always wonder if the stake-out would have been successful, especially if the Unknown Subject hit again. With that kind of threat to her conscience, Winston went to her lieutenant and counterparts on the LAPD case and a surveillance squad was assembled from all three agencies. While planning the surveillance, Winston learned that by coincidence both of the victims were buried in the same Glendale cemetery, about one hundred yards apart. Hearing that, McCaleb predicted that if the Unknown Subject was going to show, it would be in the cemetery.

He was right. On the fifth night of the surveillance, McCaleb, Winston and two other detectives hiding in a mausoleum with a view of both grave sites watched a man drive into the cemetery in a van, get out and climb over the locked gate. Carrying something under his arm, he walked to the grave of the first victim, stood motionless in front of it for ten minutes and then headed to the grave of the second victim. His actions showed a prior knowledge of the location of the graves. At the second grave, he unrolled what turned out to be a sleeping bag on top of the grave, sat down on it and leaned back against the headstone. The detectives did not disturb the man. They were recording his visit with a night-vision video camera. Before long he opened his pants and began masturbating.