Michael Connelly - Blood Work

There was reflective film on the glass of the door. She couldn’t see him watching her. The sense of familiarity came over him again and he tried to place her face. He found her very striking. Dark almond-shaped eyes that seemed both sad and understanding of some secret at the same time. He knew he would easily remember if he had ever met her or even just observed her before. But nothing came. His eyes instinctively went to her hands in search of a ring. There was none. He had been right about her shoes. She wore sandals with two-inch cork heels. Her toenails were painted pink and showed off against her soft brown skin. He wondered if this was how she looked all the time, or if she had dressed to entice him into taking the job.

He found his phone book in the second drawer and quickly looked up the names Jack Lavelle and Tom Kimball. He wrote their names and numbers on an old marine service flier and opened the slider. She was opening her purse as he stepped out. He held up the paper.

“Here are two names. Lavelle is LAPD retired and Kimball was with the bureau. I worked with both and either will do a good job for you. Pick one and call. Make sure you tell him you got his name from me. He’ll take care of you.”

She didn’t take the names from him. Instead she pulled a photo out of her purse and handed it to him. McCaleb took it without thinking. He realized immediately that this was a mistake. In his hand was a photo of a smiling woman watching a small boy blowing out candles on a birthday cake. McCaleb counted seven candles. At first he thought it was a picture of Rivers a few years younger. But then he realized it wasn’t her. The woman in the photo had a rounder face and thinner lips. She wasn’t as beautiful as Graciela Rivers. Though both had deep brown eyes, the eyes of the woman in the photo did not have the same intensity as the eyes of the woman now watching him.

“Your sister?”

“Yes. And her son.”

“Which one?”

“What?”

“Which one is dead?”

The question was his second mistake, compounding the first by drawing him further in. He knew the moment he asked it that he should have just insisted that she take the names of the two private detectives and been done with it.

“My sister. Gloria Torres. We called her Glory. That’s her son, Raymond.”

He nodded and handed the photo back but she didn’t take it. He knew she wanted him to ask what had happened but he was finally putting on the brakes.

“Look, this isn’t going to work,” he finally said. “I know what you’re doing. It doesn’t work on me.”

“You mean you have no sympathy?”

He hesitated as the anger boiled up in his throat.

“I have sympathy. You read the newspaper story, you know what happened to me. Sympathy was my problem all along.”

He swallowed it back and tried to clear away any ill feeling. He knew she was consumed by horrible frustrations. McCaleb had known hundreds of people like her. Loved ones taken from them without reason. No arrests, no convictions, no closure. Some of them were left zombies, their lives irrevocably changed. Lost souls. Graciela Rivers was one of them now. She had to be or she wouldn’t have tracked him down. He knew that no matter what she said to him or how angry he got, she didn’t deserve to be hit with his own frustrations as well.

“Look,” he said. “I just can’t do this. I’m sorry.”

He put a hand on her arm to lead her back to the dock step. Her skin was warm. He felt the strong muscle beneath the softness. He offered the photo again but she still refused to take it.

“Look at it again. Please. Just one more time and then I’ll leave you alone. Tell me if you feel anything else?”

He shook his head and made a feeble hand gesture as if to say it made no difference to him.

“I was an FBI agent, not a psychic.”

But he made a show of holding the photo up and looking at it anyway. The woman and the boy seemed happy. It was a celebration. Seven candles. McCaleb remembered that his parents were still together when he turned seven. But not much longer. His eyes were drawn to the boy more than the woman. He wondered how the boy would get along now without his mother.

“I’m sorry, Miss Rivers. I really am. But there is nothing I can do for you. Do you want this back or not?”

“I have a double of it. You know, two for the price of one. I thought you’d want to keep that one.”

For the first time he felt the undertow in the emotional current. There was something else at play but he didn’t know what. He looked closely at Graciela Rivers and had the sense that if he took another step, asked the obvious question, he would be pulled under.

He couldn’t help himself.

“Why would I want to keep it if I’m not going to be able to help you?”

She smiled in a sad sort of way.

“Because she’s the woman who saved your life. I thought from time to time you might want to remind yourself of what she looked like, who she was.”

He stared at her for a long moment but he wasn’t really looking at Graciela Rivers. He was looking inward, running what she had just said through memory and knowledge and coming up short of its meaning.

“What are you talking about?”

It was all he could manage to ask. He had the sense that control of the conversation and everything else was tilting away from him and sliding across the deck to her. The undertow had him now. It was carrying him out.

She raised her hand but reached past the photo he was still holding out to her. She placed her palm on his chest and ran it down the front of his shirt, her fingers tracing the thick rope of the scar beneath. He let her do it. He stood there frozen and let her do it.

“Your heart,” she said. “It was my sister’s. She was the one who saved your life.”

OUT OF THE CORNER of his eye he could just see the monitor. The screen was grainy silver and black, the heart like an undulating ghost, the rivets and staples that closed off blood vessels showing like black buckshot in his chest.

“Almost there,” a voice said.

It came from behind his right ear. Bonnie Fox. Always calm and comforting, professional. Soon he saw the snaking line of the scope move into the monitor’s X-ray field, following the path of the artery and entering the heart. He closed his eyes. He hated the tug, the one they say you won’t feel but you always do.

“Okay, you shouldn’t feel this,” she said.

“Right.”

“Don’t talk.”

Then, there it was. Like the slightest tug on the end of a fishing line, a scrap fish stealing your bait. He opened his eyes and saw the line of the scope, as thin as a fishing line, still deep in the heart.

“Okay, we got it,” she said. “Coming out now. You did good, Terry.”

He felt her pat his shoulder, though he couldn’t turn his head to look at her. The scope was removed and she taped a gauze compress against the incision in his neck. The brace that had held his head at such an uncomfortable angle was unstrapped and he slowly straightened his neck, bringing his hand up to work the stiff muscles. Dr. Bonnie Fox’s smiling face then hovered above his.

“How you feeling?”

“Can’t complain. Now that it’s over.”

“I’ll see you in a little while. I want to check the blood work and get the tissue over to the lab.”

“I want to talk to you about something.”

“You got it. See you in a bit.”

A few minutes later two nurses wheeled McCaleb’s bed out of the cath lab and into an elevator. He hated being treated as an invalid. He could have walked but it was against the rules. After a heart biopsy the patient must be kept horizontal. Hospitals always have rules. Cedars-Sinai seemed to have more than most.