Michael Connelly - Blood Work

He looked at McCaleb. McCaleb thought of a response but decided to keep it to himself.

“Anything in particular you want me to ask him?” he asked instead.

Arrango looked at his partner and winked.

“Yeah, get us the license plate off that getaway vehicle. That’d be nice.”

He smiled brilliantly, the toothpick jutting upward from his lower lip. McCaleb smiled back.

“It’s been done before. The victim of a rapist once gave me a complete description of a tattoo on her attacker’s arm. Before hypnosis she hadn’t even remembered the tattoo.”

“Good, then do it again. Get us a plate. Get us a tattoo. Your pal Bolotov has enough of ’em.”

There had been a clear challenge in his voice. Arrango seemed to insist on putting everything on a personal level, as if McCaleb’s desire to bring a multiple killer in was in some way a show of disrespect to him. It was ludicrous but McCaleb had challenged him simply by entering the case.

“Okay, guys,” Hitchens said, cutting it off and trying to diffuse tensions. “We’re just taking a shot at this, that’s all. It’s worth the shot. Maybe we get something, maybe we don’t.”

“Meantime, we lose the guy in court,” Arrango said.

“What court?” McCaleb said. “You’re not going anywhere near court with what you guys have got. This is your last chance, Arrango. I’m your last chance.”

Arrango swiftly stood up. Not to challenge McCaleb physically but to underline his next words.

“Lookit, asshole, I don’t need some washed-out fed to tell me how to-”

“Okay, okay, that’s it,” Hitchens said, standing up also. “We’re gonna do this thing and do it right now. Jaye, why don’t you take Terry into the interview room and get started. The rest of us will wait here.”

Winston guided McCaleb out the door. He looked back over his shoulder at Arrango, whose face had turned dark with anger. Past him McCaleb noticed a quizzical smile on Donna de Groot’s face. She had apparently enjoyed the testosterone show.

As they walked through the squad room and past rows of empty desks, McCaleb shook his head with embarrassment.

“Sorry,” he said. “I can’t believe I let him draw me into that.”

“It’s okay. Guy’s an asshole. It was going to happen sooner or later.”

After stopping by Winston’s desk to pick up the file containing the photo lineup, they went down a hallway and Winston stopped outside a closed door. She put her hand on the knob but looked back at McCaleb before turning it.

“Okay, any particular way you want to do this?”

“The main thing is that it works best if only I do the talking once the session begins and I communicate verbally only with him. That way he won’t get confused about who I am talking to. So if you and I need to communicate, we can either write notes or point to the door and we can come out here.”

“Fine. Are you all right? You look like shit.”

“I’m fine.”

She opened the door and James Noone looked up from table.

“Mr. Noone, this is Terry McCaleb, the hypnotism expert I told you about,” Winston said. “He used to work for the FBI. He’s going to see if he can’t work with you on this.”

McCaleb smiled and reached a hand across the table. They shook.

“Good to meet you, Mr. Noone. This shouldn’t take long and it should be a relaxing experience. Do you mind if I call you James?”

“No, James is fine.”

McCaleb looked around the room and at the table and chairs. The chairs were standard government issue, with a half inch of foam padding on the seats. He looked at Winston.

“Jaye, you think we can get a more comfortable chair for James? Something with arms maybe? Like the one Captain Hitchens was sitting in.”

“Sure. Hang on a minute.”

“Oh, also, I’m going to need a pair of scissors.”

Winston looked at him quizzically but left without a word. McCaleb took an appraising look around the room. There was an overhead bank of fluorescent lights in the ceiling. No other lighting. The glare from the overheads was magnified by the mirrored window on the left wall. He knew the video camera was set up on the other side of the glass, so he needed to keep Noone in a position facing it.

“Let’s see,” he said to Noone. “I need to get up on the table to get at those lights.”

“No problem.”

Using a chair as a stepladder, McCaleb climbed onto the table and reached up to the light panel. He moved slowly, trying to avoid another bout of vertigo. He opened the panel and began removing the long light tubes, handing them down to Noone and engaging him in small talk, hoping to make the witness feel comfortable with him.

“I hear you’re going to Vegas from here? Is that work or play?”

“Uh, work mostly.”

“What do you do?”

“Computer software. I’m designing a new accounting and security system for the El Rio. Still working out the bugs. We’ll be running tests for the next week or so.”

“A week in Las Vegas? Boy, I could lose a lot of money there in a week.”

“I don’t gamble.”

“That’s a good thing.”

He had taken out three of the four bulbs, dropping the room into a dim ambiance. He hoped that left enough light for the video. As he got off the table, Winston returned with a chair that actually looked like the one Hitchens had been sitting in.

“You took that from the captain?”

“Best chair in the place.”

“Good.”

He looked at the mirror and winked at the camera behind it. As he did this, he noticed the dark circles beginning to form under his eyes and quickly looked away.

Winston reached into the pocket of the blazer she wore and carefully eased out a pair of scissors. McCaleb took them and put them on the table and then pushed it against the wall below the mirror. He then took the captain’s chair and positioned it against the opposite wall. He put two chairs from the table facing the captain’s chair but split them apart far enough so as not to block the camera’s view of Noone. He directed Noone to the captain’s chair and then Winston and he took the remaining seats. McCaleb looked at his watch and noted that it was ten minutes before six.

“Okay,” he said. “We’ll try to do this quick and have you on your way, James. First off, any questions you have for us about what we’re trying to do here?”

Noone thought a moment before speaking.

“Well, I guess I don’t know much about it. What will happen to me?”

“Nothing will happen to you. All hypnosis really is is an altered state of consciousness. What we want you to do is go through some progressive stages of relaxation until you reach a point where you can easily move through the recesses of your mind to pull out some of the stored information. Kind of like turning through a Rolodex and pulling out the card you need.”

McCaleb waited but Noone asked nothing else.

“Why don’t we start with an exercise. I want you to tilt your head back slightly and look up. Try to roll your eyes upward as far as they can go. Maybe you should take off your glasses.”

Noone took off the glasses, folded them and put them in his pocket. He tilted his head back and rolled his eyes up. McCaleb studied him. He was able to roll them upward enough so that a quarter inch of white cornea was visible below each iris. This was a good indicator of receptivity to hypnosis.

“Okay, that’s good. Now, I want you to just relax if you can, take long, deep breaths and tell us what you can recall about the incident on the night of January twenty-second. Just recount what you now remember about what you saw.”

For the next ten minutes Noone told the story about coming upon the tail end of the shooting and robbery at the ATM in Lancaster. His story was no different than the versions he had recounted during various interviews since the night it had all happened. He added no new details that McCaleb picked up on and seemed to leave nothing out from his prior tellings. This was unusual and encouraging to McCaleb. The memories of most witnesses begin fading after two months. They forgot details. The fact that Noone seemed to remember every detail led McCaleb to hope the computer programmer’s recessed memory might be just as sharp. When Noone had finished recounting the event, McCaleb nodded to Winston, who then leaned toward Noone and handed him the six-pack file.