Michael Connelly - Blood Work

He pulled the tape of the Gloria Torres murder out, put it in the player and repeated the process again. The words fit the lips of the shooter once again. There was no doubt.

“Don’t forget the cannoli,” McCaleb said aloud again.

He went to the cabinet next to the chart table and got the phone out. He still had not played the messages that had accumulated over the weekend but he was too hyped to do it now. He punched in the number for Jaye Winston.

“Where have you been and don’t you ever check your machine?” she asked. “I’ve been trying to call you all weekend and all day to explain. It wasn’t my-”

“I know. It wasn’t you. It was Hitchens. I’m not calling about that anyway. I know what the bureau told you. I know what you’ve got-the connection to Donald Kenyon. You’ve got to bring me back in.”

“That’s impossible. Hitchens already said I shouldn’t even talk to you. How am I going to bring-”

“I can help you.”

“How? With what?”

“Just answer me this, see if I have this right. This morning Gilbert Spencer and a couple of field agents-I’m guessing they were named Nevins and Uhlig-come out and give you the news that the bullet you sent to Washington matched up with Kenyon. Right?”

“So far, but that’s no great-”

“I’m not done. Next, he tells you the bureau would like to look into your case and the LAPD case but that initially there seems to be no likely connection other than the weapon. He says, after all, Kenyon is a professional hit and you guys are working two street robberies. Not only that, his shooter used a Devastator on Kenyon and your guy used something else. Federals. That backs the bureau theory that the professional shooter in the Kenyon case discarded his weapon somewhere and the shooter from your two cases then came along and picked it up. End of connection. How am I doing so far?”

“Dead on.”

“Okay, so you asked Spencer for information on the Kenyon killing just so you could do your own cross-checking but that didn’t go over so well.”

“He said the Kenyon case was at a-quote-sensitive point and that he would rather us peons be on a need-to-know basis.”

“And Hitchens agreed to that?”

“He went along for the ride.”

“And did anybody serve the cannoli?”

“What?”

McCaleb spent the next five minutes explaining the cannoli connection, reading her the transcript from the bugs in Kenyon’s house and the conclusions of the cryptology report. Winston said these were all facts that Gilbert Spencer had not mentioned during the morning meeting. McCaleb knew that he would not have. McCaleb had been in the bureau. He knew how it worked. Given the opportunity, you brush the locals aside and say that the bureau will handle it from here.

“So the cannoli connection makes it clear this wasn’t a throw-away gun that our guy happened to pick up,” McCaleb said. “It’s the same shooter on all three. Kenyon, then Cordell, then Torres. Whether the bureau people knew that going in to your meeting, I don’t know. But if you copied them the case file and the tapes, they know it now. The question is, how do these three killings fit together?”

Winston was silent for a moment before finally expressing her confusion.

“Man, I have no-well, maybe they don’t connect. Look, if it’s a contract killer like the bureau says, maybe they were three separate contracts. You know? Maybe there is no connection other than the same killer did all three on three separate jobs.”

McCaleb shook his head and said, “It’s possible, I guess, but nothing makes sense. I mean, what did Gloria Torres have that would make her a pro hitter’s target? She worked in the print shop at the newspaper.”

“It could have been something she saw. Remember what you said Friday about there being some connection between the two, Torres and Cordell? Well, maybe it’s still the same, only the connection is something they saw or something they knew.”

McCaleb nodded.

“What about the icons, the things taken from Cordell and Torres?” he asked, more to himself than to Winston.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe it’s a hitter who likes to take souvenirs. Maybe he had to prove to his employer that he had hit the right people. Is there anything in the reports about anything being taken from Kenyon?”

“Not that I have seen yet.”

His mind was a jumble of possibilities. Winston’s question made him realize that in his excitement he had called her too soon. He still had a stack of unread Kenyon files. The connection he was looking for might be there.

“Terry?”

“Yeah, sorry, I was just thinking. Look, let me call you back. I’ve got some more stuff to go through and I might be able-”

“What stuff do you have?”

“I think I’ve got everything, or almost everything, that Spencer wasn’t telling you.”

“I would say that that is going to buy you back into the captain’s good graces.”

“Well, don’t say anything to him yet. Let me figure out a little more about this and I’ll call you.”

“You promise?”

“Yeah.”

“Then say it. I don’t want you pulling any bureau bullshit on me.”

“Hey, I’m retired, remember? I promise.”

An hour and a half later McCaleb finished going through the bureau documents. The adrenaline that had jazzed him before had dissipated. He had learned a lot of new information as he read the reports but nothing that hinted at a connection between Kenyon and Cordell and Torres.

The rest of the bureau documents contained a lengthy printout of the names, addresses and investment histories of the two thousand victims of the savings and loan collapse. And neither Cordell nor Torres had been investors.

The bureau had had to consider every victim of the S amp;L collapse a suspect in the Kenyon shooting. Each name on the investors list was backgrounded and screened for criminal connections and other flags that might elevate it to viable suspect status. A dozen or so investors were raised to that level but then eventually cleared through full field investigations.

The investigation had then shifted its focus toward theory two, that Kenyon’s phantom was real and had ordered the hit on the man who had stolen millions for him.

This theory gathered momentum after it was learned that Kenyon had been about to reveal whom he had turned over the stolen S amp;L funds to. According to a statement from Kenyon’s attorney, Stanley LaGrossa, Kenyon had decided to cooperate with authorities in hopes of getting the U.S. Attorney’s office to petition the judge who sentenced him to reduce his penalty. LaGrossa said that on the morning Kenyon was murdered, they had planned to meet to discuss how LaGrossa would go about negotiating his cooperation.

McCaleb flipped back through the reports and reread the short transcript of the phone call Kenyon made to LaGrossa just minutes before the murder. The brief exchange between the lawyer and his client appeared to back up LaGrossa’s claim that Kenyon was ready to cooperate.

The bureau theory, outlined in a supplemental report to LaGrossa’s statement, was that Kenyon’s silent partner either was taking no chances and eliminated Kenyon or he eliminated Kenyon after specifically learning that his partner was planning to cooperate with government investigators. The supplemental report noted that federal agents and prosecutors had not yet been approached by the Kenyon camp with the overture of cooperation. That meant that if there was a leak to the silent partner, it came from Kenyon’s people, possibly even LaGrossa himself.

McCaleb got up and poured a glass of orange juice, emptying one of the half-gallon cartons he had bought on Saturday morning. As he drank, he thought about what all of the Kenyon information meant to the investigation. It clouded things for sure. Despite the early jolt of adrenaline, he now realized he was basically back to ground zero, no closer to knowing who killed Gloria Torres and why than he was when he opened the package mailed from Carruthers.