Michael Connelly - Blood Work

“Okay, this is how I see it. You start with Mr. X, somebody someplace that we’ll assume to be a man for now. This person needs something. A new part. Kidney, liver, maybe bone marrow. Possibly corneas but that might be stretching it. It has to be something worth killing for. Something that he might die without. Or in the case of the cornea, possibly go blind and become non-functioning without.”

“What about a heart?”

“That would be on the list but, see, I got the heart. So scratch the heart unless you are Nevins and Uhlig and Arrango and the rest of them who think I’m Mr. X, okay?”

“Okay. Go on.”

“This guy, X, he’s got money and access. Enough to be able to contact and hire a shooter.”

“With OC connections.”

“Maybe but not necessarily.”

“What about ‘Don’t forget the cannoli’?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about that. It’s kind of showy for real organized crime, don’t you think? Makes me think it’s a deflection but for now that’s just a guess.”

“All right, never mind for now. Go on with Mr. X.”

“Well, besides being able to get to a shooter to do the job, he next has to have access to the computer at BOPRA. He’s got to know who has the part that he needs. You know what BOPRA is?”

“I learned today. And I said the same thing about you to Nevins. ‘How could Terry McCaleb get access to BOPRA?’ and he told me how bullshit their computer security is. Their theory is that you hacked in one day when you were at Cedars. You got a list of blood donors of type AB with CMV negative and went from there.”

“Okay. Now follow the same theory but instead of me, it’s Mr. X and he gets the list and then puts the Good Samaritan on the case.”

McCaleb pointed out into the salon, where the image of the Good Samaritan remained frozen on the television screen. They both looked at it for a few moments before he continued.

“The shooter goes down the list and lo and behold he sees a familiar name. Donald Kenyon. Kenyon is a famous man, mostly for all the enemies he has. He becomes the perfect choice because of that. All those enemies-investors and maybe even some mobster lurking behind the scenes, it makes for good camouflage.”

“So the Good Samaritan picks Kenyon.”

“Right. He picks him and then he watches him until he has his routine. And the routine is pretty simple because Kenyon’s got a federal dog collar on and usually doesn’t go anywhere outside of his house because of it. But the Good Sam is not discouraged. He gets the household routine down and he knows that for twenty minutes each morning Kenyon is in that house alone when the wife drives the kids to school.”

His throat dry from all the talking, McCaleb rescued the glass from the sink and poured himself another glass of orange juice.

“So he hits during that twenty-minute window,” he continued, after gulping down another half glass. “And going in, he knows he has to do the job in such a way that Kenyon makes it to the hospital but no further. See, he’s got to preserve the organs for transplant. But if he goes too far, Kenyon’s dead on arrival and no good to him. So he comes into the house, grabs Kenyon and marches him to the front door. He then holds him there and waits for the wife to come back home from dropping the kids. He makes Kenyon look through the peephole and make sure it is her. Then he pops him and lays him out on the floor, fresh and ready when the wife opens the door.”

“But he doesn’t make it to the hospital.”

“No. The plan was good but he fucked up. He used a Devastator in the P7. The wrong bullet for this kind of work. It’s a frangible, it explodes and basically pulps Kenyon’s brain, destroys all life support system controls. Death is almost instantaneous.”

He stopped there and watched Winston as she evaluated the story. Then he held up a finger, signaling her to wait before commenting. He went to his bag in the salon and pulled out a sheaf of documents, careful to keep his body between the bag and Winston. He didn’t want her catching a glimpse of the P7, which was still in there.

At the galley counter he looked through the documents until he found what he needed.

“I’m not supposed to even have this but take a look. This is a transcript of the tape the bureau got from the illegal bugs in the Kenyon house. This is the part where he was hit. They didn’t get everything that was said but what is there fits with what I just said.”

Winston stood next to him and read the section he had circled with a pen while riding with Buddy Lockridge on the way to the marina.

UNKNOWN: Okay, look and see who…

KENYON: Don’t… She’s got nothing to do with this. She…

Winston nodded her head.

“He could have told him to look through the peephole,” she said. “It obviously was the wife because Kenyon then tried to protect her.”

“Right, and notice that the transcript says that there were two minutes of silence before that last exchange and the gunshot. What else could he have been doing but waiting until she showed up so she would get to the body almost as soon as it happened?”

She nodded again.

“It fits,” she said. “But what about the bureau people listening? You think the shooter didn’t know about them?”

“I’m not sure. It doesn’t seem like it. I think he just got lucky. But maybe he thought there was a slim chance the place was bugged. Maybe that’s where the cannoli line came from. Just a little misdirection, just in case.”

McCaleb finished his orange juice and put the glass back into the sink.

“Okay, so he blew it,” Winston said. “And it was back to the drawing board. Or, actually, back to the BOPRA list. And the next name he picked was my guy, James Cordell.”

McCaleb nodded and let her run with it. He knew that the more of the puzzle she fit together herself, the more apt she would be to believe in the whole thing.

“He changes the load, goes from frangible to hardball so that he would have a through-and-through wound with less immediate brain damage.

“He watches Cordell until he has the routine down and then he sets up the shoot in a way similar to Kenyon-the hit occurring almost instantaneous to the arrival of a second party who could get help. In Kenyon’s case it was his wife. In Cordell’s it was James Noone. The shooter probably stood behind Cordell until he saw Noone’s car enter the turn lane to come into the bank. That was when he fired.”

“I think Noone was an accident,” McCaleb said. “There is no way the shooter could have planned on a witness showing up. He was probably going to shoot Cordell and then call nine one one himself at the pay phone out at the curb-on the crime scene tape you can see the pay phone right there. But Noone came along and that forced him to just get the hell out of there. He probably thought the witness would make the call on the pay phone-a legitimate call for help. The bad break for him was that Noone made the call on a cell phone and the address was messed up, resulting in a terminal delay for Cordell.”

Winston nodded her agreement.

“Cordell was DOA,” she said. “Another one goes to shit. He goes back to the list and it’s Gloria Torres this time. Only this time he’s not taking a single chance. He calls the shooting in before it even happens.”

“Right, to get the paramedics rolling. He knew her routine. He was probably standing at that pay phone waiting. When he saw her car pulling in, he made the nine one one call.”

“He then goes in, does the job and splits. Outside he pulls off the mask and the jumpsuit and he becomes our Good Samaritan. He goes in, wraps her up and gets the hell out of there. This time it works. It is perfect.”