Michael Connelly - Blood Work

McCaleb watched with total concentration and quickly found himself suffering the same physical effects of frustration he had felt during the actual session. Noone had been a perfect subject. It was rare that he had hypnotized a witness who could recall such detail. The cutting frustration was that he simply hadn’t gotten a good look at the driver and the Cherokee’s license plates had been covered.

“Damn,” McCaleb cursed out loud as the taped session drew to a close.

He reached for the remote, deciding to rewind and run the interview again, when he suddenly froze, his finger poised over the remote button.

McCaleb had just seen something that did not fit, something he had missed during the actual session because he was distracted by Winston, who had been sitting in. He rewound the tape but only briefly, then replayed the last few questions that were asked.

On the tape, McCaleb was wrapping it up, asking a scatter of leftover and wishful-thinking questions. They were long shots, thrown at Noone out of frustration. He had asked about any stickers on the Cherokee’s windshield. Noone said no and then McCaleb was out of questions. He turned to Winston and asked her, “Anything else?”

Even though McCaleb had broken his own rules by asking a question of a nonparticipant, Winston followed the rules and did not answer verbally. Instead, she shook her head in the negative.

“You sure?” McCaleb asked.

Again she shook her head no. McCaleb then began bringing Noone out of the trance.

But that was wrong and McCaleb had missed it at the time. Now he came around the coffee table, remote in hand, and leaned closer to the screen. He rewound the tape one more time to watch the sequence again.

“Son of a bitch,” he whispered after the play-through. “You should’ve answered me, Noone. You should have answered!”

He punched the eject button and turned to grab another tape. He knocked the short stack across the coffee table and then quickly scrabbled through the plastic cassettes until he found the tape with the label marked Sherman Market. He put the tape into the machine, started playing it on fast forward and then paused the image when the Good Samaritan was on the screen.

The VCR could not hold the image still and McCaleb guessed the machine was an inexpensive model with only two tape heads. He ejected the tape and looked at his watch. It was four-forty. He slapped the remote down on top of the television and went to the kitchen for the phone.

Tony Banks agreed to stay once again after closing at Video GraFX Consultants until McCaleb could get there. Crossing the floor of the Valley on the 101, he initially made good time. Most of the rush-hour traffic was going the other way, the workforce of the city returning to the bedroom communities of the Valley. But when he dipped south on the freeway to go through the Cahuenga Pass into Hollywood, the brake lights were flared for as far as he could see and he got bogged down. He finally pulled Buddy Lockridge’s Taurus into the small employee lot at VGC at five after six. Once again, Tony Banks answered the door after McCaleb had pushed the night bell.

“Tony, thanks,” McCaleb said to the man’s back as he was led down the hallway once again to one of the tech rooms. “You are really helping me out here.”

“No problem.”

But McCaleb noted that there wasn’t as much enthusiasm in the “No problem” this time. They entered the same room they had sat in the week before. McCaleb handed Banks the two tapes he had brought with him.

“On each of these tapes there is a man,” he said. “I want to see if they are the same man.”

“You mean, like, you can’t tell.”

“Not for sure. They look different. But I think it’s a disguise. I think they’re the same man but I want to be sure.”

Banks put the first tape into the player on the left side of the console, turned it on and the Sherman Market robbery and shooting began playing on the corresponding overhead video display tube.

“This guy?” Banks said.

“Right. Freeze it when there’s a good look.”

Banks froze the image at the moment the so-called Good Samaritan was looking off camera in right profile.

“How is that? I need the profile. It’s hard to do a comparison front-on.”

“You’re the boss.”

He handed Banks the second tape, which was placed in the righthand player, and soon the hypnosis session was playing on the right VDT screen.

“Back it up,” McCaleb said. “I think there’s a profile before he sits down.”

Banks reversed the tape.

“What are you doing to him on this?”

“Hypnosis.”

“Really?”

“I thought so at the time. But now I think he was playing me the whole-there.”

Banks paused the tape. James Noone was looking to his right, most likely at the door to the interview room. Banks played with the dials and the computer mouse and expanded the picture, then sharpened it. He did the same with the image on the left screen. He then leaned back and looked at the side-by-side profiles. After a few moments he spoke as he unclipped an infrared pointer from his pocket and turned it on.

“Well, the complexions don’t match. One guy looks Mexican.”

“That would be easy. A couple hours in a tanning salon could give him that look.”

Banks played the pointer’s red dot along the bridge the Good Samaritan’s nose.

“Look at the slope of the nose,” he said. “See the double bump?”

“Right.”

The red dot jumped to the left screen and found the same double bump in the slope of James Noone’s nose.

“It’s an unscientific guess but it looks pretty close me,” Banks said.

“Me too.”

“You’ve got different-color eyes but that can be done.”

“Contacts.”

“Right. And here, the expanded jawline on this guy on the right. A dental appliance-you know, like a rubber sleep guard-or even wads of tissue paper like Brando used in The Godfather could be used to make that appearance.”

McCaleb nodded, silently noting another possible connection to the gangster movie. Cannolis and now possibly wads of tissue paper as cheek implants.

“And hair is always changeable,” Banks was saying. “In fact, this guy looks like he’s got on a wig.”

Banks ran the red dot along the Good Samaritan’s hairline. McCaleb silently chastised himself for seeing this only now. The hairline was a perfect line, the telltale indication of a hairpiece.

“Let’s see what else we’ve got.”

Banks went back to the dials and pulled back on the image. He then used the mouse to delineate a new enhancement area. The Good Samaritan’s hands.

“It’s like chicks,” Banks said. “They can put on makeup, wigs, even get their tits done. But they can’t do nothing about their hands. Their hands-and sometimes their feet-always give ’em away.”

Once he had the Good Samaritan’s hands blown up and in focus, he went to work on the other console until he had an enlargement of Noone’s right hand on the opposite screen. Banks stood up so that he was at direct eye level with the screens and leaned to within a few inches of each tube as he studied and compared the hands.

“Okay, here, look.”

McCaleb stood up and looked closely at the screens.

“What?”

“The first one has got a bit of a scar here on the knuckle. You see it, the discoloration?”

McCaleb leaned in close to the image of the Good Samaritan’s right hand.

“Wait a sec,” Banks said. He opened a drawer in the console and pulled out a photographer’s eyepiece, the kind used to study and magnify negatives on a light table. “Try this.”

McCaleb held the eyepiece over the knuckle in question and looked through it. He could see a swirl of white scar tissue on the knuckle. Though the whole image was distorted and blurry, he identified the scar as almost being in the shape of a question mark.