Michael Connelly - Blood Work

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s see the other.”

He took a step to his left and used the eyepiece to locate the same knuckle on James Noone’s right hand. The hand was not held in the same posture or at the same angle but the thick white swirl of scar tissue was there. McCaleb held steady and studied the image until he was sure. He then closed his eyes for a moment. It was a lock. The man on each of the VDT screens was the same man.

“Is it there?” Banks asked.

McCaleb handed him the eyepiece.

“It’s there. Any chance I can get hard copies of those two screens?”

Banks was looking through the eyepiece at the second screen.

“It’s there all right,” he said. “And yes, I can make hard copies. Let me put the images on a disk and take it back to the printer in the lab. It’ll take a few minutes.”

“Thanks, man.”

“I hope it helps.”

“More than you know.”

“What’s the guy doing anyway? Dressing up like a Mexican and doing good deeds?”

“Not really. Someday I’ll tell you the whole thing.”

Banks let it go and went to work on the console, transferring the video images on the screens to a computer disk. He backed up the videos and transferred the headshots as well.

“Be back in a few minutes,” he said, getting up. “Unless I have to warm up the machine.”

“Hey, is there a phone I can use while you’re gone?”

“In the left drawer there. Hit nine first.”

McCaleb called Winston’s home number and got her machine. As he listened to her voice, he hesitated about leaving a message, aware of the consequences to Winston if it was ever proved that she had worked with the subject of a murder investigation. A tape of his voice could do that. But he decided that the discoveries he had made in the last hour made it worth the risk. He didn’t want to page Winston because he didn’t want to wait around for her to call. He had to move. He hatched a quick plan and left a message after the beep.

“Jaye, it’s me. I’ll explain all of this when I see you but for now just trust me. I know who the shooter is. It’s Noone, Jaye, James Noone. I’m heading to his address now-the address on the witness report. Meet me there if you can. I’ll run it all down for you then.”

He hung up and called her pager number. He then punched in her home phone number and hung up. With any luck, he thought, Winston would get the message and soon be heading toward Noone’s address to back him up.

McCaleb pulled his leather bag onto his lap and opened the zippered center pouch. The two guns were there, his own Sig-Sauer P-228 and the HK P7 he now knew James Noone had planted under his boat. McCaleb reached into the bag and took his own weapon out. He checked the action and tucked the pistol into the waistband of his jeans at the small of his back. He pulled his jacket down over it.

WHEN QUESTIONED on the night of James Cordell’s murder, James Noone had provided deputies with a single address for both his home and workplace. Until McCaleb got there, the address on Atoll Avenue in North Hollywood defied identification as an apartment or an office. That area of the Valley was a hodgepodge mixture of residential, commercial and even industrial zoning.

He slowly crawled north on the 101, back through the Cahuenga Pass, and finally picked up some speed as he switched to the 134 north. He exited on Victory and drove west until he found Atoll Avenue. The neighborhood he turned into was decidedly industrial. He could smell a bakery and he passed a fenced yard where slabs of jagged granite were stacked and pointing at the sky. There were warehouses without names on them. There was a pool chemical supply wholesaler and an industrial waste recycling center. Just where Atoll dead-ended at an old railroad spur with tall weeds poking up between the rails, McCaleb turned the Taurus down a driveway bordered on both sides by a long row of small, single-garage-bay warehouses. Each unit was a separate small business or storage lockup. Some had the names of businesses painted over the aluminum roll-up doors, some had no identifying marks at all and were either unrented or used anonymously for storage. McCaleb stopped the car in front of the rusting door marked with the address James Noone had given deputies three months before. There were no other markings on the door but the address. He killed the car’s engine and got out.

It was a black night. No moon, no stars. The row of warehouses was dark save for a single floodlight down at the entrance. McCaleb looked around. He heard the tinny sound of music-Jimi Hendrix singing Let me stand next to your fire -from somewhere seemingly far away. And further down the drive, six warehouses away, the door to one of the garages had been pulled down unevenly until it jammed, offering a three-foot slice of the warehouse’s interior that looked like a crooked smile blacker than the sky.

He checked Noone’s unit, dropping to a crouch to study the line where the garage door met the concrete pavement. He wasn’t sure but there appeared to be a dim light emanating from within the warehouse. He stepped closer and could make out the padlock that attached a steel ring on the door to a matching ring embedded in the concrete.

He stood up and banged the door with an open palm. The noise was loud and he heard it reverberate inside. He stepped back and looked around again. Other than the sound of the music, there was only silence. The air was still. The night wind had not found its way down to the space between the rows of garages.

McCaleb got back in the car, started it and backed it up at an angle so that the headlights were at least partially focused on Noone’s garage. He then killed the engine but left the lights on, got out and went to the trunk. After lifting up the trunk mat, he found the jack assembly intact. He removed the jack handle and came around the car to the garage door. He looked up and down the drive once more and then bent down to the padlock.

As a bureau agent, McCaleb had never once been involved in an illegal break-in. He knew that they were a matter of routine but he had somehow avoided the ethical dilemma himself. But he felt no dilemma now as he worked the iron bar into the hasp of the lock. He wasn’t carrying the badge anymore and, above that, this was personal. Noone was a killer and, worse yet, he had sought to pin his work on McCaleb. McCaleb didn’t give a second thought to Noone’s rights to protection from unlawful search and seizure.

Holding the jack handle on the far end for leverage, he slowly began pulling the steel bar in a clockwise motion. The padlock hasp remained strong but the steel ring attached to the door groaned under the pressure and then snapped off, its solder points giving way.

McCaleb straightened up and looked around and listened. Nothing. Just Hendrix covering Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower.” He quickly moved back to the Taurus and returned the jack handle to the spare-tire kit, pulled the trunk mat back over it and closed the trunk lid.

As he came around the car, he bent over next to the front tire and ran two fingers along the wheel rim, picking up a good amount of black carbon dust that had built up from the brake pads. He stepped over to the garage door and, squatting down by the lock, he smeared the carbon over the break points of the solder so that it would appear as though the ring had been broken off the door some time ago and the break points had been exposed to the elements. He then rubbed the rest of the dirt off his fingers onto one of his black socks.

When he was ready, he gripped the door’s pull handle with his right hand. With his left he reached behind him and under his coat. He brought it back gripping his pistol, which he held at shoulder height, pointing skyward. With one move he stood and jerked the door up with him, using its momentum to keep it moving up until it was above his head.