Michael Connelly - Blood Work

McCaleb started the car but waited to turn the heater on until the engine got warm. He looked in the rearview mirror at Arrango. It was too dark to see if he had a toothpick in his mouth.

“Where’s Walters?”

“Busy.”

“Okay,” Nevins said. “Uh, we came down to tell you it looks like we were wrong about you, McCaleb. I’m sorry. We’re sorry. Looks like Noone is the guy. You did good work.”

McCaleb only nodded. It was a half-assed apology but he didn’t care about that. What he had found out in order to clear his name would be harder to live with than if he had been publicly accused of the murders. Apologies meant nothing to him.

“We know it’s been a long night for you and we want to get you on your way. I was thinking we could just kind of get your rundown on how all of this shakes out and then maybe tomorrow you come in and give a formal statement. What do you think?”

“Fine. As far as the formal statement goes, I’ll give it to Winston. Not you guys.”

“Fair enough. I can understand that. But for now, why don’t you tell us how, in your view, how this whole thing works. Can you do that?”

McCaleb leaned forward and switched on the heater. He composed his thoughts for a few moments before beginning.

“I’ll call him Noone because that’s all we have and maybe all we’ll ever have. It begins with the Code Killer. That was Noone. At that time I was the bureau’s point man on the task force. By agreement with the LAPD, I became the media spokesman on the case. I led the briefings, requests for interviews went to me. For ten months my face became synonymous on TV with the Code Killer. And so Noone fixated on me. As we got closer to him he fixated on me. He sent letters to me. In his mind, I was the nemesis. I was the embodiment of the task force that was hunting him.”

“Aren’t you taking a lot of the credit for yourself?” Arrango asked. “I mean, you weren’t the only-”

“Shut up and listen, Arrango. You might learn something.”

McCaleb stared at him in the rearview and Arrango stared back. McCaleb saw Nevins hold a hand up in a calming motion directed at Arrango.

“ He gave me the credit,” McCaleb said. “I didn’t take it. Eventually, when he knew the risks were too great, he dropped out. The killings stopped. The Code Killer disappeared. About that same time I went down with… with my problems. I needed the transplant and it became news because I had been a face in the news. Noone saw this. He could have easily been aware of this. And he hatched what he would consider his grandest scheme.”

“He decided that rather than kill you, he would save you,” Uhlig said.

McCaleb nodded.

“It would give him the ultimate victory because it would last and last. To simply eliminate me, kill me, would bring only a fleeting sense of fulfillment. But by saving me… now there was something unique, something that would get him into the hall of fame. And he’d always have me around as a reminder of how smart and powerful he is. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” Nevins said. “But that’s the psychological side. What I want to know is how he did it? How’d he get the names? How did he know about Kenyon and Cordell and then Torres?”

“His computer. Your techs are going to have to take that thing apart.”

“We’ve got Bob Clearmountain coming in,” Nevins said. “You remember him?”

McCaleb nodded. Clearmountain was the L.A. field office’s resident computer expert. A hacker extraordinary in his own right.

“Good. Then he’ll be able to answer that question better than me. Eventually. My guess is that you’ll find a hacking program in that computer. Noone got into BOPRA and from there got the names. He chose his targets based on age, physical fitness and proximity. And he went to work. With Kenyon and Cordell things went wrong. They went right with Torres. That is, according to Noone’s view.”

“And he planned all along to lay it on you?”

“All I think is that he wanted me to follow the trail and find out for myself what he had done. He knew that would happen if I became a suspect. Because then I would have to look into it myself. But then that didn’t happen at first because the case investigators missed the clues.”

He looked at Arrango in the mirror as he said this. He could see the detective’s eyes turn dark with anger. He was about to explode.

“Arrango, the fact is, you treated it as an everyday stop-and-rob with the addition of shots fired, nothing more and nothing less. You missed it. So Noone jump-started the whole thing.”

“How?” Uhlig and Nevins asked in unison.

“My involvement came about because of an article in the Times. That article was prompted by a letter from a reader. Whatever name was on that letter, I bet it was Noone.”

He stopped there, waiting for disagreement. None came.

“The letter prompts the article. The article prompts Graciela Rivers. Graciela Rivers prompts me. Like dominoes.”

A thought suddenly occurred to him. He remembered the man in the old foreign car watching from across the street the first time he visited the Sherman Market. He realized the car matched the one he had seen speeding from the marina lot the night he chased the intruder.

“I think Noone was watching me all along,” he said. “Watching his plan unfold. He knew when it was time to get into my boat and plant the evidence. He knew when to call you.”

He looked at Nevins, whose eyes shifted away and out the windshield.

“You got an anonymous call? What was said?”

“Actually, it was an anonymous message. Taken down by the overnight person. It just said, ‘Check the blood. McCaleb has their blood.’ That was it.”

“It fits. That was him. Just another move in the game.”

They were silent for a while. The windows were beginning to fog with the heat and their breath.

“Well, I don’t know how much of this we’ll ever confirm,” Nevins said. “Certainly a lot of maybes.”

McCaleb nodded. He doubted any of it would ever be confirmed because he doubted Noone would ever be identified or found.

“Okay, then,” Nevins continued. “I guess we’ll be in touch.”

He opened his door and the others followed. Before he got out, Uhlig reached over the seat and tapped McCaleb’s shoulder with a harmonica.

“It was on the floor back here,” he said.

As Arrango stepped out onto the asphalt, McCaleb lowered his window and looked up at him.

“You know, you could’ve busted it. It was all there in the book. It was waiting for you.”

“Fuck you, McCaleb.”

He walked away, following the two agents back toward Noone’s garage. McCaleb smiled slightly. He had to admit that in spite of everything he still wasn’t above the guilty pleasure of tweaking Arrango.

McCaleb sat in the car for a few more minutes before leaving. It was late, past ten o’clock, and he was wondering where to go. He had not talked to Graciela yet and he looked forward to the task with a mixture of dread and relief, the latter coming from knowing that one way or another their relationship would be clearly defined soon. The problem he had was that he wasn’t sure that he wanted to deliver his tidings at night. His news seemed better delivered during the unflinching light of day.

He put his hand on the ignition and took one last look up the drive toward the lighted garage where his life had been so brutally changed. He saw that the light cast from the garage and across the driveway was moving. He guessed that the overhead light had been disturbed somehow and was swinging. Something occurred to him then and he took his hand off the ignition.

McCaleb stepped out of the Taurus and without hesitation ducked under the yellow tape. The uniform officer in charge of entry to the crime scene said nothing. He had probably inferred-wrongly-that McCaleb was a detective, having watched three of the lead investigators walk down and sit in the car with him.