Blood Work

10

THERE WAS MORE natural light in the salon than down below in the office stateroom. McCaleb decided to work there. He also had a television and video player built into a cabinet topside. He cleared the galley table, wiped it with a sponge and paper towel and then put the stack of reports Winston had given him down on top. He got a legal pad and a sharpened pencil out of the chart table drawer and brought them over as well.

He decided that the best way to do it would be to go through the material chronologically. That meant the Cordell case came first. He went through the stack, separating out the reports regarding the Gloria Torres killing and putting them aside. He then took what was left and separated the reports into small stacks relating to the initial investigation and evidence inventory, follow-up interviews, dead-end leads, miscellaneous reports, fact sheets and weekly summaries.

When he had worked for the bureau, it was his routine to completely clear his desk and spread all the paperwork from a submitted case file across it. The cases came in from police departments all over the West. Some sent thick packages and some just thin files. He always asked for videotape of the crime scene. Big or small, the packages were all about the same thing. McCaleb was fascinated and repulsed at the same time. He became angry and vengeful as he read, all while alone in his little office, his coat on the door hook, his gun in the drawer. He could tune everything out but what was in front of him. He did his best work at the desk. As a field agent, he was average at best. But at his desk, he was better than most. And he felt a secret thrill in the back of his mind each time he opened one of those packages and the hunt for a new evil began again. He felt that thrill now as he began to read.

James Cordell had a lot going for him. A family, nice home and cars, good health and a job that paid well enough to allow his wife to be a full-time mother to their two daughters. He was an engineer with a private firm contracted by the state to maintain the structural integrity of the aqueduct system that delivered water from the snow melt in the mountains in the central state to the reservoirs that nursed the sprawl of Southern California. He lived in Lancaster in northeast Los Angeles County, which put him within an hour and a half by car of any point on the water line. On the night of January twenty-second he had been heading home from a long day inspecting the Lone Pine segment of the concrete aqueduct. It was payday and he stopped at the Regional State Bank branch just a mile from his home. His paycheck had been automatically deposited and he needed cash. But he was shot in the head and left for dead at the ATM before the machine finished spitting out his money. His killer was the one who took the crisp twenties when they rolled out of the machine.

The first thing McCaleb realized as he read the initial crime reports was that a sanitized version of events had been given to the media. The circumstances described in the Times story Keisha Russell had read to him the day before did not mesh cleanly with the facts in the reports. The story she had read said that Cordell’s body was found fifteen minutes after the shooting. According to the crime report, Cordell was found almost immediately by an ATM customer who had pulled into the bank lot just as another vehicle-most likely the shooter’s-was speeding out. The witness, identified as James Noone, quickly called for help on a cellular car phone.

Because the call was relayed through a cell transponder, the 911 operator did not have an automatic address readout of the exact location from which the call had been made. She had to take that information the old-fashioned way-manually-and managed to transpose two numbers of the address Noone had given when she dispatched an emergency medical unit. In his statement, Noone said he had watched helplessly as a paramedic ambulance went screaming by to a location seven blocks away. He had to call and explain himself all over again to a new operator. The paramedics were redirected but Cordell was dead by the time they arrived.

As he read the initial reports, it was hard for McCaleb to make a judgment on whether the delay in the arrival of paramedics was of any consequence. Cordell had suffered a devastating head wound. Even if paramedics had gotten to him ten minutes sooner, it probably would have made no difference. It was unlikely that death could have been avoided.

Still, the 911 screwup was just the type of thing the media loved to run with. So somebody in the Sheriff’s Department-probably Jaye Winston’s supervisor-had decided to keep that information quiet.

The screwup was a side matter that held little interest for McCaleb. What did interest him was that there was at least a partial witness as well as a vehicle description. According to Noone’s statement, he had almost been creamed by a black blur as he had pulled into the bank’s lot. He described the exiting vehicle as a black Jeep Cherokee with the newer, smoother styling. He got only a split-second view of the driver, a man he described only as white and with either gray hair or a gray cap on his head.

There were no other witnesses listed in the initial reports. Before moving on to the supplemental reports and the autopsy protocol, McCaleb decided to look at the videos. He turned on the television and VCR and first popped in the tape made from the ATM’s surveillance camera.

As with the tape from the Sherman Market, there was a timeline running across the bottom of the frame. The picture was shot through a fish-eye lens that distorted the image. The man McCaleb assumed was James Cordell came into the frame and slid his bank card into the machine. His face was very close to the camera, blocking out a view of almost everything else. It was a design flaw-unless the real purpose of the camera was not to capture robberies but the faces of fraud artists using stolen or gimmick bank cards.

As Cordell typed in his code number, he hesitated and looked over his right shoulder, his head tracking something passing behind him-the Cherokee pulling into the lot. He finished typing in his transaction and a nervous look came across his face. Nobody likes going to an ATM at night, even a well-lighted machine in a low-crime neighborhood. The only machine McCaleb ever used was inside a twenty-four-hour supermarket, where there always was the safety and deterrent of crowds. Cordell took a nervous glance over his left shoulder, nodded at someone off-screen and then looked back at the machine. Nothing about the person he looked at had alarmed him further. The shooter obviously had not pulled on the mask. Despite his outward calm, Cordell’s eyes dropped down to the cash slot, his mind probably repeating a silent mantra of Hurry up! Hurry up!

Then almost immediately the gun came into the frame, reaching over his shoulder and just kissing his left temple before the trigger was pulled and James Cordell’s life was taken. There was the blast of blood misting the camera lens and the man went forward and to his right, apparently going into the wall next to the ATM and then falling backward to the ground.

The shooter then moved into the video frame and grabbed the cash as it was delivered through the slot. At that moment McCaleb paused the picture. On the screen was a full view of the masked shooter. He was in the same dark jumpsuit and mask worn by the shooter in the Gloria Torres tape. As Winston had said, ballistics weren’t necessary. They would only be a scientific confirmation of something Winston knew and now McCaleb knew in the gut. It was the same man. Same clothes, same method of operation, same dead eyes behind the mask.

He flicked the button again and the video continued. The shooter grabbed the cash from the machine. As he did this, he seemed to be saying something but his face was not squared to the camera as with the Sherman Market shootings. It was as if he was speaking to himself this time rather than to the camera.

The shooter quickly moved to the left of the screen and stooped to pick up something unseen. The bullet casing. He then darted to the right and disappeared from the screen. McCaleb watched for a few moments. The only figure in the picture was the still form of Cordell on the pavement below the machine. The only movement was the widening pool of blood around his head. Seeking the lower ground, the blood slid into a joint in the pavement and started moving in a line toward the curb.

A minute went by and then a man entered the video screen, crouching over Cordell’s body. James Noone. He was bald across the top of his head and wearing thin-framed glasses. He touched the wounded man’s neck, then looked around, probably to make sure he was safe himself. He then jumped up and was gone, presumably to make the call on his cell phone. Another half minute went by before Noone returned to the frame to wait for help. As the time went by, Noone swiveled his head back and forth, apparently fearing that the gunman, if not in the car he had seen speeding away, might still be around. Finally, his attention was drawn in the direction of the street. His mouth opened in a silent scream and he waved his arms above his head as he apparently watched the paramedics speed by. He then jumped up and left the screen again.

A few moments later the screen jumped. McCaleb checked the time and saw that it was now seven minutes later. Two paramedics moved quickly into place around Cordell. They checked for pulse and pupil response. They ripped open his shirt and one of the rescuers listened to his chest with a stethoscope. Another quickly arrived with a wheeled stretcher. But one of the first two looked at the man and shook his head. Cordell was dead.

A few moments later the screen went blank.

After pausing a moment, almost in reverence, McCaleb put in the crime scene tape next. This was obviously taken from a hand-held video camera. It started with some environmental shots of the bank property and the street. In the bank lot there were two vehicles: a dusty white Chevy Suburban and a smaller vehicle barely visible on its other side. McCaleb assumed the Suburban was Cordell’s. It was large and rugged, dusty from driving the mountain and desert roads alongside the aqueduct. He assumed the other car belonged to the witness, James Noone.

The tape then showed the ATM and panned downward to the blood-stained sidewalk in front of it. Cordell’s body was sprawled in the spot where the paramedics had found it and then left it. It was uncovered, the dead man’s shirt open, his pale chest exposed.

Over the next several minutes the video jumped in time through various stages of the crime scene. First a criminalist measured and photographed the scene, then coroner’s investigators worked on the body, wrapped it in a plastic body bag and removed it on a gurney. Lastly, the criminalist and a latents man moved in to search the crime scene more thoroughly for evidence and fingerprints. There was a segment showing the criminalist using a small metal spike to work the bullet slug out of the wall next to the ATM.

Finally, there was a bonus McCaleb had not been expecting. The camera operator recorded James Noone’s first recounting of what he had seen. The witness had been taken to the edge of the bank property and was standing next to a public phone and talking to a uniformed deputy when the cameraman wandered up. Noone was a man of about thirty-five. He appeared-in comparison to the deputy-to be short and compactly built. He now had on a baseball cap. He was agitated, still pumped by what he had witnessed and apparently frustrated by the screwup with the paramedics. The camera had been turned on in mid-conversation.

“All I’m saying is that he had a fighting chance.”

“Yes, sir, I understand. I’m sure it will be one of the things they take a look at.”

“I mean, I think somebody ought to investigate how this could-and the thing is, we’re only what, a half mile from the hospital?”

“We’re aware of that, Mr. Noone,” the deputy said patiently. “Now if we could just move on for a moment. Could you tell me if you saw anything before you found the body? Anything unusual.”

“Yes, I saw the guy. At least I think I did.”

“What guy is that?”

“The robber. I saw the getaway car.”

“Can you describe that, sir?”

“Sure, black Cherokee. The new kind. Not one of those that look like a shoe box.”

The deputy looked a bit confused but McCaleb understood that Noone was describing a Grand Cherokee model. He had one himself.

“I was pulling in and it came tearing out of here, almost hit me,” Noone said. “The guy was a real asshole. I blasted my horn at him, then I pull in and find this man here. I called on my cell phone but then it got all fucked up.”

“Yes, sir. Can you refrain from that kind of language? This might be played in court one day.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“Can we go back to this car? Did you happen to see a license plate?”

“I wasn’t even looking.”

“How many people in the vehicle?”

“I think one, the driver.”

“Male or female?”

“Male.”

“Can you describe him for me?”

“Wasn’t really looking. I was just trying not to get plowed into, that’s all.”

“White? Black? Asian?”

“Oh, he was white. I’m pretty sure about that. But I couldn’t identify him or anything like that.”

“What about hair color?”

“It was gray.”

“Gray?”

The deputy said it with surprise. An old robber. It seemed unusual to him.

“I think,” Noone said. “It was all so quick. I can’t be sure.”

“What about a hat?”

“Yeah, it could have been a hat.”

“What do you mean, the gray?”

“Yeah, gray hat, gray hair. I can’t be sure.”

“Okay, anything else? Was he wearing glasses?”

“Uh, I either don’t remember or didn’t see. I really wasn’t looking at the guy, you know. Besides, the car had dark windows. The only time I could really see the guy was through the windshield and I only saw that for a second. When he was coming right at me.”

“Okay, Mr. Noone. This is a help. We are going to need you to make a formal statement and the detectives will need to talk to you. Is this going to be an inconvenience?”

“Yes, but what are you gonna do? I want to help. I tried to help. I don’t mind.”

“Thank you, sir. I’m going to have a deputy take you into the Palmdale station. The detectives will talk to you there. They’ll be with you as soon as possible and I’ll make sure they know you are waiting.”

“Well, okay. What about my wheels?”

“Someone will take you back here when they are done.”

The tape ended there. McCaleb ejected it and thought about what he had seen and heard and read so far. The fact that the Sheriff’s Department did not give the black Cherokee to the media was curious. It would be something he would have to ask Jaye Winston about. He made a note of it on the legal pad he had been writing questions on and then started through the remaining reports on Cordell.

The crime scene evidence inventory was a single page that was almost blank. Collected evidence amounted to the slug removed from the wall, a half dozen fingerprints lifted from the ATM and photographs of a tire mark possibly made by the shooter’s car. The video from the ATM camera was also listed.

Clipped to the report were photocopies of photos of the tread mark and a freeze frame from the ATM video of the gun in the shooter’s hand. An ancillary report from the crime lab stated that it was the technician’s opinion that the tire mark had been on the asphalt at least several days and was not useful in the investigation.

A ballistics report identified the bullet as a slightly pancaked nine-millimeter Federal FMJ. Stapled to the report was a photocopy of a page from the autopsy showing a top-view drawing of the skull. The track of the bullet through Cordell’s brain was charted on the drawing. The bullet had entered just forward on the left temple, then tumbled on a straight line through the frontal lobe and out through the right temple region. The track of the tumbling bullet had been an inch wide. As McCaleb read it, he realized it was probably a good thing the paramedics were late. If they had managed to save Cordell, it probably would have been for a life on a machine in one of those medical centers that were nothing more than vegetable warehouses.

The ballistics report also contained an enhanced photo of the gun. Though much of the weapon was hidden in the gloved grip of the shooter, the sheriff’s firearms experts had identified it as a Heckler amp; Koch P7, a nine-millimeter pistol with a four-inch barrel and nickel finish.

The weapon identification was a curiosity to McCaleb. The HK P7 was a fairly expensive weapon, about a thousand dollars on the legitimate market, and not the kind of weapon normally seen in street crimes. He guessed that Jaye Winston must have assumed that the gun itself had to have been taken earlier in a robbery or burglary. McCaleb looked through the remaining supplemental reports and sure enough Winston had pulled crime reports from across the county in which an HK P7 of matching description had been reported stolen. It did not appear that she had taken the lead much further than that. It was true that many gun thefts went unreported because the people who lost the weapons shouldn’t have had them in the first place. But as Winston had undoubtedly done before, McCaleb scanned the list of reported thefts-only five in the last two years-to see if any names or addresses turned a switch. None did. All five of the burglaries Winston had collected were open cases with no suspects. It was a dead end.

After the burglary list was a report detailing all thefts of black Grand Cherokees in the county during the last year. Winston had apparently believed the shooter’s car was also a contradiction-a high-line vehicle used in an economically low-line crime. McCaleb thought it was a good jump to consider the car was probably stolen. There were twenty-four Cherokees on the list but no other reports indicating any follow-up. Maybe, he considered, Winston had simply changed her mind after connecting her shooting to the Torres case. The Good Samaritan had described a getaway vehicle from the market shooting that could be a Cherokee. Since that indicated the shooter had not gotten rid of it, it possibly hadn’t been stolen after all.

The autopsy protocol was next and McCaleb flipped through the pages quickly. He knew from experience that ninety percent of any autopsy report was dedicated to the minute description of the procedure, identifying the characteristics of the victim’s interior organs and state of health at the time of death. Most of the time it was only the summary that was important to McCaleb. But in the Cordell case even that part of the autopsy was irrelevant because it was obvious. He found the summary anyway and nodded as he read what he already knew. Massive brain damage had led to Cordell’s death within minutes of the shooting.

He put the autopsy report aside. The next stack of reports dealt with Winston’s three-strike theory. Believing the shooter was an ex-convict facing life without parole for another conviction, Winston had gone to the state parole offices in Van Nuys and Lancaster and pulled files on paroled armed robbers who were Caucasian and had two prior felony convictions on their records. These were people facing third-strike penalties if arrested again under the new law. There were seventy-one of them assigned to the two parole offices geographically nearest the two robbery-shootings.

Winston and other deputies had slowly gone through the list in the weeks since the robberies and murders. According to the reports, they had paid visits to nearly every man on the list. Of the seventy-one, only seven of the men couldn’t be found. This indicated they had violated parole and had probably left the area or might still be in the area hiding and possibly were more likely to be committing armed robberies and even murders. Nationwide parole pickup bulletins were issued for all these men on law enforcement computer networks. Of the men who were contacted, initial interviews and investigation cleared almost ninety percent through alibis. The remaining eight had been cleared through other investigative means-chiefly because their physical dimensions did not match those of the shooter’s upper body on the video.

Aside from the missing seven men on the list, the three-strikes avenue of investigation was stagnant. Winston was apparently hoping that one of those seven would eventually turn up and be tied to the shooting.

McCaleb moved on to the remaining Cordell reports. There were two follow-up interviews with James Noone at the Star Center. His story never differed in these reports and his recollection of the Cherokee driver never got any better.

There also was a crime scene sketch and four field-interview reports on traffic stops of men driving black Cherokees. They had been stopped in Lancaster and Palmdale within an hour of the ATM shooting by deputies made aware of the Cherokee’s use in the crime by a sheriff’s radio broadcast. The identification of each driver was run through the computer and they were sent on their way after coming up clean. The reports were forwarded to Winston.

The last item McCaleb read was the most recent summary report filed by Winston. It was short and to the point.

“No new leads or suspects at this time. Investigating officer is waiting at this point for additional information that may lead to the ID of a suspect.”

Winston was at the wall. She was waiting. She needed fresh blood.

McCaleb drummed his fingers on the table and thought about all he had just read. He agreed with the moves Winston had made but he tried to think of what she had missed and what else could be done. He liked her three-strike theory and shared her disappointment at not being able to cull a suspect out of the list of seventy-one. The fact that most of the men were cleared through alibis bothered him. How could so many two-strikes dirtbags be able to perfectly account for their exact whereabouts on two different nights? He had always been suspicious of alibis when he was working cases. He knew it took only one liar to make an alibi.

McCaleb stopped his finger roll on the table as he thought of something. He fanned the stack of Cordell reports across the table. He didn’t need to look through them because he knew that what he was thinking of was not in the pile. He had realized that Winston had never geographically cross-referenced her various theories.

He got up and left the boat. Buddy Lockridge was sitting in the cockpit of his boat sewing a rip in a wet suit when McCaleb walked up.

“Hey, you got a job?”

“Guy over on millionaires’ row wants me to scrape his Bertram. It’s the sixty over there. But if you need a ride, I can do his thing whenever I want. He’s a once-a-month weekender.”

“No. I just want to know if you have a Thomas Brothers I can borrow. Mine’s in my car and I don’t want to take the tarp off it to get to it.”

“Yeah, sure. It’s in the bull.”

Lockridge reached into his pocket and got his car keys out and tossed them to McCaleb. On his way out to the Taurus McCaleb glanced over at millionaires’ row. It was a dock with double-wide, long slips to handle the girth of the larger yachts that moored in Cabrillo Marina. He picked out the Bertram 60. It was a beautiful boat. And he knew it had cost its owner, who probably used it no more than once a month, an easy million and a half.

After retrieving the map book from Lockridge’s car, returning the key and then returning to his own boat, McCaleb set to work with the Cordell records. First he went through the reports on thefts of Cherokees and HK P7 pistols. He numbered each reported theft and then charted it by address on the appropriate page of the map book. He then went on to the list of three-strike suspects, using the same procedure to chart the home and job locations of each man as well. Lastly, he charted the locations of the shootings.

It took him almost an hour. But by the time he was done, he felt a sense of cautious excitement. One name from the list of seventy-one clearly stood out as being geographically relevant to the Sherman Market shooting and the theft of an HK P7.

The man’s name was Mikail Bolotov, a thirty-year-old Russian émigré who had already served two stints in California prisons for armed robberies. Bolotov lived and worked in Canoga Park. His home was off DeSoto near Sherman Way, a mile or so from the market where Gloria Torres and Chan Ho Kang were murdered. His job was at a clock manufacturing plant located on Winnetka only eight blocks south and two blocks east of the market. Lastly, and this was what excited McCaleb, the Russian also worked only four blocks from a Canoga Park home from which an HK P7 had been stolen during a burglary in December. Reading the burglary report, McCaleb noted that the intruder had taken several presents from beneath a Christmas tree, including a new HK P7 that had been wrapped as a gift from the homeowner to his wife-the perfect L.A. Christmas gift. The burglar left no fingerprints or other evidence behind.

McCaleb read through the entire parole package and investigator’s report. Bolotov had a long record of violence, though no previous suspicion of homicide and no tangles with the law since his last discharge from prison three years before. He routinely made his parole appointments and to outward appearance appeared to be on the straight and narrow.

Bolotov had been interviewed on the Cordell matter at his place of employment by two sheriff’s investigators named Ritenbaugh and Aguilar. The interview had taken place two weeks after the Cordell murder but nearly three weeks before the Sherman Market murders. Also, the interview had apparently taken place before Winston had pulled the reports on HK P7 thefts. This, he guessed, was why the significance of Bolotov’s geographic location was missed.

During the interview, Bolotov’s answers had apparently been sufficient to avoid suspicion and his employer had provided an alibi, reporting that on the night James Cordell was murdered, Bolotov had worked his normal two-to-ten shift. He showed the detectives pay records and time cards reflecting the hours worked. That was enough for Ritenbaugh and Aguilar. Cordell had died at about 10:10P.M. It would have been physically impossible for Bolotov to get from Canoga Park to Lancaster in ten minutes-even if he had used a helicopter. Ritenbaugh and Aguilar moved on to the next name on the list of three-strike candidates.

“Bullshit,” McCaleb said out loud.

He felt excited. Bolotov was a lead that should be rechecked no matter what his boss or the pay records said. The man was an armed robber by trade, not a clock maker. His geographic proximity to key locations relating to the investigation demanded that another look be taken. McCaleb felt he had at least accomplished something that he could go back to Winston with.

He quickly wrote a few notes on the legal pad and then set it aside. He was exhausted from the work done so far and felt the low pounding of a headache coming on. He looked at his watch and saw that time had sped by without his realizing it. It was two o’clock already. He knew he should eat something but he had no desire for any kind of food in particular. He decided instead to take a nap and went below to the stateroom.