Blood Work

14

BUDDY LOCKRIDGE PULLED the Taurus into an open spot in the parking lot of Video GraFX Consultants on La Brea Avenue in Hollywood. Lockridge was not dressed Hollywood-cool for his second day as McCaleb’s driver. This time he was wearing boat shorts and a Hawaiian shirt with ukuleles and hula girls floating on an ocean blue background. McCaleb told him he didn’t think he would be long and got out.

VGC was a business used mostly by the entertainment industry. It rented professional video equipment as well as video editing and dubbing studios. Adult filmmakers, whose product was almost exclusively shot on video, were its main clients but VGC also provided one of the best video-effects and image-enhancing labs in Hollywood.

McCaleb had been inside VGC once before, working on loan to the field office’s bank unit. It was the downside of his being transferred from Quantico to the FO outpost; technically he was under the command of the FO’s special agent in charge. And whenever the SAC thought things were slow-if they ever were-in the serials unit, he would yank McCaleb out and put him on something else, usually something McCaleb considered menial.

When he had walked into VGC the previous time, he had a videotape from the ceiling camera of a Wells Fargo Bank in Beverly Hills. The bank had been robbed by several masked gunmen who had escaped with $363,000 in cash. It was the group’s fourth bank robbery in twelve days. The one lead agents had was on the video. When one of the robbers had reached his arm across the teller’s counter to grab the bag she had just stuffed her cash into, his sleeve had caught on the edge of the marble counter and was pulled back. The robber quickly pulled the sleeve forward again but for a split second the form of a tattoo was seen on the inside of his forearm. The image was grainy and had been shot by a camera thirty feet away. After a tech in the field office lab said he could do nothing with it, it was decided not to send the tape to Washington HQ because it would take more than a month to have it analyzed. The robbers were hitting every three days. They seemed agitated in the videos, on the verge of violence. Speed was a necessity.

McCaleb took the tape to Video GraFX. A VGC tech took the frame from the video and in one day enhanced it through pixel redefinition and amplification to the point that the tattoo was identifiable. It was a flying hawk clutching a rifle in one claw and a scythe in the other.

The tattoo broke the case. Its description and a photocopy were teletyped and faxed to sixty field offices across the country. A supervisor in the Butte office then retransmitted the information to the smaller Resident Agency in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, where an agent recognized the tattoo as the insignia he had seen on a flag flown outside the house of a member of a local group of anti-government extremists. The group had intermittently been under bureau observation and suspicion because of its recent purchases of huge tracts of rural land outside the city. The supervisor of the RA was able to provide the Los Angeles FO with a list of members’ names and social security numbers. Agents then began checking hotels and soon found seven members of the group staying at the Airport Hilton. The group was placed under surveillance and the following day watched as they robbed a bank in Willowbrook. Thirty agents were poised in surveillance points outside and ready to go in at the first sign of violence. There wasn’t any. The robbers were followed back to their hotel and systematically arrested in their rooms by agents posing as room service waiters and housekeeping staff. One of the robbers eventually cooperated with agents and admitted that the group had been robbing banks in order to raise capital to buy more land in Idaho. The group wanted the land so members could safely sit out the Armageddon their leader promised was coming to the United States.

Now McCaleb was back. As he stepped to the reception counter, he noticed that the letter of thanks under the bureau’s seal that he had sent following the bank robbery investigation was framed on the wall behind the receptionist. He leaned over the counter until he could read the name of the man he had sent the letter to.

“Can I help you?” the receptionist asked.

McCaleb pointed at the letter and said, “I’d like to talk to Tony Banks.”

She asked McCaleb his name, didn’t seem to recognize it though it was on the letter that hung on the wall above her, and then put in a call. Shortly after, a man McCaleb recognized as Tony Banks came out to greet him. He didn’t recognize McCaleb until he started recounting the bank video story.

“Right, right, I remember. You sent the letter.”

He pointed to the framed letter.

“That’s me.”

“So what can I do for you? Another bank job?”

He was eyeing the videotape McCaleb had in his hand.

“Well, I’ve got another case here. I’m wondering if you could take a look at this tape. There’s something on it I want to see if I can get a better look at.”

“Well, let’s take a look. Always glad to help out.”

He led McCaleb down a hallway of gray carpet past several doors that he knew from his previous visit were editing booths. Business was good. There were Occupied signs on all of the doors. From behind one of them McCaleb heard muffled cries of passion. Banks looked over his shoulder at him and rolled his eyes.

“It’s not real,” he said. “They’re editing a tape.”

McCaleb nodded. Banks had explained the same thing to him when he had been there before.

Banks opened the last door in the hallway. He ducked his head inside to make sure the room was empty, then stepped back and signaled McCaleb inside. There were two chairs set in front of a video editing machine with twin thirty-inch monitors above it. Banks turned on the equipment, pushed a button and the left side cassette cradle opened.

“Now this is going to be pretty graphic,” McCaleb said. “Somebody gets shot. If you want, you can go outside and I’ll just move it to the frame I want you to look at.”

Banks took a moment to think about the offer. He was a thin man of about thirty, with limp hair dyed so blond it was almost white. It was long on the top and shaved around the sides. A Hollywood haircut.

“I’ve seen graphic,” he said. “Put it in.”

“None like this, I don’t think. There’s a difference between graphic real life and the stuff they put in movies.”

“Put it in.”

McCaleb put the tape in the slot and Banks began to play it. McCaleb heard the younger man’s breath catch as he watched Gloria Torres get grabbed from behind and the gun placed against her head and fired. McCaleb reached over and put his hand on the pause button. At the right moment, after Chan Ho Kang had been shot and his body had fallen across the counter and then slid back, he pushed the button and froze the frame. Then, by using a dial, he could move the picture backward and forward slowly until he had exactly the image he wanted. He looked at Banks. The man looked as though all of the evil of humanity had just been revealed to him.

“You okay?”

“It’s horrible.”

“Yes. It is.”

“How can I help you?”

Taking a pen from his shirt pocket, McCaleb pointed at the screen and tapped it on the watch on Kang’s wrist.

“The watch?”

“Yes. I want to know if it is possible to blow this frame up or do something that would let me read the watch. I want to know what time it was at this point of the video.”

“Time? What about this?”

He pointed to the timeline running along the bottom of the screen.

“I can’t trust that time. That’s why I need the watch.”

Banks leaned forward and began fiddling with the dials on the console that controlled the focus and image amplification.

“This is not the original,” he said.

“The tape? No, why?”

“I’m not getting much amplification. Can you get the original?”

“I don’t think so.”

McCaleb looked at the screen. Banks had made the image clearer and larger. The screen was filled with Kang’s upper body and outstretched arm. But the face of the watch was still a blurred gray.

“Well, then what I can do, if you want to leave it with me, is work with it a little bit, take it to one of the guys in the lab. Maybe bring it up a little, clarify it a bit more with some pixel redefinition. But this is the best I can do with it on this equipment.”

“You think it’s worth doing, even without the original? Will we get anything?”

“I don’t know but it’s worth a try. They can do some wild stuff back there. You’re after him, right? This man on the video?”

He gestured toward the screen, though at the moment the shooter wasn’t on it.

“Yeah, I’m after him.”

“Then we’ll see what we can do. Can you leave this?”

“Yeah. I mean… uh, can you dub off a copy for me so I can have it with me? I might need to show it to somebody else.”

“Sure. Let me go get a tape.”

Banks got up and left the booth. McCaleb sat there staring at the screen. He had watched how Banks had used the equipment. He backed the tape up and amplified a frame showing the masked shooter. It didn’t help much. He hit the fast forward for a bit and stopped it on a close-up of Gloria’s face. It felt intrusive to be so close at such a moment, to be staring at a woman who had just had her life taken. Her face was in left profile and the one eye that he could see was still open.

McCaleb noticed the three earrings on her left ear. One was a stud, a small silver crescent moon. Next, going down the curve of the ear, was a small hoop that he guessed was silver and last, dangling below the lobe, was a cross. He knew it was the style among young women to have multiple earrings on at least one ear.

While he continued to wait for Banks, he played with the dials once more and backed the tape up until there was a view of Gloria’s right side, just as she entered the frame. He could see only one earring on her right ear, another crescent moon.

Banks came back in with a tape and quickly inserted it into the second cassette cradle while he finished rewinding the first tape. It took him about thirty seconds to make a high-speed dub copy. He ejected it, slid it into a box and handed it to McCaleb.

“Thanks,” McCaleb said. “How long you think before somebody gets a chance to work on it?”

“We’re kind of busy. But I’ll go look at the job board and see if we can’t get someone on it as soon as possible. Maybe by tomorrow or Saturday. Is that okay?”

“It’s okay. Thanks, Tony, I appreciate it.”

“No problem. I don’t know if I still have your card. You want me to call you?”

In that moment McCaleb decided to continue the deception. He didn’t tell Banks that he was no longer an FBI agent. He thought Banks might push the project a little harder if he thought that the job was being done for the bureau.

“Tell you what, let me give you a private number. If you call and I don’t pick up, just leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

“Sounds good. I hope we can help.”

“Me too. And Tony? Do me a favor and don’t show the tape to anybody who doesn’t need to see it.”

“I won’t,” Banks said, his face reddening a bit. McCaleb realized either he had needlessly embarrassed Banks with a request that did not need to be spoken or he had made the request just as Banks was thinking about whom he could show the tape to. McCaleb thought it was the latter.

McCaleb gave him his number, they shook hands and McCaleb went back down the hall on his own. As he passed the door from which he had heard the feigned sounds of passion, he noticed there was only silence now.

As McCaleb opened the door of the Taurus, he heard the radio playing and noticed Lockridge had a harmonica on his thigh, ready to be played if the right tune came along. Buddy closed a book called Death of a Tenor Man. He has marked a spot about halfway through.

“What happened to Inspector Fujigama?”

“What?”

“The book you had yesterday.”

“ Inspector Imanishi Investigates. I finished it.”

“Imanishi then. You’re a fast reader.”

“Good books read fast. You read crime novels?”

“Why would I want to read made-up stuff when I’ve seen the real stuff and can’t stand it?”

Buddy started the car. He had to turn the ignition twice before it kicked over.

“It’s a much different world. Everything is ordered, good and bad clearly defined, the bad guy always gets what he deserves, the hero shines, no loose ends. It’s a refreshing antidote to the real world.”

“Sounds boring.”

“No, it’s reassuring. Where to now?”