Blood Work

22

THE DAY HAD GONE WELL. Raymond caught two barracudas and a white bass. The first fish had been the biggest and most exciting, though the second was hooked while they were eating lunch and almost pulled the unattended pole into the water. After they got back in the late afternoon Graciela insisted that Raymond rest before dinner and took him down to the forward stateroom. McCaleb used the time to spray off the fishing equipment with the stern hose. When Graciela came back up and they were alone, sitting on chairs on the deck, he felt a physical craving for a cold beer that he could just sit back and enjoy.

“That was wonderful,” Graciela said of the outing to the jetty.

“I’m glad. Think you’re going to stay for dinner?”

“Of course. He wants to stay over, too. He loves boats. And I think he wants to fish again tomorrow. You’ve created a monster.”

McCaleb nodded, thinking about the night ahead. A few minutes of easy silence went by while they watched the other activities in the marina. Saturdays were always busy days. McCaleb kept his eyes moving. Having guests made him more alert for the Russian, even though he’d decided the chances of Bolotov showing up were slim. He’d had the upper hand in Toliver’s office. If he had wanted to harm McCaleb, he could have done it then. But thoughts of Bolotov brought the case intruding. He remembered a question he’d thought of for Graciela.

“Let me ask you something,” he said. “You first came to me last Saturday. But the story about me ran a week before that. Why did you wait a week?”

“I didn’t really. I didn’t see the article. A friend of Glory’s from the paper called up and said he saw it and wondered if, you know, you could’ve been the one who got her heart. Then I went to the library and read the story. I came here the next day.”

He nodded. She decided it was her turn to ask a question.

“Those boxes down there.”

“What boxes?”

“Stacked under the desk. Are they your cases?”

“They’re old files.”

“I recognize some of the names written on them. The article mentioned some of them. Luther Hatch, I remember him. And the Code Killer. Why did they call him that?”

“Because he-if it was a he-left messages for us or sent messages to us that always had the same number at the bottom.”

“What did it mean?”

“We never found out. The best people at the bureau and even the encryption people at the National Security Agency couldn’t crack it. Personally, I didn’t think it meant anything at all. It wasn’t a code. It was just another way for the UnSub to tweak us, keep us chasing our tails… nine-oh-three, four-seven-two, five-six-eight.”

“That’s the code?”

“That’s the number. Like I said, I don’t think there was any code.”

“Is that what they decided in Washington, too?”

“No. They never gave up on it. They were sure it meant something. They thought it might be the guy’s Social Security number. You know, scrambled around. With their computer they printed out every combination and then got all the names from Social Security. Hundreds of thousands. They ran them all through the computers.”

“Looking for what?”

“Criminal records, profile matches… it was one big wild-goose chase. The UnSub wasn’t on the list.”

“What is UnSub?”

“Unknown subject. That’s what we called each one until we caught him. We never caught the Code Killer.”

McCaleb heard the faint sound of a harmonica and looked over at the Double-Down. Lockridge was down below practicing Spoonful.

“Was he the only one of your cases where that happened?”

“You mean where the guy was never caught? No. Unfortunately, a lot of them get away. But the Code case was personal, I guess. He sent letters to me. He resented me for some reason.”

“What did he do to the people he…”

“The Code Killer was unusual. He killed in many different ways and with no discernible pattern. Men, women, even one small child. He shot, he stabbed, he strangled. There was no handle.”

“Then how did you know it was him each time?”

“He told us. The letters, the code left at the crime scenes. You see, the victims and who they were didn’t matter. They were only objects by which he could exercise power and stick it in the face of authority. He was an authority-complex killer. There was another killer, the Poet. He was a traveler, was active across the country a few years ago,”

“I remember. He got away here in L.A., right?”

“Right. He was an authority killer, too. See, you strip away their fantasies and their methods and a lot of these people are very much alike. The Poet got off on watching us flailing around. The Code Killer was the same way. He liked to tweak the cops every chance he got.”

“Then he just stopped?”

“He either died or went to jail for something else. Or he moved somewhere else and started a new routine. But it’s not something these guys can just turn off.”

“And what did you do in the Luther Hatch case?”

“Just my job. Look, we should talk about something else, don’t you think?”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. I just… I don’t know, I don’t like all of those old stories.”

He had wanted to talk to her about her sister and the latest developments but now it didn’t seem like the right time. He let the opportunity pass.

For dinner McCaleb grilled hamburgers and barracuda steaks. Raymond seemed enthusiastic about eating the fish he had caught but then didn’t like the strong taste of the barracuda. Neither did Graciela, though McCaleb didn’t think it was bad.

The meal was followed with another walk to the ice-cream store and then a walk along the shops on Cabrillo Way. It was dark by the time they got back to the boat. The marina was quiet again. Raymond got the bad news from Graciela.

“Raymond, it’s been a long day and I want you to go to sleep,” she said gently. “If you’re good, you can fish some more tomorrow before we leave.”

The boy looked at McCaleb, seeking either confirmation or an appeal.

“She’s right, Raymond,” he said. “In the morning I’ll take you back out there. We’ll catch some more fish. Okay?”

In a cranky tone the boy agreed and Graciela took him down to his room. His parting request was that he be allowed to take his fishing pole to his room with him. There was no objection to that. McCaleb had secured the hook on one of the pole’s eyelets.

McCaleb had two space heaters on the boat and he set them up in each of their rooms. He knew that at night it could get cold on the boat, no matter how many blankets you had on.

“What are you going to use?” Graciela asked him.

“I’ll be fine. I’m going to use my sleeping bag. I’ll probably be warmer than both of you.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

He left them down there and went topside to wait for Graciela. He poured the last of the Sanford pinot noir he had opened on her first visit into her glass.

He took that and a can of Coke out to the stern. She joined him after ten minutes.

“It gets cold out here,” she said.

“Yeah. Do you think he’ll be all right with that heater?”

“Yes, he’s fine. He fell asleep almost as soon as he hit the pillow.”

He handed her the glass of wine and she tapped it against his Coke.

“Thank you,” she said. “He had a wonderful time today.”

“I’m glad.”

He tapped his Coke against her glass. He knew that at some point he needed to finally talk about the investigation with her but he didn’t want to spoil the moment. Once again he put it off.

“Who is that girl in the picture down on your desk?”

“What girl?”

“It looks like a photo from a yearbook or something. It’s taped to the wall over the desk in Raymond’s room.”

“Oh… it’s just… it’s just somebody I always want to remember. Somebody who died.”

“You mean like a case or someone you knew?”

“A case.”

“The Code Killer?”

“No, long before that.”

“What was her name?”

“Aubrey-Lynn.”

“What happened?”

“Something that shouldn’t happen to anybody. Let’s not talk about it right now.”

“Okay. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. I should have taken that thing down before Raymond came anyway.”

McCaleb didn’t get into the sleeping bag. He just draped it over his body and lay on his back with his hands laced behind his head. He knew he should be tired but he wasn’t. Many thoughts raced through his mind, from the mundane to the gut-wrenching. He was thinking about the heater in the boy’s berth. He knew it was safe but he worried about it anyway. The talk earlier in the day also resurfaced in a strand of thoughts about his father in the hospital bed. Once more he wished he had brought the old man home to die. He remembered taking the boat out after the ceremony at Descanso Beach and circling Catalina, parceling out the ashes a little at a time so that they lasted until he had come all the way around the island.

But those memories and concerns were only distractions from his thoughts of Graciela. The evening had ended on a wrong note after she had brought up Aubrey-Lynn Showitz. The memory had knocked McCaleb off stride and he stopped talking. He was infatuated with Graciela. He wanted her and had hoped the evening would end with them together. But he had let the grim memories intrude and it spoiled the moment.

He felt the boat gently rise and fall as the tide rolled in. He exhaled loudly, hoping to expel the demons. He readjusted himself on the thin cushion. There was a seam down the middle of the makeshift bed and he couldn’t get comfortable. He thought about getting up for some orange juice, but worried that if he had a glass, there might not be enough left for Raymond and Graciela in the morning.

Finally, he decided to go down and check the vitals. The old standby for killing time. It would give him something to do, maybe make him tired and finally able to sleep.

He had plugged a night-light into the circuit over the sink in case Raymond had to get up and find the toilet. He decided not to turn on the overhead fixture and stood there in the dim light with the thermometer under his tongue. He looked at his shadowy reflection and saw that the circles beneath his eyes were becoming more pronounced.

He had to lean over the sink and hold the thermometer close to the night-light in order to read it. It looked like he had a slight fever. He took the clipboard off the hook and wrote the date and time and 99 instead of a slash. As he replaced the clipboard, he heard the door of the master stateroom open across the passageway.

He had never closed the door to the head. He looked across the dark hallway and saw Graciela’s face peering around the edge of her door. The rest of her body she hid behind the door. They spoke in whispers.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes. You?”

“I’m fine. What are you doing?”

“I couldn’t sleep. I was just checking my temperature.”

“Do you have a fever?”

“No… I’m fine.”

He nodded as he said it. He became aware he was wearing only his boxer shorts. He folded his arms and raised one hand to rub his chin but he was really just trying to hide the ugly scar on his chest.

They looked at each other in silence for a moment. McCaleb realized he had been holding his hand to his chin too long. He dropped his arms to his sides and watched her as her eyes fell to his chest.

“Graciela…”

He didn’t finish. She had slowly opened the door and he could see she wore a pink silk sleep shirt cut high on her hips. She was beautiful in it. For a moment they just stood there and looked at each other. Graciela still held the door, as if to steady herself against the boat’s slight movements. After another moment she took a step into the hallway and he took a step to meet her. He reached forward and traced his hand gently up her side and then around to her back. With his other hand he caressed her throat and moved to the back of her neck. He pulled her into him.

“Can you do this?” she whispered, her face pressed into his neck.

“Nothing’s going to stop me,” he whispered back.

They moved into the stateroom and shut the door. He left his shorts on the floor and crawled onto the bed with her as she unbuttoned the nightshirt. The sheets and blanket already had her smell, the vanilla he had noticed once before. He moved on top of her and she pulled him down into a long kiss. He worked his face down to her chest and kissed her breasts. His nose found the spot just below her neck where she had touched the perfume to her skin. The deep musky vanilla filled him and he moved his lips back up to hers.

Graciela moved her hand in between their bodies and held her warm palm against his chest. He felt her body tense and he opened his eyes. In a whisper she said, “Wait. Terry, wait.”

He froze and lifted himself up with one arm. “What is it?” he whispered.

“I don’t think… It doesn’t feel right to me. I’m sorry.”

“What’s not right?”

“I’m not sure.”

She turned her body underneath him and he had no choice but to get off her.

“Graciela?”

“It’s not you, Terry. It’s me. I’m… I just don’t want to rush. I want to think about things.”

She was on her side, looking away from him.

“Is it because of your sister? Because I have her-”

“No, it’s not that… Well, maybe a little. I just think we should think about it more.”

She reached back and caressed his cheek.

“I’m sorry. I know it was wrong to invite you in and then do this.”

“It’s okay. I don’t want you to do something you might be unhappy about later. I’ll go back up.”

He made a move to slide toward the foot of the bed but she grabbed his arm.

“No, don’t leave. Not yet. Lie here with me. I don’t want you to leave yet.”

He moved back up the bed and put his head on the pillow next to hers. It was an odd feeling. Though obviously rejected, he felt no anxiety about it. He felt that the time would come for them and he could wait. McCaleb began wondering how long he could stay with her before having to return to his sleeping bag.

“Tell me about the girl,” she said.

“What?” he replied, confused.

“The girl in the yearbook picture on your desk.”

“It’s not a nice story, Graciela. Why do you want to know that story?”

“Because I want to know you.”

That was all she said. But McCaleb understood. He knew that if they were to become lovers, they had to share their secrets. It was part of the ritual. He remembered years before how on the night he first made love to the woman who would become his wife, she had told him that she had been sexually abused as a child. Her sharing of such a carefully held and guarded secret had touched him more deeply than the actual physical act of their making love. He always remembered that moment, cherished it, even after the marriage was over.

“All of this was put together from witnesses and physical evidence… and the video,” he began.

“What video?”

“I’ll get to that. It was a Florida case. This was before I was sent out here. A whole family… abducted. Mother, father, two daughters. The Showitz family. Aubrey-Lynn, the girl in the photo, she was the youngest.”

“How old?”

“She had just turned fifteen on the vacation. They were from the Midwest, a little town in Ohio. And it was their first family vacation. They didn’t have a lot of money. The father owned a little auto garage-there was still grease under his nails when they found him.”

McCaleb blew his air out in a short laugh-the kind a person makes when something isn’t funny but he wished it were.

“So they were on a cut-rate vacation and they did Disney World and all of that and they eventually got down to Fort Lauderdale, where they stayed in one room in this little shitty motel by the I-95 freeway. They had made the reservation from Ohio and thought because the place was called the Sea Breeze, it was near the ocean.”

His voice caught because he had never spoken the story out loud; every detail about it was pitiful and made him hurt inside.

“Anyway, when they got there, they decided to stay. They were only going to be in town a couple days and they’d lose their deposit if they left for a beach hotel. So they stayed. And on their first night there one of the girls spots this pickup in the lot that was attached to a trailer with an airboat on it. You know what an airboat is?”

“Like with an airplane propeller and it goes in the swamp out there?”

“Right, the Everglades.”

“I saw them on CNN when that plane crashed into the swamp and disappeared.”

“Yeah, same thing. But this girl and her family had never seen one other than on TV or in a magazine and so they were looking it over and a man-the owner-just happens to walk up to them. He’s a friendly guy and he tells the family that he’ll take ’em on out for a real Florida airboat ride if they want.”

Graciela turned her face into the crook of his neck and pressed a hand against his chest. She knew where the story was going.

“So they said okay. I mean, they were from some town in Ohio with only one high school. They didn’t know anything about the real world. So they went ahead and accepted this man’s-this stranger’s-invitation.”

“And he killed them?”

“All of them,” McCaleb said, nodding in the dark. “They went out with him and they never came back. The father was found first. A couple nights later his body was found by a frogger working the grass. It wasn’t too far from a ramp where they launch those boats. He’d been shot once in the back of the head and dumped off the boat.”

“What about the girls?”

“It took the local sheriffs a couple days to ID the father and trace him to the Sea Breeze. When there was no sign there of the wife and kids, and they weren’t back in Ohio, the sheriffs went back out into the ’Glades with helicopters and more airboats. They found the three other bodies about six miles out. The middle of nowhere. A spot the airboaters call the Devil’s Keep. The bodies were there. He had done things to all three of them. Then he tied them to concrete blocks and threw them over. While they were alive. They drowned.”

“Oh, God…”

“God wasn’t anywhere around that day. Decomposition gases eventually made the bodies float to the top, even with the concrete blocks attached.”

After a long moment of silence he continued.

“About that time the bureau was called in and I went down there with another agent, named Walling. There wasn’t a whole lot to go on. We worked up a profile-we knew it was somebody very familiar with the ’Glades. Most of it’s three feet deep anywhere you stop out there. But the women were dropped in a deep spot. He didn’t want them found. He had to have known about that spot. The Devil’s Keep. It was like a sinkhole or a meteorite crater. He had to have been out there before to have known about it.”

McCaleb was staring through the darkness at the ceiling, but what he was seeing was his own private and horrible version of the events that took place at the Devil’s Keep. It was a vision that was never far from memory, always in the dark reaches of his mind.

“He had stripped them, taken their jewelry, anything that would ID them. But in Aubrey-Lynn’s hand, when they pried it open, there was a silver necklace with a crucifix. She had somehow hidden it from him and held on to it. Probably praying to her God until the end.”

McCaleb thought about the story and the hold it had on him. Its resonance still moved through his life all these years later, like the incoming tide that gently lifted the boat in an almost rhythmic pattern. The story was always there. He knew he didn’t need to display the photo above his desk like a holy card. He would never be able to forget the face of that girl. He knew that his heart had started to die with that girl’s face.

“Did they catch that man?” Graciela asked.

She had just heard the story for the first time and already needed to know someone had paid for the horrible crime. She needed the closure. She didn’t understand, as McCaleb did, that it didn’t matter. That there was never closure on a story like this.

“No. They never caught him. They went through the registry at the Sea Breeze and ran everybody down. There was one person they never found. He had registered as Earl Hanford but it was a phony. The trail ended there… until he sent the video.”

A beat of silence passed.

“It was sent to the sheriff’s lead detective. The family had a video camera. They took it with them on the airboat trip. The tape starts with lots of happy scenes and smiles. Disney World, the beach, then some of the ’Glades. Then the killer started taping… everything. He wore a black hood over his face so we couldn’t ID him. He never showed enough of the boat to help us, either. He knew what he was doing.”

“You watched it?”

McCaleb nodded. He disengaged from Graciela and sat on the side of the bed, his back to her.

“He had a rifle. They did what he wanted. All sorts of things… the two sisters… together. Other things. And he killed them anyway. He-ah, shit…”

He shook his head and rubbed his hands harshly over his face. He felt her warm hand on his back.

“The blocks he tied them to weren’t enough to take them right down. They struggled, you know, on the surface. He watched and taped it. It got him aroused. He was masturbating while he watched them drown.”

He heard Graciela crying quietly. He lay back down and put an arm around her.

“The tape was the last we ever heard from him,” he said. “He’s out there somewhere. Another one.”

He looked at her in the darkness, not sure if she could see him.

“That’s the story.”

“I’m sorry you have that to carry around.”

“And now you have it. I’m sorry, too.”

She rubbed the tears away from her eyes.

“That’s when you stopped believing in angels, isn’t it?”

He nodded.

An hour or so before dawn McCaleb got up and went back to his uncomfortable bed in the salon. They had spent the night until that point talking in whispers, holding and kissing, but never making love. Once back in his sleeping bag, sleep still did not come to him. McCaleb’s mind kept running over the details of the hours he had just spent with Graciela, the touch of her warm hands on his skin, the softness of her breasts against his lips, the taste of her lips. And during moments when his mind wandered from these sensual memories, he also thought about the story he had told her and the way she had reacted.

In the morning they did not talk about what had happened in the stateroom or what had been said, even when Raymond had gone out to the stern to look into the live well and was out of earshot. Graciela seemed to act as if there had been no rendezvous, consummated or not, and McCaleb acted in kind. The first thing he spoke of while he scrambled eggs for the three of them was the case.

“I want you to do something for me when you get home today,” he said, checking over his shoulder to make sure Raymond was still outside. “I want you to think about your sister and write down as much as you can about her routines. I mean like places she would go, friends she would see. Anything you can think of she did between the first of the year and the night she went into that store. Also, I want to talk to her friends and boss at the Times. It might be better if you set that up.”

“All right. How come?”

“Because things are changing about the case. Remember I asked you about the earring?”

McCaleb told her his belief that it had been the shooter who had taken the earring. He also told her how he had found out late Friday that something of a personal nature had been taken from the victim in the first shooting as well.

“What was it?”

“A photo of his wife and kids.”

“What do you think it means?”

“That maybe these weren’t robberies. That maybe this man at the ATM and then your sister were picked for some other reason. There’s a chance they might have had some prior interaction with the man who shot them. You know, crossed paths with him somewhere. That’s why I want you to do this. The wife of the first victim is doing it for me with her husband. I’ll look at the two of them together and see if there are any commonalities.”

Graciela folded her arms and leaned against the galley counter.

“You mean like they did something to this man to cause this?”

“No. I mean that they crossed paths and something about them attracted him to them. There’s no valid reason. I think we’re looking for a psychopath. There is no telling what caught his eye. Why he chose these two people out of the nine million others who live in this county.”

She slowly shook her head in disbelief.

“What do the police say about all of this?”

“I don’t think the LAPD even knows yet. And the sheriff’s investigator is not sure whether or not she sees it the way I do. We’re all going to talk about it tomorrow morning.”

“What about the man?”

“What man?”

“The store owner. Maybe he was the one who crossed the path. Maybe Glory had nothing to do with it.”

McCaleb shook his head and said, “No. If he was the target, the shooter would have just gone in and shot him when nobody else was in the store. It was your sister. Your sister and the first man up in Lancaster. There is some connection. We have to find it.”

McCaleb reached into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out a photo Amelia Cordell had given him. It showed James Cordell in close-up, a bright smile on his face. He showed the photo to Graciela.

“Do you recognize this man? Is he someone that your sister might have known?”

She took the photo from him and studied it but then shook her head.

“Not that I know of. Is he… the man from Lancaster?”

McCaleb nodded and took the photo back. He put it in his pocket, then told Graciela to go get Raymond to come inside for his breakfast. As she got to the sliding door, he stopped her.

“Graciela, do you trust me?”

She looked back at him.

“Of course.”

“Then trust me about this. I don’t care if the LAPD and the sheriffs don’t believe me, but I know what I know. With or without them, I’m going to keep pushing on this.”

She nodded and turned back to the door and the boy out in the stern.