Blood Work

28

WHAT WAS THAT ABOUT? What’s going on?”

McCaleb was walking quickly toward the car. He felt that maintaining velocity would somehow help keep the growing dread he was feeling from entirely overtaking his thoughts. Graciela had to trot to keep up.

“The blood.”

“The blood?”

“They both gave blood. Your sister and Cordell. It was right there in front of me all the-I saw that poster and I remembered I saw a letter at Cordell’s house… and I just knew. Do you have your keys?”

“Listen, slow down, Terry. Slow down.”

He reluctantly slowed his pace and she came up next to him, digging the car keys out of her purse.

“Now tell me what you are talking about.”

“Open the car and I’ll show you.”

They reached the car. She unlocked his door first and started around to her side. He slipped in and reached across to open her door. He then leaned forward and started going through the bag on the floor. It was so jammed with paperwork, he had to pull the gun out and place it on the floor mat just so there was room to look through the documents. Graciela got in the car and started watching.

“You can start it,” he said without turning his attention from his task.

“What are you doing?”

He pulled out the Cordell autopsy.

“I’m looking for-shit, this is just the preliminary report.”

He flipped through the protocol to make sure. It was incomplete.

“No toxicology and blood.”

He shoved the autopsy report back into the bag and then the gun. He straightened up.

“We’ve got to find a phone. I’ll call his wife.”

Graciela started the car.

“Fine,” she said. “We will-we’ll go to my house. But you have to tell me what it is you’re thinking, Terry.”

“Okay, just give me a minute to think first.”

He slowed the jumble of thoughts streaming through his mind and tried to analyze the jump he had just made.

“I’m talking about the match,” he said. “The link.”

“What link?”

“What have we been missing? What have we been looking for? The link between these cases. At first the connection was simply the randomness of crime. That’s what the cops thought. That’s what I thought when I first started looking at it. We had two holdup victims-no connection other than the killer and the chance crossing of his path with the paths of these individuals. This is L.A., this sort of thing happens all the time. The capital of random violence, right?”

Graciela turned onto Sherman Way. They were just a couple of minutes from her home.

“Right.”

“Wrong. Because then we read more into it. We discover a killer who takes personal icons and this suggests something more involved than random collisions of shooter and victim. This suggests a deeper relationship-the targeting, stalking and acquisition of each victim.”

McCaleb stopped. They were passing the Sherman Market and they both wordlessly looked at the store as they went by. McCaleb waited a moment longer before continuing.

“Then all of a sudden we get another wrinkle, another layer of the onion is peeled back. We get the ballistics and it’s a whole new ball game. Now we have another murder and what looks like a professional running through this. A hitter. Why? What could possibly be the connection between your sister, James Cordell and Donald Kenyon?”

Graciela didn’t answer. She was coming up on Alabama now and moved the car into the left-turn lane.

“Blood,” he said. “Blood has got to be the link.”

She pulled into the driveway of her home. She turned the engine off.

“Blood,” she said.

McCaleb stared straight ahead at the closed garage door. He spoke slowly, the dread finally catching up with him.

“All this time I’ve been thinking, What did she see, what did she know? Whose path could she have crossed that would have gotten her killed? You see, I looked at her life and made a judgment. I decided that she didn’t have anything that anyone would want to take, so the reason had to be elsewhere. But I missed it. Missed it completely. Your sister was a good mother, a good sister, good employee and friend. But the one thing she had that made her almost unique was her blood. That made what she had inside her so very valuable… to someone.”

He waited a beat. He still didn’t look at her.

“Someone like me.”

He heard her breath leaving her body and he felt as though it was the hope going out of him. His hope of redemption.

“You’re saying she was… taken for her organs. You look at a poster back there and can say that?”

He finally looked over at her.

“I just knew it. That’s all.”

He opened his door.

“We call Mrs. Cordell. She’ll tell us her husband’s blood type. It will be AB with CMV negative. Perfect match. Then we get Kenyon’s blood. It, too, will match. I’d bet on it.”

He turned his body to get out.

“It doesn’t make sense,” she said. “Because you told me Mr. Cordell died right there. At the bank. His heart wasn’t taken. His organs. It’s not the same. And Kenyon. Kenyon died at his house.”

He got out and then leaned down and looked in at her. She was looking out through the windshield now.

“Cordell and Kenyon didn’t work out,” he said. “The shooter learned from them. He finally got it right with your sister.”

McCaleb shut the door and walked toward the house. It was a while before Graciela caught up to him.

Inside, McCaleb sat down on a sectional couch in the living room and Graciela brought him the phone from the kitchen. He realized he had left Amelia Cordell’s number in his bag in the car. He also realized that the car was unlocked and his gun was in the bag as well.

As he stepped back outside and approached the car, his eyes casually swept the street. He was looking for the car from the night before at the marina. He saw nothing that remotely matched and no other cars parked along the curb with occupants inside.

Back in the house again, he sat on the couch and punched Amelia Cordell’s number into the phone while Graciela sat down in the far corner of the couch and watched him with a distant look on her face. The phone rang five times before a machine picked up. McCaleb left his name, number and the message that he needed James Cordell’s blood type as soon as she could get it to him. He clicked off the phone and looked at Graciela.

“Do you know if she works?” she asked.

“No, she doesn’t. She could be anywhere.”

He clicked the phone back on and called his own machine to check for messages. There were nine, the machine having accumulated them unplayed since Saturday. He listened to four messages from Jaye Winston and two from Vernon Carruthers that were outdated by events. There was also Graciela’s message that she would be coming to the boat Monday. Of the two remaining messages, the first was from Tony Banks, the video tech. He told McCaleb that he had completed the job on the video he had dropped off. The other message was from Jaye Winston again. She had called that morning to tell McCaleb that his prediction had come true. The bureau was increasing its involvement in the investigations of the murders. Hitchens had not only promised full cooperation but was abdicating lead status to agents Nevins and Uhlig. She was frustrated. McCaleb could easily read it in her voice. But so was he. He clicked off and blew out his breath.

“Now what?” Graciela asked.

“I don’t know. I need to confirm this… this idea before I take the next step.”

“What about the sheriff’s detective? She should have the complete autopsy. She’d know the blood type.”

“No.”

He didn’t say anything else by way of explanation. He looked around what he could see of the house from the couch. It was small, neatly furnished and kept. There was a large framed photo of Gloria Torres on the top shelf of a china cabinet in the adjoining dining room.

“Why don’t you want to call her?” Graciela asked.

“I’m not sure. I just… I want to figure things out a little bit before I talk to her. I think I should wait a little while and see if I hear from Mrs. Cordell.”

“What about calling the coroner’s office directly?”

“No, I don’t think that would work, either.”

What he was leaving unsaid was the fact that if he confirmed his theory, it would mean that anyone who benefited from Glory’s death would rightly have to be considered a suspect. That included him. Therefore, he did not want to make any inquiry to authorities that might set that into motion. Not until he was ready with a few more answers with which to defend himself.

“I know!” Graciela suddenly said. “The computer in the blood lab-I can probably confirm it there. Unless his name’s been deleted. But I doubt that. I remember coming across the name of a donor who had been dead four years and he was still on there.”

What she was saying made little sense to McCaleb.

“What are you talking about?” he asked.

She looked at her watch and jumped up from her chair.

“Let me change and then we have to hurry. I’ll explain everything on the way.”

She then disappeared down a hallway and McCaleb heard a bedroom door close.