Blood Work

34

McCALEB HAD COMPOSED himself and was resolved by the time they reached Video GraFX Consultants. On the way he had examined the possibility of flight and then quickly discarded it. Fight was the only choice. He knew that he was tethered in place by his heart-to flee was to die, for he needed the carefully set post-op drug therapy to prevent his body from rejecting his new heart. To flee would also mean to leave Graciela and Raymond. And it felt already as if doing that would wither his heart just as quickly.

Lockridge dropped him off out front and waited in a red zone. The door was locked but Tony Banks had told him to ring the delivery buzzer if he arrived after closing. McCaleb pushed the button twice before Banks answered the door himself. He had a manila envelope with him and he handed it through the open door to McCaleb.

“This everything?”

“The tape and the hard copies. Everything is pretty clear.”

McCaleb took the package.

“What do I owe you, Tony?”

“Not a thing. Glad to help.”

McCaleb nodded and was about to head back to the car but stopped and looked back at Banks.

“I’ve got to tell you something. I’m not with the bureau anymore, Tony. I apologize if I misled you, but-”

“I know you’re not with the bureau anymore.”

“You do?”

“I called your old office yesterday when you didn’t return my call from Saturday. The number was on that letter you sent, the letter on the wall. I called and they said you hadn’t worked there in something like two years.”

McCaleb studied Banks, really taking the young man’s measure for the first time, and then held up the package.

“Then why are you giving me this?”

“Because you are after him, the man on that tape.”

McCaleb nodded.

“Then good luck. I hope you get him.”

Banks closed and locked the door then. McCaleb said thanks but by then the door was already closed.

The Sherman Market was empty save for a couple of young girls mulling choices at the candy rack and a young man behind the counter. McCaleb had been hoping to see the same older woman who had been there on his first visit, the widow of Chan Ho Kang. He spoke slowly and clearly to the young man, hoping he understood English better than the woman had.

“I am looking for the woman who works here during the daytime.”

The man-he was really no more than a teenager-looked sullenly at McCaleb.

“You don’t have to talk like I’m some kind of retard,” he said. “I speak English. I was born here.”

“Oh,” McCaleb said, taken aback by his clumsiness. “Sorry about that. It’s just that the woman that was here before, she had a hard time understanding me.”

“My mother. She lived her first thirty years in Korea speaking Korean. You try it sometime. Why don’t you move over there and try to be understood in twenty years.”

“Look, I’m sorry.”

McCaleb held his hands up wide and palms out. This wasn’t going well. He tried again.

“You are Chan Ho Kang’s son?”

The boy nodded.

“Who are you?”

“My name is Terry McCaleb. I’m sorry about the loss of your father.”

“What do you want?”

“I am doing some work for the family of the woman that was killed in here that-”

“What work?”

“I am trying to find the killer.”

“My mother doesn’t know anything. Leave her alone. She’s had enough.”

“Actually all I want to do is to look at her watch. I was in here the other day and I noticed she’s wearing the watch your father was wearing that night.”

The young man stared blankly at him, then glanced away from him to check on the girls at the candy racks.

“Okay, girls, let’s go. Make your choices.”

McCaleb looked back at the girls. They didn’t look happy about being hurried about such an important decision.

“What about the watch?”

McCaleb looked back at him.

“Well, it’s kind of complicated. There are things that don’t add up on the police reports. I am trying to figure out why. To do that, I need to know the exact time the man with the gun came in here.”

He pointed at the video camera on the wall behind and above the counterman.

“The police gave me a copy of the tape. On the tape your father’s watch is seen. I have had it enhanced. If your mother has not reset the watch since… she started wearing it, then there is a way I can get the time I need.”

“You don’t need the watch. The time is on the tape. You said you had the tape.”

“The police say the time on the tape is wrong. That’s what I’m trying to find out. Will you call your mother for me?”

The girls came over to the counter then. The man didn’t answer McCaleb as he silently took their money and gave them change. He watched them walk out before looking back at McCaleb.

“I don’t understand this. It makes no sense to me what you want.”

McCaleb blew out his breath.

“I am trying to help you. Do you want the man who killed your father to be caught?”

“Of course. But this watch business… what does it have to do with anything?”

“I could explain it all to you if you had about a half hour but-”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

McCaleb looked at him a moment and decided that it was going to be the only way to go. He nodded and told him to wait while he got a photo out of the car.

The young man’s name was Steve Kang. Riding in the front passenger seat, he directed Buddy Lockridge into a neighborhood just a few blocks from where Graciela Rivers and Raymond Torres lived.

McCaleb had convinced him with his long version. The young man had then thought enough of McCaleb’s theory to put a Be Back Soon sign on the door and lock up. He normally walked to and from the store, but Lockridge’s car would save them time.

When they got to his home, Steve Kang led McCaleb inside while Lockridge waited in the car. The house was virtually identical in design to Graciela’s and had probably been built in the early fifties by the same developer. Kang told McCaleb to sit in the living room and he then disappeared down a hallway leading to the bedrooms. McCaleb heard muffled talking from the hallway. After a few seconds he realized the conversation was in Korean.

While he waited, he thought about the similarities in the houses and envisioned the two different families grieving on the night of the shooting and the days after.

Steve Kang came back then. He handed McCaleb a remote phone and the watch his father had worn.

“She did not change anything,” he said. “It’s just the way it was that night.”

McCaleb nodded. From the corner of his eye he noticed movement. He looked to his left and saw Steve Kang’s mother standing in the hallway, just watching him. He nodded to her but she didn’t respond in any way.

McCaleb had brought the hard copy of the enhanced video frame in with him along with his notebook and phone book. He had told Sieve Kang what he planned to do but was still uncomfortable carrying it out in front of him. He was about to impersonate a police officer, which was a crime, even if that officer was Eddie Arrango.

From his phone book he got the number for the Central Communications Center in downtown L.A. He’d had the number since his days with the L.A. field office, when he would at times need to coordinate intra-agency activities. The CCC was the dark, cavernous dispatch center four floors below City Hall from which all police and fire department radio communications were transmitted. It was also where the clock was from which the official time of the murders of Gloria Torres and Chan Ho Kang had been set.

On the drive from Hollywood to the market McCaleb had pulled out the Torres file and gotten Arrango’s badge number from the homicide report. He now placed the watch Steve Kang had given him on the arm of the couch and dialed the nonemergency number of the CCC. An operator answered in four rings.

“This is Arrango, West Valley homicide,” McCaleb said. “That’s serial one four one one. I’m not on the radio. I just need a ten-twenty for a surveillance commencement. And could you give me the seconds with that, too?”

“Seconds? Why, you’re a precise man, Detective Arrango.”

“Precisely.”

“Hold one.”

McCaleb looked down at the watch. As the operator spoke, he noted the watch time was 5:14:42P.M.

“That’s seventeen fourteen thirty-eight.”

“Gotcha,” he said. “Thanks.”

He hung up and looked at Steve Kang.

“Your father’s watch is running four seconds ahead of the CCC clock.”

Kang narrowed his eyes and he came around the side of the couch to look over McCaleb as he wrote numbers down in his notebook, referred back to specific times listed on the timeline he had put together earlier, and then did the math.

They both arrived at the same conclusion at the same time.

“That means…”

Steve Kang didn’t finish. McCaleb noticed that he glanced over at his mother in the hallway and then back at the time McCaleb had underlined in the notebook.

“That bastard!” he said in a hateful whisper.

“He’s more than that,” McCaleb said.

Outside, Buddy Lockridge started the Taurus as soon as he saw McCaleb leave the house. McCaleb jumped in.

“Let’s go.”

“We giving the kid a ride back?”

“No, he’s got to talk to his mother. Let’s go.”

“Okay, okay. Where to?”

“Back to the boat.”

“The boat? You can’t go there, Terry. Those people might still be there. Or they might be watching it.”

“It doesn’t matter. I have no choice.”