Blood Work

36

HAVE YOU HASHED this around, figured out how it all plays?”

“A little bit.”

“So then tell me.”

McCaleb was standing in the galley now, pouring himself a glass of orange juice. Winston had passed on a drink but was standing in the galley also. Her adrenaline would not allow her to sit. McCaleb knew that feeling.

“Wait a second,” he said.

He gulped down the orange juice in one tilt.

“Sorry, I messed with my blood sugar today, I think. Ate too late.”

“Are you all right?”

“Fine.”

He put the glass in the sink, turned and leaned against the counter.

“Okay, this is how I see it. You start with Mr. X, somebody someplace that we’ll assume to be a man for now. This person needs something. A new part. Kidney, liver, maybe bone marrow. Possibly corneas but that might be stretching it. It has to be something worth killing for. Something that he might die without. Or in the case of the cornea, possibly go blind and become non-functioning without.”

“What about a heart?”

“That would be on the list but, see, I got the heart. So scratch the heart unless you are Nevins and Uhlig and Arrango and the rest of them who think I’m Mr. X, okay?”

“Okay. Go on.”

“This guy, X, he’s got money and access. Enough to be able to contact and hire a shooter.”

“With OC connections.”

“Maybe but not necessarily.”

“What about ‘Don’t forget the cannoli’?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about that. It’s kind of showy for real organized crime, don’t you think? Makes me think it’s a deflection but for now that’s just a guess.”

“All right, never mind for now. Go on with Mr. X.”

“Well, besides being able to get to a shooter to do the job, he next has to have access to the computer at BOPRA. He’s got to know who has the part that he needs. You know what BOPRA is?”

“I learned today. And I said the same thing about you to Nevins. ‘How could Terry McCaleb get access to BOPRA?’ and he told me how bullshit their computer security is. Their theory is that you hacked in one day when you were at Cedars. You got a list of blood donors of type AB with CMV negative and went from there.”

“Okay. Now follow the same theory but instead of me, it’s Mr. X and he gets the list and then puts the Good Samaritan on the case.”

McCaleb pointed out into the salon, where the image of the Good Samaritan remained frozen on the television screen. They both looked at it for a few moments before he continued.

“The shooter goes down the list and lo and behold he sees a familiar name. Donald Kenyon. Kenyon is a famous man, mostly for all the enemies he has. He becomes the perfect choice because of that. All those enemies-investors and maybe even some mobster lurking behind the scenes, it makes for good camouflage.”

“So the Good Samaritan picks Kenyon.”

“Right. He picks him and then he watches him until he has his routine. And the routine is pretty simple because Kenyon’s got a federal dog collar on and usually doesn’t go anywhere outside of his house because of it. But the Good Sam is not discouraged. He gets the household routine down and he knows that for twenty minutes each morning Kenyon is in that house alone when the wife drives the kids to school.”

His throat dry from all the talking, McCaleb rescued the glass from the sink and poured himself another glass of orange juice.

“So he hits during that twenty-minute window,” he continued, after gulping down another half glass. “And going in, he knows he has to do the job in such a way that Kenyon makes it to the hospital but no further. See, he’s got to preserve the organs for transplant. But if he goes too far, Kenyon’s dead on arrival and no good to him. So he comes into the house, grabs Kenyon and marches him to the front door. He then holds him there and waits for the wife to come back home from dropping the kids. He makes Kenyon look through the peephole and make sure it is her. Then he pops him and lays him out on the floor, fresh and ready when the wife opens the door.”

“But he doesn’t make it to the hospital.”

“No. The plan was good but he fucked up. He used a Devastator in the P7. The wrong bullet for this kind of work. It’s a frangible, it explodes and basically pulps Kenyon’s brain, destroys all life support system controls. Death is almost instantaneous.”

He stopped there and watched Winston as she evaluated the story. Then he held up a finger, signaling her to wait before commenting. He went to his bag in the salon and pulled out a sheaf of documents, careful to keep his body between the bag and Winston. He didn’t want her catching a glimpse of the P7, which was still in there.

At the galley counter he looked through the documents until he found what he needed.

“I’m not supposed to even have this but take a look. This is a transcript of the tape the bureau got from the illegal bugs in the Kenyon house. This is the part where he was hit. They didn’t get everything that was said but what is there fits with what I just said.”

Winston stood next to him and read the section he had circled with a pen while riding with Buddy Lockridge on the way to the marina.

UNKNOWN: Okay, look and see who…

KENYON: Don’t… She’s got nothing to do with this. She…

Winston nodded her head.

“He could have told him to look through the peephole,” she said. “It obviously was the wife because Kenyon then tried to protect her.”

“Right, and notice that the transcript says that there were two minutes of silence before that last exchange and the gunshot. What else could he have been doing but waiting until she showed up so she would get to the body almost as soon as it happened?”

She nodded again.

“It fits,” she said. “But what about the bureau people listening? You think the shooter didn’t know about them?”

“I’m not sure. It doesn’t seem like it. I think he just got lucky. But maybe he thought there was a slim chance the place was bugged. Maybe that’s where the cannoli line came from. Just a little misdirection, just in case.”

McCaleb finished his orange juice and put the glass back into the sink.

“Okay, so he blew it,” Winston said. “And it was back to the drawing board. Or, actually, back to the BOPRA list. And the next name he picked was my guy, James Cordell.”

McCaleb nodded and let her run with it. He knew that the more of the puzzle she fit together herself, the more apt she would be to believe in the whole thing.

“He changes the load, goes from frangible to hardball so that he would have a through-and-through wound with less immediate brain damage.

“He watches Cordell until he has the routine down and then he sets up the shoot in a way similar to Kenyon-the hit occurring almost instantaneous to the arrival of a second party who could get help. In Kenyon’s case it was his wife. In Cordell’s it was James Noone. The shooter probably stood behind Cordell until he saw Noone’s car enter the turn lane to come into the bank. That was when he fired.”

“I think Noone was an accident,” McCaleb said. “There is no way the shooter could have planned on a witness showing up. He was probably going to shoot Cordell and then call nine one one himself at the pay phone out at the curb-on the crime scene tape you can see the pay phone right there. But Noone came along and that forced him to just get the hell out of there. He probably thought the witness would make the call on the pay phone-a legitimate call for help. The bad break for him was that Noone made the call on a cell phone and the address was messed up, resulting in a terminal delay for Cordell.”

Winston nodded her agreement.

“Cordell was DOA,” she said. “Another one goes to shit. He goes back to the list and it’s Gloria Torres this time. Only this time he’s not taking a single chance. He calls the shooting in before it even happens.”

“Right, to get the paramedics rolling. He knew her routine. He was probably standing at that pay phone waiting. When he saw her car pulling in, he made the nine one one call.”

“He then goes in, does the job and splits. Outside he pulls off the mask and the jumpsuit and he becomes our Good Samaritan. He goes in, wraps her up and gets the hell out of there. This time it works. It is perfect.”

“It was a learning process. He learned from the mistakes of the first two, perfected it on the third.”

McCaleb folded his arms and waited for Winston to make the next jump.

“So we have to follow the harvest now,” she said. “One of the people who received one of the organs will be Mr. X. We have to go to BOPRA and get the-wait, you said you had a list of names?”

He nodded.

“From BOPRA?”

“From BOPRA.”

He went back to his bag and found the list Bonnie Fox had given him. He turned around and almost bumped into Winston, who had moved out of the galley. He handed her the sheet.

“There’s the list.”

She studied it intently, as if she was expecting to see that one of the names on it would actually be Mr. X or in some other way be readily identifiable as him.

“How did you get this?”

“Can’t say.”

She looked up at him.

“For the time being I have to protect a source. But it’s legit. Those people got organs from Gloria Torres.”

“Are you giving me this?”

“If you are going to do something with it.”

“I will. I’ll start tomorrow.”

McCaleb was fully aware of what he was giving her. Of course, it might be the key to his exoneration and the capture of the worst kind of killer. But he was also handing her an E-ticket ride. If she was successful in breaking the case while the bureau and the LAPD were heading down the wrong road, her professional future would have no bounds.

“How are you going to run them down?” he asked.

“Anyway I can. I’ll look for money, criminal records, anything that stands out. You know, the usual things, the full background. What are you going to be doing?”

McCaleb glanced over at his bag. It was bulging with documents, tapes and the guns.

“I don’t know yet. Will you tell me something? How did this all turn on me? What pointed all you people at me?”

Winston folded the list into a neat square and slid it into the pocket of her blazer.

“The bureau. Nevins told me they got a tip. He wouldn’t say from where. The tip was suspect-specific, though. He did tell me that. The source said you killed Glory Torres for her heart. They took it from there. They checked the autopsies of all three victims and found the blood matches. From there it was easy, everything fell into place. I have to admit they had me going. At the time, it all seemed to fit.”

“ How? ” McCaleb asked angrily, his voice rising. “None of this would have even happened if I hadn’t started looking into it. The ballistics match to Kenyon was made because of me. That brought the bureau in. You think that is what a guilty man would do? That’s crazy.”

He was angrily pointing at his own chest.

“All of that was considered. We sat around and hashed it out this morning. The theory that emerged was that you had this woman-the sister-who had come to you and you figured she wasn’t going to let this go. So you decided you better take the case before somebody else did. You took it and proceeded to sabotage it. You came up with this Bolotov goose chase. You hypnotized the only real witness and now he’s lost to us as far as court goes. Yes, the ballistics match was made because of you but maybe that was a surprise, maybe you were expecting it to come up empty since a Devastator had been used the first time.”

McCaleb shook his head. He wouldn’t allow himself to see their side of it. He still couldn’t believe they had turned the focus on him.

“Look, we weren’t sold on it one hundred percent,” Winston said. “We felt there was enough to get and justify a warrant for the search-and there was. We felt the search was make or break. We would find evidence and go further with it, or we would drop it. But then we find out you drive a black Cherokee and then sitting under that drawer are three very damning pieces of evidence. The only thing that could have been worse for you would have been to find the gun.”

McCaleb thought of the gun sitting in his bag, five feet away from them. Again he knew how lucky he had been.

“But like you said, it was too easy.”

“For me it was. The others didn’t see it that way. Like I said before, they started strutting. They saw the headlines.”

McCaleb shook his head. The discussion had sapped his strength. He stepped over to the galley table and slid into the booth.

“I am being set up,” he said.

Winston came over.

“I believe you,” she said. “And whoever he is, he’s done a good job of it. Have you thought at all about why it is you that’s been set up?”

McCaleb nodded as he drew a design in a spray of sugar that had been spilled on the table.

“When I look at it from the shooter’s view, I see why.”

He brushed the sugar off the table with his palm.

“After Kenyon didn’t work out and the shooter knew he had to go back to the list, he also knew he was doubling the risk. He knew there was an off chance that the cases might be connected through the blood. He knew he had to lay the groundwork for a deflection. He picked me. If he was in the BOPRA computer, then he knew I was next on the list for a heart. He probably backgrounded me like the others. He knew about the Cherokee I drove and used one himself. He took souvenirs from the victims so that he could plant them, if needed, here. Then it was probably him who made the tip call to Nevins when everything was set.”

McCaleb sat silently for a long moment, brooding about his situation. Then he slowly slid back out of the booth.

“I have to finish packing.”

“Where are you going to go?”

“I’m not sure.”

“I’ll need to talk to you tomorrow.”

“I’ll be in touch.”

He started down the stairs, his hands gripping the overhead rails.

“Terry.”

He stopped and turned to look back at her.

“I’m taking a big chance. My neck’s a mile out there.”

“I know that, Jaye. Thanks.”

With that he disappeared into the darkness below.