Blood Work

3

THE MOON WAS LIKE a balloon being kept aloft by children poking at it with sticks. The masts of dozens of sailboats stood raised beneath it, ready to keep it from falling. McCaleb watched it hover in the black sky until it finally escaped by slipping behind the clouds somewhere out over Catalina. As good a hiding spot as any, he thought, as he looked down at the empty coffee cup in his hand. He missed being able to sit in the stern at the end of the day with an ice-cold beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. But cigarettes had been part of the problem and were gone for good now. And it would be a few months before the medication therapy would relax enough to allow a dose of alcohol into the mix. For now, if he had just one beer, it might give him what Bonnie Fox called a fatal hangover.

McCaleb got up and went into the boat’s salon. First he tried sitting at the galley table but soon got up, turned the TV on and started flipping through the channels without really looking at what was on. He turned the tube off and checked the clutter on the chart table but found there was nothing for him there, either. He moved about the cabin, looking for a distraction from his thoughts. But there was nothing.

He moved down the stairs into the forward passageway and into the head. He took the thermometer from the medicine cabinet, shook it and dipped it under his tongue. It was an oldstyle glass tube instrument. The electronic thermometer with digital reading display the hospital had provided was still in its box on the cabinet shelf. For some reason he didn’t trust it.

Looking at himself in the mirror, he pulled open the collar of his shirt and studied the small wound left by the morning’s biopsy. It never got a chance to heal. There had been so many biopsies that the incision was always just about covered with new skin when it was opened up again and the artery probed once more. He knew it would be a permanent mark, like the thirteen-inch scar running down his chest. As he stared at himself, his thoughts drifted to his father. He remembered the permanent marks, the tattoos, left on the old man’s neck. The coordinates of a radiation battle that served only to prolong the inevitable.

The temperature reading was normal. He washed the thermometer and put it back, then took the clipboard with the temperature log sheet off the towel hook and wrote the date and time. In the last column, under TEMPERATURE, he drew another dash indicating no change.

After hanging up the board, he leaned into the mirror to look at his eyes. Green flecked with gray, the corneas showing hairline cracks of red. He stepped back and pulled the shirt off. The mirror was small but he could still see the scar, whitish pink and thick, ugly. He did this often, appraised himself. It was because he couldn’t get used to the way his body looked now and the way it had so fully betrayed him. Cardiomyopathy. Fox had told him it was a virus that could have been waiting in the walls of his heart for years, only to bloom by happenstance and to be nurtured by stress. The explanation meant little to him. It didn’t ease the feeling that the man he had once been was gone now forever. He sometimes felt when he looked at himself he was looking at a stranger, someone beaten down and left fragile by life.

After pulling his shirt back on, he went into the forward berth. It was a triangular-shaped room that followed the shape of the bow. There was a double bunk on the port side and a bank of storage compartments to starboard. He had turned the lower berth into a desk and used the overhead berth for storage of cardboard boxes full of old bureau files. Marked on the side of these boxes were the names of the investigations. They said POET, CODE, ZODIAC, FULL MOON and BREMMER. Two of the boxes were marked VARIOUS UNSUBS. McCaleb had copied most of his files before leaving the bureau. It was against policy but no one stopped him. The files in the boxes came from various cases, open and closed. Some filled whole cartons, some were thin enough to share space in the same boxes. He wasn’t sure why he had copied everything. He hadn’t opened any of the boxes since he had retired. But at various times he had thought he would write a book or maybe even continue his investigations of the open cases. Largely, though, he just liked the idea of having the files as a physical accounting or proof of what he had done with that part of his life.

McCaleb sat down at the desk and turned on the wall-mounted light. Momentarily, his eyes fell on the FBI badge he had carried for sixteen years. It was now encased in a Lucite block and hanging on the wall above the desk. Tacked to the wall next to it was a photo of a young girl with braces, smiling at the camera. It had been copied from a yearbook many years before. McCaleb frowned at the memory and looked away, his eyes falling to the desk clutter.

There was a handful of bills and receipts scattered on the desk, an accordion file full of medical records, a stack of manila files that were mostly empty, three fliers from competing dry-docking services and the Cabrillo Marina dockage rules book. His checkbook was open and ready to be put to use but he couldn’t bring himself to wade into the mundane task of paying bills. Not now. He was restless but it was not because of a paucity of things on his mind. He couldn’t stop thinking about the visit from Graciela Rivers and the sudden change it had put him through.

He sorted through the clutter on the desk until he found the newspaper clip that had brought the woman to his boat. He had read it the day it was published, cut it out and then tried to forget about it. But that had been impossible. The story had drawn a procession of victims to his boat. The mother whose teenage daughter’s body was found mutilated on the beach down in Redondo; the parents whose son had been hanged in an apartment in West Hollywood. The young husband whose wife had gone clubbing on the Sunset Strip one night and had never come back. All of them zombies, left nearly catatonic by grief and the betrayal of their faith in a God who wouldn’t allow such things to happen. McCaleb couldn’t comfort them, he couldn’t help them. He sent them on their way.

He had agreed to the newspaper interview only because he was in the reporter’s debt. When he had been with the bureau, Keisha Russell had always been good to him. She was the kind of reporter who gave some and didn’t always take. She had called him on the boat a month earlier to collect on that debt. She’d been assigned the story for the Times ’s “Whatever Happened to…” column. Since a year earlier she had written a story about McCaleb’s wait for a heart, she wanted to update it now that he had finally received the transplant. McCaleb wanted to decline the invitation, knowing it would disrupt the anonymous life he was now living, but Russell had reminded him of all the times she had helped him-either holding back details of an investigation or putting them into a story, depending on what McCaleb thought would be useful. McCaleb felt he had no choice. He always made good on his debts.

On the day the story was published, McCaleb had taken it as his official badge of has-been status. Usually, the column was reserved for updates on hack politicians who had disappeared from the local scene or people whose fifteen minutes of fame had long ago lapsed. Every now and then it featured a washed-up TV star who was selling real estate or had become a painter because it was his true creative calling.

He unfolded the clip now and reread it.

New Heart, New Start for Former FBI Agent

By Keisha Russell

TIMES STAFF WRITER

It used to be that Terrell McCaleb’s face was a routine fixture on the nightly newscasts of Los Angeles and his words always found space in the local newspapers. It was not a nice routine for him or the city.

An FBI agent, McCaleb was the bureau’s point man in the investigations of the handful of serial killers that plagued Los Angeles and the West in the last decade.

A member of the Investigative Support Unit, McCaleb helped focus the investigations of the local police. Media-savvy and always quotable, he often took the spotlight-a move that sometimes rubbed the locals and his supervisors in Quantico, Va., the wrong way.

But it has been more than two years since he has made even a blip on the public radar screen. These days, McCaleb no longer carries a badge or a gun. He says he doesn’t even own a standard-issue navy blue FBI suit anymore.

More often than not he wears old blue jeans and torn T-shirts and can be found restoring his 42-foot fishing boat, The Following Sea. McCaleb, who was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Avalon on nearby Catalina Island, currently lives on the boat in a San Pedro marina but plans eventually to moor the vessel in Avalon Harbor.

Recovering from heart transplant surgery, McCaleb says hunting serial killers and rapists is the furthest thing from his mind these days.

McCaleb, 46, says he gave his heart to the bureau-his doctors say severe stress triggered a virus that led to the near-fatal weakening of his original heart-but doesn’t miss it.

“When you go through something like this, it changes you more than just physically,” he said in an interview last week. “It puts things in perspective. Those FBI days seem like a long time ago. I’ve got a new start now. I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do with it but I’m not too worried. I’ll find something.”

McCaleb almost didn’t get the new start. Because he has a blood type found in less than one percent of the population, his wait for a suitable heart lasted almost two years.

“He really strung it out,” said Dr. Bonnie Fox, the surgeon who performed the transplant. “We probably would have lost him or he would have become too weak to undergo the surgery if we’d had to wait much longer.”

McCaleb is out of the hospital and already physically active after only eight weeks. He says that only on occasion does he think about the adrenaline-pumping investigations that once occupied him.

The former agent’s case list reads like a Who’s Who of a macabre walk of fame. Among the cases he worked locally were the Nightstalker and Poet investigations and he took key roles in the hunts for the Code Killer, Sunset Strip Strangler and Luther Hatch, who became known after his arrest as the Cemetery Man because of his visits to the graves of his victims.

McCaleb had been a profiler in the unit’s Quantico base for several years. He specialized in West Coast cases and was flown to Los Angeles often to assist local police in investigations. Finally, the unit’s supervisors decided to create a satellite post here and McCaleb was returned to his native Los Angeles to work out of the FBI field office in Westwood. The move put him closer to many of the investigations in which the FBI was called upon for assistance.

Not all of the investigations were successful and eventually the stress took its toll. McCaleb suffered a heart attack while working late one evening in the local field office. He was found by a night janitor, who was credited with saving the agent’s life. Doctors determined McCaleb suffered from advanced cardiomyopathy-a weakening of the heart’s muscles-and placed him on a transplant list. As he waited, he was given a disability retirement by the bureau.

He traded his bureau pager for a hospital pager and on Feb. 9 it sounded; a heart from a donor with matching blood was available. After six hours of surgery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, the donor’s heart was beating in McCaleb’s chest.

McCaleb is unsure what he’ll do with his new life-other than go fishing. He has had offers from former agents and police detectives to join them as a private investigator or security consultant. But his focus so far has been on restoring The Following Sea, a twenty-year-old sport-fishing boat he inherited from his father. The boat was left to deteriorate for six years but now has McCaleb’s full-time attention.

“At the moment I’m content to take things a little at a time,” he said. “I’m not worried too much about what’s ahead.”

His regrets are few but like all retired investigators and fishermen, McCaleb laments the ones that got away.

“I wish I had solved all the cases,” he said. “I hated it when somebody got away. I still do.”

For a moment McCaleb studied the photo they had used with the story. It was an old head shot they had used many times before during his days with the bureau. His eyes stared boldly into the camera.

When Keisha Russell had come around to do the story on him, she had come with a photographer. But McCaleb wouldn’t let them take a fresh shot. He told them to use one of the old photos. He didn’t want anybody to see the way he looked now.

Not that anyone could tell much, unless he had his shirt off. He was about thirty pounds lighter but that wasn’t what he wanted to hide. It was the eyes. He had lost that look-the eyes as piercingly hard as bullets. He didn’t want anyone to know he had lost that.

He folded the newspaper clip and put it aside. He tapped his fingers on the desk for a few seconds while brooding over things and then looked at the steel paper spike next to the phone. The number Graciela Rivers had given him was scratched in pencil on the scrap of paper that sat at the top of the stack of notes punctured by the spike.

When he was an agent, he had carried with him a bottomless reservoir of rage for the men he hunted. He had seen firsthand what they had done and he wanted them to pay for the horrible manifestations of their fantasies. Blood debts had to be paid in blood. That was why in the bureau’s serial killer unit the agents called what they did “blood work.” There was no other way to describe it. And so it worked on him, cut at him, every time one didn’t pay. Every time one got away.

What happened to Gloria Torres now cut at him. He was alive because she had been taken away by evil. Graciela had told him the story. Gloria had died for no reason other than that she was in the way of somebody and a cash register. It was a simple, stupid and ghastly reason to die. It somehow put McCaleb in debt. To her and her son, to Graciela, even to himself.

He picked up the phone and dialed the number scratched on the paper. It was late but he didn’t want to wait and he didn’t think she would want him to. She answered in a whisper after only one ring.

“Miss Rivers?”

“Yes.”

“It’s Terry McCaleb. You came by my-”

“Yes.”

“Is this a bad time?”

“No.”

“Well, listen, I wanted to tell you that I, uh, have been thinking about things and I promised you I’d call you back no matter what I decided.”

“Yes.”

There was a hopeful tone in just her one word. It touched his heart.

“Well, this is what I think. My, um, my skills, I guess you’d call them, they’re not really suited to this kind of crime. From what you described about your sister, we’re talking about a random occurrence with a financial motive. A robbery. So it’s different from, you know, the kind of cases I worked for the bureau, the serial cases.”

“I understand.”

The hopefulness was bleeding out.

“No, I’m not saying I’m not going to-you know, that I’m not interested. I’m calling because I am going to go see the police tomorrow and ask about this. But-”

“Thank you.”

“-I don’t know how successful I’m going to be. That’s what I’m trying to say. I don’t want to get your hopes up, is what I’m saying. These things… I don’t know.”

“I understand. Thank you for just being willing to do this. Nobody-”

“Well, I’ll take a look at things,” he said, cutting her off. He didn’t want her thanking him too much. “I don’t know what kind of help or cooperation I’ll get from the L.A. police but I’ll do what I can. I owe your sister at least that much. To try.”

She was silent and he told her he needed to get some additional information about her sister as well as the names of the LAPD detectives on the case. They talked for about ten minutes and when he had all of the information he needed written down in a small notebook, an uneasy silence played across the telephone line.

“Well,” he finally said, “I guess that’s it, then. I’ll call you if I have any other questions or if anything else comes up.”

“Thank you again.”

“Something tells me I should be thanking you. I’m glad I’ll be able to do this. I just hope it helps.”

“Oh, it will. You’ve got her heart. She’ll guide you.”

“Yes,” he said hesitantly, not really understanding what she meant or why he was agreeing. “I’ll call you when I can.”

He hung up and stared at the phone for a few moments, thinking about her last line. Then again he unfolded the newspaper clip with his picture. He studied the eyes for a long time.

Finally, he folded the newspaper clip closed and hid it under some of the paperwork on the desk. He looked up at the girl with the braces and after a few moments nodded. Then he turned off the light.