The Narrows

CHAPTER 3

Even though I knew it was going to be what she would ask me, Graciela McCaleb's request gave me pause. Terry McCaleb had died on his boat a month earlier. I had read about it in the Las Vegas Sun. It had made the papers because of the movie. FBI agent gets heart transplant and then tracks down his donor's killer. It was a story that had Hollywood written all over it and Clint Eastwood played the part, even though he had a couple decades on Terry. The film was a modest success at best, but it still gave Terry the kind of notoriety that guaranteed an obituary notice in papers across the country. I had just gotten back to my apartment near the strip one morning and picked up the Sun. Terry's death was a short story in the back of the A section.

A deep tremor rolled through me when I read it. I was surprised but not that surprised. Terry had always seemed to be a man on borrowed time. But there was nothing suspicious in what I had read or what I had then heard when I went out to Catalina for the funeral service. It had been his heart-his new heart-that had failed. It had given him six good years, better than the national average for a heart transplant patient, but then it had succumbed to the same factors that destroyed the original.

"I don't understand," I said to Graciela. "He was on the boat, a charter, and he collapsed. They said… his heart."

"Yes, it was his heart," she said. "But something new has come up. I want you to look into it. I know you're retired from the police, but Terry and I watched on the news last year what happened here."

Her eyes moved around the room and she gestured with her hands. She was talking about what had happened in my house a year earlier when my first post-retirement investigation had ended so badly and with so much blood.

"I know you still look into things," she said. "You're like Terry was. He couldn't leave it behind. Some of you are like that. When we saw on the news what happened here, that's when Terry said he would want you if he had to pick someone. I think what he was telling me was that if anything ever happened to him, I should go to you."

I nodded and looked at the floor.

"Tell me what has come up and I will tell you what I can do."

"You have a bond with him, you know?"

I nodded again.

"Tell me."

She cleared her throat. She moved to the edge of the couch and began to tell it.

"I'm a nurse. I don't know if you saw the movie but they made me a waitress in the movie. That's not right. I'm a nurse. I know about medicine. I know about hospitals, all of it."

I nodded and didn't say anything to stop her.

"The coroner's office conducted an autopsy on Terry. There were no signs of anything unusual but they decided to go ahead with the autopsy at the request of Dr. Hansen-Terry's cardio doctor-because he wanted to see if they could find out what went wrong."

"Okay," I said. "What did they find?"

"Nothing. I mean, nothing criminal. The heart simply stopped beating… and he died. It happens. The autopsy showed that the muscles of the heart's walls were thinning, getting narrow. Cardiomyopathy. The body was rejecting the heart. They took the normal blood samples and that was it. They released him to me. His body. Terry didn't want to be buried-he always told me that. So he was cremated at Griffin and Reeves and after the funeral service Buddy took the children and me out on the boat and we did what Terry asked. We let him go then. Into the water. It was very private. It was nice."

"Who is Buddy?"

"Oh, he is the man Terry worked with on the charter business. His partner."

"Right. I remember."

I nodded and tried to retrack her story, looking for the opening, the reason she had come to see me.

"The blood scan from the autopsy," I said. "What did they find in it?"

She shook her head.

"No, it's what they didn't find."

"What?"

"You have to remember that Terry took a ton of meds. Every day, pill after pill, liquid after liquid. It kept him alive-I mean, until the end. So the blood scan was like a page and a half long."

"They sent it to you?"

"No, Dr. Hansen got it. He told me about it. And he was calling because there were things missing from the scan that should have been there but weren't. CellCept and Prograf. They weren't in his blood when he died."

"And they're important."

She nodded.

"Exactly. He took seven capsules of Prograf every day. CellCept twice a day. These were his key meds. They kept his heart safe."

"And without them he would die?"

"Three or four days would be all it would take. Congestive heart failure would come up quickly. And that is exactly what happened."

"Why did he stop taking them?"

"He didn't and that is why I need you. Someone tampered with his meds and killed him."

I pushed all of her information through the grinder again.

"First, how do you know he was taking his medicine?"

"Because I saw him and Buddy saw him and even their charter, the man they were with on the last trip, said he saw him taking his meds. I asked them. Look, I told you, I'm a nurse. If he wasn't taking his meds I would've noticed."

"Okay, so you are saying he was taking his pills but they weren't really his pills. Somebody tampered with them. What makes you say that?"

Her body language indicated frustration. I wasn't making the logic jumps she thought I should be making.

"Let me back up," she said. "A week after the funeral, before I knew anything about all of this, I started to try to get things back to normal and I cleared out the closet where Terry kept all his meds. You see, the meds are very, very expensive. I didn't want them to go to waste. There are people who can barely afford them. We could barely afford them. Terry's insurance had run out and we needed Medi-Cal and Medicaid just to pay for his medicine."

"So you donated the meds?"

"Yes, it's a tradition with transplants. When somebody…"

She looked down at her hands.

"I understand," I said. "You give everything back."

"Yes. To help the others. Everything is so expensive. And Terry had at least a nine-week supply. It would be worth thousands to somebody."

"Okay."

"So, I took everything across on the ferry and up to the hospital. Everybody thanked me and I thought that was that. I have two children, Mr. Bosch. As hard as it was, I had to move on. For their sake."

I thought about the daughter. I had never seen her but Terry had told me about her. He'd told me her name and why he had named her. I wondered if Graciela knew that story.

"Did you tell Dr. Hansen this?" I asked. "If somebody tampered with them you have to warn them that-"

She shook her head.

"There's an integrity procedure. All the containers are examined. You know, the seals on bottles are checked, expiration dates checked, lot numbers checked against recall and so on. Nothing came up. Nothing had been tampered with. Nothing I had given them, at least."

"Then what?"

She moved closer to the edge of the couch. Now she would get to it.

"On the boat. The open containers I didn't donate because they don't take them. Hospital protocol."

"You found tampering."

"There was one more day's dosage of Prograf and two more days of CellCept in the bottles. I put them in a plastic bag and took them to the Avalon clinic. I used to work there. I made up a story. I told them a friend of mine found the capsules in her son's pocket while doing the laundry. She wanted to know what he was using. They ran tests and the capsules-all of them-were dummies. They were filled with a white powder. Powdered shark cartilage, actually. They sell it in specialty shops and over the Internet. It's supposed to be some sort of homeopathic cancer treatment. It's easily digestible and gentle. Contained in a capsule, it would have tasted the same to Terry. He would not have known the difference."

From her small purse she pulled out a folded envelope and handed it to me. It contained two capsules. Both white with small pink printing running along the side.

"Are these from the last dosage?"

"Yes. I saved those two and gave four to my friend at the clinic."

Using the envelope to catch its contents I used my fingers to pull one of the capsules open. It came apart freely without damaging the two pieces of the casing. The white powder it had held poured into the envelope. I knew then that it would not be a difficult process to pour the intended content of the capsules out and to replace it with a useless powder.

"What you are telling me, Graciela, is that when Terry was on that last charter he was taking pills he thought were keeping him alive but they weren't doing a thing for him. In a way, they were actually killing him."

"Exactly."

"Where did those pills come from?"

"The bottles came from the hospital pharmacy. But they could have been tampered with anywhere."

She stopped and allowed time for this to register with me.

"What is Dr. Hansen going to do?" I asked.

"He said he has no choice. If tampering took place in the hospital, then he has to know. Other patients could be in danger."

"That's not likely. You said two different medicines had been tampered with. That means it likely happened out of the hospital. It happened after they were in Terry's possession."

"I know. He said that. He told me he is going to refer it to the authorities. He has to. But I don't know who that will be or what they will do. The hospital is in L.A. and Terry died on his boat about twenty-five miles off the coast of San Diego. I don't know who would-"

"It would probably go to the Coast Guard first and then it will be referred to the FBI. Eventually. But that will take several days. You could move it along if you called the bureau right now. I don't understand why you are talking to me instead of them."

"I can't. Not yet anyway."

"Why not? Of course you can. You shouldn't be coming to me. Go to the bureau with this. Tell the people he worked with. They'll go right at this, Graciela. I know they will."

She stood up and went to the sliding door and looked out across the pass. It was one of those days when the smog was so thick it looked like it could catch on fire.

"You were a detective. Think about it. Someone killed Terry. It could not have been random tampering-not with two different meds from two different bottles. It was intentional. So, the next question is, who had access to his meds? Who had motive? They are going to look at me first and they may not look any further. I have two children. I can't risk that."

She turned and looked back at me.

"And I didn't do it."

"What motive?"

"Money, for one thing. There's a life insurance policy from when he was with the bureau."

"For one thing? Does that mean there is a second thing?"

She looked down at the floor.

"I loved my husband. But we were having trouble. He was sleeping on the boat those last few weeks. It's probably why he agreed to take that long charter. Most of the time he just did day trips."

"What was the trouble, Graciela? If I'm going to do this, then I have to know."

She shrugged as if she didn't know the answer but then answered it.

"We lived on an island and I no longer liked it. I don't think it was a big secret that I wanted us to move back to the mainland. The problem was, his job with the bureau had left him afraid for our children. Afraid of the world. He wanted to shelter the children from the world. I didn't. I wanted them to see the world and be ready for it."

"And that was it?"

"There were other things. I wasn't happy that he was still working cases."

I stood up and joined her next to the door. I slid it open to let some of the stuffiness out. I realized I should have opened it as soon as we got inside. The place smelled sour. I'd been gone two weeks.

"What cases?"

"He was like you. Haunted by the ones that got away. He had files, boxes of files, down on that boat."

I had been in the boat a long time ago. There was a stateroom in the bow McCaleb had converted into an office. I remembered seeing the file boxes on the top bunk.

"For a long time he tried to keep it from me but it became obvious and we dropped the pretext. In the last few months he was going over to the mainland a lot. When he didn't have charters. We argued about it and he just said it was something he couldn't let go of."

"Was it one case or more than one?"

"I don't know. He never told me what exactly he was working on and I never asked. I didn't care. I just wanted him to stop. I wanted him to spend time with his children. Not those people." "Those people?'

"The people he was so fascinated by, the killers and their victims. Their families. He was obsessed. Sometimes I think they were more important to him than we were."

She stared out across the pass as she said this. Opening the door had let the traffic noise in. The freeway down below sounded like a distant ovation in some sort of arena where the games never ended. I opened the door all the way and stepped out onto the deck. I looked down into the brush and thought about the life-and-death struggle that had taken place there the year before. I had survived to find out that, like Terry McCaleb, I was a father. In the months since, I had learned to find in my daughter's eyes what Terry had once told me he had already found in his daughter's. I knew to look for it because he had told me. I owed him something for that.

Graciela came out behind me.

"Will you do this for me? I believe what my husband said about you. I believe you can help me and help him."

And maybe help myself, I thought but didn't say. Instead I looked down at the freeway and saw the sun reflected on the windshields of the cars moving through the pass. It was like a thousand bright, silver eyes were watching me.

"Yes," I said, "I will do it."