The Narrows Read online

  "Think, Buddy. He made a road trip around then. He didn't bring the boat across. Where did he go? Did he tell you anything about it?"

  "He didn't tell me jack. But I remember that trip now because the Jeep came back dirtier than shit. Had salt or some shit all over it. And I was the one who was left to wash it."

  "Did you ask him about it?"

  "Yeah, I said, 'Where have you been, out off-roading?' and he said, 'Yeah, something like that.'"

  "And that was it?"

  "That's all he said. I washed the car."

  "What about the inside? Did you clean that out?"

  "No, I'm just talking about the outside. I took it over to the drive-through in Pedro and power-sprayed the thing. That's all I did."

  I nodded as I concluded I had gotten everything I needed from Lockridge. For the time being.

  "You going to be around tomorrow?"

  "Yup, I'm always around these days. Got nowhere to go."

  "All right. I'll see you then."

  After ending the conversation I made one more call, punching in the number McCaleb had written at the top of the file flap after the name of Ritz, the detective quoted in the Times article.

  The call was picked up by a tape announcing that the Vegas Metro's Missing Persons unit was open from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday. The message advised anyone with an emergency to hang up and dial 911.

  I closed the phone. It was late and I had an early start in the morning but I knew I wasn't going to sleep any time soon. I had the wire in the blood now and knew from long experience that sleep was not an option. Not yet. I was marooned on a boat with two flashlights to see by, but there was still work to be done. I opened my notebook and started constructing a chronological record of the dates and times of events in the weeks and months before Terry McCaleb's death. I put everything on the page, the important and not important, the real connections and imagined connections. Just as experience had taught me about sleep and the ability to go long stretches without it, I knew the details were important. The answer is always in the details. What is seemingly not important now is all-important later. What is cryptic and unconnected now becomes the magnifying glass through which things become clear later.

  CHAPTER 14

  You can always tell who the locals are. They're the ones who sit inside and work crossword puzzles while the ferry makes the ninety-minute crossing. The tourists are usually up top or lining the bow or stern with their cameras and last glimpses of the island as it shrinks in the mist behind them. On the first boat out the next morning I was inside with the locals. But I was working a puzzle of a different kind. I sat with the file in which Terry McCaleb had made his case notations open on my lap. I also had the chronology I had worked up the night before. I studied it, hoping to commit as much of it as I could to memory. An instant command of case details is required for the successful completion of an investigation.

  Jan. 7-McC reads about missing men in Nevada, calls Vegas Metro Jan. 9-Vegas Metro not interested Feb. 2-Hinton, Vegas Sun. Who called who? Feb. 13-half-day charter with Jordan Shandy Feb. 19-charter with Finder Feb. 22-GPS stolen/sheriff's report Feb. 27-McC creates photo file March 1 ?-McC on mainland for three-day period March 28-Last charter. McC on The Following Sea with meds March 31-McC dies

  I now added what I had learned an hour earlier from Graciela. The same credit-card records I had asked her to gather in regard to her husband's movements contained her purchases as well. There was a Visa charge attributed to a Nordstrom department store on February 21. When I asked about it she said she had made the purchase at the Promenade. I asked if she had been back since then and she said no.

  As I added the date into the chronology I noted that it was the day before the GPS device was reported stolen from The Following Sea. This meant it was likely the same day it was stolen. The photo stalker had been on the ferry with Graciela on the way back to the island. Could he have been the one who snuck onboard The Following Sea that night and took the GPS device? If so, why? And if so, could this also have been the night that Terry McCaleb's medicine was tampered with, real capsules exchanged for dummies?

  I circled the letters GPS on the chronology. What was the significance of this device and this theft? I wondered if I was putting too much emphasis on this. Perhaps Buddy Lockridge's theory was the correct one, the de- vice had simply been stolen by Finder, a competitor. Perhaps that was all it was, but the proximity to the mall stalking of Graciela made me think otherwise. My instincts told me there was a connection. I just didn't have it yet.

  Despite that, I felt as though I was getting close to something. The chronology was very helpful in allowing me to see connections and the timeliness of things. There was more still to add and I remembered I had intended to follow up with phone calls to Las Vegas this morning. I opened my cell phone and checked the battery. I had been unable to recharge it on The Following Sea. Now I was running out of juice. I had maybe one last call on it before it died. I punched in the number for the Missing Persons unit at Vegas Metro. The call went through and I asked for Detective Ritz. I was put on hold for nearly three minutes, during which time the phone started to beep every minute, warning me it was running low on power.

  "This is Detective Ritz, how can I help you?" "Detective, my name is Bosch. I'm LAPD retired. Homicide mostly. I'm doing a favor for a friend. Her husband passed away last month and I'm sort of putting his things in order. I came across a file of his that had your name and number in it and a newspaper article about one of your cases."

  "What case?"

  "The six missing men."

  "And what was your friend's husband's name?"

  'Terry McCaleb. He was FBI retired. He worked-"

  "Oh, him."

  "You knew him?" "I talked to him on the phone once. That doesn't qualify as knowing him."

  "You talked about the missing men?"

  "Look, what did you say your name is?"

  "Harry Bosch."

  "Well, listen, Harry Bosch, I don't know you and I don't know what you are doing, but it's usually not my practice to talk about open cases over the phone with strangers."

  "I could come see you."

  "That wouldn't change things."

  "You know he's dead, don't you?"

  "McCaleb? I heard he had a heart attack and he was out on his boat and nobody could get to him in time. It sounded stupid. What's a guy with a heart transplant doing twenty-five miles out in the middle of nowhere?"

  "Making a living, I guess. Look, some things have come up about that and I'm checking into what Terry was into at the time. To sort of see if he might've drawn somebody's eye, if you know what I mean. All I want-"

  "Actually, I don't know what you mean. You talking voodoo? Somebody put the hex on him and gave him a heart attack? I'm kind of busy here, Bosch. Too busy for that bullshit. You retired guys think us working stiffs have all the time in the world for you and your long-shot voodoo theories. Well, guess what, we don't."

  "Is that what you said to him when he called? You didn't want to listen to his theory or his profile of the case? You called it voodoo?"

  "Look, man, what good is a profile? Those things don't narrow down shit. They're bullshit and that's what I told him and that was-"

  His last word was cut off by my phone's warning beep.

  "What was that?" he asked. "Are you recording this?"

  "No, it's my phone's low-battery warning. Terry didn't come over there to talk to you about this?"

  "Nope. I think he ran to the newspaper with it instead. Typical fed move."

  "There was a story about his take on this in the SunT'

  "I wouldn't call it that. I think they pretty much thought he was full of shit, too."

  That line revealed an untruth. If Ritz thought McCaleb and his theory were full of shit, he had to have listened to it in order to make such a determination. I believed that it revealed that Ritz had discussed the case with McCaleb, possibly at length.

  "Let me ask
you one last thing and then I'll leave you alone. Did Terry mention something about a triangle theory? Something about one point giving three? Does any of that make sense?"

  The laugh I heard over the phone wasn't pleasant. It wasn't even good-natured.

  "That was three questions, Bosch. Three questions, three sides of a triangle and three strikes and you're-"

  The phone went dead, its battery drained.

  "Out," I said, completing Ritz's line.

  I knew it meant he was not going to answer my question. I closed the phone and dropped it back into my pocket. I had a charger in my car. I'd have the phone back up and running as soon as we got across the Santa Monica Bay. There was still the reporter at the Sun to talk to but I doubted I'd be having further conversations with Ritz. I got up and walked out onto the stern to have the cool morning air refresh me. Catalina was far in the distance, just a jagged gray rock sticking up in the mist. We were more than halfway across. I heard a little girl exclaim, "There!" very loudly to her mother and I followed her pointed finger out to the water where a school of porpoises were breaking the surface in the boat's wake. There must have been twenty of them and soon the stern became crowded with people and their cameras. I think maybe some of the locals even came out to look. The porpoises were beautiful, their gray skin shining like plastic in the morning light. I wondered if they were just having fun or had mistaken the ferry for a fishing boat and were hoping to feed on the debris of the day's catch.

  Soon the show wasn't enough to hold everyone's attention and the passengers returned to their former positions. The little girl who first sounded the alert stayed at the gunwale and watched, and so did I, until the porpoises finally dropped off the wake and disappeared in the blue-black sea.

  I went inside and took up McCaleb's file again. I reread everything he and I had written. No new ideas came up. I then looked at all the photos I had printed out the night before. I had shown the photos of the man named Jordan Shandy to Graciela but she didn't recognize him and hit me with more questions than answers about him, questions I didn't want to try to answer just yet.

  Next in the review were the credit-card and phone records. I had already looked at these in Graciela's presence but wanted to check them more thoroughly. I paid closest attention to the end of February and the beginning of March, when Graciela was sure her husband had been on the mainland. But there was no purchase with a credit card nor phone call made on his cell that gave any indication of where he was, let alone in Los Angeles or maybe Las Vegas. It was almost as if he wanted to leave no trail.

  A half hour later the boat pulled into the Los Angeles Harbor and docked next to the Queen Mary, a permanently moored cruise ship that had been turned into a hotel and convention center. As I was walking through the parking lot to my car I heard a shriek and turned around to see a woman bouncing and swaying upside down from the end of a bungee cord extending down from a jumping platform at the stern of the Queen Mary. She had her arms clamped to the sides of her torso and I realized that the reason she had screamed was not because of the fear and adrenaline rush of the free fall, but because her T-shirt had apparently threatened to fall down over her shoulders and head, exposing her to the crowd that lined the railing of the cruise ship.

  I turned away and headed on to my car. I drive a Mercedes-Benz sport utility vehicle, the kind some people think helps keep terrorists in business. I don't get involved in such debates but I do know that the people who go on talk shows to argue such things usually pull up in stretch limos. As soon as I got into the car and cranked it, I plugged my phone into the charger and waited for it to come back to life. When it did I saw I had gotten two messages in the forty-five minutes the phone had been out of commission.

  The first was from my old partner Kizmin Rider, who now handled administrative and planning duties in the chief of police's office. She left no message other than a request for me to call her. This was curious because we hadn't talked in nearly a year and that conversation had not been the most pleasant. Her usual Christmas card to me had carried her signature only and not the usual cordial note and promise to get together soon. I wrote her direct number down-at least I still rated that-and saved the message.

  The next message was from Cindy Hinton, the Sun reporter. She was simply returning my call. I started the Benz and headed toward the freeway so I could loop over to San Pedro and the Cabrillo Marina, where Terry McCaleb's Jeep was waiting for me. I called Hinton back on the way and she answered immediately.

  "Yes, I was calling about Terry McCaleb," I said. "I'm sort of re-creating his movements in the last couple months of his life. I assume you had heard he passed away. I remember that the Sun carried an obituary."

  "Yes, I knew. You said on your message last night that you are an investigator. An investigator for what agency?"

  "Actually, I'm a state-licensed private detective. But I was a cop for almost thirty years."

  "Is this related to the missing persons case?"

  "In what way?"

  "I don't know. You called me. I don't understand what it is you want"

  "Well, let me ask you a question. First of all, I know from Detective Ritz over at Metro that Terry had taken an interest in the missing persons case. He studied the facts that were available to him and called on Detective Ritz, offering his time and expertise to work on the case or provide investigative theories. You with me so far?"

  "Yes. I know all of this."

  "Okay, good. Terry's offer to Ritz and Vegas Metro was rejected. What my question is is what happened next? Did he call you? Did you call him? Did you write a story that said he was investigating this case?"

  "And why is it that you want to know these things?"

  "Sorry, hold on a second."

  I had realized I should not have made the call while driving. I should have expected Hinton to be cagey with me and should have known the call would need my undivided attention. I glanced at the mirrors and cut across two lanes to go down an exit. I didn't even see the sign and didn't know where I was going. I found myself in an industrial area where trucking depots and warehouses lined the street. I pulled to a stop behind a tractor-trailer parked in front of the open garage doors of a warehouse.

  "Okay, sorry, I'm back. You asked why I wanted to know the answers to these questions. Well, Terry McCaleb was my friend. And I'm picking up some of the things he was working on. I want to finish his work."

  "There sounds like there is something else, something you're not telling me."

  I thought for a moment of how to handle this. Giving a reporter information, especially a reporter you didn't know, was risky business. It could snap back on you in bad ways. I had to figure out a way to give her what she needed in order to help me, but then I needed to take it all back.

  "Hello? Are you still there?"

  "Uh, yeah. Tell you what, can we go off the record here?" "Off the record? We're not even talking about anything here."

  "I know. I am going to tell you something if I can tell it to you off the record. Meaning, you can't use it."

  "Sure, fine, whatever, we're off the record. Could you please get to the point or whatever this important information is because I need to write a story this morning?"

  'Terry McCaleb was murdered."

  "Uh, no, actually he wasn't. I read the story. He had a heart attack. He had a heart transplant like six years before. He-"

  "I know what was put out in the press and I'm telling you it is wrong. And it will come out that it is wrong. And I'm trying to find out who killed him. Now can you tell me whether or not you put out a story that had his name in it?"

  She seemed exasperated when she answered.

  "Yes, I wrote one story that he was in. For like a paragraph or two. Okay?"

  "Just a paragraph? What did it say?"

  "It was a follow-up to my story on the missing men. I did a follow-up to see what had come in. You know, what new leads, if any. McCaleb was mentioned, that's all. I said he came forward and offered his
help and a theory but Metro said no thanks. It was worth throwing in because the story was dry as a bone and he was sort of famous because of the movie and Clint Eastwood and all of that. Does that answer your question?"

  "So he didn't call you?"

  'Technically, yes, he did. I got his number from Ritz and called him. I left a message and he called me back. So technically he called me, if that's how you want it. What is it you think happened to him anyway?"

  "Did he tell you what his theory was? The one Ritz wasn't interested in?"

  "No, he said he didn't want to comment at all and he asked me to keep his name out of the paper. I talked to my editor and we decided to keep it in. Like I said, he was famous."