The Narrows (2004) Page 2

  "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."

  CHAPTER 4

  My first interview was on the docks at the Cabrillo Marina in San Pedro. I always liked coming down this way but rarely did. I didn't know why. It was one of those things you forget about until you do it again and then you remember that you like it. The first time I arrived I was a sixteen-year-old runaway. I made my way down to the Pedro docks and spent my days getting tattooed and watching the tuna boats come in. I spent my nights sleeping in an unlocked towboat called Rosebud. Until a harbormaster caught me and I was sent back to the foster home, the words Hold Fast tattooed across my knuckles.

  Cabrillo Marina was newer than that memory. These weren't the working docks where I had ended up so many years before. Cabrillo Marina provided dockage for pleasure craft. The masts of a hundred sailboats poked up behind its locked gates like a forest after a wildfire. Beyond these were rows of power yachts, many in the millions of dollars in value. Some not. Buddy Lockridge's boat was not a floating castle. Lockridge, who Graciela McCaleb told me was her husband's charter partner and closest friend at the end, lived on a thirty-two-foot sailboat that looked like it had the contents of a sixty-footer on its deck. It was a junker, not by virtue of the boat itself but by how it was cared for. If Lockridge had lived in a house it would've had cars on blocks in the yard and walls of stacked newspapers inside.

  He had buzzed me in at the gate and emerged from the cabin wearing shorts, sandals and a T-shirt worn and washed so many times the inscription across the chest was unreadable. Graciela had called him ahead of time. He knew I wanted to talk to him but not the exact reason why.

  "So," he said as he stepped off the boat onto the dock. "Graciela said you are looking into Terry's death. Is this like an insurance thing or something?"

  "Yes, you could say that."

  "You like a private eye or something?"

  "Something like that, yeah."

  He asked for identification and I showed him the laminated wallet copy of my license that had been sent to me from Sacramento. He raised a quizzical eyebrow at my formal first name.

  "Hieronymus Bosch. Like that crazy painter, huh?"

  It was rare that someone recognized the name. That told me something about Buddy Lockridge.

  "Some say he was crazy. Some think he accurately foretold the future."

  The license seemed to appease him and he said we could talk in his boat or we could walk over to the chan- dlery to get a cup of coffee. I wanted to get a look inside his home and boat-it was basic investigative strategy -but didn't want to be obvious about it so I told him I could use some caffeine.

  The chandlery was a ship's store that was a five-minute walk down the dock. We small-talked as we walked over and I mostly listened to Buddy complain about his portrayal in the movie that had been inspired by McCaleb's heart transplant and his search for his donor's killer.

  "They paid you, didn't they?" I asked when he was finished.

  "Yes, but that's not the point."

  "Yes it is. Put your money in the bank and forget about the rest. It's just a movie."

  There were some tables and benches outside the chandlery and we took our coffees there. Lockridge started asking questions before I got the chance. I let him run his line out a little bit. My view was that he was a very important piece of my investigation, since he knew Terry McCaleb and was one of two witnesses to his death. I wanted him to feel comfortable with me so I let him ask away.

  "So what's your pedigree?" he asked. "Were you a cop?"

  "Almost thirty years. With the LAPD. Half of the time I worked homicides."

  "Murders, huh? Did you know Terror?"

  "What?"

  "I mean, Terry. I called him Terror."

  "How come?"

  "I don't know. I just did. I give everyone nicknames. Terry had seen firsthand the terror of the world, you know what I mean? I called him Terror."

  "What about me? What's my nickname going to be?"

  "You..."

  He looked at me like a sculptor sizing up a block of granite.

  "Um, you are Suitcase Harry."

  "How come?"

  "Because you're sort of rumpled, like you live out of a suitcase."

  I nodded.

  "Pretty good."

  "So, did you know Terry?"

  "Yes, I knew him. We worked a few cases together when he was with the bureau. Then one more after he got the new heart."

  He snapped his fingers and pointed at me.

  "Now I remember, you were the cop. You were the one who was here that night on his boat when those two goons showed up to do him in. You saved him and then he turned around and saved you."

  I nodded.

  "That's right. Now can I ask some questions, Buddy?"

  He spread his hands wide, indicating he was available and had nothing to hide.

  "Oh, sure, man, I didn't mean to be hogging the microphone, you know?"

  I took out my notebook and put it on the table.

  "Thanks. Let's start with that last charter. Tell me about it"

  "Well, what do you want to know?"

  "Everything." Lockridge expelled his breath.

  "That's a tall order," he said.

  But he began to tell me the story. What he initially told me matched the minimal accounts I had read in the Las Vegas papers and what I had then heard when I attended McCaleb's funeral. McCaleb and Lockridge had been on a four-day, three-night charter, taking a party of one into waters off Baja California to fish for marlin. While returning to Avalon Harbor on Catalina on the fourth day McCaleb collapsed at the boat's topside helm station. They were 22 miles off the coast, midway between San Diego and Los Angeles. A help call was radioed to the U.S. Coast Guard and a rescue chopper was dispatched. McCaleb was airlifted to a hospital in Long Beach, where he was pronounced dead on arrival.

  When he was finished telling it I nodded like it had matched everything I had already heard.

  "Did you actually see him collapse?"

  "No, not really. I felt it, though."

  "How do you mean?"

  "Well, he was up on top at the wheel. I was in the pit with the charter party. We were headed north, going home. The party'd had enough fishing by then so we weren't even trolling. Terry had it flat out, probably doing twenty-five knots. So me and Otto-he's the party-we were in the cockpit and the boat suddenly made a ninety-degree turn to the west. Out to sea, man. I knew that wasn't in the plan so I climbed up the ladder to poke my head up there and I see Terry sort of hunched over the wheel. He'd collapsed. I got to him and he was alive but, man, he was out of it."

  "What did you do?" "I was a lifeguard once. Venice Beach. I still know my CPR. I called Otto up on top and I went to work on Terry while Otto got control of the boat and got on the radio to call the Coast Guard. I was never able to bring Terry around but I kept putting air into him until that helicopter showed up. Took them long enough, too."

  I wrote a note in my notebook. Not because it was important but because I wanted Lockridge to know I took him seriously and that whatever he thought was important was also important to me.

  "How long did they take?"

  'Twenty, twenty-five minutes. I'm not sure how long but it seemed like an eternity when you're trying to keep somebody breathing."

  "Yeah. Everybody I talked to said you did your best. So you're saying he never said a word. He just collapsed at the wheel."

  "Exactly."

  "Then what was the last thing he said to you?"

  Lockridge started chewing the nail on one of his thumbs as he tried to recall this.

  "That's a good question. I guess it was when he came back to the railing that looks down into the cockpit and he yelled down that we'd be home by sunset."

  "And how long was this before he collapsed?"

  "Maybe ahalf hour, maybe a little longer."

  "He seemed fine then?"

  "Yeah, he seemed like the regular Terror, you know? Nobody could've guessed what was going to happen."

  "By now you
men had been on the boat for four straight days, right?"

  "That's right. Pretty close quarters because the party got the stateroom. Me and Terry bunked it in the forward cabin."