Blood Work (1998) Read online

  McCaleb nodded. He liked her outrage-fueled dedication. It was a full turn away from Arrango's view of things. He started gathering up the documents and tapes and told Winston he would be calling her after he looked over all of the material. He told her it might be a few days.

  "No sweat," she said. "Whatever you can do we can use."

  When McCaleb got back to the Taurus, he found Buddy Lockridge sitting with his back to the driver's-side door and his legs stretched across the front seat. He was idly practicing a blues riff on a harmonica while reading a book opened on his lap. McCaleb opened the passenger door and waited for him to move his legs. As he finally got in, he noticed Buddy had been reading a book titled Inspector Imanishi Investigates.

  "That was pretty quick," Buddy said.

  "Yeah, there wasn't a lot to say."

  He put the stack of reports and videocassettes on the floor between his feet.

  "What's all of that?"

  "Just some stuff I have to go through."

  Lockridge leaned over and looked at the top sheet. It was an incident report.

  "James Cordell," he read out loud. "Who's that?"

  "Buddy, I'm beginning to think-"

  "I know, I know."

  He took the hint, straightened up and started the car. He asked nothing more about the documents.

  "So, where to now?"

  "Now we just go back. San Pedro."

  "I thought you said you needed me for a few days. I'll stop asking questions, I promise."

  There was a slight protest in his voice.

  "It's not that. I still need you. But right now I need to go back and go through some of this stuff."

  Buddy dejectedly tossed his book onto the dashboard, dropped the harp into the door pocket and put the car into gear.

  10

  THERE WAS MORE natural light in the salon than down below in the office stateroom. McCaleb decided to work there. He also had a television and video player built into a cabinet topside. He cleared the galley table, wiped it with a sponge and paper towel and then put the stack of reports Winston had given him down on top. He got a legal pad and a sharpened pencil out of the chart table drawer and brought them over as well.

  He decided that the best way to do it would be to go through the material chronologically. That meant the Cordell case came first. He went through the stack, separating out the reports regarding the Gloria Torres killing and putting them aside. He then took what was left and separated the reports into small stacks relating to the initial investigation and evidence inventory, follow-up interviews, dead-end leads, miscellaneous reports, fact sheets and weekly summaries.

  When he had worked for the bureau, it was his routine to completely clear his desk and spread all the paperwork from a submitted case file across it. The cases came in from police departments all over the West. Some sent thick packages and some just thin files. He always asked for videotape of the crime scene. Big or small, the packages were all about the same thing. McCaleb was fascinated and repulsed at the same time. He became angry and vengeful as he read, all while alone in his little office, his coat on the door hook, his gun in the drawer. He could tune everything out but what was in front of him. He did his best work at the desk. As a field agent, he was average at best. But at his desk, he was better than most. And he felt a secret thrill in the back of his mind each time he opened one of those packages and the hunt for a new evil began again. He felt that thrill now as he began to read.

  James Cordell had a lot going for him. A family, nice home and cars, good health and a job that paid well enough to allow his wife to be a full-time mother to their two daughters. He was an engineer with a private firm contracted by the state to maintain the structural integrity of the aqueduct system that delivered water from the snow melt in the mountains in the central state to the reservoirs that nursed the sprawl of Southern California. He lived in Lancaster in northeast Los Angeles County, which put him within an hour and a half by car of any point on the water line. On the night of January twenty-second he had been heading home from a long day inspecting the Lone Pine segment of the concrete aqueduct. It was payday and he stopped at the Regional State Bank branch just a mile from his home. His paycheck had been automatically deposited and he needed cash. But he was shot in the head and left for dead at the ATM before the machine finished spitting out his money. His killer was the one who took the crisp twenties when they rolled out of the machine.

  The first thing McCaleb realized as he read the initial crime reports was that a sanitized version of events had been given to the media. The circumstances described in the Times story Keisha Russell had read to him the day before did not mesh cleanly with the facts in the reports. The story she had read said that Cordell's body was found fifteen minutes after the shooting. According to the crime report, Cordell was found almost immediately by an ATM customer who had pulled into the bank lot just as another vehicle-most likely the shooter's-was speeding out. The witness, identified as James Noone, quickly called for help on a cellular car phone.

  Because the call was relayed through a cell transponder, the 911 operator did not have an automatic address readout of the exact location from which the call had been made. She had to take that information the old-fashioned way-manually-and managed to transpose two numbers of the address Noone had given when she dispatched an emergency medical unit. In his statement, Noone said he had watched helplessly as a paramedic ambulance went screaming by to a location seven blocks away. He had to call and explain himself all over again to a new operator. The paramedics were redirected but Cordell was dead by the time they arrived.

  As he read the initial reports, it was hard for McCaleb to make a judgment on whether the delay in the arrival of paramedics was of any consequence. Cordell had suffered a devastating head wound. Even if paramedics had gotten to him ten minutes sooner, it probably would have made no difference. It was unlikely that death could have been avoided.

  Still, the 911 screwup was just the type of thing the media loved to run with. So somebody in the Sheriff's Department-probably Jaye Winston's supervisor-had decided to keep that information quiet.

  The screwup was a side matter that held little interest for McCaleb. What did interest him was that there was at least a partial witness as well as a vehicle description. According to Noone's statement, he had almost been creamed by a black blur as he had pulled into the bank's lot. He described the exiting vehicle as a black Jeep Cherokee with the newer, smoother styling. He got only a split-second view of the driver, a man he described only as white and with either gray hair or a gray cap on his head.

  There were no other witnesses listed in the initial reports. Before moving on to the supplemental reports and the autopsy protocol, McCaleb decided to look at the videos. He turned on the television and VCR and first popped in the tape made from the ATM's surveillance camera.

  As with the tape from the Sherman Market, there was a timeline running across the bottom of the frame. The picture was shot through a fish-eye lens that distorted the image. The man McCaleb assumed was James Cordell came into the frame and slid his bank card into the machine. His face was very close to the camera, blocking out a view of almost everything else. It was a design flaw-unless the real purpose of the camera was not to capture robberies but the faces of fraud artists using stolen or gimmick bank cards.

  As Cordell typed in his code number, he hesitated and looked over his right shoulder, his head tracking something passing behind him-the Cherokee pulling into the lot. He finished typing in his transaction and a nervous look came across his face. Nobody likes going to an ATM at night, even a well-lighted machine in a low-crime neighborhood. The only machine McCaleb ever used was inside a twenty-four-hour supermarket, where there always was the safety and deterrent of crowds. Cordell took a nervous glance over his left shoulder, nodded at someone off-screen and then looked back at the machine. Nothing about the person he looked at had alarmed him further. The shooter obviously had not pulled on the mask. Despite his o
utward calm, Cordell's eyes dropped down to the cash slot, his mind probably repeating a silent mantra of Hurry up! Hurry up!

  Then almost immediately the gun came into the frame, reaching over his shoulder and just kissing his left temple before the trigger was pulled and James Cordell's life was taken. There was the blast of blood misting the camera lens and the man went forward and to his right, apparently going into the wall next to the ATM and then falling backward to the ground.

  The shooter then moved into the video frame and grabbed the cash as it was delivered through the slot. At that moment McCaleb paused the picture. On the screen was a full view of the masked shooter. He was in the same dark jumpsuit and mask worn by the shooter in the Gloria Torres tape. As Winston had said, ballistics weren't necessary. They would only be a scientific confirmation of something Winston knew and now McCaleb knew in the gut. It was the same man. Same clothes, same method of operation, same dead eyes behind the mask.

  He flicked the button again and the video continued. The shooter grabbed the cash from the machine. As he did this, he seemed to be saying something but his face was not squared to the camera as with the Sherman Market shootings. It was as if he was speaking to himself this time rather than to the camera.

  The shooter quickly moved to the left of the screen and stooped to pick up something unseen. The bullet casing. He then darted to the right and disappeared from the screen. McCaleb watched for a few moments. The only figure in the picture was the still form of Cordell on the pavement below the machine. The only movement was the widening pool of blood around his head. Seeking the lower ground, the blood slid into a joint in the pavement and started moving in a line toward the curb.

  A minute went by and then a man entered the video screen, crouching over Cordell's body. James Noone. He was bald across the top of his head and wearing thin-framed glasses. He touched the wounded man's neck, then looked around, probably to make sure he was safe himself. He then jumped up and was gone, presumably to make the call on his cell phone. Another half minute went by before Noone returned to the frame to wait for help. As the time went by, Noone swiveled his head back and forth, apparently fearing that the gunman, if not in the car he had seen speeding away, might still be around. Finally, his attention was drawn in the direction of the street. His mouth opened in a silent scream and he waved his arms above his head as he apparently watched the paramedics speed by. He then jumped up and left the screen again.

  A few moments later the screen jumped. McCaleb checked the time and saw that it was now seven minutes later. Two paramedics moved quickly into place around Cordell. They checked for pulse and pupil response. They ripped open his shirt and one of the rescuers listened to his chest with a stethoscope. Another quickly arrived with a wheeled stretcher. But one of the first two looked at the man and shook his head. Cordell was dead.

  A few moments later the screen went blank.

  After pausing a moment, almost in reverence, McCaleb put in the crime scene tape next. This was obviously taken from a hand-held video camera. It started with some environmental shots of the bank property and the street. In the bank lot there were two vehicles: a dusty white Chevy Suburban and a smaller vehicle barely visible on its other side. McCaleb assumed the Suburban was Cordell's. It was large and rugged, dusty from driving the mountain and desert roads alongside the aqueduct. He assumed the other car belonged to the witness, James Noone.

  The tape then showed the ATM and panned downward to the blood-stained sidewalk in front of it. Cordell's body was sprawled in the spot where the paramedics had found it and then left it. It was uncovered, the dead man's shirt open, his pale chest exposed.

  Over the next several minutes the video jumped in time through various stages of the crime scene. First a criminalist measured and photographed the scene, then coroner's investigators worked on the body, wrapped it in a plastic body bag and removed it on a gurney. Lastly, the criminalist and a latents man moved in to search the crime scene more thoroughly for evidence and fingerprints. There was a segment showing the criminalist using a small metal spike to work the bullet slug out of the wall next to the ATM.

  Finally, there was a bonus McCaleb had not been expecting. The camera operator recorded James Noone's first recounting of what he had seen. The witness had been taken to the edge of the bank property and was standing next to a public phone and talking to a uniformed deputy when the cameraman wandered up. Noone was a man of about thirty-five. He appeared-in comparison to the deputy-to be short and compactly built. He now had on a baseball cap. He was agitated, still pumped by what he had witnessed and apparently frustrated by the screwup with the paramedics. The camera had been turned on in mid-conversation.

  "All I'm saying is that he had a fighting chance."

  "Yes, sir, I understand. I'm sure it will be one of the things they take a look at."

  "I mean, I think somebody ought to investigate how this could-and the thing is, we're only what, a half mile from the hospital?"

  "We're aware of that, Mr. Noone," the deputy said patiently. "Now if we could just move on for a moment. Could you tell me if you saw anything before you found the body? Anything unusual."

  "Yes, I saw the guy. At least I think I did."

  "What guy is that?"

  "The robber. I saw the getaway car."

  "Can you describe that, sir?"

  "Sure, black Cherokee. The new kind. Not one of those that look like a shoe box."

  The deputy looked a bit confused but McCaleb understood that Noone was describing a Grand Cherokee model. He had one himself.

  "I was pulling in and it came tearing out of here, almost hit me," Noone said. "The guy was a real asshole. I blasted my horn at him, then I pull in and find this man here. I called on my cell phone but then it got all fucked up."

  "Yes, sir. Can you refrain from that kind of language? This might be played in court one day."

  "Oh. Sorry."

  "Can we go back to this car? Did you happen to see a license plate?"

  "I wasn't even looking."

  "How many people in the vehicle?"

  "I think one, the driver."

  "Male or female?"

  "Male."

  "Can you describe him for me?"

  "Wasn't really looking. I was just trying not to get plowed into, that's all."

  "White? Black? Asian?"

  "Oh, he was white. I'm pretty sure about that. But I couldn't identify him or anything like that."

  "What about hair color?"

  "It was gray."

  "Gray?"

  The deputy said it with surprise. An old robber. It seemed unusual to him.

  "I think," Noone said. "It was all so quick. I can't be sure."

  "What about a hat?"

  "Yeah, it could have been a hat."

  "What do you mean, the gray?"

  "Yeah, gray hat, gray hair. I can't be sure."

  "Okay, anything else? Was he wearing glasses?"

  "Uh, I either don't remember or didn't see. I really wasn't looking at the guy, you know. Besides, the car had dark windows. The only time I could really see the guy was through the windshield and I only saw that for a second. When he was coming right at me."

  "Okay, Mr. Noone. This is a help. We are going to need you to make a formal statement and the detectives will need to talk to you. Is this going to be an inconvenience?"

  "Yes, but what are you gonna do? I want to help. I tried to help. I don't mind."

  "Thank you, sir. I'm going to have a deputy take you into the Palmdale station. The detectives will talk to you there. They'll be with you as soon as possible and I'll make sure they know you are waiting."

  "Well, okay. What about my wheels?"

  "Someone will take you back here when they are done."

  The tape ended there. McCaleb ejected it and thought about what he had seen and heard and read so far. The fact that the Sheriff's Department did not give the black Cherokee to the media was curious. It would be something he would have to ask Jaye Wins
ton about. He made a note of it on the legal pad he had been writing questions on and then started through the remaining reports on Cordell.

  The crime scene evidence inventory was a single page that was almost blank. Collected evidence amounted to the slug removed from the wall, a half dozen fingerprints lifted from the ATM and photographs of a tire mark possibly made by the shooter's car. The video from the ATM camera was also listed.