The Narrows (9 page)

“Uh, yes, hello, my name is Harry Bosch. I’m an investigator from Los Angeles and would like to talk to you about Terry McCaleb.”

I left my cell phone number and closed the phone, still not sure I had made the right move but thinking that leaving it short and cryptic was the best way to go. It might get her to call me back.

The last reference in the notes was the most intriguing of all. McCaleb had written “Zzyzx” and then asked if it was possible and if so, how. This had to be a reference to Zzyzx Road. This was a leap. A giant leap. McCaleb had received photos from someone who had watched and photographed his family. That same person had taken photographs at Zzyzx Road near the California-Nevada border. Somehow McCaleb saw a possible link and was asking himself if one mystery could be related to the other. Could he have set something in motion by calling Vegas Metro and offering to help with the missing men case? To be able to make the leap to such questions was impossible. It meant I was missing something. I was missing the bridge, the piece of information that made the jump possible. McCaleb had to have known something that wasn’t noted in the file but that made the possibility of a link seem real to him.

The last notations to check were the two Las Vegas phone numbers written on the border of the file along with the name William Bing. I opened my cell again and called the first number. The call was picked up by a recorded voice announcing that I had reached the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino. I hung up as the voice began to list a number of options I could choose from.

The second number was followed by the name. I punched it into the phone, prepared to awaken William Bing and ask him what his connection to Terry McCaleb was. But the call was answered after several rings by a woman who said, “Las Vegas Memorial Medical Center, how would you like me to direct your call?”

I wasn’t expecting that. To gain some time while I thought about what to do I asked her for the hospital’s location. By the time she was finished giving me the address on Blue Diamond Road I had come up with a valid question.

“Do you have a doctor on staff named William Bing?”

After a moment the answer came back negative.

“Do you have any employee named William Bing?”

“No, we don’t, sir.”

“How about a patient?”

There was another pause as she consulted a computer.

“Not currently, no.”

“Did you formerly have a patient there named William Bing?”

“I don’t have access to that kind of information, sir.”

I thanked her and closed the phone.

I thought about the last two numbers in McCaleb’s notes for a long moment. My conclusions were simple. Terry McCaleb was a heart transplant recipient. If he were to travel to another city he would need to know where to go and who to ask for if there was an emergency or any medical problem. My guess was that McCaleb had called information to get the two numbers noted on the file. He then made a reservation at the Mandalay Bay and checked in with a local hospital as a precaution. The fact that there was no William Bing on staff at Las Vegas Memorial Medical Center did not preclude that he might be a cardio specialist who handled patients there.

I opened the phone, checked the time on the display screen and called Graciela anyway. She answered quickly, her voice alert, though I could tell she had been sleeping.

“Graciela, sorry to call so late. I have a few more questions.”

“Can I answer them tomorrow?”

“Just tell me, did Terry go to Las Vegas within the month before he died?”

“Las Vegas? I don’t know. Why?”

“What do you mean you don’t know? He was your husband.”

“I told you, we had . . . separated. He was staying on the boat. I know he went over to the mainland a few times but if he went to Vegas from there I wouldn’t have any way of knowing unless he told me, and he didn’t tell me.”

“What about credit-card bills and cell phone records, ATM withdrawals, things like that?”

“I paid them but I don’t remember anything like that, like a hotel or anything.”

“Do you have those records still?”

“Of course. I have them here at the house somewhere. They’re probably packed already.”

“Find them and I’ll come for them in the morning.”

“I’m already in bed.”

“Then find them in the morning. First thing. It’s important, Graciela.”

“Okay, I will. And look, the one thing I can tell you is that usually if Terry was going to the mainland, he took the boat across so he had a place to stay while he was there. If he was going across but wasn’t going to be in L.A. or was going to be staying at Cedars for tests or something, he would take a ferry because otherwise it would cost too much in boat fuel.”

“Okay.”

“Well, there was one trip in that last month. I think he was gone for like three days. Yes, three days, two nights. He took the ferry. So that meant he was either going across and then somewhere else or to the hospital. And I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the hospital. I think he would have told me and I know everybody in cardio at Cedars anyway. They would have let me know he was there and what was going on. I had that place wired.”

“Okay, Graciela, that’s good. That helps. Do you remember exactly when that was?”

“Not exactly. It was the end of February, I think. Maybe the first couple days of March. I remember it was bill time. I called him on his cell to talk about money and he said he was on the mainland. He didn’t say where. He just said he was over there and he’d be back in a couple days. I could tell he was driving when we talked. And I knew he hadn’t taken the boat because I was on the balcony looking at it in the harbor when we talked.”

“Why were you calling him, do you remember?”

“Yes, we had bills to pay and I didn’t know what if anything he had taken in on the boat in February. The credit-card payouts were sent directly here but Terry had a bad habit of walking around with personal checks and cash from customers in his wallet. When he died and I got his wallet back, there were three checks in there for nine hundred dollars that he’d had in there for two weeks. He wasn’t very good at business.”

She said it as though it was one of her husband’s endearing and humorous qualities, though I was pretty sure that during his life she didn’t smile at these oversights.

“A couple more things,” I said. “Do you know if it would be his routine to check in with a hospital in a city he was going to? In other words, if he was going to Las Vegas would he set things up at a local hospital in case he needed anything?”

There was a pause before she answered.

“No, that doesn’t sound like anything he would do. Are you saying he did that?”

“I don’t know. I found a phone number in one of the files. And a name. The number was for Vegas Memorial and I’m trying to figure out why he would call there.”

“Vegas Memorial has a transplant program, I know that. But I don’t know why he would call there.”

“What about the name William Bing, does that mean anything? Could it be a doctor he was recommended to?”

“I don’t know that . . . something about that name is familiar but I can’t place it. It could be a doctor. Maybe that’s where I heard it.”

I waited a moment to see if it came to her but it didn’t. I pressed on.

“Okay, one last thing, where is Terry’s car?”

“It should be over there at Cabrillo, at the marina. It’s an old Jeep Cherokee. There’s a key on the ring I gave you. Buddy also has a key because he uses it sometimes. He basically takes care of it for us. I mean, me now.”

“Okay, I’m going to check that out in the morning, so I’ll need to keep the key. Do you know when the first ferry goes back across?”

“Not till nine-fifteen.”

“Then can we meet at seven-thirty or eight at your house? I want to get those records and also show you a few things. It won’t take too long and then I’ll grab the first ferry.”

“Um, can we make it eight? I should be back by then. I usually walk Raymond to school and take CiCi to day care.”

“No problem. I’ll see you at eight.”

We ended the conversation and I immediately called Buddy Lockridge again, one more time rousing him from sleep.

“Buddy, it’s me again.”

He groaned.

“Did Terry go to Las Vegas the month before he died? Like maybe around March first?”

“I don’t know, man,” he said in a tired, annoyed voice. “How would I know that? I can’t remember what
I
did March first.”

“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.

14

Y
OU 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 device 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
Sun
?”

“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?”