“Just tell her to call Dr. McCaleb as soon as she can.”
About five minutes later he got the callback.
“Dr. McCaleb?”
“Sorry, I had to do that so she would be sure to give you the message.”
“What’s up?”
“Well, I’m going through the case files again and I’ve got a loose end here. The property report says that they took two crescent moon earrings and a hoop earring off your sister’s ears at the hospital after she was brought in.”
“Right, they would have needed to remove those for the CAT scan. They wanted to look at the wound track.”
“Okay, what about the cross earring she wore in her left ear? There’s nothing on the property report about-”
“She wasn’t wearing it that night. I always thought that was weird. Like it was bad luck, because that was her favorite earring. She usually wore it every day.”
“Like a personal signature,” McCaleb said. “What do you mean, she wasn’t wearing it that night?”
“Because when the police gave me her things-you know, her watch and rings and earrings-it wasn’t there. She wasn’t wearing it.”
“Are you sure? In the video she’s wearing it.”
“What video?”
“From the store.”
She was silent a moment.
“No, that can’t be. I found it in her jewelry box. I gave it to them at the funeral home so they could, you know, put it on for when she was buried.”
Now McCaleb was silent and then he put it together.
“But wouldn’t she have had two of them? I don’t know anything about crosses, but don’t you buy earrings in pairs?”
“Oh, you’re right. I didn’t think about that.”
“So the one you found was the extra one?”
He felt a stirring inside that he immediately recognized but hadn’t felt in a long time.
“I guess…,” Graciela said. “So if she did have one on in the store, what happened to it?”
“That’s what I want to find out.”
“But what does it matter anyway?”
He was silent for a few moments thinking about how he should answer. He decided that what he was thinking was too speculative at the moment to share with her.
“It’s just a loose end that should be tied up. Let me ask you something, was it the kind of earring that just hooked on or was there a hasp to make sure it didn’t fall off easily? You know what I mean? I couldn’t tell that from the video.”
“Yes. Um, I think there was like a hook that you sort of clipped after it was on your ear. I don’t think it would have fallen off.”
While she was speaking, McCaleb was looking through the stack for the paramedics’ report. He ran his finger down the lines of the information box until he found the squad number and names of the two paramedics who had treated and transported Gloria.
“Okay, I’m gonna go,” he said. “Are we still on for tomorrow?”
“Sure. Um, Terry?”
“What?”
“You saw the video from the store? I mean, all of it? You saw Glory…”
“Yes,” he said quietly. “I had to.”
“Was she… was she scared?”
“No, Graciela. It was very quick. She never saw it coming.”
“I guess that’s good.”
“I think so… Listen, are you going to be all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“Okay then. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
The paramedics who had transported Gloria worked out of Fire Station 76. McCaleb called but the crew that had worked the night of January 22nd was off until Sunday. However, the station captain told him that under department policy governing what are called “crime transports,” any property left behind on a stretcher or found anywhere in an ambulance would have been turned over to police custody. This meant that if this had occurred following the transport of Gloria Torres, there would be a property-received report in the murder book. There wasn’t. The cross earring remained unaccounted for.
The irony that McCaleb carried inside of him alongside a stranger’s heart was the secret belief that he had been the wrong one saved. It should have been someone else. In the days and weeks before he received Glory’s heart, he had been prepared for the end. He had accepted it as the way it was to be. He was long past believing in a God-the horrors he had seen and documented had little by little sapped his stores of faith until the only absolute he believed in was that there were no bounds to the evil acts of men. And in those seemingly final days, as his own heart withered and tapped out its final cadences, he did not grasp desperately for his lost faith as a shield or a means of easing the fear of the unknown. Instead, he was accepting of the end, of his own nothingness. He was ready.
It was easy to do. When he had been with the bureau, he was driven and consumed by a mission, a calling. And when he carried it out and was successful, he knew he was making a difference. Better than any heart surgeon, he was saving lives from horrible ends. He was facing off against the worst kinds of evil, the most malignant cancers, and the battle, though always wearing and painful, gave his life its meaning.
That was gone the moment his heart deserted him and he fell to the floor of the field office thinking he had surely been stabbed in the chest. It was still gone two years later when the pager sounded and he was told they had a heart for him.
He had a new heart but it didn’t feel like a new life. He was a man on a boat that never left port. It didn’t matter what stock quotes about second chances he had used with a newspaper reporter. That existence was not enough for McCaleb. That was the struggle he was facing when Graciela Rivers had stepped down off the dock and into his life.
The quest she had given him had been a way of avoiding his own inner struggle. But now things were suddenly different. The missing cross earring stirred something deep and dormant in him. His long experience had given him true knowledge and instincts about evil. He knew its signs.
This was one of them.
McCALEB HAD BEEN to the sheriff’s homicide bureau so often during the week that the receptionist just waved him back without a phone call or escort. Jaye Winston was at her desk, using a three-hole punch on a thin stack of documents which she then slipped over the prongs of an open binder. She snapped it closed and looked up at her visitor.
“You moving in?”
“Feels like it. You get caught up on the paper?”
“Instead of four months behind I’m only two. What’s going on? I didn’t think I was going to see you today.”
“You still upset about me holding that thing back?”
“Water under the bridge.”
She leaned back in her chair, looked him over and waited for an explanation of why he was there.
“I’ve sort of come up with something I think bears looking into,” he said.
“Is this about Bolotov again?”
“No, it’s something new.”
“Don’t become the boy who cried wolf on me, McCaleb.”
She smiled.
“I won’t.”
“Then tell me.”
He put his palms down on the desk and leaned over it, so he could speak to her in a confidential tone. There were still plenty of Winston’s colleagues around the bureau, working at their desks and trying to get things done before the weekend.
“Arrango and Walters missed something,” McCaleb said. “So did I on my first go-through. But I picked up on it this morning when I took a second look at the videos and the paperwork. It’s something that has to be considered pretty seriously. I think it changes things.”
Winston furrowed her eyebrows and looked at him seriously.