“Uh, sure, I suppose so. I have to go get the master from the maintenance supervisor.”
Neff left them in his office while he went to get the master key and to find Nettie Stapleton. Since Glory’s locker was obviously in the women’s locker room, Neff had said before leaving that Nettie would escort Graciela in to search its contents. McCaleb would have to wait in the hallway with Neff. This did not sit well with McCaleb. It was not that he didn’t think Graciela capable of searching a locker. It was just that he would look at and treat the locker in its entirety, taking in the subtleties of what he saw the way he studied crime scenes and crime scene tapes.
Soon Neff was back with Stapleton and introductions were made. She remembered Graciela and offered seemingly heartfelt condolences. Neff then led the entourage downstairs to the hallway leading to the locker rooms. McCaleb was going to make one last offer, that if the locker room was empty, he be allowed in. But as they approached the door to the women’s locker room, he could hear the sound of the showers running. He knew he was going to be left out.
McCaleb had run out of things to ask Neff and was short of small talk. While they waited, he slowly sauntered away from the man so that he could avoid idle conversation and personal questions. There were more bulletin boards affixed to the wall between the locker room doors and he acted as though he was reading some of the posted notices.
Four minutes of silence went by in the hallway. McCaleb had moved from one end of the side-by-side bulletin boards to the other. When Graciela and Nettie finally came out, he was staring at a hand-drawn rendering of a liquid drop on a poster attached to the board. The drop was half shaded in with red, indicating that the employees were halfway toward their goal in an ongoing blood drive. Graciela walked up to him.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just some clothes, a bottle of perfume and her earphones. There were four pictures of Raymond and one of me taped to the door.”
“Earphones?”
“I mean ear protectors. But nothing else.”
“What kind of clothes?”
McCaleb was still staring at the poster as he spoke.
“A couple of fresh uniforms and a top from home and a pair of jeans.”
“You check all the pockets?”
“Yes. Nothing.”
It hit him then, with the impact of an armor-piercing bullet. He leaned forward and put his hand up against the bulletin board for support.
“Terry, what is it?” Graciela said. “Are you okay?”
He didn’t respond. His thoughts were racing. Graciela put her hand to his forehead to feel for fever. He brushed it aside.
“No, it’s not that,” he said.
“Is there a problem?” Neff chimed in.
“No,” McCaleb said, a little too loudly. “We just have to go. I need to get to the car.”
“Is everything all right?”
“Yes,” McCaleb said, again too loudly. “I’m sorry, but everything’s fine. We just have to go.”
McCaleb nodded his thanks to Annette Stapleton and headed down the hallway toward what he believed was the entrance lobby. Graciela followed and Neff called after them, telling them to take their first left.
WHAT WAS THAT ABOUT? What’s going on?”
McCaleb was walking quickly toward the car. He felt that maintaining velocity would somehow help keep the growing dread he was feeling from entirely overtaking his thoughts. Graciela had to trot to keep up.
“The blood.”
“The blood?”
“They both gave blood. Your sister and Cordell. It was right there in front of me all the-I saw that poster and I remembered I saw a letter at Cordell’s house… and I just knew. Do you have your keys?”
“Listen, slow down, Terry. Slow down.”
He reluctantly slowed his pace and she came up next to him, digging the car keys out of her purse.
“Now tell me what you are talking about.”
“Open the car and I’ll show you.”
They reached the car. She unlocked his door first and started around to her side. He slipped in and reached across to open her door. He then leaned forward and started going through the bag on the floor. It was so jammed with paperwork, he had to pull the gun out and place it on the floor mat just so there was room to look through the documents. Graciela got in the car and started watching.
“You can start it,” he said without turning his attention from his task.
“What are you doing?”
He pulled out the Cordell autopsy.
“I’m looking for-shit, this is just the preliminary report.”
He flipped through the protocol to make sure. It was incomplete.
“No toxicology and blood.”
He shoved the autopsy report back into the bag and then the gun. He straightened up.
“We’ve got to find a phone. I’ll call his wife.”
Graciela started the car.
“Fine,” she said. “We will-we’ll go to my house. But you have to tell me what it is you’re thinking, Terry.”
“Okay, just give me a minute to think first.”
He slowed the jumble of thoughts streaming through his mind and tried to analyze the jump he had just made.
“I’m talking about the match,” he said. “The link.”
“What link?”
“What have we been missing? What have we been looking for? The link between these cases. At first the connection was simply the randomness of crime. That’s what the cops thought. That’s what I thought when I first started looking at it. We had two holdup victims-no connection other than the killer and the chance crossing of his path with the paths of these individuals. This is L.A., this sort of thing happens all the time. The capital of random violence, right?”
Graciela turned onto Sherman Way. They were just a couple of minutes from her home.
“Right.”
“Wrong. Because then we read more into it. We discover a killer who takes personal icons and this suggests something more involved than random collisions of shooter and victim. This suggests a deeper relationship-the targeting, stalking and acquisition of each victim.”
McCaleb stopped. They were passing the Sherman Market and they both wordlessly looked at the store as they went by. McCaleb waited a moment longer before continuing.
“Then all of a sudden we get another wrinkle, another layer of the onion is peeled back. We get the ballistics and it’s a whole new ball game. Now we have another murder and what looks like a professional running through this. A hitter. Why? What could possibly be the connection between your sister, James Cordell and Donald Kenyon?”
Graciela didn’t answer. She was coming up on Alabama now and moved the car into the left-turn lane.
“Blood,” he said. “Blood has got to be the link.”
She pulled into the driveway of her home. She turned the engine off.
“Blood,” she said.
McCaleb stared straight ahead at the closed garage door. He spoke slowly, the dread finally catching up with him.
“All this time I’ve been thinking, What did she see, what did she know? Whose path could she have crossed that would have gotten her killed? You see, I looked at her life and made a judgment. I decided that she didn’t have anything that anyone would want to take, so the reason had to be elsewhere. But I missed it. Missed it completely. Your sister was a good mother, a good sister, good employee and friend. But the one thing she had that made her almost unique was her blood. That made what she had inside her so very valuable… to someone.”
He waited a beat. He still didn’t look at her.
“Someone like me.”
He heard her breath leaving her body and he felt as though it was the hope going out of him. His hope of redemption.
“You’re saying she was… taken for her organs. You look at a poster back there and can say that?”
He finally looked over at her.
“I just knew it. That’s all.”
He opened his door.
“We call Mrs. Cordell. She’ll tell us her husband’s blood type. It will be AB with CMV negative. Perfect match. Then we get Kenyon’s blood. It, too, will match. I’d bet on it.”