“Hidden under a drawer. They found your sister’s earring. The cross the shooter took.”
He watched her a moment before continuing. Her eyes dropped from his to the glass-topped coffee table as she thought about his words.
“They also found the photo from Cordell’s car. And they found a cuff link that was taken from Donald Kenyon. They found all the icons the killer took, Graciela. My source, the sheriff’s detective, she tells me they are going to go to a grand jury and indict me. I can’t go back to my boat now.”
She glanced at him and then away. She stood up and walked to the window, even though the curtain was closed. She shook her head.
“You want me to leave?” he said to her back.
“No, I don’t want you to leave. This makes no sense. How can they-did you tell the detective about the intruder? He’s the one who must have done this, who put those things in the drawer. He’s the killer. Oh my God! We were that close to my sister’s…”
She didn’t finish. McCaleb got up and went to her, relief coursing through him. She didn’t believe it. None of it. He put his arms around her from behind and pushed his face into her hair.
“I’m so glad you believe me,” he whispered.
She turned around in his arms and they kissed for a long moment.
“What can I do to help?” she whispered.
“Just keep believing. And I’ll do the rest. Can I stay here?
“Nobody knows that we’re together. They might come here, but I don’t think it will be to look for me. It might be just to tell you they think it’s me.”
“I want you to stay. As long as you need or want to.”
“I just need a place where I can work. Where I can go through everything again. I get this feeling I missed something. Like the blood work. There’s got to be some answers in all of that paper.”
“You can work here. I’ll stay home tomorrow and help look through-”
“No. You can’t. You can’t do anything unusual. I just want you to get up in the morning and take Raymond to school and then go to work. I can do this. This part is my job.”
He held her face in his hands. The weight of his guilt was lessened by her just being there with him and he felt the subtle opening inside of some passage that had long been closed. He wasn’t sure where it would lead but knew in his heart he wanted to go there, that he must go there.
“I was just about to go to bed,” she said.
He nodded.
“Are you coming with me?”
“What about Raymond? Shouldn’t we-”
“Raymond’s asleep. Don’t worry about him. For right now let’s worry about us.”
IN THE MORNING, after Graciela and Raymond were gone and the house was quiet, McCaleb opened his leather bag and spread all of the accumulated paperwork in six stacks across the coffee table. While contemplating it all, he drank a glass of orange juice and ate two untoasted blueberry Pop Tarts that he guessed were meant for Raymond. When he was done, he set to work, hoping his involvement in the paper would keep his mind off things beyond his control, mainly Jaye Winston’s investigation of the names on the list.
Despite that distraction McCaleb could feel the flow of adrenaline start to kick in. He was looking for the tell. The piece of the puzzle that didn’t fit before but would make sense now, that would tell him the story. He had survived in the bureau largely by following gut instincts. He was following one now. He knew that the larger the case file was-the larger the accumulation of facts-the easier it was for the tell to be hidden. He would go hunting for it now, in a sense looking for the perfect red apple in the stack at the grocery store-the one that when pulled brings the whole pile down and bouncing across the floor.
But as jazzed as McCaleb had been at eight-thirty in the morning, his spirits had immolated by late afternoon. In eight hours interrupted only by bologna sandwiches and unanswered calls to Winston, he had reviewed every page of every document he had accumulated in the ten days he had worked the case. And the tell-if it had ever been there-remained hidden. The feelings of paranoia and isolation were creeping back up on him. At one point he realized he was daydreaming about what would be the best place to flee to, the mountains of Canada or the beaches of Mexico.
At four o’clock he called the Star Center once more and was told for the fifth time that Winston was not in. This time, however, the secretary added that she was presumed gone for the day. In earlier calls the secretary had dutifully refused to reveal where Winston was or give him her pager number. For that he would have to speak to the captain and McCaleb declined, knowing the jeopardy he would place Winston in if it was revealed she was not only sympathetic to a suspect but was actually aiding him.
After hanging up, he called his phone on the boat and played back two messages that had come in during the last hour. The first was Buddy Lockridge checking in and the second was a wrong number, a woman saying she wasn’t sure if she had the right number but was looking for some one named Luther Hatch. She left a callback number. McCaleb recognized the name Luther Hatch-the suspect in the case in which he had first met Jaye Winston. Once he made that connection, he recognized her voice on the message. She was telling him to call her.
As he punched in the numbers Winston had left, he recognized the exchange-it was the same for the bureau offices in Westwood, where he used to work. The phone was answered immediately.
“This is Winston.”
“This is McCaleb.”
Silence.
“Hey,” she finally said. “I was wondering if you would get that message.”
“What’s up? Can you talk?”
“Not really.”
“Okay, I’ll talk, then. Do they know you are helping me?”
“No, obviously.”
“But you’re there because they moved the investigation to the bureau, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Okay, have you had a chance to run those names down yet?”
“I’ve been out on it all day.”
“Do you have anything? Do any of them look good?”
“No, there’s nothing there.”
McCaleb closed his eyes and cursed silently. Where had he gone wrong? How could this be a dead end? He was confused and his mind was running over the possibilities. He wondered if Winston had had enough time to thoroughly run out the list.
“Is there any place or time I can talk to you about this? I need to ask you some questions.”
“In a little while I probably can. Why don’t you give me a number and I’ll get back to you?”
McCaleb was silent while he thought about this. But he didn’t take long. As Winston had said the night before, her neck was way out there for him. He believed he could trust her. He gave her Graciela’s number.
“Call me back as soon as you can.”
“I will.”
“One last thing. Did they go to the grand jury yet?”
“No, not yet.”
“How long before they do?”
“I’ll see you tomorrow morning, then. Bye.”
She hung up before she heard him curse out loud. The following morning they were going to seek an indictment against him for murder. And he was sure that obtaining it would be only a formality. Grand juries were always rigged in the prosecution’s favor. In McCaleb’s case, he knew that all they needed to do was show the Sherman Market tape and then introduce the earring found during the search of his boat. They would be staging press conferences by the afternoon-perfect timing for the six o’clock news.
While he was standing there contemplating his grim future, the phone rang in his hand.
“It’s Jaye.”
“Where are you?”
“The federal cafeteria. A pay phone.”
McCaleb immediately envisioned her location, in an a cove with vending machines off to the side of the cafeteria dining room. It was private enough,
“What’s going on, Jaye?”