“Right. And I am going to go to BOPRA with a warrant to get all their waiting lists and their blood donor records. It should be interesting to see how they respond.”
McCaleb nodded but his mind was skipping ahead.
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” he said. “It’s too complicated.”
“What is?”
“The whole thing. If somebody wanted to move up on the list, why take out donors? Why not just knock people off the list?”
“Because that might be too obvious. If two or three people needing heart or liver transplants in a row get hit, it’s bound to raise a question somewhere. But by hitting the donors, it’s more obscure. No one noticed it until you came along.”
“I guess,” McCaleb said, still not sure he was convinced. “Then if you’re right, it could even mean the shooter’s going to hit again. You’ve got to go down the list of AB donors. You’ve got to warn them, protect them.”
That possibility brought the excitement back. It was jangling in his veins.
“I know,” Winston said. “When I get the warrant, I’m going to have to tell Nevins and Uhlig, all of them, what I am doing. That’s why you have to come in, Terry. It’s the only way. You have to come in with a lawyer and lay this all out, then take your chances. Nevins, Uhlig, these are smart people. They’ll see where they went wrong.”
McCaleb didn’t respond. He saw the logic in what she was saying but was hesitant to agree because it would be putting his fate in the hands of others. He would rather rely on himself.
“Do you have a lawyer, Terry?”
“No, I don’t have a lawyer. Why would I have a lawyer? I haven’t done anything wrong.”
He cringed. He had heard countless guilty individuals make the same statement before. Winston probably had, too.
“I meant do you know a lawyer who could help you?” she said. “If you don’t, then I can suggest a few. Michael Haller, Jr. would be a good choice.”
“I know lawyers in case I need one. I have to think about this.”
“Well, call me. I can bring you in, make sure everything is handled right.”
McCaleb’s mind wandered and he was inside a holding cell at the county jail. He had been in the lockup on interviews as a bureau agent. He knew how loud jails were and how dangerous. He knew that innocent or not, he would never surrender himself to that.
“Terry, you there?”
“Yeah, sorry. I was just thinking about something. How can I reach you to arrange this?”
“I’ll give you my pager and my home. I’ll be here until probably six but after that I’m heading home. Call me anywhere, any time.”
She gave him the numbers and McCaleb wrote them down in his notebook. He then put it away and shook his head.
“I can’t believe this. I’m sitting here talking about turning myself in for something I didn’t do.”
“I know that. But the truth is a powerful thing. It will work out. Just make sure you call me, Terry. When you decide.”
“I’ll call you.”
He hung up.
“Hey, who is getting the heart?”
“What?”
“You said she was in surgery. Which patient? Was it the boy?”
“I’m sorry, I’m not at liberty to discuss other patients with you,” said the frowner.
“Fine,” he said. “Then just make sure you tell her to call me.”
McCaleb spent the next fifteen minutes pacing between the living room and kitchen, hoping unrealistically that the phone would ring and Fox would be on the line.
He finally managed to shoehorn the anxiety into a side compartment of his brain and started thinking about the larger problems at hand. McCaleb knew he had to start making decisions, chief of which was to decide whether to get a lawyer. He knew Winston was right; it was the smart move to get legal protection. But McCaleb couldn’t bring himself to make the call to Michael Haller, Jr. or anybody else, to give up on his own skills and rely on another’s.
In the living room, there were no documents left on the coffee table. As he had gone through the pages, he had returned them to the leather bag until all that was on the table was the stack of videotapes.
Desperate for a diversion from his thoughts about what exactly Fox had said to him about the other patient, he picked up the videocassette on top of the stack and walked it over to the television. He popped it into the VCR without looking to see which tape it was. It didn’t matter. He just wanted something else to think about for a while.
