Blood Work полностью

“I’ll call him Noone because that’s all we have and maybe all we’ll ever have. It begins with the Code Killer. That was Noone. At that time I was the bureau’s point man on the task force. By agreement with the LAPD, I became the media spokesman on the case. I led the briefings, requests for interviews went to me. For ten months my face became synonymous on TV with the Code Killer. And so Noone fixated on me. As we got closer to him he fixated on me. He sent letters to me. In his mind, I was the nemesis. I was the embodiment of the task force that was hunting him.”

“Aren’t you taking a lot of the credit for yourself?” Arrango asked. “I mean, you weren’t the only-”

“Shut up and listen, Arrango. You might learn something.”

McCaleb stared at him in the rearview and Arrango stared back. McCaleb saw Nevins hold a hand up in a calming motion directed at Arrango.

“ He gave me the credit,” McCaleb said. “I didn’t take it. Eventually, when he knew the risks were too great, he dropped out. The killings stopped. The Code Killer disappeared. About that same time I went down with… with my problems. I needed the transplant and it became news because I had been a face in the news. Noone saw this. He could have easily been aware of this. And he hatched what he would consider his grandest scheme.”

“He decided that rather than kill you, he would save you,” Uhlig said.

McCaleb nodded.

“It would give him the ultimate victory because it would last and last. To simply eliminate me, kill me, would bring only a fleeting sense of fulfillment. But by saving me… now there was something unique, something that would get him into the hall of fame. And he’d always have me around as a reminder of how smart and powerful he is. Do you understand?”

“I understand,” Nevins said. “But that’s the psychological side. What I want to know is how he did it? How’d he get the names? How did he know about Kenyon and Cordell and then Torres?”

“His computer. Your techs are going to have to take that thing apart.”

“We’ve got Bob Clearmountain coming in,” Nevins said. “You remember him?”

McCaleb nodded. Clearmountain was the L.A. field office’s resident computer expert. A hacker extraordinary in his own right.

“Good. Then he’ll be able to answer that question better than me. Eventually. My guess is that you’ll find a hacking program in that computer. Noone got into BOPRA and from there got the names. He chose his targets based on age, physical fitness and proximity. And he went to work. With Kenyon and Cordell things went wrong. They went right with Torres. That is, according to Noone’s view.”

“And he planned all along to lay it on you?”

“All I think is that he wanted me to follow the trail and find out for myself what he had done. He knew that would happen if I became a suspect. Because then I would have to look into it myself. But then that didn’t happen at first because the case investigators missed the clues.”

He looked at Arrango in the mirror as he said this. He could see the detective’s eyes turn dark with anger. He was about to explode.

“Arrango, the fact is, you treated it as an everyday stop-and-rob with the addition of shots fired, nothing more and nothing less. You missed it. So Noone jump-started the whole thing.”

“How?” Uhlig and Nevins asked in unison.

“My involvement came about because of an article in the Times. That article was prompted by a letter from a reader. Whatever name was on that letter, I bet it was Noone.”

He stopped there, waiting for disagreement. None came.

“The letter prompts the article. The article prompts Graciela Rivers. Graciela Rivers prompts me. Like dominoes.”

A thought suddenly occurred to him. He remembered the man in the old foreign car watching from across the street the first time he visited the Sherman Market. He realized the car matched the one he had seen speeding from the marina lot the night he chased the intruder.

“I think Noone was watching me all along,” he said. “Watching his plan unfold. He knew when it was time to get into my boat and plant the evidence. He knew when to call you.”

He looked at Nevins, whose eyes shifted away and out the windshield.

“You got an anonymous call? What was said?”

“Actually, it was an anonymous message. Taken down by the overnight person. It just said, ‘Check the blood. McCaleb has their blood.’ That was it.”

“It fits. That was him. Just another move in the game.”

They were silent for a while. The windows were beginning to fog with the heat and their breath.

“Well, I don’t know how much of this we’ll ever confirm,” Nevins said. “Certainly a lot of maybes.”

McCaleb nodded. He doubted any of it would ever be confirmed because he doubted Noone would ever be identified or found.

“Okay, then,” Nevins continued. “I guess we’ll be in touch.”

He opened his door and the others followed. Before he got out, Uhlig reached over the seat and tapped McCaleb’s shoulder with a harmonica.

“It was on the floor back here,” he said.

As Arrango stepped out onto the asphalt, McCaleb lowered his window and looked up at him.