When McCaleb got back to the Taurus, he found Buddy Lockridge sitting with his back to the driver’s-side door and his legs stretched across the front seat. He was idly practicing a blues riff on a harmonica while reading a book opened on his lap. McCaleb opened the passenger door and waited for him to move his legs. As he finally got in, he noticed Buddy had been reading a book titled
“That was pretty quick,” Buddy said.
“Yeah, there wasn’t a lot to say.”
He put the stack of reports and videocassettes on the floor between his feet.
“What’s all of that?”
“Just some stuff I have to go through.”
Lockridge leaned over and looked at the top sheet. It was an incident report.
“James Cordell,” he read out loud. “Who’s that?”
“Buddy, I’m beginning to think-”
“I know, I know.”
He took the hint, straightened up and started the car. He asked nothing more about the documents.
“So, where to now?”
“Now we just go back. San Pedro.”
“I thought you said you needed me for a few days. I’ll stop asking questions, I promise.”
There was a slight protest in his voice.
“It’s not that. I still need you. But right now I need to go back and go through some of this stuff.”
Buddy dejectedly tossed his book onto the dashboard, dropped the harp into the door pocket and put the car into gear.
He decided that the best way to do it would be to go through the material chronologically. That meant the Cordell case came first. He went through the stack, separating out the reports regarding the Gloria Torres killing and putting them aside. He then took what was left and separated the reports into small stacks relating to the initial investigation and evidence inventory, follow-up interviews, dead-end leads, miscellaneous reports, fact sheets and weekly summaries.
When he had worked for the bureau, it was his routine to completely clear his desk and spread all the paperwork from a submitted case file across it. The cases came in from police departments all over the West. Some sent thick packages and some just thin files. He always asked for videotape of the crime scene. Big or small, the packages were all about the same thing. McCaleb was fascinated and repulsed at the same time. He became angry and vengeful as he read, all while alone in his little office, his coat on the door hook, his gun in the drawer. He could tune everything out but what was in front of him. He did his best work at the desk. As a field agent, he was average at best. But at his desk, he was better than most. And he felt a secret thrill in the back of his mind each time he opened one of those packages and the hunt for a new evil began again. He felt that thrill now as he began to read.
James Cordell had a lot going for him. A family, nice home and cars, good health and a job that paid well enough to allow his wife to be a full-time mother to their two daughters. He was an engineer with a private firm contracted by the state to maintain the structural integrity of the aqueduct system that delivered water from the snow melt in the mountains in the central state to the reservoirs that nursed the sprawl of Southern California. He lived in Lancaster in northeast Los Angeles County, which put him within an hour and a half by car of any point on the water line. On the night of January twenty-second he had been heading home from a long day inspecting the Lone Pine segment of the concrete aqueduct. It was payday and he stopped at the Regional State Bank branch just a mile from his home. His paycheck had been automatically deposited and he needed cash. But he was shot in the head and left for dead at the ATM before the machine finished spitting out his money. His killer was the one who took the crisp twenties when they rolled out of the machine.
The first thing McCaleb realized as he read the initial crime reports was that a sanitized version of events had been given to the media. The circumstances described in the
