“Okay, okay,” Winston finally said. “I’ll talk to the captain about it. I’ll tell him I want to do this. If he gives the go-ahead, I’ll send a package. One bullet-that’s all.”
“That’s all it takes.”
McCaleb filled her in further on Carruthers’s need to get the package by Tuesday morning and urged her to get in with the captain as soon as possible. This created another silence.
“All I can say is, it’s worth the shot, Jaye,” he said by way of reinforcement.
“I know. It’s just that… well, never mind. Give me your guy’s name and his number.”
McCaleb clenched his fist and punched it into the air in front of him. It didn’t matter how long a shot it was. They were rolling the dice. It felt good to him to be getting something going.
After he gave Winston the direct number and address for contacting Carruthers, she asked if there was anything else McCaleb wanted to talk about. He looked down at his pad but what he wanted to talk about wasn’t written down on it.
“I’ve got one last thing that’s probably going to put you on the spot,” he said.
“Oh, no,” Winston said with a groan. “Serves me right for answering the phone on a court day. Give it to me, McCaleb. What is it?”
“James Noone.”
“The witness? What about him?”
“He saw the shooter. He saw the shooter’s car.”
“Yeah, a lot of good it did us. There’s only about a hundred thousand of those Cherokees in southern California and his description of the guy is so vague he can’t tell if the guy was wearing a hat or not. He’s a witness but just barely.”
“But he saw him. It was during a stress situation. The more stress, the deeper the imprint. Noone would be perfect.”
“Perfect for what?”
“To be hypnotized.”
VGC was a business used mostly by the entertainment industry. It rented professional video equipment as well as video editing and dubbing studios. Adult filmmakers, whose product was almost exclusively shot on video, were its main clients but VGC also provided one of the best video-effects and image-enhancing labs in Hollywood.
McCaleb had been inside VGC once before, working on loan to the field office’s bank unit. It was the downside of his being transferred from Quantico to the FO outpost; technically he was under the command of the FO’s special agent in charge. And whenever the SAC thought things were slow-if they ever were-in the serials unit, he would yank McCaleb out and put him on something else, usually something McCaleb considered menial.
When he had walked into VGC the previous time, he had a videotape from the ceiling camera of a Wells Fargo Bank in Beverly Hills. The bank had been robbed by several masked gunmen who had escaped with $363,000 in cash. It was the group’s fourth bank robbery in twelve days. The one lead agents had was on the video. When one of the robbers had reached his arm across the teller’s counter to grab the bag she had just stuffed her cash into, his sleeve had caught on the edge of the marble counter and was pulled back. The robber quickly pulled the sleeve forward again but for a split second the form of a tattoo was seen on the inside of his forearm. The image was grainy and had been shot by a camera thirty feet away. After a tech in the field office lab said he could do nothing with it, it was decided not to send the tape to Washington HQ because it would take more than a month to have it analyzed. The robbers were hitting every three days. They seemed agitated in the videos, on the verge of violence. Speed was a necessity.
McCaleb took the tape to Video GraFX. A VGC tech took the frame from the video and in one day enhanced it through pixel redefinition and amplification to the point that the tattoo was identifiable. It was a flying hawk clutching a rifle in one claw and a scythe in the other.
