The Narrows (2004)

by Michael Connelly

  The missing men are:

  -Gordon Stansley, 41, of Los Angeles, missing since May 17,2001. He checked into the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino in Las Vegas but his bed was never slept in and his suitcase never unpacked. He is married and has two children.

  -John Edward Dunn, 39, of Ottawa, Canada, who was driving from his home to Los Angeles on a vacation. He never made it to his intended destination, his brother's home in Granada Hills. Dunn's 30-foot recreational vehicle was found Dec. 29,2001, at an RV park in Laughlin. That was 20 days after his expected arrival in Granada Hills.

  -Lloyd Rockland, 61, disappeared from Las Vegas on June 17,2002. His plane from Atlanta arrived at 11 a.m. at McCarran International Airport. He picked up a Hertz rental car, but he never checked in to the MGM Grand, where he had a reservation. His car was returned to the Hertz rental car center at the airport at 2 p.m. the next day but nobody seems to remember the father of four and grandfather of three being the one who returned it.

  -Fenton Weeks, 29, of Dallas, TX, was reported missing Jan. 25, 2003, after he did not return from a business trip to Las Vegas. Police determined he had checked in to the Golden Nugget in downtown Las Vegas and attended the first day of an electronics exposition held at the Las Vegas Convention Center but was not in attendance on the second and third days. His wife reported him missing. He has no children.

  -Joseph O'Leary, 55, of Berwyn, PA, disappeared May 15 of last year from the Bellagio where he was staying with his wife. Alice O'Leary left her husband in the casino playing blackjack while she went to spend the day at the resort's spa. Several hours later her husband failed to return to their suite. O'Leary, a stockbroker, was reported missing the next day.

  -Rogers Eberle, 40, of Los Angeles, disappeared Nov. 1 while on a day off from his work as a graphic designer at the Disney Studios in Burbank. His car was found parked in the lot outside the Buffalo Bill's Casino in Primm, NV, just across the California border on the Interstate 15 freeway.

  Investigators say there are few leads in the investigation. They point to Rockland's rental car as possibly being the best clue they have. The car was returned 27 hours after it was picked up by Rockland. It had been driven 328 miles during that period, according to Hertz records. Whoever returned it to the Hertz airport center dropped it off without waiting for a receipt or to speak to a Hertz clerk.

  "They just pulled in, got out of the car and walked away," Ritz said. "Nobody remembers anything. They process about a thousand cars a day in that center. There are no cameras and there is no record but the rental record."

  And it is those 328 miles that Ritz and the other detectives wonder about.

  "That is a lot of miles," said Detective Peter Echerd, Ritz's partner. "That car could have gone a lot of places. You figure a hundred and sixty-four out and a hundred and sixty-four back in and you've got a hell of a big circle to cover."

  Nevertheless, the investigators are trying to do just that, hoping their efforts will uncover a clue that makes the circle smaller and possibly leads to the answers to the six missing family men.

  "It's tough," said Ritz. "These guys all have families and we're doing our best for them. But at the moment we have lots of questions and not any answers."

  The article was nicely drawn with the Times's signature method of finding larger significance to a story than the story itself. In this case it was the theorizing that the disappearance of these men was symptomatic of the newest permutation of Las Vegas as an adult playground. It reminded me of a time I was working a case in which a man who owned an auto garage cut the hydraulic lines on a lift and a seven-thousand-pound Cadillac came down and crushed his longtime partner beneath it. A Times reporter called me up for the details for a story and then asked if the killing was symptomatic of the tightening economy in which money woes turned partners against partners. I said, no, I thought it was symptomatic of one guy not liking his partner screwing his wife.

  Larger implications aside, the story was a plant. I could tell that. I had done the same thing with the same reporter in my time. Ritz was trolling for information. Since half the missing men were either from or going to Los Angeles, why not call the Times, plant a story with the cop reporter and see who and what pops up?

  One person who popped up was Terry McCaleb. He obviously read the story on January 7, the day it was published, because his first set of notes on the file flap was dated as such. The notes were short and cryptic. At the top of the flap the name Ritz and a phone number with a 702 area code had been jotted down. Beneath this, McCaleb had written: 1/9call back-png 2/28

  Zzyzx-possible? how? miles

  Written along the side border of the file were two more phone numbers with 702 area codes. These were followed with the name William Bing.

  I reread the notes and looked at the clipping again. I noticed for the first time that McCaleb had circled two things on the newspaper article, the mention of the 328 miles found to have been put on the rental car and the word circle in Echerd's comment about the circle of the investigation being 164 miles in any direction. I didn't know why he had circled these two things but I did know what most of the notes on the flap meant. I had spent more than seven hours reading through McCaleb's files. I had seen notation after notation in file after file. The ex-agent used a shorthand of his own invention but one that was decipherable because in some files he spelled out what he chose to abbreviate in others.

  Immediately recognizable to me was what he meant by the use of "DD." It meant "definitely dead," a classification and conclusion McCaleb made on the wide majority of the missing cases he reviewed. Also easy to decipher was "png," which meant persona non grata, meaning McCaleb's offer to help with the investigation was not received well or not received at all.

  McCaleb had also found some significance in the age of the missing men. He wrote down an average age and then pulled out three of the victims' ages because they were within two years of each other and very close to the average. This appeared to me to be notes relating to a victim profile but there wasn't one in the file and I didn't know if McCaleb ever proceeded past the notes stage.

  The "find intersection" reference seemed to also be part of this profile. McCaleb was referring to a geographic or lifestyle intersection of the six missing men. Just as the Metro detective had put forth in the Times article, McCaleb was operating under the belief that there had to be a connection between these men. Yes, they were from as far apart as Ottawa and Los Angeles and did not know one another, but there had to be a point where they came together in some way.

  "Cycle disruption-there are more" I suspected was a reference to the frequency of the disappearances. If someone was abducting and killing these men, as McCaleb believed, there would usually be a recognizable time cycle. Serial killers operate this way in most cases, with violent psychosexual urges building and then subsiding after a kill. McCaleb had apparently worked out the cycle and found holes in it-missing victims. He believed there were more than six men missing.

  What puzzled me most about the notes was the reference to "triangle theory" and the phrase "i point gives 3" below it. This was something I had not seen come up in the previous files and I did not know what was meant by it. It was noted in conjunction with references to the car and the 328 miles that had been put on it. But the more I played with it, the more puzzled I became by it. It was code or shorthand for something I didn't know. It bothered me but there was nothing I could do about it with what I currently knew.

  The January 9 reference was to a call back from Ritz. McCaleb had probably called and left a message and the Vegas detective had called back, listened to his pitch and maybe his profile, and had said not interested. This was not surprising. The FBI was often unwanted by the locals. The clash of egos between feds and locals was a routine part of the job. A retired bureau man would likely be treated no differently. Terry McCaleb was persona non grata.

  That might have been it for this file and this case but then came the February 2 notation. A name and a num
ber. I opened my cell phone and called the number, not caring about how late it was. Or early, depending on how you looked at it. I got a recording of a female voice.

  'This is Cindy Hinton at the Las Vegas Sun. I can't take your call right now but it is important to me. Please leave your name and number and I will call you back as soon as I can. Thank you."

  There was a beep and I hesitated, not sure I wanted to make contact yet. But I went ahead anyway.

  "Uh, yes, hello, my name is Harry Bosch. I'm an investigator from Los Angeles and would like to talk to you about Terry McCaleb."

  I left my cell phone number and closed the phone, still not sure I had made the right move but thinking that leaving it short and cryptic was the best way to go. It might get her to call me back.

  The last reference in the notes was the most intriguing of all. McCaleb had written "Zzyzx" and then asked if it was possible and if so, how. This had to be a reference to Zzyzx Road

  . This was a leap. A giant leap. McCaleb had received photos from someone who had watched and photographed his family. That same person had taken photographs at Zzyzx Road

  near the California-Nevada border. Somehow McCaleb saw a possible link and was asking himself if one mystery could be related to the other. Could he have set something in motion by calling Vegas Metro and offering to help with the missing men case? To be able to make the leap to such questions was impossible. It meant I was missing something. I was missing the bridge, the piece of information that made the jump possible. McCaleb had to have known some- thing that wasn't noted in the file but that made the possibility of a link seem real to him.

  The last notations to check were the two Las Vegas phone numbers written on the border of the file along with the name William Bing. I opened my cell again and called the first number. The call was picked up by a recorded voice announcing that I had reached the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino. I hung up as the voice began to list a number of options I could choose from.

  The second number was followed by the name. I punched it into the phone, prepared to awaken William Bing and ask him what his connection to Terry McCaleb was. But the call was answered after several rings by a woman who said, "Las Vegas Memorial Medical Center, how would you like me to direct your call?"

  I wasn't expecting that. To gain some time while I thought about what to do I asked her for the hospital's location. By the time she was finished giving me the address on Blue Diamond Road

  I had come up with a valid question.

  "Do you have a doctor on staff named William Bing?"

  After a moment the answer came back negative.

  "Do you have any employee named William Bing?"

  "No, we don't, sir."

  "How about a patient?"

  There was another pause as she consulted a computer.

  "Not currently, no."

  "Did you formerly have a patient there named William Bing?"

  "I don't have access to that kind of information, sir."

  I thanked her and closed the phone.

  I thought about the last two numbers in McCaleb's notes for a long moment. My conclusions were simple. Terry McCaleb was a heart transplant recipient. If he were to travel to another city he would need to know where to go and who to ask for if there was an emergency or any medical problem. My guess was that McCaleb had called information to get the two numbers noted on the file. He then made a reservation at the Mandalay Bay and checked in with a local hospital as a precaution. The fact that there was no William Bing on staff at Las Vegas Memorial Medical Center did not preclude that he might be a cardio specialist who handled patients there.

  I opened the phone, checked the time on the display screen and called Graciela anyway. She answered quickly, her voice alert, though I could tell she had been sleeping.

  "Graciela, sorry to call so late. I have a few more questions."

  "Can I answer them tomorrow?"

  "Just tell me, did Terry go to Las Vegas within the month before he died?"

  "Las Vegas? I don't know. Why?"

  "What do you mean you don't know? He was your husband."

  "I told you, we had... separated. He was staying on the boat. I know he went over to the mainland a few times but if he went to Vegas from there I wouldn't have any way of knowing unless he told me, and he didn't tell me."

  "What about credit-card bills and cell phone records, ATM withdrawals, things like that?"

  "I paid them but I don't remember anything like that, like a hotel or anything." "Do you have those records still?"

  "Of course. I have them here at the house somewhere. They're probably packed already."

  "Find them and I'll come for them in the morning."

  "I'm already in bed."

  "Then find them in the morning. First thing. It's important, Graciela."

  "Okay, I will. And look, the one thing I can tell you is that usually if Terry was going to the mainland, he took the boat across so he had a place to stay while he was there. If he was going across but wasn't going to be in L.A. or was going to be staying at Cedars for tests or something, he would take a ferry because otherwise it would cost too much in boat fuel." "Okay."

  "Well, there was one trip in that last month. I think he was gone for like three days. Yes, three days, two nights. He took the ferry. So that meant he was either going across and then somewhere else or to the hospital. And I'm pretty sure it wasn't the hospital. I think he would have told me and I know everybody in cardio at Cedars anyway. They would have let me know he was there and what was going on. I had that place wired."

  "Okay, Graciela, that's good. That helps. Do you remember exactly when that was?"

  "Not exactly. It was the end of February, I think. Maybe the first couple days of March. I remember it was bill time. I called him on his cell to talk about money and he said he was on the mainland. He didn't say where. He just said he was over there and he'd be back in a couple days. I could tell he was driving when we talked. And Iknew he hadn't taken the boat because I was on the balcony looking at it in the harbor when we talked."

  "Why were you calling him, do you remember?"

  "Yes, we had bills to pay and I didn't know what if anything he had taken in on the boat in February. The credit-card payouts were sent directly here but Terry had a bad habit of walking around with personal checks and cash from customers in his wallet. When he died and I got his wallet back, there were three checks in there for nine hundred dollars that he'd had in there for two weeks. He wasn't very good at business."

  She said it as though it was one of her husband's endearing and humorous qualities, though I was pretty sure that during his life she didn't smile at these oversights.

  "A couple more things," I said. "Do you know if it would be his routine to check in with a hospital in a city he was going to? In other words, if he was going to Las Vegas would he set things up at a local hospital in case he needed anything?"

  There was a pause before she answered.

  "No, that doesn't sound like anything he would do. Are you saying he did that?"

  "I don't know. I found a phone number in one of the files. And a name. The number was for Vegas Memorial and I'm trying to figure out why he would call there."

  "Vegas Memorial has a transplant program, I know that. But I don't know why he would call there."

  "What about the name William Bing, does that mean anything? Could it be a doctor he was recommended to?"

  "I don't know that... something about that name is familiar but I can't place it. It could be a doctor. Maybe that's where I heard it." I waited a moment to see if it came to her but it didn't. I pressed on.

  "Okay, one last thing, where is Terry's car?"

  "It should be over there at Cabrillo, at the marina. It's an old Jeep Cherokee. There's a key on the ring I gave you. Buddy also has a key because he uses it sometimes. He basically takes care of it for us. I mean, me now."

  "Okay, I'm going to check that out in the morning, so I'll need to keep the key. Do you know w
hen the first ferry goes back across?"

  "Not till Hine-fifteen."

  "Then can we meet at seven-thirty or eight at your house? I want to get those records and also show you a few things. It won't take too long and then I'll grab the first ferry."

  "Um, can we make it eight? I should be back by then. I usually walk Raymond to school and take CiCi to day care."

  "No problem. I'll see you at eight."

  We ended the conversation and I immediately called Buddy Lockridge again, one more time rousing him from sleep.

  "Buddy, it's me again."

  He groaned.

  "Did Terry go to Las Vegas the month before he died? Like maybe around March first?"