Blood Work

by Michael Connelly

  As he read the initial reports, it was hard for McCaleb to make a judgment on whether the delay in the arrival of paramedics was of any consequence. Cordell had suffered a devastating head wound. Even if paramedics had gotten to him ten minutes sooner, it probably would have made no difference. It was unlikely that death could have been avoided.

  Still, the 911 screwup was just the type of thing the media loved to run with. So somebody in the Sheriff’s Department-probably Jaye Winston’s supervisor-had decided to keep that information quiet.

  The screwup was a side matter that held little interest for McCaleb. What did interest him was that there was at least a partial witness as well as a vehicle description. According to Noone’s statement, he had almost been creamed by a black blur as he had pulled into the bank’s lot. He described the exiting vehicle as a black Jeep Cherokee with the newer, smoother styling. He got only a split-second view of the driver, a man he described only as white and with either gray hair or a gray cap on his head.

  There were no other witnesses listed in the initial reports. Before moving on to the supplemental reports and the autopsy protocol, McCaleb decided to look at the videos. He turned on the television and VCR and first popped in the tape made from the ATM’s surveillance camera.

  As with the tape from the Sherman Market, there was a timeline running across the bottom of the frame. The picture was shot through a fish-eye lens that distorted the image. The man McCaleb assumed was James Cordell came into the frame and slid his bank card into the machine. His face was very close to the camera, blocking out a view of almost everything else. It was a design flaw-unless the real purpose of the camera was not to capture robberies but the faces of fraud artists using stolen or gimmick bank cards.

  As Cordell typed in his code number, he hesitated and looked over his right shoulder, his head tracking something passing behind him-the Cherokee pulling into the lot. He finished typing in his transaction and a nervous look came across his face. Nobody likes going to an ATM at night, even a well-lighted machine in a low-crime neighborhood. The only machine McCaleb ever used was inside a twenty-four-hour supermarket, where there always was the safety and deterrent of crowds. Cordell took a nervous glance over his left shoulder, nodded at someone off-screen and then looked back at the machine. Nothing about the person he looked at had alarmed him further. The shooter obviously had not pulled on the mask. Despite his outward calm, Cordell’s eyes dropped down to the cash slot, his mind probably repeating a silent mantra of Hurry up! Hurry up!

  Then almost immediately the gun came into the frame, reaching over his shoulder and just kissing his left temple before the trigger was pulled and James Cordell’s life was taken. There was the blast of blood misting the camera lens and the man went forward and to his right, apparently going into the wall next to the ATM and then falling backward to the ground.

  The shooter then moved into the video frame and grabbed the cash as it was delivered through the slot. At that moment McCaleb paused the picture. On the screen was a full view of the masked shooter. He was in the same dark jumpsuit and mask worn by the shooter in the Gloria Torres tape. As Winston had said, ballistics weren’t necessary. They would only be a scientific confirmation of something Winston knew and now McCaleb knew in the gut. It was the same man. Same clothes, same method of operation, same dead eyes behind the mask.

  He flicked the button again and the video continued. The shooter grabbed the cash from the machine. As he did this, he seemed to be saying something but his face was not squared to the camera as with the Sherman Market shootings. It was as if he was speaking to himself this time rather than to the camera.

  The shooter quickly moved to the left of the screen and stooped to pick up something unseen. The bullet casing. He then darted to the right and disappeared from the screen. McCaleb watched for a few moments. The only figure in the picture was the still form of Cordell on the pavement below the machine. The only movement was the widening pool of blood around his head. Seeking the lower ground, the blood slid into a joint in the pavement and started moving in a line toward the curb.

  A minute went by and then a man entered the video screen, crouching over Cordell’s body. James Noone. He was bald across the top of his head and wearing thin-framed glasses. He touched the wounded man’s neck, then looked around, probably to make sure he was safe himself. He then jumped up and was gone, presumably to make the call on his cell phone. Another half minute went by before Noone returned to the frame to wait for help. As the time went by, Noone swiveled his head back and forth, apparently fearing that the gunman, if not in the car he had seen speeding away, might still be around. Finally, his attention was drawn in the direction of the street. His mouth opened in a silent scream and he waved his arms above his head as he apparently watched the paramedics speed by. He then jumped up and left the screen again.

  A few moments later the screen jumped. McCaleb checked the time and saw that it was now seven minutes later. Two paramedics moved quickly into place around Cordell. They checked for pulse and pupil response. They ripped open his shirt and one of the rescuers listened to his chest with a stethoscope. Another quickly arrived with a wheeled stretcher. But one of the first two looked at the man and shook his head. Cordell was dead.

  A few moments later the screen went blank.

  After pausing a moment, almost in reverence, McCaleb put in the crime scene tape next. This was obviously taken from a hand-held video camera. It started with some environmental shots of the bank property and the street. In the bank lot there were two vehicles: a dusty white Chevy Suburban and a smaller vehicle barely visible on its other side. McCaleb assumed the Suburban was Cordell’s. It was large and rugged, dusty from driving the mountain and desert roads alongside the aqueduct. He assumed the other car belonged to the witness, James Noone.

  The tape then showed the ATM and panned downward to the blood-stained sidewalk in front of it. Cordell’s body was sprawled in the spot where the paramedics had found it and then left it. It was uncovered, the dead man’s shirt open, his pale chest exposed.

  Over the next several minutes the video jumped in time through various stages of the crime scene. First a criminalist measured and photographed the scene, then coroner’s investigators worked on the body, wrapped it in a plastic body bag and removed it on a gurney. Lastly, the criminalist and a latents man moved in to search the crime scene more thoroughly for evidence and fingerprints. There was a segment showing the criminalist using a small metal spike to work the bullet slug out of the wall next to the ATM.

  Finally, there was a bonus McCaleb had not been expecting. The camera operator recorded James Noone’s first recounting of what he had seen. The witness had been taken to the edge of the bank property and was standing next to a public phone and talking to a uniformed deputy when the cameraman wandered up. Noone was a man of about thirty-five. He appeared-in comparison to the deputy-to be short and compactly built. He now had on a baseball cap. He was agitated, still pumped by what he had witnessed and apparently frustrated by the screwup with the paramedics. The camera had been turned on in mid-conversation.

  “All I’m saying is that he had a fighting chance.”

  “Yes, sir, I understand. I’m sure it will be one of the things they take a look at.”

  “I mean, I think somebody ought to investigate how this could-and the thing is, we’re only what, a half mile from the hospital?”

  “We’re aware of that, Mr. Noone,” the deputy said patiently. “Now if we could just move on for a moment. Could you tell me if you saw anything before you found the body? Anything unusual.”

  “Yes, I saw the guy. At least I think I did.”

  “What guy is that?”

  “The robber. I saw the getaway car.”

  “Can you describe that, sir?”

  “Sure, black Cherokee. The new kind. Not one of those that look like a shoe box.”

  The deputy looked a bit confused but McCaleb understood that Noone was describing a Grand Cherokee mo
del. He had one himself.

  “I was pulling in and it came tearing out of here, almost hit me,” Noone said. “The guy was a real asshole. I blasted my horn at him, then I pull in and find this man here. I called on my cell phone but then it got all fucked up.”

  “Yes, sir. Can you refrain from that kind of language? This might be played in court one day.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “Can we go back to this car? Did you happen to see a license plate?”

  “I wasn’t even looking.”

  “How many people in the vehicle?”

  “I think one, the driver.”

  “Male or female?”

  “Male.”

  “Can you describe him for me?”

  “Wasn’t really looking. I was just trying not to get plowed into, that’s all.”

  “White? Black? Asian?”

  “Oh, he was white. I’m pretty sure about that. But I couldn’t identify him or anything like that.”

  “What about hair color?”

  “It was gray.”

  “Gray?”

  The deputy said it with surprise. An old robber. It seemed unusual to him.

  “I think,” Noone said. “It was all so quick. I can’t be sure.”

  “What about a hat?”

  “Yeah, it could have been a hat.”

  “What do you mean, the gray?”

  “Yeah, gray hat, gray hair. I can’t be sure.”

  “Okay, anything else? Was he wearing glasses?”

  “Uh, I either don’t remember or didn’t see. I really wasn’t looking at the guy, you know. Besides, the car had dark windows. The only time I could really see the guy was through the windshield and I only saw that for a second. When he was coming right at me.”

  “Okay, Mr. Noone. This is a help. We are going to need you to make a formal statement and the detectives will need to talk to you. Is this going to be an inconvenience?”

  “Yes, but what are you gonna do? I want to help. I tried to help. I don’t mind.”

  “Thank you, sir. I’m going to have a deputy take you into the Palmdale station. The detectives will talk to you there. They’ll be with you as soon as possible and I’ll make sure they know you are waiting.”

  “Well, okay. What about my wheels?”

  “Someone will take you back here when they are done.”

  The tape ended there. McCaleb ejected it and thought about what he had seen and heard and read so far. The fact that the Sheriff’s Department did not give the black Cherokee to the media was curious. It would be something he would have to ask Jaye Winston about. He made a note of it on the legal pad he had been writing questions on and then started through the remaining reports on Cordell.

  The crime scene evidence inventory was a single page that was almost blank. Collected evidence amounted to the slug removed from the wall, a half dozen fingerprints lifted from the ATM and photographs of a tire mark possibly made by the shooter’s car. The video from the ATM camera was also listed.

  Clipped to the report were photocopies of photos of the tread mark and a freeze frame from the ATM video of the gun in the shooter’s hand. An ancillary report from the crime lab stated that it was the technician’s opinion that the tire mark had been on the asphalt at least several days and was not useful in the investigation.

  A ballistics report identified the bullet as a slightly pancaked nine-millimeter Federal FMJ. Stapled to the report was a photocopy of a page from the autopsy showing a top-view drawing of the skull. The track of the bullet through Cordell’s brain was charted on the drawing. The bullet had entered just forward on the left temple, then tumbled on a straight line through the frontal lobe and out through the right temple region. The track of the tumbling bullet had been an inch wide. As McCaleb read it, he realized it was probably a good thing the paramedics were late. If they had managed to save Cordell, it probably would have been for a life on a machine in one of those medical centers that were nothing more than vegetable warehouses.

  The ballistics report also contained an enhanced photo of the gun. Though much of the weapon was hidden in the gloved grip of the shooter, the sheriff’s firearms experts had identified it as a Heckler amp; Koch P7, a nine-millimeter pistol with a four-inch barrel and nickel finish.

  The weapon identification was a curiosity to McCaleb. The HK P7 was a fairly expensive weapon, about a thousand dollars on the legitimate market, and not the kind of weapon normally seen in street crimes. He guessed that Jaye Winston must have assumed that the gun itself had to have been taken earlier in a robbery or burglary. McCaleb looked through the remaining supplemental reports and sure enough Winston had pulled crime reports from across the county in which an HK P7 of matching description had been reported stolen. It did not appear that she had taken the lead much further than that. It was true that many gun thefts went unreported because the people who lost the weapons shouldn’t have had them in the first place. But as Winston had undoubtedly done before, McCaleb scanned the list of reported thefts-only five in the last two years-to see if any names or addresses turned a switch. None did. All five of the burglaries Winston had collected were open cases with no suspects. It was a dead end.

  After the burglary list was a report detailing all thefts of black Grand Cherokees in the county during the last year. Winston had apparently believed the shooter’s car was also a contradiction-a high-line vehicle used in an economically low-line crime. McCaleb thought it was a good jump to consider the car was probably stolen. There were twenty-four Cherokees on the list but no other reports indicating any follow-up. Maybe, he considered, Winston had simply changed her mind after connecting her shooting to the Torres case. The Good Samaritan had described a getaway vehicle from the market shooting that could be a Cherokee. Since that indicated the shooter had not gotten rid of it, it possibly hadn’t been stolen after all.

  The autopsy protocol was next and McCaleb flipped through the pages quickly. He knew from experience that ninety percent of any autopsy report was dedicated to the minute description of the procedure, identifying the characteristics of the victim’s interior organs and state of health at the time of death. Most of the time it was only the summary that was important to McCaleb. But in the Cordell case even that part of the autopsy was irrelevant because it was obvious. He found the summary anyway and nodded as he read what he already knew. Massive brain damage had led to Cordell’s death within minutes of the shooting.

  He put the autopsy report aside. The next stack of reports dealt with Winston’s three-strike theory. Believing the shooter was an ex-convict facing life without parole for another conviction, Winston had gone to the state parole offices in Van Nuys and Lancaster and pulled files on paroled armed robbers who were Caucasian and had two prior felony convictions on their records. These were people facing third-strike penalties if arrested again under the new law. There were seventy-one of them assigned to the two parole offices geographically nearest the two robbery-shootings.

  Winston and other deputies had slowly gone through the list in the weeks since the robberies and murders. According to the reports, they had paid visits to nearly every man on the list. Of the seventy-one, only seven of the men couldn’t be found. This indicated they had violated parole and had probably left the area or might still be in the area hiding and possibly were more likely to be committing armed robberies and even murders. Nationwide parole pickup bulletins were issued for all these men on law enforcement computer networks. Of the men who were contacted, initial interviews and investigation cleared almost ninety percent through alibis. The remaining eight had been cleared through other investigative means-chiefly because their physical dimensions did not match those of the shooter’s upper body on the video.

  Aside from the missing seven men on the list, the three-strikes avenue of investigation was stagnant. Winston was apparently hoping that one of those seven would eventually turn up and be tied to the shooting.

  McCaleb moved on to the remaining Cordell reports. There were tw
o follow-up interviews with James Noone at the Star Center. His story never differed in these reports and his recollection of the Cherokee driver never got any better.

  There also was a crime scene sketch and four field-interview reports on traffic stops of men driving black Cherokees. They had been stopped in Lancaster and Palmdale within an hour of the ATM shooting by deputies made aware of the Cherokee’s use in the crime by a sheriff’s radio broadcast. The identification of each driver was run through the computer and they were sent on their way after coming up clean. The reports were forwarded to Winston.

  The last item McCaleb read was the most recent summary report filed by Winston. It was short and to the point.

  “No new leads or suspects at this time. Investigating officer is waiting at this point for additional information that may lead to the ID of a suspect.”

  Winston was at the wall. She was waiting. She needed fresh blood.

  McCaleb drummed his fingers on the table and thought about all he had just read. He agreed with the moves Winston had made but he tried to think of what she had missed and what else could be done. He liked her three-strike theory and shared her disappointment at not being able to cull a suspect out of the list of seventy-one. The fact that most of the men were cleared through alibis bothered him. How could so many two-strikes dirtbags be able to perfectly account for their exact whereabouts on two different nights? He had always been suspicious of alibis when he was working cases. He knew it took only one liar to make an alibi.

  McCaleb stopped his finger roll on the table as he thought of something. He fanned the stack of Cordell reports across the table. He didn’t need to look through them because he knew that what he was thinking of was not in the pile. He had realized that Winston had never geographically cross-referenced her various theories.

  He got up and left the boat. Buddy Lockridge was sitting in the cockpit of his boat sewing a rip in a wet suit when McCaleb walked up.

  “Hey, you got a job?”

  “Guy over on millionaires’ row wants me to scrape his Bertram. It’s the sixty over there. But if you need a ride, I can do his thing whenever I want. He’s a once-a-month weekender.”