All except for one document. McCaleb stared at it for a long moment, his finger raised and poised over the mouse button.
McCaleb.doc He clicked the mouse and the document quickly filled the screen. McCaleb began to read it like a man reading his own obituary. The words filled him with dread, for he knew that they unalterably changed his life. They stripped his soul from him, took any meaning from his accomplishments and made a horrible mockery of them.
Hello Agent McCaleb:
It is you out there, I would hope.
I will assume so. I will assume that you have lived up to that wonderful reputation you carried so nobly.
I wonder? Are you alone? Are you running from them now as a wanted man? But, of course, now you have what you need to save yourself from them. But I am asking about before now, how did it feel to be the hunted one? I wanted you to know that feeling. My feelings . . . A terrible thing to live with fear, no?
Fear never sleeps.
Most of all, what I wanted was a place in your heart, Agent McCaleb. I wanted always to be with you. Cain and Abel, Kennedy and Oswald, darkness and light. Two worthy opponents, chained together through time . . .
I could have killed you. I had that power and opportunity. But it would have been too easy, don't you think? The man on the dock, asking directions. Your morning walk, the man on the rock jetty with the fishing pole. Do you remember me?
Now you do. I was there. But it would have been too easy, don't you agree? Too easy.
You see, I needed something more than vengeance or the vanquishing of a foe. Those are the goals of fools. I wanted-no, I needed and craved-something different. To test you first by turning you into me. The villain. The hunted one.
Then, when you emerged from that fire, your skin scorched but your body whole, to reveal myself as your most ardent benefactor. Yes, it was me. I followed her. I studied her. I chose her for you. She was my Valentine to you.
You are mine forever, Agent McCaleb. Every breath you take belongs to me. Every beat of that stolen heart is the echo of my voice in your head. Always. Every day.
Remember . . .
Every breath . . .
McCaleb folded his arms across his chest and held himself as though he had been flayed open with a blade. A deep shudder rolled through him and a moan escaped his throat. He pushed the chair back from the desk, away from the horrible message still on the screen, and bent his body forward into the crash position. His plane was going down.
41
HIS THOUGHTS WERE blood red and black. He felt as though he were in some permanent void, surrounded by a velvet curtain of black space, his hands forever searching for the seam through which to escape but never finding it. He saw the faces of Graciela Rivers and Raymond as distant images receding into the darkness.
Suddenly, he felt a cold hand on his neck and he jumped, a shriek escaping from his throat like a prisoner going over the wall. He sat up. It was Winston. His reaction had scared her as much as she had scared him.
"Terry? Are you okay?"
"Yes. I mean, no. It's him. Noone is the Code Killer. He killed all of them. The last three for me. He did it until he got it right. He killed Gloria Torres for her heart. For me. So that I would live and be the testament to his glory."
The coincidence of the name and Noone's purpose suddenly struck McCaleb.
"Wait a minute," Winston said. "Slow down. What are you talking about?"
"It's him. It's all here. Check the files, the computer. He killed those others. He then decided to save me. To kill for me."
He pointed to the computer screen, where the message to McCaleb was still displayed. He waited while she read it but finally couldn't contain himself.
"All the pieces, they were right there. All the time."
"What pieces?"
"The code. It was so simple. He used every digit but the number one. No one. Get it? I am no one. That's all he was saying."
"Terry, let's talk about this later. Tell me how you got here? How did you know it was Noone?"
"The tape. The session we did with him."
"The hypnosis? What about it?"
"Remember how I told you not to speak so the subject would not be confused?"
"Right. You said only you should ask questions to Noone. Anything between us should be signals or written down."
"But at the end, when I knew it was all going to shit, I got frustrated. I said to you, 'Anything else?' and you shook your head no. I asked, 'Are you sure?' and you shook your head again. I broke my own rule by speaking to you. The thing is, I asked those questions to you out loud. So Noone should have answered me. If he was in a true hypnotic trance, he should have answered because he would not have known those questions were directed at you. But he didn't answer. It shows cognizance of the situation. He knew, either by the direction of my voice or its inflection, that I was talking to you instead of him. He shouldn't have known that. Not in a true trance. He should have answered every question spoken in that room unless it was specifically addressed to someone else. I never used your name."
"He was faking."
"Right. And if he was faking it, then his answers were bogus. It meant he was part of the setup. I had the videos compared before I came here. There are hard copies in my car. James Noone and the Good Samaritan are the same guy. The shooter."
Winston shook her head as if to signal brain overload. Her eyes scanned the room for a place to sit down. There was only the cot.
"You want to sit here," McCaleb said, standing up.
"I want to sit down but not in here. We have to back out of here, Terry. I need to call Captain Hitchens and then the others, LAPD and the bureau. I better put out a pickup on Noone, too."
McCaleb was amazed that she still didn't have all the pieces together.
"Aren't you listening? There is no Noone. He doesn't exist."
"What do you mean?"
"The name. It goes with everything else, Noone. Break it down and you get no one. I am no one. The pieces were there all the time . . ."
He shook his head and dropped back into the chair. He put his face in his hands.
"How am I . . . I can't live with this."
Again Winston put her hand on his neck but this time he didn't startle.
"Come on, Terry, let's not think about that. Let's go out to the car and wait. I have to get a crime scene crew in here, maybe get some prints so we can ID this guy."
McCaleb stood up and walked around the desk and out toward the door. He spoke without looking back at her.
"He never left a print anywhere else before. I doubt he started now."
Two hours later McCaleb was sitting in the Taurus, parked out on Atoll behind the yellow police lines that had been strung between the rows of garage warehouses. A hundred yards down the drive he could see the cluster of activity in and around Noone's brightly lit garage. There were several detectives-some McCaleb recognized from the Code Killer task force, technicians, videographers from at least two of the agencies involved, and a half dozen uniformed officers standing by.
Moths to the flame, he thought. He watched it all with a strange detachment. His thoughts were on other things. Graciela and Raymond. And Noone. He couldn't stop thinking about the man who called himself Noone. He had been in the same room with him. He had been that close.
He needed a drink, wanted the burning taste of whiskey in his throat, but he knew to take that taste would be the same as putting a gun to his head. He knew that despite the pain cutting through him, he would not give Noone, or whoever he was, that satisfaction. He decided in the darkness of the car that he would live. Despite it all he would live.
He didn't notice the men walking down the drive toward him until they were almost to the Taurus. He flicked on the lights and identified them as Nevins and Uhlig and Arrango. He turned the lights off and waited. They opened the doors of the car and got in, Nevins in the front, the other two in the back, with Arrango directly behind McCaleb.
"Got any heat in th
is thing?" Nevins asked. "It's getting cold out here."
McCaleb started the car but waited to turn the heater on until the engine got warm. He looked in the rearview mirror at Arrango. It was too dark to see if he had a toothpick in his mouth.
"Where's Walters?"
"Busy."
"Okay," Nevins said. "Uh, we came down to tell you it looks like we were wrong about you, McCaleb. I'm sorry. We're sorry. Looks like Noone is the guy. You did good work."
McCaleb only nodded. It was a half-assed apology but he didn't care about that. What he had found out in order to clear his name would be harder to live with than if he had been publicly accused of the murders. Apologies meant nothing to him.
"We know it's been a long night for you and we want to get you on your way. I was thinking we could just kind of get your rundown on how all of this shakes out and then maybe tomorrow you come in and give a formal statement. What do you think?"
"Fine. As far as the formal statement goes, I'll give it to Winston. Not you guys."
"Fair enough. I can understand that. But for now, why don't you tell us how, in your view, how this whole thing works. Can you do that?"
McCaleb leaned forward and switched on the heater. He composed his thoughts for a few moments before beginning.
"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.
"You know, you could've busted it. It was all there in the book. It was waiting for you."
"Fuck you, McCaleb."
He walked away, following the two agents back toward Noone's garage. McCaleb smiled slightly. He had to admit that in spite of everything he still wasn't above the guilty pleasure of tweaking Arrango.
* * *
McCaleb sat in the car for a few more minutes before leaving. It was late, past ten o'clock, and he was wondering where to go. He had not talked to Graciela yet and he looked forward to the task with a mixture of dread and relief, the latter coming from knowing that one way or another their relationship would be clearly defined soon. The problem he had was that he wasn't sure that he wanted to deliver his tidings at night. His news seemed better delivered during the unflinching light of day.
He put his hand on the ignition and took one last look up the drive toward the lighted garage where his life had been so brutally changed. He saw that the light cast from the garage and across the driveway was moving. He guessed that the overhead light had been disturbed somehow and was swinging. Something occurred to him then and he took his hand off the ignition.
McCaleb stepped out of the Taurus and without hesitation ducked under the yellow tape. The uniform officer in charge of entry to the crime scene said nothing. He had probably inferred-wrongly-that McCaleb was a detective, having watched three of the lead investigators walk down and sit in the car with him.
He walked to the periphery of the light and waited until he could catch Jaye Winston's eye. She was standing with a clipboard and writing down descriptions of the warehouse's contents. Every item in the place was being tagged and taken.
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When Winston stepped out of the way of one of the technicians, she glanced out into the darkness and McCaleb caught her attention with a wave. She walked out of the garage and over to him. She had a cautious smile on her face.