11

REFRESHED FROM an hour-long nap during which he had no dreams that he could remember, McCaleb made himself a sandwich of white bread and processed cheese. He opened a can of Coke to go with it and went back to the galley table to go through the Gloria Torres case.

He started with the surveillance tape from the Sherman Market. He had seen it twice already in the company of Arrango and Walters but decided he needed to watch it again. He put the tape in and watched it on normal speed, then put what was left of his sandwich in the sink. He couldn’t eat any more. His insides were clenched too tight.

He rewound the tape and started playing it again, this time on slow-motion play. Gloria’s movements seemed languid and relaxed. McCaleb found himself almost ready to return the smile she showed. He wondered what she was thinking. Was the smile for Mr. Kang? McCaleb doubted it. It was a secret smile. A smile for something inside. His guess was that she was thinking about her son and he knew then that she had at least been happy in that final conscious moment.

The tape brought no new ideas, just the rekindling of anger toward the shooter. He put in the crime scene tape next and watched the documentation, measuring and quantification of the carnage. Gloria’s body, of course, was not there and the blood on the floor where she had dropped was minimal-thanks to the Good Samaritan. But the store owner’s corpse was crumpled on the floor behind the counter, blood seemingly surrounding it completely. It made McCaleb think of the old woman he had seen in the store the day before. She stood where her husband had fallen. That took a certain kind of courage, a kind McCaleb didn’t think he had.

After turning off the tape, he started through the stack of reports. Arrango and Walters had not produced as much paper as Winston had. McCaleb tried not to take this to mean anything significant but he couldn’t help it. In his experience, the size of a murder book reflected not only the depth of the investigation but the commitment of the investigators. McCaleb believed there was a sacred bond between the victim and the investigator. All homicide cops understood this. Some took it straight to the heart. Some less so, simply as a matter of psychological survival. But it was there in all of them. It didn’t matter if you had religion, if you believed the soul of the departed watched over you. Even if you believed that all things ended with the final breath, you still spoke for the dead. Your name was whispered on the last breath. But only you heard it. Only you knew it. No other crime came with such a covenant.

McCaleb set aside the thick protocols from the autopsies of Torres and Kang to read last. As with the Cordell file, he knew, the autopsies would provide few salient details beyond what was already obvious. He quickly went through the initial crime reports and next came to a thin sheaf of witness reports. They were statements of people who each had a little part of the whole: a gas station attendant, a passing motorist, a Times pressroom employee who worked with Gloria. There were also investigative summaries, supplemental reports, fact sheets, crime scene charts, ballistics reports and a chronological record of the travels and calls made by the detectives on the case. Last in this section of the stack was the transcript of the never-identified Good Samaritan’s 911 call made after he stumbled into the shooting’s aftermath and tried to save Gloria’s life. The transcript was of a man speaking English with difficulty as he hurriedly reported a shooting. But when the operator offered to switch him to a Spanish-speaker, he declined.

CALLER: I must go. I go now. The girl is shot very bad. The man, he run. He drive away. A black car, like a truck.

OPERATOR: Sir, please stay on the line… Sir? Sir?

That was it. He was gone. He had mentioned the vehicle but gave no description of the suspect.

Following this statement there was a ballistics report identifying the bullets recovered in the market and during the autopsy of Chan Ho Kang as nine-millimeter Federal FMJs. A photo from the store video was analyzed and the weapon was again identified as the HK P7.

It struck McCaleb as he finished an initial reading of the rest of the reports that what was missing from the murder book was a timeline. Unlike the Cordell case, which had only one witness, the Torres case had a variety of minor witnesses and time markers. The detectives apparently had not sat down with all of these and collated them into a timeline. They had not re-created the sequence of incidents that made up the event as a whole.

McCaleb sat back and thought about this for a moment. Why wasn’t it there? Would such a timeline or exact sequence of events even be useful? Probably not initially, he decided. In terms of identifying a killer, it would give little help. And at least initially, that’s all that mattered. But a sequential analysis of the event should have been done later, after the dust had settled, so to speak. McCaleb had often advised investigators who sent their cases to him to create a timeline. It could be useful breaking alibis, finding holes in witness accounts, in simply giving the investigator a better command and knowledge of exactly what had happened.

McCaleb was fully aware that he was Monday morning quarterbacking. Arrango and Walters didn’t have the luxury of coming into a case two months after the fact. Maybe thought of a timeline got lost. They had other concerns and other cases to worry about.

He got up and went to the galley to turn on the coffeemaker. He was feeling fatigued again and had been awake only ninety minutes. McCaleb hadn’t been drinking much coffee since the transplant. Dr. Fox had told him to avoid caffeine and on the occasion that he had ignored that advice and had a cup, it sometimes caused a fluttering sensation in his chest. But he wanted to keep alert and finish his work. He took the risk.

After the coffee was ready, he poured himself a mug, then overpowered it with milk and sugar. He sat back down and silently chastised himself for looking for reasons to excuse Arrango and Walters. They should have taken the time to work the case thoroughly. McCaleb was angry with himself for having thought anything else.

He took up the legal pad and began to read through the witness reports again, noting down the salient times and a brief summary of what each witness brought to the case. He then overlaid various time notations from the other crime reports. It took him an hour to do this, during which time he refilled his mug three times without really thinking about it. When he was finished, he had constructed a timeline on two pages of the pad. The problem, he realized as he studied his work, was that the sequence was inexact in all but a couple of references and contained outright conflicts, if not impossibilities.

10:01P.M.-End of B shift, Los Angles Times pressroom, Chatsworth facility. Gloria punches out.

10:10P.M.-approximate-Gloria leaves with coworker Annette Stapleton. They talk in the parking lot approximately five minutes. Gloria leaves in her blue Honda Civic.

10:29P.M.-Gloria at the Chevron gas station on Winnetka at Roscoe. Self-service credit card sale: $14.40. Attendant Connor Davis recalls Gloria as a regular nighttime customer who would ask about sports scores because he often had a game on the radio. Time ascribed to credit card records.

10:40 to 10:43P.M.-approximate-Motorist Ellen Taaffe traveling east on Sherman Way, windows down, hears popping sound as she passes the Sherman Market. Looks, sees nothing wrong. Two cars in the lot. Sale signs in windows of the market prevent viewing into the store. As she looks, she hears another popping sound but again sees nothing unusual. Timing of sounds ascribed by Taaffe to the beginning of KFWB news report cycle which started at 10:40.