After McCaleb gave him the information, Carruthers cleared his throat.

“So, you talk to Kate lately?” he asked.

“She called the hospital a couple days after the transplant. But I was still out of it. We didn’t talk long.”

“Hmmm. Well, you ought to call her just to let her know you’re okay.”

“I don’t know. How is she doing?”

“Fine, I guess. Haven’t heard anything to the contrary. You should call her.”

“It’s better just to leave it alone, I think. We’re divorced, remember?”

“Whatever. You’re the boss. I’ll send her an E-mail just to let her know you’re still breathing out there.”

After a few more minutes of catching up, McCaleb clicked off the phone and went back up to the salon for more coffee. He was out of milk so he took it black. It was hair of the dog that bit him but he had to keep the momentum. If things went as he hoped, he would be on the road most of the day.

It was now near seven and almost time to call Winston. He went out onto the deck to take a look at the morning. The marine layer had come in strong and thick and the other boats looked ghostlike in the mist. It would be a few hours before it burned off and anybody got a look at the sun. He looked over at Buddy Lockridge’s boat and saw no activity yet.

At 7:10 he sat at the salon table with his legal pad and punched Jaye Winston’s number into the cordless phone. He caught her just as she was sitting down at her desk.

“I just walked in,” she said. “And I didn’t expect to hear from you for a couple of days. That was a lot of paper I gave you.”

“Yeah, well, once I got into it, I couldn’t put it down, I guess.”

“What did you think?”

McCaleb knew she was asking what he thought of her investigation, asking him to make a judgment.

“I think you run a tight show but I already knew that from before. I liked all the moves you made on this one, Jaye. No complaints from me.”

“But?”

“But I’ve got a few questions I wrote down here if you’ve got a few minutes. Maybe a couple of suggestions if you want ’em. A lead or two maybe.”

Winston laughed good-naturedly.

“You federal guys always have questions, always have suggestions, always have new leads.”

“Hey, I’m not federal anymore.”

“Well, I guess it sticks in the blood, then. Go ahead.”

McCaleb looked over the notes he had taken the day before and started right in on the Mikail Bolotov angle.

“First off, Ritenbaugh and Aguilar, you close to them?”

“Don’t even know them. They’re not in homicide. The captain pulled them out of burglaries and gave them to me for a week. That was when we were running down the three-strikes names. What about them?”

“Well, I think one of the names that they scratched off that list needs a second look.”

“Which one?”

“Mikail Bolotov.”

McCaleb heard the rustling of papers as Winston looked for the report from Ritenbaugh and Aguilar.

“Okay, got it. What are you seeing here? Looks like he’s got a solid alibi.”

“Have you ever heard of geographic cross-referencing?”

“What?”

He explained the concept and told her what he had done and how it led to Bolotov. He further explained that Bolotov had been interviewed before the Sherman Market robbery/shooting and therefore the significance of the location of Bolotov’s home and employment to the market murders and one of the HK P7 thefts was not as apparent as it was to the other case. When he was done, Winston agreed that the Russian needed to be rechecked but she was not as enthusiastic about the prospect as McCaleb.

“Look, like I said, I don’t know those two guys, so I can’t vouch for them, but I have to assume they’re not fresh off the boat. I have to assume they could handle an interview like this and check out the alibi.”

McCaleb didn’t say anything.

“Look, I’ve got court this week. I can’t go check this guy out again.”

“I can.”

Now she didn’t say anything.

“I’ll be cool,” McCaleb said. “Just sort of play it by ear.”

“I don’t know, Terry. You’re a citizen now. This might be going too far.”

“Well, think about it. I’ve got some other stuff here to talk about.”

“Fine. What else?”

McCaleb knew that if she didn’t bring up Bolotov again during the conversation, she was giving him unofficial permission to check the Russian out. She just didn’t want to sanction what he was doing.

He glanced down at the legal pad again. He wanted to be careful with what he asked next. He needed to build up to the big questions he had, bring Winston along and not let her think he was second-guessing everything.

“Um, first off, I didn’t see anything in there about the bank card in the Cordell case. I know the guy took the money. Did he take the card?”

“No. It was in the machine. It rolled it out but when he didn’t take it, the machine automatically swallowed it again. It’s a built-in security measure so people don’t leave their cards to be taken.”

McCaleb nodded and drew a check mark next to that question on his pad.

“Okay. Next I have a question about the Cherokee. How come you didn’t put that out to the media?”

“Well, we did put it out but not right away. On that first day we were still evaluating things and didn’t put it into the first press release. I wasn’t sure we should put that out because then the guy might see it and just dump the car. A few days later, when nothing was happening and we were hitting the wall, I put out another press release with the Cherokee in it. Trouble is, Cordell was old news and nobody picked it up. A little weekly paper up there in the desert was the only one to run it. I know, it was a screwup. I guess I should’ve put it all out in the first press release.”

“Not necessarily,” McCaleb said as he drew another check on the pad. “I can see your reasoning.”

He read through the notes on the page again.

“Couple things… In both tapes the shooter says something-after the shots. He’s either talking to himself or the camera. There were no reports on that. Was anything done to-”

“There’s a guy in the bureau here who has a brother who is deaf. He took the tapes to him to see if he could lip-read them. He couldn’t be sure but on the first one-the ATM tape-he thought he said, ‘Don’t forget the cashola’ just as he took the money from the machine. On the other tape he was less sure. He thought he might have said either the same thing or possibly something along the lines of ‘Don’t fuck with the’ something or other. The last word was least clear to him on both tapes. I guess I never typed up a supp on it. You don’t miss a thing, do you?”

“All the time,” McCaleb said. “Would the lip reader know Russian if that was what this guy was saying?”

“What? Oh, you mean if it was Bolotov. No, I doubt his brother knows Russian.”

McCaleb wrote down the possible translations of what the shooter had said. He then drummed the pen against the pad and wondered if he should take his shot now.

“Do you have anything else?” Winston finally asked.

He decided it wasn’t the right moment to bring up Carruthers. At least not directly.

“The gun,” he said.

“I know. I don’t like it, either. The P7 is not your routine scumbag’s choice of firearm. It had to have been stolen. You saw I pulled reports on stolens. But like with everything else, I hit a wall. It got me nowhere.”

“I think it’s a good theory,” McCaleb said. “To a point. I don’t like him keeping it after the first shooting. If it was stolen, I see him throwing that thing as far out into the desert as he can about ten minutes after he takes down Cordell. He then goes and steals another for the next time.”

“No, you can’t say that,” Winston said and McCaleb envisioned her shaking her head. “There is no definitive pattern here. He could have been just as likely to keep the gun because he knew it was valuable. And you have to remember, Cordell was a through-and-through shot. He might have figured the lead wouldn’t be found or if it had hit the bank-like it actually did-it would be too mangled for comparison. Remember, he picked up the brass. He probably believed the gun had at least one more use.”