I had once been close but not in the last few years and now it was too late. I didn't know where the trust she spoke of came from.
"What did Terry tell you about me that would make you want to trust me? To choose me. You and I don't really even know each other, Graciela."
She nodded like that was a fair question and assessment.
"At one time in our marriage Terry told me everything about everything. He told me about the last case you two worked together. He told me what happened and how you saved each other's life. On the boat. So that makes me think I can trust you."
I nodded.
"He one time told me something about you that I always remembered," she added. "He told me there were things about you he didn't like and that he didn't agree with. I think he meant the way you do things. But he said at the end of the day, after all the cops and agents he had known and worked with, if he had to pick somebody to work a murder case with, that it would be you. Hands down. He said he would pick you because you wouldn't give up."
I felt a tightness around my eyes. It was almost like I could hear Terry McCaleb saying it. I asked a question, already knowing the answer.
"What is it you want me to do for you?"
"I want you to investigate his death."
CHAPTER 3
Even though I knew it was going to be what she would ask me, Graciela McCaleb's request gave me pause. Terry McCaleb had died on his boat a month earlier. I had read about it in the Las Vegas Sun. It had made the papers because of the movie. FBI agent gets heart transplant and then tracks down his donor's killer. It was a story that had Hollywood written all over it and Clint Eastwood played the part, even though he had a couple decades on Terry. The film was a modest success at best, but it still gave Terry the kind of notoriety that guaranteed an obituary notice in papers across the country. I had just gotten back to my apartment near the strip one morning and picked up the Sun. Terry's death was a short story in the back of the A section.
A deep tremor rolled through me when I read it. I was surprised but not that surprised. Terry had always seemed to be a man on borrowed time. But there was nothing suspicious in what I had read or what I had then heard when I went out to Catalina for the funeral service. It had been his heart-his new heart-that had failed. It had given him six good years, better than the national average for a heart transplant patient, but then it had succumbed to the same factors that destroyed the original.
"I don't understand," I said to Graciela. "He was on the boat, a charter, and he collapsed. They said… his heart."
"Yes, it was his heart," she said. "But something new has come up. I want you to look into it. I know you're retired from the police, but Terry and I watched on the news last year what happened here."
Her eyes moved around the room and she gestured with her hands. She was talking about what had happened in my house a year earlier when my first post-retirement investigation had ended so badly and with so much blood.
"I know you still look into things," she said. "You're like Terry was. He couldn't leave it behind. Some of you are like that. When we saw on the news what happened here, that's when Terry said he would want you if he had to pick someone. I think what he was telling me was that if anything ever happened to him, I should go to you."
I nodded and looked at the floor.
"Tell me what has come up and I will tell you what I can do."
"You have a bond with him, you know?"
I nodded again.
"Tell me."
She cleared her throat. She moved to the edge of the couch and began to tell it.
"I'm a nurse. I don't know if you saw the movie but they made me a waitress in the movie. That's not right. I'm a nurse. I know about medicine. I know about hospitals, all of it."
I nodded and didn't say anything to stop her.
"The coroner's office conducted an autopsy on Terry. There were no signs of anything unusual but they decided to