The Narrows - Michael Connelly [39]
1/ 9—
call back—png
2/ 2
Hinton—702 259-4050
n/ c story?
2/ 28
Zzyzx—possible? how?
miles
Written along the side border of the file were two more phone numbers with 702 area codes. These were followed with the name William Bing.
I reread the notes and looked at the clipping again. I noticed for the first time that McCaleb had circled two things on the newspaper article, the mention of the 328 miles found to have been put on the rental car and the word circle in Echerd’s comment about the circle of the investigation being 164 miles in any direction. I didn’t know why he had circled these two things but I did know what most of the notes on the flap meant. I had spent more than seven hours reading through McCaleb’s files. I had seen notation after notation in file after file. The ex-agent used a shorthand of his own invention but one that was decipherable because in some files he spelled out what he chose to abbreviate in others.
Immediately recognizable to me was what he meant by the use of “DD.” It meant “definitely dead,” a classification and conclusion McCaleb made on the wide majority of the missing cases he reviewed. Also easy to decipher was “png,” which meant persona non grata, meaning McCaleb’s offer to help with the investigation was not received well or not received at all.
McCaleb had also found some significance in the age of the missing men. He wrote down an average age and then pulled out three of the victims’ ages because they were within two years of each other and very close to the average. This appeared to me to be notes relating to a victim profile but there wasn’t one in the file and I didn’t know if McCaleb ever proceeded past the notes stage.
The “find intersection” reference seemed to also be part of this profile. McCaleb was referring to a geographic or lifestyle intersection of the six missing men. Just as the Metro detective had put forth in the Times article, McCaleb was operating under the belief that there had to be a connection between these men. Yes, they were from as far apart as Ottawa and Los Angeles and did not know one another, but there had to be a point where they came together in some way.
“Cycle disruption—there are more” I suspected was a reference to the frequency of the disappearances. If someone was abducting and killing these men, as McCaleb believed, there would usually be a recognizable time cycle. Serial killers operate this way in most cases, with violent psychosexual urges building and then subsiding after a kill. McCaleb had apparently worked out the cycle and found holes in it—missing victims. He believed there were more than six men missing.
What puzzled me most about the notes was the reference to “triangle theory” and the phrase “1 point gives 3” below it. This was something I had not seen come up in the previous files and I did not know what was meant by it. It was noted in conjunction with references to the car and the 328 miles that had been put on it. But the more I played with it, the more puzzled I became by it. It was code or shorthand for something I didn’t know. It bothered me but there was nothing I could do about it with what I currently knew.
The January 9 reference was to a call back from Ritz. McCaleb had probably called and left a message and the Vegas detective had called back, listened to his pitch and maybe his profile, and had said not interested. This was not surprising. The FBI was often unwanted by the locals. The clash of egos between feds and locals was a routine part of the job. A retired bureau man would likely be treated no differently. Terry McCaleb was persona non grata.
That might have been it for this file and this case but then came the February 2 notation. A name and a number. I opened my cell phone and called the number, not caring about how late it was. Or early, depending on how you looked at it. I got a recording of a female voice.
“This is Cindy Hinton at the Las Vegas Sun. I can’t take your call right now but it is important to me. Please leave your name and number and I will call you back