"They just pulled in, got out of the car and walked away," Ritz said. "Nobody remembers anything. They process about a thousand cars a day in that center. There are no cameras and there is no record but the rental record."

And it is those 328 miles that Ritz and the other detectives wonder about.

"That is a lot of miles," said Detective Peter Echerd, Ritz's partner. "That car could have gone a lot of places. You figure a hundred and sixty-four out and a hundred and sixty-four back in and you've got a hell of a big circle to cover."

Nevertheless, the investigators are trying to do just that, hoping their efforts will uncover a clue that makes the circle smaller and possibly leads to the answers to the six missing family men.

"It's tough," said Ritz. "These guys all have families and we're doing our best for them. But at the moment we have lots of questions and not any answers."

The article was nicely drawn with the Times's signature method of finding larger significance to a story than the story itself. In this case it was the theorizing that the disappearance of these men was symptomatic of the newest permutation of Las Vegas as an adult playground. It reminded me of a time I was working a case in which a man who owned an auto garage cut the hydraulic lines on a lift and a seven-thousand-pound Cadillac came down and crushed his longtime partner beneath it. A Times reporter called me up for the details for a story and then asked if the killing was symptomatic of the tightening economy in which money woes turned partners against partners. I said, no, I thought it was symptomatic of one guy not liking his partner screwing his wife.

Larger implications aside, the story was a plant. I could tell that. I had done the same thing with the same reporter in my time. Ritz was trolling for information. Since half the missing men were either from or going to Los Angeles, why not call the Times, plant a story with the cop reporter and see who and what pops up?

One person who popped up was Terry McCaleb. He obviously read the story on January 7, the day it was published, because his first set of notes on the file flap was dated as such. The notes were short and cryptic. At the top of the flap the name Ritz and a phone number with a 702 area code had been jotted down. Beneath this, McCaleb had written: 1/9-

call back-png 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 "i 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 as soon as I can. Thank you."

There was a beep and I hesitated, not sure I wanted to make contact yet. But I went ahead anyway.

"Uh, yes, hello, my name is Harry Bosch. I'm an investigator from Los Angeles and would like to talk to you about Terry McCaleb."

I left my cell phone number and closed the phone, still not sure I had made the right move but thinking that leaving it short and cryptic was the best way to go. It might get her to call me back.

The last reference in the notes was the most intriguing of all. McCaleb had written "Zzyzx" and then asked if it was possible and if so, how. This had to be a reference to Zzyzx Road. This was a leap. A giant leap. McCaleb had received photos from someone who had watched and photographed his family. That same person had taken photographs at Zzyzx Road near the California-Nevada border. Somehow McCaleb saw a possible link and was asking himself if one mystery could be related to the other. Could he have set something in motion by calling Vegas Metro and offering to help with the missing men case? To be able to make the leap to such questions was impossible. It meant I was missing something. I was missing the bridge, the piece of information that made the jump possible. McCaleb had to have known some- thing that wasn't noted in the file but that made the possibility of a link seem real to him.

The last notations to check were the two Las Vegas phone numbers written on the border of the file along with the name William Bing. I opened my cell again and called the first number. The call was picked up by a recorded voice announcing that I had reached the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino. I hung up as the voice began to list a number of options I could choose from.