Looking at himself in the mirror, he pulled open the collar of his shirt and studied the small wound left by the morning’s biopsy. It never got a chance to heal. There had been so many biopsies that the incision was always just about covered with new skin when it was opened up again and the artery probed once more. He knew it would be a permanent mark, like the thirteen-inch scar running down his chest. As he stared at himself, his thoughts drifted to his father. He remembered the permanent marks, the tattoos, left on the old man’s neck. The coordinates of a radiation battle that served only to prolong the inevitable.

The temperature reading was normal. He washed the thermometer and put it back, then took the clipboard with the temperature log sheet off the towel hook and wrote the date and time. In the last column, under TEMPERATURE, he drew another dash indicating no change.

After hanging up the board, he leaned into the mirror to look at his eyes. Green flecked with gray, the corneas showing hairline cracks of red. He stepped back and pulled the shirt off. The mirror was small but he could still see the scar, whitish pink and thick, ugly. He did this often, appraised himself. It was because he couldn’t get used to the way his body looked now and the way it had so fully betrayed him. Cardiomyopathy. Fox had told him it was a virus that could have been waiting in the walls of his heart for years, only to bloom by happenstance and to be nurtured by stress. The explanation meant little to him. It didn’t ease the feeling that the man he had once been was gone now forever. He sometimes felt when he looked at himself he was looking at a stranger, someone beaten down and left fragile by life.

After pulling his shirt back on, he went into the forward berth. It was a triangular-shaped room that followed the shape of the bow. There was a double bunk on the port side and a bank of storage compartments to starboard. He had turned the lower berth into a desk and used the overhead berth for storage of cardboard boxes full of old bureau files. Marked on the side of these boxes were the names of the investigations. They said POET, CODE, ZODIAC, FULL MOON and BREMMER. Two of the boxes were marked VARIOUS UNSUBS. McCaleb had copied most of his files before leaving the bureau. It was against policy but no one stopped him. The files in the boxes came from various cases, open and closed. Some filled whole cartons, some were thin enough to share space in the same boxes. He wasn’t sure why he had copied everything. He hadn’t opened any of the boxes since he had retired. But at various times he had thought he would write a book or maybe even continue his investigations of the open cases. Largely, though, he just liked the idea of having the files as a physical accounting or proof of what he had done with that part of his life.

McCaleb sat down at the desk and turned on the wall-mounted light. Momentarily, his eyes fell on the FBI badge he had carried for sixteen years. It was now encased in a Lucite block and hanging on the wall above the desk. Tacked to the wall next to it was a photo of a young girl with braces, smiling at the camera. It had been copied from a yearbook many years before. McCaleb frowned at the memory and looked away, his eyes falling to the desk clutter.

There was a handful of bills and receipts scattered on the desk, an accordion file full of medical records, a stack of manila files that were mostly empty, three fliers from competing dry-docking services and the Cabrillo Marina dockage rules book. His checkbook was open and ready to be put to use but he couldn’t bring himself to wade into the mundane task of paying bills. Not now. He was restless but it was not because of a paucity of things on his mind. He couldn’t stop thinking about the visit from Graciela Rivers and the sudden change it had put him through.

He sorted through the clutter on the desk until he found the newspaper clip that had brought the woman to his boat. He had read it the day it was published, cut it out and then tried to forget about it. But that had been impossible. The story had drawn a procession of victims to his boat. The mother whose teenage daughter’s body was found mutilated on the beach down in Redondo; the parents whose son had been hanged in an apartment in West Hollywood. The young husband whose wife had gone clubbing on the Sunset Strip one night and had never come back. All of them zombies, left nearly catatonic by grief and the betrayal of their faith in a God who wouldn’t allow such things to happen. McCaleb couldn’t comfort them, he couldn’t help them. He sent them on their way.

He had agreed to the newspaper interview only because he was in the reporter’s debt. When he had been with the bureau, Keisha Russell had always been good to him. She was the kind of reporter who gave some and didn’t always take. She had called him on the boat a month earlier to collect on that debt. She’d been assigned the story for the Times ’s “Whatever Happened to…” column. Since a year earlier she had written a story about McCaleb’s wait for a heart, she wanted to update it now that he had finally received the transplant. McCaleb wanted to decline the invitation, knowing it would disrupt the anonymous life he was now living, but Russell had reminded him of all the times she had helped him-either holding back details of an investigation or putting them into a story, depending on what McCaleb thought would be useful. McCaleb felt he had no choice. He always made good on his debts.

On the day the story was published, McCaleb had taken it as his official badge of has-been status. Usually, the column was reserved for updates on hack politicians who had disappeared from the local scene or people whose fifteen minutes of fame had long ago lapsed. Every now and then it featured a washed-up TV star who was selling real estate or had become a painter because it was his true creative calling.

He unfolded the clip now and reread it.

New Heart, New Start for Former FBI Agent

By Keisha Russell

TIMES STAFF WRITER

It used to be that Terrell McCaleb’s face was a routine fixture on the nightly newscasts of Los Angeles and his words always found space in the local newspapers. It was not a nice routine for him or the city.

An FBI agent, McCaleb was the bureau’s point man in the investigations of the handful of serial killers that plagued Los Angeles and the West in the last decade.

A member of the Investigative Support Unit, McCaleb helped focus the investigations of the local police. Media-savvy and always quotable, he often took the spotlight-a move that sometimes rubbed the locals and his supervisors in Quantico, Va., the wrong way.

But it has been more than two years since he has made even a blip on the public radar screen. These days, McCaleb no longer carries a badge or a gun. He says he doesn’t even own a standard-issue navy blue FBI suit anymore.

More often than not he wears old blue jeans and torn T-shirts and can be found restoring his 42-foot fishing boat, The Following Sea. McCaleb, who was born in Los Angeles and grew up in Avalon on nearby Catalina Island, currently lives on the boat in a San Pedro marina but plans eventually to moor the vessel in Avalon Harbor.

Recovering from heart transplant surgery, McCaleb says hunting serial killers and rapists is the furthest thing from his mind these days.

McCaleb, 46, says he gave his heart to the bureau-his doctors say severe stress triggered a virus that led to the near-fatal weakening of his original heart-but doesn’t miss it.

“When you go through something like this, it changes you more than just physically,” he said in an interview last week. “It puts things in perspective. Those FBI days seem like a long time ago. I’ve got a new start now. I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do with it but I’m not too worried. I’ll find something.”