The Narrows

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