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.”

McCaleb almost didn’t get the new start. Because he has a blood type found in less than one percent of the population, his wait for a suitable heart lasted almost two years.

“He really strung it out,” said Dr. Bonnie Fox, the surgeon who performed the transplant. “We probably would have lost him or he would have become too weak to undergo the surgery if we’d had to wait much longer.”

McCaleb is out of the hospital and already physically active after only eight weeks. He says that only on occasion does he think about the adrenaline-pumping investigations that once occupied him.