“That’s the million-dollar question. We don’t know. He was keeping it in his head instead of his files. But that’s why I want the case. Because if he had a bead on somebody, that somebody’s a pretty good suspect for the Angels Flight murders.”
Lindell looked down at his smoking coffee and was quiet a long moment.
“Sounds like lawyer bullshit to me. Grandstanding. How was he gonna find the killer if you guys on the PD didn’t? That is, if the killer really wasn’t Michael Harris, like every cop and white person in this town believes.”
Bosch hiked his shoulders.
“Even if he was wrong — even if he was going to name somebody as a smoke screen, it could have made him a target.”
He purposely wasn’t telling Lindell everything — particularly about the mystery notes. He wanted the FBI agent to think that Bosch’s team would be chasing rainbows while he would be commanding the real investigation.
“So you run with that and I chase down bad cops, is that the deal?”
“Pretty much. Chastain should have a head start for you. First of all, he’s the most familiar with the Black Warrior thing. He handled the IAD investigation on it. And — ”
“Yeah, but he cleared everybody on it.”
“Maybe he messed up. Or maybe he was told to clear everybody.”
Lindell nodded that he understood the suggestion.
“Also, his crew was supposedly going through Elias’s files yesterday and making a list. And I just brought in five more boxes of files. From all of that you’ll get a list of guys to talk to. I think you’re in good shape.”
“If I’m in such great shape why are you giving this side of things to me?”
“ ’Cause I’m a nice guy.”
“Bosch, you’re holding out.”
“I just have a hunch, that’s all.”
“That what, Harris really was framed?”
“I don’t know. But something wasn’t right with the case. I want to find out what it was.”
“So meantime I’m stuck with Chastain and his crew.”
“Yup. That’s the deal.”
“Well, what am I going to do with them? You just told me Chastain’s a leak.”
“Send them out for coffee and then run away and hide.”
Lindell laughed.
“This is what I would do,” Bosch then added on a serious note. “I’d put two of them on Elias and two on Perez. You know, doing the paper, managing the evidence, taking the autopsies — which will probably be today anyway. That will keep them busy and out of your way. Regardless of whether it’s them or not, you’ve got to put at least one body on Perez. We’ve treated her as an also-ran, which she obviously was. But you gotta do the due diligence on it or it can come back on you if you ever go to court and the lawyer asks why Perez wasn’t pursued as the primary target.”
“Right, right. We gotta cover all the bases.”
“Right.”
Lindell nodded but said nothing further.
“So come on, do we have a deal?” Bosch prompted.
“Yeah. Sounds like a plan to me. But I want to know what you and your people are doing. You keep in touch.”
“You got it. Oh, and by the way, one of the IAD guys is a Spanish speaker. Fuentes. Put him on Perez.”
Lindell nodded and pushed back from the table. He left his coffee cup there, untouched. Bosch took his with him.
On his way through the anteroom to Irving’s conference room, Bosch noticed that the deputy chief’s adjutant was not at his desk. He saw a telephone message pad on the blotter and reached down and grabbed it as he passed by. He put it in his pocket and entered the conference room.
Bosch’s partners and the IAD men were now in the conference room. Irving was there also. It was very crowded. After some brief introductions the floor was turned over to Bosch, who briefed the newcomers and Irving on the investigation up to that point. He left out specific details about the visit to Regina Lampley’s apartment, making that part of the investigation appear to be at a dead end. He also made no mention at all of his barroom talk with Frankie Sheehan. When he was done he nodded to Irving, who then took the floor. Bosch moved over to the wall and leaned next to a bulletin board Irving had apparently had installed for the investigators to use.
Irving began speaking of the political tensions surrounding the case like a storm pressure cell. He mentioned that protest marches were scheduled that day in front of three of the south end police stations and at Parker Center. He said City Councilman Royal Sparks and Reverend Preston Tuggins were scheduled to be guests that morning on a local meet-the-press type of television show called Talk of L.A. He said the chief of police had met with Tuggins and other South Central church leaders the night before to call in markers and urge them to call for calm and restraint from the pulpits during the morning’s services.
“We are sitting on a powder keg here, people,” Irving said. “And the way to defuse it is to solve this case one way or the other . . . quickly.”
While he talked, Bosch took out the phone message pad and wrote on it. He then checked the room to make sure all eyes were on Irving and quietly tore off the top sheet. He reached over and tacked it to the bulletin board and then nonchalantly moved inch by inch down the wall and away from the board. The sheet he had put on the board had Chastain’s name on it. In the message section it said: “Harvey Button called, said thanks for the tip. Will call back later.”
Irving wound up his comments with a mention about the Channel 4 story.
“Someone in this room leaked information to a television reporter yesterday. I am warning you people that we will not have this. That one story was your grace period. One more leak and you people will be the ones under investigation.”
He looked around the room at the LAPD faces, to make sure the message was clear.
“Okay, that is it,” he finally said. “I will leave you to it. Detective Bosch, Agent Lindell? I would like to be briefed at noon on our progress.”
“No problem, Chief,” Lindell said before Bosch could respond. “I will be talking to you then.”
Fifteen minutes later Bosch was walking down the hallway to the elevators again. Edgar and Rider were following behind.
“Harry, where are we going?” Edgar asked.
“We’ll work out of Hollywood station.”
“What? Doing what? Who is going to run the show?”
“Lindell. I made a deal. He runs the show. We do something else.”
“Suits me,” Edgar said. “Too many agents and too much brass around here anyway.”
Bosch got to the elevators and pushed the call button.
“What exactly are we doing, Harry?” Rider asked.
He turned and looked at them.
“Starting over,” he said.
22
THE squad room was completely empty, which was unusual, even for a Sunday. Under the twelve-and-twelve readiness plan all detectives not assigned to time-critical investigations were to be in uniform and out on the street. The last time such deployment had been instituted was after a major earthquake had rocked the city in 1994. The Elias murder was a social rather than a geologic cataclysm, but its magnitude was just as great.
Bosch carried the box containing Elias’s files on the Black Warrior case to what they called the homicide table, a raft of desks pushed up against each other to create a huge boardroom-like table. The section that belonged to team one, Bosch’s team, was at the end, near an alcove of file cabinets. He put the box in the middle, where his team’s three desks conjoined.
“Dig in,” he said.
“Harry . . . ,” Rider said, not happy with his lack of direction.
“Okay, listen, this is what I want. Kiz, you’re going to be master of the ship. Jerry and I will work the field.”
Rider groaned. Master of the ship meant that she was to be the keeper of the facts. She was to become familiar with all facets of the files, a walking compendium of the details of the investigation.
Since they were starting off with an entire carton of files, this was a lot of work. It also meant she would not be doing much, if anything, in the way of field investigation. And no detective wants to be stuck in a windowless and empty office all day.
“I know,” Bosch said. “But I think you are best for it. We’ve got a ton of stuff here and your mind and your computer will be best for keeping track of it.”
“Next time I get the field.”
“There might not be a next time if we don’t do something this time. Let’s see what we got here.”
They spent the next ninety minutes going through Elias’s files on the Harris case, pointing out specific items to each other when they seemed to warrant attention, other times tossing files back into the box when their importance was not apparent.
Bosch spent his time with the investigative files that Elias had subpoenaed from the LAPD. He had a copy of the entire RHD murder book. Reading the daily investigative summaries turned in by Sheehan and other RHD detectives, Bosch noted that the case seemed initially to be lacking a focus. Stacey Kincaid had been taken from her room in the night, her abductor jimmying the lock on a bedroom window with a screwdriver and then grabbing the girl while she slept. Initially suspecting an inside job, the detectives interviewed the gardeners, the pool man, a local maintenance man, a plumber who had been in the house two weeks earlier, as well as the sanitation men and postal workers who had the route that included the Kincaids’ home in Brentwood. Teachers, janitors and even fellow students from Stacey’s private school in West Hollywood were interviewed. But the wide net being thrown by Sheehan and his cohorts was pulled in after the lab came up with the fingerprint match between the missing girl’s schoolbook and Michael Harris. The case then shifted to a complete focus on locating Harris, taking him into custody and then attempting to make him confess to what he had done with the girl.
The second section of the file also dealt with the crime scene investigation and efforts to connect Harris to the body through scientific analysis and technology. This proved to be a dead end. The girl’s body had been found by two homeless men in a vacant lot. The body was naked and badly decomposed after four days. It had apparently been washed after her death and therefore was lacking any significant microscopic evidence that could be analyzed and connected to Harris’s apartment or car. Though the girl appeared to have been raped, no bodily fluids belonging to her attacker were recovered. Her clothes were never found. The ligature that had been used to strangle her had been cut away by her killer and that, too, was never found. In the end, the only evidence that connected Harris to the crime was his fingerprints on the book in Stacey’s bedroom and the disposal of the body in the vacant lot less than two blocks from his apartment.
Bosch knew that was usually more than enough to win a conviction. He had worked cases in which convictions were won with less evidence. But that was before O.J. Simpson, before juries looked at police in Los Angeles with suspicious and judging eyes.
Bosch was writing a list of things to do and people to be interviewed when Edgar cried out.
“Yahtzee!”
Bosch and Rider looked at him and waited for an explanation.
“Remember the mystery notes?” Edgar said. “The second or third one said license plates prove he’s innocent?”
“Wait a second,” Bosch said.
He opened his briefcase and took out the file containing the notes.
“The third one. ‘License plates prove his innocence.’ Came in April five. Innocence spelled wrong.”
“Okay, here’s Elias’s file on subpoena returns. Got one here dated April fifteen for Hollywood Wax and Shine. That’s where Harris worked before they arrested him. It seeks — quote — ‘copies of all records and receipts of customer orders and billings containing license plate numbers of said customers between the dates of April one and June fifteen of last year.’ It’s gotta be what the note was talking about.”
Bosch leaned back in his chair to think about this.
“This is a subpoena return, right? It was approved.”
“Right.”
“Well, April one and June fifteen, that’s seventy-five days. There — ”
“Seventy-six days,” Rider corrected.
“Seventy-six days. That would be a lot of receipts. We got none here and there weren’t any in the office I saw. There should be boxes of receipts.”
“Maybe he returned them,” Edgar said.
“You said he subpoenaed copies.”
Edgar hiked his shoulders.
“Another thing, why those days?” Bosch asked. “The murder of the girl was July twelve. Why not subpoena the receipts right up until then?”
“Because he knew what he was looking for,” Rider said. “Or knew within the parameters of those dates.”
“Knew what?”
They dropped into silence. Bosch’s mind was running the puzzle but coming up empty. The license plate clue was still as mysterious as the Mistress Regina lead. Then by joining the two mysteries he came up with something.
“Pelfry again,” he said. “We need to talk to him.”
He stood up.
“Jerry, get on the phone. See if you can run down Pelfry and set up an interview for as soon as you can get it. I’m going out back for a few minutes.”
Normally, when Bosch told his partners he was going out back it meant he was going outside the building to have a smoke. As he walked toward the rear doorway, Rider called after him.
“Harry, don’t do it.”
He waved without turning back.
“Don’t worry, I’m not.”
Out in the lot Bosch stood and looked around. He knew he had done some of his best analytical thinking while standing outside smoking. He hoped he could put something together now, without the aid of a smoke. He looked into the sand jar that the station’s smokers used and saw a half-smoked cigarette protruding from the sand. There was lipstick on it. He decided he wasn’t that desperate yet.
He thought about the mystery notes. He knew because of postmarks and the markings made on the notes by Elias that they had numbers two, three and four, but not the first note. The meaning of the fourth note — the warning Elias was carrying with him — was obvious. The third note they now had a line on, thanks to the subpoena return Edgar had come across. But the second note — dot the i humbert humbert — still made no sense to Bosch.
He looked at the cigarette protruding from the sand again but once more dismissed it. He remembered he carried no matches or lighter anyway.
It suddenly occurred to him that the one other piece of the puzzle that seemed to stand out as making no sense, at least so far, was the Mistress Regina connection — whatever that was.
Bosch turned and quickly headed back into the station. Edgar and Rider had their heads down and into the paperwork when he came to the table. Bosch immediately began looking through the stacks of files.
“Who has the Mistress Regina file?”
“Over here,” Edgar said.
He handed over the file and Bosch opened it and took out the photo printout of the dominatrix. He then put it down next to one of the mystery notes and tried to make a comparison between the printing on the note and the printing below the photo — the web page address. It was impossible for him to determine if the same hand had printed both lines. He was no expert and there were no obvious anomalies in the printing to make a comparison easy.
When Bosch took his hand off the printout, its top and bottom edges rose an inch off the desk, telling him that at one time the page had been folded top and bottom, as if to be placed in an envelope.
“I think this is the first note,” he said.
Bosch had often found that when he made a logic breakthrough it was like clearing a clog in a drain. The pipe was open and other breaks soon came. It happened now. He saw what he could have and maybe should have seen all along.
“Jerry, call Elias’s secretary. Right now. Ask her if he had a color printer in the office. We
should have seen this — I should have seen it.”
“Seen what?”
“Just make the call.”
Edgar started looking through a notebook for a phone number. Rider got up from her spot and came around next to Bosch. She looked down at the printout. She was now riding on Bosch’s wave. She saw where he was going.
“This was the first one,” Bosch said. “Only he didn’t keep the envelope because he probably thought it was crank mail.”
“But it probably was,” Edgar said, the phone to his ear. “We were there, the woman didn’t know the man and didn’t know what the hell we — ”