“Do you believe that to be your husband on the images with Stacey?”
“No. I don’t know who that was.”
“How can you be sure?”
“My husband has a birthmark. A discoloration on his back. I said he wasn’t smart, but he was at least smart enough not to appear on that web site.”
Bosch thought about this. Though he did not doubt Kate Kincaid’s story, he also knew that hard evidence backing it up would be needed to prosecute Kincaid. For the same reason she felt she could not bring her story to the authorities, Bosch needed to be able to go into the district attorney’s office with Sam Kincaid solidly locked down by the evidence. Right now all he had was a wife saying evil things about her husband. The fact that Kincaid apparently was not the man in the web site images with his stepdaughter was a major loss of corroborative evidence. He thought about the searches. Teams were descending on Kincaid’s home and office at that moment. It was Bosch’s hope that they would find evidence that would prove his wife’s story.
“Your last note to Howard Elias,” he said. “You warned him. You said your husband knew. Did you mean your husband knew that Elias had found the secret web site?”
“At the time, yes.”
“Why?”
“Because of the way he was acting — on edge, suspicious of me. He asked me if I had been on his computer. It made me think that they must have known someone was poking around. I sent the message, but now I’m not so sure.”
“Why is that? Howard Elias is dead.”
“I’m not sure he did that. He would have told me.”
“What?”
Bosch was thoroughly confused by her logic.
“He would have told me. He told me about Stacey, why wouldn’t he tell me about Elias as well? And the fact that you know about the web site. If they thought Elias knew, wouldn’t they have closed it down or hidden it somewhere else?”
“Not if they were just going to kill the intruder instead.”
She shook her head. She didn’t see it the way Bosch obviously did.
“I still think he would’ve told me.”
Still confused, Bosch said, “Wait a minute. Are you talking about the confrontation you mentioned at the start of this interview?”
Bosch’s pager went off and he reached down and silenced it without taking his eyes off Kate Kincaid.
“Yes.”
“Well, when was this confrontation?”
“Last night.”
“Last night?”
Bosch was shocked. He had jumped to the conclusion that the confrontation she had mentioned had been weeks or even months earlier.
“Yes. After you left. I knew by the questions you asked that you had probably found my notes to Howard Elias. I knew you would find Charlotte’s Web. It was a matter of time.”
Bosch looked down at his pager. The number belonged to Lindell’s cell phone. The emergency code 911 was printed on the little screen after it. He looked back up at Kate Kincaid.
“So I finally summoned the courage I didn’t have for all those months and years. I confronted him. And he told me. And he laughed at me. He asked me why I cared now since I didn’t care while Stacey was alive.”
Now Bosch’s cell phone began to ring inside his briefcase. Kate Kincaid slowly stood up.
“I’ll let you take that in private.”
As he reached to his briefcase, he watched her pick her purse up and walk across the room in the direction of the hallway to her dead daughter’s bedroom. Bosch fumbled with the briefcase’s release but eventually got it open and got to the phone. It was Lindell.
“I’m at the house,” the FBI agent said, his voice tight with adrenaline and excitement. “Kincaid and Richter are here. It’s not very pretty.”
“Tell me.”
“They’re dead. And it doesn’t look like it was an easy ride for them. They were knee-capped, both of them shot in the balls . . . You still with the wife?”
Bosch looked in the direction of the hallway.
“Yes.”
Just as he said it he heard a single popping sound from down the hallway. He knew what it was.
“Better bring her over here,” Lindell said.
“Right.”
Bosch closed the phone and placed it back in the briefcase, his eyes still on the hallway.
“Mrs. Kincaid?”
There was no answer. All he heard was the rain.
32
BY the time Bosch cleared the scene in Brentwood and got up the hill to The Summit it was almost two o’clock. Driving through the rain on the way he could think only of Kate Kincaid’s face. He had gotten to Stacey’s room less than ten seconds after hearing the shot, but she was already gone. She had used a twenty-two and placed the muzzle in her mouth, firing the bullet up into her brain. Death was instant. The kick of the gun had knocked it out of her mouth and onto the floor. There was no exit wound, often the case with a twenty-two. She simply appeared as though she was sleeping. She had wrapped herself in the pink blanket that had been used by her daughter. Kate Kincaid looked as though she was serene in death. No mortician would be able to improve on that.
There were several cars and vans parked in front of the Kincaid residence. Bosch had to park so far away that his raincoat was soaked through by the time he got to the door. Lindell was there waiting for him.
“Well, this certainly’s turned all to shit,” the FBI agent said by way of greeting.
“Yeah.”
“Should we have seen it coming?”
“I don’t know. You never can tell what people are going to do.”
“How’d you leave it over there?”
“The coroner and SID are still there. A couple RHD bulls — they’re handling it.”
Lindell nodded.
“I saw what I needed to see. Show me what you have here.”
They went into the house and Lindell led the way to the huge living room where Bosch had sat with the Kincaids the afternoon before. He saw the bodies. Sam Kincaid was in the same spot on the couch where Bosch had last seen him. D.C. Richter was on the floor below the window that looked out across the Valley. There was no jetliner view now. It was just gray. Richter’s body was in a pool of blood. Kincaid’s blood had seeped into the material covering the couch. There were several technicians working in the room and lights were set up. Bosch saw that numbered plastic markers had been put in place where .22-caliber shells had been located on the floor and other furniture.
“You have the twenty-two over in Brentwood, right?”
“Yeah, that’s what she used.”
“You didn’t think about searching her before you started talking, huh?”
Bosch looked at the FBI agent and shook his head slightly in annoyance.
“Are you kidding me? It was a voluntary Q&A, man. Maybe you’ve never done one over there at the bureau, but rule number one is you don’t make the subject feel like a suspect before you even start. I didn’t search and it would have been a mistake if — ”
“I know, I know. Sorry I asked. It’s just that . . .”
He didn’t finish but Bosch knew what he was getting at. He decided to change the subject.
“The old man show up?”
“Jack Kincaid? No, we sent people to him. I hear he is not taking it well. He’s calling every politician he ever gave money to. I guess he thinks maybe the city council or the mayor will be able to bring his son back.”
“He knew what his son was. Probably knew all the time. That’s why he’s making the calls. He doesn’t want that to come out.”
“Yeah, well, we’ll see about that. We’ve already found digital video cameras and editing equipment. We’ll tie him to Charlotte’s Web. I feel confident of that.”
“It won’t matter. Where’s Chief Irving?”
“On the way.”
Bosch nodded. He stepped close to the couch and bent over, his hands on his knees, to look closely at the dead car czar. His eyes were open and his jaw was set
in a final grimace. Lindell had been right when he’d said it had not been an easy ride down. He thought of Kincaid’s expression in comparison to his wife’s death look. There was no comparison.
“How do you think it went down?” he asked. “How’d she get the two of them?”
He continued to stare at the body while Lindell spoke.
“Well, you shoot a man in the balls and he’s going to be pretty docile. From the blood on them, I’d say that was where they got it first. Once she got past that point, I think she had pretty good control of the situation.”
Bosch nodded.
“Richter wasn’t armed?”
“Nope.”
“Anybody find a nine-millimeter around here yet?”
“No, not yet.”
Lindell gave Bosch another we fucked up look.
“We need that nine,” Bosch said. “Mrs. Kincaid got them to admit what they did with the girl but they didn’t say anything about Elias. We need to find that nine to tie them in and end this thing.”
“Well, we’re looking. If anybody finds the nine, we’ll be the first to know.”
“You have people on Richter’s home, office and car? I’m still putting my money on him being the shooter.”
“Yeah, we’re on it but don’t count on anything there.”
Bosch tried to read the FBI agent but couldn’t. He knew that something was not being said.
“What?”
“Edgar pulled his file from the police academy this morning.”
“Right. He was a washout way back. How come?”
“Turned out the guy was blind in one eye. The left eye. He was trying to make it through with nobody noticing. He did all right until the weapons course. He couldn’t shoot for shit on the range. That’s how they found out. Then they washed him out.”
Bosch nodded. He thought of the expert shooting that had taken place on Angels Flight and he knew this new information on Richter changed things. He knew it was unlikely Richter could have been the shooter.
His thoughts were disrupted by the muted roar of a helicopter. He looked up at the windows and saw a helicopter from Channel 4 drifting down and hovering outside the house, about fifty yards away. Through the rain Bosch could barely make out the cameraman in the open sliding door.
“Fucking vultures,” Lindell said. “You’d think the rain would keep them inside.”
He stepped back to the doorway where there was a panel of light switches and other electronic controls. He pushed a round button and kept his finger on it. Bosch heard the whine of an electric motor and watched an automatic window shade drop down over the windows.
“They can’t get near this place on the ground,” Bosch said. “Because of the gates. So the air’s their only shot.”
“I don’t care. Let’s see what they get now.”
Bosch didn’t care either. He looked back down at the bodies. Judging by the coloring and the slight odor already apparent in the room, he guessed that the two men had been dead for several hours. He wondered if this meant that Kate Kincaid had been in the house all that time with the bodies or had gone to Brentwood and spent the night in her daughter’s bed. He guessed the latter.
“Anybody come up with a TOD?” he asked.
“Yeah. Coroner puts time of death at sometime last night, anywhere from nine to midnight. He said the blood flow indicates they could have been alive as long as a couple hours from first to last bullet. It looks like she wanted some information from them but they didn’t want to give it up — at first.”
“Her husband talked. I don’t know about Richter — she probably didn’t care about him. But her husband told her everything about Stacey. Then, I guess, she finished him. Finished them both. It wasn’t her husband with the girl on the site images. You should get the coroner to take torso photos of Richter and do a comparison. It might have been him.”
Lindell gestured toward the bodies.
“Will do. So what do you think? She did this last night and then what, went up to bed?”
“Probably not. I think she spent the night in the Brentwood house. It looked to me like the girl’s bed had been slept in. She had to see me and tell the story before she could finish her plan.”
“The finish being her suicide.”
“Right.”
“That’s hard-core, man.”
“Living with her daughter’s ghost, what she let happen to her, that was even more hard-core. Suicide was the easy way out.”
“Not if you ask me. Like I keep thinking about Sheehan, man, and wondering. I mean, how dark out could it have been for him to do that?”
“Just hope you never know. Where are my people?”
“Down the hall in the office. They’re handling that.”
“I’ll be in there.”
Bosch left Lindell then and went down the hall to the office. Edgar and Rider were silently conducting a search. The items they wished to seize were being piled on top of the desk. Bosch nodded his hello and they did the same. A quiet pallor hung over the investigation now. There would be no prosecution, no trial. It would be left to them to explain what had happened. And they all knew the media would be skeptical and the public might not believe them.
Bosch approached the desk. There was a lot of computer equipment with connecting wires. There were boxes of thick disks used for data storage. There was a small video camera and an editing station.
“We’ve got a lot, Harry,” Rider said. “We would have had Kincaid cold on the pedo net. He’s got a Zip drive with all the images from the secret web site on it. He’s got this camera — we think it’s what was used to take the videos of Stacey.”
Rider, who was wearing gloves, lifted the camera up to show him.
“It’s digital. You take your movie, plug the camera into this dock here and download what you want. Then you upload it on your computer and put it out on the pedo net. All from the privacy of your home. It’s literally as easy as — ”
She didn’t finish. Bosch turned to see what the distraction was and saw Deputy Chief Irving standing in the doorway of the room. Behind him stood Lindell and Irving’s adjutant, Lieutenant Tulin. Irving moved into the office and handed his wet raincoat to Tulin. He told him to take it and to wait in another room of the house.
“Which room, Chief?”
“Any room.”
Irivng closed the door after Tulin left. That left him, Lindell and Bosch’s team in the office. Bosch had an idea what was coming. The fixer was here now. The investigation was about to go through the spin cycle where decisions and public pronouncements would be made based on what best served the department, not the truth. Bosch folded his arms and waited.
“I want to finish this up now,” Irving said. “Take what you have found and clear out.”
“Chief,” Rider said, “we still have a lot of the house to cover.”
“I do not care. I want the bodies removed and then I want the police removed.”
“Sir,” she persisted, “we still haven’t found the weapon. We need that weapon to — ”
“And you are not going to find it.”
Irving stepped further into the room. He looked around and when his eyes finally came to Bosch’s face they stopped.
“I made a mistake listening to you. I hope the city does not have to pay for it.”
Bosch paused a moment before responding. Irving never took his eyes off him.
“Chief, I know that you are thinking in . . . political terms about this. But we have to continue our searches of this house and other locations related to the Kincaids. We need to find the weapon in order to prove that — ”
“I just told you, you are not going to find the weapon. Not here or anywhere else related to the Kincaids. All this was, Detective, was a diversion. A diversion that caused three deaths.”
Bosch didn’t know what was going on but he felt defensive. He gestured toward the equipment on the desk.
“I wouldn’t call this a diversion. Kincaid was involved in a
major pedophile ring and we — ”
“Your assignment was Angels Flight. I obviously gave you people too much latitude and now here we are.”
“This is Angels Flight. That’s why we need the weapon. It will tie it all — ”