The mall was a two-block stretch of San Fernando Road that went through the middle of town and was lined with small shops, businesses, bars, and restaurants. It was in a historic part of town and was anchored on one end by a large department store that had been closed and vacant for several years, the JC Penney sign still on the front facade. Most of the other signs were in Spanish and the businesses catered to the city’s Latino majority.
It was a three-minute drive from the police station to the scene of the shooting. Lourdes drove her unmarked city car. Bosch tried his best to put the Borders case and what had been discussed in the war room behind him so that he could concentrate on the task at hand.
“So what do we know?” he asked.
“Two dead at La Farmacia Familia,” Lourdes said. “Called in by a customer who went in and saw one of the victims. Patrol found the second in the back. Both employees. Looks like a father and son.”
“The son an adult?”
“Yes.”
“Gang affiliation?”
“No word.”
“What else?”
“That’s it. Gooden and Sanders headed out when we got the call. Sheriff’s forensics have been called.”
Gooden and Sanders were the two coroner’s investigators who worked out of the sub-leased office in the detective bureau. It was a lucky break having them so close, since they would have to examine the bodies before the detectives and forensics techs could take over the scene. While Bosch had solved three cold case murders since coming to work for San Fernando, this would be the first live murder investigation, so to speak, since his arrival. The protocol and pace would be quite different.
As Lourdes turned in to the mall, Bosch looked ahead and saw that the investigation was already starting off wrong. Three patrol cars were parked directly in front of the farmacia, and that was too close. Traffic through the two-lane mall had not been stopped and drivers were going slowly by the business, hoping to catch a glimpse of the horrors that were inside.
“Pull in here,” he said. “Those cars are too close and I’m going to move them back and shut down the street.”
Lourdes did as he instructed and parked the car in front of a bar called the Tres Reyes and well behind a growing crowd of onlookers gathering near the drugstore.
Bosch and Lourdes were soon out of the car and weaving through the crowd. Yellow crime scene tape had been strung between the patrol cars, and two officers stood conferring by the trunk of one car while another stood with his hands on his belt buckle, watching the front door of the farmacia.
Bosch saw Chief Valdez standing near the open front door of the store with Sisto and Luzon. It appeared that they were waiting for the all-clear from the coroner’s investigators before entering the crime scene. That was the only good thing Bosch had seen so far. He gave a short, low whistle that drew their attention and then spun a finger in the air to signal he wanted to group everybody into a meeting.
Everyone gathered between two of the patrol cars. Bosch looked at Valdez and waited for the chief to give him the nod to take charge.
“Okay, we need to protect the crime scene a lot better than this,” he began. “Patrol, I want you guys to move your cars out and to shut down this block on either end. Tape it up. Nobody comes in without authorization. I then want clipboards on either end, and you write down the name of every cop or lab rat that comes into the crime scene. You write down the license-plate number of every car you let out too.”
Nobody moved.
“You heard him,” Valdez said. “Let’s move it, people. We’ve got two citizens on the floor in there. We need to do right by them.”
The patrol officers moved quickly to their cars to carry out Bosch’s orders. That left him with the chief and the three detectives as the black-and-whites backed out on either side of them. Bosch once more looked at Valdez for confirmation of his authority, because he didn’t expect his next moves to go over well.
“I still have this, Chief?” he asked.
“All yours, Harry,” Valdez said. “How do you want to do it?”
“Okay, we want to limit people inside,” Bosch said. “That’s going to be Lourdes and me. Sisto and Luzon, I want you going down the street in both directions. We’re looking for witnesses and cameras. We—”
“We got here first,” Luzon said. “It should be our case.”
At about forty, Luzon was the oldest of the three investigators, but he had the least experience as a detective. He was moved into the unit six months ago after twelve years in patrol. He had gotten the promotion to fill the void left by Lourdes’s leave of absence and then Valdez found the money in the budget to keep him on board at a time when there was a spike in property crimes attributed to a local gang called the SanFers.
“That’s not how it works,” Bosch said. “Lourdes is going to be lead. I need you two to go two blocks in both directions. We’re looking for the getaway vehicle. We need video and I need you guys to go find it.”
Bosch could see Luzon fighting back the urge to again argue Bosch’s orders. But he looked at the chief and saw no indication that the man ultimately in charge disagreed with Bosch.
“You got it,” he said.
He headed in one direction while Sisto headed off in the other. Sisto did not complain.
“Take down plates and phone numbers,” Bosch called to them.
“Harry,” Valdez said. “Let’s talk for a second.”
He stepped away from Lourdes and Bosch followed. The chief spoke quietly.
“Look, I get what you’re doing with those two. But I want you on lead. Bella’s good but this is what you do.”
“I get that, Chief. But you don’t want me. We have to think about when this gets into court. You don’t want a part-timer on lead. You want Bella. They try character assassination on her, and she’ll eat their lunch after what happened last year and then her coming back to the job. On top of that, she’s good and she’s ready for this. And besides, I may have some problems coming up soon from downtown. You don’t want me on lead.”
Valdez looked at him. He knew that “downtown” meant from outside the SFPD, from Bosch’s past.
“We’ll have to talk about that later,” he said. “So where do you want me?”
“Media relations,” Bosch said. “They’ll get wind of this soon enough and will start showing up. ‘The little town with a murder problem’—it’ll be a story. You need to set up a command post and corral them. That and see if you can get more bodies from patrol to come in and help with the canvass. There were people in all of these shops. Somebody saw something.”
“You got it. What if I can get Penney’s to open up and we use that as the CP? I know the guy who owns the building.”
Bosch looked across the street and down half a block at the facade of the long-closed department store.
“If you can get lights on in there, go for it. What about Captain Trevino? Is he around?”
“I have him covering the shop while I was here. You need him?”
“No, I can fill him in on things later.”
The chief headed off and Lourdes came up to Bosch.
“Let me guess, he didn’t want me as lead,” she said.
“He wanted me,” Bosch said. “But it was no reflection on you. I said no. I said it was your case.”
“Does that have something to do with the three visitors you had this morning?”
“Maybe. Why don’t you stick your head inside and see how Gooden and Sanders are doing? I want to know when we’re going to get in there. I’ll call the sheriff’s lab and get an ETA.”
“Roger that.”
Lourdes headed toward the door of the farmacia and Bosch pulled his phone. The SFPD was so small, it did not have its own forensics team. It used the Sheriff’s Department unit and that often put it in second position for services. Bosch called the liaison at the lab and was told a team was on the road to San Fernando as they spoke. Bosch reminded the liaison that they were working a double murd
er and asked for a second team, but he was denied that request. He was told there wasn’t a second team to spare.
As he hung up, he noticed one of the patrol officers he had given orders to earlier standing at the new crime scene perimeter at the end of the block. Yellow tape had been strung completely across, closing the road through the mall. The patrol officer had his hands on his belt buckle and was watching Bosch.
Bosch put his phone away and walked up the street to the yellow tape and the officer manning it.
“Don’t look in,” Bosch said. “Look out.”
“What?” the officer asked.
“You’re watching the detectives. You should be watching the street.”
Bosch put his hand on the officer’s shoulder and turned him toward the tape.
“Look outward from a crime scene. Look for people watching, people who don’t fit. You’d be surprised how many times the doer comes back to watch the investigation. Anyway, you’re protecting the crime scene, not watching like one of these looky-loos. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“Good.”
The forensic team of two evidence technicians arrived shortly after that, and it was another thirty minutes before Bosch, Lourdes, and the team entered the farmacia to go to work. They wore gloves and paper booties. As he entered behind Lourdes, Bosch leaned forward and whispered.
“Make sure you take time just to observe.”
“Okay.”
When Bosch was a young homicide detective, he worked with a partner named Frankie Sheehan, who always kept an old milk crate in the trunk of their unmarked car. He’d carry it into every scene, find a good vantage point, and put the crate down. Then he’d sit on it and just observe the scene, studying its nuances and trying to take the measure and motive of the violence that had occurred there. Sheehan had worked the Danielle Skyler case with Bosch and had sat on his crate in the corner of the room where the body was strewn nude and viciously violated on the floor. But Sheehan was long dead now and would not be taking the free fall awaiting Bosch.
4
La Farmacia Familia was a small operation that appeared to Bosch to rely mostly on the business of filling prescriptions. In the front section of the store, there were three short aisles of shelved retail items relating to home remedies and care, almost all of it in Spanish-language boxes imported from Mexico. There were no racks of greeting cards or point-of-purchase candy displays. There was no cold case stocked with sodas and water. The business was nothing like the chain pharmacies scattered across the city.
The entire back wall of the store was the actual pharmacy, where there was a counter that fronted the storage area of medicines and a work area for filling prescriptions. The front section of the store seemed completely untouched by the crime that had occurred here. Bosch moved down an aisle to the left, which brought him to a half door leading to the rear of the pharmacy counter. Immediately he saw blood spatter on the white plastic drawers behind the counter. He then saw Gooden squatting behind the counter next to the first body. It was a man on his back, his hands up and palms out by his shoulders. He was wearing a white pharmacist’s jacket with a name embroidered on it.
“Harry, meet José,” Gooden said. “At least he’s José until we confirm it with fingerprints. Through and through gunshot to the chest.”
He formed a gun with his thumb and finger as he gave the report and pointed the barrel against his chest.
“We’re talking point-blank,” he added. “Maybe six to twelve inches. Guy probably had his hands up and they still shot him.”
Bosch didn’t say anything. He was in observation mode. He would form his own impressions about the scene and determine if the victim’s hands were up or down when he was shot. He didn’t need that information from Gooden.
He moved into a hallway to the left and came up behind Lourdes. The passageway led to the work and storage areas and a restroom. There was a door marked Exit that presumably led to a back alley. In the hallway, Sanders, the second coroner’s tech, was on his knees next to a second body, also a male. He wore a pale blue pharmacist’s coat. He was facedown, one arm reaching out toward the door. There were blood smears on the floor, leading to the body. Lourdes walked down the side edge of the hallway, careful not to step in the blood.
“And here we have José Jr.,” Sanders said. “We have three points of impact: the back, the rectum, the head—most likely in that order.”
Bosch stepped away from Lourdes and crossed over the blood smears to the other side of the hallway so he could get an unobstructed view of the body. José Jr. was lying with his right cheek against the floor. He looked like he was in his midtwenties, a meager growth of whiskers on his chin.
The blood and bullet wounds told the tale. At the first sign of trouble, José Jr. had made a break for the rear door, running for his life down the hallway. He was knocked down with the first shot to the upper back. On the floor, he turned to look behind him, spilling his blood on the floor. He saw the shooter coming and turned to try to crawl toward the door. The shooter had come up and shot him again, this time in the rectum, then stepped up and ended it with the shot to the back of the head.
Bosch had seen the rectum shot in prior cases, and it drew his attention.
“The shot up the pipe—how close?” he asked.
Sanders reached over and used one gloved hand to pull the seat of the victim’s pants out and taut so the bullet entry could be clearly seen. With the other hand he pointed to where the cloth had been burned.
“He got up in there,” Sanders said. “Point-blank.”
Bosch nodded. His eyes tracked up to the wounds on the back and head. It appeared to him that the two entrance wounds he could see were neater and smaller than the one shot to José Sr.’s chest.
“You thinking two different weapons?” he asked.
Sanders nodded.
“If I were betting,” he said.
Bosch nodded in reply.
“Okay, do what you have to do,” he said.
He carefully stepped back down the hallway and moved into the pharmacy’s work and drug-storage area. He started by looking up and immediately saw the camera mounted in the corner of the ceiling over the door.
Lourdes entered the room behind him. He pointed up and she saw the camera.
“Need the feed,” he said. “Hopefully off-site or to a website.”
“I can check that,” she said.
Bosch surveyed the room. Several of the drawers where stores of pills were kept were pulled out and dropped to the floor, and loose pills were scattered across it. He knew the difficult task of inventorying what had been in the pharmacy and what was taken lay ahead. Some of the drawers on the floor were larger than others and he guessed that they had contained more commonly prescribed drugs.
On the worktable, there was a computer. There were also tools for measuring out and bottling pills in plastic vials as well as a label printer.
“Let’s get the photographer in here before we start stepping on pills and crunching them,” he said.
“I’ll go get him,” Lourdes said.
After Lourdes went out, Bosch moved into the hallway again. He knew they would be here until late into the night. The whole place needed to be photographed and videoed, and then the forensics team would gather and document every pill and piece of evidence in the place. A homicide case moved slowly from the center out.
In the old days he would have stepped out at this point to smoke a cigarette and contemplate things. This time he went out through the front door to just think. Almost immediately his phone vibrated in his pocket. The caller ID was blocked.
“That wasn’t cool, Harry,” Lucia Soto said when he answered.
“Sorry, we had an emergency,” he said. “Had to go.”
“You could have told us. I’m not your enemy on this. I’m trying to run interference for you.”
“Are they with you right now?”
“No, of course not. This is just you and me.”
/> “Can you get me a copy of the report you turned in to Kennedy?”
“Harry …”
“I thought so. Lucia, don’t say you’re on my side, running interference for me if you’re not. You know what I mean?”
“That’s not fair and you know it.”
“Look, I’m in the middle of things here. Give me a call back if you change your mind. I remember there was a case that meant a lot to you once. We were partners and I was right there for you. I guess things are different now.”
He disconnected. He felt a pang of guilt. He was being heavy-handed with Soto but felt he needed to push her toward giving him what he needed. He dropped the thought when he saw Lourdes walking up with a troubled look on her face.
“What’s wrong?”
“I came out and Garrison signaled me over to the tape. He had the wife and mother there and she was hysterical. I just put her in a car and they’re taking her to the station.”
Bosch nodded. It was a good move.
“You up for talking with her?” he asked. “We can’t leave her over there too long.”
“I don’t know,” Lourdes said. “I just ruined her life. Everything that’s important to her is suddenly gone.”
“I know, but you have to establish rapport. You never know, this case could go on for years. She’s going to need to trust the person carrying it and it shouldn’t be me.”
“Okay, I can do it.”
“Focus on the son. His friends, what he did when he wasn’t working, enemies, all of that stuff. Find out where he lived, whether he had a girlfriend. And ask her if José Sr. was having any problems with him at work. The son is going to be the key to this.”