The Black Ice (1993)

  “Well, you have a basic understanding of the fruit fly right? It chews up the citrus crop, can bring the entire industry to its knees, umpty-ump millions lost, no orange juice in the morning, et cetera, et cetera, the decline of civilization as we know it. Right?”

  He nodded and she went on, talking very quickly.

  “Okay, we seem to have an annual medfly infestation here. I’m sure you’ve seen the quarantine signs on the freeways or heard the helicopters spraying malathion at night.”

  “They make me dream of Vietnam,” Harry said.

  “You must have also seen or read about the movement against malathion spraying. Some people say it poisons people as well as these bugs. They want it stopped. So, what’s a Department of Agriculture to do? Well, one thing is step up the other procedure they use to get these bugs.

  “The USDA and state Medfly Eradication Project release billions of sterile medflies all across southern California. Millions every week. See, the idea is that when the ones that are already out there mate, they’ll do it with sterile partners and eventually the infestation will die out because less and less are reproduced. It’s mathematical, Harry. End of problem—if they can saturate the region with enough sterile flies.”

  She stopped there but Bosch still didn’t get it.

  “Geez, this is all really fantastic, Teresa. But does it get to a point eventually or are we just—”

  “I’m getting there. I’m getting there. Just listen. You are a detective. Detectives are supposed to listen. You once told me that solving murders was getting people to talk and just listening to them. Well, I’m telling it.”

  He held his hands up. She went on.

  “The flies released by the USDA are dyed when they are in the larval stage. Dyed pink, so they can keep track of them or quickly separate the sterile ones from the nonsterile ones when they check those little traps they have in orange trees all over the place. After the larvae are dyed pink, they are irradiated to make them sterile. Then they get released.”

  Harry nodded. It was beginning to sound interesting.

  “My entomologist examined the two samples taken from Juan Doe #67 and this is what he found.” She referred to some notes in the file. “The adult fly obtained from the deceased’s stomach was both dyed and sterilized, female. Okay, nothing unusual about that. Like I said, they release something like three hundred million of these a week—billions over the year—and so it would seem probable that one might be accidentally swallowed by our man if he was anywhere in, say, southern California.”

  “That narrows it down,” Bosch said. “What about the other sample?”

  “The larva is different.” She smiled again. “Dr. Braxton, that’s the bug doctor, said the larval specimen was dyed pink as to USDA specifications. But it had not yet been irradiated—sterilized—when it went up our Juan Doe’s nose.”

  She unfolded her hands and put them down at her sides. Her factual report was concluded. Now it was time to speculate and she was giving him the first shot.

  “So inside his body he has two dyed flies, one sterilized and one not sterilized,” Bosch said. “That would lead me to conclude that shortly before his death, our boy was at the location where these flies are sterilized. Millions of flies around. One or two could have gotten in his food. He could have breathed one in through the nose. Anything like that.”

  She nodded.

  “What about the wheat dust? In the ears and hair.”

  “The wheat dust is the food, Harry. Braxton said that is the food used in the breeding process.”

  He said, “So I need to find where they make, where they breed, these sterile flies. They might have a line on Juan Doe. Sounds like he was a breeder or something.”

  She smiled and said, “Why don’t you ask me where they breed them.”

  “Where do they do it, Teresa?”

  “Well, the trick is to breed them where they are already a part of the natural insect population or environment and therefore not a problem in case some happen to slip out the door before getting their dose of radiation.

  “And, so, the USDA contracts with breeders in only two places; Hawaii and Mexico. In Hawaii there are three breeding contractors on Oahu. In Mexico there is a breeder down near Zihuatenejo and the largest of all five is located near—”

  “Mexicali.”

  “Harry! How did you know? Did you already know all of this and let me—”

  “It was just a guess. It fits with something else I’ve been working on.”

  She looked at him oddly and for a moment he was sorry he had spoiled her fun. He drained his beer mug and looked around for the squeamish waiter.

  10

  She drove him back to get his car near the Red Wind and then followed him out of downtown and up to his home in the hills. She lived in a condo in Hancock Park, which was closer, but she said she had been spending too much time there lately and wanted a chance to see or hear the coyote. He knew her real reason was that it would be easier for her to extricate herself from his place than to ask him to leave hers.

  Bosch didn’t mind, though. The truth was, he felt uncomfortable at her place. It reminded him too much of what L.A. was coming to. It was a fifth-floor loft with a view of downtown in a historic residence building called the Warfield. The exterior of the building was still as beautiful as the day in 1911 it was completed by George Allan Hancock. Beaux Arts architecture with a blue-gray terra-cotta facade. George hadn’t spared the oil money and from the street the Warfield, with its fleurs-de-lys and cartouches, showed it. But it was the interior—the current interior, that is—that Bosch found objectionable. The place had been bought a few years back by a Japanese firm and completely gutted, then retrofitted, renovated and revamped. The walls in each apartment were knocked down and each place was nothing but a long, sterile room with fake wood floors, stainless-steel counters and track lighting. Just a pretty shell, Bosch thought. He had a feeling George would’ve thought the same.

  At Harry’s house they talked while he lit the hibachi on the porch and put an orange roughy filet on the grill. He had bought it Christmas Eve and it was still fresh and large enough to split. Teresa told him the County Commission would probably informally decide before New Year’s on a permanent chief medical examiner. He wished her good luck but privately wasn’t sure he meant it. It was a political appointment and she would have to toe the line. Why get into that box? He changed the subject.

  “So, if this guy, this Juan Doe, was down in Mexicali—near where they make these fruit flies—how do you think his body got all the way up here?”

  “That’s not my department,” Teresa said.

  She was at the railing, staring out over the Valley. There were a million lights glinting in the crisp, cool air. She was wearing his jacket over her shoulders. Harry glazed the fish with a pineapple barbecue sauce and then turned it over.

  “It’s warm over here by the fire,” he said. He dawdled a bit over the filet and then said, “I think what it was is that maybe they didn’t want anybody checking around that USDA contractor’s business. You know? They didn’t want that body connected to that place. So they take the guy’s body far away.”

  “Yeah, but all the way to L.A.?”

  “Maybe they were . . . well, I don’t know. That is pretty far away.”

  They were both silent with their thoughts for a few moments. Bosch could hear and smell the pineapple sizzling as it dripped on the coals. He said, “How do you smuggle a dead body across the border?”

  “Oh, I think they’ve smuggled larger things than that across, don’t you?”

  He nodded.

  “Ever been down there, Harry, to Mexicali?”

  “Just to drive through on my way to Bahia San Felipe, where I went fishing last summer. I never stopped. You?”

  “Never.”

  “You know the name of the town just across the border? On our side?”

  “Uh uh.”

  “Calexico.”

  “You’re
kidding? Is that where—”

  “Yup.”

  The fish was done. He forked it onto a plate, put the cover on the grill and they went inside. He served it with Spanish rice he made with Pico Pico. He opened a bottle of red wine and poured two glasses. Blood of the gods. He didn’t have any white. As he put everything on the table he saw a smile on her face.

  “Thought I was a TV dinner guy, didn’t you?”

  “Crossed my mind. This is very nice.”

  They clicked glasses and ate quietly. She complimented him on the meal but he knew the fish was a little too dry. They descended into small talk again. The whole time he was looking for the opening to ask her about the Moore autopsy. It didn’t come until they were finished.

  “What will you do now?” she asked after putting her napkin on the table.

  “Guess I’ll clear the table and see if—”

  “No. You know what I mean. About the Juan Doe case.”

  “I’m not sure. I want to talk to Porter again. And I’ll probably look up the USDA. I’d like to know more about how those flies get here from Mexico.”

  She nodded and said, “Let me know if you want to talk to the entomologist. I can arrange that.”

  He watched her as she once again got the far-off stare that had been intruding all night.

  “What about you?” he asked. “What will you do now?”

  “About what?”

  “About the problems with the Moore autopsy.”

  “That obvious, huh?”

  He got up and cleared the plates away. She didn’t move from the table. He sat back down and emptied the bottle into the glasses. He decided he would have to give her something in order for her to feel comfortable giving him something in return.

  “Listen to me, Teresa. I think you and I should talk about things. I think we have two investigations, probably three investigations, here, that may all be part of the same thing. Like different spokes on the same wheel.”

  She brought her eyes up, confused. “What cases? What are you talking about?”

  “I know that all of what I’m about to say is outside your venue but I think you need to know it to help make your decision. I’ve been watching you all night and I can tell you have a problem and don’t know what to do.”

  He hesitated, giving her a chance to stop him. She didn’t. He told her about Marvin Dance’s arrest and its relation to the Jimmy Kapps murder.

  “When I found out Kapps had been bringing ice over from Hawaii, I went to Cal Moore to ask about black ice. You know, the competition. I wanted to know where it comes from, where you get it, who’s selling it, anything that would help me get a picture of who might’ve put down Jimmy Kapps. Anyway, the point is I thought Moore shined me on, said he knew nothing, but today I find out he was putting together a file on black ice. He was gathering string on my case. He held stuff back from me, but at the same time was putting something together on this when he disappeared. I got the file today. There was a note. It said ‘Give to Harry Bosch’ on it.”

  “What was in it? The file.”

  “A lot. Including an intelligence report, says the main source of black ice is probably a ranch down in Mexicali.”

  She stared at him but said nothing.

  “Which brings us to our Juan Doe. Porter bails out and the case comes to me today. I am reading through the file and I’ll give you one guess who it was that found the body and then disappeared the next day.”

  “Shit,” she said.

  “Exactly. Cal Moore. What this means I don’t know. But he is the reporting officer on the body. The next day he is in the wind. The next week he is found in a motel room, a supposed suicide. And then the next day—after the discovery of Moore has been in the papers and on TV—Porter calls up and says, ‘Guess what, guys, I quit.’ Does all of this sound aboveboard to you?”

  She abruptly stood up and walked to the sliding door to the porch. She stared through the glass out across the pass.

  “Those bastards,” she said. “They just want to drop the whole thing. Because it might embarrass somebody.”

  Bosch walked up behind her.

  “You have to tell somebody about it. Tell me.”

  “No. I can’t. You tell me everything.”

  “I’ve told you. There isn’t much else and it’s all a jumble. The file didn’t have much, other than that the DEA told Moore that black ice is coming up from Mexicali. That’s how I guessed about the fruit fly contractor. And then there’s Moore. He grew up in Calexico and Mexicali. You see? There are too many coincidences here that I don’t think are coincidences.”

  She still faced the door and he was talking to her back, but he saw the reflection of her worried face in the glass. He could smell her perfume.

  “The important thing about the file is that Moore didn’t keep it in his office or his apartment. It was in a place where someone from IAD or RHD wouldn’t find it. And when the guys on his crew found it, there was the note that said to give it to me. You understand?”

  The confused look in the glass answered for her. She turned and moved into the living room, sitting on the cushioned chair and running her hands through her hair. Harry stayed standing and paced on the wood floor in front of her.

  “Why would he write a note saying give the file to me? It wouldn’t have been a note to himself. He already knew he was putting the file together for me. So, the note was for someone else. And what does that tell us? That he either knew when he wrote it that he was going to kill himself. Or he—”

  “Knew he was going to be killed,” she said.

  Bosch nodded. “Or, at least, he knew he had gotten into something too deep. That he was in trouble. In danger.”

  “Jesus,” she said.

  Harry approached and handed her her wineglass. He bent down close to her face.

  “You have to tell me about the autopsy. Something’s wrong. I heard that bullshit press release they put out. Inconclusive. What is that shit? Since when can’t you tell if a shotgun blast to the face killed somebody or not?

  “So tell me, Teresa. We can figure out what to do.”

  She shrugged her shoulders and shook her head, but Harry knew she was going to tell.

  “They told me because I wasn’t a hundred percent—Harry, you can’t reveal where you got this information. You can’t.”

  “It won’t get back to you. If I have to, I will use it to help us, but it won’t get back to you. That’s my promise.”

  “They told me not to discuss it with anyone because I couldn’t be completely sure. The assistant chief, Irving, that arrogant prick knew just where to stick it in. Talking about the County Commission deciding soon about my position. Saying they would be looking for a chief ME who knew discretion. Saying what friends he had on the commission. I’d like to take a scalpel—”

  “Never mind all of that. What was it you weren’t one hundred percent sure about?”

  She drained her wineglass. Then the story came out. She told him that the autopsy had proceeded as routine, other than the fact that in addition to the two case detectives observing it, Sheehan and Chastain from IAD, was assistant police chief Irving. She said a lab technician was also on hand to make the fingerprint comparisons.

  “The decomposition was extensive,” Teresa said. “I had to take the fingertips off and spray them with a chemical hardening agent. Collins, that’s my lab tech, was able to take prints after that. He made the comparison right there because Irving had brought exemplars. It was a match. It was Moore.”

  “What about the teeth?”

  “Dental was tough. There wasn’t much left that hadn’t been fragged. We made a comparison between a partial incisor found in the tub and some dental records Irving came up with. Moore had had a root canal and it was there. That was a match, too.”

  She said she began the autopsy after confirming the identity and immediately concluded the obvious: that damage from the double-barrel-shotgun blast was massive and fatal. Instantly. But it was while exa
mining the material that had separated from the body that she began to question whether she could rule Moore’s death a suicide.

  “The force of the blast resulted in complete cranial displacement,” she said. “And, of course, the autopsy protocol calls for examination of all vital organs, including the brain.

  “Problem was the brain was mostly unmassed due to the wide projectile pattern. I believe I was told the pellets came from a double-barrel, side-by-side configuration. I could see that. The projectile pattern was very wide. Nevertheless, a large portion of the frontal lobe and corresponding skull fragment were left largely intact, though it had been separated.