“Well, that’s bullshit. Protecting a killer cop? He should be —”
“Maybe protecting a killer cop. We don’t know. He didn’t know. I think it was probably a just-in-case move.”
“Doesn’t matter. If that’s what he was doing, he shouldn’t have a badge.”
Bosch didn’t say anything to that and Rider wasn’t placated. She shook her head in disgust. Like most cops in the department, she was tired of fuck-ups and cover-ups, of the few tainting the many.
“What about the scratch on the hand?”
Edgar and Rider looked at him with arched eyebrows.
“What about it?” Edgar said. “Prob’ly happened when the shooter pulled off the watch. One of those with the expanding band. Like a Rolex. Knowing Elias, it was prob’ly a Rolex. Makes a nice motive.”
“Yeah, if it was a Rolex,” Bosch said.
He turned and looked out across the city. He doubted Elias wore a Rolex. For all of his flamboyance, Elias was the kind of lawyer who also knew the nuances of his profession. He knew that a lawyer wearing a Rolex might turn jurors off. He wouldn’t wear one. He would have a nice and expensive watch, but not one that advertised itself like a Rolex.
“What, Harry?” Rider said. “What about the scratch?”
Bosch looked back at them.
“Well, whether it was a Rolex or a high-priced watch or not, there’s no blood in the scratch.”
“Meaning?”
“There is a lot of blood in there. The bullet wounds bled out, but there was no blood in the scratch. Meaning I don’t think the shooter took the watch. That scratch was made after the heart stopped. I’d say long after. Which means it was made after the shooter left the scene.”
Rider and Edgar considered this.
“Maybe,” Edgar finally said. “But that vascular system shit is hard to nail down. Even the coroner isn’t gonna be definitive on that.”
“Yeah,” Bosch said, nodding. “So call it gut instinct. We can’t take it to court but I know the shooter didn’t take the watch. Or probably the wallet, for that matter.”
“So what are you saying?” Edgar asked. “Somebody else came along and took it?”
“Something like that.”
“You think it was the guy who ran the train—the one who called it in?”
Bosch looked at Edgar but didn’t answer him. He hiked his shoulders.
“You think it was one of the RHD guys,” Rider whispered. “Another just-in-case move. Send us down the robbery path, just in case it was one of their own.”
Bosch looked at her a moment, thinking about how to respond and how thin the ice was where they now stood.
“Detective Bosch?”
He turned. It was Sally Tam.
“We’re clear and the coroner’s people want to bag ’em and tag ’em if that’s okay.”
“Fine. Hey, listen, I forgot to ask, did you get anything with the laser?”
“We got a lot. But probably nothing that will help. A lot of people ride that car. We probably got passengers, not the shooter.”
“Well, you’ll run them anyway, right?”
“Sure. We’ll put everything through AFIS and DOJ. We’ll let you know.”
Bosch nodded his thanks.
“Also, did you collect any keys from the guy?”
“We did. They’re in one of the brown bags. You want them?”
“Yeah, we’re probably going to need them.”
“Be right back.”
She smiled and went back to the train car. She seemed too cheerful to be at a crime scene. Bosch knew that would wear off after a while.
“See what I mean?” Edgar said. “They gotta be real.”
“Jerry,” Bosch said.
Edgar raised his hands in surrender.
“I’m a trained observer. Just filing a report.”
“Well, you better keep it to yourself,” Bosch whispered. “Unless you want to file it with the chief.”
Edgar turned just in time to see Irving come up to them.
“Well, initial conclusions, Detectives?”
Bosch looked at Edgar.
“Jerry? What were you just saying you observed?”
“Uh, well, uh, at the moment we’re still kind of thinking about all we saw in there.”
“Nothing that doesn’t really jibe with what Captain Garwood told us,” Bosch said quickly, before Rider could say anything that would reveal their true conclusions. “At least, preliminarily.”
“What next, then?”
“We’ve got plenty to do. I want to talk to the train operator again and we’ve got to canvass that residential building for wits. We’ve got next-of-kin notification and we’ve got to get into Elias’s office. When is that help you promised us going to show up, Chief?”
“Right now.”
Irving raised an arm and beckoned Chastain and the three others he stood with. Bosch had known that was probably what they were doing at the scene but seeing Irving waving them over still put a tight feeling in his chest. Irving was well aware of the animosity between IAD and the rank and file, and the enmity that existed between Bosch and Chastain in particular. To put them together on the case told Bosch that Irving wasn’t as interested in finding out who killed Howard Elias and Catalina Perez as he had outwardly expressed. This was the deputy chief’s way of appearing to be conscientious but actually working to cripple the investigation.
“Are you sure you want to do this, Chief?” Bosch asked in an urgent whisper as the IAD men approached. “You know Chastain and I don’t —”
“Yes, it is how I want to do it,” Irving said, cutting Bosch off without looking at him. “Detective Chastain headed up the internal review of the Michael Harris complaint. I think he is an appropriate addition to this investigation.”
“What I’m saying is that Chastain and I have a history, Chief. I don’t think it’s going to work out with —”
“I do not care if you two do not like each other. Find a way to work together. I want to go back inside now.”
Irving led the entourage back into the station house. It was close quarters. No one said anything by way of a greeting to one another. Once inside, they all looked expectantly at Irving.
“Okay, we are going to set some ground rules here,” the deputy chief began. “Detective Bosch is in charge of this investigation. The six of you report to him. He reports to me. I do not want any confusion about that. Detective Bosch runs this case. Now I have arranged for you to set up an office in the conference room next to my office on the sixth floor at Parker Center. There will be added phones and a computer terminal in there by Monday morning. You men from IAD, I want you to be primarily used in the areas of interviewing police officers, running down alibis, that part of the investigation. Detective Bosch and his team will handle the traditional elements of homicide investigation, the autopsy, witness interviews, that whole part of it. Any questions so far?”
The room went stone silent. Bosch was quietly seething. It was the first time he had thought of Irving as a hypocrite. The deputy chief had always been a hard-ass but ultimately a fair man. This move was different. He was maneuvering to protect the department when the rot they were seeking might be inside it. But what Irving didn’t know was that Bosch had accomplished everything in his life by channeling negatives into motivation. He vowed to himself that he would clear the case in spite of Irving’s maneuvers. And the chips would fall where they would fall.
“A word of warning about the media. It will be all over this case. You are not to be distracted or deterred. You are not to talk to the media. All such communications will come through my office or Lieutenant Tom O’Rourke in media relations. Understood?”
The seven detectives nodded.
“Good. That means I will not have to fear picking the Times up off the driveway in the morning.”
Irving looked at his watch and then back at the group.
“I can control you people but not the coroner’s people or anyone else w
ho learns about this through official channels in the next few hours. I figure by ten hundred the media will be all over this with full knowledge of the victims’ identities. So I want a briefing in the conference room at ten hundred. After I am up-to-date I will brief the chief of police and one of us will address the media with the bare minimum of information we wish to put out. Any problem with that?”
“Chief, that barely gives us six hours,” Bosch said. “I don’t know how much more we’ll know by then. We’ve got a lot of legwork to do before we can sit down and start sifting through —”
“That is understood. You are to feel no pressure from the media. I do not care if the press conference is merely to confirm who is dead and nothing else. The media will not be running this case. I want you to run with it full bore, but at ten hundred I want everyone back at my conference room. Questions?”
There were none.
“Okay, then I will turn it over to Detective Bosch and leave you people to it.”
He turned directly to Bosch and handed him a white business card.
“You have all my numbers there. Lieutenant Tulin’s as well. Anything comes up that I should know about, you call me forthwith. I do not care what time it is or where you are at. You call me.”
Bosch nodded, took the card and put it in his jacket pocket.
“Go to it, people. As I said before, let the chips fall where they may.”
He left the room and Bosch heard Rider whisper, “Yeah, right.”
Bosch turned and looked at the faces of the new team, coming to Chastain’s last.
“You know what he’s doing, don’t you?” Bosch said. “He thinks we can’t work together. He thinks we’ll be like those fighting fish that you put in the same bowl and they go nuts trying to get at each other. Meantime, the case is never cleared. Well, it’s not going to happen. Anything anybody in here’s ever done to me or anyone else, forget about it. I let it go. This case is the thing. There are two people in that train that somebody blew away without so much as a second thought. We’re going to find that person. That’s all I care about now.”
He held Chastain’s eyes until he finally saw a slight nod of agreement. Bosch nodded back. He was sure all the others had seen the exchange. He then took out his notebook and opened it to a fresh page. He handed it to Chastain.
“Okay, then,” he said. “I want everybody to write down their names followed by their home and pager numbers. Cell phones, too, if you got ’em. I’ll make a list up and everybody will get copies. I want everybody in communication. That’s the trouble with these big gang bangs. If everybody isn’t on the same wavelength, something can slip through. We don’t want that.”
Bosch stopped and looked at the others. They were all watching him, paying attention. It seemed that for the moment the natural animosities were relaxed, if not forgotten.
“Okay,” he said. “This is how we’re going to break this down from here on out.”
6
One of the men from IAD was a Latino named Raymond Fuentes. Bosch sent him along with Edgar to the address on Catalina Perez’s identification cards to notify her next of kin and to handle the questions about her. It was most likely the dead-end part of the investigation—it seemed apparent that Elias was the primary target—and Edgar tried to protest. But Bosch cut him off. The explanation he would share privately with Edgar later was that he needed to spread the IAD men out in order to give him better control of things. So Edgar went with Fuentes. And Rider was sent with a second IAD man, Loomis Baker, to interview Eldrige Peete at Parker Center and then bring him back to the scene. Bosch wanted the train operator at the scene to go over what he had seen and to operate the train as he had before discovering the bodies.
That left Bosch, Chastain and the last IAD man, Joe Dellacroce. Bosch dispatched Dellacroce to Parker Center as well, to draw up a search warrant for Elias’s office. He then told Chastain that the two of them would go to Elias’s home to make the death notification to his next of kin.
After the group split up, Bosch walked to the crime scene van and asked Hoffman for the keys found on the body of Howard Elias. Hoffman looked through the crate he had placed his evidence bags in and came out with a bag containing a ring with more than a dozen keys on it.
“From the front pants pocket, right side,” Hoffman said.
Bosch studied the keys for a moment. There seemed to be more than enough keys for the lawyer’s home, office and cars. He noticed that there was a Porsche key on the ring as well as a Volvo key. He realized that when the investigators finished the current crop of tasks, one assignment he would have to make would be to put someone on locating Elias’s car.
“Anything else in the pockets?”
“Yeah. In the left front he had a quarter.”
“A quarter.”
“Costs a quarter to ride Angels Flight. That’s probably what that was for.”
Bosch nodded.
“And in the inside coat pocket was a letter.”
Bosch had forgotten that Garwood had mentioned the letter.
“Let’s see that.”
Hoffman looked through his crate again and came up with a plastic evidence bag. Inside it was an envelope. Bosch took it from the crime scene tech and studied it without removing it. The envelope had been addressed to Elias’s office by hand. There was no return address. On the left lower corner the sender had written PERSONAL & CONFIDENTIAL. Bosch tried to read the postmark but the light was bad. He wished he still carried a lighter.
“It’s your neck of the woods, Harry,” Hoffman said. “Hollywood. Mailed Wednesday. He probably got it Friday.”
Bosch nodded. He turned the bag over and looked at the back of the envelope. It had been cleanly cut open along the top. Elias or his secretary had opened it, probably at his office, before he had put it into his pocket. There was no way of knowing if the contents had been examined since.
“Anybody open it?”
“We didn’t. I don’t know what happened before we got here. I understand that the first detectives saw the name on there and then recognized the body. But I don’t know if they actually looked at the letter.”
Bosch was curious about the contents of the envelope but knew it wasn’t the right time or place to open it.
“I’m going to take this, too.”
“You got it, Harry. Let me just get you to sign it out. And the keys, too.”
Bosch waited while Hoffman got a chain-of-evidence form out of his kit. He squatted down and put the envelope and keys into his briefcase. Chastain came over, ready to leave the scene.
“You want to drive or you want me to?” Bosch said as he snapped his case closed. “I’ve got a slick. What have you got?”
“I still have a plain jane. Runs like dogshit but at least I don’t stand out like dogshit on the street.”
“That’s good. You got a bubble?”
“Yes, Bosch, even IAD guys have to respond to calls now and then.”
Hoffman held a clipboard and pen out to Bosch and he signed his initials next to the two pieces of crime scene evidence he was taking with him.
“Then you drive.”
They started walking across California Plaza to where the cars were parked. Bosch pulled his pager off his belt and made sure it was running properly. The battery light was still green. He hadn’t missed any pages. He looked up at the tall towers surrounding them, wondering if they could possibly interfere with a page from his wife, but then he remembered the page from Lieutenant Billets had come through earlier. He clipped the pager back to his belt and tried to think about something else.
Following Chastain’s lead they came to a beat-up maroon LTD that was at least five years old and about as impressive-looking as a Pinto. At least, Bosch thought, it isn’t painted black and white.
“It’s unlocked,” Chastain said.
Bosch went to the passenger side door and got in the car. He got his cell phone out of his briefcase and called the central dispatch center. He asked for a
Department of Motor Vehicles run on Howard Elias and was given the dead man’s home address as well as his age, driving record and the plate numbers of the Porsche and Volvo registered in his and his wife’s names. Elias had been forty-six. His driving record was clean. Bosch thought that the lawyer was probably the most cautious driver in the city. The last thing Elias probably ever wanted to do was draw the attention of an LAPD patrol cop. It made driving a Porsche seem almost a waste.
“Baldwin Hills,” he said after closing the phone. “Her name is Millie.”
Chastain started the engine, then plugged the flashing emergency light—the bubble—into the lighter and put it on the dashboard. He drove the car quickly down the deserted streets toward the 10 Freeway.
Bosch was silent at first, not sure how to break the ice with Chastain. The two men were natural enemies. Chastain had investigated Bosch on two different occasions. Both times Bosch was grudgingly cleared of any wrongdoing, but only after Chastain was forced to back off. It seemed to Bosch that Chastain had a hard-on for him that felt close to a vendetta. The IAD detective seemed to take no joy in clearing a fellow cop. All he wanted was a scalp.
“I know what you are doing, Bosch,” Chastain said once they got onto the freeway and started west.
Bosch looked over at him. For the first time he considered how physically similar they were. Dark hair going gray, full mustache beneath dark brown-black eyes, a lean, almost wiry build. Almost mirror images, yet Bosch had never considered Chastain to be the kind of physical threat that Bosch knew he projected himself. Chastain carried himself differently. Bosch had always carried himself like a man afraid of being cornered, like a man who wouldn’t allow himself to be cornered.
“What? What am I doing?”
“You’re thinning us out. That way you have better control.”
He waited for Bosch to reply but only got silence.
“But eventually, if we’re going to do this thing right, you are going to have to trust us.”
After a pause, Bosch said, “I know that.”
Elias lived on Beck Street in Baldwin Hills, a small section of upper-middle-class homes south of the 10 Freeway and near La Cienega Boulevard. It was an area known as the black Beverly Hills—a neighborhood where affluent blacks moved when they did not wish to have their wealth take them out of their community. As Bosch considered this he thought that if there was anything that he could like about Elias, it was the fact that he didn’t take his money and move to Brentwood or Westwood or the real Beverly Hills. He stayed in the community from which he had risen.