She answered right away.
“Soto.”
“Lucia.”
“Harry, what’s up?”
Bosch had the caller ID on his phone blocked, so she still recognized his voice or remembered that he was the only one who called her Lucia. Everybody else called her Lucy or Lucky or Lucky Lucy, none of which she cared for.
“You going to get coffee?”
“You know me. It’s good to hear from you. How’s retired life?”
“Not so retiring, it turns out. I was wondering if you might do me a favor when you get back to the squad with your latte.”
“Sure, Harry, what do you need?”
“Before I tell you, I want to be up front with you. I am looking into a case for my half brother.”
“The defense lawyer.”
“Yeah, the defense lawyer.”
“And he’s also the guy you’re using to sue the department.”
“That’s right.”
Bosch waited and there was a long pause before Soto responded.
“Okay. So what do you need?”
Bosch smiled. He knew he could count on her.
“I don’t need your help on the specific case I’m working but there is another case that I heard about that might be related in some way. I just need to get a line on it, find out what it is.”
He paused to give her a chance to shut it down but she said nothing. So far so good, Bosch thought. He’d had no doubt that she would do the favor for him but he didn’t want her to feel compromised or fear that he might put her in any departmental crosshairs. They had only talked a few times since he had walked out the door of the Open-Unsolved Unit the year before, never to return. When he had checked in with her after the first of the year to see how she was doing, he learned that she had already been hit with some of the blowback from his departure.
The captain of the unit had partnered her with a veteran detective named Stanley O’Shaughnessy. Known as Stanley the Steamer by most of the other detectives in the Robbery-Homicide Division, O’Shaughnessy was the worst kind of partner to be saddled with. He didn’t work hard at solving murders but was very active when it came to discussing what was wrong with the department and filing complaints against other detectives and supervisors who he felt had slighted him. He was a man who let his frustrations and disappointments with his life and career paralyze him. Consequently, his partners never stayed with him for long unless they had no choice in the matter. Soto, being the low man on the totem pole in RHD, would probably be stuck with Stanley the Steamer until the next round of promotions brought new blood into the division, and that was only if a new detective coming in had less seniority than her. Since Soto had been on the job less than eight years, the chances of that were almost nonexistent. She was stuck and she knew it. She spent her days largely working cases on her own and only bringing in O’Shaughnessy when department policy required two partners on an excursion.
All of this had been accorded her because she had been Harry Bosch’s partner for the last four months of his career and had refused to rat him out in an Internal Affairs investigation prompted by the same captain who handed out the partner assignments. When she had told Bosch how she had landed, all he could do was encourage her to leave O’Shaughnessy behind and go out and work cases, knock on doors. She did that and called Bosch a few times to tap into his experience and ask his advice. He had been happy to give it. It had been a one-way road like that until now.
“Do you know the murder journals in the captain’s office?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said.
“I’m looking for a case. I don’t have a name or an exact date, only that it was in Hollywood and probably took place within a week after March nineteenth this year.”
“Okay, but why don’t I just look it up on CTS and do it real quick?”
CTS was the LAPD’s internal Crime Tracking System, which she could access from her computer. But to access it she would have to sign in with her user key.
“No, don’t go on CTS,” Bosch said. “I have no idea where this will go, so just to be safe, don’t leave any digital fingerprints.”
“Okay, got it. Anything else?”
“I don’t know if it will be in the journal but the victim was a prostitute. Might be listed as a dragon or a tranny or something like that. The street name was Sindy, spelled S-I-N-D-Y, and that’s all I got.”
In the age of electronic data compilation and storage, the LAPD still kept a tradition of logging every murder in a leather-bound journal. The journals had been religiously kept since September 9, 1899, when a man named Simon Christenson was found dead on a downtown railroad bridge—the first recorded murder in the LAPD’s history. Detectives at the time believed Christenson had been beaten to death and then placed on the tracks so a train would hit his body and the killing would look like a suicide. It was a misdirection that didn’t work, yet no one was ever charged with the murder.
Bosch had read through the journals regularly when he worked in RHD. It was a hobby of sorts, to read the paragraph or two written about every murder that had been recorded. He had committed Christenson’s name to memory. Not because it was the first murder, but because it was the first and it was never solved. It always bothered Bosch that there had been no justice for Simon Christenson.
“What do I tell the captain?” Soto asked. “He’ll probably ask me why I’m looking at that case.”
Bosch had anticipated the question before he made the call to her.
“Don’t tell him you’re looking at a specific case,” he said. “Pull the latest journal and tell him you’re just trying to keep up with what’s going on out there. A lot of guys check those books out. I read through every one of them at least once.”
“Okay, got it. Let me get my coffee now, and then I’ll go back up and do it first thing.”
“Thanks, Lucia.”
Bosch disconnected and thought about next steps. If Lucia came through, then he’d have a starting point on the Sindy case. He might be able to determine if there was any link to Lexi Parks and whether Da’Quan Foster’s alibi was for real.
While Bosch waited for the callback from Soto, his daughter emerged from her bedroom dressed for school, her backpack slung over a shoulder.
“Hey,” she said. “I’m late.”
She grabbed her car keys off the table by the front door. Bosch got up from the table to follow her.
“Not going to eat again?” he asked.
“No time,” she said, moving toward the door.
“Maddie, I’m starting to get worried about this.”
“Don’t. Just worry about that killer guy you’re working for.”
“Oh, come on, Mads. Don’t be so dramatic. If the guy’s a killer he won’t be going anywhere. Trust me, okay?”
“Okay. Bye.”
She went through the front door, letting it bang loudly behind her. Bosch just stood there.
After an hour of waiting for Soto to call, Bosch started to worry that something had gone wrong with the captain when she went into his office to look at the murder journal. He started pacing, wondering if he should call to check on her but knowing that an ill-timed call from him—if she was in a jam with the captain—might make matters worse. Besides, if she was in a jam, there was nothing he could do about it. He was an outsider now.
Finally, after another twenty minutes, his phone buzzed and he saw on the screen that she was calling from her desk phone. He’d expected that when she called, it would be on her cell and from outside the building, or at least from a stall in the women’s room.
“Lucia?”
“Hi, Harry. I got you some information.”
“You’re at your desk. Where’s the Steamer?”
“Oh, he’s probably off filing a complaint or something. He came in and then mysteriously left without saying anything. He does that a lot.”
“Well, at least that means he’s out of your hair. So you got a look at the journal?”
Bosch sat down at
the dining room table and opened his notebook. He took out a pen and got ready to write.
“I did and I’m pretty sure I found your case.”
“No problem with the captain?”
“No, I said what you told me to say and he sort of waved me off, told me to have at it. No problem. To make it look good I took a couple of the other journals, too. The first one goes back to eighteen ninety-nine.”
“Simon Christenson.”
“God, how do you remember that?”
“I don’t really know. I just do. Killed on a bridge and nobody ever charged.”
“Not a good start for LAPD homicide, huh?”
“No, not good. So, what did you find for me?”
“March twenty-first, the body of James Allen, white male, age twenty-six, was found in an alley running parallel to Santa Monica Boulevard at El Centro. It was behind an auto repair shop. Victim was a prostitute with multiple hits for solicitation, drug possession, the usual stuff. That’s all it says in the journal other than that the case was assigned to RHD and detectives Stotter and Karim.”
Bosch stopped writing. Robbery-Homicide Division comprised the elite detective squads that worked out of the PAB and usually handled cases that were politically or media sensitive or considered too complex for divisional detective squads because of the time commitment needed. Mike Stotter and Ali Karim were assigned to Homicide Special, the elite of the elite. To Bosch it seemed unusual for the murder of a Hollywood prostitute to be assigned to RHD. In a perfect world all murder victims would be treated equally. Everybody counts or nobody counts. But it wasn’t a perfect world and some murders were big and some were small.
“RHD?” Bosch asked.
“Yeah, I thought that was strange, too,” Soto said. “So I wandered over to that side of the room and Ali was at his desk and so I asked him what was with that. He—”
“Lucia, you shouldn’t have done that. You can’t let anybody know you have any interest in this case or it might come back to bite you on the ass if I end up making waves with it. Ali’s going to know I sent you to him.”
“Harry, relax, I’m not that stupid. Give me a little credit here, okay? I didn’t go blundering over to Homicide Special and start asking questions about the case. Besides Ali and I are pals. He was called out the night of my thing in Rampart and handled the scene till the shooting team got there. He was very nice to me that night, calmed me down, coached me up on how to deal with the shooting team. And when I got here after that, he was one of the few people who didn’t look down their nose at me, you know what I mean? In fact, it was just Ali and you, to be exact.”
She was talking about her path to RHD and the Open-Unsolved Unit. Less than two years earlier she was a slick sleeve assigned to patrol in Rampart Division. But her bravery and deadly calm in surviving a shoot-out with four armed robbers that left her partner dead catapulted her into the media spotlight. She was dubbed Lucky Lucy in a profile published by the Times, and the department quickly took advantage of the rare bit of positive attention she was drawing. The chief of police offered her a promotion and told her she could pick her spot. She chose the RHD’s Open-Unsolved Unit and was elevated to homicide detective before she had logged five years on the job.
The media loved it but it didn’t go over so well with those in the department who had been waiting years and even decades for a slot on a homicide squad anywhere, let alone the elite Robbery-Homicide Division. Soto came in with that kind of enmity in her backpack and had to deal with a squad room where more than half of her colleagues didn’t think she belonged there or had earned it. While the media called her Lucky Lucy, some in RHD referred to her as FasTrak, after the electronic pass that allows motorists to use express lanes to blow by traffic on the city’s crowded freeways.
“I finessed it, Harry,” Soto said. “I stopped by his cube to shoot the shit and, sure enough, he had the murder book right on his desk. I asked what he was working on and he spilled. I also asked what was so special about it that made it a Homicide Special assignment and he said the case got kicked to him and Mike because everybody in West Bureau was tied up on a training day the morning the body was found.”
Bosch nodded. It made sense. The murder rate in the city had fallen so much in recent years that many of the divisional homicide teams were consolidated. Hollywood Homicide was gone and the few murders that occurred in the area were now assigned to a squad that worked out of the West Bureau. This created a higher likelihood for cases to get kicked over to RHD because of backups and other conflicts. Satisfied that the case had not drawn any unusual attention from the department, Bosch now wanted to know what Soto had learned.
“So you asked him about it?”
“Yeah, I asked him, and you know Ali, he’s a storyteller. He told me the whole thing. The victim was a transvestite who usually worked out of a room at the Haven House near Gower. There’s a whole book on him at Hollywood Vice.”
“Did he say what room?”
“He didn’t but I saw the photos. Room six, bottom floor.”
“So what’s their theory?”
“Ali said they figure the odds just caught up to him and some john he picked up probably did him in. They’ve got no suspects but they think it might be a serial.”
“Did he say why they think that?”
“Yeah, because fifteen months before, another pro got offed and left in the same alley.”
“How similar are the cases?”
“I didn’t really ask.”
“You ask about cause of death?”
“Didn’t have to. Like I said, Ali showed me the pictures. The guy was strangled from behind with a wire. One thin line across the front of the neck. It broke the skin. Ali said that when they checked out his room at the motel they found a framed picture of Marilyn Monroe on the floor, leaning against the wall. They saw there was a nail in the wall but when they checked the back of the picture, the wire for hanging it was gone. They think that’s what the killer used.”
“Was that where he was killed? The room?”
“That’s the theory. Ali said no signs of a struggle in the room but the picture frame missing the wire is kind of a marker, you know? He thinks that the john met the victim there and things went sideways and he got killed. The body was moved to a car and then taken to the alley and dumped. Because of the one fourteen months before, they got a profile from Behavioral and it says the killer was probably some guy with a wife and kids at home and he somehow blamed the victim for his crossing the line into that kind of activity. So he killed Allen, dumped him, and went back to his normal life in the Valley or wherever. Pure psychopath.”
Bosch didn’t correct her but he didn’t think there was enough information in the profile or case summary to declare the suspect a pure psychopath. It was a young detective’s easy response. But based on the facts known to him, the murder looked spontaneous. The killer had not brought a weapon and there was no other evidence of prior planning. The possibility that the killing of Allen was connected to a prior murder was the only real indication of psychopathy.
“So have they officially connected this one and the one fourteen months before?” he asked.
“Not yet,” Soto said. “West Bureau still has the first one. Ali said there’s a bit of a tug-of-war but that there are elements of the cases that don’t match.”
It was not unusual for the divisional detective squads to fight against having to turn over investigations to the big shots downtown. People who worked homicide were not timid people. They were confident investigators who believed they could crack any case, given enough time and support.
“Did Ali say whether they got DNA off the body?” he asked.
“No, no DNA directly on the body. The victim was into safe sex—I saw photos of the room and the guy had a big ol’ industrial-size container of condoms. Like what they used to put licorice and candy in in the clinic waiting room. But they swept the room and got what you’d expect from a room like that, a ton of hair and
fiber. None of it has led to anything.”
Bosch thought for a moment about what else he could ask. He felt there was something he had missed, maybe a follow-up on the information she had just given him. It didn’t come to him and he decided to leave it at that. She had helped enough.
“Thanks, Lucia,” he finally said. “I owe you one.”
“Not at all,” she said. “Did it help?”
Bosch nodded even though she could not see this.
“I think so.”
“Then call me for lunch sometime.”
“I don’t know if you want to be seen with me. I’m persona non grata, remember?”
“Fuck ’em, Harry. Just call me.”
Bosch laughed.
“Will do.”
16
Bosch read the notes he had taken during the phone call and tried to put things in context. Two days after Da’Quan Foster was arrested for killing Lexi Parks in West Hollywood, the man he would claim was his alibi for the time of that murder was himself murdered in Hollywood, possibly by a serial killer. There was no evidence or even suggestion that this was anything other than a grim coincidence—Allen’s profession put him at a higher probability of becoming a murder victim than most. But Bosch only accepted coincidence grudgingly.
From victim profile to crime scene to method of murder the two killings were different, at least as far as Bosch had seen from photos of one and a verbal description of the other. Still, the possible connection bore further scrutiny. Bosch considered what Lucia had told him about the investigation of the Allen case. The motel room had been processed by a forensic team. Bosch wondered, What were the chances that hair and fiber left behind six weeks earlier by Foster could have been collected during the sweep of the room. What about DNA? What about fingerprints?
Regardless, he knew that the six-week time difference between Allen’s death and the night of Lexi Parks’s murder would render any such evidence inconclusive in terms of the law. It would not be viable in establishing an alibi, and no judge would allow it into court. There would be no way of establishing when the evidence was put in the motel room. But Bosch was not a court of law. He worked on instinct. If Da’Quan Foster had left any microscopic trace in Allen’s motel room, it would go a long way toward assuring Bosch that Foster’s account of his whereabouts on the night Lexi Parks died was true.