Angels Flight (4 page)

Bosch and his partners were quiet a long moment. The scenario Garwood had woven didn’t sit right with Bosch but he didn’t know enough about the crime scene yet to challenge him on it.

“The robbery look legit?” Bosch finally asked.

“It did to me. I know the people down south aren’t going to want to hear that but there it is.”

Rider and Edgar were silent stones.

“What about the woman?” Bosch asked. “Was she robbed?”

“Doesn’t look like it. I kind of think the shooter didn’t want to come onto the train. Anyway, the lawyer was the one in the thousand-dollar suit. He’d be the target.”

“What about Peete? Did he hear the shots, a scream, anything?”

“He says no. He says the generator for the electric is right below the floor here. Sounds like an elevator running all day long so he wears earplugs. He never heard anything.”

Bosch stepped around the cable wheels and looked at the train operator’s station. For the first time he saw that mounted above the cash register was a small video display box with a split screen showing four camera views of Angels Flight — from a camera in each of the train cars and from above each terminus. On one corner of the screen he could see a long shot of the inside of Olivet. The crime scene techs were still working with the bodies.

Garwood came around the other side of the cable wheels.

“No luck there,” he said. “The cameras are live only, no tape. They are so the operator can check to make sure everyone is aboard and seated before starting the train.”

“Did he — ”

“He didn’t look,” Garwood said, knowing Bosch’s questions. “He just checked through the window, thought the car was empty and brought it up so he could lock it up.”

“Where is he?”

“At Parker. Our offices. I guess you’ll have to come over and talk to him for yourself. I’ll keep somebody with him until you make it by.”

“Any other witnesses?”

“Not a one. Eleven o’clock at night down here, the place is pretty dead. The Grand Central Market closes up at seven. There’s nothing else down there except some office buildings. A couple of my guys were getting ready to go into those apartments next door here to knock on doors. But then they got the ID and sort of backed away.”

Bosch paced around in a small area of the room and thought. Very little had been done so far and the discovery of the murders was already four hours old. This bothered him even though he understood the reason behind the delay.

“Why was Elias on Angels Flight?” he asked Garwood. “They figure that out before backing away?”

“Well, he must’ve wanted to go up the hill, don’t you think?”

“Come on, Captain, if you know, why not save us the time?”

“We don’t know, Harry. We ran a DMV check, he lives out in Baldwin Hills. That’s a long way from Bunker Hill. I don’t know why he was coming up here.”

“What about where he was coming from?”

“That’s a little easier. Elias’s office is just over on Third. In the Bradbury Building. He was probably coming from there. But where he was going . . .”

“Okay, then what about the woman?”

“She’s a blank. My guys hadn’t even started with her when we were told to pull back.”

Garwood dropped his cigarette to the floor and crushed it with his heel. Bosch took it as a signal that the briefing was about over. He decided to see if he could get a rise out of him.

“You pissed off, Captain?”

“About what?”

“About being pulled off. About your people being on the suspect list.”

A small smile played on Garwood’s thin lips.

“No, I’m not angry. I see the chief’s point.”

“Are your people going to cooperate with us on this?”

After some hesitation Garwood nodded.

“Of course. The quicker they cooperate, the quicker you will clear them.”

“And you’ll tell them that?”

“That’s exactly what I’ll tell them.”

“We appreciate that, Captain. Tell me, which one of your people do you think could have done this?”

The lips curled into a full smile now. Bosch studied Garwood’s cigarette-yellowed teeth and for a moment was glad he was trying to quit.

“You’re a clever guy, Harry. I remember that.”

He said nothing else.

“Thanks, Captain. But do you have an answer to the question?”

Garwood moved to the door and opened it. Before leaving he turned and looked back at them, his eyes traveling from Edgar to Rider to Bosch.

“It wasn’t one of mine, Detectives. I guarantee it. You’ll be wasting your time if you look there too long.”

“Thanks for the advice,” Bosch said.

Garwood stepped out, closing the door behind him.

“Jeez,” Rider said. “It’s like Captain Boris Karloff or something. Does that guy only come out at night?”

Bosch smiled and nodded.

“Mr. Personality,” he said. “So, what do you think so far?”

“I think we’re at ground zero,” Rider said. “Those guys didn’t do jack before getting the hook.”

“Yeah, well, Robbery-Homicide, what do you want?” Edgar said. “They aren’t known for tap dancing. They back the tortoise over the hare any day of the week. But if you ask me, we’re fucked. You and me, Kiz, we can’t win on this one. Blue race, my ass.”

Bosch stepped toward the door.

“Let’s go out and take a look,” he said, cutting off discussion of Edgar’s concerns. He knew they were valid but for the moment they only served to clutter their mission. “Maybe we’ll get a few ideas before Irving wants to talk again.”

Chapter 5

T
HE number of detectives outside the station had finally begun to decrease. Bosch watched as Garwood and a group of his men crossed the plaza toward their cars. He then saw Irving standing to the side of the train car talking to Chastain and three detectives. Bosch didn’t know them but assumed they were IAD. The deputy chief was animated in his discussion but kept his voice so low that Bosch couldn’t hear what he was saying. Bosch wasn’t sure exactly what the IAD presence was all about, but he was getting an increasingly bad feeling about it.

He saw Frankie Sheehan hanging back behind Garwood and his group. He was about to leave but was hesitating. Bosch nodded at him.

“I see what you mean now, Frankie,” he said.

“Yeah, Harry, some days you eat the bear . . .”

“Right. You taking off?”

“Yeah, the cap told us all to get out of here.”

Bosch stepped over and kept his voice low.

“Any ideas I could borrow?”

Sheehan looked at the train car as if considering for the first time who might have killed the two people inside it.

“None other than the obvious and I think that will be a waste of time. But then again, you have to waste it, right? Cover all the bases.”

“Yeah. Anybody you think I should start with?”

“Yeah, me.” He smiled broadly. “I hated the douche bag. Know what I’m gonna do? I’m going now to try and find an all-night liquor store and buy the best Irish whiskey they got. I’m going to have a little celebration, Hieronymus. Because Howard Elias was a motherfucker.”

Bosch nodded. With cops the word motherfucker was rarely used. It was heard a lot by them but not used. With most cops it was reserved as being the worst thing you could say about someone. When it was said it meant one thing: that the person had crossed the righteous, that the person had no respect for the keepers of the law and therefore the rules and bounds of society. Cop killers were always motherfuckers, no questions asked. Defense lawyers got the call, most of the time. And Howard Elias was on the motherfucker list, too. Right at the top.

Sheehan gave a little salute and headed off across the plaza. Bosch turned his attention toward the interior of the train while he put on rubber gloves. The lights were back on and the techs were finished with the laser. Bosch knew one of them, Hoffman. He was working with a trainee Bosch had heard about but not met. She was an attractive Asian woman with a large bust. He had overheard other detectives in the squad room discussing her attributes and questioning their authenticity.

“Gary, is it cool to come in?” Bosch asked, leaning in through the door.

Hoffman looked up from the tackle box in which he kept his tools. He was organizing things and was about to close it.

“It’s cool. We’re wrapping up. This one yours, Harry?”

“It is now. Got anything good for me? Gonna make my day?”

Bosch stepped into the car, followed by Edgar and Rider. Since the car was on an incline, the floor was actually a series of steps down to the other door. The seats also were on graduated levels on either side of the center aisle. Bosch looked at the slatted bench seats and suddenly remembered how hard they had been on his skinny behind as a boy.

“ ’Fraid not,” Hoffman said. “It’s pretty clean.”

Bosch nodded and moved down a few more steps to the first body. He studied Catalina Perez the way someone might study a sculpture in a museum. There was no feeling for the object in front of him as human. He was studying details, gaining impressions. His eyes fell to the bloodstain and the small tear the bullet had made in the T-shirt. The bullet had hit the woman dead center. Bosch thought about this and envisioned the gunman in the doorway of the train twelve feet away.

“Hell of a shot, huh?”

It was the tech Bosch didn’t know. He looked at her and nodded. He had been thinking the same thing, that the shooter was someone with some expertise in firearms.

“Hi, I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Sally Tam.”

She put out her hand and Bosch shook it. It felt weird. They were both wearing rubber gloves. He told her his name.

“Oh,” she said. “Somebody was just talking about you. About the hard-boiled eggs case.”

“It was just luck.”

Bosch knew he was getting a longer ride out of that case than he deserved. It was all because a Times reporter had heard about it and written a story that exaggerated Bosch’s skills to the point where he seemed like a distant relative of Sherlock Holmes.

Bosch pointed past Tam and said he needed to get by to take a look at the other body. She stepped to the side and leaned back and he slid by, careful not to allow himself to rub against her. He heard her introducing herself to Rider and Edgar. He dropped into a crouch so he could study the body of Howard Elias.

“Is this still as is?” he asked Hoffman, who was squatting next to his tackle box near the feet of the dead man.

“Pretty much. We turned him to get into his pockets but then put him back. There are some Polaroids over on that seat behind you if you want to double-check. Coroner’s people took those before anybody touched him.”

Bosch turned and saw the photos. Hoffman was right. The body was in the same position in which it had been found.

He turned back to the body and used both hands to turn the head so that he could study the wounds. Garwood’s interpretation had been correct, Bosch decided. The entry wound at the back of the head was a contact wound. Though partially obscured by blood that had matted the hair, there were still powder burns and stippling visible in a circular pattern around the wound. The face shot, however, was clean. This did not refer to the blood — there was a good amount of that. But there were no powder burns on the skin. The bullet to the face had come from a distance.

Bosch picked up the arm and turned the hand so he could study the entry wound in the palm. The arm moved easily. Rigor mortis had not yet begun — the cool evening air was delaying this process. There was no discharge burn on the palm. Bosch did some computing. No powder burns on the palm meant the firearm was at least three to four feet away from the hand when the bullet was discharged. If Elias had his arm extended with his palm out, then that added another three feet.

Edgar and Rider had made their way to the second body. Bosch could feel their presence behind him.

“Six to seven feet away, through the hand and still right between the eyes,” he said. “This guy can shoot. Better remember that when we take him down.”

Neither of them answered. Bosch hoped they picked up on the confidence in his last line as well as the warning. He was about to place the dead man’s hand down on the floor when he noticed the long scratch mark on the wrist and running along the side of the palm. He guessed the wound had occurred when Elias’s watch had been pulled off. He studied the wound closely. There was no blood in the track. It was a clean white laceration along the surface of the dark skin, yet it seemed deep enough to have drawn blood.

He thought about this for a moment. There were no shots to the heart, only to the head. The blood displacement from the wounds indicated the heart had continued to pump for at least several seconds after Elias had gone down. It would seem that the shooter would have yanked the watch off Elias’s wrist very quickly after the shooting — there was obviously no reason to hang around. Yet, the scratch on the hand had not bled. It was as if it had occurred well after the heart had stopped pumping.

“What do you think about the lead enema?” Hoffman asked, interrupting Bosch’s thoughts.

As Hoffman got out of the way, Bosch stood and gingerly stepped around the body until he was down by the feet. He crouched again and looked at the third bullet wound. Blood had soaked the seat of the pants. Still, he could see the tear and tight burn pattern where the bullet went through the cloth and into Howard Elias’s anus. The weapon had been pressed in deep at the point where the seams of the pants were joined and then fired. It was a vindictive shot. More than a coup de grâce, it showed anger and hatred. It contradicted the cool skill of the other shots. It also told Bosch that Garwood had been wrong about the shooting sequence. Whether the captain had been intentionally wrong, he didn’t know.

He stood up and backed to the rear door of the car so that he was in the spot where the shooter had probably stood. He surveyed the carnage in front of him once more and nodded to no one in particular, just trying to commit it all to memory. Edgar and Rider were still between the bodies and making their own observations.

Bosch turned around and looked down the tracks to the turnstile station below. The detectives he had seen before were gone. Now a lone cruiser sat down there and two patrol officers guarded the lower crime scene.