Angels Flight (14 page)

“What did you use?” Bosch asked.

“His DOB. You did next of kin, right? What was his wife’s name?”

“Millie.”

Rider typed it in and after a few seconds got the same rejection message.

“What about his son?” Bosch asked. “His name’s Martin.”

Rider didn’t type anything.

“What’s the matter?”

“A lot of these password gates give you three strikes. If you don’t get in on the third one they go into automatic lockdown.”

“Forever?”

“No. For however long Elias would have set it at. Could be fifteen minutes or an hour or even longer. Let’s think about this for a — ”

“V-S-L-A-P-D.”

Rider and Bosch turned. Chastain was in the doorway.

“What?” Bosch asked.

“That’s the password. V-S-L-A-P-D. As in Elias versus the LAPD.”

“How do you know that?”

“The secretary wrote it down on the underside of her blotter. Guess she’s got to use the computer, too.”

Bosch studied Chastain for a moment.

“Harry?” Rider said. “Should I?”

“Give it a shot,” Bosch said, still looking at Chastain. He then turned and watched as his partner typed in the password. The hourglass blinked on and then the screen changed and icon symbols began appearing on a field of blue sky and white clouds.

“We’re in,” Rider said.

Bosch glanced back at Chastain.

“Good one.”

He then looked back at the screen and watched as Rider hit keys and maneuvered through the icons, files and programs, all of it meaning little to Bosch and reminding him that he was an anachronism.

“You really ought to learn this stuff, Harry,” Rider said, seeming to know his thoughts. “It’s easier than it looks.”

“Why should I when I’ve got you? What are you doing anyway?”

“Just having a look around. We’ll have to talk to Janis about this. There are a lot of file names corresponding with cases. I don’t know if we should open them before — ”

“Don’t worry about it for now,” Bosch interjected. “Can you get on the Internet?”

Rider made a few more moves with the mouse and then typed the user name and password into blanks on the screen.

“I’m running lawyerlink,” she said. “Hopefully the same passwords work and we’ll be able to go to that naked lady’s web page.”

“What naked lady?” Chastain said.

Bosch picked the file off the desk and handed it unopened to Chastain. He opened it, glanced at the photo and smirked.

Bosch looked back at the screen. Rider was on lawyerlink, using Elias’s user name.

“What’s that address?”

Chastain read it off to her as she typed. She then hit the enter key and they waited.

“What this is is a singular web page address within a larger web site,” she said. “What we’ll get here is the Gina page.”

“You mean that’s her name? Gina?”

“Looks like it.”

As she said this the photo from the printout appeared on the screen. Beneath it was information on what the woman in the photo provided and how to contact her.

I am Mistress Regina. I am a lifestyle dominatrix providing elaborate bondage, humiliation, forced feminization, slave training and golden blessings. Other torments available upon request. Call me now.

Below the block of information there was a phone number, a pager number and an E-mail address. Bosch wrote these down in a notebook he took from his pocket. He then looked back at the screen and saw there was also a blue button with the letter A on it. He was about to ask Rider what the button meant when Chastain made a disdainful sound with his mouth. Bosch turned and looked at him and the Internal Affairs man shook his head.

“The bastard was probably getting his rocks off on his knees with this broad,” Chastain said. “I wonder if Reverend Tuggins and his pals down at the SCCA knew about that.”

He was referring to an organization called the South Central Churches Association, a group which Tuggins headed and which always seemed to be at Elias’s beck and call when he needed to show the media an image of South Central outrage in regard to alleged police misconduct.

“We don’t know that he ever even met the woman yet, Chastain,” Bosch said.

“Oh, he met her. Why else did he have this laying around? I tell you, Bosch, if Elias was into rough trade like that, there’s no telling where that could’ve led. It’s a righteous avenue of investigation and you know it.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll be checking everything out.”

“You’re damn right we will.”

“Uh,” Rider said, interrupting. “There’s an audio button.”

Bosch looked at the screen. Rider had the arrow poised over the blue button.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“I think we can actually hear Mistress Regina.”

She clicked the arrow on the button. The computer then downloaded an audio program and started playing it. A dark and heavy voice came from the computer’s speaker.

“This is Mistress Regina. If you come to me I will find the secret of your soul. Together, we will reveal the true subservience through which you will know your rightful identity and attain the release you can find nowhere else. I will mold you into my own. I will own you. I am waiting. Call me now.”

They were all silent for a long moment. Bosch looked at Chastain.

“Does it sound like her?”

“Like who?”

“The woman on tape at the apartment.”

Chastain suddenly realized the possibility and was silent as he thought about this.

“What tape?” Rider asked.

“Can you play it again?” Bosch asked.

Rider clicked the audio button again and asked about the tape once more. Bosch waited until the replay was over.

“A woman left a message on the phone at Elias’s apartment. It wasn’t his wife. But I don’t think it was this voice either.”

He looked at Chastain once more.

“I don’t know,” Chastain said. “Could be. We’ll be able to do a comparison in the lab if we need to.”

Bosch hesitated, studying Chastain for any indication that he knew the phone message had been erased. He saw nothing.

“What?” Chastain said, uneasy under Bosch’s stare.

“Nothing,” Bosch said.

He turned back and looked at the computer screen.

“You said this was part of a larger web site,” he said to Rider. “Can we look at that?”

Rider didn’t answer. She just went to work on the keyboard. In a few moments the screen changed and they were looking at a graphic which showed a woman’s stocking-clad leg bent at the knee and reaching across the screen. Below this it said:

WELCOME TO GIRLAWHIRL, a directory of intimate, sensual and erotic services in Southern California

Below this was a table of contents by which the user could choose listings of women offering a variety of services, from sensual massage to evening escort to female domination. Rider clicked the mouse on this last offering and a new screen was revealed featuring boxes with the names of mistresses followed by an area code prefix.

“It’s a goddamn Internet whorehouse,” Chastain said. Bosch and Rider said nothing. Rider moved the arrow onto the box marked Mistress Regina.

“This is your directory,” she said. “You choose which page you want and click.”

She clicked the mouse and the Regina page appeared again.

“He chose her,” Rider said.

“A white woman,” Chastain said. There was glee in his voice. “Golden blessings from a white woman. I bet they aren’t going to be too pleased about that on the South Side, either.”

Rider turned around and looked sharply at Chastain. She was about to say something when her eyes widened and looked past the IAD detective. Bosch noticed this and turned. Standing in the doorway of the office was Janis Langwiser. Next to her was a woman Bosch recognized from her newspaper photos and television appearances. She was an attractive woman with the smooth coffee-and-cream skin of mixed races.

“Wait a minute,” Bosch said to Langwiser. “This is a crime investigation. She can’t come in here and — ”

“Yes, Detective Bosch, she can,” Langwiser said. “Judge Houghton just appointed her special master on the case. She’ll be reviewing the files for us.”

With that the woman Bosch recognized stepped fully into the room, smiled, but not warmly, and held her hand out to him in order to shake his.

“Detective Bosch,” she said. “It’s good to meet you. I hope we will be able to work together on this. I’m Carla Entrenkin.”

She waited a beat but no one responded. She continued.

“Now the first thing I am going to need is for you and all of your people to vacate these premises.”

Chapter 12

O
UTSIDE the front doors of the Bradbury the detectives walked empty-handed to their cars. Bosch was still angry but was cooler now. He walked slowly, allowing Chastain and Dellacroce to get to their car first. As he watched them drive off on their way back up Bunker Hill to California Plaza he opened the passenger door of Kiz’s slickback but didn’t get in. He bent down and looked in at her as she pulled the seat belt across her lap.

“You go on up, Kiz. I’ll meet you up there.”

“You’re going to walk it?”

Bosch nodded and looked at his watch. It was eight-thirty.

“I’ll take Angels Flight. It should be running again. When you get up there you know what to do. Start everybody knocking on doors.”

“Okay, see you up there. You going to go back up and talk to her again?”

“Entrenkin? Yeah, I think so. Do you still have Elias’s keys?”

“Yeah.” She dug them out of her purse and handed them to Bosch. “Is there something I should know about?”

Bosch paused for a moment.

“Not yet. I’ll see you up there.”

Rider started the car. She looked over at him again before putting it into drive.

“Harry, you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.” He nodded. “It’s just the case. First we got Chastain — asshole’s always been able to get to me. Now we’ve got Carla I’mthinkin’. It’s bad enough we knew she’d be watching the case. Now she’s a part of it. I don’t like politics, Kiz. I just like putting cases together.”

“I’m not talking about all of that. It’s like you’ve been walking on the sun since we met this morning to pick up the cars in Hollywood. You want to talk about it?”

He almost nodded.

“Maybe later, Kiz,” he said instead. “We got work to do right now.”

“Whatever, but I’m about to get worried about you, Harry. You need to be straight. If you’re distracted, then we’re distracted and we aren’t going to get anywhere on this thing. That’d be okay most days but on this one you just said it yourself, we’re under the glass.”

Bosch nodded again. Her having picked up on his personal turmoil was a testament to her skill as a detective — reading people was always more important than reading clues.

“I hear you, Kiz. I’ll straighten up.”

“I copy that.”

“I’ll see you up there.”

He slapped the roof of the car and watched her drive off, knowing this would be the time he would normally put a cigarette in his mouth. He didn’t. Instead he looked down at the keys in his hand and thought about his next move and how he had to be very careful.

Bosch went back into the Bradbury and as he rode the slow-moving elevator back up he tumbled the keys in his hand and thought about Entrenkin’s three separate entries into the case. First as a curious listing in Elias’s now missing phone book, then in her capacity as inspector general and now finally a full entrance as a player, the special master who would decide what in Elias’s files the investigators would be allowed to see.

Bosch didn’t like coincidences. He didn’t believe in them. He needed to know what Entrenkin was doing. He believed he had a good idea what that was and intended to confirm it before going any further with the case.

After being delivered to the top floor, Bosch pushed the button that would send the elevator back down to the lobby and got off. The door to Elias’s offices was locked and Bosch knocked sharply on the glazed glass, just below the lawyer’s name. In a few moments Janis Langwiser opened it. Bosch could see Carla Entrenkin standing a few feet behind her.

“Forget something, Detective Bosch?” Langwiser asked.

“No. But is that your little foreign job down there in the no-park zone? The red one? It was about to get towed. I badged the guy and told him to give me five minutes. But he’ll be back.”

“Oh, shit!” She glanced back at Entrenkin as she headed out the door. “I’ll be right back.”

As she moved by him Bosch stepped into the office and closed the door behind him. He then locked it and turned back to Entrenkin.

“Why did you lock that?” she asked. “Please leave it open.”

“I just thought it might be better if I said what I want to say without anybody interrupting us.”

Entrenkin folded her arms across her chest as if bracing for an attack. He studied her face and got the same vibe he had gotten before, when she had told them all they had to leave. There was a certain stoicism there, propping her up despite some clear pain beneath. She reminded Bosch of another woman he knew only from TV: the Oklahoma law school teacher who was brutalized in Washington by the politicians a few years before during the confirmation of a Supreme Court justice.

“Look, Detective Bosch, I really don’t see any other way around this. We have to be careful. We have to think about the case as well as the community. The people have to be reassured that everything possible is being done — that this won’t be swept under in the manner they have seen so many times before. I want — ”

“Bullshit.”

“Excuse me?”

“You shouldn’t be on this case and we both know it.”

“That’s what is bullshit. I have the trust of this community. You think they will believe anything you say about this case? Or Irving or the police chief?”

“But you don’t have the trust of the cops. And you’ve got one big conflict of interest, don’t you, Inspector General?”

“What are you saying? I think it was rather wise of Judge Houghton to choose me to act as special master. As inspector general I already have a degree of civilian oversight on the case. This just streamlines things instead of adding another person to the mix. He called me. I didn’t call him.”