Michael Connelly (16 page)

Only Thelia King was in, sitting in front of the computer. That was what Bosch wanted. Also known as The King, which she hated,
and Elvis, which she didn’t mind, Thelia King was the CRASH computer jockey. If you wanted to trace a gang lineage or were
just looking for a juvie floating somewhere around Hollywood, Elvis was the one to see. But Bosch was surprised she was alone.
He looked at his watch. Just after two, too early for the gang troops to be on the street.

“Where’s everybody at?”

“Hey, Bosch,” she said, looking away from the screen. “Funerals. We got two different gangs, and I mean warring tribes, planting
homeboys in the same cemetery today up in the Valley. They got all hands up there to make sure things stay cool.”

“And so why aren’t you out there with the boys?”

“Just got back from court. So, before you tell me why you are here, Harry, why don’t you tell me what happened in Ninety-eight
Pounds’s office today?”

Bosch smiled. Word traveled faster through a police station than it did on the street. He gave her an abbreviated account
of his time in the barrel and the expected battle with IAD.

“Bosch, you take things too seriously,” she said. “Why don’t you get yourself an outside gig? Something to keep yourself sane,
moving in the flow. Like your partner. Too bad that sucker’s married. He’s making three times selling houses on the side what
we make bustin’ heads full-time. I need a gig like that.”

Bosch nodded. But too much going with the flow is heading us into the sewer, he thought but didn’t say. Sometimes he believed
that he took things just right and everybody else didn’t take them seriously enough. That was the problem. Everybody had an
outside gig.

“What do you need?” she said. “I better do it now before they put your paper through. After that, you’ll be a leper ’round
here.”

“Stay where you are,” he said, and then he pulled over a chair and told her what he needed from the computer.

The CRASH computer had a program called GRIT, an acronym within an acronym, this one for Gang-Related Information Tracking.
The program files contained the vitals on the 55,000 identified gang members and juvenile offenders in the city. The computer
also tied in with the gang computer at the sheriff’s department, which had about 30,000 of its own gangbangers on file. One
part of the GRIT program was the moniker file. This stored references to offenders by their street names and could match them
with real names, DOBs, addresses, and so on. All monikers that came to police attention through arrests or shake cards — field
interrogation reports — were fed into the computer program. It was said the GRIT file had more than 90,000 monikers in it.
You just needed to know which keys to push. And Elvis did.

Bosch gave her the three letters he had. “I don’t know if that’s the whole thing or a partial,” he said. “I think it’s a partial.”

She typed in the commands to open the GRIT files, put in the letters S-H-A and hit the prompt key. It took about thirteen
seconds. A frown creased Thelia King’s ebony face. “Three hundred forty-three hits,” she announced. “You might be hidin’ out
here a while, Hon.”

He told her to eliminate the blacks and Latinos. The 911 tape sounded white to him. She pressed more keys, then the computer
screen’s amber letters recomposed the list.

“That’s better, nineteen hits,” King said.

There was no moniker that was just the three letters, Sha. There were five Shadows, four Shahs, two Sharkeys, two Sharkies
and one each of Shark, Shabby, Shallow, Shank, Shabot and Shame. Bosch thought quickly about the graffiti he had seen on the
pipe up at the dam. The jagged S, almost like a gaping mouth. The mouth of a shark?

“Pull up the variations on Shark,” he said.

King hit a couple of keys and the top third of the screen filled with new amber letters. Shark was a Valley boy. Limited contact
with police; he had gotten probation and graffiti clean-up after he was caught tagging bus benches along Ventura Boulevard
in Tarzana. He was fifteen. It wasn’t likely he would have been up at the dam at three o’clock on a Sunday morning, Bosch
guessed. King pulled the first Sharkie up on the screen. He was currently in a Malibu fire camp for juvenile offenders. The
second Sharkie was dead, killed in a gang war between the KGB — Kids Gone Bad — and the Vineland Boyz in 1989. His name had
not yet been purged from the computer records.

When King called up the first Sharkey the screen filled with information and a blinking word at the bottom said “More.” “Here’s
a regular troublemaker,” she said.

The computer report described Edward Niese, a male white, seventeen years of age, known to ride a yellow motorbike, tag number
JVN138, and who had no known gang affiliation but used Sharkey as a graffiti tag. A frequent runaway from his mother’s home
in Chatsworth. Two screens of police contacts with Sharkey followed. Bosch could tell by the location of each arrest or questioning
that this Sharkey was partial to Hollywood and West Hollywood when he ran away. He scanned to the bottom of the second screen,
where he saw a loitering arrest three months earlier at the Hollywood reservoir.

“This is him,” he said. “Forget the last kid. Hard copy?”

She pushed keys to print the computer file and then pointed to the wall of file cabinets. He went over and opened the N drawer.
He found a file on Edward Niese and pulled it. Inside was a color booking photo. Sharkey was blond and seemed small in the
picture. He had the look of hurt and defiance that was as common as acne on teenagers’ faces these days. But Bosch was struck
by a familiarity about the face. He couldn’t place it. He turned the photo over. It was dated two years earlier. King handed
him the computer printout and he sat down at one of the empty desks to study it and the contents of the file.

• • •

The most serious offenses the boy who called himself Sharkey had committed — and been caught at — were shoplifting, vandalism,
loitering and possession of marijuana and speed. He had been held once — twenty days — at Sylmar Juvenile Hall after one of
the drug arrests but later released on home probation. All the other times he was popped he was immediately released to his
mother. He was a chronic runaway from home and a throw-away from the system.

There was not much more in the file than was on the computer. A little elaboration on the arrests was all. Bosch shuffled
through the papers until he found the report on the loitering charge. It went to pretrial intervention and was dismissed when
Sharkey agreed to go home to his mother and stay there. That apparently didn’t last long. There was a report that the mother
had reported him missing to his probation officer two weeks later. According to these records, he had not been picked up yet.

Bosch read the investigating officer’s summary on the loitering arrest. It said:

I/O interviewed Donald Smiley, a caretaker at the Mulholland Dam, who said at 7
A.M.
this date he went into the pipe situated alongside the reservoir access road to clear it of debris. Smiley found the boy
asleep on a bed made of newspapers. The boy was dirty and incoherent when roused. Subject appeared to be under the influence
of narcotics. Police were called and I/O responded. The arrestee stated to I/O that he had been sleeping there regularly because
his mother did not want him at home. I/O determined the subject was a reported runaway and took him into custody this date,
suspicion of loitering.

Sharkey was a creature of habit, Bosch thought. He was arrested at the dam two months ago, but had gone back there to sleep
Sunday morning. He looked through the rest of the papers in the file for indications of other habits that would help Bosch
find him. From a three-by-five shake card, Bosch learned that Sharkey had been stopped and questioned but not arrested on
Santa Monica Boulevard near West Hollywood in January. Sharkey was lacing up new Reeboks and the officer, believing he might
have just lifted them, asked Sharkey to produce a receipt. He did and that would have been that. But when the boy pulled the
receipt out of a leather pouch on his motorbike, the officer noticed a plastic bag in there and asked to see that as well.
The bag contained ten photographs of Sharkey. He was naked in each and stood in different poses, fondling himself in some,
his penis erect in others. The officer took the photos and destroyed them, but noted on the shake card that he would alert
the sheriff’s station in West Hollywood that Sharkey was hustling photos to homosexuals on Santa Monica Boulevard.

That was it. Bosch closed the file but kept the photo of Sharkey. He thanked Thelia King and left the small office. He was
walking through the station’s rear hallway, past the lockup benches, when he placed the familiarity in the photo. The hair
was longer now and in dreadlocks, the defiance crowding out the hurt in the face, but Sharkey had been the kid who was cuffed
to the juvie bench early that morning. Bosch felt sure of it. Thelia had missed it on the computer search because the arrest
had not yet been logged in. Bosch cut into the watch commander’s office, told the lieutenant what he was looking for and was
led to a box labeled
A.M.
Watch. Bosch looked through the reports stacked in the box until he found the paperwork on Edward Niese.

Sharkey had been picked up at 4
A.M.
loitering near a newsstand on Vine. A patrol officer thought he was hustling. After he grabbed him he ran a computer check
and learned he was a runaway. Bosch checked the day’s arrest sheet and learned the kid had been held until 9
A.M.
, when his probation officer came and got him. Bosch called the PO at Sylmar Juvenile Hall but learned that Sharkey had already
been arraigned before a juvenile court referee and was released to the custody of his mother.

“And that’s his biggest problem,” the PO said. “He’ll be gone by tonight, back on the street. I guarantee it. And I told the
ref that, but he wasn’t going to book the kid into the monkey house just ’cause he was caught loitering and his mother happens
to be a telephone whore.”

“A what?” Bosch asked.

“It should be in the file. Yeah, while Sharkey’s on the street, dear old mom is at home telling guys on the phone how she’s
gonna piss in their mouths and put rubber bands on their dicks. Advertises in skin mags. She gets forty bucks for fifteen
minutes. Takes MasterCard, Visa, puts ’em on hold while she checks on another line to make sure the number is valid and they
got credit. Anyway, she’s been doing it, near as I can tell, five years now. Edward’s formative years were listening to this
shit. I mean, no wonder the kid’s a scammer and runner. What do you expect?”

“How long ago did he leave with her?”

“’Bout noon. You want to catch him there, you better go. You got the address?”

“Yeah.”

“And Bosch, one thing: Don’t be expecting no whore when you get there. His mom, she doesn’t look like the part she plays on
the phone, if you know what I mean. Her voice might do the job but her looks would scare a blind man.”

Bosch thanked him for the warning and hung up. He took the 101 out to the Valley and then the 405 north to the 118 and west.
He got off in Chatsworth and drove into the rocky bluffs at the top corner of the Valley. There was a condominium community
built on what he knew was once a movie ranch. It had been one of the places Charlie Manson and his crew used to hide out.
Parts of one member of that crew’s body were supposedly still missing and buried around there someplace. It was near dusk
when Bosch got there. People were off work and getting home. A lot of traffic on the development’s thin roads. A lot of closing
doors. A lot of calls to Sharkey’s mother. Bosch was too late.

“I have no time to talk to more police,” Veronica Niese said when she answered the door and looked at the badge. “As soon
as I get him home he is out the door again. I don’t know where he goes. You tell me. That’s your job. I have three calls waiting,
one long distance. I gotta go.”

She was in her late forties, fat and wrinkled. She obviously wore a wig and the dilation of her eyes did not match. She had
the dirty-socks smell of a speed addict. Her callers were better off with their fantasies, with just a voice with which to
construct a body and face.

“Mrs. Niese, I’m not looking for your son for something he did. I need to talk to him because of something he saw. He could
possibly be in danger.”

“Oh, bullshit. I’ve heard that line before.”

She closed the door and he just stood there. After a few moments he could hear her on the phone, and he thought it was a French
accent but couldn’t be sure. He could only make out a few of the sentences but they made him blush. He thought about Sharkey
and realized he wasn’t really a runaway, because there was nothing here to run away from. He left the doorstep and went back
to the car. That would be it for the day. And he was out of time. Lewis and Clarke must have paper out on him by now. He’d
be assigned to a desk at IAD by morning. He drove back to the station and signed out. Everyone was already gone and there
were no messages on his desk, not even from his lawyer. On the way home he stopped by the Lucky and bought four bottles of
beer, a couple from Mexico, a lager from England called Old Nick and a Henry’s.

He expected to find a message from Lewis and Clarke on his phone tape when he got home. He wasn’t wrong, but the message was
not what he expected.

“I know you’re there, so listen,” said a voice Bosch recognized as Clarke’s. “They can change their mind but they can’t change
ours. We’ll see you around.”

There were no other messages. He played Clarke’s message over three times. Something had gone wrong for them. They must have
been called off. Could his lame threat to the FBI to go to the media have worked? Even as he thought the question, he doubted
the answer was yes. So then, what happened? He sat down in the watch chair and began drinking the beers, the Mexicans first,
and looking through the war scrapbook he had forgotten to put away. When he had opened it Sunday night he had opened a dark
memory. He now found himself entranced by it, the distance of time having faded the threat as well as the photos. Sometime
after dark the phone rang and Harry picked it up before the tape machine.