Michael Connelly (21 page)

“It’s a matter of trust, that’s all,” Wish said. “I don’t care how long or short we work together. If you are going to keep
up the one-man army stuff, there will never be the trust we need to succeed.”

He stared at the mirror on the passenger’s side, which he had adjusted so he could watch the car that had pulled away from
the curb and followed them from the Blue Chateau. He was sure now it was Lewis and Clarke. He had seen Lewis’s huge neck and
crew cut behind the wheel when the car had pulled up within three car lengths at a traffic signal. He didn’t tell Wish they
were being followed. And if she had noticed the tail, she hadn’t said so. She was too involved in other things. He sat there
watching the tail car and listening to her complaints about how badly he had handled things.

Finally he said, “Meadows was found Sunday. Today is Tuesday. It is a fact of life in homicide that the odds, the likelihood,
of solving a homicide grow longer as each day on the calendar flips by. And so, I’m sorry. I did not think it would help us
to waste a day booking some asshole who was probably baited into a motel room by a hooker sixteen years old going on thirty.
I also did not think it would be worth waiting for DYS to come out to pick up the girl because I would bet a paycheck that
DYS already knows that girl and knows where she is, if they want her. In short, I wanted to get on with it, leave other people’s
jobs to other people and do my job. And that meant doing what we are doing now. Slow down up here at Ragtime. It’s one of
the spots I got off the shake cards.”

“We both want to solve this, Bosch. So don’t be so goddam condescending, as if you have this noble mission and I am just along
for the ride. We are both on it. Don’t forget it.”

She slowed in front of the open-air café, where pairs of men sat in white wrought-iron chairs at glass-top tables, drinking
ice tea with slices of orange hooked on the rim of beveled glasses. A few of the men looked at Bosch and then looked away
uninterested. He scanned the dining area but didn’t see Sharkey. As the car cruised past, he looked down the side alley and
saw a couple of young men hanging around, but they were too old to be Sharkey.

They spent the next twenty minutes driving around gay bars and restaurants, keeping mostly on Santa Monica, but did not see
the boy. Bosch watched as the Internal Affairs car kept pace, never more than a block back. Wish never said anything about
them. But Bosch knew that law officers were usually the last to notice a surveillance because they were the last to ever think
they might be followed. They were the hunters, not the prey.

Bosch wondered what Lewis and Clarke were doing. Did they expect that he would break some law or cop rule with an FBI agent
in tow? He began to wonder if the two IAD detectives weren’t just hotdogging on their own time. Maybe they wanted him to see
them. Some kind of a psych-out. He told Wish to pull to a curb in front of Barnie’s Beanery and he jumped out to use the pay
phone near the old bar’s screen door. He dialed the Internal Affairs nonpublic number, which he knew by heart, having had
to call in twice a day when he was put on home duty the year before while they investigated him. A woman, the desk officer,
answered the phone.

“Is Lewis or Clarke there?”

“No, sir, they’re not. Can I take a message?”

“No thanks. Uh, this is Lieutenant Pounds, Hollywood detectives. Are they just out of the office? I need to check a point
with them.”

“I believe they are code seven till
P.M.
watch.”

He hung up. They were off duty until four. They were scamming, or Bosch had simply kicked them too hard in the balls this
time and now they were going after him on their own time. He got back in the car and told Wish he had checked his office for
messages. It was as she merged the car back into traffic that he saw the yellow motorbike leaning on a parking meter about
a half block from Barnie’s. It was parked in front of a pancake restaurant.

“There,” he said and pointed. “Go on by and I’ll get the number. If it’s his, we’ll sit on it.”

It was Sharkey’s bike. Bosch matched the plate to his notes from the kid’s CRASH file. But there was no sign of the boy. Wish
drove around the block and parked in the same spot in front of Barnie’s that they had been in before.

“So, we wait,” she said. “For this kid you think might be a witness.”

“Right. It’s what I think. But two of us don’t need to waste the time. You can leave me here if you want. I’ll go in the beanery,
order a pitcher of Henry’s and a bowl of chili and watch from the window.”

“That’s all right. I’m staying.”

Bosch settled back for a wait. He took out his cigarettes but she nailed him before he got one out of the pack.

“Have you heard of the draft risk assessment?” she asked.

“The what?”

“Secondhand cigarette smoke. It’s deadly, Bosch. The EPA came out last month, officially. Said it’s a carcinogen. Three thousand
people are getting lung cancer a year from passive smoking, they call it. You are killing yourself and me. Please don’t.”

He put the cigarettes back in his coat pocket. They were quiet as they watched the bike, which was chain-locked to the parking
meter. Bosch took a few glances at the side-view mirror but didn’t see the IAD car. He glanced over at Wish, too, whenever
he thought she wasn’t looking. Santa Monica Boulevard steadily got crowded with cars as the apex of rush hour approached.
Wish kept her window closed to cut down on the carbon monoxide. It made the car very hot.

“Why do you keep staring at me?” she asked about an hour into the surveillance.

“At you? I didn’t know that I was.”

“You were. You are. You ever have a female partner before?”

“Nope. But that’s not why I would be staring. If I was.”

“Why then? If you were.”

“I’d be trying to figure you out. You know, why you are here, doing this. I always thought, I mean at least I heard, that
the bank squad over at the FBI was for dinosaurs and fuckups, the agents too old or too dumb to use a computer or trace some
white-collar scumbag’s assets through a paper trail. Then, here you are. On the heavy squad. You’re no dinosaur, and something
tells me you’re no fuckup. Something tells me you’re a prize, Eleanor.”

She was quiet a moment, and Bosch thought he saw the trace of a smile play on her lips. Then it was gone, if it had been there
at all.

“I guess that is a backhanded compliment,” she said. “If it is, thank you. I have my reasons for choosing where I am with
the bureau. And believe me, I do get to choose. As far as the others in the squad, I would not characterize any of them as
you do. I think that attitude, which, by the way, seems to be shared by many of your fellow —”

“There’s Sharkey,” he said.

A boy with blond dreadlocks had come through a side alley between the pancake shop and a mini-mall. An older man stood with
him. He wore a T-shirt that said The Gay 90s Are Back! Bosch and Wish stayed in the car and watched. Sharkey and the man exchanged
a few words and then Sharkey took something from his pocket and handed it over. The man shuffled through what looked like
a stack of playing cards. He took a couple of cards and gave the rest back. He then gave Sharkey a single green bill.

“What’s he doing?” Wish asked.

“Buying baby pictures.”

“What?”

“A pedophile.”

The older man headed off down the sidewalk and Sharkey walked to his motorbike. He hunched over the chain and lock.

“Okay,” Bosch said, and they got out of the car.

• • •

That would be enough for today, Sharkey thought. Time to kick. He lit a cigarette and bent over the seat of his motorbike
to work the combination on the Master lock. His dreads flopped down past his eyes and he could smell some of the coconut stuff
he had put in his hair the night before at the Jaguar guy’s house. That was after Arson had broken the guy’s nose and the
blood got everywhere. He stood up and was about to wrap the chain around his waist when he saw them coming. Cops. They were
too close. Too late to run. Trying to act like he hadn’t yet seen them, he quickly made a mental list of everything in his
pockets. The credit cards were gone, already sold. The money could have come from anywhere, some of it did. He was cool. The
only thing they’d have would be the queer guy’s identification if they had a lineup. Sharkey was surprised the guy had made
a report. No one ever had before.

Sharkey smiled at the two approaching cops, and the man held up a tape recorder. A tape recorder? What was this? The man hit
the play button and after a few seconds Sharkey recognized his own voice. Then he recognized where it had come from. This
wasn’t about the Jaguar guy. This was about the pipe.

Sharkey said, “So?”

“So,” said the man, “we want you to tell us about it.”

“Man, I didn’t have anything to do with it. You ain’t going to put that — Hey! You’re the guy from the police station. Yeah,
I saw you there the next night. Well, you ain’t going to get me to say I did that shit up there.”

“Take it down a notch, Sharkey,” the man said. “We know you didn’t do it. We just want to know what you saw, is all. Lock
your bike up again. We’ll bring you back.”

The man gave his name and the woman’s. Bosch and Wish. He said she was FBI, which really confused things. The boy hesitated,
then stooped and locked the bike again.

Bosch said, “We just want to take a ride over to Wilcox to ask you some questions, maybe draw a picture.”

“Of what?” Sharkey asked.

Bosch didn’t answer; he just gestured with his hand to come along and then pointed up the block at a gray Caprice. It was
the car Sharkey had seen in front of the Chateau. As they walked, Bosch kept his hand on Sharkey’s shoulder. Sharkey wasn’t
as tall as Bosch yet, but they shared the same wiry build. The boy wore a tie-dyed shirt of purple and yellow shades. Black
sunglasses hung around his neck on orange string. The boy put them on as they approached the Caprice.

“Okay, Sharkey,” Bosch said at the car. “You know the procedure. We’ve got to search you before you go in the car. That way
we won’t have to cuff you for the ride. Put everything on the hood.”

“Man, you said I was no suspect,” Sharkey protested. “I don’t have to do this.”

“I told you, procedure. You get it all back. Except the pictures. We can’t do that.”

Sharkey looked first at Bosch and then Wish, then he started putting his hands in the pockets of his frayed jeans.

“Yeah, we know about the pictures,” Bosch said.

The boy put $46.55 on the hood along with a pack of cigarettes and book of matches, a small penknife on a key chain and a
deck of Polaroid photos. They were photos of Sharkey and the other guys in the crew. In each, the model was naked and in various
stages of sexual arousal. As Bosch shuffled through them, Wish looked over his shoulder and then quickly looked away. She
picked up the pack of cigarettes and looked through it, finding a single joint among the Kools.

“I guess we have to keep that, too,” Bosch said.

• • •

They drove to the police station on Wilcox because it was rush hour and it would have taken them an hour to get to the Federal
Building in Westwood. It was after six by the time they got into the detective bureau, and the place was deserted, everybody
having gone home. Bosch took Sharkey into one of the eight-by-eight interview rooms. There was a small, cigarette-scarred
table and three chairs in the room. A handmade sign on one wall said No Sniveling! He sat Sharkey down in the Slider — a wooden
chair with its seat heavily waxed and a quarter-inch of wood cut off the bottom of the front two legs. The incline was not
enough to notice, but enough that the people who sat in the chair could not get comfortable. They would lean back like most
hard cases and slowly slide off the front. The only thing they could do was lean forward, right into the face of their interrogator.
Bosch told the boy not to move, then stepped outside to plan a strategy with Wish, shutting the door. She opened the door
after he closed it.

She said, “It’s illegal to leave a juvenile in a closed room unattended.”

Bosch closed the door again.

“He isn’t complaining,” he said. “We’ve got to talk. What’s your feel for him? You want him, or you want me to take it?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

That settled it. That was a no. An initial interview with a witness, a reluctant witness at that, required a skillful blend
of scamming, cajoling, demanding. If she didn’t know, she didn’t go.

“You’re supposed to be the expert interrogator,” she said in what seemed to Bosch to be a mocking voice. “According to your
file. I don’t know if that’s using brains or brawn. But I’d like to see how it’s done.”

He nodded, ignoring the jab. He reached into his pocket for the boy’s cigarettes and matches.

“Go in and give him these. I want to go check my desk for messages and set up a tape.” When he saw the look on her face as
she eyed the cigarettes, he added, “First rule of interrogation: make the subject think he is comfortable. Give ’im the cigarettes.
Hold your breath if you don’t like it.”

He started to walk away but she said, “Bosch, what was he doing with those pictures?”

So that was what was bothering her, he thought. “Look. Five years ago a kid like him would have gone with that man and done
who knows what. Nowadays, he sells him a picture instead. There are so many killers — diseases and otherwise — these kids
are getting smart. It’s safer to sell your Polaroids than to sell your flesh.”

She opened the door to the interview room and went in. Bosch crossed the squad room and checked the chrome spike on his desk
for messages. His lawyer had finally called back. So had Bremmer over at the
Times,
though he had left a pseudonym they had both agreed on earlier. Bosch didn’t want anybody snooping around his desk to know
the press had called.

Bosch left the messages on the spike, took out his ID card and went to the supply closet and slipped the lock. He opened a
new ninety-minute cassette and popped it into the recorder on the bottom shelf of the closet. He turned on the machine and
made sure the backup cassette was turning. He set it on record and watched to make sure both tapes were rolling. Then he went
back down the hallway to the front desk and told a fat Explorer Scout who was sitting there to order a pizza to be delivered
to the station. He gave the kid a ten and told him to bring it to the interview room with three Cokes when it came.