Michael Connelly (52 page)

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He paid the cabdriver at the station on Wilcox and went in through the front door, where he knew there was less chance that
he would be recognized or spoken to. There was a rookie he didn’t know on the front desk with the same pimple-faced Explorer
Scout who had brought the pizza to Sharkey. Bosch held up his badge and passed by without saying a word. The detective bureau
was dark and deserted, as it was on most Sunday nights, even in Hollywood. Bosch had a desk light clamped to his spot at the
homicide table. He turned it on rather than using the bureau’s ceiling lights, which might draw curious patrol officers down
the hall from the watch commander’s office. Harry didn’t feel like answering questions, even the well-meaning ones from the
uniform troops.

He first went to the back of the room and started a pot of coffee. Then he went into one of the interview rooms to change
into his new shirt. His shoulder sent arrows of searing pain through his chest and down his arm as he pulled the hospital
shirt off. He sat down in one of the chairs and examined the bandage for signs of a blood leak. There was none. Carefully,
and much less painfully, he slipped the new shirt on — it was extra large. There was a small drawing of a mountain, sun, and
seascape on the left breast and the words City of Angels. Bosch covered that when he put on the sling and adjusted it so that
it held his arm tightly against his chest.

The coffee was ready when he was finished changing. He carried a steaming cup to the homicide table, lit a cigarette and pulled
the murder book and other files on the Meadows case out of a file drawer. He looked at the pile and didn’t know where to start
or what he was looking for. He began reading through it all, hoping something would hit him as being wrong. He was looking
for anything, a new name, a discrepancy in somebody’s statement, something that had been discarded earlier as unimportant
but would look different to him now.

He quickly scanned his own reports because most of the information he could still recall. Then he reread Meadows’s military
file. It was the slimmer version, the FBI handout. He had no idea what had happened to the more detailed records he had received
from St. Louis and had left in the car when he went running toward the vault the morning before. He realized then that he
had no idea where that car was, either.

Bosch drew a blank on the military file. While he was looking down at the miscellaneous paperwork in the back of the binder,
the ceiling lights came on and an old beat cop named Pederson came in. He was heading toward one of the typewriters with an
arrest report in his hand and didn’t notice Bosch until he had sat down. He looked around when he smelled the cigarettes and
coffee and saw the detective with the sling.

“Harry, how goes it? They let you out quick. Word around here was that you were righteously fucked up.”

“Just a scratch, Peds. You get it worse from the fingernails of the he-shes you pull in every Saturday night. Least with a
bullet you don’t have to worry about the AIDS shit.”

“You’re telling me.” Pederson instinctively massaged his neck where he still had scars from scratches inflicted by a transvestite
hooker infected with the HIV virus. The old beat cop had sweated out two years of testing every three months but didn’t get
the virus. It was a story that was nightmarish legend in the division and probably the single reason the average occupancy
in the TV and prostitute tanks at the station jail had dropped by half since then. Nobody wanted to arrest them anymore, unless
it was for murder.

“Anyway,” Pederson said, “sorry it went to shit out there, Harry. I heard the second cop went code seven a little while ago.
Two cops and a feebee down in one shootout. Not to mention you gettin’ your arm all fucked up. Probably some kind of a record
for this town. Mind if I have a cup?”

Bosch gestured to the coffeepot. He hadn’t heard that Clarke had died. Code seven. Out of service, for good. He still couldn’t
bring himself to feel sorry for the two IAD cops, and that made him feel sorry for himself. Made him feel like the hardening
of the heart was now complete. He no longer had compassion for anybody, not even poor dumb jerks who screwed up and got themselves
killed.

“They don’t tell you shit around here,” Pederson was saying as he poured, “but when I read those names in the paper I said,
‘Whoah, I know them guys.’ Lewis and Clarke. They were IAD, not on any bank detail. They called them two the great explorers.
Always digging around, looking to fuck somebody up. I think everybody knows that’s who they were but the TV and the
Times.
Anyway, that sure was curious, you know, what they were doing there.”

Bosch wasn’t going to bite on that. Pederson and the other cops would have to find out from another source what really went
down at Beverly Hills Safe & Lock. In fact, he began to wonder if Pederson really had an arrest report to type up. Or had
the rookie at the front desk spread the word that Bosch was in the bureau and the old beat cop been sent back to pump him?

Pederson had hair whiter than chalk and was considered an old cop but was actually only a few years older than Bosch. He had
walked or driven the Boulevard beat for twenty years on night watch, and that was enough to turn a man’s hair white early.
Bosch liked Pederson. He was a silo of information about the street. There was rarely a murder on the Boulevard that went
by without Bosch’s checking with him to see what his informants were saying. And he almost always came through.

“Yeah, it’s curious,” Bosch said. He added nothing else.

“You doing paper from your shooting?” Pederson asked after settling himself in front of a typewriter. When Bosch didn’t answer
he added, “You got any more of those cigarettes?”

Bosch got up and carried a whole pack over to Pederson. He put them down on the typewriter in front of the beat cop and told
him they were his. Pederson got the message. Nothing personal, but Bosch wasn’t going to talk about the shoot-out, especially
about what a couple of IAD cops were doing there.

Pederson got to work on the typewriter after that, and Bosch went back to his murder book. He finished reading through it
without a single forty-watt bulb lighting up in his head. He sat there with the typewriter clacking in the background and
smoked and tried to think of what else there was to do. There was nothing. He was at the wall.

He decided to call his home and check the tape machine. He picked up his phone, then thought better of using it and hung up.
On the off chance his desk phone wasn’t a private line, he walked around to Jerry Edgar’s spot at the table and used his line.
He got his answering machine, punched in a code and listened as it played a dozen messages. The first nine were from cops
and some old friends wishing him a speedy recovery. The last three, the most recent messages, were from the doctor who had
been treating him, Irving and Pounds.

“Mr. Bosch, this is Dr. McKenna. I consider it very unwise and unsafe for you to have left the hospital environment. You are
risking further damage to your body. If you get this message, would you please return to the hospital. We are holding the
bed. I can no longer treat you or consider you my patient if you do not return. Please. Thank you.”

Irving and Pounds were not as worried about Bosch’s health.

Irving’s message said, “I do not know where you are or what you are doing, but it better be that you just do not like hospital
food. Think about what I told you, Detective Bosch. Do not make a mistake we will both be sorry for.”

Irving hadn’t bothered to identify himself but didn’t have to. Neither did Pounds. His message was the last. It was the chorus.

“Bosch, call me at home as soon as you get this. I have received word that you left the hospital and we need to talk. Bosch,
you are not, repeat, not, to continue any line of investigation relating to the shootings on Saturday. Call me.”

Bosch hung up. He wasn’t going to call any of them. Not yet. While sitting at Edgar’s spot he noticed a scratch pad on the
table on which the name Veronica Niese was written. Sharkey’s mother. There was also a phone number. Edgar must have called
her to notify her about her son’s death. Bosch thought of her answering the call, expecting it to be another one of her jerkoff
customers, and instead it was Jerry Edgar calling to say her son was dead.

His thought of the boy reminded Bosch of the interview. He had not had the tape transcribed yet. He decided to listen to it,
and went back to his place at the table. He pulled his tape recorder out of a drawer. The tape was gone. He remembered he
had given it to Eleanor. He went to the supply closet, trying to calculate whether the interview would still be on the backup
tape. The backup automatically rewound when it reached its end and then started taping over itself. Depending on how often
the taping system in the interview room had been used since Tuesday’s session with Sharkey, the Q-and-A with the boy might
still be intact on the backup tape.

Bosch popped the cassette out of the recorder and brought it back to his table. He put it in his own portable, put on a set
of earphones and rewound the tape to its beginning. He reviewed it by playing it for a few seconds until he could tell whether
it was his voice or Sharkey’s or Eleanor’s, and then fast-forwarding for about ten seconds. He repeated this process for several
minutes before he finally hit the Sharkey interview in the last half of the tape.

Once he found it, he rewound the tape a bit so he could hear the interview from the start. He rewound too far and ended up
listening to half a minute of another interview concluding. Then he heard Sharkey’s voice.

“What are you looking at?”

“I don’t know.” It was Eleanor. “I was wondering if you knew me. You seem familiar. I didn’t realize I was staring.”

“What? Why should I know you? I never did no federal shit, man. I don’t know —”

“Never mind. You looked familiar to me, that’s all. I was wondering if you recognized me. Why don’t we wait until Detective
Bosch comes in.”

“Yeah, okay. Cool.”

There was silence on the tape then. Listening to it, Bosch was confused. Then he realized that what he had just heard had
been said before he went into the interview room.

What had she been doing? The silence on the tape ended and Bosch heard his own voice.

“Sharkey, we are going to tape this because it might help us later to go over it. Like I said, you are not a suspect so you
—”

Bosch stopped the tape and rewound it to the exchange between the boy and Eleanor. He listened to it again and then again.
Each time it felt as if he had been punched in the heart. His hands were sweating and his fingers slipped on the buttons of
the recorder. He finally pulled the earphones off and flung them onto the table.

“Damn it,” he said.

Pederson stopped typing and looked over.

MONDAY, MAY 28
MEMORIAL DAY OBSERVED

By the time Bosch got to the veterans cemetery in Westwood, it was just after midnight.

He had checked a new car out of the Wilcox fleet garage and then driven by Eleanor Wish’s apartment. There were no lights
on and he felt like a teenager checking on the girlfriend who dumped him. Even though he was alone he was embarrassed. He
didn’t know what he would have done if there had been a light. He headed back east toward the cemetery, thinking about Eleanor
and how she had betrayed him in love and business, all at the same time.

He started with the supposition that Eleanor had asked Sharkey if he recognized her because it was she who had been in the
Jeep that delivered Meadows’s body to the reservoir. She had been looking for a sign that the boy realized this and recognized
her. But he didn’t. Sharkey went on — after Bosch joined the interview — to say he had seen two people who he thought were
men. He said the smaller of the two stayed in the Jeep’s passenger seat and didn’t help with the body at all. It seemed to
Bosch that the boy’s mistake should have insured his life. But he knew that it had been he who had then doomed Sharkey when
he suggested hypnotizing him. Eleanor had passed that on to Rourke, who knew he couldn’t risk it.

Next was the question of why. The money was the ultimate answer, but Bosch could not comfortably attribute this motive to
Eleanor. There was something more. The others involved — Meadows, Franklin, Delgado and Rourke — all shared the common bond
of Vietnam as well as direct knowledge of the two targets, Binh and Tran. How did Eleanor fit into this? Bosch thought about
her brother, killed in Vietnam. Was he the connection? He remembered that she had said his name was Michael, but she hadn’t
mentioned how or when he was killed. Bosch hadn’t let her. Now he regretted having stopped her when she apparently wanted
to talk about him. She had mentioned the memorial in Washington and how it had changed her. What could she have seen that
would do that? What could the wall have told her that she didn’t already know?

He drove into the cemetery off Sepulveda Boulevard and up to the great black iron gates that stood closed across the gravel
entrance road. Bosch got out and walked up, but they were locked with a chain and padlock. He looked through the black bars
and saw a small stone-block house about thirty yards up the gravel road. He saw the pale blue glow of TV light against a curtained
window. Bosch went back to the car and flipped the siren. He let it wail until a light came on behind the curtain. The cemetery
attendant came out a few moments later and walked toward the gate with a flashlight, while Bosch got his badge case out and
held it open through the bars. The man wore dark pants and a light-blue shirt with a tin badge on it.