Michael Connelly (61 page)

“The dirty work.”

“Right. I got stuck with the dirty work. But like I said, I sort of knew your husband and…”

“I don’t think it’s a mystery you can solve, Detective Bosch.”

He nodded — the old standby.

“I teach English and lit at Grant High in the Valley,” she said. “I assign my students a lot of books written about L.A. so
they can get a feel for the history and character of their community. Lord knows, few of them were born here. Anyway, one
of the books I assign is
The Long Goodbye
. It’s about a detective.”

“I’ve read it.”

“There is a line. I know it by heart. ‘There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.’ Whenever I read that
I think of my husband. And me.”

She started to cry again. Silently, never taking her eyes off Bosch. This time he didn’t nod. He saw the need in her eyes
and crossed the room and put his hand on her shoulder. It felt awkward, but then she moved into him and leaned her head against
his chest. He let her keep crying until she pulled away.

• • •

An hour later, Bosch was home. He picked up the half-filled glass of wine and the bottle that had been sitting on the table
since dinner. He went out on the back porch and sat and drank and thought about things until early into the morning hours.
The glow of the fire across the pass was gone. But now something burned within himself.

Calexico Moore had apparently answered a question that all people carry deep within themselves — that Harry Bosch, too, had
longed to answer.
I found out who I was.

And it had killed him. It was a thought that pushed a fist into Bosch’s guts, into the most secret folds of his heart.

Thursday, the morning after Christmas, was one of those days the postcard photographers pray for. There was no hint of smog
in the sky. The fire in the hills had burned out and the smoke had long been blown over the hills by Pacific breezes. In its
stead the Los Angeles basin basked under a blue sky and puffy cumulus clouds.

Bosch decided to take the long way down out of the hills, driving on Woodrow Wilson until it crossed Mulholland and then taking
the winding route through Nichols Canyon. He loved the views of the hills covered with blue wisteria and violet ice plants,
topped with aging million-dollar homes that gave the city its aura of fading glory. As he drove he thought of the night before
and how it had made him feel to comfort Sylvia Moore. It made him feel like a cop in a Rockwell painting. Like he had made
a difference.

Once he was out of the hills he took Genesee to Sunset and then cut over to Wilcox. He parked behind the station and walked
past the fenced windows of the drunk tank into the detective bureau. The gloom in the squad room was thicker than cigarette
smoke in a porno theater. The other detectives sat at their tables with their heads down, most talking quietly on the phone
or with their faces buried in the paperwork that haunted their lives with its never-ceasing flow.

Harry sat down at the homicide table and looked across at Jerry Edgar, his some-of-the-time partner. There were no permanently
assigned partners anymore. The bureau was shorthanded and there was a departmental hiring and promotion freeze because of
budget cuts. They were down to five detectives on the homicide table. The bureau commander, Lieutenant Harvey “Ninety-eight”
Pounds, managed this by working detectives solo except on key cases, dangerous assignments or when making arrests. Bosch liked
working on his own, anyway, but most of the other detectives complained about it.

“What’s going on?” Bosch asked Edgar. “Moore?”

Edgar nodded. They were alone at the table. Shelby Dunne and Karen Moshito usually came in after nine and Lucius Porter was
lucky if he was sober enough to get in by ten.

“Little while ago Ninety-eight came out of the box and said they got the fingerprint match. It was Moore. He blew his own
shit away.”

They were silent for a few minutes after that. Harry scanned the paperwork on his desk but couldn’t help thinking about Moore.
He imagined Irving or Sheehan or maybe even Chastain calling Sylvia Moore to tell her the identification was confirmed. Harry
could see his slim connection to the case disappearing like smoke. Without having to turn, he realized someone was standing
behind him. He looked around to see Pounds looking down at him.

“Harry, c’mon in.”

An invitation to the glass box. He looked at Edgar, who raised his eyes in a who-knows gesture. Harry got up and followed
the lieutenant into his office at the head of the squad room. It was a small room with windows on three sides that enabled
Pounds to look out on his charges but limit his actual contact with them. He didn’t have to hear them or smell them or know
them. The blinds that were often used to cut off his sight of them were open this morning.

“Sit down, Harry. I don’t have to tell you not to smoke. Have a good Christmas?”

Bosch just looked at him. He was uncomfortable with this guy calling him Harry and asking him about Christmas. He hesitantly
sat down.

“What’s up?” he said.

“Let’s not get hostile, Harry. I’m the one who should be hostile. I just heard you spent a good part of Christmas night at
that dump motel, the Hideaway, where nobody in this world would want to be and where Robbery-Homicide happened to be conducting
an investigation.”

“I was on call,” Bosch said. “And I should have been called out to the scene. I went by to see what was going on. Turned out,
Irving needed me, anyway.”

“That’s fine, Harry, if you leave it at that. I have been told to tell you not to get any ideas about the Moore case.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just what it sounds like it means.”

“Look, if you —”

“Never mind, never mind.” Pounds raised his hands in a calming gesture, then pinched the bridge of his nose, signifying the
onset of a headache. He opened the center drawer of his desk and took out a small tin of aspirin. He took two without water.

“Enough said, okay?” Pounds said. “I’m not — I don’t need to get into —”

Pounds made a choking sound and jumped up from his desk. He moved past Bosch and out of the box to the water fountain near
the entrance to the bureau. Bosch didn’t even watch him. He just sat in his chair. Pounds was back in a few moments and continued.

“Excuse me. Anyway, what I was saying was that I don’t need an argument with you every time I bring you in here. I really
think you have to work through this problem you have with dealing with the command structure of this department. You take
it to extremes.”

Bosch could still see chalky white aspirin caking at the corners of his mouth. Pounds cleared his throat again.

“I was just passing on an aside in your best —”

“Why doesn’t Irving pass it on himself?”

“I didn’t say — look, Bosch, forget it. Just forget it. You’ve been told and that’s that. If you have any ideas about last
night, about Moore, drop them. It’s being handled.”

“I am sure it is.”

The warning delivered, Bosch stood up. He wanted to throw this guy through his glass wall but would settle for a cigarette
out behind the drunk tank.

“Siddown,” Pounds said. “That’s not why I brought you in.”

Bosch sat down again and quietly waited. He watched Pounds try to compose himself. He opened the drawer again and pulled out
a wood ruler, which he absentmindedly manipulated in his hands while he began to talk.

“Harry, you know how many homicides we’ve caught in the division this year?”

The question came from left field. Harry wondered what Pounds was up to. He knew he had handled eleven cases himself, but
he had been out of the rotation for six weeks during the summer while in Mexico recovering from the bullet wound. He figured
the homicide squad for about seventy cases in the year. He said, “I have no idea.”

“Well, I’m going to tell you,” Pounds said. “Right now we are at sixty-six homicides for the year to date. And, of course,
we’ve still got five days to go. Probably, we’ll pick up another. I’m thinking, at least one. New Year’s Eve is always trouble.
We’ll pro —”

“So what about it? I remember we had fifty-nine last year. Murder is going up. What else is new?”

“What is new is that the number of cases we have cleared is going down. It is less than half that number. Thirty-two out of
sixty-six cases have been cleared. Now, a good number of those cases have been cleared by you. I have you with eleven cases.
Seven have been cleared by arrest or other. We have warrants out on two others. Of the two you have open, one is idle pending
developments and you are actively pursuing the James Kappalanni matter. Correct?”

Bosch nodded. He didn’t like the way this was going but wasn’t sure why.

“The problem is the overall record,” Pounds said. “When taken in its entirety,…well, it’s a pitiful record of success.”

Pounds slapped the ruler hard into his palm and shook his head. An idea was forming in Harry’s mind about what this was about,
but still there was a part missing. He wasn’t sure exactly what Pounds was up to.

“Think of it,” Pounds continued. “All those victims — and their families! — for whom justice eludes. And then, and then, think
how badly the public’s confidence in us, in this department, will erode when the
L.A. Times
trumpets across their Metro page that more than half the killers in Hollywood Division walk away from their crimes?”

“I don’t think we have to worry about public confidence going down,” Bosch said. “I don’t think it can.”

Pounds rubbed the bridge of his nose again and quietly said, “This is not the time for your unique cynical view of the job,
Bosch. Don’t bring your arrogance in here. I can take you off that table and put you on autos or maybe juvies any time I want
to make the move. Get me? I’d gladly take the heat when you took a beef to the union.”

“Then where’s your homicide clearance rate going to be? What’s it going to say in the Metro section then? Two thirds of the
killers in Hollywood walk?”

Pounds put the ruler back in the drawer and closed it. Bosch thought there was a thin smile on his face and he began to believe
he had just talked his way into a trap. Pounds then opened another drawer and brought a blue binder up onto the desk. It was
the type used to keep record of a murder investigation but Bosch saw few pages inside it.

“Point well taken,” Pounds said. “Which brings us to the point of this meeting. See, we’re talking about statistics, Harry.
We clear one more case and we’re at the halfway mark. Instead of saying more than half get away, we can say half of the killers
are caught. If we clear two more, we can say
more
than half are cleared. Get me?”

Pounds nodded when Bosch said nothing. He made a show of straightening the binder on his desk, then he looked directly at
Bosch.

“Lucius Porter won’t be back,” he said. “Talked to him this morning. He is going stress-related. Said he is getting a doctor
lined up.”

Pounds reached into the drawer and pulled up another blue murder book. Then another. Bosch could see what was happening now.

“And I hope he has a good one lined up,” Pounds was saying as he added the fifth and sixth binders to the pile. “Because last
I checked this department doesn’t consider cirrhosis of the liver a stress-related malady. Porter’s a lush, simple as that.
And it’s not fair that he claim a stress disability and take early retirement because he can’t handle his booze. We’re going
to bust him at the administrative hearing. I don’t care if he has Mother Theresa as his lawyer. We’ll bust him.”

He tapped his finger on top of the pile of blue binders. “I’ve looked through these cases — he has eight open cases — and
it’s just pathetic. I’ve copied the chronologies and I’m going to verify them. I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts they are replete
with fraudulent entries. He was sitting on a stool somewhere, his head on the bar, when he says he was interviewing wits or
doing the legwork.”

Pounds shook his head sadly.

“You know, we lost our checks and balances when we stopped partnering our investigators. There was nobody to watch this guy.
Now I’m sitting here with eight open investigations that were as slipshod as anything I’ve ever seen. For all I know, each
one could’ve been cleared.”

And whose idea was it to make detectives work solo, Bosch wanted to say but didn’t. Instead, he said, “You ever hear the story
about when Porter was in uniform about ten years back? He and his partner stopped one time to write up a citation for some
shitbag they saw sitting on a curb drinking in public. Porter was driving. It was routine — just a misdee writeup — so he
stayed behind the wheel. He’s sitting there when the shitbag stands up and caps his partner in the face. Standing there, both
hands on his cite book, takes it right between the eyes and Porter sat there watching.”

Pounds looked exasperated.

“I know that story, Bosch,” Pounds said. “They re-enact it for every class of recruits that goes through the academy. A lesson
in what not to do, how not to fuck up. But it’s ancient history. If he wanted a stress-out, he should’ve taken it then.”