Michael Connelly (62 page)

“That’s the point, man. He didn’t take it then when he could have. He tried to make it through. Maybe he tried for ten years
and then he just went down in the flood of all the shit in the world. What do you want him to do? Take the same out Cal Moore
took? You get a star in your file for saving the city the pension?”

Pounds did not speak for a few seconds, then said, “Very eloquent, Bosch, but in the long run it is none of your business
what happens to Porter. I should not have brought it up. But I did so you would understand what I have to say now.”

He went through his housekeeping trick of making sure all the corners were aligned on the stack of blue binders. Then he pushed
the stack across the desk toward Bosch.

“You are taking Porter’s caseload. I want you to shelve the Kappalanni matter for a few days. You’re not getting anywhere
at the moment. Put it down until after the first and dive into this.

“I want you to take Porter’s eight open cases and study them. Do it quickly. I want you to look for the one you think you
can do something with quickly and then hit it with everything you’ve got for the next five days — until New Year’s Day. Work
the weekend, I’ll approve the overtime. If you need one of the others on the table to double up with you, no problem. But
put somebody in jail, Harry. Go get me an arrest. I — we need to clear one more case to get to that halfway mark. The deadline
is midnight, New Year’s Eve.”

Bosch just looked at him over the stack of binders. He had the full measure of this man now. Pounds wasn’t a cop anymore.
He was a bureaucrat. He was nothing. He saw crime, the spilling of blood, the suffering of humans, as statistical entries
in a log. And at the end of the year the log told him how well he did. Not people. Not the voice from within. It was the kind
of impersonal arrogance that poisoned much of the department and isolated it from the city, its people. No wonder Porter wanted
out. No wonder Cal Moore pulled his own plug. Harry stood up and picked up the stack of binders and stared at Pounds with
a look that said, I know you. Pounds turned his eyes away.

At the door, Bosch said, “You know, if you bust Porter down, he’ll just get sent back here to the table. Then where will you
be? Next year how many cases will there still be open?”

Pounds’s eyebrows went up as he considered this.

“If you let him go, you’ll get a replacement. A lot of sharp people on the other tables. Meehan over on the juvenile table
is good. You bring him over to our table and I bet you’ll see your stats go up. But if you go ahead and bust Porter and bring
him back, we might be doing this again next year.”

Pounds waited a moment, to make sure Bosch was done, before speaking.

“What is it with you, Bosch? When it comes to investigations Porter couldn’t carry your lunch. Yet you’re standing there trying
to save his ass. What’s the point?”

“There is no point, Lieutenant. I guess that’s the point. Get me?”

He carried the binders to his spot at the table and dropped them on the floor next to his chair. Edgar looked at him. So did
Dunne and Moshito, who had recently arrived.

“Don’t ask,” Harry said.

He sat down and looked at the pile at his feet and didn’t want to have anything to do with it. What he wanted was a cigarette
but there was no smoking in the squad room, at least while Pounds was around. He looked up a number in his Rolodex and dialed.
The call was not picked up until the seventh ring.

“What now?”

“Lou?”

“Who is it?”

“Bosch.”

“Oh, yeah, Harry. Sorry, I didn’t know who was calling. What’s going on? You hear I’m going for a stress-out?”

“Yeah. That’s why I’m calling. I got your cases — Pounds gave ’em to me — and, uh, I want to try to turn one real quick, like
by the end of the week. I was wondering if you had any idea — you think you might know which one I should hit? I’m starting
from scratch.”

There was a long silence on the phone.

“Harry, shit,” he finally said and for the first time Bosch realized he might already be drunk. “Aw, damn. I didn’t think
that cocksucker would dump it all on you. I, uh, Harry …Harry, I didn’t do too good on…”

“Hey, Lou. It’s no biggee, you know? My decks were cleared. I’m just looking for a place to start. If you can’t point me,
that’s okay. I’ll just look through the stuff.”

He waited and realized the others at the table had been listening to him and not even acting like they weren’t.

“Fuck it,” Porter said. “I, aw fuck it, I don’t know, Harry. I — I haven’t been on it, you know what I mean. I been kinda
fallin’ apart here. You hear about Moore? Shit, I saw the news last night. I…”

“Yeah, it’s too bad. Listen, Lou, don’t worry about it, okay? I’ll look through the stuff. I got the murder books here and
I’ll look through ’em.”

Nothing.

“Lou?”

“Okay, Harry. Give me a call back if you want. Maybe later I’ll think of something. Right now I’m not too fucking good.”

Bosch thought a few moments before saying anything else. In his mind he pictured Porter on the other end of the line standing
in total darkness. Alone.

“Listen,” he said in a low voice. “You better …you have to watch out for Pounds on your application. He might ask the suits
to check you out, you know what I mean, put a couple of guys on you. You gotta stay out of the bars. He might try to bust
your application. Understand?”

After a while Porter said he understood. Bosch hung up then and looked at the others at the table. The squad room always seemed
loud until he had to make phone calls he didn’t want anyone to hear. He got out a cigarette.

“Ninety-eight dumped Porter’s whole caseload on you?” Edgar asked.

“That’s right. That’s me, the bureau garbage man.”

“Yeah, then what’s that make us, chopped liver?”

Bosch smiled. He could tell Edgar didn’t know whether to be happy he avoided the assignment or mad because he was passed over.

“Well, Jed, if you want, I’ll hustle back into the box and tell Ninety-eight that you’re volunteering to split this up with
me. I’m sure the pencil-pushing prick will —”

He stopped because Edgar had kicked him under the table. He turned in his seat and saw Pounds coming up from behind. His face
was red. He had probably heard the last exchange.

“Bosch, you’re not going to smoke that disgusting thing in here, are you?”

“No, Lieutenant, I was just on my way out back.”

He pushed his chair back and walked out to the back parking lot to smoke. The backdoor of the drunk tank was unlocked and
open. The Christmas-night drunks had already been loaded into the jail bus and hauled to arraignment court to make their pleas.
A trustee in gray overalls was spraying the floor of the tank with a hose. Harry knew the concrete floor of the tank had been
graded on a slight incline as an aid in this daily cleansing. He watched the dirty water slosh out the door and into the parking
lot where it flowed to a sewer drain. There was vomit and blood in the water and the smell from the tank was terrible. But
Harry stood his ground. This was his place.

When he was done he threw his cigarette butt into the water and watched the flow take it to the drain.

It felt like the detective bureau had become a fishbowl and he was the only one in the water. He had to get away from the
curious eyes that were watching him. Bosch picked up the stack of blue binders and walked out the back-door into the parking
lot. Then he quickly walked back into the station through the watch office door, went down a short hallway past the lockup
and up a staircase to the second-floor storage room. It was called the Bridal Suite because of the cots in the back corner.
An unofficial official cooping station. There was an old cafeteria table up there and a phone. And it was quiet. It was all
he needed.

The room was empty today. Bosch put the stack of binders down and cleared a dented bumper marked with an evidence tag off
the table. He leaned it against a stack of file boxes next to a broken surfboard that had also been tagged as evidence. Then
he got down to work.

Harry stared at the foot-high stack of binders. Pounds said the division had sixty-six homicides so far in the year. Figuring
the rotation and including Harry’s two-month absence while recovering from the bullet wound, Porter had probably caught fourteen
of the cases. With eight still open, that meant he had cleared six others. It wasn’t a bad record, considering the transient
nature of homicide in Hollywood. Nationwide, the vast majority of murder victims know their killer. They are the people they
eat with, drink with, sleep with, live with. But Hollywood was different. There were no norms. There were only deviations,
aberrations. Strangers killed strangers here. Reasons were not a requirement. The victims turned up in alleys, on freeway
shoulders, along the brushy hillsides in Griffith Park, in bags dropped like garbage into restaurant Dumpsters. One of Harry’s
open files was the discovery of a body in parts — one on each of the fire escape landings of a six-story hotel on Gower. That
one didn’t raise too many eyebrows in the bureau. The joke going around was that it was a lucky thing that the victim hadn’t
stayed at the Holiday Inn. It was fifteen stories.

The bottom line was that in Hollywood a monster could move smoothly in the flow of humanity. Just one more car on the crowded
freeway. And some would always be caught and some would always be untraceable, unless you counted the blood they left behind.

Porter had gone six and eight before punching out. It was a record that wouldn’t get him any commendations but, still, it
meant six more monsters were out of the flow. Bosch realized he could balance Porter’s books if he could clear one of the
eight open cases. The broken-down cop would at least go out with an even record.

Bosch didn’t care about Pounds and his desire to clear one more case by midnight on New Year’s Eve. He felt no allegiance
to Pounds and believed the annual tabulating, charting and analysing of lives sacrificed added up to nothing. He decided that
if he was to do this job, he would do it for Porter. Fuck Pounds.

He pushed the binders to the back of the table so he would have room to work. He decided to quickly scan each murder book
and separate them into two piles. One stack of possible quick turns, another for the cases he did not think he could do anything
with in a short time.

He reviewed them in chronological order, starting with a Valentine’s Day strangulation of a priest in a stall at a bathhouse
on Santa Monica. By the time he was done two hours had passed and Harry had only two of the blue binders in his stack of possibilities.
One was a month old. A woman was pulled from a bus stop bench on Las Palmas into the darkened entranceway of a closed Hollywood
memorabilia store and raped and stabbed. The other was the eight-day-old discovery of the body of a man behind a twenty-four-hour
diner on Sunset near the Directors Guild building. The victim had been beaten to death.

Bosch focused on these two because they were the most recent cases and experience had instilled in him a firm belief that
cases become exponentially more difficult to clear with each day that passes. Whoever strangled the priest was as good as
gold. Harry knew the percentages showed that the killer had gotten away.

Bosch also saw that the two most recent cases could quickly be cleared if he caught a break. If he could identify the man
found behind the restaurant, then that information could lead to his family, friends and associates and most likely to a motive
and maybe a killer. Or, if he could trace the stabbing victim’s movement back to where she was before going to the bus stop,
he might be able to learn where and how the killer saw her.

It was a toss-up and Bosch decided to read each case file thoroughly before deciding. But going with the percentages he decided
to read the freshest case first. The body found behind the restaurant was the warmest trail.

On first glance, the murder book was notable for what it did not contain. Porter had not picked up a finished, typed copy
of the autopsy protocol. So Bosch had to rely on the Investigator’s Summary reports and Porter’s own autopsy notes, which
simply said the victim had been beaten to death with a “blunt object” — policespeak, meaning just about anything.

The victim, estimated to be about fifty-five years old, was referred to as Juan Doe #67. This because he was believed to be
Latin and was the sixty-seventh unidentified Latin man found dead in Los Angeles County during the year. There was no money
on the body, no wallet and no belongings other than the clothing — all of it manufactured in Mexico. The only identification
key was a tattoo on the upper left chest. It was a monocolor outline of what appeared to be a ghost. There was a Polaroid
snapshot of it in the file. Bosch studied this for several moments, deciding the blue line drawing of a Casper-like ghost
was very old. The ink was faded and blurred. Juan Doe #67 had gotten the tattoo as a young man.

The crime scene report Porter had filled out said the body had been found at 1:44
A.M.
on December18 by an off-duty police officer, identified only by his badge number, going in for an early breakfast or late
dinner when he saw the body lying next to the Dumpster near the kitchen door of the Egg and I Diner.