Michael Connelly (74 page)

“Impossible,” Edson said quickly. “You have to remember these are private contractors. We get all our bred flies from privately
owned facilities. Though we have a state USDA inspector at each facility and state entomologists, such as myself, make routine
visits, we cannot order them to open their doors to an inquiry by police or anyone, for that matter, without showing notice
of an infraction of our contract.

“In other words, Detective Bosch, tell me what they did and I will tell you if I can get you in there.”

Bosch didn’t answer. He wanted to tell Edson as little as possible. He changed the subject.

“These environment boxes that the bug tubes come in, how big are they?” he asked.

“Oh, they’re a pretty decent size. We generally use a forklift when unloading deliveries.”

“Can you show me one?”

Edson looked at his watch and said, “I suppose that is possible. I don’t know what has come in, if anything.”

Bosch stood up to force the issue. Edson finally did, too. He led Harry out of the office and down another hallway past more
offices and labs that had once been the holding pens for the insane, the addicted and the abandoned. Harry recalled that once
while a patrolman he had walked down this same hallway escorting a woman he had arrested on Mount Fleming, where she was climbing
the steel frame behind the first
O
of the Hollywood sign. She had a nylon cord with her, already tied into a noose at one end. A few years later he read in
the newspaper that after getting out of Patton State Hospital she had gone back to the sign and done the job he had interrupted.

“Must be tough,” Edson said. “Working homicides.”

Bosch said what he always said when people said that to him.

“Sometimes it’s not so bad. At least the victims I deal with are out of their misery.”

Edson didn’t say anything else. The hall ended at a heavy steel door, which he pushed open. They walked out onto a loading
dock that was inside a large hangarlike building. About thirty feet away, there were a half dozen or so workers, all Latinos,
placing white plastic boxes on wheeled dollies and then pulling them through a set of double doors on the other side of the
unloading area. Bosch noted that each of the boxes was just about the size of a coffin.

The boxes were first being removed from a white van with a mini-forklift. On the side of the van the word “EnviroBreed” was
painted in blue. The driver’s door was open and a white man stood watching the work. Another white man with a clipboard was
at the end of the truck, bending down to check numbers on the seals of each of the boxes and then making notes on the clipboard.

“We’re in luck,” Edson said. “A delivery in process. The environment boxes are taken into our lab where the M&M process, that’s
what we call metamorphosis around here, is completed.”

Edson pointed through the open garage doors to a row of six orange pickup trucks parked outside in the lot.

“The mature flies are placed in covered buckets and we use our fleet to take them to the attack areas. They are released by
hand. Right now the attack zone is about one hundred square miles. We are dropping fifty million sterile flies a week. More
if we can get them. Ultimately, the steriles will overwhelm the wild fly population and breed it out of existence.”

There was a note of triumph in the entomologist’s voice.

“Would you like to speak with the EnviroBreed driver?” Edson said. “I am sure he would be ha —”

“No,” Bosch said. “I just wanted to see how it is done. I’d appreciate it, Doctor, if you kept my visit confidential.”

As he said this, Bosch noticed the EnviroBreed driver was looking right at him. The man’s face was deeply lined and tanned
and his hair was white. He wore a straw plantation hat and smoked a brown cigarette. Bosch returned the stare, knowing full
well that he had been made. He thought he saw a slight smile on the driver’s face, then the man finally broke away his stare
and went back to watching the unloading process.

“Then is there anything else I can do for you, Detective,” Edson said.

“No, Doc. Thanks for your cooperation.”

“I’m sure you know your way out.”

Edson turned and went back in through the steel door. Harry put a cigarette in his mouth but left it unlit. He waved a nattering
of flies, probably pink medflies, he thought, away from his face, went down the loading-dock stairs and walked out through
the garage door.

• • •

Driving back toward downtown, Bosch decided to get it over with and face Teresa. He pulled into the County–USC parking lot
and spent ten minutes looking for a spot big enough to put the Caprice in. He finally found one in the back where the lot
is on a rise overlooking the old railroad yard. He sat in the car for a few moments thinking about what to say and smoking
and looking down at all the rusted boxcars and iron tracks. He saw a group of
cholos
in their oversized white T-shirts and baggy pants making their way through the yard. The one carrying a spray can dropped
back from the others and along one of the old boxcars sprayed a scrip. It was in Spanish but Bosch understood it. It was the
gang’s imprimatur, its philosophy:

LAUGH NOW CRY LATER

He watched them until they had moved behind another line of boxcars. He got out and went into the morgue through the rear
door, where the deliveries are made. A security guard nodded after seeing his badge.

Today was a good day inside. The smell of disinfectant had the upper hand over the odor of death. Harry walked past the doors
to refrigeration rooms one and two and then through a door to a set of stairs that led up to the second-floor administration
offices.

Bosch asked the secretary in the chief medical examiner’s office if Dr. Corazón could see him. The woman, whose pale skin
and pinkish hair made her resemble some of the clients around the place, spoke quietly on the phone and then told him to go
in. Teresa was standing behind her desk, looking out the window. She had the same view Bosch had of the railroad yard and
may have even seen him coming. But from the second floor, she also had a view that spanned the area from the towers of downtown
to Mt Washington. Bosch noticed how clear the towers were in the distance. It was a good day outside as well.

“I’m not talking to you,” Teresa announced without turning around.

“C’mon.”

“I’m not.”

“Then why’d you let me in?”

“To tell you I am not talking to you and that I am very angry and that you have probably compromised my position as chief
medical examiner.”

“C’mon, Teresa. I hear you have a press conference later today. It will work out.”

He couldn’t think of anything else to say. She turned around and leaned back against the windowsill. She looked at him with
eyes that could’ve carved his name on a tombstone. He could smell her perfume all the way across the room.

“And, of course, I have you to thank for that.”

“Not me. I heard Irving called the press con —”

“Don’t fuck with me, Harry. We both know what you did with what I told you. And we both know that little shit Irving automatically
thinks I did it. I now have to consider myself seriously fucked as far as the permanent job goes. Take a good look around
the office, Harry. Last time you’ll ever see me here.”

Bosch had always noticed how many of the professional women he encountered, mostly cops and lawyers, turned profane when arguing.
He wondered if they felt it might put them on the same level as the men they were battling.

“It will work out,” he said.

“What are you talking about? All he has to do is tell a few commissioners that I leaked information from a confidential, uncompleted
investigation to the press and that will eliminate me completely from consideration.”

“Listen, he can’t be sure it was you and he’ll probably think it was me. Bremmer, the
Times
guy who stirred this all up, we go back some. Irving will know. So quit worrying about it. I came to see if you want to have
lunch or something.”

Wrong move. He saw her face turn red with pure anger.

“Lunch or something? Are you kidding? Are you — you just told me we are the two likely suspects on this leak and you want
me to sit with you in a restaurant? Do you know what could —”

“Hey, Teresa, have a nice press conference,” Bosch cut in. He turned around and headed to the door.

• • •

On the way into downtown, his pager went off and Bosch noticed the number was Ninety-eight’s direct line. He must be worried
about his statistics, Harry thought. He decided to ignore the page. He also turned the Motorola radio in the car off.

He stopped at a
mariscos
truck parked on Alvarado and ordered two shrimp tacos. They were served on corn tortillas, Baja style, and Bosch savored
the heavy cilantro in the salsa.

A few yards from the truck stood a man reciting scripture verses from memory. On top of his head was a cup of water that nestled
comfortably in his seventies-style Afro and did not spill. He reached up for the cup and took a drink from time to time but
never stopped bouncing from book to book of the New Testament. Before each quote, he gave his listeners the chapter and verse
numbers as a reference. At his feet was a glass fishbowl half full of coins. When he was done eating, Bosch ordered a Coke
to go and then dropped the change into the fishbowl. He got a “God bless you” back.

The Hall of Justice took up an entire block across from the criminal courts building. The first six floors housed the sheriff’s
department and the top four the county jail. Anyone could tell this from the outside. Not just because of the bars behind
the windows, but because the top four floors looked like an abandoned, burned-out shell. As if all the hate and anger held
in those un-air-conditioned cells had turned to fire and smoke and stained the windows and concrete balustrades forever black.

It was a turn-of-the-century building and its stone-block construction gave it an ominous fortresslike appearance. It was
one of the only buildings in downtown that still had human elevator operators. An old black woman sat on a padded stool in
the corner of each of the wood-paneled cubicles and pulled the doors open and worked the wheel that leveled the elevator with
each floor it stopped at.

“Seven thousand,” Bosch said to the operator as he stepped on. It had been some time since he had been in the Hall and he
could not remember her name. But he knew she had been working the elevators here since before Harry was a cop. All of the
operators had. She opened the door on the sixth floor where Bosch saw Rickard as soon as he stepped out. The narc was standing
at the glass window at the check-in counter, putting his badge case into a slide drawer.

“Here you go,” Bosch said and quickly put his badge in the drawer.

“He’s with me,” Rickard said into the microphone.

The deputy behind the glass exchanged the badges for two visitor clearance badges and slid them out. Bosch and Rickard clipped
them to their shirts. Bosch noticed they were cleared to visit the High Power block on the tenth floor. High Power was where
the most dangerous criminal suspects were placed while awaiting trial or to be shipped out to state prisons following guilty
verdicts.

They began walking down a hall to the jail elevator.

“You got the kid in High Power?” Bosch asked.

“Yeah. I know a guy. Told him one day, that’s all we needed. The kid’s going to be shitless. He’s going to tell you everything
he knows about Dance.”

They took the security elevator up, this one operated by a deputy. Bosch figured it had to be the worst job in law enforcement.
When the door opened on ten they were met by another deputy, who checked their badges and had them sign in. Then they moved
through two sets of sliding steel doors to an attorneys’ visiting area, which consisted of a long table with benches running
down both sides of it. There was also a foot-high divider running lengthwise down the table. At the far end of the table a
female attorney sat on one side, leaning toward the divider and whispering to a client, who cupped his ears with his hands
to hear better. The muscles on the inmate’s arms bulged and stretched the sleeves of his shirt. He was a monster.

On the wall behind them was a sign that read
NO TOUCHING
,
KISSING
,
REACHING ACROSS THE DIVIDER
. There was also another deputy at the far end, leaning against the wall, his own massive arms folded, and watching the lawyer
and her client.

As they waited for the deputies to bring out Tyge, Bosch became aware of the noise. Through the barred door behind the visiting
table he could hear a hundred voices competing and echoing in a metallic din. There were steel doors banging somewhere and
occasionally an unintelligible shout.

A deputy walked up to the barred door and said, “It’ll be a few minutes, fellas. We have to get him out of medical.”

The deputy was gone before either of them could ask what happened. Bosch didn’t even know the kid but felt his stomach tighten.
He looked over at Rickard and saw he was smiling.