The Crossing (30 page)

“You hassled him?”

“Yeah, I went out and asked him what he was doing. He got all nervous and left. That’s when he showed me this cockamamie badge he had around his neck.”

Bosch reached into his jacket and pulled out the remaining photocopy of the photos of Ellis and Long. He unfolded it and stared at the two vice cops.

“What did he look like?” he asked.

There was a long pause before Albert answered.

“I don’t know, he was normal,” he finally said.

“Normal?” Bosch asked. “Was he white, black, brown?”

“White.”

“How old?”

“Uh, forties. I think. Maybe thirties.”

Bosch looked at the two photos.

“Did he have a mustache?”

“Yeah, he had a mustache. You know him?”

Long had a mustache. Ellis didn’t.

“I don’t know. Are you going to be around later? I have a couple photos I’d like to show you.”

“Sure, I’m here all the time.”

“Thanks, Frank.”

“Just watching out for the neighborhood. That’s what we do.”

Bosch disconnected and looked at the photos of the two vice cops. He didn’t think he needed to go by Frank’s to confirm what he knew in his gut. It had been Long with the binoculars. It seemed odd to Bosch that he was snooping around so soon. It was only nine-thirty. Why had he already gotten suspicious about the Cherokee not moving?

Bosch decided that there must be something else that had sent Long up the hill. He folded the photocopy and put it back into his jacket pocket. While he was doing it, he saw a man he believed was Wojciechowski walking out through the front door of the rehab center.

The man had a noticeable limp and was walking with the aid of a cane—black with flames painted on it. He wore blue jeans, a black T-shirt, and a leather vest with the Harley-Davidson insignia on the back. The traditional wings of the logo were broken. Bosch knew this was to indicate the rider had gone down, gotten hurt, and had survived.

“Cisco?” Bosch called.

The man stopped and turned back to see who had called out. Bosch caught up to him.

“You’re Cisco, right?”

“Maybe. Who are you?”

“Harry Bosch. Mickey Haller’s—”

“Investigator. Yeah, you took my job.”

“I was going to say brother. I didn’t take your job. I don’t want your job, and it will be there for you as soon as you’re ready to go back. I’m just working this one case for him and that’s it.”

Cisco put both hands on the cane. Bosch could tell that standing and walking weren’t his favorite pastimes at the moment. There were several benches lining the walkway, places for people to wait for those in rehab.

“Can we sit down for a minute?” Bosch asked.

He pointed to one of the benches. Cisco headed that way and seemed relieved to take his weight off his knee. He was a big man with massive arms and a powerful V-shaped torso, an inverted pyramid unsteady on its points of support.

“So this isn’t a coincidence?” he asked. “Mick told me you were in the Army, too.”

“I was in the Army and I’ve been in this place before, but this isn’t a coincidence,” Bosch said. “I came looking for you. I need to ask you a few questions.”

“About what?”

“Well, let’s start with your accident. Mickey told—”

“It was no accident.”

“Well, that’s what I want to know. Tell me what happened.”

“I don’t get it. Why?”

“You heard that Mickey got popped for a DUI, right?”

“Yeah. Your old pals the LAPD.”

“It was a setup. I think it was to hinder his efforts on the Foster case. I think the same thing might’ve happened with you. So what happened?”

Bosch could see a coldness set in Cisco’s eyes.

“It was fucking April Fools’ Day. I was on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, heading down toward Hollywood. The guy in the lane next to me pushes over and I had no choice; let him knock me down and go under his wheels or take my chances in the oncoming lanes. I almost made it.”

“What makes you think it was intentional?”

“I don’t think it. I know it. Two things. Number one, the guy didn’t stop. I mean, he didn’t even slow down. And number two, he knew what he was doing. Hell, I reached out and kicked the side of his car and he still kept coming. Steel-toe boot, man. He heard it. He knew I was there.”

“You saw the driver?”

Bosch started taking the photocopy back out of his coat pocket.

“No, I didn’t see him,” Cisco said. “The windows on the car were tinted too dark. Way beyond legal.”

Bosch left the photocopy in his pocket.

He knew that a favored tactic of the UC units in the LAPD was to smoke the windows of their cars beyond legal limits.

“What kind of car was it?”

“A Camaro. Burnt orange with black rims and yellow calipers. I got a good look at the wheels, you could say. Real up close and personal.”

“But I take it you didn’t get the plate.”

“Too busy trying to stay alive by that point. What’s in your pocket anyway? What were you going to show me?”

Bosch pulled out the photocopy.

“These are the two guys who pulled over Haller. I thought maybe you’d recognize one of them—if you had seen the driver.”

Cisco unfolded the page and looked at the two faces. They were just head shots, but in both, the top collars of police uniforms were evident.

“So you’re saying two cops might be behind all of this?” he said.

Bosch nodded.

“It’s beginning to look that way.”

“Jesus Christ. Rogue cops. What’ll they think of next?”

“I’m going to need you to keep all of this to yourself. Haller’s okay, but nobody else. It might fuck things up if it leaks.”

“You didn’t have to say that.”

“Right, sorry. So your accident, it occurred—”

“I told you, it was no accident.”

“Right, sorry, wrong word. So this attack occurred right after Haller got the Foster case. Had you started working the case yet?”

“Not in a big way. We had the case and we were gearing up for it, but the discovery hadn’t come in yet and so we were sort of waiting on the D.A. to cough up the murder book.”

Bosch nodded.

“So you really hadn’t begun.”

“Not really. Just sort of grasping at straws until we got our hands on those records. That’s where it all starts, you know?”

“Yeah, I get that. So ‘grasping at straws’—what does that mean?”

“Well, you always get your client’s side of the story and you can pursue that. Our guy said he had an alibi, so I looked into that and found we were a day late and a dollar short. The pro he said he was with got himself murdered.”

“James Allen.”

“That was the guy.”

“How deep did you go into that?”

“Not that deep. The guy was dead and we couldn’t talk to him, end of story. I had a couple calls into the LAPD guys on it but—big surprise—hadn’t heard anything back.”

“Do you think you did anything on the investigation that could have brought about the attack with the Camaro? Anything come to mind at all?”

Cisco thought for a moment and then shook his head.

“I really don’t, or else I would have already jumped on it, you know?”

“Yeah.”

Bosch realized that if there was a connection between Cisco being sent into oncoming traffic and Ellis and Long, then he was going to have to find it through other means.

“Sorry I’m not much help,” Cisco said.

“You gave me a solid description of the car. That’ll help.”

“I wish I knew something, but I don’t know what I did that would have brought them on. Mickey I get. But I had barely started on the case.”

“Well, you did something or they thought you were about to do something. Maybe they just wanted to put Haller in the hole by knocking out his investigator. Maybe we’ll never know.”

“Maybe.”

“Did you report the incident to the police?”

“Sure, but that was a waste of time.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Come on, man, look at me. The cops take one look at me and say ‘biker.’ They think whoever ran me off the road was doing the public a solid. I called them and they didn’t give a shit. The report went straight into the circular file. All it got me was my insurance payout, but the cops I never heard from again.”

There was a time when Bosch might have defended the LAPD against those kind of accusations. But he wasn’t in the fold anymore. He just nodded in an understanding way. The men exchanged cell numbers and then Bosch headed off, leaving Cisco on the bench. He said he was going to rest the knee a little longer before getting up and going to the parking lot.

I
t wasn’t that Bosch had expected Cisco to identify one of his attackers as Ellis or Long, but he had hoped for further confirmation of his belief that the two vice cops were behind everything that had happened involving the case.

Still, he was undaunted and knew of other ways to close in on the proof. First stop on that path was the Hollywood Athletic Club. He went directly from Westwood and along the way called Haller, who picked up right away.

“Good morning,” he said cheerily. “I was just about to call you.”

“I was going to leave a message,” Bosch said. “Last night you said you had court.”

“I did, but I’m done.”

“You sound happy. Let me guess, you got another case dismissed and another drug dealer goes free.”

“I’m happy but not because of another case. I have news. But you go first. You called me.”

“All right, well, I just came from talking to Cisco. He never got a look at whoever ran him off the road. But he did describe the car—right down to the yellow brake calipers. It was a burnt-orange Camaro with black rims. I was calling to see if it rings any bells with you.”

There was a moment before Haller answered.

“No,” he finally said. “Should it?”

“What about the car that pulled you over on the DUI?” Bosch asked.

“No, it wasn’t a Camaro. It was a Dodge. A Challenger or a Charger. I didn’t look all that closely but definitely not a Camaro.”

“You sure?”

“Hey, I’m the Lincoln Lawyer. I know cars. Plus it wasn’t burnt orange. It was jet-black. Like the souls of those two fuckers who were riding in it.”

“Okay, well, that’s all I had. Strike two. First Cisco, now you. Lift my spirits. What’s your news?”

“Got our DNA back today.”

“And Foster isn’t a match.”

“No, not quite. He’s a match, all right.”

“And that’s what’s making you so happy?”

“No, the condom trace evidence is what’s doing that. You were right. They found it in the sample.”

Bosch thought about that. It was a moment of vindication. The finding supported the case theory that semen from Da’Quan Foster could have been transported to the murder scene and planted in and on the body of Alexandra Parks.

“Next, they have to try to match it to a specific brand,” Haller said. “Allen’s brand. We get that, and they won’t be able to wriggle out of this by claiming he had a condom all along and it just broke.”

“Okay,” Bosch said.

“You know, usually I feel like I’m shooting at the state’s case with a damn BB gun. I’m beginning to think we got ourselves a shotgun on this one. Double-barrel. We are going to blow big holes in their case. Big fucking holes.”

Haller sounded almost giddy about the DNA analysis. But for Bosch the upcoming trial was still too far distant. Long and Ellis were running around loose and five weeks was too long to wait to get something done.

“All you think about is the trial,” Bosch snapped.

“Because that’s my job,” Haller said. “Our job. What’s going on, Harry? I thought this would be good news for you. You’re on the right track, man.”

“What’s going on is Ellis and Long are out there doing what they do. They’re watching my house, they know about my kid. I can’t prove it yet but I think they took out Cisco because somehow he threatened them, and now I’m threatening them. The trial is more than a month away and we have to be thinking about the right now. You get Foster off at trial and so what? The prosecution will spin it, call it smoke and mirrors and not do anything about these two guys. What happens then?”

Haller took some time to compose his response.

“Harry, you spent all those years chasing killers and I know that’s your natural instinct, to do it here,” he said. “But I keep telling you, we are working this from a different angle. It’s not what you’re used to, but our responsibility above all is to the client. We can’t do anything that may hurt the possibility of a successful defense at trial. Now, I know it’s going to take some getting used to but—”

“Don’t worry about it,” Bosch interrupted. “I don’t want to get used to it. After this, I’m done.”

“Well, suit yourself. We’ll talk about it down the line.”

“What about us going into LAPD and showing what we got? I can make the case that they need to take these two off the street. At the very least, they’ll put eyeballs on them.”

“Not going to happen,” Haller said emphatically. “We do that and we are giving the prosecution five weeks to prepare for what they’ll know we are bringing.”

“Maybe there won’t even be a trial. They bring these two in, play them against each other, and one guy coughs up the other—oldest trick in the book. End of case.”

“Too risky. I’m not going to do it. And you aren’t either.”

Bosch was silent. He had to consider Haller’s motives. Was he really protecting his client’s chances at a not-guilty verdict or preserving his own shot at glory at trial? A murder case provided the biggest stage in the courthouse. If Haller won at trial, he’d be the hero and prospective clients would start lining up. If the case never made it to trial, somebody else would get the applause.

“You still there?” Haller asked.

“Yeah,” Bosch said. “We’re not done talking about this.”

“All right, all right. Tell you what, let’s meet tomorrow morning. Breakfast at Du-Par’s. How’s eight o’clock sound? You make your case to me. I’ll listen.”

“Which Du-Par’s?”

“Farmer’s Market.”

“I’ll be there.”

“Where are you headed now?”

“Hollywood. To check something out.”