The Last Coyote (11 page)

“Then give me what you’ve got.”

Bosch knew he could get more, that they’d have to have a phone number somewhere, but he was handicapped because this was an unauthorized investigation. If he pushed things too far, then he’d only succeed in having his activities discovered and then halted.

She floated the paper across the desk to him. He looked at it. It had two addresses on it, the P.O. box for McKittrick and the street address in Las Vegas for Eno’s widow. Her name was Olive.

Bosch thought of something.

“When do the checks go out?”

“Funny you should ask.”

“Why?”

“Because today’s the last day of the month. They always go out the last day of the month.”

That was a break and he felt like he deserved it, that he had worked for it. He picked up the paper she had given him and slipped it into his briefcase, then he stood up.

“Always a pleasure to do work with the public servants of the city.”

“Likewise. And, uh, Detective? Could you return the chair to the place you found it? As I said, Cassidy will need it.”

“Of course, Mona. Pardon my forgetfulness.”

Chapter Fifteen

A
FTER THE BOUT
with bureaucratic claustrophobia, Bosch decided he needed some air to recover. He took the elevator down to the lobby and out the main doors to Spring Street. As he walked out, he was directed by a security officer to walk down the right side of the wide-staired entrance to the great building because there was a film location shoot taking place on the left side. Bosch watched what they were doing as he stepped down the stairs and then decided to take a break and have a smoke.

He sat down on one of the concrete sidings along the stairs and lit a cigarette. The film shoot involved a group of actors posing as reporters who rushed down the stairs of City Hall to meet and question two men getting out of a car at the curb. They rehearsed it twice and then shot it twice while Bosch sat there and smoked two cigarettes. Each time, the reporters all yelled the same thing at the two men.

“Mr. Barrs, Mr. Barrs, did you do it? Did you do it?”

The two men refused to answer and pushed through the pack and up the stairs with the reporters backtracking. On one of the takes one of the reporters stumbled as he moved backwards, fell on his back on the stairs and was partially trampled by the others. The director kept the scene going, perhaps thinking that the fall added a touch of realism to the scene.

Bosch figured that the filmmakers were using the steps and front facade of City Hall as a courthouse setting. The men coming from the car were the defendant and his high-priced lawyer. He knew that City Hall was frequently used for such shots because it actually looked more like a courthouse than any real courthouse in the city.

Bosch was bored after the second take, though he guessed there would be many more. He got up and walked down to First and then over to Los Angeles Street. He took that back to Parker Center. Along the way he was asked for spare change only four times, which he thought was a low count for downtown and possibly a sign of improving economic times. In the lobby of the police building he passed the bank of pay phones and on a whim stopped, picked one of the phones off the hook and dialed 305-555-1212. He had dealt with Metro-Dade Police in Miami several times over the years and 305 was the only Florida area code that readily came to mind. When the operator came on he asked for Venice and she informed him that 813 was the proper area code.

He then redialed and got information in Venice. First he asked the operator what the nearest large city to Venice was. She told him that was Sarasota and he asked what the nearest large city was to that. When she said St. Petersburg, he finally started getting his bearings. He knew where St. Petersburg was on a map—the west coast of Florida—because he knew the Dodgers occasionally played spring training games there and he had looked it up once.

He finally gave the operator McKittrick’s name and promptly got a tape recording saying the number was unlisted at the customer’s request. He wondered if any of the detectives he had dealt with by phone at Metro-Dade could get the number for him. He still had no idea exactly where Venice was or how far it was from Miami. Then he decided to leave it alone. McKittrick had taken steps to make it difficult to be contacted. He used a P.O. box and had an unlisted phone. Bosch didn’t know why a retired cop would take such steps in a state three thousand miles away from where he had worked but he felt sure that the best approach to McKittrick was going to have to be in person. A telephone call, even if Bosch got the number, was easy to avoid. Someone standing right at your door was different. Besides, Bosch had caught a break; he knew McKittrick’s pension check was in the mail to his P.O. box. He was sure he could use it to find the old cop.

He clipped his ID card to his suit and went up to the Scientific Investigation Division. He told the woman behind the counter that he had to talk to someone in Latent Prints and pushed through the half door and down the hall to the print lab like he always did, without waiting for her go-ahead.

The lab was a large room with two rows of work tables with overhead fluorescent lights. At the end of the room were two desks with AFIS computer terminals on them. Behind them was a glass-walled room with the mainframes inside. There was condensation on the glass because the mainframe room was kept cooler than the rest of the lab.

Because it was lunchtime there was only one technician in the lab and Bosch didn’t know him. He was tempted to turn around and come back later when someone else might be there, but the tech looked up from one of the computer terminals and saw him. He was a tall, skinny man with glasses and a face that had been ravaged by acne when he was younger. The damage gave him a permanently sullen expression.

“Yes?”

“Yeah, hi, howya doin’?”

“I’m doing fine. What can I do for you?”

“Harry Bosch, Hollywood Division.”

He put out his hand and the other man hesitated, then shook it tentatively.

“Brad Hirsch.”

“Yeah, I think I’ve heard your name. We’ve never worked together but that probably won’t last. I work homicide so it seems I basically get around to working with everybody in here eventually.”

“Probably.”

Bosch sat down on a chair to the side of the computer module and pulled his briefcase onto his lap. He noticed that Hirsch was looking into his blue computer screen. He seemed more comfortable looking there than at Bosch.

“Reason I’m here is, at the moment, it’s kind of slow out in Tinseltown. And so I’ve been going through some old cases. I came across this one from nineteen sixty-one.”

“Nineteen sixty-one?”

“Yeah, it’s old. A female…cause of death blunt force trauma, then he made it look like a strangulation, a sex crime. Anyway, nobody was ever popped for it. It never went anywhere. In fact, I don’t think anyone’s really looked at it since the due diligence in sixty-two. A long time. Anyway, the thing is, the reason I’m here, is that back then the cops on this pulled a decent set of prints at the crime scene. They got a bunch of partials and some full rounds. And I’ve got them here.”

Bosch took the yellowed print card out of the briefcase and held it out to the man. Hirsch looked at it but didn’t take it. He looked back at the computer screen and Bosch placed the print card down on the keyboard in front of him.

“And, well, as you know, that was before we had these fancy computers and all of this technology you got here. All they did with this back then was use it to compare these to a suspect’s prints. They got no match, they let the guy go and then they just shoved these in an envelope. They’ve been sitting in the case file ever since. So what I was thinking was, we could—”

“You want to run them through AFIS.”

“Yeah, right. You know, take a shot at it. Spin the dice, maybe we get lucky and pick up a hitchhiker on the information highway. It’s happened before. Edgar and Burns out on the Hollywood table nailed an old one this week with an AFIS run. I was talking to Edgar and he said one of you guys down here—I think it was Donovan—said the computer has access to millions of prints from all across the country.”

Hirsch nodded unenthusiastically.

“And that’s not just criminal print files, right?” Bosch asked. “You’ve got military, law enforcement, civil service, everything. That right?”

“Yes, that’s right. But, look, Detective Bosch, we—”

“Harry.”

“Okay, Harry. This is a great tool that’s getting better all the time. You’re correct about that but there still are human and time elements here. The comparison prints have to be scanned and coded and then those codes have to be entered into the computer. And right now we have a backup that’s running twelve days.”

He pointed to the wall above the computer. There was a sign with changeable numbers on it. Like the signs in the union office that said X number of days since the last death in the line of duty.

AUTOMATED FINGERPRINT IDENTIFICATION SYSTEM

Search Requests Will Take 12 Days To Process No Exception!

“So, you see, we can’t take everybody who walks in here and put them at the front of the pack, okay? Now if you want to fill out a search request form, I can—”

“Look, I know there are exceptions. Especially in homicide cases. Somebody made that run for Burns and Edgar the other day. They didn’t wait twelve days. They were put through right away and they cleared three homicides just like that.”

Bosch snapped his fingers. Hirsch looked at him and then back to the computer.

“Yes, there are exceptions. But that comes from on high. If you want to talk to Captain LeValley, maybe she’ll approve it. If you—”

“Burns and Edgar didn’t talk to her. Somebody just did it for them.”

“Well, then that was against the rules. They must have known somebody who did it for them.”

“Well, I know you, Hirsch.”

“Why don’t you just fill out a request and I’ll see what—”

“I mean, what’s it take, ten minutes?”

“No. In your case much longer. This print card you have is an antique. It’s obsolete. I’d have to run it through the Livescan machine, which would then assign codes to the prints. Then I’d have to hand-enter the codes it gives me. Then depending on the restrictions on the run you want, it could take—”

“I don’t want any restrictions. I want it compared to all data bases.”

“Then the computer time can run as long as thirty, forty minutes.”

With a finger Hirsch punched his glasses back up his nose as if punctuating his resolve not to break the rules.

“Well, Brad,” Bosch said, “the problem is I don’t know how much time I’ve got on this. Certainly not twelve days. No way. I’m working on it now because I have the time, but the next time I get a fresh call that will be it, I’ll be off it. That’s the nature of homicide, you know? So, are you sure there isn’t something we can do right now?”

Hirsch didn’t move. He just stared at the blue screen. It reminded Bosch of the youth hall, when kids would literally shut down like a computer on standby when the bullies taunted them.

“What are you doing now, Hirsch? We could do it right now.”

Hirsch looked at him for a long moment before talking.

“I’m busy. And look, Bosch, I know who you are, okay? That’s an interesting story about pulling old cases but I know it’s a lie. I know you’re on a stress leave. The story’s getting around. And you shouldn’t even be here and I shouldn’t be talking to you. So, could you please leave me alone? I don’t want to get into trouble. I don’t want people to get the wrong idea, you know?”

Bosch looked at him but Hirsch’s eyes had moved back onto the computer screen.

“Okay, Hirsch, let me tell you a real story. One—”

“I really don’t want any more stories, Bosch. Why don’t you just—”

“I’m going to tell you this story, then I’m leaving, okay? Just this one story.”

“Okay, Bosch, okay. You tell the story.”

Bosch looked at him silently and waited for Hirsch to make eye contact but the latent print technician’s eyes remained on the computer screen as if it were his security blanket. Bosch told the story anyway.

“One time, a long time ago, I was almost twelve and I’m swimming in this pool, you see, and I’m under the water but I’ve got my eyes open. And I look up and I see up through the water up to the edge of the pool. I see this dark figure. You know, it was hard to figure out what it was, all wavy and all. But I could tell it was a man and there wasn’t supposed to be a man up there. So I came up for air at the side of the pool and I was right. It was a man. He was wearing this dark suit. And he reached down and grabbed me by the wrist. I was just a scrawny little runt. It was easy for him to do. He pulled me out and he gave me this towel to put on my shoulders and he led me over to a chair and he told me…he told me that my mother was dead. Murdered. He said they didn’t know who did it, but whoever he was, he left his fingerprints. He said, ‘Don’t worry, son, we got the fingerprints and they’re as good as gold. We’ll get him.’ I remember those words exactly. ‘We’ll get him.’ Only they never did. And now I’m going to. That’s my story, Hirsch.”

Hirsch’s eyes dropped down to the yellowed print card on the keyboard.

“Look, man, it’s a bad story, but I can’t be doing this. I’m sorry.”

Bosch stared at him a moment and then slowly stood up.

“Don’t forget the card,” Hirsch said.

He picked it up and held it up to Bosch.

“I’ll leave it here. You’re going to do the right thing, Hirsch. I can tell.”

“No, don’t. I can’t do—”

“
I’m leaving it here!
”

The power of his voice shocked even Bosch and it seemed to have scared Hirsch. The print tech replaced the card on the keyboard. After a few seconds of silence Bosch leaned down and spoke quietly.

“Everybody wants the chance to do the right thing, Hirsch. It makes them feel good inside. Even if doing it doesn’t exactly fit inside the rules, sometimes you have to rely on the voice inside that tells you what to do.”

Bosch stood back up and took out his wallet and a pen. He pulled out a business card and wrote some numbers on it. He put it down on the keyboard next to the print card.

“That’s got my portable and my home on it. Don’t bother calling the office, you know I won’t be there. I’ll be waiting to hear from you, Hirsch.”

He walked slowly out of the lab.