The Last Coyote (33 page)

“Bosch…”

He didn’t finish. There was a long silence and then Bosch spoke first.

“You were going to cover it all up, weren’t you? Shove it in the trash with her. You see, after everything that’s happened, she still doesn’t count, does she?”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Bosch sat up. Now he was angry. Immediately, he was hit with vertigo. He closed his eyes until it passed.

“Well, then why don’t you tell me what I don’t know? Okay, Chief? You’re the one who doesn’t know what you’re talking about. I heard what you people put out. That there may be no connection between Conklin and Mittel. What kind of—you think I’m going to sit here for that? And Vaughn. Not even a mention of him. A fucking mechanic in a splatter suit, he throws Conklin out the window and is ready to put me in the dirt. He’s the one who did Pounds and he doesn’t even rate a mention by you people. So, Chief, why don’t you tell me what the fuck I don’t know, okay?”

“Bosch, listen to me.
Listen
to me. Who did Mittel work for?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care.”

“He was employed by very powerful people. Some of the most powerful in this state, some of the most powerful in the country. And—”

“I don’t give a shit!”

“—a majority of the city council.”

“So? What are you telling me? The council and the governor and the senators and all of those people, what, are they all involved now, too? You covering their asses, too?”

“Bosch, would you calm down and make sense? Listen to yourself. Of course, I’m not saying that. What I am trying to explain to you is that if you taint Mittel with this, then you taint many very powerful people who associated with him or who used his services. That could come back to haunt this department as well as you and me in immeasurable ways.”

That was it, Bosch saw. Irving the pragmatist had made a choice, probably along with the police chief, to put the department and themselves ahead of the truth. The whole deal stunk like rotting garbage. Bosch felt exhaustion roll over him like a wave. He was drowning in it. He’d had enough of this.

“And by covering it up, you are helping them in immeasurable ways, right? And I’m sure you and the chief have been on the phone all morning letting each of those powerful people know just that. They’ll all owe you, they’ll all owe the department a big one. That’s great, Chief. That’s a great deal. I guess it doesn’t matter that the truth is nowhere to be found in it.”

“Bosch, I want you to call her back. Call that reporter and tell her that you took this knock on the head and you—”

“No! I’m not calling anybody back. It’s too late. I told the story.”

“But not the whole story. The whole story is just as damaging to you, isn’t it?”

There it was. Irving knew. He either outright knew or had made a pretty good guess that Bosch had used Pounds’s name and was ultimately responsible for his death. That knowledge was now his weapon against Bosch.

“If I can’t contain this,” Irving added, “I may have to take action against you.”

“I don’t care,” Bosch said quietly. “You can do whatever you want to me, but the story is coming out, Chief. The truth.”

“But is it the truth? The whole truth? I doubt it and deep in inside I know you doubt it, too. We’ll never know the whole truth.”

A silence followed. Bosch waited for him to say more and when there was only more silence, he hung up. He then disconnected the phone and finally went to sleep.

Chapter Forty-five

BOSCH AWOKE AT
six the next morning with dim memories of his sleep having been interrupted by a horrible dinner and the visits of nurses through the night. His head felt thick. He gently touched the wound and found it not as tender as the day before. He got up and walked around the room a bit. His balance seemed back to normal. In the bathroom mirror his eyes were still a colorful mess but the dilation of the pupils had evened out. It was time to go, he knew. He got dressed and left the room, briefcase in hand and carrying his ruined jacket over his arm.

At the nurses’ station he pushed the elevator button and waited. He noticed one of the nurses behind the counter eyeing him. She apparently didn’t readily recognize him, especially with his street clothes on.

“Excuse me, can I help you?”

“No, I’m fine.”

“Are you a patient?”

“I was. I’m leaving. Room four-nineteen. Bosch.”

“Wait a moment, sir. What are you doing?”

“I’m leaving. Going home.”

“What?”

“Just send me the bill.”

The elevator doors opened and he stepped in.

“You can’t do that,” the nurse called. “Let me get the doctor.”

Bosch raised his hand and waved good-bye.

“Wait!”

The doors closed.

He bought a newspaper in the lobby and caught a cab outside. He told the driver to take him to Park La Brea. Along the way, he read Keisha Russell’s story. It was on the front page and it was pretty much an abbreviated account of what he had told her the day before. Everything was qualified with the caveat that it was still under investigation, but it was a good read.

Bosch was mentioned throughout by name as a source and main player in the story. Irving was also a named source. Bosch figured the assistant chief must have decided in the end to throw in with the truth, or a close approximation of it, once Bosch had already let it out. It was the pragmatic thing to do. This way it seemed like he had a handle on things. He was the voice of conservative reason in the story. Bosch’s statements were usually followed by those from Irving cautioning that the investigation was still in its infancy and no final conclusions had been made.

The part Bosch liked best about the story were the statements from several statesmen, including most of the city council, expressing shock both at the deaths of Mittel and Conklin and at their involvement in and/or cover-up of murders. The story also mentioned that Mittel’s employee, Jonathan Vaughn, was being sought by police as a murder suspect.

The story was most tenuous in regard to Pounds. It contained no mention that Bosch was suspected or known to have used the lieutenant’s name or that his using it had led to Pounds’s death. The story simply quoted Irving as saying the connection between Pounds and the case was still under investigation but that it appeared that Pounds might have stumbled onto the same trail Bosch had been following.

Irving had held back when he talked to Russell even after threatening Bosch. Harry could only believe it was the assistant chief’s desire not to see the department’s dirty laundry in print. The truth would hurt Bosch but could damage the department as well. If Irving was going to make a move against him, Bosch knew it would be inside the department. It would remain private.

Bosch’s rented Mustang was still in the La Brea Lifecare parking lot. He had been lucky; the keys were in the door lock where he had left them a moment before being attacked by Vaughn. He paid the driver and went to the Mustang.

Bosch decided to take a cruise up Mount Olympus before going to the Mark Twain. He plugged his phone into the cigarette lighter so it would recharge and headed up Laurel Canyon Boulevard.

On Hercules Drive, he slowed outside the gate in front of Mittel’s grounded spaceship. The gate was closed and there was yellow police-line tape still hanging from it. Bosch saw no cars in the driveway. It was quiet and peaceful. And soon he knew that a FOR SALE sign would be erected and the next genius would move in and think he was master of all he surveyed.

Bosch drove on. Mittel’s place wasn’t what he really wanted to see, anyway.

Fifteen minutes later Bosch came around the familiar turn on Woodrow Wilson but immediately found things unfamiliar. His house was gone, its disappearance as glaring in the landscape as a tooth missing from a smile.

At the curb in front of his address were two huge construction waste bins filled with splintered wood, mangled metal and shattered glass, the debris of his home. A mobile storage container had also been placed at the curb and Bosch assumed—hoped—it contained the salvageable property removed before the house was razed.

He parked and walked over to the flagstone path that formerly had led to his front door. He looked down and all that was left were the six pylons that poked out of the hillside like tombstones. He could rebuild upon these. If he wanted.

Movement in the acacia trees near the footings of the pylons caught his eye. He saw a flash of brown and then the head of a coyote moving slowly through the brush. It never heard Bosch or looked up. Soon it was gone. Harry lost sight of it in the brush.

He spent another ten minutes there, smoking a cigarette and waiting, but he saw nothing else. He then said a silent good-bye to the place. He had the feeling he wouldn’t be back.

Chapter Forty-six

WHEN BOSCH GOT
to the Mark Twain, the city’s morning was just starting. From his room he heard a garbage truck making its way down the alley, taking away another week’s debris. It made him think of his house again, fitted nicely into two dumpsters.

Thankfully, the sound of a siren distracted him. He could identify it as a squad car as opposed to a fire engine. He knew he’d get a lot of that with the police station just down the street. He moved about his two rooms and felt restless and out of it, as if life was passing by while he was stuck here. He made coffee with the machine he had brought from home and it only served to make him more jittery.

He tried the paper again but there was nothing of real interest to him except the story he had already read on the front page. He paged through the thin Metro section anyway and saw a report that the county commission chambers were being outfitted with bulletproof desk blotters that the commissioners could hold up in front of them in the event a maniac came in spraying bullets. He threw the section aside and picked up the front section again.

Bosch reread the story about his investigation and couldn’t escape a growing feeling that something was wrong, that something was left out or incomplete. Keisha Russell’s reporting had been fine. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was in seeing the story in words, in print. It didn’t seem as convincing to him as it had been when he recounted it for her or for Irving or even for himself.

He put the newspaper aside, leaned back on the bed and closed his eyes. He went over the sequence of events once more and in doing so finally realized the problem that gnawed at him was not in the paper but in what Mittel had said to him. Bosch tried to recall the words exchanged between them on the manicured lawn behind the rich man’s house. What had really been said there? What had Mittel admitted to?

Bosch knew that at that moment on the lawn, Mittel was in a position of seeming invulnerability. He had Bosch captured, wounded and doomed before him. His attack dog, Vaughn, stood ready with a gun to Bosch’s back. In that situation, Bosch believed there would be no reason for a man of Mittel’s ego to hold back. And, in fact, he had not held back. He had boasted of his scheme to control Conklin and others. He had freely, though indirectly, admitted that he had caused the deaths of Conklin and Pounds. But despite those admissions, he had not done the same when it came to the killing of Marjorie Lowe.

Through the fragmented images of that night, Bosch tried to recall the exact words said and couldn’t quite get to them. His visual recollection was good. He had Mittel standing in front of the blanket of lights. But the words weren’t there. Mittel’s mouth moved but Bosch couldn’t get the words. Then, finally, after working at it for a while, it came to him. He had it. Opportunity. Mittel had called her death an opportunity. Was that an acknowledgement of culpability? Was he saying he killed her or had her killed? Or was he simply admitting that her death presented an opportunity for him to take advantage of?

Bosch didn’t know and not knowing felt like a heavy weight in his chest. He tried to put it out of his mind and eventually started drifting off toward sleep. The sounds of the city outside, even the sirens, were comforting. He was at the threshold of unconsciousness, almost there, when he suddenly opened his eyes.

“The prints,” he said out loud.

Thirty minutes later he was shaved, showered and in fresh clothes heading downtown. He had his sunglasses on and he checked himself in the mirror. His battered eyes were hidden. He licked his fingers and pressed his curly hair down to better cover the shaved spot and the stitches in his scalp.

At County-USC Medical Center, he drove through the back lot to the parking slots nearest the rear garage bays of the Los Angeles County medical examiner’s office. He walked in through one of the open garage doors and waved to the security guard, who knew him by sight and nodded back. Investigators weren’t supposed to go in the back way but Bosch had been doing it for years. He wasn’t going to stop until someone made a federal case out of it. The minimum-wage guard was an unlikely candidate to do that.

He went up to the investigators’ lounge on the second floor, hoping not only that there would be someone there he knew but, more important, someone Bosch hadn’t alienated over the years.

He swung the door open and immediately was hit with the smell of fresh coffee. But the room was bad news. Only Larry Sakai was in the room, sitting at a table with newspapers spread across it. He was a coroner’s investigator Bosch had never really liked and the feeling was mutual.

“Harry Bosch,” Sakai said after looking up from the newspaper he held in his hands. “Speak of the devil, I’m reading about you here. Says here you’re in the hospital.”

“Nah, I’m here, Sakai. See me? Where’s Hounchell and Lynch? Either of them around?”

Hounchell and Lynch were two investigators who Bosch knew would do him a favor without having to think about it too long. They were good people.

“Nah, they’re out baggin’ and taggin’. Busy morning. Guess things are picking up again.”

Bosch had heard a rumor through the grapevine that while removing victims from one of the collapsed apartment buildings after the earthquake, Sakai had gone in with his own camera and taken photos of people dead in their beds—the ceilings crushed down on top of them. He then sold the prints to the tabloid newspapers under a false name. That was the kind of guy he was.

“Anybody else around?”

“No, Bosch, jus’ me. Whaddaya want?”

“Nothing.”

Bosch turned back to the door, then hesitated. He needed to make the print comparison and didn’t want to wait. He looked back at Sakai.

“Look, Sakai, I need a favor. You want to help me out? I’ll owe you one.”

Sakai leaned forward in his chair. Bosch could see just the point of a toothpick poking out between his lips.

“I don’t know, Bosch, having you owe me one is like having the old whore with AIDS say she’ll give me a free one if I pay for the first.”

Sakai laughed at the comparison he had created.

“Okay, fine.”

Bosch turned and pushed through the door, keeping his anger in check. He was two steps down the hall when he heard Sakai call him back. Just as he had hoped. He took a deep breath and went back into the lounge.

“Bosch, c’mon, I didn’t say I wouldn’t help you out. Look, I read your story here and I feel for what you’re going through, okay?”

Yeah, right, Bosch thought but didn’t say.

“Okay,” he said.

“What do you need?”

“I need to get a set of prints off one of the customers in the cooler.”

“Which one?”

“Mittel.”

Sakai nodded toward the paper, which he had thrown back onto the table.

“That Mittel, huh?”

“Only one I know of.”

Sakai was quiet while he considered the request.

“You know, we make prints available to investigating officers assigned to homicides.”

“Cut the crap, Sakai. You know I know that and you know, if you read the paper, that I’m not the IO. But I still need the prints. You going to get them for me or am I just wasting my time here?”

Sakai stood up. Bosch knew that Sakai knew that if he backed down now after making the overture, then Bosch would gain a superior position in the netherworld of male interaction and in all their dealings that would follow. If Sakai followed through and got the prints, then the advantage would obviously go to him.

“Cool your jets, Bosch. I’m gonna get the prints. Why don’t you get yourself a cup of coffee and sit down? Just put a quarter in the box.”

Bosch hated the idea of being beholden to Sakai for anything but he knew this was worth it. The prints were the one way he knew to end the case. Or tear it open again.

Bosch had a cup of coffee and in fifteen minutes the coroner’s investigator was back. He was still waving the card so the ink would dry. He handed it to Bosch and went to the counter to get another cup of coffee.

“This is from Gordon Mittel, right?”

“Right. That’s what it said on the toe tag. And, man, he got busted up pretty good in that fall.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“You know, it sounds to me like that story in the newspaper ain’t as solid as you LAPD guys claim if you’re sneaking around here gettin’ the guy’s prints.”

“It’s solid, Sakai, don’t worry about it. And I better not get any calls from any reporters about me picking up prints. Or I’ll be back.”

“Don’t give yourself a hernia, Bosch. Just take the prints and leave. Never met anybody who tried so hard to make the person doin’ him a favor feel bad.”

Bosch dumped his coffee cup in a trash can and started out. At the door he stopped.

“Thanks.”

It burned him to say it. The guy was an asshole.

“Just remember, Bosch, you owe me.”

Bosch looked back at him. He was stirring cream into his cup. Bosch walked back, sticking his hand in his pocket. When he got to the counter he pulled out a quarter and dropped it into the slotted tin box that was the coffee fund.

“There, that’s for you,” Bosch said. “Now we’re even.”

He walked out and in the hallway he heard Sakai call him an asshole. To Bosch that was a sign that all might be right in the world. His world, at least.

When Bosch got to Parker Center fifteen minutes later, he realized he had a problem. Irving had not returned his ID tag because it was part of the evidence recovered from Mittel’s jacket in the hot tub. So Bosch loitered around the front of the building until he saw a group of detectives and administrative types walking toward the building from the City Hall annex. When the group moved inside and around the entry counter, Bosch stepped up behind them and got by the duty officer without notice.

Bosch found Hirsch at his computer in the Latent Fingerprint Unit and asked him if he still had the Lifescan from the prints off the belt buckle.

“Yeah, I’ve been waiting for you to pick them up.”

“Well, I got a set I want you to check against them first.”

Hirsch looked at him but hesitated only a second.

“Let’s see ’em.”

Bosch got the print card Sakai had made out of his briefcase and handed it over. Hirsch looked at it a moment, turning the card so it reflected the overhead light better.

“These are pretty clean. You don’t need the machine, right? You just want to compare these to the prints you brought in before.”

“That’s right.”

“Okay, I can eyeball it right now if you want to wait.”

“I want to wait.”

Hirsch got the Lifescan card out of his desk and took it and the coroner’s card to the work counter, where he looked at them through a magnifying lamp. Bosch watched his eyes going back and forth between the prints as if he were watching a tennis ball go back and forth across a net.

Bosch realized as he watched Hirsch work that more than anything else in the world he wanted the print man to look up at him and say that the prints from the two cards in front of him matched. Bosch wanted this to be over. He wanted to put it away.

After five minutes of silence, the tennis match was over and Hirsch looked up at him and gave him the score.