Harry Bosch Novels, The: Volume 2

by Michael Connelly

  He had brought a homemade tape with him and played it on the car stereo. It contained recordings of saxophone pieces Bosch particularly liked. He fast-forwarded until he found the one he wanted. It was Frank Morgan’s “Lullaby.” It was like a sweet and soulful funeral dirge to Bosch, a good-bye and apology to Frankie Sheehan. A good-bye and apology to Eleanor. It went well with the rain. Bosch played it over and over as he drove.

  He got to the house where Margaret Sheehan and her two daughters were living before two. There was an outside light still on and light could be seen through the curtains of the front windows. Bosch got the idea that Margie was in there waiting for his call, or maybe for him to show up. He hesitated at the door, wondering about how many times he had made this kind of call, then finally knocked.

  When Margie answered the door Bosch was reminded of how there was never any planning for these things. She stared at him for a moment and he thought she didn’t recognize him. It had been a lot of years.

  “Margie, it’s —”

  “Harry? Harry Bosch? We just —”

  She stopped and put it together. Usually they did.

  “Oh, Harry, no. Oh no. Not Francis!”

  She brought both hands up to her face. Her mouth was open and she looked like that famous painting of someone on a bridge screaming.

  “I’m sorry, Margie. I really am. I think maybe I should come in.”

  She was stoic about the whole thing. Bosch gave her the details and then Margie Sheehan made coffee for him so he wouldn’t fall asleep on the ride back. That was a cop’s wife thinking. In the kitchen Bosch leaned against a counter as she brewed the coffee.

  “He called you tonight,” he said.

  “Yes, I told you.”

  “Tell me how he seemed.”

  “Bad. He told me what they did to him. He seemed so . . . betrayed? Is that the right word? I mean, his own people, fellow cops, had taken him in. He was very sad, Harry.”

  Bosch nodded.

  “He gave his life to that department . . . and this is what they did to him.”

  Bosch nodded again.

  “Did he say anything about . . .”

  He didn’t finish.

  “About killing himself? No, he didn’t say that . . . I read up on police suicide once. Long time ago. In fact, back when Elias sued him the first time over that guy he killed. Frankie got real depressed then and I got scared. I read up on it. And what I read said that when people tell you about it or say they’re going to do it, what they are really doing is asking you to stop them.”

  Bosch nodded.

  “I guess Frankie didn’t want to be stopped,” she continued. “He didn’t say anything about it to me.”

  She pulled the glass coffeepot out of the brewer and poured some into a mug. She then opened a cabinet and took down a silver Thermos. She started filling it.

  “This is for the road home. I don’t want you falling asleep on the clothesline.”

  “What?”

  “I mean the Grapevine. I’m not thinking straight here.”

  Bosch stepped over and put his hand on her shoulder. She put the coffee- pot down and turned to him to be hugged.

  “This last year,” she said. “Things . . . things just went haywire.”

  “I know. He told me.”

  She broke away from him and went back to filling the Thermos.

  “Margie, I have to ask you something before I head back,” Bosch said. “They took his gun from him today to run ballistics. He used another. Do you know anything about that one?”

  “No. He only had the one he wore on the job. We didn’t have other guns. Not with two little girls. When Frankie would come home he’d lock his job gun up in a little safe on the floor of the closet. And only he had the key. I just didn’t want any more guns than were required in the house.”

  Bosch understood that if it was her edict that there be no more weapons than the one Sheehan was required to carry, then that left a hole. He could have taken a weapon in and hidden it from her—in a spot so obscure even the FBI didn’t find it when they searched his house. Maybe it was wrapped in plastic and buried in the yard. Sheehan also could have gotten the weapon after she and the girls moved out and up to Bakersfield. She would never have known about it.

  “Okay,” he said, deciding not to pursue it.

  “Why, Harry, are they saying it was your gun? Are you in trouble?”

  Bosch thought a moment before answering.

  “No, Margie, I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.”

  31

  The rain continued through Monday morning and slowed Bosch’s drive into Brentwood to a frustrating crawl. It wasn’t heavy rain, but in Los Angeles any rain at all can paralyze the city. It was one of the mysteries Bosch could never fathom. A city largely defined by the automobile yet full of drivers unable to cope with even a mild inclemency. He listened to KFWB as he drove. There were far more reports of traffic tie-ups than incidents of violence or unrest during the night. Unfortunately, the skies were expected to clear by midday.

  He arrived twenty minutes late for his appointment with Kate Kincaid. The house from which Stacey Kincaid had allegedly been kidnapped was a sprawling white ranch house with black shutters and a slate-gray roof. It had a broad green lawn stretching back from the street and a driveway that cut across the front of the house, and then back around to the garage in the side yard. When Bosch pulled in there was a silver Mercedes Benz parked near the covered entryway. The front door of the house was open.

  When he got to the threshold Bosch called out a hello and he heard Kate Kincaid’s voice telling him to enter. He found her in the living room, sitting on a couch that was covered in a white sheet. All the furniture was covered in this way. The room looked like a meeting of big, heavy ghosts. She noticed Bosch’s eyes taking in the room.

  “When we moved we didn’t take a single piece of furniture,” she said. “We decided just to start over. No reminders.”

  Bosch nodded and then studied her. She was dressed completely in white, with a silk blouse tucked into tailored linen pants. She looked like a ghost herself. Her large black leather purse, which was on the couch next to her, seemed to clash with her outfit and the sheets covering the furniture.

  “How are you, Mrs. Kincaid?”

  “Please call me Kate.”

  “Kate then.”

  “I am very fine, thank you. Better than I have been in a long, long time. How are you?”

  “I’m just so-so today, Kate. I had a bad night. And I don’t like it when it rains.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. It does look like you haven’t slept.”

  “Do you mind if I look around a little bit before we start talking?”

  He had a signed search warrant for the house in his briefcase but he didn’t want to bring it up yet.

  “Please do,” she said. “Stacey’s room is down the hall to your left. First door on the left.”

  Bosch left his briefcase on the tiled entryway floor and headed the way she had directed. The furniture in the girl’s room was not covered. The white sheets that had covered everything were in piles on the floor. It looked like someone—probably the dead girl’s mother—had visited here on occasion. The bed was unmade. The pink bedspread and matching sheets were twisted into a knot—not as if by someone sleeping, but maybe by someone who had lain on the bed and gathered the bedclothes to her chest. It made Bosch feel bad seeing it that way.

  Bosch stepped to the middle of the room, keeping his hands in the pockets of his raincoat. He studied the girl’s things. There were stuffed animals and dolls, a shelf of picture books. No movie posters, no photos of young television stars or pop singers. It was almost as if the room belonged to a girl much younger than Stacey Kincaid had been at the end. Bosch wondered if the design was her parents’ or her own, as if maybe she had thought by holding on to the things of her past she could somehow avoid the horror of the present. The thought made him feel worse than when he had studied the be
dclothes.

  He noticed a hairbrush on the bureau and saw strands of blond hair caught in it. It made him feel a little easier. He knew that the hair from the brush could be used, if it ever came to the point of connecting evidence—possibly from the trunk of a car—to the dead girl.

  He stepped over and looked at the window. It was a slider and he saw the black smudges of fingerprint powder still on the frame. He unlocked the window and pulled it open. There were splinter marks where the latch had supposedly been jimmied with a screwdriver or similar tool.

  Bosch looked out through the rain at the backyard. There was a lima bean- shaped pool that was covered with a plastic tarp. Rainwater was collecting on the tarp. Again Bosch thought of the girl. He wondered if she ever dove into the pool to escape and to swim to the bottom to scream.

  Past the pool he noticed the hedge that surrounded the backyard. It was ten feet high and insured backyard privacy. Bosch recognized the hedge from the computer images he had seen on the Charlotte’s Web Site.

  Bosch closed the window. Rain always made him sad. And this day he didn’t need it to feel that way. He already had the ghost of Frankie Sheehan in his head, he had a crumbled marriage he didn’t have time to think about, and he had haunting thoughts about the little girl with the lost-in-the-woods face.

  He took his hand from his pocket to open the closet door. The girl’s clothes were still there. Colorful dresses on white plastic hangers. He looked through them until he found the white dress with the little semaphore flags. He remembered that from the web site, too.

  He went back out into the hallway and checked the other rooms. There was what looked like a guest bedroom, which Bosch recognized as the room from the photos on the web page. This was where Stacey Kincaid had been assaulted and filmed. Bosch didn’t stay long. Further down the hall were a bathroom, the master suite and another bedroom, which had been converted into a library and office.

  He went back out to the living room. It did not look as though Kate Kincaid had moved. He picked up his briefcase and walked into the room to join her.

  “I’m a little damp, Mrs. Kincaid. All right if I sit down?”

  “Of course. And it’s Kate.”

  “I was thinking that I’d rather keep things on a formal basis for the moment, if you don’t mind.”

  “Suit yourself, Detective.”

  He was angry at her, angry at what had happened in this house and how the secret had been locked away. He had seen enough during his tour of the place to confirm in his own mind what Kizmin Rider had fervently believed the night before.

  He sat down on one of the covered chairs across from the couch and put his briefcase on his knees. He opened it and started going through some of the contents, which from her angle Kate Kincaid could not see.

  “Did you find something of interest in Stacey’s bedroom?”

  Bosch stopped what he was doing and looked over the top of the briefcase at her for a moment.

  “Not really,” he said. “I was just getting a feel for the place. I assume it was thoroughly searched before and there isn’t anything in there that I could find. Did Stacey like the pool?”

  He went back to his work inside the briefcase while she told him what a fine swimmer her daughter had been. Bosch really wasn’t doing anything. He was just following an act he had rehearsed in his head all morning.

  “She could go up and back without having to come up for air,” Kate Kincaid said.

  Bosch closed the case and looked at her. She was smiling at the memory of her daughter. Bosch smiled but without any warmth.

  “Mrs. Kincaid, how do you spell innocence?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The word. Innocence. How do you spell it?”

  “Is this about Stacey? I don’t understand. Why are you —”

  “Indulge me for a moment. Please. Spell the word.”

  “I’m not a good speller. With Stacey I always kept a dictionary in my purse in case she asked about a word. You know, one of those little ones that —”

  “Go ahead. Try it.”

  She paused to think. The confusion was evident on her face.

  “I-double n, I know there’s two. I-double n-o-c-e-n-s-e.”

  She looked at him and raised her eyebrows in a question. Bosch shook his head and reopened the briefcase.

  “Almost,” he said. “But there’s two c’s, no s.”

  “Darn. I told you.”

  She smiled at him. He took something out of the briefcase, closed it and put it down on the floor. He got up and walked across to the couch. He handed her a plastic document envelope. Inside it was one of the anonymous letters that had been sent to Howard Elias.

  “Take a look,” he said. “You spelled it wrong there, too.”

  She stared at the letter for a long time and then took a deep breath. She spoke without looking up at Bosch.

  “I guess I should have used my little dictionary. But I was in a hurry when I wrote this.”

  Bosch felt a lifting inside. He knew then that there would be no fight, no difficulty. The woman had been waiting for this moment. Maybe she knew it was coming. Maybe that was why she had said she felt better than she had in a long, long time.

  “I understand,” Bosch said. “Would you like to talk to me about this, Mrs. Kincaid? About everything?”

  “Yes,” she said, “I would.”

  Bosch put a fresh battery into the tape recorder, then turned it on and put it down on the coffee table, the microphone pointed up so that it would capture his voice as well as Kate Kincaid’s.

  “Are you ready?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  He then identified himself and said who she was, noted the date, time and location of the interview. He read off a constitutional rights advisement from a printed form he had taken from his briefcase.

  “Do you understand these rights as I have just read them?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Do you wish to talk with me, Mrs. Kincaid, or do you wish to contact an attorney?”

  “No.”

  “No what?”

  “No attorney. An attorney can’t help me. I want to talk.”

  This gave Bosch pause. He was thinking about how best to keep hair off the cake.

  “Well, I can’t give you legal advice. But when you say, ‘An attorney can’t help me,’ I’m not sure that that is going to constitute a waiver. You see what I mean? Because it is always possible that an attorney could —”

  “Detective Bosch, I don’t want an attorney. I fully understand my rights and I don’t want an attorney.”

  “Okay, then I need you to sign this paper at the bottom and then sign again where it says that you do not request an attorney.”

  He put the rights form down on the coffee table and watched her sign it. He then took it back and made sure she had signed her own name. He then signed it himself as the witness and put it in one of the slots of the accordion file in the briefcase. He sat back down in the chair and looked at her. He thought for a moment about talking to her about a spousal waiver but decided that could wait. He’d let the district attorney’s office handle that—when and if the time came.

  “Then I guess this is it,” he said. “You want to start, Mrs. Kincaid, or do you want me to ask you questions?”

  He was using her name frequently on purpose—in case the tape was ever played before a jury there would be no misunderstanding of whom the voices belonged to.

  “My husband killed my daughter. I guess that’s what you want to know first. That’s why you are here.”

  Bosch froze for a moment and then slowly nodded.

  “How do you know this?”

  “For a long time it was a suspicion . . . then it became my belief based on things I had heard. Eventually, he actually told me. I finally confronted him and he admitted it.”

  “What exactly did he tell you?”

  “He said that it was an accident—but you don’t strangle people by accident. He said she t
hreatened him, said that she was going to tell her friends what he . . . what he and his friends did to her. He said he was trying to stop her, to talk her out of doing it. He said things got out of hand.”

  “This occurred where?”

  “Right here. In the house.”

  “When?”

  She gave the date of her daughter’s reported abduction. She seemed to understand that Bosch had to ask some questions that had obvious answers. He was building a record.

  “Your husband had sexually abused Stacey?”

  “Yes.”

  “He admitted this to you?”

  “Yes.”

  She started to cry then and opened her purse for a tissue. Bosch let her alone for a minute. He wondered if she was crying because of grief or guilt or out of relief that the story was finally being told. He thought it was probably a combination of all three.

  “Over how long a period was she abused?” he finally asked.

  Kate Kincaid dropped the tissue to her lap.

  “I don’t know. We were married five years before . . . before she died. I don’t know when it started.”

  “When did you become aware of it?”

  “I would rather not answer that question, if you don’t mind.”

  Bosch studied her. Her eyes were downcast. The question was at the foundation of her guilt.

  “It’s important, Mrs. Kincaid.”

  “She came to me once.” She got a fresh tissue from her purse for a fresh torrent of tears. “About a year before . . . She said that he was doing things she didn’t think were right . . . At first, I didn’t believe her. But I asked him about it anyway. He denied it, of course. And I believed him. I thought it was an adjustment problem. You know, to a stepfather. I thought maybe this was her way of acting out or something.”