The Black Ice (1993)

by Michael Connelly

  “In here, please,” a voice said from the next room.

  Bosch and Aguila stepped into a large office that was weighted in the center by a huge steel desk. A man in a light blue guayaberra shirt sat behind it. He was writing something in a ledger book and there was a Styrofoam cup of steaming coffee on the desk. Enough light came through the jalousie window behind him so that he didn’t need a desk light. He looked about fifty years old, with gray hair that showed streaks of old black dye. He also was a gringo.

  The man said nothing and continued writing. Bosch looked around and saw the four-picture closed-circuit television console on a low shelf against the wall next to the desk. He saw the black-and-white images from the gate and front corners. The fourth image was very dark and was an interior look at what Harry assumed was the cargo-loading room. He saw a white van with its rear doors open, two or three men loading large white boxes into it.

  “Yes?” the man said. He still hadn’t looked up.

  “Quite a lot of security for flies.”

  Now he looked up. “Excuse me?”

  “Didn’t know they were so valuable.”

  “What can I do for you?” He threw his pen down on the desk to signal that the wheels of international commerce were grinding to a halt because of Bosch.

  “Harry Bosch, Los Angeles po—”

  “You said that at the gate. What can I do for you?”

  “I am here to talk about one of your employees.”

  “Name?” He picked up the pen again and went back to work on the ledger.

  “You know something? I would think that if a cop had come three hundred miles, crossed the border, just to ask you a few questions, then it might rate a little interest. But not with you. That bothers me.”

  The pen went down harder this time and bounced off the desk into the trash can next to it.

  “Officer, I don’t care whether it bothers you or not. I have a shipment of perishable material I must get on the road by four o’clock. I can’t afford to show the interest you seem to think you rate. Now, if you want to give me the employee’s name—that is, if he was an employee—I will answer what I can.”

  “What do you mean ‘was an employee’?”

  “What?”

  “You said, ‘was,’ just then.”

  “So?”

  “So, what’s it mean?”

  “You said—you’re the one who came in here with these questions. I—”

  “And your name is?”

  “What?”

  “What is your name?”

  The man stopped, thoroughly confused, and drank from the cup. He said, “You know, mister, you have no authority here.”

  “You said, ‘even if the guy was an employee,’ and I never said anything about ‘was.’ Makes me think, you already know we are talking about an individual that was. Who is dead now.”

  “I just assumed, okay. A cop comes all the way down from L.A., I just assumed we were talking about a dead guy. Don’t try to put words—you can’t come in here with that badge that isn’t worth the tin it’s made of once you cross that border and start pushing me. I don’t have—”

  “You want some authority? This is Carlos Aguila of the State Judicial Police here. You can consider that he is asking the same questions as me.”

  Aguila nodded but said nothing.

  “That’s not the point,” the man behind the desk said. “The point is this typical bullshit American imperialism you bring with you. I find it very distasteful. My name is Charles Ely. I am proprietor of EnviroBreed. I do not know anything about the man you said worked here.”

  “I didn’t tell you his name.”

  “It doesn’t matter. You understand now? You made a mistake. You played this game wrong.”

  Bosch took the morgue photo of Gutierrez-Llosa out of his pocket and slid it across the desk. Ely did not touch the photo but looked down at it. He showed no reaction that Bosch could see. Then Bosch put down the pay stubs. Same thing. No reaction.

  “Name is Fernal Gutierrez-Llosa,” Bosch said. “A day laborer. I need to know when he worked here last, what he was doing.”

  Ely retrieved his pen from the trash can and flicked the photo back toward Bosch with it.

  “Afraid I can’t help. Day laborers we don’t carry records on. We pay them with ‘pay to bearer’ checks at the end of each day. Different people all the time. I wouldn’t know this man from Adam. And I believe we already answered questions about this man. From the SJP. A Captain Grena. I guess I will have to call him now to see why that wasn’t sufficient.”

  Bosch wanted to ask whether he meant the payoff Ely had given Grena or the information wasn’t sufficient. But he held back because it would come back on Aguila. Instead he said, “You do that, Mr. Ely. Meantime, somebody else around here might remember this man. I am going to take a look around.”

  Ely became immediately agitated. “No, sir, you are not going to have free range of this facility. Portions of this building are used to irradiate material and are considered dangerous and off limits to all but certified personnel. Other areas are subject to USDA monitoring and quarantine and we cannot allow anyone access. Again, you have no authority here.”

  “Who owns EnviroBreed, Ely?” Bosch asked.

  Ely seemed startled by the change in subject.

  “Who?” he sputtered.

  “Who is the man, Ely?”

  “I don’t have to answer that. You have no—”

  “The man across the street? Is the pope the man?”

  Ely stood up and pointed at the door.

  “I don’t know what you are talking about but you’re leaving. And I will be contacting both the SJP and the American and Mexican authorities. We will see if this is how they want police from Los Angeles to operate on foreign soil.”

  Bosch and Aguila moved back into the hall and closed the door. Harry stood there for a moment and listened for the sound of a telephone or steps. He heard nothing and then turned to the door at the end of the hall. He tried it but it was locked.

  In front of the door marked USDA, he leaned his head forward and listened but heard nothing. He opened the door without knocking and a man with bureaucrat written all over him looked up from behind a small wooden desk. The room was about a quarter the size of Ely’s suite. The man wore a short-sleeved white shirt with a thin blue tie. He had close-cropped gray hair, a mustache that looked like the end of a toothbrush and small, dead eyes that looked out from behind bifocals that squeezed against his pudgy pink temples. The plastic ink guard in his pocket had his name printed on the flap: Jerry Dinsmore. He had a half-eaten bean burrito on his desk, sitting on oil-stained paper.

  “Can I help you?” he said with a mouthful.

  Bosch and Aguila moved into the room.

  Bosch showed him his ID and let him have a good look at it. Then he put the morgue photo on the desk, next to the burrito. Dinsmore looked at it and folded up the paper around his half-finished meal and put it in a drawer.

  “Recognize him?” Bosch said. “Just a routine check. Infectious disease alert. Guy took it with him up to L.A. and croaked. We are retracing him so we can get anybody who had contact inoculated. We still got plenty of time. We hope.”

  Dinsmore was chewing his food much slower now. He looked down at the Polaroid and then up over his glasses at Bosch.

  “Was he one of the men who worked around here?”

  “We think so. We are checking with all the regular employees. We thought you might recognize him. It depends on how close you got as far as whether you need to be quarantined.”

  “Well, I never get close to the laborers. I’m in the clear. But what is the disease that you are talking about? I don’t see why LAPD is—this man looks like he was beaten.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Dinsmore, that’s confidential until we determine if you are at risk. If you are, well, then we have to put our cards on the table. Now, how do you mean you never get close to the laborers? Are you not the inspection officer for t
his facility?”

  Bosch expected Ely to burst in any moment.

  “I am the inspector but I am only interested in the finished product. I inspect samples directly from the travel cases. Then I seal the cases. This is done in the shipping room. You have to remember, this is a private facility and consequently I do not have free reign of the breeding or sterilization labs. Therefore, I do not interface with the workers.”

  “You just said, ‘samples.’ So that means you don’t look in all of the boxes.”

  “Wrong. I don’t look in all of the larvae cylinders in each of the transport cases, but I do inspect and seal the cases. I don’t see what this has to do with this man. He didn’t—”

  “I don’t see it, either. Never mind. You’re in the clear.”

  Dinsmore’s small eyes widened slightly. Bosch winked at him to further confuse him. He wondered if Dinsmore was part of what was going on here or whether, like a mole, he was in the dark. He told him to go back to his burrito and then he and Aguila stepped back into the hall. Just at that moment the door at the end of the hall opened and through it stepped Ely. He pulled a breathing mask and goggles off his face and charged down the hall, coffee slopping over the sides of the Styrofoam cup.

  “I want you two out of here unless you have a court order.”

  He was right up to Bosch now and anger was etching red lines on his face. It was the act he might have used to intimidate others but Bosch was not impressed. He looked down into the shorter man’s coffee cup and smiled as a small piece of the puzzle slipped into place. The stomach contents of Juan Doe #67 had included coffee. That was how he had swallowed the medfly which had brought Bosch here. Ely followed his eyes down and saw the medfly floating on the surface of the hot liquid.

  “Fuckin’ flies,” he said.

  “You know,” Bosch said, “I’ll probably get that court order.”

  He couldn’t think of anything else to say and didn’t want to leave Ely with the satisfaction of throwing him out. He and Aguila headed for the exit.

  “Don’t count on it,” Ely said. “This is Mexico. You aren’t jackshit here.”

  23

  Bosch stood at the window of his third-floor room in the Hotel Colorado on Calzado Justo Sierra and looked out at what he could see of Mexicali. To his left the view was obscured by the other wing of the hotel. But looking out to the right he saw the streets were clogged with cars and the colorful buses he had seen earlier. He could hear a mariachi band playing somewhere. There was the smell of frying grease in the air from a nearby restaurant. And the sky above the ramshackle city was purple and red in the day’s dying light. In the distance he could see the buildings of the justice center and, near them to the right, the rounded shape of a stadium. Plaza de los Toros.

  He had called Corvo in Los Angeles two hours earlier, left his number and location, and was waiting for a call back from his man in Mexicali, Ramos. He walked away from the window and looked at the phone. He knew it was time to make the rest of the calls but he hesitated. He grabbed a beer out of the tin ice bucket on the bureau and opened it. He drank a quarter of it and sat on the bed next to the phone.

  There were three messages on the phone tape at his home, all of them from Pounds saying the same thing: “Call me.”

  But he didn’t. Instead, he called the homicide table first. It was Saturday night but the chances were it would still be all hands on deck because of Porter. Jerry Edgar answered.

  “What’s the situation?”

  “Shit, man, you gotta come in.” He was speaking in a very low voice. “Everybody’s looking for you. RHD’s got the lead on this thing so I don’t know exactly what’s happening. I’m just one of the gofers. But, I think uh, . . . I don’t know, man.”

  “What? Say it.”

  “It’s like they think you either did Porter or you might be next. It’s hard to gauge what the fuck they’re doing or thinking.”

  “Who’s there?”

  “Everybody. This is the command post. Irving’s in there in the box with Ninety-eight now.”

  Bosch knew he couldn’t let it go on much further. He had to call in. He might have already damaged himself beyond repair.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’m going to call them. I have to make one other call first. Thanks.”

  Bosch hung up and dialed another number, hoping he had remembered it correctly and that she would be home. It was near seven and he thought maybe she had gone out for dinner, but then she picked up on the sixth ring.

  “It’s Bosch. A bad time?”

  “What do you want?” Teresa said. “Where are you? Everybody’s looking for you, you know.”

  “I heard. But I’m outta town. I was just calling ’cause I heard they found my friend Lucius Porter.”

  “Yeah, they did. Sorry. I just got back from the cut.”

  “Yeah, I figured you’d do it.”

  And then silence before she said, “Harry, why do I get the feeling you want—that you aren’t calling just because he was your friend?”

  “Well . . .”

  “Oh, shit, here we go again, right?”

  “No. I just wanted to know how he got it is all. He was a friend. I worked with him. Never mind.”

  “I don’t know why I let you do this to me. Shit. Mexican necktie, Harry. There, you happy? Got all you need now?”

  “Garrote?”

  “Yes. Steel baling wire, wrapped at the ends around two wooden pegs. I’m sure you’ve seen it before. Do I get to read this in the Times tomorrow, too?”

  He was silent until he was sure she was done. He looked from the bed to the open window and saw the daylight was now completely gone. The sky was a deep red wine. He thought of the man at Poe’s. Three tears.

  “Did you do a compar—”

  “Comparison to the Jimmy Kapps case? Yes. We’re way ahead of you, but it won’t be done for a few days.”

  “How come?”

  “Because it takes that long to do wood-fiber testing between the dowel pegs and alloy-content analysis on the baling wire. We did do a cut analysis on the wire, though. It looks very good.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning it looks like the wire on the garrote used to kill Porter was cut from the same length of wire used to kill Kapps. The ends match. It’s not one hundred percent because similar pliers will leave similar cut tracings. So we are doing the metal-alloy comparison. We’ll know in a few days.”

  She seemed so matter-of-fact about it all. He was surprised she was still angry with him. The television reports of the night before seemed to be in her favor. He didn’t know what to say. He had gone from being at ease in bed with her to being nervous on the phone with her.

  “Thanks, Teresa,” he finally said. “I’ll see you.”

  “Harry?” she said before he could hang up.

  “Yeah?”

  “When you get back, I don’t think you should call me again. I think we should keep it professional. If we see each other in the suite, then that’s fine. But let’s leave it there.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Okay?”

  “Sure.”

  They hung up. Bosch sat without moving for several minutes. Finally, he picked the phone up again and dialed the direct line into the glass box. Pounds picked up immediately.

  “It’s Bosch.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Mexicali. You left messages?”

  “I called the hotel on your tape. They said you never checked in.”

  “I decided to stay on the other side of the border.”

  “Never mind the bullshit. Porter is dead.”

  “What!” Bosch tried his best to make it seem real. “What happened? I just saw him yesterday. He—”

  “Never mind the bullshit, Bosch. What are you doing down there?”

  “You told me to go where the case followed. It led here.”

  “I never told you to go to Mexico.” He was yelling. “I want you back here ten minutes ago. This do
es not look good for you. We have a bartender that so help me Christ is ready to put your dick in the dirt on this. He—hang on.”

  “Bosch,” a new voice on the line said. “Assistant Chief Irving here. What is your location?”

  “I’m in Mexicali.”

  “I want you in my office at oh eight hundred tomorrow.”

  Bosch didn’t hesitate. He knew he could not show any weakness.