The Last Coyote

by Michael Connelly

  “Now, then,” Brockman started. “I’m going to read you your rights, Detective Bosch.”

  He took a small card from his wallet and proceeded to read to Bosch the Miranda warning. Bosch knew for sure the phone line was going to a tape recorder. This was something they would want on tape.

  “Now,” Brockman said when he was finished. “Do you agree to waive those rights and talk to us about this situation?”

  “It’s a situation now, huh? I thought it was a murder. Yeah, I’ll waive.”

  “Jerry, go get a waiver, I don’t have one here.”

  Jerry got up and left through the hallway door. Bosch could hear his feet moving quickly on the linoleum, then a door open. He was taking the stairs down to IAD on the fifth.

  “Uh, let’s start by—”

  “Don’t you want to wait until you have your witness back? Or is this being secretly recorded without my knowledge?”

  This immediately flustered Brockman.

  “Yes, Bosch it’s being sec—it’s being recorded. But not secretly. We told you before we started that we’d be taping.”

  “Good cover-up, Lieutenant. That last line, that was a good one. I’ll have to remember that one.”

  “Now, let’s start with—”

  The door opened and Toliver came in with a sheet of paper. He handed it to Brockman, who studied it a moment, made sure it was the correct form and slid it across the table to Bosch. Harry grabbed it and quickly scribbled a signature on the appropriate line. He was familiar with the form. He slid it back and Brockman put it off to the side of the table without looking at it. So he didn’t notice the signature Bosch had written was “Fuck You.”

  “All right, let’s get this going. Bosch, give us your whereabouts over the last seventy-two hours.”

  “You don’t want to search me first, do you? How ’bout you, Jerry?”

  Bosch stood up, opening his jacket so they could see he was not armed. He thought by taunting them like this they would do the exact opposite and not search him. Carrying Pounds’s badge was a piece of evidence that would probably put him in the ground if they discovered it.

  “Siddown, Bosch!” Brockman barked. “We’re not going to search you. We’re trying to give you every benefit of the doubt but you make it damn hard.”

  Bosch sat back down, relieved for the time being.

  “Now, just give us your whereabouts. We don’t have all day.”

  Bosch thought about this. He was surprised by the window of time they wanted. Seventy-two hours. He wondered what had happened to Pounds and why they hadn’t narrowed time of death to a shorter span.

  “Seventy-two hours ago. Well, about seventy-two hours ago it was Friday afternoon and I was in Chinatown at the Fifty-One-Fifty building. Which reminds me, I’m due over there in ten minutes. So, boys, if you’ll excuse me…”

  He stood up.

  “Siddown, Bosch. That’s been taken care of. Sit down.”

  Bosch sat down and said nothing. He realized, though, that he actually felt disappointed he would miss the session with Carmen Hinojos.

  “Come on, Bosch, let’s hear it. What happened after that?”

  “I don’t remember all the details. But I ate over at the Red Wind that night, also stopped at the Epicentre for a few drinks. Then I got to the airport about ten. I took a red-eye to Florida, to Tampa, spent the weekend there and got back about an hour and a half before I found you people illegally inside my home.”

  “It’s not illegal. We had a warrant.”

  “I’ve been shown no warrant.”

  “Never mind that, what do you mean you were in Florida?”

  “I guess I mean I was in Florida. What do you think it means?”

  “You can prove this?”

  Bosch reached into his pocket, took out his airline folder with the ticket receipt and slid it across the table.

  “For starters there’s the ticket receipt. I think there’s one in there for a rental car, too.”

  Brockman quickly opened the ticket folder and started reading.

  “What were you doing there?” he asked without looking up.

  “Dr. Hinojos, that’s the company shrink, said I should try to get away. And I thought, how ’bout Florida? I’d never been there and all my life I’ve liked orange juice. I thought, what the hell? Florida.”

  Brockman was flustered again. He wasn’t expecting something like this. Bosch could tell. Most cops never realized how important the initial interview with a suspect or witness was to an investigation. It informed all other interviews and even court testimony that followed. You had to be prepared. Like lawyers, you had to know most of the answers before you asked the questions. The IAD relied so much on its presence as an intimidating factor that most of the detectives assigned to the division never really had to prepare for interviews. And when they hit a wall like this, they didn’t know what to do.

  “Okay, Bosch, uh, what did you do in Florida?”

  “You ever heard that song Marvin Gaye sang? Before he got killed? It’s called—”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “—‘Sexual Healing.’ It says it’s good for the soul.”

  “I’ve heard it,” Toliver said.

  Both Brockman and Bosch looked at him.

  “Sorry,” he offered.

  “Again, Bosch,” Brockman said. “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about that I spent most of the time with a woman I know there. Most of the other time I spent with a fishing guide on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico. What I’m talking about, asshole, is that I was with people almost every minute. And the times I wasn’t weren’t long enough for me to fly back here and kill Pounds. I don’t even know when he was killed but I’ll tell you right now you don’t have a case, Brockman, because there is no case. You’re looking in the wrong direction.”

  Bosch had chosen his words carefully. He was unsure what, if anything, they knew about his private investigation and he wasn’t going to give them anything if he could help it. They had the murder book and the evidence box but he thought that he might be able to explain all of that away. They also had his notebook because he had stuffed it into his overnighter at the airport. In it were the names, numbers and addresses of Jasmine and McKittrick, the address of the Eno house in Vegas, and other notes about the case. But they might not be able to put together what it all meant. Not if he was lucky.

  Brockman pulled a notebook and pen from the inside pocket of his jacket.

  “Okay, Bosch, give me the name of the woman and this fishing guide. I need their numbers, everything.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Brockman’s eyes widened.

  “I don’t care what you think, give me the names.”

  Bosch said nothing, just stared down at the table in front of him.

  “Bosch, you’ve told us your whereabouts, now we need to confirm them.”

  “I know where I was at, that’s all I need.”

  “If you’re in the clear, as you claim, let us check it out, clear you and move on to other things, other possibilities.”

  “You’ve got the airlines and the car rental right there. Start with that. I’m not dragging people into this who don’t need to be. They’re good people and unlike you, they like me. I’m not going to let you spoil that by having you come in with your concrete block feet and step all over the relationships.”

  “You don’t have a choice, Bosch.”

  “Oh, yes, I do. Right now, I do. You want to try to make a case against me, do it. If it gets to that point, I’ll bring these people out and they’ll blow your shit away, Brockman. You think at the moment you’ve got PR problems in the department over sending Bill Connors to the closet? You’ll end this case with worse PR than Nixon had. I’m not giving you the names. If you want to write something down there in your notebook, just write that I said ‘Fuck you.’ That ought to cover it.”

  Brockman’s face got kind of blotchy with pinks and whi
tes. He was quiet a moment before speaking.

  “Know what I think? I still think you did it. I think you hired somebody to do it and you went waltzing off to Florida so you’d be nowhere near here. A fishing guide. If that doesn’t sound like a conjured-up piece of shit I don’t know what does. And the woman? Who was she, some hooker you picked up in a bar? What was she, a fifty-dollar alibi? Or did you go a hundred?”

  In one explosive move, Bosch shoved the table toward Brockman, catching him completely by surprise. It slid under his arms and crashed into his chest. His chair tipped back against the wall behind him. Bosch kept the pressure on his end and pinned Brockman against the wall. Bosch pushed back on his own chair until it was against the wall behind him. He raised his left leg and put his foot against the table to keep the pressure on it. He saw the blotches of color on Brockman’s face become more pronounced as he went without air. His eyes bugged. But he had no leverage and couldn’t move the table off himself.

  Toliver was slow to react. Stunned, he seemed to look at Brockman for a long moment as if awaiting orders before jumping up and moving toward Bosch. Bosch was able to fend off his first effort, shoving the younger man back into a potted palm tree that was in the corner of the room. While Bosch did this, he saw in his peripheral vision a figure enter the room through the other door. Then his chair was abruptly knocked over and he was on the ground with a heavy weight on top of him. By turning his head slightly he could see it was Irving.

  “Don’t move, Bosch!” Irving yelled in his ear. “Settle down right now!”

  Bosch went limp to signify his compliance and Irving got off him. Bosch stayed still for a few moments and then put a hand up on the table to pull himself up. As he got up, he saw Brockman hacking and trying to get air into his lungs while holding both hands against his chest. Irving held one hand out to Bosch’s chest as a calming gesture and a means of stopping him from taking another run at Brockman. With his other hand, he pointed at Toliver, who was trying to right the potted palm. It had become uprooted and wouldn’t stand up. He finally just leaned it against the wall.

  “You,” Irving snapped at him. “Out.”

  “But, sir, the—”

  “Get out!”

  Toliver quickly left through the hallway door as Brockman was finally finding his voice.

  “Buh…Bosch, you sonova bitch, you…you’re going to jail. You—”

  “Nobody’s going to jail,” Irving said sternly. “Nobody’s going to jail.”

  Irving stopped to gulp down some air. Bosch noticed that the assistant chief seemed just as winded as anybody in the room.

  “There will be no charges on this,” Irving finally continued. “Lieutenant, you baited him and got what you got.”

  Irving’s tone invited no debate. Brockman, his chest still heaving, put his elbows on the table and began running his fingers through his hair, trying to look as if he still had some composure but all he had was defeat. Irving turned to Bosch, anger bunching the muscles of his jaw into hard surfaces.

  “And you. Bosch, I don’t know how to help you. You’re always the loose cannon. You knew what he was doing, you’ve done it yourself. But you couldn’t sit there and take it. What kind of man are you?”

  Bosch didn’t say anything and he doubted Irving wanted a spoken answer. Brockman started coughing and Irving looked back at him.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I think.”

  “Go across the street, have one of the paramedics check you out.”

  “No, I’m all right.”

  “Good, then go down to your office, take a break. I have someone else I want to have talk to Bosch.”

  “I want to continue the inter—”

  “The interview is over, Lieutenant. You blew it.” Then, looking at Bosch, he added, “You both did.”

  Chapter Thirty-three

  IRVING LEFT BOSCH alone in the conference room and in a few moments Carmen Hinojos walked in. She took the same seat that Brockman had sat in. She looked at Bosch with eyes that seemed filled with equal parts anger and disappointment. But Bosch didn’t flinch under her gaze.

  “Harry, I can’t believe—”

  He held a finger up to his mouth, silencing her.

  “What is it?”

  “Are our sessions still supposed to be private?”

  “Of course.”

  “Even in here?”

  “Yes. What is it?”

  Bosch got up and walked to the phone on the counter. He pushed the button that disconnected the conference call. He returned to his seat.

  “I hope that was left on unintentionally. I’m going to speak to Chief Irving about that.”

  “You’re probably speaking to him right now. The phone was too obvious. He’s probably got the room wired.”

  “C’mon, Harry, this isn’t the CIA.”

  “No, it’s not. Sometimes it’s even worse. All I’m saying is Irving, the IAD, they still might be listening somehow. Be careful what you say.”

  Carmen Hinojos looked exasperated.

  “I’m not paranoid, Doctor. I’ve been through this before.”

  “All right, never mind. I really don’t care who’s listening or not. I can’t believe what you just did. It makes me very sad and disappointed. What have our meetings been about? Nothing? I’m sitting in there hearing you resort to the same type of violence that brought you to me in the first place. Harry, this isn’t some joke. This is real life. And I have to make a decision that could very well decide your future. This makes it all the more difficult to do.”

  He waited until he was sure she was done.

  “You were in there with Irving the whole time?”

  “Yes, he called and explained the situation and asked me to come over and sit in. I have to say—”

  “Wait a minute. Before we go any further. Did you talk to him? Did you tell him about our sessions?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Okay, for the record, I just want to reiterate that I do not give up any of my protections under the patient-doctor relationship. We okay on that?”

  For the first time she looked away from him. He could see her face turning dark with anger.

  “Do you know what an insult that is for you to tell me that? What, do you think I’d tell him about our sessions just because he may have ordered me to?”

  “Did he?”

  “You don’t trust me at all, do you?”

  “Did he?”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  “That’s good.”

  “It’s not just me. You don’t trust anyone.”

  Bosch realized that he had been out of line. He could see, though, that there was more hurt than anger in her face.

  “I’m sorry, you’re right, I shouldn’t have said that. I’m just…I don’t know, I’ve got my back to the corner here, Doctor. When that happens, sometimes you forget who’s on your side and who isn’t.”

  “Yes, and as a matter of course you respond with violence against those who you perceive are not on your side. This is not good to see. It’s very, very disappointing.”

  He looked away from her and over to the potted palm in the corner. Before leaving the room, Irving had replanted it, getting his hands dirty with black soil. Bosch noticed it was still slightly tilted to the left.

  “So what are you doing up here?” he asked. “What does Irving want?”

  “He wanted me to sit in his office and listen to your interview on the conference line. He said he was interested in my evaluation of your answers as to whether I believed you could have been responsible for the death of Lieutenant Pounds. Thanks to you and your attack on your interviewer, he didn’t need any evaluation from me. It’s clear at this point you are prone to and quite capable of violence against fellow police officers.”

  “That’s bullshit and you know it. Damn it, what I did in here to that guy masquerading as a cop was a lot different than what they think I did. You’re talking about things that are worlds apart and
if you don’t see that, you’re making your living in the wrong business.”

  “I’m not so sure.”

  “Have you ever killed anyone, Doctor?”

  Saying the question reminded him of his true confessions conversation with Jasmine.

  “Of course not.”

  “Well, I have. And believe me it’s a lot different than roughing up some pompous ass in a suit with a shine on its ass. A lot different. If you or they think that doing one means you can do the other, you all have a lot to learn.”