The Last Coyote

by Michael Connelly

  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.

  Chapter Forty-seven

  WHEN CARMEN HINOJOS opened her waiting room door she seemed pleasantly surprised to see Bosch sitting on the couch.

  “Harry! Are you all right? I didn’t expect to see you here today.”

  “Why not? It’s my time, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but I read in the paper you were at Cedars.”

  “I checked out.”

  “Are you sure you should have done that? You look…”

  “Awful?”

  “I didn’t want to say that. Come in.”

  She ushered him in and they took their usual places.

  “I actually look better than I feel right now.”

  “Why? What is it?”

  “Because it was all for nothing.”

  His statement put a confused look on her face.

  “What do you mean? I read the story today. You solved the murders, including your mother’s. I thought you’d be quite different than this.”

  “Well, don’t believe everything you read, Doctor. Let me clarify things for you. What I did on my so-called mission was cause two men to be murdered and another to die by my own hands. I solved, let’s see, I solved one, two, three murders, so that’s good. But I didn’t solve the murder I set out to solve. In other words, I’ve been running around in circles causing people to die. So, how did you expect me to be during our session?”

  “Have you been drinking?”

  “I had a couple beers with lunch but it was a long lunch and I think that a minimum of two beers is required considering what I just told you. But I am not drunk, if that is what you want to know. And I’m not working, so what’s the difference?”

  “I thought we agreed to cut back on—”

  “Oh, fuck that. This is the real world here. Isn’t that what you called it? The real world? Between now and the last time we talked, I’ve killed someone, Doc. And you want to talk about cutting back on booze. Like it means anything anymore.”

  Bosch took out his cigarettes and lit one. He kept the pack and the Bic on the arm of the chair. Carmen Hinojos watched him for a long time before speaking again.

  “You’re right. I’m sorry. Let’s go to what I think is the heart of the problem. You said you didn’t solve the murder you set out to solve. That, of course, is your mother’s death. I am only going by what I read, but today’s Times attributes her killing to Gordon Mittel. Are you telling me that you now know that to be incontrovertibly wrong?”

  “Yes. I now know that to be incontrovertibly wrong.”

  “How?”

  “Simple. Fingerprints. I went down to the morgue, got Mittel’s prints and had them compared to those on the murder weapon, the belt. No match. He didn’t do it. Wasn’t there. Now, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I’m not sitting here with a guilty conscience over Mittel. He was a man who decided to kill people and then had them killed. Just like that. At least two times I’m sure of, then he was going to have me killed, too. So I say fuck him. He got what he had coming. But I’ll carry Pounds and Conklin around with me for a long time. Maybe forever. And one way or another, I’ll pay for it. It’s just that it would make that weight easier to carry if there had been a reason. Any good reason. Know what I mean? But there isn’t a reason. Not anymore.”

  “I understand. I don’t—I’m not sure how to proceed with this. Do you want to talk some about your feelings in regard to Pounds and Conklin?”

  “Not really. I’ve thought about it enough already. Neither man was innocent. They did things. But they didn’t have to die like they did. Especially Pounds. Jesus. I can’t talk about it. I can’t even think about it.”

  “Then how will you go on?”

  “I don’t know. Like I said, I have to pay.”

  “What is the department going to do, any idea?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t care. It’s bigger than the department to decide. I have to decide my penance.”

  “Harry, what does that mean? That concerns me.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m not going to the closet. I’m not that type.”

  “The closet?”

  “I’m not going to stick a gun in my mouth.”

  “Through what you’ve said here today, it is already clear you have accepted responsibility for what happened to these two men. You’re facing it. In effect, you are denying denial. That is a foundation you can build on. I am concerned about this talk about penance. You have to go on, Harry. No matter what you do to yourself, it doesn’t bring them back. So the best you can do is go on.”

  He didn’t say anything. He suddenly grew tired of all the advice, of her intervention in his life. He was feeling resentful and frustrated.

  “Do you mind if we cut the session short today?” he asked. “I’m not feeling so hot.”

  “I understand. It’s no problem. But I want you to promise me something. Promise me we will talk again before you make any decisions.”

  “You mean about my penance?”

  “Yes, Harry.”

  “Okay, we’ll talk.”

  He stood up and attempted a smile but it came out more like a frown. Then he remembered something.

  “By the way, I apologize for not getting back to you the other night when you called. I was waiting on a call and couldn’t talk and then I just kind of forgot. I hope you were just checking on me and it wasn’t too important.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I forgot myself. I was just calling to see how you made it through the rest of the afternoon with Chief Irving. I also wanted to see if you wanted to talk about the photos. It doesn’t matter now.”

  “You looked at them?”

  “Yes. I had a couple of comments but—”

  “Let’s hear them.”


  Bosch sat back down. She looked at him, weighing his suggestion, and decided to go ahead.

  “I have them here.”

  She bent down to get the envelope out of one of the lower drawers of the desk. She almost disappeared from Bosch’s view. Then she was up and placed the envelope on the desk.