The Black Ice hb-2

by Michael Connelly

  “Anyway, I’m Detective Harry Bosch,” he began again, hoping she might introduce herself.

  “Yes, I’ve heard of you. I remember the newspaper articles. And I’m sure my husband spoke of you-I think it was when they sent you out to Hollywood Division. Couple years ago. He said before that one of the studios had paid you a lot of money to use your name and do a TV movie about a case. He said you bought one of those houses on stilts up in the hills.”

  Bosch nodded reluctantly and changed the subject.

  “I don’t know what the reporters told you, Mrs. Moore, but I have been sent out to tell you that it appears your husband has been found and he is dead. I am sorry to have had to tell you this. I-”

  “I knew and you knew and every cop in town knew it would come to this. I didn’t talk to the reporters. I didn’t need to. I told them no comment. When that many of them come to your house on Christmas night, you know it’s because of bad news.”

  He nodded and looked down at the imaginary hat in his hands.

  “So, are you going to tell me? Was it an official suicide? Did he use a gun?”

  Bosch nodded and said, “It looks like it but nothing is definite un-”

  “Until the autopsy. I know, I know. I’m a cop’s wife. Was, I mean. I know what you can say and can’t say. You people can’t even be straight with me. Until then there are always secrets to keep to yourselves.”

  He saw the hard edge enter her eyes, the anger.

  “That’s not true, Mrs. Moore. I’m just trying to soften the im-”

  “Detective Bosch, if you want to tell me something, just tell me.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Moore, it was with a gun. If you want the details, I can give you the details. Your husband, if it was your husband, took his face off with a shotgun. Gone completely. So, we have to make sure it was him and we have to make sure he did it himself, before we can say anything for sure. We are not trying to keep secrets. We just don’t have all the answers yet.”

  She leaned back in her chair, away from light. In the veil of shadows Bosch saw the look on her face. The hardness and anger in her eyes had softened. Her shoulders seemed to untighten. He felt ashamed.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know why I told you that. I should have just-”

  “That’s okay. I guess I deserved it… I apologize, too.”

  She looked at him then without anger in her eyes. He had broken through the shell. He could see that she needed to be with someone. The house was too big and too dark to be alone in right now. All the Christmas trees and book reports in the world couldn’t change that. But there was more than that making Bosch want to stay. He found that he was instinctively attracted to her. For Bosch it had never been an attraction of an opposite but the reverse of that myth. He had always seen something of himself in the women who attracted him. Why it was this way, he never understood. It was just there. And now this woman whose name he didn’t even know was there and he was being drawn to her. Maybe it was a reflection of himself and his own needs, but it was there and he had seen it. It hooked him and made him want to know what had etched the circles beneath such sharp eyes. Like himself, he knew, she carried her scars on the inside, buried deep, each one a mystery. She was like him. He knew.

  “I’m sorry but I don’t know your name. The deputy chief just gave me the address and said go.”

  She smiled at his predicament.

  “It’s Sylvia.”

  He nodded.

  “Sylvia. Um, is that coffee I smell by any chance?”

  “Yes. Would you like a cup?”

  “That would be great, if it’s not too much trouble.”

  “Not at all.”

  She got up and as she passed in front of him so did his doubts.

  “Listen, I’m sorry. Maybe I should go. You have a lot to think about and I’m intruding here. I’ve-”

  “Please stay. I could use the company.”

  She didn’t wait for an answer. The fire made a popping sound as the flames found the last pocket of air. He watched her head toward the kitchen. He waited a beat, took another look around the room and stood up and headed toward the lighted doorway of the kitchen.

  “Black is fine.”

  “Of course. You’re a cop.”

  “You don’t like them much, do you. Cops.”

  “Well, let’s just say I don’t have a very good record with them.”

  Her back was to him and she put two mugs on the counter and poured coffee from a glass pot. He leaned against the doorway next to the refrigerator. He was unsure what to say, whether to press on with business or not.

  “You have a nice home.”

  “No. It’s a nice house, not a home. We’re selling it. I guess I should say I’m selling it now.”

  She still hadn’t turned around.

  “You know you can’t blame yourself for whatever he did.”

  It was a meager offering and he knew it.

  “Easier said than done.”

  “Yeah.”

  There was a long moment of silence then before Bosch decided to get on with it.

  “There was a note.”

  She stopped what she was doing but still did not turn.

  “‘I found out who I was.’ That’s all he said.”

  She didn’t say anything. One of the mugs was still empty.

  “Does it mean anything to you?”

  She finally turned to him. In the bright kitchen light he could see the salty tracks that tears had left on her face. It made him feel inadequate, that he was nothing and could do nothing to help heal her.

  “I don’t know. My husband… he was caught on the past.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He was just-he was always going back. He liked the past better than the present or the hope of the future. He liked to go back to the time he was growing up. He liked… He couldn’t let things go.”

  He watched tears slide into the grooves below her eyes. She turned back to the counter and finished pouring the coffee.

  “What happened to him?” he asked.

  “What happens to anybody?” For a while after that she didn’t speak, then said, “I don’t know. He wanted to go back. He had a need for something back there.”

  Everybody has a need for their past, Bosch thought. Sometimes it pulls harder on you than the future. She dried her eyes with tissue and then turned and gave him a mug. He sipped it before speaking.

  “Once he told me he lived in a castle,” she said. “That’s what he called it, at least.”

  “In Calexico?” he asked.

  “Yes, but it was for a short while. I don’t know what happened. He never told me a lot about that part of his life. It was his father. At some point, he wasn’t wanted anymore by his father. He and his mother had to leave Calexico-the castle, or whatever it was-and she took him back across the border with her. He liked to say he was from Calexico but he really grew up in Mexicali. I don’t know if you’ve ever been there.”

  “Just to drive through. Never stopped.”

  “That’s the general idea. Don’t stop. But he grew up there.”

  She stopped and he waited her out. She was looking down at her coffee, an attractive woman who looked weary of this. She had not yet seen that this was a beginning for her as well as an end.

  “It was something he never got over. The abandonment. He often went back there to Calexico. I didn’t go but I know he did. Alone. I think he was watching his father. Maybe seeing what could have been. I don’t know. He kept pictures from when he was growing up. Sometimes at night when he thought I was asleep, he’d take them out and look at them.”

  “Is he still alive, the father?”

  She handed him a mug of coffee.

  “I don’t know. He rarely spoke of his father and when he did he said his father was dead. But I don’t know if that was metaphorically dead or that he actually was dead. He was dead as far as Cal went. That was what mattered. It was a very private thing with Cal. He still fe
lt the rejection, all these years later. I could not get him to talk about it. Or, when he would, he would just lie, say the old man meant nothing and that he didn’t care. But he did. I could tell. After a while, after years, I have to say that I stopped trying to talk with him about it. And he would never bring it up. He’d just go down there-sometimes for a weekend, sometimes a day. He’d never talk about it when he came back.”

  “Do you have the photos?”

  “No, he took them when he left. He’d never leave them.”

  Bosch sipped some coffee to give himself time to think.

  “It seems,” he said, “I don’t know, it seems like… could this have had anything to do with…”

  “I don’t know. All I can tell you is that it had a lot to do with us. It was an obsession with him. It was more important to him than me. It’s what ended it for us.”

  “What was he trying to find?”

  “I don’t know. In the last few years he shut me out. And I have to say that after a while I shut him out. That’s how it ended.”

  Bosch nodded and looked away from her eyes. What else could he do? Sometimes his job took him too far inside people’s lives and all he could do was stand there and nod. He was asking questions he felt guilty asking because he had no right to the answers. He was just the messenger boy here. He wasn’t supposed to find out why somebody would hold a double-barrel shotgun up to his face and pull the triggers.

  Still, the mystery of Cal Moore and the pain on her face wouldn’t let him go. She was captivating in a way that went beyond her physical beauty. She was attractive, yes, but the hurt in her face, the tears and yet the strength in her eyes tugged at him. The thought that occurred to him was that she did not deserve this. How could Cal Moore have fucked up so badly?

  He looked back at her.

  “There was another thing he told me once. Uh, I’ve had some experience with the IAD, uh, that’s Internal-”

  “I know what it is.”

  “Yes, well, he asked me for some advice. Asked me about if I knew somebody that was asking questions about him. Name of Chastain. Did Cal tell you about this? What it was about?”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  Her demeanor was changing. Bosch could actually see the anger welling up from inside again. Her eyes were very sharp. He had struck a nerve.

  “But you knew about it, right?”

  “Chastain came here once. He thought I would cooperate with whatever it was he was doing. He said I made a complaint about my husband, which was a lie. He wanted to go through the house and I told him to leave. I don’t want to talk about this.”

  “When did Chastain come?”

  “I don’t know. Couple months ago.”

  “You warned Cal?”

  She hesitated and then nodded.

  Then Cal came to the Catalina and asked me for advice, Harry realized.

  “You sure you don’t know what it was about?”

  “We were separated by then. We didn’t talk. It was over between us. All I did was tell Cal that this man had come and that he had lied about who made the complaint. Cal said that was all they do. Lie. He said don’t worry about it.”

  Harry finished his coffee but held the mug in his hand. She had known her husband had somehow fallen, had betrayed their future with his past, but she had stayed loyal. She had warned him about Chastain. Bosch couldn’t fault her for that. He could only like her better.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “What?”

  “If you are investigating my husband’s death, I would assume you already know about IAD. You are either lying to me, too, or don’t know. If that’s the case, what are you doing here?”

  He put the mug down on the counter. It gave him a few extra seconds.

  “I was sent out by the assistant chief to tell you what was-”

  “The dirty work.”

  “Right. I got stuck with the dirty work. But like I said, I sort of knew your husband and…”

  “I don’t think it’s a mystery you can solve, Detective Bosch.”

  He nodded-the old standby.

  “I teach English and lit at Grant High in the Valley,” she said. “I assign my students a lot of books written about L.A. so they can get a feel for the history and character of their community. Lord knows, few of them were born here. Anyway, one of the books I assign isThe Long Goodbye. It’s about a detective.”

  “I’ve read it.”

  “There is a line. I know it by heart. ‘There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.’ Whenever I read that I think of my husband. And me.”

  She started to cry again. Silently, never taking her eyes off Bosch. This time he didn’t nod. He saw the need in her eyes and crossed the room and put his hand on her shoulder. It felt awkward, but then she moved into him and leaned her head against his chest. He let her keep crying until she pulled away.

  * * *

  An hour later, Bosch was home. He picked up the half-filled glass of wine and the bottle that had been sitting on the table since dinner. He went out on the back porch and sat and drank and thought about things until early into the morning hours. The glow of the fire across the pass was gone. But now something burned within himself.

  Calexico Moore had apparently answered a question that all people carry deep within themselves-that Harry Bosch, too, had longed to answer.I found out who I was.

  And it had killed him. It was a thought that pushed a fist into Bosch’s guts, into the most secret folds of his heart.

  Chapter 5

  Thursday, the morning after Christmas, was one of those days the postcard photographers pray for. There was no hint of smog in the sky. The fire in the hills had burned out and the smoke had long been blown over the hills by Pacific breezes. In its stead the Los Angeles basin basked under a blue sky and puffy cumulus clouds.

  Bosch decided to take the long way down out of the hills, driving on Woodrow Wilson until it crossed Mulholland and then taking the winding route through Nichols Canyon. He loved the views of the hills covered with blue wisteria and violet ice plants, topped with aging million-dollar homes that gave the city its aura of fading glory. As he drove he thought of the night before and how it had made him feel to comfort Sylvia Moore. It made him feel like a cop in a Rockwell painting. Like he had made a difference.

  Once he was out of the hills he took Genesee to Sunset and then cut over to Wilcox. He parked behind the station and walked past the fenced windows of the drunk tank into the detective bureau. The gloom in the squad room was thicker than cigarette smoke in a porno theater. The other detectives sat at their tables with their heads down, most talking quietly on the phone or with their faces buried in the paperwork that haunted their lives with its never-ceasing flow.

  Harry sat down at the homicide table and looked across at Jerry Edgar, his some-of-the-time partner. There were no permanently assigned partners anymore. The bureau was shorthanded and there was a departmental hiring and promotion freeze because of budget cuts. They were down to five detectives on the homicide table. The bureau commander, Lieutenant Harvey “Ninety-eight” Pounds, managed this by working detectives solo except on key cases, dangerous assignments or when making arrests. Bosch liked working on his own, anyway, but most of the other detectives complained about it.

  “What’s going on?” Bosch asked Edgar. “Moore?”

  Edgar nodded. They were alone at the table. Shelby Dunne and Karen Moshito usually came in after nine and Lucius Porter was lucky if he was sober enough to get in by ten.

  “Little while ago Ninety-eight came out of the box and said they got the fingerprint match. It was Moore. He blew his own shit away.”

  They were silent for a few minutes after that. Harry scanned the paperwork on his desk but couldn’t help thinking about Moore. He imagined Irving or Sheehan or maybe even Chastain calling Sylvia Moore to tell her the identification was confirmed. Harry could see his slim connection to the case disappearing like smoke. Without having to
turn, he realized someone was standing behind him. He looked around to see Pounds looking down at him.

  “Harry, c’mon in.”

  An invitation to the glass box. He looked at Edgar, who raised his eyes in a who-knows gesture. Harry got up and followed the lieutenant into his office at the head of the squad room. It was a small room with windows on three sides that enabled Pounds to look out on his charges but limit his actual contact with them. He didn’t have to hear them or smell them or know them. The blinds that were often used to cut off his sight of them were open this morning.

  “Sit down, Harry. I don’t have to tell you not to smoke. Have a good Christmas?”

  Bosch just looked at him. He was uncomfortable with this guy calling him Harry and asking him about Christmas. He hesitantly sat down.

  “What’s up?” he said.

  “Let’s not get hostile, Harry. I’m the one who should be hostile. I just heard you spent a good part of Christmas night at that dump motel, the Hideaway, where nobody in this world would want to be and where Robbery-Homicide happened to be conducting an investigation.”

  “I was on call,” Bosch said. “And I should have been called out to the scene. I went by to see what was going on. Turned out, Irving needed me, anyway.”

  “That’s fine, Harry, if you leave it at that. I have been told to tell you not to get any ideas about the Moore case.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Just what it sounds like it means.”

  “Look, if you-”

  “Never mind, never mind.” Pounds raised his hands in a calming gesture, then pinched the bridge of his nose, signifying the onset of a headache. He opened the center drawer of his desk and took out a small tin of aspirin. He took two without water.

  “Enough said, okay?” Pounds said. “I’m not-I don’t need to get into-”