Mystery Writers of America Presents Vengeance

by Lee Child

  Harry Bosch had a day off and was in the waiting area outside the school principal’s office when he got the call. More like a half a day off. His plan was to head downtown to the PAB after dealing with the summons from the school’s high command.

  The buzzing of his phone brought an immediate response from the woman behind the gateway desk.

  “There’s no cell phones in here,” she said.

  “I’m not a student,” Bosch said, stating the obvious as he pulled the offending instrument from his pocket.

  “Doesn’t matter. There’s no cell phones in here.”

  “I’ll take it outside.”

  “I won’t come out to find you. If you miss your appointment then you’ll have to reschedule, and your daughter’s situation won’t be resolved.”

  “I’ll risk it. I’ll just be in the hallway, okay?”

  He pushed through the door into the hallway as he connected to the call. The hallway was quiet, as it was the middle of the fourth period. The ID on the screen had said simply LAPD data but that had been enough to give Bosch a stirring of excitement.

  The call was from a tech named Malek Pran. Bosch had never dealt with him and had to ask him to repeat his name twice. Pran was from Data Evaluation and Theory—known internally as the DEATH squad—which was part of a new effort by the Open-Unsolved Unit to clear cases through what was called data synthesizing.

  For the past three years the DEATH squad had been digitizing archived murder books—the hard-copy investigative records—of unsolved cases, creating a massive database of easily accessible and comparable information on unsolved crimes. Suspects, witnesses, weapons, locations, word constructions—anything that an investigator thought important enough to note in an investigative record was now digitized and could be compared with other cases.

  The project had actually been initiated simply to create space. The city’s records archives were bursting at the seams with acres of files and file boxes. Shifting it all to digital would make room in the cramped department.

  Pran said he had a case-to-case hit. A witness listed in a cold case Bosch had submitted for synthesizing had come up in another case, also a homicide, as a witness once again. Her name was Diane Gables. Bosch’s case was from 1999 and the second case was from 2007, which was too recent to fall under the purview of the Open-Unsolved Unit.

  “Who submitted the 2007 case?”

  “Uh, it was out of Hollywood Division. Detective Jerry Edgar made the submission.”

  Bosch almost smiled in the hallway. He went a distance back with Jerry Edgar.

  “Have you talked to Edgar yet about the hit?” Bosch asked.

  “No. I started with you. Do you want his contact info?”

  “I already have it. What’s the vic’s name on that case?”

  “Raymond Randolph, DOB six, six, sixty-one—that’s a lot of sixes. DOD July second, 2007.”

  “Okay, I’ll get the rest from Edgar. You did good, Pran. This gives me something I can work with.”

  Bosch disconnected and went back into the principal’s office. He had not missed his appointment. He checked his watch. He’d give it fifteen minutes, and then he’d have to start moving on the case. His daughter would have to go without her confiscated cell phone until he could get another appointment with the principal.

  BEFORE CONTACTING JERRY Edgar at Hollywood Division, Bosch pulled up the files—both hard and digital—on his own case. It involved the murder of a precious-metals swindler named Roy Alan McIntyre. He had sold gold futures by phone and internet. It was the oldest story in the book: There was no gold, or not enough of it. It was a Ponzi scheme through and through and like all of them, it finally collapsed upon itself. The victims lost tens of millions. McIntyre was arrested as the mastermind, but the evidence was tenuous. A good lawyer came to his defense and was able to convince the media that McIntyre was a victim himself, a dupe for organized-crime elements that had pulled the strings on the scheme. The DA started floating a deal that would put McIntyre on probation—provided he cooperated and returned all the money he still had access to. But word leaked about the impending deal, and hundreds of the scam’s victims organized to oppose it. Before the whole thing went to court, McIntyre was murdered in the garage under the Westwood condominium tower where he lived. Shot once between the eyes, his body found on the concrete next to the open door of his car.

  The crime scene was clean; not even a shell casing from the nine-millimeter bullet that had killed him was recovered. The investigators had no physical evidence and a list of possible suspects that numbered in the hundreds. The killing looked like a hit. It could have been McIntyre’s unsavory backers in the gold scam or it could have been any of the investors who’d gotten ripped off. The only bright spot was that there was a witness. She was Diane Gables, a twenty-nine-year-old stockbroker who happened to be driving by McIntyre’s condo on her way home from work. She’d reported seeing a man wearing a ski mask and carrying a gun at his side run from the garage and jump into the passenger seat of a black SUV waiting in front. Panicked by the sight of the gun, she didn’t get an exact make or model of the SUV or its license-plate number. She’d pulled to the side of the road rather than following the vehicle as it sped off.

  Bosch had not interviewed Gables when he had reevaluated the case in the Open-Unsolved Unit. He had simply reviewed the file and submitted it to the DEATH squad. Now, of course, he would be talking to her.

  He picked the phone up and dialed a number from memory. Jerry Edgar was at his desk.

  “It’s me—Bosch. Looks like we’re going to be working together again.”

  “Sounds good to me, Harry. What’ve you got?”

  DIANE GABLES’S CURRENT address, obtained through the DMV, was in Studio City. Edgar drove while Bosch looked through the file on the 2007 case. It involved the murder of a man who had been awaiting trial for raping a seventeen-year-old girl who had knocked on his door to sell him candy bars as part of a fund-raiser for a school trip to Washington, DC.

  As Bosch read through the murder book, he remembered the case. It had been in the news because the circumstances suggested it had been a crime of vigilante justice by someone who was not willing to wait for Raymond Randolph to go on trial. Randolph was intending to mount a defense that would acknowledge that he’d had sexual intercourse with the girl but state that it was consensual. He planned to claim that the victim offered him sex in exchange for his buying her whole carton of candy bars.

  The forty-six-year-old Randolph was found in the single-car garage behind his bungalow on Orange Grove, south of Sunset. He had been on his knees when he was shot twice in the back of the head.

  The crime scene was clean, but it was a hot day in July and a neighbor who had her windows open because of a broken air conditioner heard the two shots, followed by the high-revving and rapid departure of a vehicle in the street. She called 911, which brought a near-immediate response from the police at Hollywood Station three blocks away and also served to peg the time of the murder almost to the minute.

  Jerry Edgar was the lead investigator on the case. While obvious suspicion focused on the family and friends of the rape victim, Edgar cast a wide net—Bosch took some pride in seeing that—and in doing so came across Diane Gables. Two blocks from the Randolph home was an intersection controlled by a traffic signal and equipped with a camera that photographed vehicles that ran the red light. The camera took a double photo—one shot of the vehicle’s license plate, and one shot of the person behind the wheel. This was done so that when the traffic citation was sent to the vehicle’s owner, he or she could determine who’d been behind the wheel when the infraction occurred.

  Diane Gables was photographed in her Lexus driving through the red light in the same minute as the 911 call reporting the gunshots was made. The photograph and registration was obtained from the DMV the day after the murder and Gables, now thirty-seven, was interviewed by Edgar and his partner, Detective Manuel Soto. She was then dismissed as both a
possible suspect and a witness.

  “So, how well do you remember this interview?” Bosch asked.

  “I remember it because she was a real looker,” Edgar said. “You always remember the lookers.”

  “According to the book, you interviewed her and dropped her. How come? Why so fast?”

  “She and her story checked out. Keep going. It’s in there.”

  Bosch found the interview summary and scanned it. Gables had told Edgar and Soto that she had been cruising through the neighborhood after filling out a crime report at the nearby Hollywood Station on Wilcox. Her Lexus had been damaged by a hit-and-run driver the night before while parked on the street outside a restaurant on Franklin. In order to apply for insurance coverage on the repairs, she had to file a police report. After stopping at the station, she was running late for work and went through the light on what she was thought was a yellow signal. The camera said otherwise.

  “So she had filed the report?” Bosch asked.

  “She had indeed. She checked out. And that’s what makes me think we’re dealing with just a coincidence here, Harry.”

  Bosch nodded but continued to grind it down inside. He didn’t like coincidences. He didn’t believe in them.

  “You checked her work too?”

  “Soto did. Confirmed her position and that she was indeed late to work on the day of the killing. She had called ahead and said she was running late because she had been at the police station. She called her boss.”

  “What about the restaurant? I don’t see it in here.”

  “Then I probably didn’t have that information.”

  “So you never checked it.”

  “You mean did I check to see if she ate there the night before the murder? No, Harry, I didn’t and that’s a bullshit question. She was—”

  “It’s just that if she was setting up a cover story, she could’ve crunched her own car and—”

  “Come on, Harry. You’re kidding me, right?”

  “I don’t know. We’re still going to talk to her.”

  “I know that, Harry. I’ve known that since you called. You’re going to have to see for yourself. Just like always. So just tell me how you want to go in, rattlesnake or cobra?”

  Bosch considered for a moment, remembering the code they’d used back when they were partners. A rattlesnake interview was when you shook your tail and hissed. It was confrontational and useful for getting immediate reactions. Going cobra was the quiet approach. You’d slowly move in, get close, and then strike.

  “Let’s go cobra.”

  “You got it.”

  DIANE GABLES WASN’T home. They had timed their arrival for 5:30 p.m., figuring that with the stock market closing at 1:00 p.m., Gables would easily have finished work for the day.

  “What do you want to do?” Edgar said as they stood at the door.

  “Go back to the car. Wait awhile.”

  Back in the car, they talked about old cases and detective bureau pranks. Edgar revealed that it had been he who had cut ads for penile-enhancement surgery out of the sports pages and slipped them into an officious lieutenant’s jacket pocket while it had been hanging on a rack in his office. The lieutenant had subsequently mounted an investigation focused squarely on Bosch.

  “Now you tell me,” Bosch said. “Pounds tried to bust me to burglary for that one.”

  Edgar was a clapper. He backed his laughter with his own applause but cut the display short when Bosch pointed through the windshield.

  “There she is.”

  A late-model Range Rover pulled into the driveway.

  Bosch and Edgar got out and crossed the front lawn to meet Gables as she took the stone path from the driveway to her front door. Bosch saw her recognize Edgar, even after five years, and saw her eyes immediately start scanning, going from the front door of her house to the street and the houses of her neighbors. Her head didn’t move, only her eyes, and Bosch recognized it as a tell. Fight or flight. It might have been a natural reaction for a woman with two strange men approaching her, but Bosch didn’t think that was the situation. He had seen the recognition in her eyes when she looked at Edgar. A pulse of electricity began moving in his blood.

  “Ms. Gables,” Edgar said. “Jerry Edgar. You remember me?”

  As planned, Edgar was taking the lead before passing it off to Bosch.

  Gables paused on the path. She was carrying a stylish red leather briefcase. She acted as though she were trying to place Edgar’s face, and then she smiled.

  “Of course, Detective. How are you?”

  “I’m fine. You must have a very good memory.”

  “Well, it’s not every day that you meet a real live detective. Is this coincidence or…”

  “Not a coincidence. I’m with Detective Bosch here and we would like to ask you a few questions about the Randolph case, if you don’t mind.”

  “It was so long ago.”

  “Five years,” Bosch said, asserting himself now. “But it’s still an open case.”

  She registered the information and then nodded.

  “Well, it’s been a long day. I start at six in the morning, when the market opens. Could we—”

  Bosch cut her off. “I start at six too, but not because of the stock market.”

  He wasn’t backing down.

  “Then fine, you’re welcome to come in,” she said. “But I don’t know what help I can be after so long. I didn’t really think I was much help five years ago. I didn’t see anything. Didn’t hear anything. I just happened to be in the neighborhood after I was at the police station.”

  “We’re investigating the case again,” Bosch said. “And we need to talk to everybody we talked to five years ago.”

  “Well, like I said, come on in.”

  She unlocked the front door and entered first, greeted by the beeping of an alarm warning. She quickly punched a four-digit combination into an alarm-control box on the wall. Bosch and Edgar stepped in behind her and she ushered them into the living room.

  “Why don’t you gentlemen have a seat? I’m going to put my things down and be right back out. Would either of you like something to drink?”

  “I’ll take a bottle of water if you got it,” Edgar said.

  “I’m fine,” Bosch said.

  “You know what?” Edgar said quickly. “I’m fine too.”

  Gables glanced at Bosch and seemed to register that he was the power in the room. She said she’d be right back.

  After she was gone Bosch looked around the room. It was a basic living room setup with a couch and two chairs surrounding a glass-topped coffee table. One wall was made up entirely of built-in bookshelves, all filled with what looked by their titles to be crime novels. He noticed there were no personal displays. No framed photographs anywhere.

  They remained standing until Gables came back and pointed them to the couch. She took a chair directly across the table from them.

  “Now, what can I tell you? Frankly, I forgot the whole incident.”

  “But you remembered Detective Edgar. I could tell.”

  “Yes, but seeing him out of context, I knew I recognized him but I could not remember from where.”

  According to the DMV, Gables was now forty-one years old. And Edgar had been right: She was a looker, attractive in a professional sort of way. A short, no-nonsense cut to her brown hair. Slim, athletic build. She sat straight and looked straight at one or the other of them, no longer scanning because she was inside her comfort zone. Still, there were tells: Bosch knew through his training in interview techniques that normal eye contact between individuals lasted an average of three seconds, yet each time Gables looked at Bosch, she held his eyes a good ten seconds. That was a sign of stress.

  “I was rereading the reports,” Bosch said. “They included your explanation for being in the area—you were at the police station filling out a report.”

  “That’s right.”

  “It didn’t say, though, where your car was when it got damaged t
he night before.”

  “I had been at a restaurant on Franklin. I told them that. And when I came out after, the back taillight was smashed and the paint scraped.”

  “You didn’t call the police then?”

  “No, I didn’t. No one was there. It was a hit-and-run; they didn’t even leave a note on the car. They just took off and I thought I was out of luck.”

  “What was the name of the restaurant?”

  “I can’t remember—oh, it was Birds. I love the roasted chicken.”

  Bosch nodded. He knew the place and the roasted chicken.

  “So what made you come back to Hollywood the next day and file the report on the hit-and-run?”

  “I called my insurance company first thing in the morning and they said I needed it if I wanted to file a claim to cover the damages.”

  Bosch was covering ground that was already in the reports. He was looking for variations, changes. Stories told five years apart often had inconsistencies and contradictions. But Gables wasn’t changing the narrative at all.

  “When you drove by Orange Grove, you heard no shots or anything like that?”

  “No, nothing. I had my windows up.”

  “And you were driving fast.”

  “Yes, I was going to be late for work.”

  “Now, when Detective Edgar came to see you, was that unsettling?”

  “Unsettling? Well, yes, I guess so, until I realized what he was there for, and of course I knew I had nothing to do with it.”

  “Was it the first time you’d ever encountered a detective or the police like that? You know, on a murder case.”

  “Yes, it was very unusual. To say the least. Not a normal part of my life.”

  She shook her shoulders as if to intimate a shiver, imply that police and murder investigations were foreign to her. Bosch stared at her for a long moment. She had either forgotten about seeing the armed man with a ski mask coming out of the garage where Roy Alan McIntyre was murdered, or she was lying.