Angels Flight (1998)

by Michael Connelly

  “Because there was other evidence linking Harris to the murder,” Edgar said. “The girl’s — uh, Stacey — was found less than two blocks from his apartment. That was a strong tie-in. His lawyer decided the tack he had to take was to go after the cops. Taint the fingerprints by tainting the cops. He never went after the truth.”

  “And neither did the cops,” Bosch said. “They had the prints and when the body was found in Harris’s neighborhood, that sealed it. You remember, the investigation was emotionally charged from the beginning. It changed at that point when they found the body and it all tied in to Harris. It changed from a search for a little girl to a prosecution of a specific target. In between it never was a search for the truth.”

  Sam Kincaid seemed shell-shocked.

  “All this time,” he said. “Can you imagine the hate I have built up inside of me for this man? This hate, this utter and complete contempt, has been the only real emotion I’ve had for the last nine months . . .”

  “I understand, sir,” Bosch said. “But we need to start over now. We need to reinvestigate the case. That was what Howard Elias was doing. We have reason to believe that he knew what I just told you. Only he also knew or had a pretty good idea who the actual killer was. We think that got him killed.”

  Sam Kincaid looked surprised.

  “But the TV said a little while ago that — ”

  “The TV’s wrong, Mr. Kincaid. It’s wrong and we’re right.”

  Kincaid nodded. His eyes wandered out to the view and the smog.

  “What do you want from us?” Kate Kincaid said.

  “Your help. Your cooperation. I know we are hitting you out of the blue with this so we’re not expecting you to drop everything. But as you can tell if you’ve been watching TV, time isn’t something we have a lot of.”

  “You have our full cooperation,” Sam Kincaid said. “And D.C. here can do whatever you need him to do.”

  Bosch looked from Kincaid to the security man and then back to Kincaid.

  “I don’t think that will be necessary. We just have a few more questions for right now and then tomorrow we want to come back and start the case over.”

  “Of course. What are your questions?”

  “Howard Elias learned what I just told you because of an anonymous note that came in the mail. Do either of you know who that could have come from? Who would have known about the Volvo going to that car wash?”

  There was no answer for a long time.

  “Just me,” Kate Kincaid said. “I don’t know who else. I don’t remember telling anyone I went there. Why would I?”

  “Did you send Howard Elias the note?”

  “No. Of course not. Why would I help Michael Harris? I thought he was the one who . . . who took my daughter. Now you tell me he is innocent and I think I believe you. But before, no, I wouldn’t have lifted a finger to help him.”

  Bosch studied her as she spoke. Her eyes moved from the coffee table to the view and then to her hands clasped in front of her. She didn’t look at her questioner. Bosch had been reading people in interviews and interrogations for most of his adult life. In that moment he knew she had sent Elias the anonymous note. He just couldn’t figure out why. He glanced up again at Richter and saw that the security man was also closely studying the woman. Bosch wondered if he was reading the same thing. He decided to move on.

  “The house where this crime took place. The one in Brentwood. Who owns that now?”

  “We still own it,” Sam Kincaid said. “We’re not sure what we’re going to do with it. Part of us wants to get rid of it and never think of it again. But the other part . . . Stacey was there. She lived half of her life there . . .”

  “I understand. What I’d like — ”

  Bosch’s pager went off. He cut it off and continued.

  “I’d like to take a look at it, at her room. Tomorrow, if possible. We’ll have a search warrant by then. I know you’re a busy man, Mr. Kincaid. Maybe, Mrs. Kincaid, you could meet me there, show me around. Show me Stacey’s room. If that won’t be too difficult.”

  Kate Kincaid looked as if she dreaded the possibility of returning to the Brentwood house. But she nodded her head yes in a disengaged sort of way.

  “I’ll have D.C. drive her,” Sam Kincaid announced. “And you can have the run of the place. And you won’t need a search warrant. We give you our permission. We have nothing to hide.”

  “Sir, I didn’t mean to imply that you did. The search warrant will be necessary so there will be no questions later. It is more a protection for us. If something new in the house is found and leads to the real killer, we don’t want that person to be able to challenge the evidence on any legal grounds.”

  “I understand.”

  “And we appreciate you offering the help of Mr. Richter but that won’t be necessary.” Bosch looked at Kate Kincaid.“I would prefer it if just you came, Mrs. Kincaid. What time would be good?”

  While she thought about this Bosch looked down at his pager. The number on it was one of the homicide lines. But there was a 911 added after the phone number. It was code from Kiz Rider: Call immediately.

  “Uh, excuse me,” Bosch said. “It looks like this call is important. Do you have a phone I could use? I have a cell phone in the car but in these hills I’m not sure I’ll be able to get — ”

  “Of course,” Sam Kincaid said. “Use my office. Go back out to the entry hall and go left. The second door on the left. You’ll have privacy. We’ll wait here with Detective Edwards.”

  Bosch stood.

  “It’s Edgar,” Edgar said.

  “I’m sorry. Detective Edgar.”

  As Bosch headed to the entry hall another pager sounded. This time it was Edgar’s. He knew it was Rider sending the same message. Edgar looked down at his pager and then at the Kincaids.

  “I better go with Detective Bosch.”

  “Sounds like something big,” Sam Kincaid offered. “Hope it’s not a riot.”

  “Me, too,” Edgar said.

  • • •

  Kincaid’s home office would have been able to accommodate the entire Hollywood homicide squad. It was a huge room with towering ceilings and bookcases along two walls that went all the way up to the ceiling. The centerpiece of the room was a desk that would have dwarfed Howard Elias’s. It looked as if you could build a nice-sized office inside it.

  Bosch came around behind it and picked up the phone. Edgar came into the room behind him.

  “You get one from Kiz?” Bosch asked.

  “Yeah. Something’s happening.”

  Bosch punched in the number and waited. He noticed that on the desk was a gold-framed photo of Kincaid holding his stepdaughter on his lap. The girl was indeed beautiful. He thought about what Frankie Sheehan had said about her looking like an angel, even in death. He looked away and noticed the computer set up on a worktable to the right of the desk. There was a screen saver on the tube. It showed a variety of different cars racing back and forth across the screen. Edgar noticed it, too.

  “The car czar,” Edgar whispered. “More like the smog wog.”

  Rider answered before the first ring was finished.

  “It’s Bosch.”

  “Harry, did you talk to the Kincaids yet?”

  “We’re here now. We’re in the middle of it. What’s going — ”

  “Did you advise them?”

  Bosch was silent a moment. When he spoke again his voice was very low.

  “Advise them? No. What for, Kiz?”

  “Harry, back out of there and come back to the station.”

  Bosch had never heard Rider’s voice with such a serious tone. He looked at Edgar, who just raised his eyebrows. He was in the dark.

  “Okay, Kiz, we’re on our way. You want to tell me why?”

  “No. I have to show you. I found Stacey Kincaid in afterlife.”

  26

  BOSCH couldn’t put his finger on the look he saw on Kizmin Rider’s face when he and Edgar returned to
the squad room. She sat alone at the homicide table, her laptop in front of her, the glow of the screen reflecting slightly on her dark face. She looked both horrified and energized. Bosch knew the look but didn’t have the words for it. She had seen something horrible but at the same time she knew she was going to be able to do something about it.

  “Kiz,” Bosch said.

  “Sit down. I hope you didn’t leave hair on the cake with the Kincaids.”

  Bosch pulled out his seat and sat down. Edgar did likewise. The phrase Rider had used referred to making a miscue that tainted a case with constitutional or procedural error. If a suspect asks for a lawyer but then confesses to a crime before the lawyer arrives, there is hair on the cake. The confession is tainted. Likewise, if a suspect is not advised of his rights before questioning, it is unlikely anything he says in that conversation can be used against him later in court.

  “Look, neither one was a suspect when we walked in there,” Bosch said. “There was no reason to advise. We told them the case was open again and asked a few basic questions. Nothing came out of any consequence anyway. We told them Harris has been cleared and that’s it. What do you have, Kiz? Maybe you should just show us.”

  “Okay, bring your chairs around here. I’ll school you.”

  They moved their chairs to positions on either side of her. Bosch checked her computer and saw the Mistress Regina web page was on the screen.

  “First off, either of you guys know Lisa or Stacey O’Connor in Major Fraud downtown?”

  Bosch and Edgar shook their heads.

  “They’re not sisters. They just have the same last name. They work with Sloane Inglert. You know who she is, right?”

  Now they nodded. Inglert was a member of a new computer fraud unit working out of Parker Center. The team, and Inglert in particular, had gotten a lot of play in the media earlier that year when they bagged Brian Fielder, a hacker of international reputation who headed a crew of hackers known as the “Merry Pranksters.” Fielder’s exploits and Inglert’s chase of her quarry across the Internet had played in the paper for weeks and were now destined to be filmed by Holywood.

  “All right,” Rider said. “Well, they’re friends of mine from when I worked Fraud. I called them and they were happy to come in to work this because otherwise they’d have to put on uniforms and work twelve hours tonight.”

  “They came here?” Bosch asked.

  “No, their office at Parker. Where the real computers are. Anyway, we talked over the phone once they got there. I told them what we had — this web address that we knew was important but at the same time didn’t make any sense. I told them about going to Mistress Regina’s place and I think I pretty much creeped them out. Anyway, they told me there was a good chance that what we were looking for had nothing to do with Regina herself, just her web page. They said the page could have been hijacked and that we should be looking for a hidden hypertext link somewhere in the image.”

  Bosch raised his hands palms up but before he could say anything Rider kept going.

  “I know, I know, talk English. I will. I just wanted to take you step by step. Do either of you know anything at all about web pages? Am I making even any basic sense here?”

  “Nope,” said Bosch.

  “Nada,” said Edgar.

  “Okay, then I’ll try to keep this simple. We start with the Internet. The Internet is the so-called information superhighway, okay? Thousands and thousands of computer systems all connected by a Telnet system. It is worldwide. On that highway are millions of turnoffs, places to go. These are whole computer networks, web sites, so on and so forth.”

  She pointed to Mistress Regina on her computer screen.

  “This is an individual web page that is on a web site where there are many other pages. You see this on my computer here but its home, so to speak, is on the larger web site. And that web site resides in an actual, physical piece of equipment — a computer we call the web server. Do you follow me?”

  Bosch and Edgar nodded.

  “So far,” Bosch said. “I think.”

  “Good. Now the web server may have many, many web sites that it manages and maintains. See, if you wanted to have a Harry Bosch web page you would go to a web server and say put my page on one of your web sites. Do you have one that features morose detectives who never say much of anything to anybody?”

  That got a smile from Bosch.

  “That’s how it works. Often you have like-minded businesses or interests bundled on one site. That’s why when you look at this site it’s like Sodom and Gomorrah on the Internet. Because like-minded advertisers seek the same sites.”

  “Okay,” Bosch said.

  “The one thing the web server should provide is security. By that I mean security from anyone hacking in and compromising your page — altering it or crashing it. The problem is, there isn’t a whole lot of security out there on these web servers. And if someone can hack into a server they can then assume site-administrator capabilities for a web site and hijack any page on the site.”

  “What do you mean, hijack?” Edgar said.

  “They can go to a page on the site and use it as a front for their own intentions. Think of it as it is on my screen here. They can come up behind the image you see here and add all kinds of hidden doors and commands, whatever they want. They can then use the page as a gateway to anything they want.”

  “And that’s what they did with her page?” Bosch asked.

  “Exactly. I had O’Connor/O’Connor run a uniform resource locator. In effect they traced this page back to the web server. They checked it out. There are indeed some firewalls — security blocks — but the default passwords are still valid. They, in effect, render the firewalls invalid.”

  “You lost me,” Bosch said.

  “When a web server is first set up, there are default passwords necessary for first getting inside. In other words, standard log-on names and passwords. Guest/guest, for example. Or administrator/administrator. Once the server is up and running these should be eliminated to prevent compromise but quite often it is forgotten about and these become back doors, ways to sneak in. It was forgotten here. Lisa got in using administrator/administrator. And if she was able to do it, then any hacker worth his salt could have gotten in and then hijacked the Mistress Regina page. And somebody did.”

  “What did they do?” Bosch asked.

  “They put in a hidden hypertext link. A hot button. When located and pushed, it will take the user to another web site all together.”

  “In English,” Edgar said.

  Rider thought for a moment.

  “Think of it as a tall building — the Empire State building. You are on one floor. The Mistress Regina floor. And you find a hidden button on the wall. You push it and an elevator door you didn’t even see before opens and you get on. The elevator takes you to another floor and opens. You step out. You are someplace completely new. But you couldn’t have gotten there if you hadn’t been on Mistress Regina’s floor and stumbled onto that hidden button.”

  “Or been told where it was,” Bosch said.

  “Exactly,” Rider said. “Those in the know can go.”

  Bosch nodded at her computer.

  “Show us.”

  “Well, remember, the first note to Elias was the web page address and the image of Regina. The second one said, ‘dot the i humbert humbert.’ The mystery writer was simply telling Elias what to do with the web page.”

  “Dot the i in Regina?” Edgar asked. “Click the mouse on the dot?”

  “That’s what I thought but O’Connor/O’Connor said a hot button can only be hidden behind an image. Something about pixel redefinition that I don’t need to get into.”

  “So you dot the eye?” Bosch said, pointing to his eye.

  “Right.”

  She turned to her laptop, to which she had attached a mouse. She now moved it with her hand and Bosch watched the arrow on the screen move to Mistress Regina’s left eye. Rider double-clicked the m
ouse button and the screen went blank.

  “Okay, we’re on that elevator.”

  After a few seconds a field of blue sky and clouds appeared on the screen. Then tiny angels with wings and halos appeared sitting on the clouds. Then a password template appeared.

  “Humbert humbert,” Bosch said.

  “See, Harry, you get this stuff. You’re just acting like you don’t.”

  She typed in the name humbert in the user name and password slots and the screen went blank once again. A few seconds later there was a welcome message.