“Were you just going to look at cards from the day or week of the murder? The month maybe?”
“No, all of them. Whatever they still had. Who’s to say the guy who did this didn’t get FI-ed a couple years before or a year after?”
Ballard nodded.
“No stone uncovered. I get it.”
“That make you change your mind? It’ll be a lot of work.”
“Nope.”
“Good.”
“Well, I’m gonna go. Might even go in early to get started.”
“Happy hunting. If I can come by, I will. But I have a search warrant to execute.”
“Right.”
“Otherwise, call me if you find something.”
He reached into a pocket and produced a business card with his cell number on it.
“Copy that,” she said.
Ballard walked off, holding the container in front of her by the indented grips on either side. As Bosch watched, she made a smooth U-turn and came back to him.
“Lucy Soto said you know Daisy’s mother,” she said. “Is that the standing you said you had?”
“I guess you could say that,” Bosch said.
“Where’s the mother—if I want to talk to her?”
“My house. You can talk to her anytime.”
“You live with her?”
“She’s staying with me. It’s temporary. Eighty-six-twenty Woodrow Wilson.”
“Okay. Got it.”
Ballard turned again and walked off. Bosch watched her go. She made no further U-turns.
6
Bosch went back into the jail to get the search warrant and to close and lock the cold-case cell. He then crossed First Street and entered the SFPD detective bureau through the side door off the parking lot. He saw two of the unit’s full-time detectives at their workstations. Bella Lourdes was the senior detective most often paired with Bosch when his investigations took him out into the streets. She had a soft, motherly look that camouflaged her skills and toughness. Oscar Luzon was older than Lourdes but the most recent transfer to the detective unit. He had a sedentary thickness settling in and liked wearing his badge on a chain around his neck like a narc instead of on his belt. Otherwise, it might not be seen. Danny Sisto, the third member of the team, was not present.
Bosch checked Captain Trevino’s office and found the door open and the detective commander behind his desk. He looked up from some paperwork at Bosch.
“How’d it go?” Trevino asked.
“Signed, sealed, delivered,” Bosch said, holding the warrant up as proof. “You want to get everybody in the war room to talk about how we do this?”
“Yeah, bring Bella and Oscar in. Sisto’s out at a crime scene, so he won’t make it. I’ll pull somebody in from patrol.”
“What about LAPD?”
“Let’s figure it out first and then I’ll call Foothill and make it a captain-to-captain thing.”
Trevino was picking up the phone to call the watch office as he spoke. Bosch ducked back out and used the warrant to signal Lourdes and Luzon to the war room. Bosch went in, took a yellow pad off the supply table and sat at one end of the oval meeting table. The so-called war room was really a multipurpose room. It was used for training classes, as a lunchroom, as an emergency command post, and on occasion as a place to strategize investigations and tactics with the whole detective squad—all five members of it.
Bosch sat down and flipped over the cover sheet of the warrant so he could reread the probable-cause section he had composed. It was drawn from a fourteen-year-old murder case. The victim was Cristobal Vega, fifty-two, who was shot once in the back of the head while he was walking his dog up his street to Pioneer Park. Vega was a veteran gang member, a shot caller for Varrio San Fer 13, one of the oldest and most violent gangs in the San Fernando Valley.
His death was a shock to the tiny town of San Fernando because he was well known within the community after having publicly adopted a Godfather-like presence, deciding neighborhood disputes, contributing major funds to local churches and schools, and even delivering food baskets to the needy during the holidays.
It was a good-guy disguise that cloaked a thirty-plus-year run as a gangster. On the inside of the VSF, he was notoriously violent and known by the moniker Uncle Murda. He moved with two bodyguards at all times and rarely strayed from SanFer turf, because he had been “green-lit” by all surrounding gangs as a result of his leadership position and planning of violent forays into other turf. The Vineland Boyz wanted him dead. The Pacas wanted him dead. Pacoima Flats wanted him dead. And so on.
The killing of Uncle Murda was also surprising because Vega had been caught on the street alone. He had a handgun tucked into the waist of his sweatpants but had apparently thought he was safe to duck out of his fortified home and take his dog to the park shortly after dawn. He never made it. He was found facedown on the sidewalk a block short of the park. His assassin had approached so stealthily from behind that Vega had not even pulled the gun from his waistband.
Though Vega was a hood and a killer himself, the SFPD investigation into his murder had initially been intense. But no witness to the shooting was ever found and the only evidence recovered was the .38 caliber bullet removed during autopsy from the victim’s brain. No competing gang from the area took credit for the kill, and graffiti that either lamented or celebrated Vega’s demise offered no clue as to who or what gang had carried out the hit.
The case went cold and detectives who were assigned due-diligence checks on it each year did not muster a lot of enthusiasm. It was clearly a case where the victim’s death was not seen as much of a loss to society. The world was doing just fine without Uncle Murda.
But when Bosch opened the files as part of his cold-case review, he took a different approach. He had always operated according to the axiom that everybody counts in this world or nobody counts. This belief dictated that he must give each case and each victim his best effort. The fact that Uncle Murda had gotten his moniker because of his willingness to carry out the deadly business of the VSF did not deter Bosch from wanting to find his killer. In Bosch’s book, nobody should be able to come up behind a man on a sidewalk at dawn, put a bullet in his brain, and then disappear into the shadows of time. There was a murderer out there. He might have killed since and he might kill again. Bosch was coming for him.
The time of death was determined by various factors. Vega’s wife said he had gotten up at six a.m. and taken the dog out the door about twenty minutes later. The coroner could only narrow it down to the 100 minutes between then and eight a.m., which was when his body was discovered by a resident near the park. Two canvasses by detectives in the neighborhood produced not a single resident who reported hearing the shot, leading to the conclusion that the shooter might have used a silencer on his weapon—or the entire neighborhood did not want to cooperate with police.
While there were many handicaps in the investigation of years-old cases—loss of evidence, witnesses, crime scenes—the element of time could also be advantageous. Bosch always looked for ways to turn time in his favor.
In the Cristobal Vega investigation, a lot had happened in the fourteen years since the murder. Many of the gangsters in the VSF and its rivals had gone to prison for various crimes, including murder. Some had gone straight and cut ties with the life. These were the people Bosch focused on, using database searches and conversations with gang unit officers in the SFPD and from nearby LAPD divisions to produce two lists of gangsters in prison or believed to be in the straight life.
Over the previous year, he had made numerous prison stops and conducted dozens of visits to the homes and workplaces of men who had left their gang affiliations behind. Each conversation was tailored to the circumstances of the man he was visiting but in each instance questioning casually moved toward the unsolved killing of Cristobal Vega.
Most of the conversations were dead ends. The subject either maintained the code of silence or had no knowledge of the Vega killing.
But eventually pieces of information started to create the mosaic. When he heard more than three denials of involvement from members of the same gang he moved that gang off the suspect list. Eventually he had scratched every one of the SanFer rivals off the list. It wasn’t conclusive but it was enough to turn his focus inward at Vega’s own gang.
Bosch eventually struck pay dirt in the rear parking lot of a discount shoe store in Alhambra, east of Los Angeles. The store was where a man named Martin Perez, a reformed SanFer, worked as an inventory manager far away from the turf he once trod. Perez was forty-one years old and had shed his gang affiliation twelve years earlier. Though he had been carried in gang unit intel files as a hard-core member of the SanFers since he was sixteen, he had escaped the life with several arrests on his record but no convictions. He had never been to prison and had spent only a few days here and there in county jail.
The files Bosch reviewed contained color photos of the tattoos that adorned most parts of Perez’s body during his active years. Included in these was an RIP UNCLE MURDA ink job on his neck. This put him high on the list of men Bosch wanted to talk to.
Bosch staked out the shoe store’s parking lot and spotted Perez stepping out back to smoke a cigarette while on a three p.m. break. Through a pair of binoculars Bosch confirmed that Perez still carried the tattoo on his neck. He noted the time of the break and then drove away.
The next day he came back shortly before break time. He was dressed in blue jeans and a denim work shirt with permanent stains on it and carried a soft pack of Marlboro reds in the breast pocket. When he saw Perez behind the shop, he casually joined him, holding a cigarette up and asking if he could borrow a light. Perez flicked a lighter and Bosch leaned in to ignite his smoke.
Leaning back away, Bosch mentioned the tattoo he had just seen up close and asked how Uncle Murda died. Perez responded by saying that Uncle Murda was a good man who had been set up by his own people.
“How come?” Bosch asked.
“Because he got greedy,” Perez said.
Bosch pushed no further. He finished his cigarette—the first he had smoked in years—and thanked Perez for the light, then walked away.
That night, Bosch knocked on the door of Perez’s apartment. He was accompanied by Bella Lourdes. This time he identified himself, as did Lourdes, and told Perez he had a problem. He pulled his phone and played a snippet of the conversation they had shared while smoking behind the shoe store. Bosch explained that Perez had knowledge about a gang murder but had deliberately withheld it from authorities. This was obstruction of justice—a crime—not to mention conspiracy to commit murder, which would be the charges he would face unless he agreed to cooperate.
Perez took the option of cooperating, but he did not want to go to the San Fernando Police Department lest he be spotted in the old neighborhood by someone he used to run with. Bosch made a call to an old friend who worked in the Sheriff’s Department homicide unit in Whittier and arranged to borrow an interview room for a couple hours.
The threat of charges against Perez was largely a bluff by Bosch, but it worked. Perez was deathly afraid of the L.A. County jail and the California prison system. He said both were well stocked with members of the eMe—the Mexican Mafia—which had a strong alliance with the VSF and was known for its brutal crimes against those who snitched or were perceived to be vulnerable to law enforcement pressure to flip. Perez believed that he would be marked for death whether he snitched or not. He chose to put everything on the table in hopes of convincing Bosch and Lourdes that he was not the killer but knew who was.
The story Perez told was as old as the crime of murder itself. Vega had risen to a place of power in the gang, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. He was taking more than his share in proceeds from the SanFers’ criminal enterprises and was also known to force sexual relations on young women associated with members on the lower tiers of the gang. Many of those young vatos despised him. One named Tranquillo Cortez plotted against him. According to Perez, he was the nephew of Vega’s wife and was incensed by Vega’s greed and very public infidelities.
Perez was in Cortez’s clique within the gang and was privy to part of the planning but insisted he was not present when Cortez killed Vega. The case had long been considered the perfect hit within the SFPD, because no evidence other than a bullet had been left behind. So this was where Bosch and Lourdes pressed Perez, asking many questions about the gun, its ownership, and its present whereabouts.
Perez said the gun was Cortez’s own gun but had no information on how Cortez came to own it. As far as what happened to the weapon after the murder, he had no idea because he soon separated himself from the gang and left the Valley. But Perez did provide a piece of information that gave Bosch his focus. He said that Cortez had equipped the gun with a homemade silencer. This fit with the original investigation.
Bosch zeroed in, asking how Cortez had made the silencer. Perez said that at the time, Cortez worked in an uncle’s muffler shop in nearby Pacoima, and he had machined it out of the same piping and internal sound-suppressing materials used in motorcycle mufflers. He did this after hours and without his uncle’s knowledge. Perez also acknowledged that he and two other fellow gang members were with Cortez in the shop when he tested his creation by attaching it to his gun and firing a couple of shots into the back wall of the muffler shop.
After the interview with Perez, the priority for the investigators became confirming as much of his story as possible. Lourdes was able to nail down the link between Cortez and Vega’s wife. She was his father’s sister. She also determined that Cortez’s standing within the VSF had risen over the past fourteen years and he was now a shot caller like the man he was suspected of assassinating. Meanwhile, Bosch confirmed that Pacoima Tire & Muffler, located on San Fernando Road in Los Angeles, was previously owned by Helio Cortez, the suspect’s uncle, and that the new owner’s name was not in any gang intel files of the San Fernando and Los Angeles police departments. Other details were substantiated and it all added up to enough probable cause for Bosch to go see a judge for a search warrant.
He had that now and it was time to move the case forward.
Lourdes and Luzon were the first to enter the war room. Soon they were followed by Trevino and then Sergeant Irwin Rosenberg, a dayside watch commander. In accordance with department protocol, all search warrants were served with a uniformed presence, and Rosenberg, a veteran street cop with high people skills, would coordinate that side of things. Everyone took seats around the oval table.
“What, no doughnuts?” Rosenberg asked.
The table was usually where the spread of food donated by citizens ended up. Almost every morning there were doughnuts or breakfast burritos. Rosenberg’s disappointment was shared by all.
“All right, let’s get this going,” Trevino said. “What’ve we got, Harry? You should bring Irwin up to speed.”
“This is the Cristobal Vega case,” Bosch said. “The murder of Uncle Murda fourteen years ago. We have a search warrant allowing us to enter Pacoima Tire & Muffler on San Fernando Road and search for bullets fired into the rear wall of the main garage fourteen years ago. This place is on LAPD turf, so we will coordinate with them. We want to do it as unobtrusively as possible so word doesn’t get back to our suspect or anybody else with the SanFers. We want to keep this quiet until it’s time to hopefully make an arrest.”
“It’s going to be impossible with the SanFers,” Rosenberg said. “They have eyes all over the place.”
Bosch nodded.
“We know that,” he said. “Bella’s been working on a cover story. We just need to buy a couple days. If we find slugs, then I have it greased down at the lab. They’ll ASAP the comparison to the bullet that killed Vega. If there’s a match, we’ll be good to go at our suspect.”
“Who is the suspect?” Rosenberg asked.
Bosch hesitated. He trusted Rosenberg but it was not good case management to discuss suspects—especially when there was an info
rmant involved.
“Never mind,” Rosenberg said quickly. “I don’t need to know. So, do you want to keep this to one car, two uniforms?”
“At the most,” Bosch said.
“Done. We’ve got the new SUV in the yard that just came in. Hasn’t been decaled yet. We could use that, not advertise we’re from SFPD. That might help.”
Bosch nodded. He had seen the SUV in the Public Works yard by the old jail. It had arrived from the manufacturer in black-and-white paint but the SFPD identifiers had not been applied to its doors and rear hatch. It could blend in with the LAPD vehicles and help disguise that the search was part of an SFPD investigation. It would further insulate the investigation from the VSF.
“In case we have to take out the whole wall, we’ll have a Public Works crew with us,” Bosch said. “They’ll be using an unmarked truck.”
“So what’s our cover?” Luzon asked.
“Burglary,” Lourdes said. “If anybody asks, we say somebody broke in during the night and there’s a crime scene. It should do it. The place is no longer owned by the suspect’s uncle. As far as we can tell, the new owner is clean, and we expect his full cooperation with both the search and the cover story.”
“Good,” Trevino said. “When do we go?”
“Tomorrow morning,” Bosch said. “Right when the place opens at seven. With any luck we’ll be in and out before most gangsters in the neighborhood open their eyes for the day.”
“Okay,” Trevino said. “Let’s rally here at six and be in Pacoima when they open the doors.”
The meeting broke up after that and Bosch followed Lourdes back to her workstation.
“Hey, I had a visitor to my cell earlier,” he said. “Did you send her over?”
Lourdes shook her head.
“No, nobody came in here,” she said. “I’ve been doing reports all day.”
Bosch nodded. He wondered about Ballard and how she knew where to find him. His guess was that Lucia Soto had told her.
He knew he would find out soon enough.
Dark Sacred Night Page 5