Dark Sacred Night

by Michael Connelly

  Most of the day had been spent on surveillance of the busy medical office where Henriquez practiced. Both Bosch and Lourdes dodged calls from sheriff’s detectives Lannark and Boyce. And as they watched the medical building and the Mercedes-Benz registered to Henriquez parked out front, they tried to figure out where the leak in the investigation had been.

  One of two things had happened. Someone had tipped the SanFers to the fact that Martin Perez was cooperating with the police. Or Perez had made some slip with an acquaintance or family member and had given himself away.

  Bosch and Lourdes believed it was most likely the former and they spent their time running down the possibilities, dismissing some and holding on to others.

  Bosch had mentioned his suspicions about Tom Yaro, the LAPD detective assigned as interdepartmental liaison to the execution of the search warrant, but Lourdes pointed out that Yaro didn’t have enough information about the case to set up the hit on Perez. Additionally, it had been Yaro who had alerted Lourdes to Cortez watching the morning’s search from the parking lot of the laundry. But that could have been a sincere warning or part of a more devious plan to solidify Yaro as someone on the pro-Bosch team.

  “Yaro was briefed for the search warrant,” Lourdes said. “But we never discussed your source in the briefing, and Perez was a John Doe on the warrant. Yaro had no name, no location—it’s a long shot, if you ask me.”

  This turned the conversation uncomfortably toward the SFPD. Many of the officers in the department were from San Fernando, and it would have been virtually impossible to grow up in the two-square-mile town without knowing somebody who was in the SanFers. Still, that connection usually worked in a positive way. Many officers added to the gang intel files after street conversations with past acquaintances. Lourdes’s cousin J-Rod was an example of this and she could not remember an incident in her history with the department when information had gone the other way.

  That seemed to turn the conversation even more uncomfortably toward Bosch. What move had he made that might have revealed Perez’s betrayal to the SanFers?

  Bosch was at a loss. He acknowledged that he often left his laptop in the cell he used as an office. But the cell was always locked and the computer was password protected. He knew that both could be compromised but it still seemed like a remote possibility that a member of the SanFer gang would undertake such an intrusion.

  “It’s gotta be something else,” he said. “Maybe we look at Perez again. Who knows? Maybe he called somebody, bragged about taking down Cortez. Nobody said he was very smart.”

  “Maybe,” Lourdes said, but her tone implied that she was unconvinced.

  Defeated in their efforts to figure it out or at least settle on a focus, they let silence fill the car until they spotted a man approaching Henriquez’s Mercedes-Benz.

  “Is that him?” Bosch asked.

  Lourdes held up her phone where she had downloaded to her screen a photo of Henriquez from the DMV.

  “It’s him,” she said. “Here we go.”

  They followed the doctor north and into the Huntington Estates, where he pulled into a garage next to a two-story home with columns out front. The garage was attached to the house, and the detectives lost sight of the doctor once the door automatically came down.

  “Think that’s it?” Lourdes said. “He’s in for the night?”

  “If he worked on the shooter this morning, then I think he’s gotta check on the patient at some point,” Bosch said.

  “Unless he died.”

  “There’s that.”

  “Or unless he’s in that house.”

  “There’s that, too.”

  “So we stay?”

  “I’m staying. If you’ve got stuff to do, you can walk down the street and call an Uber. I’ll let you know if he makes a move.”

  “No, I’m not leaving you here alone.”

  “Not a big deal. This is a long shot anyway.”

  “Not what partners do.”

  Bosch nodded.

  “Okay,” he said. “But one of us might have to Uber over to Route 66 to pick up dinner. Haven’t eaten all day.”

  “Not a problem,” Lourdes said. “If you like that stuff.”

  Bosch didn’t take the bait. They’d had good-natured disputes about surveillance food in the past.

  They were parked a half block from the doctor’s house in the driveway of a home that was empty while under full renovation. Bosch had positioned his old Jeep Cherokee in front of a flatbed used for towing construction materials, and the old beater fit in. The windows were smoked, and as long as they didn’t light themselves with phone screens, they would go unnoticed by the doctor or others in the neighborhood.

  “Do you remember the music group Seals and Crofts?” Lourdes asked.

  “Yeah,” Bosch said. “Seventies, right? They were big.”

  “Before my time but I heard this is where they lived. The Estates.”

  “Hmm.”

  The small talk continued for almost two hours, until the discussion of food came up again in earnest. Lourdes wasn’t interested in Bosch’s hamburger-and-hot-dog joint and Bosch had long ago OD’d on all the Mexican restaurants in town. They were about to flip for it, when a car came down the street and killed its lights as it pulled into the driveway of the Henriquez house. It was full dark now but Bosch had identified the make of the car as it drove by the construction site. It was a white Chrysler 300.

  “This is it,” Bosch said.

  No one got out of the car. It sat and idled, exhaust puffing from its twin pipes.

  None of the house’s exterior lights came on when a figure emerged from the side and got into the Chrysler.

  “Is that the doctor?” Lourdes asked.

  “Can’t tell, but I’m betting it is,” Bosch said.

  The car took off from the Henriquez house and passed in front of Bosch’s Jeep without slowing down. Bosch waited until it had turned a corner and then he pulled out.

  The trick was following the Chrysler out of the residential neighborhood without being made. Once the surveillance was in the commercial district, it was easier to use other cars on the road as camouflage. Bosch and Lourdes followed it to San Fernando Road and then north into the Sylmar region of Los Angeles. At Roxford the Chrysler turned right and entered a neighborhood of middle-class ranch homes on quarter-acre properties.

  Just past Herrick Street the Chrysler turned right into a driveway and parked. Bosch drove on by. Lourdes reported what she saw.

  “Several men,” she said. “They met the car and hurried him inside.”

  “Must’ve taken a turn for the worse,” Bosch said.

  “So, what do we do?”

  “For now we wait.”

  “For what? This is L.A. We should call in LAPD SWAT and scoop them all up.”

  “We will. But let’s wait till they get the doctor out of there. Now that we can prove he does work for the SanFers, I think your cousin might want to flip him and keep him on the hook the rest of his days.”

  Lourdes nodded. It was a good plan. Henriquez would more than likely be willing to trade information with the gang intel unit in exchange for avoiding the humiliation of being exposed as a gang doctor.

  “Except we still don’t know who snitched off Perez,” Lourdes said. “That could make things very dangerous for the doctor if he turns informant too.”

  Bosch nodded.

  “That we need to keep working on,” he said. “But once we know who the shooter is, that might become clearer.”

  19

  When Bosch entered his house, he was met with Elizabeth’s suitcase sitting on the floor just inside the front door. It was actually his suitcase but he had brought it to her on the last day of rehab so she could pack her meager belongings. There had still been room in it for items they would shop for.

  Through the back sliders he saw her on the deck on one of the lounges. He watched her for a moment, thinking she had not heard him come in. She was not reading
or listening to music. She was not looking at her phone. She was simply staring into the pass, the never-ending movement of vehicles down on the freeway, like blood through the veins of the city. It was an aspect of the view that was always changing but always the same. In recent years, the only addition was the fireworks shot on special occasions from the Harry Potter ride at Universal Studios.

  He crossed the living room, slid open one of the doors, and stepped out.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hello,” she said.

  She smiled. He crossed the deck to the railing and leaned his back to it so he could look at her.

  “You’re limping,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Guess I gotta go see Dr. Zhang.”

  The previous year Bosch had met Elizabeth while he briefly worked undercover on a case. He’d adopted a cane and limp as part of a pose as an opioid addict scamming shady pharmacies for prescriptions. The irony was that during a struggle with a murder suspect on a plane, he had strained a ligament in his already arthritic knee, and now he made monthly visits to Dr. Zhang, an acupuncturist he had met many years earlier on a case.

  “I’ll call her in the morning,” he said.

  He waited for her to say something but she didn’t.

  “I saw the suitcase,” he said.

  “Yes, I packed,” she said. “I’m going to leave. But I didn’t want to leave without telling you face-to-face. That just seemed wrong after all you’ve done.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Elizabeth…”

  “I’ll find a place.”

  “You have one right here.”

  “Your daughter won’t visit because I’m here. That’s not fair to either of you.”

  “She’ll change. Besides, I go down to see her.”

  “And she barely says a word to you. You told me. She doesn’t even text you.”

  “We texted last night.”

  “You text good night and then she says the same back. That isn’t a conversation. That isn’t what you had before I came.”

  Bosch knew he could not win this angle of the argument, because she was right.

  “We’re getting close on the case,” he tried. “This detective I told you about…I think she’s all in. It’s active. Just give us some time. We checked out a possible suspect last night.”

  “What does it matter?” Elizabeth asked. “It doesn’t change anything. Daisy’s been dead nine years.”

  “All I can tell you is that it matters,” Bosch said. “It counts. You’ll see when we get the guy.”

  He waited but she didn’t respond.

  “I’m sorry I’m so late,” he said. “Did you eat something?”

  “Yes, I made something,” she said. “I put a plate in the refrigerator for you.”

  “I think I’m just going to go to sleep. I’m tired, my knee hurts. I’m going to get up early and go down to Hollywood Division to check in with Ballard before she goes home.”

  “Okay.”

  “Will you at least stay tonight? It’s too late to go out there without a plan. We can talk about it tomorrow.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “I’ll put the suitcase back in your room,” he said.

  Bosch turned momentarily to the view just as a single rocket trailing green light arced into the sky over Universal. It exploded with a flat bang, nothing like the real mortars he had heard in his life.

  He headed toward the open slider.

  “Daisy sent me a postcard from Universal once,” Elizabeth said. “It was before they had Harry Potter. They still had the Jaws ride. The card showed the shark, I remember that. It was how I knew she was in L.A.”

  Bosch nodded.

  “When I was sitting out here, I remembered a joke she told me when she was little. She heard it at school. You want to hear it, Harry?”

  “Sure.”

  “What happens when you eat too much alphabet soup?”

  “What?”

  “You have a vowel movement.”

  She smiled at the punch line. Bosch smiled too, though he was sure his own daughter had told him the joke once, and it made Elizabeth’s grief hit him deeper.

  This had been the way he had learned more about Daisy. Elizabeth grieved and reminisced and then shared the stories, all from before the girl had run away. She told him about how the stuffed turtle she had won at Skee-Ball at a fair became her most prized possession until the seams wore out. She told him about Daisy splashing in rubber boots through the flooded pecan orchards near their home.

  There were the sad stories, too. She told Bosch about the best friend who moved away, leaving her alone. She told him about Daisy growing up without a father. About the schoolyard bullying and the drugs. Good and bad, it all brought Bosch closer to both mother and daughter, made Daisy mean more to him than just her death and stoked the fire he warmed himself by as he pursued the case.

  Bosch held at the door for a moment and then just nodded.

  “Good night, Elizabeth. See you tomorrow.”

  “Good night, Harry.”

  He went in, noting that she did not say she would see him in the morning. He stopped in the kitchen but only to put ice into a Ziploc bag for his knee. He put her suitcase in the room she used, then went to his own room and closed the door. He stripped off his clothes and took a long shower until the hot water was gone. Afterward, he put on a pair of blue-plaid boxer shorts and a white T-shirt and used an ACE bandage from the medicine cabinet to wrap his knee and hold the ice bag to it.

  He plugged his phone into its charger and set the alarm for four a.m. so he could get down the hill to Hollywood Station and work a few hours with Ballard on the shake cards before the end of her shift. He then turned out the light and gingerly climbed onto the bed, positioning himself on his back with one pillow under his head and the other propped under his knee as the slight bend this created in the joint helped ease the low hum of pain.

  Still, the ice was uncomfortable and it kept him awake until he thought the knee pain was numbed to the point he could fall asleep. He unraveled the ACE bandage and put the ice bag into an empty champagne bucket he kept next to the bed in case the bag leaked.

  Bosch was asleep soon and snoring lightly when the sound of his bedroom door opening woke him. He tensed for a moment but then saw the female silhouette in the doorway, outlined by oblique light from down the hall. It was Elizabeth. She was naked. She moved to the bed and climbed under the sheet that covered Bosch, straddling her legs over his hips. She leaned down and kissed him hard on the mouth before he could say anything, before he could remind her that he was old and might not be able to perform, let alone discuss the propriety of having a relationship with the mother of the girl whose death he was investigating.

  Elizabeth kept her mouth on his and gently began to rock her hips. Bosch felt her warmth against him and reacted. Soon she was reaching to push down his shorts. Bosch’s knee was no longer numb, but if there was pain, he wasn’t feeling it. Elizabeth made all the moves and guided him inside her. Her hips worked in a steady rhythm and she put her hands on his shoulders and arched her back. The sheet fell aside. Bosch looked up at her in the dim light. Her head was thrown back like she was looking up at the ceiling. She was silent. Her breasts swayed above him. He put his hands on her hips to help lend his rhythm to hers.

  Neither spoke, neither made a sound except for the deep exhalation of breath. First he felt her hips shudder, and soon after he desperately reached up and pulled her down into an embrace as his own body created that one moment that takes all other moments away—all fear, all sadness—and leaves just joy. Just hope. Sometimes love.

  Neither moved, as though each one thought the fragile reverie might break with even the blink of an eye. Then she pushed her face further into the crook of his neck and kissed his shoulder. They’d had boundary lines. Bosch had told her that this was not his purpose in inviting her to stay with him, and she had said it would
never come to that, because she had lost that part of herself—the capacity to connect.

  But now here they were. Bosch wondered if this was her goodbye. If she would be gone tomorrow.

  He put his hand on her back and moved his thumb and forefinger like an inchworm down her spine. He thought he heard a smothered giggle. If it was, he had never heard it before.

  “I don’t want you to go,” he whispered. “Even if this never happens again. Even if it was a mistake. I don’t want you to go. Not yet.”

  She raised herself up and looked at him in the darkness. He could see a slight glint in her dark eyes. He could feel her breasts against his chest. She kissed him. It was not a long, impassioned kiss like the one she had started with. It was a quick kiss on the lips and then she climbed off.

  “Is that a champagne bucket?” she asked. “You knew I was coming in?”

  “No,” Bosch said quickly. “I mean, it is a champagne bucket but I use it for the ice pack for my knee.”

  “Oh.”

  “Why don’t you stay in here tonight?”

  “No, I like my bed. Good night, Harry.”

  She moved toward the door.

  “Good night,” Bosch whispered.

  She closed the door behind her. Bosch stared at it in the darkness for a long time.

  Ballard

  20

  It was one a.m. and well into her official shift before Ballard completed the paperwork that went along with the arrest and booking of Theodore Bechtel on suspicion of breaking and entering and grand theft. After he was secured in a solo cell at the station, she walked through the parking lot to the storage rooms and retrieved a fresh box of shake cards. Once back in the detective bureau she set up in a back corner and soon was sifting through the reports on the human tumbleweeds, as Tim Farmer had called them, that drifted across the streets of Hollywood on a nightly basis.

  After an hour she had put six cards aside for further consideration and follow-up. Several hundred did not make the cut. Her forward progress was slowed when she came across another card written by Farmer. His words and observations held her once again.