“No more,” she said. “Leave that out here.”
Thirty minutes later they were lying entwined and spent on the floor of Aaron’s bedroom.
“How’d we get off the bed?” Ballard asked.
“Not sure,” Aaron said.
He reached over to the tequila bottle on the wood floor but Ballard used her foot to push it out of reach. She wanted him to hear what she said next.
“Hey!” Aaron said, feigning upset.
“Did I ever tell you that my father drowned?” Ballard asked. “When I was a kid.”
“No, that’s awful.”
He moved in closer to her to console her. She was turned and looking at the wall.
“Did it happen here?” Aaron asked.
“No, Hawaii,” Ballard said. “That’s where we lived. He was surfing. They never found him.”
“I’m sorry, Renée. I—”
“It was a long time ago. I always just wished they had found him, you know? It was so strange that he just got on his board and went out there. And then he never came back.”
They were silent for a long moment.
“Anyway, I was thinking about that with that guy yesterday,” Ballard said. “At least you brought him in.”
Hayes nodded.
“That must’ve been awful for you back then,” he said. “You should have told me this before.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It’s just sort of…you know, your father drowns at the beach and now you mostly sleep at the beach. You and me, with me being a lifeguard. What’s that say?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think about it.”
“Did your mother remarry?”
“No, she wasn’t around. I don’t think she knew for a long time.”
“Oh, man. This story just gets worse.”
He had his arm around her, just below her breasts. He pulled her against his chest and kissed the back of her neck.
“I don’t think I’d be here doing what I do if things hadn’t happened the way they did,” Ballard said. “There’s that.”
She reached her leg out, hooked the tequila bottle, and slid it in so he could reach it.
But he didn’t. He kept her in his embrace. She liked that.
Bosch
23
Bosch waited for Lourdes in the Starbucks a block from the station. He sat at a tall bar table that allowed him to keep his left leg straight. He had just come from Dr. Zhang’s and the knee was feeling good for the first time in two weeks. He knew that bending the joint might cut that relief short. That was inevitable with walking, but for now he kept it straight.
He had gotten Lourdes a latte and himself a straight black. They had agreed to meet away from the station after she did some preliminary intelligence gathering while he was getting needles stuck in his leg.
Lourdes arrived before the latte got cold.
“How’s the knee?” she asked.
“Feeling pretty good at the moment,” Bosch said. “But it won’t last. It never does.”
“Have you ever gotten a cortisone shot?”
“No, but I’m ready to try anything but a knee replacement.”
“Sorry, Harry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about. What did you find out?”
The night before, LAPD SWAT had moved in on the house Bosch and Lourdes had located in Sylmar and arrested four men, all SanFers gang members, and including one man who was found in a bed, suffering from a gunshot wound to the stomach. He was thirty-eight-year-old Carlos Mejia and he was the suspected shooter of Martin Perez. The other three were low-level gangsters most likely assigned to watch over Mejia and bring the doctor to him. All four were arrested on various gun and drug charges as well as probation violations.
Mejia was not charged yet with the Perez killing because the evidence was only circumstantial at the moment: he had been shot, and it was believed that Perez’s killer had been shot. The upward trajectory of the wound trail through Mejia’s lower intestine fit with the ricochet-in-the-shower theory as well. But it wasn’t enough to take to the District Attorney’s Office. The bullet had been removed from Mejia’s gut and disposed of—there would be no ballistics match to the bullet taken from Perez’s brain. However, the forensic team that processed the Perez crime scene had found that the blood spattered in the shower stall had come from two individuals—Perez and presumably his shooter after he caught the bouncing bullet. Confidence was high that a DNA comparison between Mejia’s blood and that found in the shower would lead to a match and Mejia would be charged with murder. He was now in the hospital ward of the county jail while a rush was put on the DNA comparison.
The intel gathering that Lourdes had undertaken that morning was related to Mejia and any connections he might have with those who knew about the renewed investigation of the Uncle Murda case and that Martin Perez had flipped.
“I really hate this,” Lourdes said. “What if we’re wrong?”
“We make sure we aren’t,” Bosch said. “What did you find out?”
She opened a small notebook she always carried with her.
“Okay,” she said, reading her notes. “I talked to my cousin and a couple other guys in gang intel. They say Mejia is a SanFer OG known as El Brujo.”
“What’s that, ‘sorcerer’?”
“More like ‘witch doctor,’ but it doesn’t matter. He got the moniker because of his ability to find and get to people who supposedly can’t be gotten to.”
“Case in point, Perez. But somebody told him.”
“I’m getting to that. The intel guys said that Mejia pretty much had his own set in the gang and would have been on equal footing with Tranquillo Cortez. So you can see how this is all cinching up. El Brujo hears somehow that Perez flipped and decides to take care of it for Cortez. End result, Cortez owes Mejia.”
“Got it. The question is, how did he hear that Perez was flipping?”
Lourdes nodded and a painful frown creased her face again.
“What is it?” Bosch asked.
“Well,” she said. “When the intel guys were talking to me, one of them says, ‘Maybe you should talk to your buddy Oscar about El Brujo. He grew up with him.’ I said, ‘Oscar Luzon?’ to confirm, and they said, ‘Yeah, Luzon.’ They said Oscar and Mejia went all the way back to Gridley.”
Bosch knew that Gridley was an elementary school on 8th Street.
“So, was this connection in the gang book?” Bosch asked.
Because of the unavoidable connections between some homegrown SFPD officers and local gangs, the department had a registry known as the “gang book” in which officers named acquaintances in the gangs. It allowed the officers to avoid suspicion should the connections become known through the course of investigations, wiretaps, and street gossip. The book was also a resource for gang intel officers when they wanted to target a particular gang member. If there was a connection in the book, it could be exploited, by using the officer to initiate communication with the gang member or even cross paths with him in a seemingly coincidental way.
“No, they said Luzon never put it in the book,” Lourdes said. “They only knew because they have class photos from all the schools in the city going back to the seventies. They have photos of Luzon and Mejia in the same classes at Gridley and then Lakeview. But a few years ago, when they asked Oscar why he never put it in the book, he said it was because he didn’t really know Mejia.”
“Did they believe him?” Bosch asked.
“Well, they accepted it. The question is, do we believe it?”
“The same class through elementary and high school, and Luzon says they didn’t know each other? No, I don’t believe it.”
Lourdes nodded. She didn’t believe it either.
“So, how do we do this?” she asked.
“We need to talk to him,” Bosch said.
“I know that, but how?”
“Does he still take his gun off when he works at his desk?”
“I think so.”
They needed to separate Luzon from his weapon before they confronted him. They didn’t want to risk his harming them or himself.
Luzon was a muffin top. He cinched his belt tight around a growing waistline, creating an overflow roll of bulk that circled his body. This caused him to remove his sidearm when he worked in his pod so that the arm of his desk chair didn’t drive the hard-edged weapon into his side. He usually placed the gun in the top drawer of his desk.
“Okay, we draw him out without his gun,” Bosch said. “Then we brace him.”
“But he always takes his gun when he leaves the office,” Lourdes said. “It’d be a violation if he didn’t.”
“We get him over to the old jail, to come see me.”
“That could work. We just need the reason.”
They were both silent as they thought about a way to draw Luzon across the street from the station without his gun.
Soon they concocted a two-part plan. But it would involve the police chief’s cooperation. This was not a deterrent, because they knew they could not carry out any confrontation with Luzon without alerting command staff. They finished their coffees and walked back to the station, going directly to the chief of police’s office and asking for an audience.
Chief Valdez was not happy with what Bosch and Lourdes told him but agreed that an investigation had to be carried out. The chief was particularly pained because seventeen years before, when Luzon came into the department, Valdez had been his training officer. They had been close at one time.
“He knew several SanFers,” Valdez said. “He grew up with them. And it worked in our favor. We would stop and talk to these guys and we always picked up good intel we shot back to the gang team.”
“Look, Chief, we’re not accusing him of being a double agent,” Bosch said. “He could have been used or tricked and he might not even be the source. That’s what we have to talk about with him. But the bottom line is, he never put Mejia in the book—and Mejia took out our witness.”
“I get it, I get it,” Valdez said. “It has to be done. What’s your plan?”
It was simple. The chief would have his secretary call Luzon to his office to pick up some paperwork relating to a training day scheduled for the next month. It was likely that Luzon would not clip on his firearm just for a short jaunt down the hall from the detective bureau. While he was picking up the paperwork from the secretary, the chief would step out of his office to say hello. He would then ask Luzon to take a printed memo over to Bosch in the old jail. The direct route to the jail would not be through the detective bureau. The plan pivoted on the idea that Luzon would proceed directly to Bosch—without going out of his way back to his desk to pick up his weapon.
They also allowed for a quick abort if the chief saw that Luzon was armed or if Luzon cut back to the detective bureau to retrieve his gun before leaving the station and crossing the street.
“Now, does he carry a backup?” Valdez asked.
“If he does, it’s not registered,” Bosch said.
“We checked the registry,” Lourdes said.
Department regulations allowed an officer to carry a boot gun or some other backup weapon as long as it was on an approved list of firearms and the officer notified command staff and entered the details in the weapons registry.
“Did you ever know him to carry a throw-down?” Bosch asked.
“No, never,” Valdez said.
“So do we do this?” Bella asked.
“We do it,” Valdez said. “But Bella, I want you over there with Harry. As backup.”
“Got it,” she said.
An hour later they went forward with the plan. Lourdes confirmed that Luzon was at his desk and was not wearing his weapon before she sent Valdez the go-ahead text. The chief then told his secretary to summon Luzon, and when the detective left the bureau, Lourdes confirmed that he had left his weapon behind. She then headed out the side door and crossed the street to the old jail.
Bosch was sitting at his makeshift desk in the old drunk tank when Luzon walked in carrying a memo from the chief with the schedule for the upcoming training days. He put it down on the old door that Bosch used as a desktop.
“That’s from the chief,” he said. “Asked me to drop it by.”
“Thanks,” Bosch said.
Luzon turned to go back.
“Did you hear about Sylmar last night?” Bosch asked.
Luzon reversed himself and was facing Bosch again.
“Sylmar?” he asked. “What about it?”
“They got the guy who hit our witness,” Bosch said.
Luzon just looked at him, revealing nothing.
“He took a shot in the gut himself,” Bosch said. “So he’s not doing too good. They’re hoping to stabilize him and have him ready to talk in a day or two.”
“Good,” Luzon said. “I’m going back to the bureau.”
He once more moved toward the cell’s exit.
“That doesn’t worry you, Oscar?” Bosch asked.
Luzon once again turned back and looked at Bosch.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Luzon asked.
“It was your buddy the witch doctor, Carlos Mejia,” Bosch said. “And I lied. He’s already talking and he gave you up. Said you told him about Martin Perez.”
“That’s bullshit.”
Lourdes stepped out of the next cell down and into the hallway that ran in front of the old cells. She took a position behind Luzon. He felt her presence and turned to see her.
“What the fuck is this?” he said.
Bosch stood up.
“You know what it is?” he said. “This is your chance to get out in front of this. Tell us what happened, what you did, and maybe there’s a way out for you.”
“I didn’t do anything. I told you, this is bullshit.”
“You’re playing it wrong, man. You’re giving him the leverage. They’ll lock in his story and come for you.”
Luzon seemed to freeze. His eyes went blank as he tried to figure out his next move. Bosch said nothing. Lourdes said nothing. They waited.
“All right, look,” he finally said. “I made a mistake. You two weren’t saying shit about what the search warrant at the garage was about. I thought maybe I could come up with something that would help. All I did was ask him what that place had to do with the SanFers. That’s it. He figured everything out from there.”
“That story is what’s bullshit,” Bosch said. “How’d he find Perez in Alhambra?”
“I don’t know, but it wasn’t me. You’re the one who got Perez killed. Don’t look at me now.”
“No, man, it was you. You told Mejia. And the thing is, he’s going to give you up in a heartbeat as soon as they offer him a deal.”
Luzon stared at Bosch as he realized that Mejia wasn’t talking—yet—and that he had fallen for the oldest cop bluff in the book. He turned to Lourdes as if for help. Bosch was an outsider in the department, but Lourdes was not. He looked to her but the cold set of her eyes showed he would get no sympathy from her.
“I want a lawyer,” he said.
“You can call one as soon as you’re booked,” Bosch said.
He came around the desk as Lourdes pulled her handcuffs off her belt. He put his hand on Luzon’s shoulder and directed him toward the hallway where Lourdes was waiting. He walked him through.
“Hands behind your back,” he said. “You know the drill.”
Bosch gripped Luzon by the elbow and turned him to face away from Lourdes. At that moment, Luzon brought his hands up and shoved Bosch into the cell’s bars. He then rushed into the cell and with both hands slid the door shut with a heavy metal clang. He quickly pulled the chain and padlock through the bars into the cell and locked the door.
“Oscar, what are you doing?” Lourdes said. “There’s nowhere to go.”
Bosch had lost his balance against the bars. He righted himself and reached into his pocket for his key ring. It had the padlock key on it.
But the key ring wasn’t there and he looked through the bars and could see it on his desk. He looked at Luzon, who was pacing in the cell, a man looking for options where there weren’t any.
“Oscar, come on, settle down,” Lourdes said. “Come out of there.”
“The key’s on the desk, Oscar,” Bosch said. “Unlock the door.”
Luzon acted like he didn’t hear them. He paced back and forth a few times and then abruptly sat down on the end of the bench that ran almost the length of the cell. He bent over, put his elbows on his knees and dropped his face into his hands.
Bosch leaned over to Lourdes and cupped his hands around her ear.
“Go out into the yard and get a bolt cutter,” he whispered.
Lourdes immediately headed down the corridor in front of the cells to the door that led to the Public Works yard. That left Bosch looking through the bars at Luzon.
“Oscar, come on,” he said. “Open the door. We can work this out.”
Luzon was silent, face in his hands.
“Oscar?” Bosch said. “Talk to me. You want me to get the chief in here? I know you two go way back. You want to talk to him?”
Nothing, and then without a word Luzon dropped his hands and stood. He reached to his neck and started to pull off his tie. He then climbed up onto the bench and reached up to the cell’s ceiling, where there was a metal grate over an air vent. He pushed the skinny end of his tie into the grate and worked it back out of the next opening.
“Oscar, come on, don’t do this,” Bosch said. “Oscar!”
Luzon knotted the two ends of the tie together and then twisted the loop into a figure eight. He stood on his toes to get his head through the makeshift noose and then without hesitation stepped off the end of the bench.
24
Bosch and Lourdes waited in the hallway. Only the chief of police and family members were allowed back into the critical care unit. For the most part they sat quietly and drank coffee from paper cups out of a machine. After two hours Chief Valdez emerged with the news.
“They say he only went a couple minutes without oxygen to the brain, so he should be all right,” he said. “It’s a waiting game on that. The bigger concern is the skull fracture from when he hit the ground when the grate gave way.”
Dark Sacred Night Page 16