It was that call that set several things in motion. Chastain now had further confirmation that the Dancers shooter was a cop. He had to go out and wrangle Robison to lock down his information and make sure he was safe. The question was, who got to Robison first, Chastain or Carr?
As a Major Crimes detective, Carr had routine access to RHD computers as well as to the division’s war room. If he was back-reading the Dancers case reports as they were coming in Friday, he could have picked up on Robison and been suspicious of Chastain’s dismissal of him as a witness. In trying to cover the fact that Robison had apparently gotten a good look at the shooter, Chastain had labeled him as DSS—didn’t see shit. The effort may have had a completely opposite effect in that Carr might have thought Chastain was trying to camouflage a solid witness. Carr was the shooter, so he knew that the chances were good that someone in the club had gotten a look at him. He very likely would have been checking witness reports to see if that was so.
Ballard came out of these thoughts when she saw Medore step back from the microscope and ask the other tech to take a look. She knew he was soliciting a second opinion because a lot was on the line with this case.
Ballard’s phone buzzed. It was a blocked number and she took it.
“Ballard, anything yet?”
It was Olivas.
“Your man C.P.’s on the scope. Shouldn’t be long. You want to hold? It looks like he’s just getting a second opinion.”
“Sure, I’ll hold a minute.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“What is it?”
“Carr knew I had been calling Matthew Robison to try to find him. When I asked him how he knew, he said that after Chastain got hit, RHD pulled a warrant for Robison’s phone records in an effort to find him. Was that true, or was Carr trying to cover that he had Robison’s phone because he had killed him?”
“No, we did do that. We first tried to ping his phone but it was turned off. So we pulled call records to see if there was anything there that would help. Why, Ballard? What’s it mean?”
“It means he might still be alive out there somewhere. Chastain may have gotten to him and hidden him before Carr even knew about him.”
“Then we have to find him.”
Ballard thought about that. She had an idea but wasn’t up to sharing it yet—especially with Olivas.
Just then, Medore turned to her from his lab bench. He gave her a thumbs-up.
“Lieutenant, we’ve got the first match. Chastain was killed with Carr’s backup. We’ve got Carr cold.”
“Excellent. We’ll start putting a package together for the D.A. Let me know on the other weapon as soon as you know.”
“You want me on the package?”
“No, my guys will handle it. Have you thought about my offer to come back to the team?”
Ballard hesitated before answering.
“Ballard?” Olivas prompted.
“Yes,” she finally said. “I thought about it. And I like the late show.”
“You’re telling me you’re going to pass?” Olivas said, surprise clearly in his voice.
“I pass,” Ballard said. “I went to you this morning with the Carr print because it was your team’s case and there was nowhere else to go with it. And I knew I could use you to draw Carr to MDC. But that’s it. I’ll never work for you again.”
“You’re making a big mistake.”
“Lieutenant, you tell the world what you did to me and you own it, then I’ll come back to work for you.”
“Ballard, you—”
She disconnected the call.
43
The second ballistics comparison was a match between Carr’s service weapon and the slug taken from Gino Santangelo’s brain. Late in the day, Carr was charged with six counts of murder, with special circumstances added on the Chastain kill.
That night, Ballard returned to the late show. After roll call, she and Jenkins took the plain wrap and drove up Wilcox to the Mark Twain hotel. They parked out front and pushed the button on the front door to gain admittance.
When they had been partners, Ballard and Chastain had worked a murder-for-hire case in which they needed to stash the intended victim for a couple days so that her husband would think she had disappeared, as he had paid an undercover officer to make happen. They had put her in the Mark Twain. The following year, they had another case where they used the hotel to stash two witnesses brought in from New Orleans to testify at a murder trial. They needed to make sure the defense could not find them and attempt to intimidate them and dissuade them from giving their testimony.
It was Chastain who had picked the place both times. The Twain, as he called it, was his go-to stash house.
Ballard told Jenkins her theory about Robison being alive and he agreed to take a ride with her to the Twain.
After she held up her badge to a camera over the hotel door, Ballard and Jenkins were buzzed in. When they got to the desk, Ballard showed her phone to the night man. On the screen she had Robison’s driver’s license photo.
“William Parker, what room’s he in?” she asked.
William Parker was a legendary LAPD police chief in the 1950s and ’60s. Chastain had used the name for one of the witnesses from New Orleans.
The night man didn’t look like he wanted any part of the trouble the police could cause in the middle of the night at a hotel where most customers paid in cash. He turned to a computer, typed a command, and then read the answer out loud.
“Seventeen.”
Ballard and Jenkins moved down the first-floor hallway until they stood on either side of room 17. Ballard knocked.
“Matthew Robison,” Jenkins said. “LAPD, open the door.”
Nothing.
“Metro,” Ballard said. “My name is Detective Ballard. I worked with Detective Chastain, who brought you here. We’re here to tell you it’s over. You’re safe and you can go home to Alicia now.”
They waited. After thirty seconds, Ballard heard the lock flip. The door opened six inches and a young man looked out. Ballard was holding her badge up.
“It’s safe?” he asked.
“Are you Matthew?” Ballard asked.
“Uh, yes.”
“Detective Chastain brought you here?”
“That’s right.”
“It’s safe, Matthew. We’ll take you home now.”
“Where’s Detective Chastain?”
Ballard paused and looked at Robison for a long moment.
“He didn’t make it,” she finally said.
Robison looked down at the floor.
“You called him Friday and said you just saw the shooter on TV,” Ballard said. “Didn’t you?”
Robison nodded.
“Okay, well, we’re going to take you by the station first to look at some photos,” Ballard said. “After that, we’ll take you back to your apartment and Alicia. You’ll be safe now, and she’s worried about you.”
Robison finally looked up at her. Ballard knew he was trying to decide if he could trust her. He must have seen something in her eyes.
“Okay,” he said. “Give me a minute to get my stuff.”
44
Ballard got to the water late that morning because of the drive up the coast to collect her dog. By the time she had pitched her tent on Venice Beach and was walking toward the surf with her board under her arm, the morning layer had completely choked off the sun and visibility was low. She stepped in undaunted. It had been too long since she had been on the water.
She spread her feet to the edge of the board’s rails and bent her knees. She started digging deeply into the water and shocking her muscles with the workout.
Dig… dig… dig… glide… . Dig… dig… dig… glide…
She headed straight out into the fog and soon she was lost in it. The heavy air insulated her from any sound from the land. She was alone.
She thought about Chastain and the moves he had made. He had acted nobly on the case. She thought mayb
e it was his redemption. For his father. For Ballard. It left her bereft and still haunted by their last encounter. She wished in some way they had settled things.
Soon her shoulders began to burn and the muscles of her back cramped. She eased up and stood tall. She used the paddle blade as a rudder and turned the board. She realized there was no horizon in sight, and the tide was in that short moment of stasis before it shifted. It was not going in or out, and she wasn’t sure which direction to point the board.
She kept her momentum with languid paddle strokes, all the while looking and listening for a sign of land. But there was no sound of waves crashing or of people’s voices. The fog was too dense.
She pulled the paddle from the water and twirled it upside down. She rapped the handle end hard on the board’s deck. The fiberglass produced a solid sound that Ballard knew would cut sharply through the fog.
Soon afterward she heard Lola start to bark and she had her direction. She paddled hard again and started to glide across the black water, heading toward the sound of her dog.
As she came through the mist and caught sight of the shore, she saw Lola at the waterline, panicked and frantically moving north and then south, unsure, her bark now a howl of fear at what she could not understand or control. She reminded Ballard of a fourteen-year-old girl who had done the same thing on a beach a long time ago.
Ballard paddled harder. She wanted to get off the board, drop to her knees in the sand, and hug Lola close.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A former police reporter for the Los Angeles Times, Michael Connelly is the international bestselling author of the Harry Bosch thriller series and the highly acclaimed legal thriller series featuring Mickey Haller, as well as several stand-alone bestsellers.
Michael Connelly has been President of the Mystery Writers of America. His books have been translated into 39 languages and have won awards all over the world, including the Edgar and Anthony Awards.
BOSCH, the TV series based on Michael’s novels, is the most watched original series on Amazon Prime Instant Video and its third series will go to air in 2017. It screens on SBS TV in Australia and on SKY TV in New Zealand.
Michael Connelly lives in Tampa, Florida, with his family. To find out more, visit Michael’s official website www.michaelconnelly.com.au or follow him on Facebook www.facebook.com/MichaelConnellyBooks or on Twitter @Connellybooks.
* * *
COMING IN NOVEMBER 2017
TWO KINDS OF TRUTH
A BOSCH NOVEL
BY
MICHAEL CONNELLY
FOR AN EXCERPT, TURN THE PAGE.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author wishes to thank many people for their help with the creation of Renée Ballard and this novel. First, a great debt of thanks goes to LAPD detective Mitzi Roberts, who served in many ways as the inspiration for Renée. The author hopes that Renée has done Detective Roberts proud.
Also of immeasurable help were Detective Tim Marcia and his former colleagues Rick Jackson and David Lambkin.
Many thanks to Linda Connelly, Jane Davis, Terrill Lee Lankford, John Houghton, Dennis Wojciechowski, and Henrik Bastin for early and insightful reads of the work in progress.
Asya Muchnick deserves much credit and gratitude for editing an unwieldy story and coordinating responses from a cast of different editors, including Bill Massey, Harriet Bourton, and Emad Akhtar. Lastly, the author’s deep appreciation goes to Pamela Marshall for another great job of copy-editing.
Many thanks to all who helped.
1
Bosch was in cell 3 of the old San Fernando jail, looking through files from one of the Esme Tavares boxes, when a heads-up text came in from Bella Lourdes over in the detective bureau.
LAPD and DA heading your way. Trevino told them where you are.
Bosch was sitting at the makeshift desk, a wooden door he had borrowed from the Public Works yard and placed across two stacks of file boxes. After sending Lourdes a thank-you text, he opened the memo app on his phone and turned on the recorder. He put the phone screen-down on the desk and partially covered it with a file from the Tavares box. It was a just-in-case move. He had no idea why people from the District Attorney’s Office and his old police department were coming to see him. They had not called ahead, and he knew that could be a tactical move on their part. Bosch’s relationship with the LAPD since his forced retirement two years earlier had been strained at best and his attorney had urged him to protect himself by documenting all interactions with the department.
While he waited for them, he went back to the file at hand. He was looking through statements taken in the weeks after Tavares had disappeared. He had read them before but he believed that the case files often contained the secret to cracking a cold case. It was all there if you could find it. A logic discrepancy, a hidden clue, a contradicting statement, an investigator’s handwritten note in the margin of a report—all of these things had helped Bosch clear cases in a career four decades long and counting.
There were three file boxes on the Tavares case. Officially it was a missing-persons case but it had gathered three feet of stacked files over fifteen years because it was classified as such only because a body had never been found.
When Bosch came to the San Fernando Police Department two years before to volunteer his skills looking at cold case files, he had asked Chief Anthony Valdez where to start. The chief, who had been with the department twenty-five years, told him to start with Esmerelda Tavares. It was the case that haunted Valdez as an investigator, but as police chief he could not give adequate time to it.
In two years working in San Fernando part-time, Bosch had reopened several cases and closed nearly a dozen—multiple rapes and murders among them. But he came back to Esme Tavares whenever he had an hour here and there to look through the file boxes. She was beginning to haunt him too. A young mother who vanished, leaving a sleeping baby in a crib. It might be classified as a missing-persons case but Bosch didn’t have to read through even the first box to know what the chief and every investigator before him knew. Esme Tavares was more than missing. She was dead.
Bosch heard the metal door to the jail wing open and then footsteps on the concrete floor that ran in front of the three group cells. He looked up through the iron bars and was surprised by who he saw.
“Hello, Harry.”
It was his former partner, Lucia Soto, along with two men in suits whom Bosch didn’t recognize. The fact that Soto had not let him know they were coming put Bosch on alert. It was a forty-minute drive from both the LAPD’s headquarters and the D.A.’s office downtown to San Fernando. That left plenty of time to type out a text or call him up and say, “Harry, we are heading your way.” But that hadn’t happened, so he knew that the two men he didn’t know had put the clamps on Soto.
“Lucia, long time,” Bosch said. “How are you, partner?”
He stood up, deftly grabbing his phone from beneath the files on the desk and transferring it to his shirt pocket, placing the screen against his chest. He walked to the bars and stuck his hand through. He squeezed Soto’s hand rather than shaking it. Her grip was tight and he took that as a message: be careful here.
It was easy for Bosch to figure out who was who between the two men. Both were in their early forties and dressed in suits that most likely came off the rack at Men’s Wearhouse. But the man on the left’s pinstripes were showing wear from the inside out. Bosch knew that meant he was wearing a shoulder rig beneath the jacket and the hard edge of his weapon’s slide was wearing through the fabric. Bosch guessed that the silk lining had already been chewed up. In six months the suit would be toast.
“Bob Tapscott,” he said. “Lucky Lucy’s partner now.”
Bosch wondered if he was related to Horace Tapscott, the late South L.A. musician who had been vital in preserving the community’s jazz identity.
“And I’m Alex Kennedy, deputy district attorney,” said the second man. “We’d like to talk to you if you have a few minutes.
”
“Uh, sure,” Bosch said. “Step into my office.”
He gestured toward the confines of the former cell now fitted with steel shelves containing case files. There was a long communal bench left over from the cell’s previous existence as a drunk tank. Bosch had files from different cases lined up to review on the bench. He started stacking them to make room for his visitors to sit.
“Actually, we talked to Captain Trevino, and he says we can use the war room over in the detective bureau,” Tapscott said. “It will be more comfortable. Do you mind?”
“I don’t mind if the captain doesn’t mind,” Bosch said. “What’s this about anyway?”
“Preston Borders,” Soto said.
Bosch was walking toward the open door of the cell. The name put a slight pause in his step.
“Let’s wait until we’re in the war room,” Kennedy said quickly. “Then we can talk.”
Soto gave Bosch a look that seemed to impart the message that she was under the D.A.’s thumb on this case. He stepped out of the cell, closed the metal door, and locked it with a long jail guard’s key that he put in his pocket.
They left the old jail and walked through the Public Works equipment yard out to First Street. While waiting for traffic to pass, Soto spoke again, but not about the case that had brought them up to San Fernando.
“Is that really your office, Harry?” she asked. “I mean, really, a jail cell?”
“Yep,” Bosch said. “That was the drunk tank and sometimes I think I can still smell the puke when I open it up in the morning. But it’s where they keep the cold case files, so it’s where I do my work. They store the old evidence boxes in the other two cells. Easy access all around. And usually nobody to bother me.”
The Late Show Page 33