It was a sneaky move, and while the bar went easy on Michaelson, it told Bosch a lot about his character and ethics. Michaelson was a lead partner in the firm. What did that say about the other partners and associates who worked for him? What did that say about Manley, who was just one door farther down the hallway at the firm?
“Hey, Daddo.”
Bosch looked up as his daughter slipped into the chair across the table from him. His eyes lit up. He felt the hurt of having learned about John Jack Thompson and everything else slip away.
40
Maddie slipped her backpack under the table in front of her.
“Is this okay?” Bosch asked. “I thought you were going to text me.”
“Yeah, but I love this place,” Maddie said. “Usually, you can’t get a table.”
“I must’ve hit it at the right time.”
“What are you working on?”
Bosch closed his laptop.
“I was looking up a lawyer on the California Bar,” he said. “Wanted to know if anybody had dinged him with a complaint.”
“Uncle Mickey?” Maddie asked.
“No, no, not him. Another guy.”
“Are you working on a case?”
“Yeah. Actually two of them. One with Renée Ballard—who says hello, by the way—and one sort of on my own.”
“Daddo, you’re supposed to be retired.”
“I know but I want to keep moving.”
“How’s your knee?”
“It’s pretty good. Today I went out without the cane. All day.”
“Is that okay with the doctor?”
“He didn’t want me to use it at all. He’s a hard-liner. So how’s school?”
“Boring. But did you hear the big news? They caught that guy Saturday night.”
“You mean the creeper?”
“Yeah, he broke into the wrong house. It’s on the Orange County Register website. Same thing—a house of girls. He snuck in, only he didn’t know one of the girls had her boyfriend staying over. The boyfriend catches him in the house, beats the crap out of him, then calls the cops.”
“And he’s good for the other two?”
“The police haven’t called us, but they told the Register they would be doing the DNA stuff, seeing if he was connected. But they said the MO was the same. Modus operandi—I love saying those words.”
Bosch nodded.
“Do you know where the house was?” he asked. “Was it near yours?”
“No, it was in the neighborhood on the other side of the school.”
“Well, great, I’m glad they caught the guy. You and your roommates should be able to sleep better now.”
“Yeah, we will.”
Bosch intended to call his contact at the Orange Police Department on his drive back up to L.A. to find out more about the arrest. But he was elated by the news. He was acting reserved because he didn’t want his daughter to know how truly unnerving the situation had been for him. He decided to move on to other subject matter with her.
“So, what’s the psych project you’re all doing?”
“Oh, just a dumb thing on how social media influences people. Nothing groundbreaking. We have to write up a survey and then spread out and find people on campus to take it. Ten questions about FOMO.”
She pronounced the last word foe-moe.
“What is ‘foe-moe’?” Bosch asked.
“Dad, come on,” Maddie said. “Fear Of Missing Out.”
“Got it. So, you want something to eat or drink? You have to go up to the counter. I’ll hold the table.”
He reached into his pocket for some cash.
“I’ll pay with my card,” Maddie said. “Do you want something?”
“Are you getting food?” Bosch asked.
“I’m going to get something.”
“Then get me a chicken-salad sandwich if they have it. And another coffee. Black. Let me give you some cash.”
“No, I have it.”
She got up from the table and headed to the counter. He was constantly amused by how she always wanted to pay herself with her credit card, when the credit-card bill came to him anyway.
He watched her order from a young man who most likely was a fellow student. She smiled and he smiled and Bosch began to think there was a previous connection.
She came back to the table with two coffees, one with cream.
“You have to study tonight?” Bosch asked.
“Actually, no,” Maddie said. “I have class seven to nine and then some of us are going to the D.”
Bosch knew that the D was a bar called the District favored by students over twenty-one. Maddie was one of them. The reminder of that prompted Bosch’s next question.
“So which way are you leaning today? For after graduation.”
“You’re not going to like it, but law school.”
“Why do you think I won’t like that?”
“I know you want me to be a cop. Plus it means more school and you already spent a ton of money sending me here.”
“No, how many times have we had this talk? I want you to do what you want to do. In fact, the law is safer and you’d make more money. Law school is great, and don’t worry about the costs. I have it covered. And I didn’t spend a ton of money sending you here. Your scholarships covered most of it. So it’s the other way around. You saved me money.”
“But what if I end up like Uncle Mickey—defending the damned, as you like to say?”
Bosch drank some of his fresh coffee as a delaying tactic.
“That would be your choice,” he said after putting the cup down. “But I hope you’d at least look at the other side of it. I could set you up if you wanted to talk to some people in the D.A.’s Office.”
“Maybe someday you and I could be a team. You hook ’em and I cook ’em.”
“That sounds like fishing.”
“Speaking of fishing, is that what you came down to ask me about?”
Bosch drank more coffee before answering. He caught a further break when the handsome lad from the counter delivered their food and Maddie over-thanked him. Bosch looked at her plate. It seemed like everybody was eating avocado toast lately. It looked awful to him.
“Is that dinner?” he asked.
“A snack,” Maddie said. “I’ll eat at the D. The guy with the grill outside has the best veggie dogs. It’s probably the thing I’ll miss most about this place.”
“So if it’s law school, not here?”
“I want to get back to L.A. Uncle Mickey went to Southwestern up there. I think I could get in. It’s a good feeder school for the public defender’s office.”
Before Bosch could react to that, the handsome server came back to the table and asked Maddie if she liked her toast. Maddie enthusiastically approved and he went back behind the counter. He hadn’t bothered to ask Bosch how his sandwich was.
“So that guy, you know him?” Bosch asked.
“We had a class together last year,” Maddie said. “He’s cute.”
“I think he thinks you’re cute.”
“And I think you’re changing the subject.”
“Can’t I just come down and hang with my daughter a little bit, drink coffee, eat a sandwich, and learn new words like foe-moe?”
“It’s an acronym, not a word: F-O-M-O. What’s really going on, Dad?”
“Okay, okay. I wanted to tell you something. It’s not a big deal but you always get mad when you think I intentionally don’t tell you things. I think it’s called FOLO—Fear Of Being Left Out.”
“That doesn’t make sense. Plus FOLO is already taken: that’s Fear Of Losing Out. So what’s the news? Are you getting married or something?”
“No, I’m not getting married.”
“Then what?”
“You remember how I used to have to get chest X-rays because of that case I had where radioactive material was found?”
“Yes, and then you stopped when they said you had a clean bill of health.”
“Well, now I have a very mild form of leukemia that is highly treatable and is being treated, and I’m only telling you this because I know you would scream at me if you found out later.”
Maddie didn’t respond. She looked down at her coffee and her eyes shifted back and forth as if she was reading instructions on what to say and how to act.
“It’s not a big thing, Mads. In fact, it’s just a pill. One pill I take in the morning.”
“Do you have to do chemo and all of that?”
“No, I’m serious. It’s just a pill. That is the chemo. They say I just take this and I’ll be okay. I wanted to tell you because your uncle Mickey is going to bat for me on this and he’s going to try to get some money for it. It happened when I was on the job and I don’t want to lose everything I have set up for you because of it. So he said it could make some news, and that’s what I wanted to avoid—you reading about it online somewhere and then being upset with me for not telling you. But, really, everything is fine.”
She reached across the table and put her hand on top of his.
“Dad.”
He turned his hand over so he could hold her fingers.
“You have to eat your snack,” he said. “Whatever that is.”
“I don’t feel like eating now,” she said.
He didn’t either. He hated scaring her.
“You believe me, right?” he asked. “This is like a formality. I wanted you to hear it from me.”
“They should pay. They should pay you a lot of money.”
Bosch laughed.
“I think you should go to law school,” he said.
She didn’t see the humor in that. She kept her eyes down.
“Hey, if you don’t feel like eating that, let’s take it to go and then go over to that ice-cream place you like, where they cold brew it, or whatever it’s called.”
“Dad, I’m not a little girl. You can’t make everything right with ice cream.”
“So, lesson learned. I should have just shut up and hoped you never found out.”
“No, it’s not that. I’m allowed to feel this way. I love you.”
“And I love you, and that’s what I’m trying to say: I’m going to be around for a long while. I’m going to send you to law school and then I’m going to sit in the back of courtrooms and watch you send bad people away.”
He waited for a reaction. A smile or a smirk, but he got nothing.
“Please,” he said. “Let’s not worry about this anymore. Okay?”
“Okay,” Maddie said. “Let’s go get that ice cream.”
“Good. Let’s go.”
She waved the cute guy over and asked him for to-go boxes.
An hour later Bosch had dropped his daughter back at her car and was heading north on the 5 freeway toward L.A. It had been a double-whammy of a day: John Jack Thompson injecting pain and uncertainty into his life, then Bosch doing the same to his daughter and feeling like some sort of criminal for it.
The bottom line was that he was still having a hard time with Thompson. Bosch was almost seventy years old and he had seen some of the worst things people can do to each other, yet something done decades ago and long before his knowledge of it had sent him reeling. He wondered if it was a side effect of the pills he was taking each morning. The doctor had warned there could be mood swings.
On top of all that, he realized he was experiencing FOMO: he wanted to be there when Ballard took down Elvin Kidd for killing John Jack Thompson’s son. Not because he wanted to see the arrest itself—Bosch had never taken particular joy in putting the cuffs on killers. But he wanted to be there for the son. The victim. John Hilton’s own father apparently didn’t care who had killed him, but Bosch did and he wanted to be there. Everybody counted or nobody counted. It might have been a hollow idea to Thompson. But it wasn’t to Bosch.
BALLARD
41
Ballard had her earbuds in and was listening to a playlist she had put together for building an edge and keeping it. She was squeezed between two large Special Ops officers in the back of a black SUV. It was seven a.m. and they were on the 10 freeway heading out to Rialto to take down Elvin Kidd.
Two SUVs, nine officers, plus one already in an observation post outside Kidd’s home in Rialto. The plan was to make the arrest when Kidd emerged from his house to go to work. Going into the residence of an ex-gang member was never a good plan; they would wait for Kidd to step out. The last report from the man in the OP had been that the suspect’s truck and attached equipment trailer were backed into the driveway. No movement or light had been reported inside the house.
The arrest plan had been approved by the Special Ops lieutenant, who was in the lead SUV. Ballard’s role was as observer and then arresting officer. She would step in after Kidd was in custody and read the man his rights.
In the second SUV the men had carried on a conversation as though Ballard was not among them. The dialogue crisscrossed in front of her without so much as a What do you think? or a Where do you come from? thrown Ballard’s way. It was just nervous chatter and Ballard knew everybody had different ways of getting ready for battle. She put her earbuds in and listened to Muse and Black Pumas, Death Cab, and others. Disparate songs that all built and held an edge for her.
Ballard saw the driver talking into a rover and pulled out her buds.
“What’s up, Griffin?” she asked.
“Lights on in the house,” Griffin said.
“How far out are we?”
“ETA twenty minutes.”
“We need to step it up. This guy might be ready to boogie. Can we go to code three on the freeway?”
Griffin relayed the request by radio to Lieutenant Gonzalez in the lead SUV and soon they were moving toward Rialto under lights and sirens at ninety miles per hour.
She put the earbuds back in and listened to the propulsive words and beat of “Dig Down” by Muse.
We must find a way
We have entered the fray
Twelve minutes later, they were three blocks from Kidd’s home at a meeting point with a couple of Rialto patrol officers called in by courtesy and procedure. Gonzalez and the other SUV team were in position a block from the other side of the suspect’s house. They were waiting for the call from the OP on Kidd emerging before making a move. Ballard had pulled her buds out for good in the middle of “Dark Side” by Bishop Briggs. She was ready to go. She hooked an earpiece attached to her rover on her ear and tuned the radio to the simplex channel the team was using.
Three minutes later they got the call from the OP. Ballard didn’t know if he was in a vehicle, a tree, or the roof of a neighbor’s house, but he was reporting that a black male matching Elvin Kidd’s description was outside the house putting a toolbox into the back of the equipment trailer. He was getting ready to go.
The next radio call placed him at the truck’s door, opening it with a key. Ballard then heard Gonzalez’s voice ordering everyone in. The SUV she was in lurched forward, slamming her back against her seat. Tires squealed as it made the right turn and then the vehicle picked up speed as adrenaline coursed through her bloodstream. The other SUV was point. Through the windshield, Ballard saw it arrive on scene first and pull across the pickup truck’s exit path from the driveway. Only a second behind, the second SUV pulled up on the front lawn, blocking the only other potential angle of escape.
A lot of adrenalized shouting occurred as the Special Ops team emerged from the vehicles with weapons drawn and pointed them at the unsuspecting man in the pickup truck.
“Police! Show me your hands! Show me your hands!”
As previously planned and ordered by Gonzalez, Ballard stayed behind in the SUV, waiting for the call that Kidd had been secured and all was clear. But even turning sideways, she did not have a clear view of the pickup’s front cab through the open door of the SUV. She knew that this was the moment where anything could happen. Any sudden
or furtive movement, any sound, even a radio squawk, might set off a barrage of gunfire. She decided not to wait for Gonzalez’s call—she had objected to staying behind from the start. She climbed out of the SUV on the safe side. She drew her weapon and moved around the back of the vehicle. She had a ballistic vest strapped on over her clothes.
She moved around the SUV until she had an angle on the front of the pickup. She saw Kidd inside, palms on top of the wheel, fingers up. It looked like he was surrendering.
The cacophony of voices gave way to the single voice of Gonzalez, who ordered Kidd to get out of the truck and walk backward toward the officers. It seemed like minutes, but it took only seconds. Kidd was grabbed by two officers, put on the ground, and cuffed. They then stood him up, leaned him forward over the hood of his truck, and searched him.
“What is this?” Kidd protested. “You come to my home and do this shit?”
Ballard heard her name over the radio earpiece, her cue that it was safe for her to move in and speak to Kidd. She holstered her weapon and walked to the pickup. She was surprised by the pitch of her own voice as the adrenaline held her vocal cords tight; at least to herself, she sounded like a little boy.
“Elvin Kidd, you are under arrest for murder and conspiracy to commit murder. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you. Do you understand these rights as I have recited them to you?”
Kidd turned his head to look at her.
“Murder?” he said. “Who’d I murder?”
“Do you understand your rights, Mr. Kidd?” Ballard said. “I can’t talk to you until you answer.”
The Night Fire Page 25