The Closers

by Michael Connelly

  "My mother died when I was eleven," Bosch suddenly said.

  Rider looked at him, doing her eyebrow thing.

  "I know. Why'd you bring that up?"

  "I don't know. I spent a lot of time in the youth hall after that. I mean, I had some stays with foster families but it never lasted long. I always went back."

  Rider waited but Bosch didn't continue.

  "And?" she prompted.

  "Well, we didn't have gangs in the hall," he said. "But there was sort of a natural segregation. You know, the whites stuck together. The blacks. The Hispanics. There weren't any Asians back then."

  "What are you saying, that you feel sorry for this asshole Mackey?"

  "No."

  "He killed a girl or at least helped kill her, Harry."

  "I know that, Kiz. That's not my point."

  "What is your point?"

  "I don't know. I'm just sort of wondering, you know, what makes people go down different paths. How come this guy became a hater? How come I didn't?"

  "Harry, you're overthinking. Go home tonight and get a good night's sleep. You'll need it because there won't be any tomorrow night."

  Bosch nodded but didn't move.

  "You going to take off?" Rider asked.

  "Yeah, in a few. You heading out?"

  "Yeah, unless you want me to go with you over to Hollywood Vice."

  "Nah, I'll be all right. Let's talk in the morning after we get the paper."

  "Yeah, I'm not sure where I can get the Daily News in the south end. I might have to call you up and let you read it to me."

  The Daily News was circulated widely in the Valley but sometimes hard to locate elsewhere in the city. Rider lived down near Inglewood, in the same neighborhood where she had grown up.

  "That's cool. Give me a call and I'll have it. There's a box down at the bottom of the hill from my place."

  Rider opened one of her desk drawers and pulled out her purse. She looked at Bosch and did her eyebrow thing once again.

  "You sure about doing this, marking yourself like that?"

  She was talking about their plan for pushing Mackey the next day. Bosch nodded.

  "I have to be able to sell it," he said. "Besides, I can wear long sleeves for a while. It isn't summer yet."

  "But what if it's not necessary? What if he sees the story in the paper and gets on the phone and starts talking a blue streak?"

  "Something tells me that isn't going to happen. Anyway, it isn't permanent. Vicki Landreth told me it lasts a couple weeks at the most, depending on how often you shower. It's not like those henna tattoos kids get on the Santa Monica pier. They last longer."

  She nodded her agreement.

  "Okay, Harry. I'll catch you in the a.m., then."

  "See ya, Kiz. Have a good one."

  She started walking out of the alcove.

  "Hey, Kiz?" Bosch called after her.

  "What?" she said, stopping and looking back at him.

  "What do you think? You happy to be back on it?"

  She knew what he was talking about. Being back in homicide.

  "Oh yeah, Harry, I'm happy. I'll be downright giddy once we take this pale rider down and solve the mystery."

  "Yeah," Bosch said.

  After she left, Bosch thought for a few moments about what she meant by calling Mackey a pale rider. He thought it might be some sort of biblical reference but he couldn't place it. Maybe in the south end it was what some people called racists. He decided to ask her about it the next day. He started to look through the probation file again but soon gave up. He knew it was time to focus on the here and now. Not the past. Not the choices made and the paths not taken. He got up and stacked the file and the murder book under his arm. If things were slow on the surveillance the next day, they might make for good reading. He stuck his head in Abel Pratt's office to say good-bye.

  "Good luck, Harry," Pratt said. "Close it out."

  "We're going to."

  26

  BOSCH PARKED in the rear lot and walked in through the back doors of Hollywood Division. It had been a long time since he had been in the place and he immediately found it different. The earthquake renovation that Edgar had spoken of had seemingly touched every space in the building. He found the watch office in the place where a holding tank had been located. He found a report writing room for patrol officers, whereas before they'd had to steal space in the detective bureau.

  Before going upstairs to the vice unit he had to go by the detective bureau to see if he could pull a file. He went down the rear hallway, passing a patrol sergeant named McDonald whose first name he couldn't remember.

  "Hey, Harry, you back? Long time no see, man."

  "I'm back, Six."

  "Good deal."

  Six was the radio designation for Hollywood Division. Calling the patrol sergeant Six was like calling a homicide detective Roy. It worked and it got Bosch past his awkward memory loss. By the time he got to the end of the hallway he remembered that the sergeant's name was Bob.

  The homicide unit was at the back end of the vast detective squad room. Edgar had been right. It didn't look like any detective bureau Bosch had ever seen. It was gray and sterile. It looked like a warehouse where yaks made cold calls and ripped off businesses and old ladies for overpriced pens or time-share units. He recognized the top of Edgar's head just cresting above one of the sound partitions between the cubicles. It looked like he was the only one left in the whole bureau. It was late in the day but not that late.

  He walked over and looked over the partition and down on Edgar. He had his head down and was working on the Times crossword puzzle. It had always been a ritual with Edgar. He'd work the puzzle throughout each day, taking it with him to the restroom and to lunch and out on surveillances. He never liked to go home without finishing it.

  Edgar hadn't noticed Bosch's presence. Bosch quietly stepped back and ducked into the cubicle next to Edgar's. He carefully lifted the steel trash can out of the desk's foot well and duck-walked out of the cubicle to a position right behind Edgar. He stood up and let the trash can fall to the new gray linoleum from about four feet. The resulting sound was loud and sharp, almost like a shot. Edgar leaped out of his seat, his crossword pencil flying toward the ceiling. He was about to yell something when he saw it was Bosch.

  "Goddamn it, Bosch!"

  "How you doin', Jerry?" Bosch said, barely getting it out while laughing.

  "Goddamn it, Bosch!"

  "Yeah, you said that. I take it things are pretty slow in Hollywood tonight."

  "What the fuck you doing here? I mean, besides scaring the shit out of me."

  "I'm working, man. I've got an appointment with the vice artist upstairs. What are you doing?"

  "I'm finishing up. I was about to get out of here."

  Bosch leaned forward and saw that the grid of the crossword was almost entirely filled out with words. There were several erasure marks. Edgar never worked a crossword in ink. Bosch noticed his old red dictionary was off the shelf and on the desk.

  "Cheating again, Jerry? You know you aren't supposed to be using the dictionary like that."

  Edgar dropped back into his seat. He looked exasperated by the scare and now the questions.

  "Bullshit. I can do whatever I want. There aren't any rules, Harry. Why don't you get on upstairs and leave me alone? Have her put some eyeliner on you and put you out on the stroll."

  "Yeah, you wish. You'd be my first customer."

  "All right, all right. Is there something you need here or did you just drop by to bust my chops?"

  Edgar finally smiled and Bosch knew everything was all right between them.

  "A little of both," Bosch said. "I need to pull an old file. Where do they keep them now in this palace?"

  "How old is it? They started shipping stuff downtown to be microfilmed."

  "Would've been in two thousand. You remember Michael Allen Smith?"

  Edgar nodded.

  "Of course I do. Someone like m
e isn't going to forget Smith. What do you want with him?"

  "I just want his picture. That file still here?"

  "Yeah, anything that fresh is still around. Follow me."

  He led Bosch to a locked door. Edgar had a key and soon they were in a small room lined with shelves crowded with blue binders. Edgar located the Michael Allen Smith murder book and pulled it off a shelf. He dropped it into Bosch's hands. It was heavy. It had been a tough case.

  Bosch took the murder book to the cubicle next to Edgar's and started flipping through it until he came to a section of photographs that showed Smith's upper torso and several close-ups of his tattoos. His markings had been used to identify and charge him with the murders of three prostitutes five years earlier. Bosch, Edgar and Rider had worked the case. Smith was an avowed white supremacist who secretly hired black transvestite prostitutes he picked up on Santa Monica Boulevard. Then out of guilt for crossing both racial and sexual lines, he would kill them. It somehow made him feel better about his transgressions. The key break in the case came when Rider found a prostitute who had seen one of the victims get into a van with a customer. He was able to describe a distinctive tattoo on the john's hand. That eventually led them to Smith, who had collected a variety of tattoos while in various prisons around the country. He was tried, convicted and sent to death row, where he was still dodging the needle with a barrage of legal appeals.

  Bosch removed the photos that showed Smith's neck, hands and upper left arm, all of which were festooned with prison ink.

  "I need these while I'm upstairs. If you're leaving and need to lock the file room I can just leave these on your desk."

  Edgar nodded.

  "That'll be fine. So what are you getting into, man? You're going to put that shit on yourself?"

  "That's right. I want to be like Mike."

  Edgar narrowed his eyes.

  "This connected to that Chatsworth Eights stuff we were talking about yesterday?"

  Bosch smiled.

  "You know, Jerry, you ought to be a detective. You're good at it."

  Edgar nodded like he was merely putting up with another sarcastic assault.

  "You going to get the haircut, too?" he asked.

  "Nah, I wasn't planning on going that far," Bosch said. "I'm going to be sort of a reformed skinhead, I think."

  "I get it."

  "So, listen, are you busy tonight? This shouldn't take too long up there. If you want to wait and finish your puzzle, we could go grab a steak over at Musso's."

  Just saying it made Bosch hungry for it. That and a vodka martini.

  "Nah, Harry, I gotta go over the hill to the Sportsmen's Lodge for Sheree Riley's retirement gig. That's why I was killing time here. I was just waiting out the traffic."

  Sheree Riley was a sex crimes investigator. Bosch had worked with her on occasion but they had never been close. When sex and murder entwined, the cases were usually so brutal and difficult there wasn't much room for anything but the work. Bosch didn't know she was retiring.

  "Maybe we can get that steak some other time," Edgar said. "That cool?"

  "Everything's cool, Jerry. Have a good time up there and tell her I said hello and good luck. And thanks for the pictures. They'll be on your desk."

  Bosch headed back toward the hallway but heard Edgar curse. He turned around and saw his old partner standing and looking into his cubicle with his arms wide.

  "Where'd my damn pencil go?"

  Bosch scanned the floor and didn't see it. Eventually his eyes rose and he saw the pencil stuck into the sound-absorption tiles in the ceiling above Edgar's head.

  "Jerry, sometimes what goes up doesn't come down."

  Edgar looked up and saw his pencil. It took him two jumps to grab it.

  The door to the vice unit on the second floor was locked but this was not unusual. Bosch knocked and it was quickly answered by an undercover officer Bosch didn't recognize.

  "Is Vicki here? She's expecting me."

  "Then come on in."

  The officer stepped back and let Bosch enter. He saw that this room had not been changed dramatically during the retrofitting. It was a long room with work counters running down both sides. Above each vice officer's space was a framed movie poster. In Hollywood Division, only posters from movies actually filmed in the division were allowed to grace the walls. He found Vicki Landreth at a workspace under a poster from Blue Neon Night, a film Bosch had not seen. She and the other officer were the only ones in the office. Bosch guessed everybody else was already out on the streets for the night shift.

  "Hey, Bosch," Landreth said.

  "Hey, Vic. You still have time to do this?"

  "For you, honey, I will always make time."

  Landreth was a former Hollywood makeup artist. One day twenty years earlier she was talked into taking a ride-along with one of the off-duty officers working security on the set. The guy was just trying to make time with her, hoping maybe she'd catch a thrill on the ride-along and it would lead to something else. What it led to was Landreth's enrollment in the police academy and her becoming a reserve officer, working two shifts a month on patrol, filling in where needed. Then someone in vice found out about her daytime job and asked her to work her two shifts in vice, where she could be used to make undercover officers look more like prostitutes and pimps and drug users and street people. Soon Vicki found the cop work more interesting than the movie work. She quit the industry and became a full-time cop. Her makeup skills were highly coveted and her niche in Hollywood Division was secure.

  Bosch showed her the photos of Michael Allen Smith's tattoos and she studied them for a few moments.

  "Nice guy, huh?" she finally said.

  "One of the best."

  "And you want all of this done tonight?"

  "No. I was thinking about the lightning bolts on the neck. And maybe the bicep, if you could do it."

  "It's all jailhouse. No real art to it. One color. I can do it. Sit down over here and take off your shirt."

  She led him to a makeup station, where he sat on a stool next to a rack of various body paints and powders. On an upper shelf there were mannequin heads with wigs and beards on them. Below these someone had taped the names of various supervisors in the division.

  Bosch took off his shirt and tie. He was wearing a T-shirt underneath.

  "I want these to be seen but I don't want to be too obvious about it," he said. "I was thinking that you could work it so if I had on a T-shirt like this you would sort of see parts of the tats sticking out. Enough to know what they are and what they mean."

  "Not a problem. Hold still."

  She used a piece of chalk to mark the lines on his skin where the shirt's sleeve and neck reached.

  "These will be the visibility lines," she explained. "You just tell me how much you want to go above and below them."

  "Got it."

  "Now take it all off, Harry."

  She said it with undisguised sensuality in her voice. Bosch pulled his shirt over his head and tossed it over a chair with his other shirt and the tie. He turned back to her and Landreth was studying his chest and shoulders. She reached over and touched the scar on his left shoulder.

  "That's new," she said.

  "That's old."

  "Well, it has been a long time since I saw you naked, Harry."

  "Yeah, I guess so."

  "Back when you were a boy in blue and could talk me into anything, even joining the cops."

  "I talked you into my car, not the department. Blame yourself for that."

  Bosch felt embarrassed and felt his skin blush. Their liaison twenty years earlier had flickered out for no reason other than that neither was looking for any sort of commitment to or from anybody. They went their separate ways but always remained easy friends, especially when Bosch was transferred to the Hollywood Division homicide squad and they were working out of the same building.

  "Look at you blushing," Landreth said. "After all these years."

  "Well, y
ou know . . ."

  He said nothing further. Landreth rolled her stool closer to Bosch. She reached up and rubbed her thumb over the tunnel rat tattoo at the top of his right arm.