The Crossing

by Michael Connelly

  “What do you think they’re doing?” Long asked without looking up from his cell’s screen.

  “Talking about whatever they found in the office,” Ellis said.

  “Which is?”

  “My guess is video. There’s a camera up there on the Paramount water tower.”

  That got Long’s attention and he looked up from his phone.

  “Fuck. You think—”

  “I don’t know. There’s no way to know unless we go in there and ask the same questions they did. But we can’t do that. So we’re watching.”

  “Fuck, I’m totally not into this.”

  “No kidding.”

  “They’re leaving.”

  “I got eyes.”

  “We staying with the painter?”

  Long had taken to referring to Bosch as the painter because of his name. This annoyed Ellis.

  “We’re staying with Bosch,” he said.

  “I bet I know where he’s going,” Long said.

  “Where?”

  “The alley. It’s the logical next step.”

  “Maybe. This guy’s different.”

  “When are we going to talk about taking him out?”

  “We’re not. We took out the first guy. We take out two investigators on the same case and it doesn’t look like coincidence. We need to figure out something else.”

  Long was wrong. Bosch pulled out of the cemetery and turned east on Santa Monica. Ellis had their undercover car pointing the opposite way and had to maneuver to turn around and follow.

  They tailed Bosch east on Santa Monica until he turned onto Normandie and headed south. Traffic was terrible as usual and they didn’t speak for twenty minutes—until Bosch turned right on Wilshire and almost immediately into the parking garage of a nondescript office building in Koreatown.

  “What the fuck?” Long said.

  “He’s going up to Behavioral,” Ellis said.

  “Yeah, but he’s retired.”

  “Probably some kind of retirement aftercare. He killed a lot of people. Over the years.”

  “The reigning champ till he hung it up.”

  “Officially, at least.”

  They both smiled at the same time. Ellis drove past Bosch’s car and then pulled to a stop at a red curb about half a block farther down the street. He started positioning the mirrors so he could keep an eye on Bosch’s car.

  “You want me to go in?” Long asked.

  “No, sit tight,” Ellis said. “This will be fast.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He didn’t put money in the meter. He’s a citizen now and has to pony up. So he must be going in to pick up a prescription or something.”

  “Viagra.”

  Ellis felt his work phone vibrating. He checked the screen. It was Lieutenant Gonzalez.

  “It’s Gonzo,” he said, signaling Long to be quiet.

  He shut the car down and then answered.

  “Hey L-T.”

  “Where you at, Ellis?”

  “Watching the suspect location. As instructed.”

  “Anything?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Are they even home? Don’t they work days up in the Valley?”

  “Haven’t determined that, L-T. The complaint uses the phrase ‘night and day.’ I was thinking if we don’t see some sign of life soon, we’ll think of something and door-knock ’em.”

  “Look, I don’t want you guys fucking around. If it’s not there, we need to move on to the next one. I’m thinking one more day on it and then you throw a scare at ’em, move ’em to West Hollywood, and let the Sheriff’s deal with it.”

  “Yes, sir. Sounds like a plan.”

  “And check in from time to time, Ellis. I shouldn’t have to hunt you guys down.”

  “Yes, sir. Absolutely.”

  “And tell your partner to wipe the shit-eating grin off his face.”

  Gonzalez disconnected. Ellis lowered the phone and looked at Long and saw that he was indeed smiling.

  “Gonzo’s got you pegged, partner. You better be careful about that.”

  “Absolutely.”

  Long laughed as Ellis shook his head. Ellis then saw Bosch come out through the glass doors of the elevator alcove.

  “He’s back,” he said.

  He watched in the rearview mirror as Bosch got back in his car.

  “He was carrying a file,” he said. “Not a prescription.”

  “What color?” Long asked.

  “Plain.”

  “What’s plain?”

  “Manila.”

  “Not a psych file then. They put those in blue.”

  As Ellis watched, Bosch’s car pulled away from the curb, made a U-turn on Hill, and headed back toward the freeway. Ellis started the engine.

  After following Bosch to Woodrow Wilson Drive, they peeled off in order to avoid detection. They didn’t need to stay on him all the time because they had LoJacked his Cherokee the evening before. Long had slid underneath on a dolly and hooked on a GPS tracker. He had set the app on his phone to alert him if the vehicle moved.

  They guessed that Bosch would be in his home for a few hours and this would give them the opportunity to go down to the Crescent Arms, where they were supposed to be on a surveillance post.

  Ellis and Long referred to the objects of their supposed surveillance as the Bobbsey Twins. This was because of the way their heads bobbed in unison during a performance of side-by-side fellatio in one of the videos they had put on the Internet. They were two porno girls who had moved into a two-bedroom apartment at the Crescent Arms two months earlier. Previously they had put a variety of short videos up on free porn sites across the Internet. These served to establish their credentials and draw viewers to their website, which included pay windows that allowed fans to make direct contact. There was a personal vetting process at that point designed to weed out inquiries from law enforcement, and, eventually, invitations were made and the most intrepid fans could finally pay for a face-to-face meeting with either performer or both and all the sexual abandon that would come with it. Some customers had flown in from as far as Japan to cavort with the girls. Most of them never knew that they were secretly videoed from the moment they entered the apartment to the moment they left.

  The problem with the setup was that business was always good and invariably too many men would be coming in and out of the apartment at all hours of day and night. Within days, this traffic was noticed by other tenants in the apartment complex. Within weeks, there were complaints to management, and by the one-month mark, the problem reached the attention of the LAPD. It was a constant cycle. The porno girls, stage-named Ashley Juggs and Annie Minx, had moved house on average every eight weeks in the last year. Finding new places to set up the operation had become a never-ending task for Ellis and Long. Making sure that they were the ones who handled the complaints when they were forwarded to the Vice Unit was also taxing. But the operation was too profitable to discontinue.

  The Crescent Arms was a two-story courtyard-style apartment building with exterior stairs and walkways. When Ellis and Long got to apartment 2B, Ellis used a key to open the door without knocking. One of the Bobbsey Twins was sitting on the couch watching the Home Shopping Network on the flat-screen. She didn’t appear surprised to see them. She kept glancing at the screen, where there was a sale countdown on a high-powered blender that could be bought in three easy payments.

  “Where’s Ashley?” Ellis asked.

  “I’m Ashley,” the woman said.

  “Sorry. Where’s Annie?”

  “Her bedroom.”

  “Does she have a date? I didn’t see the bear.”

  The arrangement was that a small teddy bear was put in the window next to the door when the apartment was a no-fly zone because of a customer visit.

  “No, I think she’s just sleeping or something,” Ashley said.

  “Well, go get her,” Ellis said.

  “Chop-chop,” Long said.

  Ash
ley got up off the couch. She was wearing only a hot pink T-shirt that was barely long enough to cover her hairless crotch. It said “Porn Star” on it, the letters stretched by her unnaturally large breasts. She quickly disappeared into a hallway that led to the back bedrooms. Ellis and Long didn’t talk while they waited. Ellis stepped over to the IKEA table in front of the couch and turned off the television with the remote. He then went to the coat closet next to the front door, unlocked it, and opened it, revealing the video surveillance equipment stacked on a steel rack. There was a nine-inch screen on top and he was able to rewind and play back surveillance video from the twins’ most recent dates. Each of their bedrooms was outfitted with two pinhole cameras—one in a ceiling fan, the other in the fake thermostat on the wall by the door. There were two more cameras hidden in the living room.

  Ellis put the playback on fast-forward so he could quickly speed through all the sex scenes. At intervals he stopped the playback and froze the image so he could get a look at the customer. He usually did this while they were still clothed so he could make judgments on their wealth and possibly gain hints about their professions. All that went out the window when guys got naked. Usually the rich guys were fat and ugly. Ellis needed to see them with their clothes and confidence still on. He’d also look for wedding rings or the indentations on fingers where the wedding rings had recently been.

  Long came and looked over his shoulder but said nothing. Ellis scanned through five separate dates. Two singles for each of the twins and then a threesome on the couch in the living room. None of the johns looked like good candidates to Ellis.

  “Anything?” Long asked.

  “Doesn’t look like it,” Ellis said.

  He set the equipment back up for recording and closed and locked the door. When he turned around, Ashley and Annie were sitting together on the couch. Annie wore neon pink panties and a black bra. It was like they were sharing parts of one outfit. They were both bottle blondes with breast enlargements and spray-on tans. Their lips were distended beyond natural bounds. There wasn’t a thing about them that looked real and lately there had been some buyer’s remorse. The videos on the free porn sites were about five years old now and filmed before the girls had made some of the supposed enhancements to their bodies. Putting up fresh videos wouldn’t solve the problem, because in porn, five years was a lifetime. It was a young woman’s game. In this case, honesty in advertising would backfire.

  “It’s time to move again,” Ellis said. “So, tomorrow morning get out your suitcases and pack your shit. We’ll come by to move you at two.”

  “Where are we going?” Annie asked in a whiny voice.

  “A place off of Beverly by the Farmer’s Market. It’s big, there’s a lot of units, and maybe we’ll get to stay longer this time. There’s a Starbucks over there that you can walk to.”

  He paused to see if they would complain. They didn’t. They knew better.

  “Okay, then,” he said. “What’s on the schedule today?”

  “We’ve got a double at ten tonight,” Annie said. “So far that’s it.”

  “How much?”

  “Two.”

  Ellis showed his disappointment with his silence. The threshold for a double was supposed to be three grand.

  “Better than nothing,” Long said.

  Ellis glared at him. He had just ruined the chance for Ellis to make it a teachable moment.

  “Let’s go,” he said instead.

  He walked to the door. Before opening it he turned back to the twins. “Remember, tomorrow at two,” he said.

  21

  Dr. Hinojos had put three different profiles into a file for Bosch. All were redacted in very minor ways—primarily with the names of victims and witnesses blotted out with a black marker and no crime scene photos attached.

  The second profile in the folder came from the James Allen case. This was obvious to Bosch because Haven House was named in the summary and because of the date of the murder. Bosch put the other two aside and dove in. He had always found a similarity in all the profiles he encountered as a detective—whether they came from inside the department’s Behavioral Science Unit or the FBI’s profilers in Quantico. There were only so many ways to describe a psychopath and the unstopped urges of a sexual predator. But after reading the profile on the Allen murder, he reread the Sheriff’s Department profile on the killer of Lexi Parks—done before DNA found in and on the victim was matched to Da’Quan Foster. These profiles carried some basic similarities but their conclusions about the killer from each case were distinctly different.

  The summary on the Parks case had pegged the killer as a nascent sexual predator who had likely stalked Parks and meticulously planned the deadly attack, only to be disorganized in carrying it out and to make several mistakes, chief of which was leaving his DNA behind. The culmination of his plan in murder left the killer feeling guilty enough to attempt to psychologically cover up his crime by placing the pillow over the victim’s face. This was indicative of a sexual predator who was new at killing, who had moved up the ladder from other lesser sex crimes to murder—possibly for the first time.

  The profile of the murderer of James Allen was different. Because of the victim’s occupation, it was concluded that the killing came out of a prostitution arrangement and was not motivated by a compulsive psychosexual urge. But as with the Parks killing, there was evidence of guilt being a motivating factor, this time with transference—blaming and punishing the victim for the killer’s own actions. The profile suggested that Allen’s killer was likely a closeted homosexual male who hid his sexual orientation behind the front of a heterosexual lifestyle. It was further surmised that the killer was probably married with children and a career, all of which he would consider threatened by a sexual liaison with Allen. The feeling of threat was turned into rage and then directed at Allen for “exploiting the suspect’s weakness.” The killer blamed Allen and sought to end the threat to his family and livelihood by eliminating him. Discarding the body in the alley underlined the suspect’s dismissal of Allen as nothing more than detritus. He was human trash left in the alley for pickup.

  It was also suggested that this killer could have acted in such a way before. Details of the prior murder that Ali had mentioned to Soto were contained in the profile but also redacted. The victim’s name was not given, but a summary of the facts of the case showed both eerie similarities and stark differences.

  The main similarities were that the victims were both male prostitutes who were murdered elsewhere and then “displayed” in the alley in roughly the same spot and same pose. The differences were in victim type. Beyond both being prostitutes, one was a diminutive white man and the other a heavyset black man. The profile said their “penetrative” roles were different, with Allen being a bottom and the other victim being a top. These roles indicated different client bases and therefore different killers.

  Investigators in the first case had not found the murder scene. The victim lived in a shared apartment in East Hollywood but was not killed there, indicating an unknown rendezvous point with his killer, whereas in the Allen case, evidence indicated that he was murdered in his motel room and then taken to the alley and dumped.

  The profiler—Dr. Hinojos—concluded that the two killings were the work of two separate suspects. She further posited that Allen’s killer might have had knowledge of the first killing through the media or street gossip or possibly law enforcement sources and attempted to copy aspects of the crime to throw off the investigation.

  The profile noted several other aspects of the crime for consideration by investigators. No DNA evidence was collected from Allen’s body and no evidence of either sexual assault or consensual sex was found during autopsy. This seemed to suggest that the murderous rage erupted before there was a sex act. The profile also discounted any suggestion that the sex act had occurred much earlier and that the killer had returned to the hotel room to murder Allen. The use of the picture-frame wire to strangle the victim
indicated that the killer had not come prepared to commit murder but that the killing was a spur-of-the-moment decision made while the killer was in the room. While Allen was in the bathroom or otherwise distracted or incapacitated, the wire was removed from the picture frame and then used to strangle him.

  Bosch put the two profiles in the folder Hinojos had given him. He got up and started pacing the living room as he thought about what he had read and what he knew. It was time to walk himself through the cases and establish clear lines of theory.

  Two murders, two different killers. The profiles suggested two different kinds of psychological motivation. Da’Quan Foster was charged with the murder of Lexi Parks but the forensic profile drawn up before the DNA connection was made did not match him on psychological or evidentiary levels. Meantime, the irony was that aspects of his life did fit the profile on the James Allen case, for which he had an ironclad alibi—he was in jail.

  Bosch paused in his pacing at the sliding door to look out into the canyon. But what he saw was his own dark reflection in the glass. He shook his head at the thought of the complicated trail he had delineated between the two cases. Allen was Foster’s alibi for the Parks killing and with Allen’s death much of Foster’s defense died.

  And then there was the DNA. If at the time of Parks’s murder Foster was with Allen, as he reluctantly revealed and as the video from Hollywood Forever inched toward confirming, then the DNA was planted on Parks in an effort to misdirect investigators and possibly frame Foster.

  Bosch stepped back from the glass and started moving around the room again. He felt his energy building. He sensed he was getting close to something but wasn’t sure what it was. He was still far outside the case and needed better access, but he was homing in just the same. He believed that Lexi Parks still held the secret to both cases. Why was she killed? Answer that and Bosch knew everything would unravel.