“Ricardo.”
“Last name?”
“You’re not a cop, are you?”
“I used to be.”
“Used to be? What’s that mean?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Just Ricardo, okay?”
“Sure. Thanks, Ricardo.”
Ricardo dropped his cigarette to the concrete, crushed it with his foot, and then kicked it into a nearby flower bed.
“Good night, Mr. I-Used-To-Be-A-Cop.”
“Yeah, good night.”
Bosch left through the gate and stopped to look at the directory. He confirmed the name Jiminez on unit 203 and saw the name R. Benitez on the line next to 103. He headed back into the alley where his car was waiting.
Once he was behind the wheel, he put the key in the ignition but didn’t turn it. He sat for a moment looking through the windshield at the spot where James Allen’s body was left and thinking about what Ricardo Benitez had just told him. He heard a car trunk being closed followed by two car doors. Bosch envisioned a car coming into the alley with its lights off. Two people get out, leave their doors open, and go to the trunk. They remove the body, prop it against the wall, then go back to the car. One closes the trunk as he goes around the back of the car. They get in, close their doors, and the car takes off. In and out in—what?—thirty seconds tops?
Bosch nodded.
Two people, he thought.
He turned the key and started the engine.
25
There was a line of light under the door of his daughter’s room when Bosch got home. He hesitated in the hallway for a moment and then lightly knocked. He expected there would be no reply because she usually had her earbuds in and was listening to music. But he was surprised.
“You can come in,” she called.
Bosch opened the door and stepped in. Maddie was under the bedcovers with her laptop open in front of her. She had her earbuds in.
“Hey, I’m home,” he said.
She pulled out the buds.
“I know.”
“So what are you doing?”
“Just music.”
Bosch came over and sat on the edge of her bed, trying not to show any frustration with her one- and two-word answers.
“What music?”
“Death Cab.”
“That the song or the band?”
“The band is Death Cab for Cutie. The song I like is ‘Black Sun.’”
“Sounds uplifting.”
“It’s a great song, Dad. It reminds me of you.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know. It just does.”
“Did you look at those profiles?”
“I did.”
“And?”
“Well, first of all, they were amazingly repetitive. Like you could apply the same stuff to every case even though they were different cases and different kinds of murders.”
“Well, they say it’s an inexact science.”
She folded her arms across her chest.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.
“I don’t know, that they try to cover all the bases,” he said. “So that when someone gets caught, they’re covered by the generics.”
“Let me ask you something, Dad. Did a profile of a killer or a crime scene ever help you solve a case? Tell the truth.”
Bosch had to think for a moment because there wasn’t a ready answer.
“I guess that answers my question,” Maddie said.
“No, wait,” Bosch said. “I was just thinking. I haven’t had a case where I got a profile and it was so dead-on that it pointed me right to the killer. But they’ve been helpful to me a lot of times. Your mother…”
She waited but he didn’t go on.
“My mother what?”
“No, I was just going to say that she wasn’t really a profiler but she was still the best profiler I ever knew. She could read people. I think her life experiences helped make her empathic. She always had a good feel for a crime scene and for the killer’s motivations. I’d show her pictures from my cases and she’d tell me what she thought.”
“She never told me that.”
“Well, you know, you were young. She didn’t want to talk about murder with you, I think.”
Bosch was silent for a moment as he realized he had not thought about Eleanor Wish in a long time. It made him feel bad.
“You know, she had this theory,” he said quietly. “She always said that the motivation for all murders could be dialed back to shame.”
“Just shame, that’s it?” Maddie asked.
“Yeah, just shame. People covering up shame and finding any kind of way to do it. I don’t know, I think it was pretty smart.”
Maddie nodded.
“I miss her,” she said.
Bosch nodded.
“Yeah,” he said. “I get that. It will probably always be that way.”
“I wonder what it would be like, you know, if she were still around,” she said. “Like when I have to decide things, I wish she was here.”
“You can always talk to me,” Bosch said. “You know that, right?”
“I’m talking about girl things.”
“Right.”
Bosch wasn’t sure what to say. He was happy that Maddie was opening up for the first time in a long time but he felt ill equipped to seize the moment. It underlined his failings as a father.
“Is it school?” he asked. “Are you worried about anything?”
“No, school is school. It’s like all the girls talk about how their mothers are dumb or about how they want to control them and everything about graduation and college and all of that. I kind of wish I had that sometimes, you know. A mother to tell me stuff.”
Bosch nodded.
“I should talk,” she said. “You didn’t have a mother or a father.”
“It was a little different, I think,” Bosch said. “I think a girl really needs a mother.”
“Oh, well. I lost my chance.”
Bosch leaned over and kissed the top of her head. For the first time in a long time he picked up no vibe of resistance from her. He stood up from the bed and saw her big gray duffel bag on the floor, all packed and ready to go. He realized that she was leaving from school for the camping trip the very next day.
“Shit,” he said.
“What?” she said.
“I forgot tomorrow’s the day you leave. I shouldn’t have gone out.”
“It’s okay. I had to finish packing. I’ll only be gone three nights.”
Bosch sat back down on the bed.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t be,” she said.
“I hope you have some fun up there.”
“I doubt it.”
“Well, try. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“And text me.”
“They told us the service is really bad.”
“Okay, well, if you get a signal, let me know everything’s all right.”
He leaned over and kissed the top of her head again, mindful this time not to breathe out and reveal he had beer on his breath.
He stood up and headed toward the door.
“I love you, kid,” he said. “I’ll see you in the morning before you go.”
“Love you, Dad,” she said.
He believed she meant it.
26
The next morning Maddie grudgingly allowed him to lug her duffel bag to her car. She then went off to school and her required camping trip, telling Bosch that a bus would pick the campers up from the school and take them to the mountains.
He watched her drive down the street and felt sad that she would not be in the house for the next three nights. He went back inside, brewed a pot of coffee, and settled down with a cup at the dining-room-table-turned-worktable. He did what he always did when he had worked with a badge. He went back to the book.
To Bosch the murder book was an evolving tool. It was true that in this case he had only a copy of the b
ook and would not be adding to it with his own investigation. No matter how many times he looked at it, the page count would not change and every word would stay the same. But that didn’t matter. The meaning of things changed as investigations progressed. The simple fact was that Bosch knew more about the case now than he had when he last looked through the Lexi Parks murder book. That meant that the significance of things could change as he filtered them through the net of his growing knowledge of the case.
He started rereading the documents from page one and eventually got to the phone logs. The investigators on the case had begun examining the call logs from the victim’s personal and business phones for the three months prior to her murder. They were in the process of identifying and questioning the parties involved in those calls with Lexi Parks when the results of the DNA analysis came back from the lab matching Da’Quan Foster to the murder scene. That turned everything in a new direction and it appeared to Bosch that the study of the call lists was then dropped as Foster became the intensive and sole focus of the investigation. Still, much of the work was already done on the lists, with most numbers on a spreadsheet explained in a sentence or two or dismissed as “NS”—short for not suspicious.
Bosch had checked the spreadsheet before, but this time when he scanned it a name caught in his filters. Four days before her murder Alexandra Parks had called Nelson Grant & Sons Jewelers. The call had been given an NS designation by the investigators.
It seemed obvious that the call was about her broken watch and it had drawn no suspicion from the Sheriff’s investigators. But the watch was on Bosch’s radar because of the empty box on the shelf in her home. He wondered if Parks had been calling to inquire if her watch had been repaired. He scanned the rest of the call list and jumped to the list of numbers called from her office line. He saw no other calls to the jewelry store.
The office line spreadsheet was incomplete. Parks had made hundreds of calls from the line in the months before her death, and the project was daunting. Cornell and Schmidt were probably happy to leave it behind once the DNA match came through, hanging the case on Da’Quan Foster. All they had to do at that point was check the call lists to see if there had been any contact between the victim and suspect. There had not been, and the call list analysis had been discontinued. It was a subtle form of tunnel vision. They now had the bird in hand—Foster—so there was no need to finish going through hundreds of phone calls and numbers that did not have any direct ties to their suspect.
Bosch opened his laptop and looked up Nelson Grant & Sons Jewelers. With Google maps he located its Sunset Boulevard address in the upscale Sunset Plaza shopping district and learned that the store opened at ten o’clock each morning.
He decided to visit the store as soon as it opened, but that wouldn’t be for nearly an hour. He opened the business’s website and determined that the shop dealt in many lines of jewelry and watches as well as handled estate sales. But he could not find any references to Audemars Piguet watches.
He then Googled the watchmaker and found several online dealers. He clicked on one of these and soon was looking at an array of watches manufactured by the Swiss company. He further refined his search to the Royal Oak Offshore model and soon was looking at a watch with a $14,000 price tag.
Bosch whistled. The discrepancy between what Harrick paid a year ago for the same model and the current online retail price was nearly ten thousand dollars.
He went back to the manufacturer’s website and clicked on the list of certified Audemars Piguet dealers. There were only three shops and service centers in the United States and the closest to L.A. was in Las Vegas. Bosch pulled up two numbers for the service center and then went back to the phone logs from the murder book. Scanning the call logs for matches was easy and quick because of the 702 area code for Las Vegas. Bosch found two calls connected to the service center. On Thursday, February 5—the same day Lexi Parks called Nelson Grant & Sons—a call had been placed from her office line to the Audemars Piguet service center. The call lasted almost six minutes. Then there was a return call from the service center to Parks’s office four hours later. That call lasted two minutes.
Bosch assumed that all the calls were regarding her watch and its repair. He pulled his own phone out and was about to call the first number, when he decided to wait. He needed to gather more information before blindly making the call.
On the inside cover of the folder he wrote out a timeline involving the calls Parks had made and received. The first call was to the service center in Vegas. He assumed this was a call in which Parks asked about getting her watch repaired.
But then only fourteen minutes later she called Nelson Grant & Sons, the store where her husband had bought the watch. This call lasted only seventy-seven seconds.
Then four hours later, someone at the service center in Las Vegas called Parks on her office line. That call lasted two minutes and two seconds.
Bosch had no idea what any of this meant and whether it was germane to the murder that would follow four days later. But it was a case anomaly and he would not be able to let it go until he understood it. The watch had not even come up on the radar with the Sheriff’s investigators. They were too far into the tunnel. That left it to Bosch. He decided he would start at the jewelry store where the victim’s husband had bought the watch at what appeared to be a very deep discount. From there he would go to the manufacturer’s service center.
He gathered all the reports back up into a single pile, squared the edges, and weighted the stack down on the table with his laptop. In the kitchen he poured another dose of coffee into his travel mug and grabbed his keys. He was about to go through the kitchen door into the carport when he heard the chime from the front door. He put the coffee down on the counter and went to answer it.
A man and woman stood at the door. Both had stocky builds and wore suits, the man with a tie. They didn’t smile and there was a coldness in their eyes that allowed Bosch to peg them as cops before they identified themselves.
“Mr. Bosch?” the man asked.
“That’s me,” Bosch said. “What can I do for you?”
“We’re investigators with the Sheriff’s Department. This is Detective Schmidt and I’m Cornell. We’d like to talk to you if you have the time.”
“Sure. I’ve got some time.”
There was an awkward pause as Bosch made no move to invite them into the house.
“Do you want to do this right here at the door?” Cornell asked.
“Might as well,” Bosch said. “I’m assuming this will be quick. It’s about me going by the house yesterday, right?”
“Are you working for the defense in the Parks case?”
“I am.”
“Are you a licensed private investigator, sir?”
“I was one about a dozen years ago but the license lapsed. So I am working for a state-licensed private investigator while I apply for my own to be reinstated. I have a letter of engagement from him that explains this and makes it clear—and legal.”
“Can we take a look at that letter, Mr. Bosch?”
“Sure. I’ll be right back.”
Bosch closed the door and left them there. He went and got the letter Haller had provided and came back to the door with it. Schmidt, who hadn’t said anything so far, took it and read it while her partner lectured Bosch.
“That was uncool, what you did yesterday,” Cornell said.
“What was that?” Bosch asked.
“You know what it was. You presented yourself in a false light to gain access to a crime scene.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I went to look at a house that’s for sale. I’ve been thinking about selling this place. I’ve got a kid with four years of college coming up and I could use the equity I’ve got in it.”
“Look, Bosch, I’m not going to fuck around with you. You cross the line again and there will be consequences. I’m giving you a break here. We checked you out and you used to be legit. Used to be. Now
not so much.”
“Fuck off, Cornell. I’ve seen your work on this. It’s weak.”
Schmidt handed the letter back to Bosch but Cornell snatched it out of her hand before Bosch reached for it.
“This is what I think of your letter,” he said.
He reached inside his suit jacket and around the back of his pants. He pantomimed wiping his ass with the letter, then held it out to Bosch. He didn’t take it.
“Nice,” Bosch said. “Classy and clever.”
Bosch took a step back so he could close the door on them. Cornell quickly used two hands to crunch the letter in a ball and then threw it at Bosch as he was closing the door. It bounced off his chest and fell to the floor.
Bosch stood at the door, listening to the steps as Cornell and Schmidt walked away. He could feel his face burning red with humiliation. If they had checked him out, it meant that everybody in the LAPD would know he had crossed to the dark side. It would not matter to them that Bosch actually believed there was a good chance that the man accused of the crime was innocent. The bottom line would be that Bosch was now a defense investigator.
He leaned his forehead against the door. A week ago he was a retired LAPD detective. He now seemed to have a whole new identity. He heard their car start out at the curb. He waited, head against the door, for it to drive away, and then he left, too.
27
Bosch was parked at the curb in front of Nelson Grant & Sons before it opened. He saw lights go on first and then at 10:05 he watched a young Asian man inside the shop come to the front glass door and stoop down to unlock it at the bottom. He then stepped outside with a folding sign that advertised Estate Sales, positioned it on the sidewalk and returned to the shop. Nelson Grant & Sons was open for business. Bosch took the last drink of his coffee and got out of the Cherokee. It was midmorning and traffic was thick on Sunset but the sidewalks and shops of Sunset Plaza were deserted. It was a shopping and eating destination largely favored by European visitors, and things usually didn’t start stirring until lunchtime and later.
There appeared to be no one in the store when Bosch entered, setting off a low chime somewhere in the back. A few seconds later the man he had seen before stepped out from a back room, his mouth full and chewing. He took a position behind the center segment of the U-shaped glass display counter and held up a finger, asking for a moment. He finally swallowed whatever he was eating and smiled and asked Bosch if he could help him.
The Crossing Page 17