Bosch decided that there must be something else that had sent Long up the hill. He folded the photocopy and put it back into his jacket pocket. While he was doing it, he saw a man he believed was Wojciechowski walking out through the front door of the rehab center.
The man had a noticeable limp and was walking with the aid of a cane—black with flames painted on it. He wore blue jeans, a black T-shirt, and a leather vest with the Harley-Davidson insignia on the back. The traditional wings of the logo were broken. Bosch knew this was to indicate the rider had gone down, gotten hurt, and had survived.
“Cisco?” Bosch called.
The man stopped and turned back to see who had called out. Bosch caught up to him.
“You’re Cisco, right?”
“Maybe. Who are you?”
“Harry Bosch. Mickey Haller’s—”
“Investigator. Yeah, you took my job.”
“I was going to say brother. I didn’t take your job. I don’t want your job, and it will be there for you as soon as you’re ready to go back. I’m just working this one case for him and that’s it.”
Cisco put both hands on the cane. Bosch could tell that standing and walking weren’t his favorite pastimes at the moment. There were several benches lining the walkway, places for people to wait for those in rehab.
“Can we sit down for a minute?” Bosch asked.
He pointed to one of the benches. Cisco headed that way and seemed relieved to take his weight off his knee. He was a big man with massive arms and a powerful V-shaped torso, an inverted pyramid unsteady on its points of support.
“So this isn’t a coincidence?” he asked. “Mick told me you were in the Army, too.”
“I was in the Army and I’ve been in this place before, but this isn’t a coincidence,” Bosch said. “I came looking for you. I need to ask you a few questions.”
“About what?”
“Well, let’s start with your accident. Mickey told—”
“It was no accident.”
“Well, that’s what I want to know. Tell me what happened.”
“I don’t get it. Why?”
“You heard that Mickey got popped for a DUI, right?”
“Yeah. Your old pals the LAPD.”
“It was a setup. I think it was to hinder his efforts on the Foster case. I think the same thing might’ve happened with you. So what happened?”
Bosch could see a coldness set in Cisco’s eyes.
“It was fucking April Fools’ Day. I was on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, heading down toward Hollywood. The guy in the lane next to me pushes over and I had no choice; let him knock me down and go under his wheels or take my chances in the oncoming lanes. I almost made it.”
“What makes you think it was intentional?”
“I don’t think it. I know it. Two things. Number one, the guy didn’t stop. I mean, he didn’t even slow down. And number two, he knew what he was doing. Hell, I reached out and kicked the side of his car and he still kept coming. Steel-toe boot, man. He heard it. He knew I was there.”
“You saw the driver?”
Bosch started taking the photocopy back out of his coat pocket.
“No, I didn’t see him,” Cisco said. “The windows on the car were tinted too dark. Way beyond legal.”
Bosch left the photocopy in his pocket.
He knew that a favored tactic of the UC units in the LAPD was to smoke the windows of their cars beyond legal limits.
“What kind of car was it?”
“A Camaro. Burnt orange with black rims and yellow calipers. I got a good look at the wheels, you could say. Real up close and personal.”
“But I take it you didn’t get the plate.”
“Too busy trying to stay alive by that point. What’s in your pocket anyway? What were you going to show me?”
Bosch pulled out the photocopy.
“These are the two guys who pulled over Haller. I thought maybe you’d recognize one of them—if you had seen the driver.”
Cisco unfolded the page and looked at the two faces. They were just head shots, but in both, the top collars of police uniforms were evident.
“So you’re saying two cops might be behind all of this?” he said.
Bosch nodded.
“It’s beginning to look that way.”
“Jesus Christ. Rogue cops. What’ll they think of next?”
“I’m going to need you to keep all of this to yourself. Haller’s okay, but nobody else. It might fuck things up if it leaks.”
“You didn’t have to say that.”
“Right, sorry. So your accident, it occurred—”
“I told you, it was no accident.”
“Right, sorry, wrong word. So this attack occurred right after Haller got the Foster case. Had you started working the case yet?”
“Not in a big way. We had the case and we were gearing up for it, but the discovery hadn’t come in yet and so we were sort of waiting on the D.A. to cough up the murder book.”
Bosch nodded.
“So you really hadn’t begun.”
“Not really. Just sort of grasping at straws until we got our hands on those records. That’s where it all starts, you know?”
“Yeah, I get that. So ‘grasping at straws’—what does that mean?”
“Well, you always get your client’s side of the story and you can pursue that. Our guy said he had an alibi, so I looked into that and found we were a day late and a dollar short. The pro he said he was with got himself murdered.”
“James Allen.”
“That was the guy.”
“How deep did you go into that?”
“Not that deep. The guy was dead and we couldn’t talk to him, end of story. I had a couple calls into the LAPD guys on it but—big surprise—hadn’t heard anything back.”
“Do you think you did anything on the investigation that could have brought about the attack with the Camaro? Anything come to mind at all?”
Cisco thought for a moment and then shook his head.
“I really don’t, or else I would have already jumped on it, you know?”
“Yeah.”
Bosch realized that if there was a connection between Cisco being sent into oncoming traffic and Ellis and Long, then he was going to have to find it through other means.
“Sorry I’m not much help,” Cisco said.
“You gave me a solid description of the car. That’ll help.”
“I wish I knew something, but I don’t know what I did that would have brought them on. Mickey I get. But I had barely started on the case.”
“Well, you did something or they thought you were about to do something. Maybe they just wanted to put Haller in the hole by knocking out his investigator. Maybe we’ll never know.”
“Maybe.”
“Did you report the incident to the police?”
“Sure, but that was a waste of time.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Come on, man, look at me. The cops take one look at me and say ‘biker.’ They think whoever ran me off the road was doing the public a solid. I called them and they didn’t give a shit. The report went straight into the circular file. All it got me was my insurance payout, but the cops I never heard from again.”
There was a time when Bosch might have defended the LAPD against those kind of accusations. But he wasn’t in the fold anymore. He just nodded in an understanding way. The men exchanged cell numbers and then Bosch headed off, leaving Cisco on the bench. He said he was going to rest the knee a little longer before getting up and going to the parking lot.
38
It wasn’t that Bosch had expected Cisco to identify one of his attackers as Ellis or Long, but he had hoped for further confirmation of his belief that the two vice cops were behind everything that had happened involving the case.
Still, he was undaunted and knew of other ways to close in on the proof. First stop on that path was the Hollywood Athletic Club. He went directly from Westwood an
d along the way called Haller, who picked up right away.
“Good morning,” he said cheerily. “I was just about to call you.”
“I was going to leave a message,” Bosch said. “Last night you said you had court.”
“I did, but I’m done.”
“You sound happy. Let me guess, you got another case dismissed and another drug dealer goes free.”
“I’m happy but not because of another case. I have news. But you go first. You called me.”
“All right, well, I just came from talking to Cisco. He never got a look at whoever ran him off the road. But he did describe the car—right down to the yellow brake calipers. It was a burnt-orange Camaro with black rims. I was calling to see if it rings any bells with you.”
There was a moment before Haller answered.
“No,” he finally said. “Should it?”
“What about the car that pulled you over on the DUI?” Bosch asked.
“No, it wasn’t a Camaro. It was a Dodge. A Challenger or a Charger. I didn’t look all that closely but definitely not a Camaro.”
“You sure?”
“Hey, I’m the Lincoln Lawyer. I know cars. Plus it wasn’t burnt orange. It was jet-black. Like the souls of those two fuckers who were riding in it.”
“Okay, well, that’s all I had. Strike two. First Cisco, now you. Lift my spirits. What’s your news?”
“Got our DNA back today.”
“And Foster isn’t a match.”
“No, not quite. He’s a match, all right.”
“And that’s what’s making you so happy?”
“No, the condom trace evidence is what’s doing that. You were right. They found it in the sample.”
Bosch thought about that. It was a moment of vindication. The finding supported the case theory that semen from Da’Quan Foster could have been transported to the murder scene and planted in and on the body of Alexandra Parks.
“Next, they have to try to match it to a specific brand,” Haller said. “Allen’s brand. We get that, and they won’t be able to wriggle out of this by claiming he had a condom all along and it just broke.”
“Okay,” Bosch said.
“You know, usually I feel like I’m shooting at the state’s case with a damn BB gun. I’m beginning to think we got ourselves a shotgun on this one. Double-barrel. We are going to blow big holes in their case. Big fucking holes.”
Haller sounded almost giddy about the DNA analysis. But for Bosch the upcoming trial was still too far distant. Long and Ellis were running around loose and five weeks was too long to wait to get something done.
“All you think about is the trial,” Bosch snapped.
“Because that’s my job,” Haller said. “Our job. What’s going on, Harry? I thought this would be good news for you. You’re on the right track, man.”
“What’s going on is Ellis and Long are out there doing what they do. They’re watching my house, they know about my kid. I can’t prove it yet but I think they took out Cisco because somehow he threatened them, and now I’m threatening them. The trial is more than a month away and we have to be thinking about the right now. You get Foster off at trial and so what? The prosecution will spin it, call it smoke and mirrors and not do anything about these two guys. What happens then?”
Haller took some time to compose his response.
“Harry, you spent all those years chasing killers and I know that’s your natural instinct, to do it here,” he said. “But I keep telling you, we are working this from a different angle. It’s not what you’re used to, but our responsibility above all is to the client. We can’t do anything that may hurt the possibility of a successful defense at trial. Now, I know it’s going to take some getting used to but—”
“Don’t worry about it,” Bosch interrupted. “I don’t want to get used to it. After this, I’m done.”
“Well, suit yourself. We’ll talk about it down the line.”
“What about us going into LAPD and showing what we got? I can make the case that they need to take these two off the street. At the very least, they’ll put eyeballs on them.”
“Not going to happen,” Haller said emphatically. “We do that and we are giving the prosecution five weeks to prepare for what they’ll know we are bringing.”
“Maybe there won’t even be a trial. They bring these two in, play them against each other, and one guy coughs up the other—oldest trick in the book. End of case.”
“Too risky. I’m not going to do it. And you aren’t either.”
Bosch was silent. He had to consider Haller’s motives. Was he really protecting his client’s chances at a not-guilty verdict or preserving his own shot at glory at trial? A murder case provided the biggest stage in the courthouse. If Haller won at trial, he’d be the hero and prospective clients would start lining up. If the case never made it to trial, somebody else would get the applause.
“You still there?” Haller asked.
“Yeah,” Bosch said. “We’re not done talking about this.”
“All right, all right. Tell you what, let’s meet tomorrow morning. Breakfast at Du-Par’s. How’s eight o’clock sound? You make your case to me. I’ll listen.”
“Which Du-Par’s?”
“Farmer’s Market.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Where are you headed now?”
“Hollywood. To check something out.”
Haller waited for more but Bosch wasn’t giving. He tried to shake off his upset and refocus.
“I’ll let you know if it pans out,” he finally said.
“Okay,” Haller said. “See you tomorrow.”
Bosch disconnected, pulled the earbud out, and dropped the phone into one of the cup holders in the center console. He regretted his outburst with Haller but there was nothing to do about it now. He focused on his driving as he took Fairfax up from Santa Monica to Sunset.
A few years earlier it was discovered that members of an Armenian street gang had rented an office suite in the twelve-story building located at Sunset and Wilcox. The office was on the seventh floor and at the back of the building, where its windows overlooked the LAPD Hollywood Station with a full view of its rear door and adjoining parking lots. By posting someone behind a telescope in the office twenty-four hours a day the gang was able to gather intelligence on the undercover Narcotics and Vice Units as well as the gang-suppression teams. They learned the times when the various units were on duty, when they were out on the streets, and the general direction they went after mounting up in the parking lot and heading through the gate.
At some point an informant revealed the existence of the spy post to a DEA handler and it was shut down in an FBI raid that thoroughly embarrassed the department. The FBI seized surveillance logbooks that had individual code names for various members of the Hollywood Station units, describing both their personal cars and their undercover vehicles. It was also discovered that the Armenian gang had been selling the fruits of their intelligence gathering to other gangs and criminal enterprises operating in Hollywood.
The department instituted several procedural changes designed to prevent such embarrassment from happening again. Among them was moving the undercover car pool from the station lot to an off-site lot where space was donated by a supportive local business—the Hollywood Athletic Club. As with most secrets within the department, the location of the undercover lot was not so secret. The spy post scandal had occurred after Bosch moved to the Open-Unsolved Unit in the downtown PAB, but even he had heard where they had moved the UC car lot to.
The HAC was on Sunset and only a few blocks from the Hollywood Station. Its parking lot was behind it and was surrounded by buildings on three sides and a fence on the fourth that ran along Selma. There was no parking attendant on-site but a key card was required to enter through the gate.
Bosch didn’t have a key card but he didn’t need to enter the lot. He parked at the curb on Selma, got out, and walked to the fence. He knew it was a good time to in
ventory the UC cars, because almost all of them would be in the lot. It was only 10 a.m. and the vice, drug, and gang teams that used the cars kept the same hours as their prey. That is, they started operations in the afternoons and worked into the nights. The mornings were for sleeping late.
The pool cars used by the undercover teams were changed out or swapped with other divisions at least once a year to avoid familiarity on the street. Some were pulled out of circulation for a month here and there as well. Some were traded with other divisions so each would have fresh cars. It had been two months since Cisco Wojciechowski had been run into oncoming traffic and so there was a possibility that the burnt-orange Camaro that Bosch was looking for would be gone already. The fact that Ellis and Long were using a different UC car when they bagged Haller on the DUI seemed to indicate that the car had been changed over. On the other hand, Bosch thought, if they had committed a crime in the Camaro, they might trade it in right away for a different car. A jet-black Dodge, for example.
Either way Bosch had to make sure, and his diligence paid off. He spotted the familiar front lights of a Camaro that was backed into a parking spot against the rear wall of the lot. It had a heavy layer of smog dust on its windshield and obviously had not been driven for quite a while. He had to move down the fence a few paces to get a side angle on it and confirm its color: burnt orange.
He used his phone to take a photo of the car. He then texted it to the number Cisco had given him earlier with a question: Is this the car?
Bosch walked back to his rental. Cisco answered as he was opening the door: I think so. Looks like it.
Bosch got into the car. He felt the spark ignite in his bloodstream. Seeing the Camaro confirmed only a small part of his theory and was proof of nothing, but the charge of adrenaline came nonetheless. He was putting pieces of the puzzle together, and there was always a charge when even the smallest pieces fit. The Camaro was important. If Ellis and Long were using it when they ran Cisco off the road, they may have been using it a few weeks earlier when James Allen’s body was transported to the alley off of El Centro.
He got back in the Chrysler and worked his way down to Santa Monica and then over to the Hollywood Forever cemetery. He parked in front of the office, went in, and found Oscar Gascon behind the desk in his little office. He recognized Bosch from the prior visit.
The Crossing Page 24