Angels Flight (10 page)

Rider made her way into the bushes.

“Find anything?”

“Nothing good. I’m just trying to figure out where this guy would have hidden from Elias. This could have been as good a spot as any. Elias wouldn’t see him, he’d come out after Elias walked by, move up behind him at the train car.”

“Maybe he didn’t need to hide. Maybe they walked here together.”

Bosch looked at her and nodded.

“Maybe. As good as anything I’m coming up with in here.”

“What about the bus bench?”

“Too open, too well lighted. If it was someone Elias had reason to fear, he’d’ve seen him.”

“What about a disguise? He could have sat in the bus stop in a disguise.”

“There’s that.”

“You’ve already considered all of this but you let me go on talking, saying things you already know.”

He didn’t say anything. He handed the flashlight back to Rider and headed out of the bushes. He looked over at the bus stop once more and felt sure he was right in his thinking. The bus stop hadn’t been used. Rider came up next to him and followed his gaze.

“Hey, did you know Terry McCaleb over at the bureau?” she asked.

“Yeah, we worked a case once. Why, you know him?”

“Not really. But I’ve seen him on TV. He doesn’t look like Clint Eastwood, if you ask me.”

“Yeah, not really.”

Bosch saw Chastain and Baker had crossed the street and were standing in the hollow created by the closed roll-up doors at the entrance of the huge Grand Central Market. They were looking at something on the ground.

Bosch and Rider walked over.

“Got something?” Rider asked.

“Maybe, maybe not,” Chastain said.

He pointed to the dirty, worn tiles at his feet.

“Cigarette butts,” Baker said. “Five of them — same brand. Means somebody was waiting here a while.”

“Could have been a homeless,” Rider said.

“Maybe,” Baker replied. “Could’ve been our shooter.”

Bosch wasn’t that impressed.

“Any of you smokers?” he asked.

“Why?” Baker asked.

“Because then you’d see what this probably is. What is it you see when you go in the front doors at Parker Center?”

Chastain and Baker looked puzzled.

“Cops?” Baker tried.

“Yeah, but cops doing what?”

“Smoking,” Rider said.

“Right. No smoking in public buildings anymore, so the smokers gather round the front doors. This market is a public facility.”

He pointed at the cigarette butts crushed on the tiles.

“It doesn’t necessarily mean somebody was waiting there a long time. I think it means somebody in the market came out five times during the day for smokes.”

Baker nodded but Chastain refused to acknowledge the deduction.

“Still could be our guy,” he said. “Where else did he wait, the bushes over there?”

“He could have. Or like Kiz said, maybe he didn’t wait. Maybe he walked right up to the train with Elias. Maybe Elias thought he was with a friend.”

Bosch reached into his jacket pocket and took out a plastic evidence bag. He handed it to Chastain.

“Or maybe I’m all wrong and you’re all right. Bag ’em and tag ’em, Chastain. Make sure they get to the lab.”

A few minutes later Bosch was finished with his survey of the lower crime scene. He got on the train, picked up his briefcase where he had left it and moved up the stairs to one of the benches near the upper door. He sat down heavily, almost dropping onto the hard bench. He was beginning to feel fatigue take over and wished he had gotten some sleep before Irving’s call had come. The excitement and adrenaline that accompany a new case caused a false high that always wore off quickly. He wished he could have a smoke and then maybe a quick nap. But only one of the two was possible at the moment, and he would have to find an all-night market to get the smokes. Again he decided against it. For some reason he felt that his nicotine fast had become part of his vigil for Eleanor. He thought that if he smoked all would be lost, that he would never hear from her again.

“What are you thinking, Harry?”

He looked up. Rider was in the doorway of the train, coming aboard.

“Nothing. Everything. We’re really just getting started on this. There’s a lot to do.”

“No rest for the weary.”

“Say that again.”

His pager sounded and he grabbed it off his belt with the urgency of a man who has had one go off in a movie theater. He recognized the number on the display but couldn’t remember where he had seen it before. He took the phone out of his briefcase and punched it in. It was the home of Deputy Chief Irvin Irving.

“I spoke with the chief,” he said. “He will handle Reverend Tuggins. He is not to be your concern.”

Irving put a sneer into the word Reverend.

“Okay. He isn’t.”

“So where are we?”

“We’re still at the scene, just finishing up. We need to canvass the building over here for witnesses, then we’ll clear out. Elias kept an apartment downtown. That was where he was headed. We need to search that and his office as soon as the search warrants are signed.”

“What about next of kin on the woman?”

“Perez should be done by now, too.”

“Tell me how it went at the Elias home.”

Since Irving had not asked before, Bosch assumed he was asking now because the chief of police wanted to know. Bosch quickly went over what had happened and Irving asked several questions about the reaction of Elias’s wife and son. Bosch could tell he asked them from the standpoint of public relations management. He knew that, just as with Preston Tuggins, the way in which Elias’s family reacted to his murder would have a direct bearing on how the community reacted.

“So it does not at this time sound as though we can enlist the widow or the son in helping us contain things, correct?”

“As of now, that’s correct. But once they get over the initial shock, maybe. You also might want to talk to the chief about calling the widow personally. I saw his picture on the wall in the house with Elias. If he’s talking to Tuggins, maybe he could also talk to the widow about helping us out.”

“Maybe.”

Irving switched gears and told Bosch that his office’s conference room on the sixth floor of Parker Center was ready for the investigators. He said that the room was unlocked at the moment but in the morning Bosch would be given keys. Once the investigators moved in, the room was to remain locked at all times. He said that he would be in by ten and was looking forward to a more expanded rundown of the investigation at the team meeting.

“Sure thing, Chief,” Bosch said. “We should be in from the canvass and the searches by then.”

“Make sure you are. I will be waiting.”

“Right.”

Bosch was about to disconnect when he heard Irving’s voice.

“Excuse me, Chief?”

“One other matter. I felt because of the identity of one of the victims in this case that it was incumbent upon me to notify the inspector general. She seemed — how do I put this — she seemed acutely interested in the case when I explained the facts we had at that time. Using the word acutely is probably an understatement.”

Carla Entrenkin. Bosch almost cursed out loud but held it back. The inspector general was a new entity in the department: a citizen appointed by the Police Commission as an autonomous civilian overseer with ultimate authority to investigate or oversee investigations. It was a further politicizing of the department. The inspector general answered to the police commission which answered to the city council and the mayor. And there were other reasons Bosch almost cursed as well. Finding Entrenkin’s name and private number in Elias’s phone book bothered him. It opened up a whole set of possibilities and complications.

“Is she coming out here to the scene?” he asked.

“I think not,” Irving said. “I waited to call so that I could say the scene was clearing. I saved you that headache. But do not be surprised if you hear directly from her in the daylight.”

“Can she do that? I mean, talk to me without going through you? She’s a civilian.”

“Unfortunately, she can do whatever she wants to. That is how the Police Commission set up the job. So what it means is that this investigation, wherever it goes, it better be seamless, Detective Bosch. If it is not, we will be hearing from Carla Entrenkin about it.”

“I understand.”

“Good, then all we need is an arrest and all will be fine.”

“Sure, Chief.”

Irving disconnected without acknowledging. Bosch looked up. Chastain and Baker were stepping onto the train.

“There’s only one thing worse than having the IAD tagging along on this,” he whispered to Rider. “That’s the inspector general watching over our shoulders.”

Rider looked at him.

“You’re kidding? Carla I’mthinkin’ is on this?”

Bosch almost smiled at Rider’s use of the nickname bestowed on Entrenkin by an editorialist in the police union’s Thin Blue Line newsletter. She was called Carla I’mthinkin’ because of her tendency toward slow and deliberate speech whenever addressing the Police Commission and criticizing the actions or members of the department.

Bosch would have smiled but the addition of the inspector general to the case was too serious.

“Nope,” he said. “Now we got her, too.”

Chapter 9

A
T the top of the hill they found Edgar and Fuentes had returned from notifying Catalina Perez’s family of her death, and Joe Dellacroce had returned from Parker Center with completed and signed search warrants. Court-approved searches were not always needed for the home and business of the victim of a homicide. But it made good sense to get warrants in high-profile cases. Such cases attracted high-profile attorneys if they eventually resulted in arrest. These attorneys invariably created their high profiles by being thorough and good at what they did. They exploited mistakes, took the frayed seams and loose ends of cases and ripped open huge holes — often big enough for their clients to escape through. Bosch was already thinking that far ahead. He knew he had to be very careful.

Additionally, he believed a warrant was particularly necessary to search Elias’s office. There would be numerous files on police officers and cases pending against the department. These cases would most likely proceed after being taken on by new attorneys, and Bosch needed to balance the preservation of attorney-client privacy with the need to investigate the killing of Howard Elias. The investigators would no doubt need to proceed carefully while handling these files. It was the reason he had called the district attorney’s office and asked Janis Langwiser to come to the scene.

Bosch approached Edgar first, taking him by the arm and nudging him over to the guardrail overlooking the steep drop-off to Hill Street. They were out of earshot of the others.

“How’d it go?”

“It went the way they all go. About a million other places I’d rather be than watching the guy get the news. Know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I know. You just tell him or did you ask him some questions?”

“We asked, but we didn’t get very many answers. The guy said his wife was a housecleaner and she had a gig somewhere over here. She took the bus over. He couldn’t give an address. Said his wife kept all of that stuff in a little notebook she carried.”

Bosch thought for a moment. He didn’t remember any notebook in the evidence inventory. Balancing his briefcase on the guardrail, he opened it and took out the clipboard on which he had the accumulated paperwork from the crime scene. On top was the yellow copy of the inventory Hoffman had given him before he had left. It listed Victim #2’s belongings but there was no notebook.

“Well, we’ll have to check with him again later on. We didn’t get any notebook.”

“Well, send Fuentes back. The husband didn’t speak English.”

“All right. Anything else?”

“No. We did the usual checklist. Any enemies, any problems, anybody giving her trouble, anybody stalking her, so on and so forth. Nada. The husband said she wasn’t worried about anything.”

“Okay. What about him?”

“He looked legit. Like he got hit in the face with the big frying pan called bad luck. You know?”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Hit hard. And there was as much surprise there as anything else.”

“Okay.”

Bosch looked around to make sure they were not being overheard. He spoke low to Edgar.

“We’re going to split up now and go with the searches. I want you to take the apartment Elias kept over at The Place. I was — ”

“So that’s where he was going.”

“Looks like it. I was just up there with Chastain, did a drive-by. I want you to take your time this time. I also want you to start in his bedroom. Go to the bed and take the phone book out of the top drawer of the table with the phone on it. Bag it and seal it so nobody can look at it until we get everything back to the office.”

“Sure. How come?”

“I’ll tell you later. Just get to it before anybody else. Also, take the tape from the phone machine in the kitchen. There’s a message we want to keep.”

“Right.”

“Okay then.”

Bosch stepped away from the guardrail and approached Dellacroce.

“Any problems with the paper?”

“Not really — except for waking the judge twice.”

“Which judge?”

“John Houghton.”

“He’s okay.”

“Well, it didn’t sound like he appreciated having to do everything twice.”

“What did he say about the office?”

“Had me add in a line about preserving the sanctity of attorney-client privilege.”

“That’s it? Let me see.”

Dellacroce took the search warrants out of the inside pocket of his suit jacket and handed Bosch the one for the office at the Bradbury. Bosch scanned through the stock wording on the first page of the declaration and got to the part Dellacroce had talked about. It looked okay to him. The judge was still allowing the search of the office and the files, but was simply saying that any privileged information gleaned from the files must be germane to the murder investigation.

“What he’s saying is that we can’t go through the files and turn what we get over to the city attorney’s office to help defend those cases,” Dellacroce said. “Nothing goes outside our investigation.”