Lost Light (13 page)

“You get back to Vegas much?” I asked him.

He answered without looking back at me. He kept his eyes on the plaza and the windows of the building looming above.

“Whenever I get the chance. Have to go in disguise. A lot of people over there don’t like me.”

“I can imagine.”

His undercover work coupled with my team’s homicide investigation had toppled a major underworld figure and most of his minions.

“I saw your wife over there about a month ago,” he said. “Playing cards. I think it was at the Bellagio. She had a nice stack of chips in front of her.”

He knew Eleanor Wish from that first case in Vegas. That was when and where I had married her.

“Ex-wife,” I said. “But that wasn’t why I was asking.”

“Sure, I know.”

Seemingly satisfied with the view he opened the door and got out. He looked back in at me and waited for me to say something. I nodded.

“I’ll take your case, Roy.”

He nodded back.

“Then call me anytime. And watch yourself out there,
podjo.
”

He gave me the rogue’s got-you-last smile and closed the door before I could say anything.

 

A
round the detective squad rooms of the LAPD’s numerous stations the state of Idaho is called Blue Heaven. It’s the goal line, the final destination for a good number of the detectives who go the distance, put in their twenty-five years and then cash out. I hear there are whole neighborhoods up there full of ex-cops from L.A. living side by side by side. Realtors from Coeur d’Alene and Sandpoint run business-card-size ads in the police union newsletter. In every issue.

Of course some cops turn in the badge and set out for Nevada to bake in the desert and pick up part-time work in the casinos. Some disappear into northern California—there are more retired cops in the backwoods of Humboldt County than there are marijuana growers, only the growers don’t know it. And some head south to Mexico, where there are still spots where an air-conditioned ranch house with an ocean view is affordable on an LAPD pension.

The point is, few stick around. They spend their adult lives trying to make sense of this place, trying to bring a small measure of order to it, and then can’t stand to stay here once their job is done. The work does that to you. It robs you of the ability to enjoy your accomplishment. There is no reward for making it through.

One of the few men I knew who turned in the badge but not the city was named Burnett Biggar. He gave the city its twenty-five years—the last half of it in South Bureau homicide—and then retired to open up a small business with his son near the airport. Biggar & Biggar Professional Security was on Sepulveda near La Tijera. The building was nondescript, the offices unpretentious. Biggar’s business was primarily geared toward providing security systems and patrols to the warehouse industries around the airport. The last time I had spoken to him—which was probably two years earlier—he had told me he had more than fifty employees and business was going good.

But out of the other side of his mouth he confided that he missed what he called the real work. The vital work, the work that made a difference. Protecting a warehouse full of blue jeans made in Taiwan could be profitable. But it didn’t even begin to touch what you got out of putting a stone killer on the floor and the cuffs on his wrists. It wasn’t even close, and that was what Biggar missed. It was because of that I thought I could approach him for help with what I wanted to do for Lawton Cross.

There was a small waiting room with a coffee machine but I wasn’t there that long. Burnett Biggar came down a hallway and invited me back to his office. As befitting his name, he was a large man. I had to follow him down the hallway rather than walk next to him. His head was shaved, which was a new look for him as far as I knew.

“So Big, I see you traded the Julius for the Jordan, huh?”

He rubbed a hand over his polished scalp.

“Had to do it, Harry. It’s the style. And I’m getting gray.”

“Aren’t we all.”

He led me into his office. It wasn’t small and it wasn’t big. It was basic, with wood paneling and framed commendations, news clips and photos from his days with the department. It was probably all very impressive to the clients.

Biggar swung around behind a cluttered desk and pointed me to a chair in front of it. As I sat down I noticed a framed slogan on the wall behind him. It said “Biggar & Biggar is getting Better & Better.”

Biggar leaned forward and folded his arms on his desk.

“So, Harry Bosch, I don’t think I was expecting to see you maybe ever again. It’s funny seeing you in that chair.”

“Funny seeing you, too. I don’t think I was expecting it either.”

“You come here for a job? I heard you quit last year. You were the last guy I ever thought about quitting.”

“Nobody goes the distance, Big. And I appreciate the offer but I already have a job. I’m just looking for a little help.”

Biggar smiled, the skin pulling tight around his eyes. He was intrigued. He knew I wasn’t ever going to be the corporate or industrial security type.

“I never heard you ask for help on a goddamn thing. What do you need?”

“I need a setup. Electronic surveillance. One room, nobody can know the camera is there.”

“How big’s the room?”

“Like a bedroom. Maybe fifteen by fifteen.”

“Ah, man, Harry, don’t go down that road. You start that sort of snooping and you’ll lose sight of yourself. Come work for me. I can find some —”

“No, it’s nothing like that. It’s actually an offshoot of a homicide I’m working. The guy’s in a wheelchair. He sits and watches TV all day. I just want to be able to make sure he’s okay, you know? There’s something going on with the wife. At least I think so.”

“You mean like abuse?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Something.”

“Does the guy know you’re going to do this?”

“No.”

“But you’ve got access to the room?”

“Pretty much. Think you can help me out?”

“Well, we got cameras. But you have to understand most of our work is industrial application. Heavy-duty stuff. Sounds to me like all you need is a nanny cam, something that you can just pick up at Radio Shack.”

I shook my head.

“I don’t want to be too obvious about it. The guy was a cop.”

Biggar nodded, digested it quickly and stood up.

“Well, come on back to the tech room and take a look at what we’ve got. Andre’s back there and he can fix you up.”

He led me back into the hallway and toward the back of the building. We entered the tech room, which was about the size of a double garage and was crowded with workbenches and shelves of all manner of electronics equipment. There were three men gathered around one of the workbenches. They were looking at the screen of a small television. A grainy black-and-white surveillance tape was playing. I recognized one of the men, the largest, as Andre Biggar, Burnett’s son. I had never met him but I knew it was him by his size and resemblance to Burnett. Right down to the shaved scalp.

Introductions were made and Andre explained that he was reviewing a tape showing a burglary of a client’s warehouse. His father explained what I was looking for and the son led me to another workbench, where he could display and review equipment. He showed me cameras housed in a vase, a lamp, a picture frame and finally a clock. Thinking about how Lawton Cross had complained about not being able to see the time on his television, I stopped Andre right there.

“This will do. How does it work?”

It was a round clock about ten inches across.

“This is a classroom clock. You want to put this on the wall of a bedroom? It will stick out like tits on a —”

“Andre,” his father said.

“It’s not being used as a bedroom,” I said. “It’s like a TV room. And the subject told me he can’t see the time on the corner of the screen on CNN. So this will make sense when I bring it in.”

Andre nodded.

“Okay. You want sound? Color?”

“Sound, yes. Color would be good but not necessary.”

“All right. Are you going to transmit, or you want to go self-contained?”

I looked at him blankly and he knew I didn’t understand.

“I build these two ways. One is you have a camera in the clock and you transmit picture and sound to a receiver that records it on video. You would have to find a secure place for the recorder within about a hundred feet to be sure. Are you going to be outside the house in a van or something?”

“I wasn’t planning on it.”

“Okay, the second option is to go digital and put everything in the camera and record internally to a digital tape or memory card. The drawback is capacity. With a digital tape you get about two hours real time, then you have to change it out. With a card you get even less.”

“That won’t work. I was only planning to check on it every few days.”

I started thinking of how I would be able to hide the receiver inside the house. Maybe the garage. I could pretend I was going to the garage to throw something away and I could hide the receiver somewhere Danny Cross wouldn’t see it.

“Well, we can slow the recording down if we need to.”

“How?”

“A number of different ways. First off we put the camera on a clock. Turn it off, say, midnight to eight. We can also stagger the FPS and lengthen —”

“FPS?”

“The recorded frames per second. It makes the image jump, though.”

“What about sound? Does that jump, too?”

“No, sound is separate. You’d get full sound.”

I nodded but wasn’t sure I wanted to lose any of the visual recording.

“We can also put it on a motion sensor. This guy you say is in a wheelchair, does he move around a lot?”

“No, he can’t. He’s paralyzed. Most of the time I think he just sits there staring at the TV.”

“Any pets?”

“I don’t think so.”

“So the only time there is real movement in the room is when the caregiver comes in, and that’s who you want to watch. Am I right?”

“Right.”

“No problem then. This will work. We put a motion sensor on it and a two-gig memory card and you’ll probably stretch it out a couple days.”

“That’ll work.”

I nodded and looked at Burnett. I was impressed with his son. Andre looked like he should be out breaking quarterbacks in half. But he had found a specialty in life dealing with circuits and microprocessors. I could see the pride in Burnett’s eyes.

“Give me fifteen minutes to put it together and then I’ll come show you how to install it and how to switch out the memory card.”

“Sounds good.”

I sat with Burnett in his office and we talked about the department and a couple of the cases that we had worked together. One case had involved a hired killer who had murdered both the intended target in South L.A. and then his employer in Hollywood when the employer failed to pay the second half of the agreed-upon fee. We had worked it together for a month, my team and Biggar and his partner, who was named Miles Manley. We broke it when Big and Manley, as the pair were called, came up with a witness in the target victim’s neighborhood who remembered seeing a white man on the day of the shooting and could describe his car, a black Corvette with red leather interior. The car matched the vehicle used by the second victim’s next-door neighbor. He confessed after a lengthy interrogation conducted alternately by Biggar and me.

“It’s always something small like that,” Biggar said while leaning back behind his desk. “That’s what I loved best about it. Not knowing where that little break was going to come from.”

“I know what you mean.”

“So you miss it?”

“Yeah. But I’ll get it back. I’m starting to now.”

“You mean the feeling, not the job.”

“Right. How about you, you still missing it?”

“I’m making more money than I need here but, yeah, I miss the juice. The job gave me the juice and I don’t get it shuffling rent-a-cops around and setting up cameras. Be careful what you do, Harry. You might end up successful like me and then you sit around remembering the old days, thinking they were a lot better than they were.”

“I’ll be careful, Big.”

Biggar nodded, pleased that he had dispensed his dose of advice for the day.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, Harry, but I’m guessing this guy in the chair is Lawton Cross, huh?”

I hesitated but decided it didn’t matter.

“Yeah, it’s him. I’m working something else and it crossed his path. I went to see him and he said some stuff. I just want to make sure. You know.”

“Good luck with it. I remember his wife, saw her a couple times at things. She was a nice lady.”

I nodded. I knew what he was saying, that he hoped Cross wasn’t being victimized by his wife.

“People can change,” I said. “I’m going to find out.”

Andre Biggar came in a few minutes later carrying a toolbox, a laptop computer and the camera clock in a box. He took me to school on electronic surveillance. The clock was rigged and ready. All I needed to do was mount it on a wall and plug it in. When I adjusted the time, I would activate the surveillance by pushing the dial all the way in. To switch out the memory card I just had to remove the backing of the clock and pop the card out of the camera. Easy.

“Okay, so once I take the card out, how do I look at what I’ve got?”

Andre nodded and showed me how to plug the memory card into the side of the laptop computer. He then went through the keyboard commands that would bring up the surveillance recording on the computer’s screen.

“It’s simple. Just take care of the equipment and bring it all back. We’ve got a lot of bread invested in it.”

I didn’t want to tell him that it wasn’t simple enough for me. I seized on the financial side of the equation as a way of avoiding revealing my technical shortcomings.