Michael Connelly (143 page)

He quickly got out of the car again, crossed the street and moved up the block to Mora’s house. The wide porch completely
cloaked the front door in shadows. Bosch knocked on it and while he waited he turned to look at the house across the street.
There were lights on downstairs and he could see the bluish glow of a TV on the curtains behind one of the upstairs rooms.

Nobody answered. He stepped back and appraised the front windows. He saw no warnings about security systems, no alarm tape
on the glass. He looked between the bars and through the glass into what he believed was the living room. He looked up into
the corners of the ceiling, searching for the dull glow of a motion detector. As he expected, there was nothing. Every cop
knew the best defense was a good lock or a mean dog. Or both.

He went back to the door, opened the pouch and took out the penlight. There was black electrical tape over the end so that
when he switched it on only a narrow beam of light was emitted. He knelt down and looked at the locks on the door. Mora had
a dead bolt and a common key-entry knob. Bosch put the penlight in his mouth and aimed the beam at the dead bolt. With two
picks, a tension wrench and a hook, he began working. It was a good lock with twelve teeth, not a Medeco but a cheaper knockoff.
It took Bosch ten minutes to turn it. By then sweat had come down out of his hair and was stinging his eyes.

He pulled his shirt out of his pants and wiped his face. He also wiped the picks, which had become slippery with sweat, and
took a quick look at the house across the street. Nothing seemed changed, nothing seemed amiss. The TV was still on upstairs.
He turned back and put the beam on the knob. Then he heard a car coming. He cut the light and crawled behind the porch riser
until it had passed.

Back at the door he palmed the knob and was working the hook in when he realized there was no pressure on the knob. He turned
it and the door opened. The knob hadn’t been locked. It made sense, Bosch knew. The dead bolt was the deterrent. If a burglar
got by that, the knob lock was a gimme. Why bother locking it?

He stood in the darkness of the entrance without moving, letting his eyes adjust. When he was in Vietnam he could drop into
one of Charlie’s tunnels and he would have night eyes in fifteen seconds. Now it took him longer. Out of practice, he guessed.
Or getting old. He stood in the entry for nearly a minute. When the shapes and shadows filled in, he called out, “Hey, Ray?
You here? You left your door unlocked. Hello?”

There was no answer. He knew Mora wouldn’t have a dog, not living alone and working a cop’s hours.

Bosch took a few steps farther into the house and looked at the dark shapes of the furniture in the living room. He had creeped
places before, even a cop’s house, but the feeling always seemed new, that feeling of exhilaration, jagged fear and panic,
all in one. It felt as though his center of gravity had dropped into his balls. He felt a strange power that he knew he could
never describe to anyone.

For a brief moment the panic rose and threatened the delicate balance of his thoughts and feelings. The headline flashed in
his mind — COP ON TRIAL CAUGHT IN BREAK-IN — but he quickly dismissed it. To think about failure was to invite failure. He
saw the stairs and immediately moved toward them. His thought was that Mora would keep his trophies either in his bedroom
or near a TV, which also could mean both. Rather than work his way toward the bedroom, he would start there.

The second floor was divided into two bedrooms with a bathroom in between them. The bedroom to the right had been converted
to a carpeted gym. There was an assortment of chrome-plated equipment, a rowing machine, a stationary bike and a contraption
Bosch didn’t recognize. There was a rack of free weights and a bench press with a chest bar across it. On one wall of the
room was a floor-to-ceiling mirror. It was spidered by a shatter point about face high in the center. For a moment Bosch looked
at himself and studied his shattered reflection. He thought of Mora studying his own face there.

Bosch looked at his watch. It had already been thirty minutes since Mora had gone into the theater. He took out the radio.

“One, how’s he doin’?”

“He’s still inside. How’re you doing?”

“Just hanging around. Call if you need me.”

“Anything interesting on TV?”

“Not yet.”

Then Rollenberger’s voice came up.

“Teams One and Six, let’s drop the banter and use the radio for pertinent transmissions only. Team Leader, out.”

Neither Bosch nor Sheehan acknowledged him.

Bosch moved across the hallway into the other bedroom. This was where Mora slept. The bed was unmade and clothing was draped
over a chair by the window. Bosch peeled some of the tape off his light to give him a wider swath of vision.

On the wall over the bed he saw a portrait of Jesus, his eyes cast downward, his sacred heart visible in his chest. Bosch
moved to the bed table and held the light briefly on a framed photo that stood next to the alarm clock. It was a young blonde
woman and Mora. His ex-wife, he assumed. Her hair was bleached and Bosch recognized that she fit into the physical archetype
of the victims. Was Mora killing his ex-wife over and over? he wondered again. That would be one for Locke and the other headshrinkers
to decide. On the table behind the photo was a religious holy card. Bosch picked it up and put the light on it. It was a picture
of the Infant of Prague, a golden halo shooting up from behind the little king’s head.

The night table’s drawer contained mostly innocuous junk: playing cards, aspirin bottles, reading glasses, condoms — not the
brand favored by the Dollmaker — and a small telephone book. Bosch sat on the bed and leafed through the phone book. There
were several women listed by first names but he was not surprised to find none of the names of the women associated with the
Follower or Dollmaker cases listed.

He closed the drawer and put the light on the shelf beneath it. There he found a foot-high stack of explicit pornography magazines.
Bosch guessed there were more than fifty, their covers featuring glossy photos of couplings of all equations: male-female,
male-male, female-female, male-female-male, and so on. He flipped through a handful of them and saw a check mark made with
a Magic Marker on the top right corner of each cover, as he had seen Mora do with the magazines at his office. Mora was taking
his work home. Or had he brought the magazines here for another reason?

Looking at the magazines, Bosch felt a tightening in his crotch and some strange feeling of guilt descended on him. What about
me? he wondered. Am I doing more than my job here? Am I the voyeur? He put the stack back in place. He knew there were too
many magazines for him to go through to try to find victims of the Follower. And if he found any, what would that prove?

There was a tall oak armoire against the wall opposite the bed. Bosch opened its doors and found a television and videocassette
recorder inside. There were three videotape cassettes stacked on top of the TV. They were 120-minute tapes. He opened the
two drawers in the cabinet and found one more cassette in the top drawer. The bottom drawer contained a collection of store-bought
porno tapes. He slid a couple of these tapes out, but again there were too many of them and not enough time. His attention
was drawn to the four tapes used for home recording.

He turned on the TV and VCR and checked to see if there was another tape already inserted. There wasn’t. He put in one of
the tapes that had been stacked on top of the TV. It only showed static. He hit the fast-forward play button and watched as
the static continued until the end of the tape. It took him fifteen minutes to run through the three tapes that had been on
top of the television. Each was blank.

A curious thing, Bosch thought. He had to assume that the tapes had been used at one time because they were no longer in the
cardboard jackets and plastic wrap they came from the store in. Though he did not own a VCR, he was familiar with them and
it occurred to him that people usually did not erase their home tapes. They just taped new programs over the old ones. Why
had Mora taken the time to erase what had been on these tapes? He was tempted to take one of the blank tapes to have it analyzed
but decided it would be too risky. It would probably be missed by Mora.

The last home tape, the one from the top drawer, wasn’t blank. It contained scenes of an interior of a house. A child was
playing with a stuffed animal on the floor. Through the window behind the girl Bosch could see a snow-covered yard. Then a
man entered the video frame and hugged the girl. At first Bosch thought it was Mora. Then the man said, “Gabrielle, show Uncle
Ray how much you like the horsie.”

The girl hugged the stuffed horse and yelled, “Fankoo Uggle Way.”

Bosch turned the tape off, returned it to the armoire’s top drawer once again and then pulled both drawers out and looked
below them. Nothing else. He stepped up onto the bed so he could see on top of the armoire and there was nothing there, either.
He turned the equipment off and returned the armoire to the condition it was in when he opened it. He looked at his watch.
Nearly an hour had gone by now.

The walk-in closet was neatly lined on both sides with clothes on hangers. The floor had eight pairs of shoes parked toe-in
against the back wall. He found nothing else of interest and retreated into the bedroom. He took a quick look under the bed
and through the drawers of the bureau but found nothing of interest. He moved back down the stairs and quickly looked into
the living room but there was no TV. There was none in the kitchen or dining room either.

Bosch followed a hallway off the kitchen into the back of the house. There were three doors off the hallway and this area
appeared to be either a converted garage or an addition that was constructed in recent years. There were air-conditioning
vents in the ceiling of the hallway and the white pine flooring was much newer than the scarred and browned oak floors throughout
the rest of the first floor.

The first door opened into a laundry room. Bosch quickly opened the cabinets above the washer and dryer and found nothing
of interest. The next door was to a bathroom with newer fixtures than those he had seen in the bathroom upstairs.

The last door opened into a bedroom with a four-poster bed as its centerpiece. The coverlet was pink and it had the feel of
a woman’s room. It was the perfume, Bosch realized. But, still, the room did not have a lived-in feeling. It seemed more like
a room waiting for its occupant’s return. Bosch wondered if Mora might have a daughter away at college, or was this the room
his ex-wife used before she finally ended the marriage and left?

There was a TV and VCR on a cart in the corner. He went to it and opened the video storage drawer below the VCR but it was
empty except for a round metal object the size of a hockey puck. Bosch picked it up and looked at it but could not tell what
it was. He thought it might be from the weight set upstairs. He put it back and closed the drawer.

He opened the drawers of the white dresser but found nothing but women’s underwear in the top drawer. The second drawer held
a box containing a palette of varying colors of eye makeup and several brushes. There was also a round plastic container of
beige facial powder. The makeup containers were for home use, too large to carry in a purse and therefore could not have come
from any of the Follower’s victims. They belonged to whoever used this room.

There was nothing at all in the bottom three drawers. He looked at himself in the mirror above the bureau and saw he was sweating
again. He knew he was using too much time. He looked at his watch; sixty minutes had gone by now.

Bosch opened the closet door and immediately launched himself backward as a jolt of fear punched into his chest. He took cover
to the side of the door while drawing his gun.

“Ray! That you?”

No one answered. He realized he was leaning against the light switch for the deep, walk-in closet. He flicked it on and swung
into the doorway in a low crouch, his gun pointing at the man he had seen when he opened the door.

He quickly reached outside the door and killed the light. On the shelf above the clothes bar was a round Styrofoam ball on
which sat a wig of long black hair. Bosch caught his breath and stepped all the way into the closet. He studied the wig without
touching it. How does this fit? he wondered. He turned to his right and found more pieces of women’s sheer lingerie and a
few thin silk dresses on hangers. On the floor beneath them, parked toe-in to the wall, was a pair of red shoes with stiletto
heels.

On the other side of the closet, behind some clothes in dry-cleaner bags, stood a camera tripod. Bosch’s adrenaline began
flowing again at a quicker pace. He quickly raised his eyes and began looking among the boxes on the shelves above the clothing
bar. One box was marked with Japanese writing and he carefully pulled it down, finding it surprisingly heavy. Opening it,
he found a video camera and cassette recorder.

The camera was large and he recognized that it was not a department store–bought piece of equipment. It was more like the
kind of camera Bosch had seen used by TV news crews. It had a detachable industrial battery and a strobe. It was connected
by an eight-foot coaxial cable to the recorder. The recorder had a playback screen and editing controls.

He thought that Mora’s having such obviously expensive equipment was curious but he did not know what to make of it. He wondered
if the vice cop had seized it from a porno producer and never turned it in to the evidence lockup. He pressed a button that
opened the cassette housing on the recorder but it was empty. He repacked the equipment in the box and replaced it on the
shelf, all the while wondering why a man with such a camera would have only blank tapes. He realized, as he took another quick
look around the closet, that the tapes he had found so far might have recently been erased. He knew if that was the case,
Mora might have tumbled to the surveillance.