Michael Connelly (57 page)

Moore had been a sergeant heading up the division’s street narcotics unit. It was a night job and his unit worked the Boulevard
exclusively. It was known in the division that Moore had separated from his wife and replaced her with whiskey. Bosch had
found that out firsthand the one time he had spent time with the narc. He had also learned that there might be something more
than just marital problems and early burnout plaguing him. Moore had spoken obliquely of Internal Affairs and a personnel
investigation.

It all added up to a heavy dose of Christmas depression. As soon as Bosch heard they were starting a search for Cal Moore,
he knew. The man was dead.

And so did everyone else in the department, though nobody said this out loud. Not even the media said it. At first the department
tried to handle it quietly. Discreet questions at Moore’s apartment in Los Feliz. A few helicopter runs over the nearby hills
in Griffith Park. But then a TV reporter was tipped and all the other stations and the newspapers followed the story for the
ride. The media dutifully reported on the progress of the search for the missing cop, Moore’s photograph was pinned to the
bulletin board in the Parker Center press room and the weight of the department made the standard pleas to the public. It
was drama. Or, at least, it was good video; horseback searches, air searches, the police chief holding up the photo of the
darkly handsome and serious-looking sergeant. But nobody said they were looking for a dead man.

Bosch stopped the car for the light at Vine and watched a man wearing a sandwich board cross the street. His stride was quick
and jerky and his knees continuously popped the cardboard sign up in the air. Bosch saw there was a satellite photograph of
Mars pasted on the board with a large section of it circled. Written in large letters below was
REPENT
!
THE FACE OF THE LORD WATCHES US
! Bosch had seen the same photograph on the cover of a tabloid while standing in line at a Lucky store, but the tabloid had
claimed that the face was that of Elvis.

The light changed and he continued on toward Western. He thought of Moore. Outside of one evening spent drinking with him
at a jazz bar near the Boulevard, he had not had much interaction with Moore. When Bosch had been transferred to Hollywood
Division from RHD the year before, there had been hesitant handshakes and glad-to-know-yous from everyone in the division.
But people generally kept their distance. It was understandable, since he had been rolled out of RHD on an IAD beef, and Bosch
didn’t mind. Moore was one of those who didn’t go out of his way to do much more than nod when they passed in the hall or
saw each other at staff meetings. Which was also understandable since the homicide table where Bosch worked was in the first-floor
detective bureau and Moore’s squad, the Hollywood BANG — short for Boulevard Anti-Narcotics Group — was on the second floor
of the station. Still, there had been the one encounter. For Bosch it had been a meeting to pick up some background information
for a case he was working. For Moore it had been an opportunity to have many beers and many whiskeys.

Moore’s BANG squad had the kind of slick, media-grabbing name the department favored but in reality was just five cops working
out of a converted storage room and roaming Hollywood Boulevard at night, dragging in anybody with a joint or better in his
pocket. BANG was a numbers squad, created to make as many arrests as possible in order to help justify requests for more manpower,
equipment and, most of all, overtime in the following year’s budget. It did not matter that the DA’s office handed out probation
deals on most of the cases and kicked the rest. What mattered were those arrest statistics. And if Channel 2 or 4 or a
Times
reporter from the Westside insert wanted to ride along one night and do a story on the BANG squad, all the better. There
were numbers squads in every division.

At Western Bosch turned north and ahead he could see the flashing blue and yellow lights of the patrol cars and the lightning-bright
strobes of TV cameras. In Hollywood such a display usually signaled the violent end of a life or the premiere of a movie.
But Bosch knew nothing premiered in this part of town except thirteen-year-old hookers.

Bosch pulled to the curb a half block from the Hideaway and lit a cigarette. Some things about Hollywood never changed. They
just came up with new names for them. The place had been a run-down dump thirty years ago when it was called the El Rio. It
was a run-down dump now. Bosch had never been there but he had grown up in Hollywood and remembered. He had stayed in enough
places like it. With his mother. When she was still alive.

The Hideaway was a 1940s-era courtyard motel that during the day would be nicely shaded by a large banyan tree which stood
in its center. At night, the motel’s fourteen rooms receded into a darkness only the glow of red neon invaded. Harry noticed
that the
E
in the sign announcing
MONTHLY RATES
was out.

When he was a boy and the Hideaway was the El Rio, the area was already in decay. But there wasn’t as much neon and the buildings,
if not the people, looked fresher, less grim. There had been a Streamline Moderne office building that looked like an ocean
liner docked next to the motel. It had set sail a long time ago and another mini-mall was there now.

Looking at the Hideaway from his parked car, Harry knew it was a sorry place to stay the night. A sorrier place to die. He
got out and headed over.

Yellow crime scene tape was strung across the mouth of the courtyard and was manned by uniformed officers. At one end of the
tape bright lights from TV cameras focused on a group of men in suits. The one with the gleaming, shaven scalp was doing all
the talking. As Bosch approached, he realized that the lights were blinding them. They could not see past the interviewers.
He quickly showed his badge to one of the uniforms, signed his name on the Crime Scene Attendance Log the cop held on a clipboard
and slipped under the tape.

The door to room 7 was open and light from inside spilled out. The sound of an electric harp also wafted from the room and
that told Bosch that Art Donovan had caught the case. The crime scene tech always brought a portable radio with him. And it
was always tuned to The Wave, a new-age music channel. Donovan said the music brought a soothing calm to a scene where people
had killed or been killed.

Harry walked through the door, holding a handkerchief over his mouth and nose. It didn’t help. The odor that was like no other
assaulted him as soon as he passed the threshold. He saw Donovan on his knees dusting fingerprint powder onto the dials of
the air-conditioner unit in the wall below the room’s front, and only, window.

“Cheers,” Donovan said. He was wearing a painter’s mask to guard against the odor and the intake of the black powder. “In
the bathroom.”

Bosch took a look around, quickly, since it was likely he would be told to leave as soon as the suits discovered him. The
room’s queen-sized bed was made with a faded pink coverlet. There was a single chair with a newspaper on it. Bosch walked
over and noted that it was the
Times,
dated six days earlier. There was a bureau and mirror combination to the side of the bed. On top of it was an ashtray with
a single butt pressed into it after being half smoked. There was also a .38 Special in a nylon boot holster, a wallet and
a badge case. These last three had been dusted with the black fingerprint powder. There was no note on the bureau — the place
Harry would’ve expected it to be.

“No note,” he said, more to himself than Donovan.

“Nope. Nothing in the bathroom, either. Have a look. That is, if you don’t mind losing your Christmas dinner.”

Harry looked down the short hallway that went to the rear off the left side of the bed. The bathroom door was on the right
and he felt reluctance as he approached. He believed there wasn’t a cop alive who hadn’t thought at least once of turning
his own hand cold.

He stopped at the threshold. The body sat on the dingy white floor tile, its back propped against the tub. The first thing
to register on Bosch was the boots. Gray snakeskins with bulldog heels. Moore had worn them the night they had met for drinks.
One boot was still on the right foot and he could see the manufacturer’s symbol, an
S
like a snake, on the worn rubber heel. The left boot was off and stood upright next to the wall. The exposed foot, which
was in a sock, had been wrapped in a plastic evidence bag. The sock had once been white, Bosch guessed. But now it was grayish
and the limb was slightly bloated.

On the floor next to the door jamb was a twenty-gauge shotgun with side-by-side barrels. The stock was splintered along the
bottom edge. A four-inch-long sliver of wood lay on the tile and had been circled with a blue crayon by Donovan or one of
the detectives.

Bosch had no time to deliberate on these facts. He just tried to take it all in. He raised his eyes the length of the body.
Moore was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. His hands were dropped at his sides. His skin was gray wax. The fingers thick with
putrefaction, the forearms bulging like Popeye’s. Bosch saw a misshapen tattoo on the right arm, a devil’s grinning face below
a halo.

The body was slumped back against the tub and it almost appeared that Moore had rolled his head back as if to dip it into
the tub, maybe to wash his hair. But Bosch realized it only looked that way because most of the head was simply not there.
It had been destroyed by the force of the double-barrel blast. The light blue tiles that enclosed the tub area were awash
in dried blood. The brown drip trails all went down into the tub. Some of the tiles were cracked where shotgun pellets had
struck.

Bosch felt the presence of someone behind him. He turned into the stare of Assistant Chief Irvin Irving. Irving was wearing
no mask and holding no rag to his mouth and nose.

“Evening, Chief.”

Irving nodded and said, “What brings you here, Detective?”

Bosch had seen enough to be able to put together what had happened. He stepped away from the threshold, moved around Irving
and walked toward the front door. Irving followed. They passed two men from the medical examiner’s office who were wearing
matching blue jumpsuits. Outside the room Harry threw his handkerchief into a trash can brought to the scene by the cops.
He lit a cigarette and noticed that Irving was carrying a manila file in his hand.

“I picked it up on my scanner,” Bosch said. “Thought I’d come out since I’m supposed to be on call tonight. It’s my division,
it’s supposed to be my call.”

“Yes, well, when it was established who was in the room, I decided to move the case to Robbery-Homicide Division immediately.
Captain Grupa contacted me. I made the decision.”

“So it’s already been established that’s Moore in there?”

“Not quite.” He held up the manila file. “I ran by records and pulled his prints. They will be the final factor, of course.
There is also the dental — if there is enough left. But all other appearances lead to that conclusion. Whoever’s in there
checked in under the name Rodrigo Moya, which was the alias Moore used in BANG. And there’s a Mustang parked behind the motel
that was rented under that name. At the moment, I don’t think there is much doubt here among the collective investigative
team.”

Bosch nodded. He had dealt with Irving before, when the older man was a deputy chief in command of the Internal Affairs Division.
Now he was an AC, one of the top three men in the department, and his purview had been extended to include IAD, narcotics
intelligence and investigation, and all detective services. Harry momentarily debated whether he should risk pushing the point
about not getting the first call.

“I should have been called,” he said anyway. “It’s my case. You took it away before I even had it.”

“Well, Detective, it was mine to take and give away, wouldn’t you agree? There is no need to get upset. Call it streamlining.
You know Robbery-Homicide handles all officer deaths. You would have had to pass it to them eventually. This saves time. There
is no ulterior motive here other than expediency. That’s the body of an officer in there. We owe it to him and his family,
no matter what the circumstances of his death are, to move quickly and professionally.”

Bosch nodded again and looked around. He saw an RHD detective named Sheehan in a doorway below the
MONTHLY RAT S
sign near the front of the motel. He was questioning a man of about sixty who was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt despite the
evening chill and chewing a sodden cigar stump. The manager.

“Did you know him?” Irving asked.

“Moore? No, not really. I mean, yes, I knew him. We worked the same division, so we knew each other. He was on night shift
mostly, working the streets. We didn’t have much contact…”

Bosch did not know why in that moment he decided to lie. He wondered if Irving had read it in his voice. He changed the subject.

“So, it’s suicide — is that what you told the reporters?”

“I did not tell the reporters a thing. I talked to them, yes. But I said nothing about the identity of the body in this room.
And will not, until it is officially confirmed. You and I can stand here and say we are pretty sure that is Calexico Moore
in there but I won’t give that to them until we’ve done every test, dotted every
i
on the death certificate.”

He slapped the manila file hard on his thigh.

“This is why I pulled his personnel file. To expedite. The prints will go with the body to the medical examiner.” Irving looked
back toward the door of the motel room. “But you were inside, Detective Bosch, you tell me.”

Bosch thought a moment. Is this guy interested, or is he just pulling my chain? This was the first time he had dealt with
Irving outside of the adversarial situation of an Internal Affairs investigation. He decided to take a chance.

“Looks like he sits down on the floor by the tub, takes off his boot and pulls both triggers with his toe. I mean, I assume
it was both barrels, judging by the damage. He pulls the triggers with his toe, the recoil throws the shotgun into the door
jamb, splintering off a piece of the stock. His head goes the other way. Onto the wall and into the tub. Suicide.”