Michael Connelly (7 page)

“I know, sir. I have a readout here that says you are at a pay phone on Gower near Hollywood Boulevard. Will you wait for
the officer?”

“How —? Never mind, I gotta go now. You check it out. The body is there. A dead guy.”

“Sir, we would like to talk —”

The line was disconnected. Bosch put the cassette tape in his pocket and headed out of the com center the way he had come
in.

• • •

It had been ten months since Harry Bosch had been on the third floor at Parker Center. He had worked in RHD — the Robbery-Homicide
Division — for almost ten years, but never came back after his suspension and transfer from the Homicide Special squad to
Hollywood detectives. On the day he got the word, his desk was cleared by two goons from Internal Affairs named Lewis and
Clarke. They dumped his stuff on the homicide table at Hollywood Station, then left a message on his phone tape at home saying
that’s where he could find it. Now, ten months later, he was back on the hallowed floor of the department’s elite detective
squad, and he was glad it was Sunday. There would be no faces he knew. No reason to look away.

Room 321 was empty except for the weekend duty detective, whom Bosch didn’t know. Harry pointed to the back of the room and
said, “Bosch, Hollywood detectives. I have to use the box.”

The duty man, a young guy with a haircut he had kept when he split the Marine Corps, had a gun catalog open on his desk. He
looked back at the computers along the back wall as if to make sure they were still there and then back at Bosch.

“S’pose to use the one in your own division,” he said.

Bosch walked by him. “I don’t have the time to go out to Hollywood. I got an autopsy in twenty minutes,” he lied.

“You know, I’ve heard of you, Bosch. Yeah. The TV show and all of that. You used to be on this floor. Used to.”

The last line hung in the air like smog and Bosch tried to ignore it. As he went back to the computer terminals, he couldn’t
help but let his eyes wander over his old desk. He wondered who used it now. It was cluttered, and he noticed the cards on
the Rolodex were crisp and unworn at the edges. New. Harry turned around and looked at the duty man, who was still watching
him.

“This your desk when you aren’t pulling Sundays?”

The kid smiled and nodded his head.

“You deserve it, kid. You’re just right for the part. That hair, that stupid grin. You’re going to go far.”

“Just ’cause you got busted out of here for being a one-man army …Ah, fuck you, Bosch, you has-been.”

Bosch pulled a chair on casters away from a desk and pushed it in front of the IBM PC sitting on a table against the rear
wall. He hit the switch and in a few moments the amber-colored letters appeared on the screen: “Homicide Information Tracking
Management Automated Network.”

For a moment Bosch smiled at the department’s unceasing need for acronyms. It seemed to him that every unit, task force and
computer file had been christened with a name that gave its acronym the sound of eliteness. To the public, acronyms meant
action, large numbers of manpower applied to vital problems. There was HITMAN, COBRA, CRASH, BADCATS, DARE. A hundred others.
Somewhere in Parker Center there was someone who spent all day making up catchy acronyms, he believed. Computers had acronyms,
even ideas had acronyms. If your special unit didn’t have an acronym, then you weren’t shit in this department.

Once he was in the HITMAN system, a template of case questions appeared on the screen and he filled in the blanks. He then
typed in three search keys: “Mulholland Dam,” “overdose” and “staged overdose.” He then pushed the execute key. Half a minute
later, the computer told him that a search of eight thousand homicide cases — about ten years’ worth — stored on the computer’s
hard disk had come up with only six hits. Bosch called them up one by one. The first three were unsolved slayings of young
women who were found dead on the dam in the early 1980s. Each was strangled. Bosch glanced quickly at the information and
went on. The fourth case was a body found floating in the reservoir five years earlier. Cause of death was not drowning but
otherwise unknown. The last two were drug overdoses, the first of which occurred during a picnic at the park above the reservoir.
It looked pretty straightforward to Bosch and he went on. The last hit was a DB found in the pipe fourteen months earlier.
Cause of death was later determined to be heart stoppage due to an overdose of tar heroin.

“Decedent known to frequent area of the dam and sleep in pipe,” the computer readout said. “No further follow-up.”

It was the death that Crowley, the Hollywood watch sergeant, had mentioned when he woke Bosch up that morning. Bosch pushed
a key and printed out the information on the last death, though he didn’t think it figured into his case. He signed off and
shut down the computer, then he sat there a moment thinking. Without getting out of the chair he rolled over to another PC.
He turned it on and fed his password in. He took the Polaroid out of his pocket, looked at the bracelet and typed in its description
for a stolen property records search. This in itself was an art. He had to describe the bracelet the way he believed other
cops would, cops who might be typing in descriptions of a whole inventory of jewelry taken in a robbery or burglary. He described
the bracelet simply as “antique gold bracelet with carved jade dolphin design.” He pressed the search key and in thirty seconds
the computer screen said “No hit.” He tried it again, typing “gold-and-jade bracelet” and then punching the search key. This
time there were 436 hits. Too many. He needed to thin the herd. He typed “gold bracelet with jade fish” and pressed search.
Six hits. That was more like it.

The computer said a gold bracelet with carved jade fish had turned up on four crime reports and two departmental bulletins
that had been entered into the computer system since its development in 1983. Bosch knew that because of the immense duplication
of records in any police department, all six entries could be and probably were from the same case or report of a missing
or stolen bracelet. He called the abbreviated crime reports up on the computer screen and found that his suspicion was correct.
The reports were generated by a single burglary in September at Sixth and Hill downtown. The victim was a woman named Harriet
Beecham, age seventy-one, of Silver Lake. Bosch tried to place the location in his mind but could not think of what building
or business was there. There was no summary of the crime on the computer; he would have to go to records and pull a hard copy.
But there was a limited description of the gold-and-jade bracelet, and several other pieces of jewelry taken from Beecham.
The bracelet Beecham reported lost could or could not have been the one that Meadows had pawned — the description was too
vague. There were several supplementary report numbers given on the computer report and Bosch wrote them all down in his notebook.
It seemed to him as he did this that Harriet Beecham’s loss had generated an unusual amount of paper.

He next called up the information on the two bulletins. Both had come from the FBI, the first issued two weeks after Beecham
had been burglarized. It was then reissued three months later when Beecham’s jewelry had still not turned up. Bosch wrote
down the bulletin number and turned off the computer. He went across the room to the robbery/commercial burglary section.
On a steel shelf that ran along the back wall were dozens of black binders that held the bulletins and BOLOs from past years.
Bosch took down the one marked September and began looking through it. He quickly realized that the bulletins were not in
chronological order and weren’t all issued in September. In fact, there was no order. He might have to look through all ten
months since Beecham’s burglary to find the bulletin he needed. He pulled an armful of the binders off the shelf and sat down
at the burglary table. A few moments later he felt the presence of someone across the table from him.

“What do you want?” he said without looking up.

“What do I want?” the duty detective said. “I want to know what the fuck you are doing, Bosch. This isn’t your place anymore.
You can’t just come in here like you’re running the crew. Put that shit back on the shelf, and if you want to look through
it come back down here tomorrow and ask, goddammit. And don’t give me any bullshit about an autopsy. You’ve already been here
a half hour.”

Bosch looked up at him. He put his age at twenty-eight, maybe twenty-nine, even younger than Bosch had been when he had made
it to Robbery-Homicide. Either standards had dropped or RHD wasn’t what it was. Bosch knew it was actually both. He looked
back down at the bulletin binder.

“I’m talking to you, asshole!” the detective boomed.

Bosch reached his foot up under the table and kicked the chair that was across from him. The chair shot out from the table
and its backrest hit the detective in the crotch. He doubled over and made an
oomph
sound, grabbing the chair for support. Bosch knew he had his reputation going for him now. Harry Bosch: a loner, a fighter,
a killer. C’mon kid, he was saying, do something.

But the young detective just stared at Bosch, his anger and humiliation in check. He was a cop who could pull the gun but
maybe not the trigger. And once Bosch knew that, he knew the kid would walk away.

The young cop shook his head, waved his hands like he was saying Enough of this, and walked back to the duty desk.

“Go ahead, write me up, kid,” Bosch said to his back.

“Fuck you,” the kid feebly returned.

Bosch knew he had nothing to worry about. IAD wouldn’t even look at an officer-on-officer beef without a corroborating witness
or tape recording. One cop’s word against another’s was something they wouldn’t touch in this department. Deep down, they
knew a cop’s word by itself was worthless. That was why Internal Affairs cops always worked in pairs.

An hour and seven cigarettes later, Bosch found it. A photocopy of another Polaroid of the gold-and-jade bracelet was part
of a fifty-page packet of descriptions and photos of property lost in a burglary at WestLand National Bank at Sixth and Hill.
Now Bosch was able to place the address in his mind, and he remembered the dark smoked glass of the building. He had never
been inside the bank. A bank heist with jewelry taken, he thought. It didn’t make much sense. He studied the list. Almost
every item was a piece of jewelry and there was too much there for a walk-in robbery. Harriet Beecham alone was listed as
having lost eight antique rings, four bracelets, four earrings. Besides that, these were listed as burglary losses, not robbery
losses. He looked through the Be on Lookout package for any kind of crime summary, but didn’t find any. Just a bureau contact:
Special Agent E. D. Wish.

Then he noticed in a block on the BOLO sheet that there were three dates noted for the date of the crime. A burglary over
a three-day span during the first week of September. Labor Day weekend, he realized. Downtown banks are closed three days.
It had to have been a safe-deposit caper. A tunnel job? Bosch leaned back and thought about that. Why hadn’t he remembered
it? A heist like that would have played in the media for days. It would have been talked about in the department even longer.
Then he realized he had been in Mexico on Labor Day, and for the next three weeks. The bank heist had occurred while he was
serving the one-month suspension for the Doll-maker case. He leaned forward, picked up a phone and dialed.

“
Times,
Bremmer.”

“It’s Bosch. Still got you working Sundays, huh?”

“Two to ten, every Sunday, no parole. So, what’s up? I haven’t talked to you since, uh, your problem with the Dollmaker case.
How you liking Hollywood Division?”

“It’ll do. For a while, at least.” He was speaking low so the duty detective would not overhear.

Bremmer said, “Like that, huh? Well, I heard you caught the stiff up at the dam this morning.”

Joel Bremmer had covered the cop shop for the
Times
longer than most cops had been on the force, including Bosch. There was not much he didn’t hear about the department, or
couldn’t find out with a phone call. A year ago he called Bosch for comment on his twenty-two-day suspension, no pay. Bremmer
had heard about it before Bosch. Generally, the police department hated the
Times,
and the
Times
was never short in its criticism of the department. But in the middle of that was Bremmer, whom any cop could trust and many,
like Bosch, did.

“Yeah, that’s my case,” Bosch said. “Right now, it’s nothing much. But I need a favor. If it works out the way it’s looking,
then it will be something you’d want to know about.”

Bosch knew he didn’t have to bait him, but he wanted the reporter to know there might be something later.

“What do you need?” Bremmer said.

“As you know, I was out of town last Labor Day on my extended vacation, courtesy of IAD. So I missed this one. But there was
—”

“The tunnel job? You’re not going to ask about the tunnel job, are you? Over here in downtown? All the jewelry? Negotiable
bonds, stock certificates, maybe drugs?”

Bosch heard the reporter’s voice go up a notch in urgency. He had been right, it had been a tunnel and the story had played
well. If Bremmer was this interested, then it was a substantial case. Still, Bosch was surprised he had not heard of it after
coming back to work in October.

“Yeah, that’s the one,” he said. “I was gone then, so I missed it. Ever any arrests?”

“No, it’s open. FBI’s doing it, last I checked.”

“I want to look at the clips on it tonight. Is that all right?”

“I’ll make copies. When are you coming?”

“I’ll head over in a little while.”

“I take it this has got something to do with this morning’s stiff?”

“It’s looking that way. Maybe. I can’t talk right now. And I know the fee-bees have the case. I’ll go see them tomorrow. That’s
why I want to see the clips tonight.”

“I’ll be here.”