The Overlook (13 page)

“Harry, what are you doing?” Ferras yelled.

“I told you. Nobody’s pushing us aside.”

Once he had the agent’s hands cuffed behind him he grabbed the credentials out of his hand. He opened them and checked the name. Clifford Maxwell. Bosch turned him around and shoved the creds into the side pocket of his jacket.

“Your career is over,” Maxwell said calmly.

“Tell me about it,” Bosch said.

Maxwell looked at Ferras.

“You go along with this and you’re in the toilet, too,” he said. “You better think about it.”

“Shut up, Cliff,” Bosch said. “The only one who is going to be in the toilet is you when you go back to Tactical and tell them how you let two of the local yokels get the drop on you.”

That shut him up. Bosch opened the front door and walked the agent in. He roughly pushed him down into a stuffed chair in the living room.

“Have a seat,” he said. “And shut the fuck up.”

He reached down and opened up Maxwell’s jacket so he could see where he carried his weapon. His gun was in a pancake holster under his left arm. He would not be able to reach it with his wrists cuffed behind his back. Bosch frisked the agent’s lower legs to make sure he wasn’t carrying a throw-down. Satisfied, he stepped back.

“Relax now,” he said. “We won’t be long.”

Bosch started down the hallway, signaling his partner to follow him.

“You start in the office and I’ll start in the bedroom,” he instructed. “We’re looking for anything and everything. We’ll know it when we see it. Check the computer. Anything unusual, I want to know about it.”

“Harry.”

Bosch stopped in the hallway and looked at Ferras. He could tell that his young partner was running scared. He let him have his say even though they were still within earshot of Maxwell.

“We shouldn’t be doing it this way,” Ferras said.

“How should we be doing it, Ignacio? Do you mean we should be going through channels? Have our boss talk to his boss, grab a latte and wait for permission to do our job?”

Ferras pointed down the hallway toward the living room.

“I understand the need for speed,” he said. “But do you think he’s going to let this go? He’s going to have our badges, Harry, and I don’t mind going down in the line of duty, but not for what we just did.”

Bosch admired Ferras for saying
we
and that gave him the patience to calmly step back and put a hand on his partner’s shoulder. He lowered his voice so Maxwell would not hear him from the living room.

“Listen to me, Ignacio, not one thing is going to happen to you because of this. Not one thing, okay? I’ve been around a little longer than you and I know how the bureau works. Hell, my ex-wife is ex-bureau, okay? And the one thing I know better than anything is that the number-one FBI priority is not to be embarrassed. That is a philosophy they teach them at Quantico and it seeps into the bones of every agent in every field office in every city.
Do not embarrass the bureau
. So when we are done here and we cut that guy loose he’s not going to tell a single soul what we did or that we were even here. Why do you think they had him sitting on the house? Because he’s F-B-Einstein? Uh-uh. He’s working off an embarrassment—either to himself or the bureau. And he’s not going to do or say a thing that brings him any more heat.”

Bosch paused to allow Ferras to respond. He didn’t.

“So let’s just move quickly here and check out the house,” Bosch continued. “When I was here this morning it was all about the widow and dealing with her and then we had to run out the door to Saint Aggy’s. I want to take my time but be quick, you know what I mean? I want to see the place in daylight and grind the case down for a while. This is how I like to work. You’d be surprised what you come up with sometimes. The thing to remember is that there’s always a transfer. Those two killers left their mark somewhere in this house and I think SID and everybody else missed it. There’s got to be a transfer. Let’s go find it.”

Ferras nodded.

“Okay, Harry.”

Bosch clapped him on the shoulder.

“Good. I’ll start in the bedroom. You check the office.”

Bosch moved down the hallway and was to the threshold of the bedroom when Ferras called his name again. Bosch turned and went back down the hallway to the office alcove. His partner was standing behind the desk.

“Where’s the computer?” Ferras asked.

Bosch shook his head in frustration.

“It was on the desk. They took it.”

“The FBI?”

“Who else? It wasn’t on the SID log, only the mouse pad. Just look around, go through the desk. See what else you can find. We’re not taking anything. We’re just looking.”

Bosch went down the hall to the master bedroom. It appeared to be undisturbed since he had last seen it. There was still a slight odor of urine due to the soiled mattress.

He walked over to the night table on the left side of the bed. He saw black fingerprint powder dusted across the knobs on the two drawers and its flat surfaces. On top of the table were a lamp and a framed photograph of Stanley and Alicia Kent. Bosch picked up the photo and studied it. The couple was standing next to a rosebush in full bloom. Alicia had dirt smudged on her face but was smiling broadly, as if she were standing proudly next to her own child. Bosch could tell that the rosebush was hers and in the background he could see others just like it. Farther up the hillside were the first three letters of the Hollywood sign and he realized the photo was probably taken in the backyard of the house. There would be no more pictures of the happy couple like this.

Bosch put the photo down and slid open the table’s drawers one by one. They were full of personal items belonging to Stanley. Various reading glasses, books and prescription bottles. The lower drawer was empty and Bosch remembered that it was the place where Stanley had kept his gun.

Bosch closed the drawers and stepped into the corner of the room on the other side of the table. He was looking for a new angle, some sort of fresh take on the crime scene. He realized that he needed the crime scene photos and he had left them in a file in the car.

He walked down the hallway toward the front door. When he got to the living room he saw Maxwell lying on the floor in front of the chair he had been placed in. He had managed to move his handcuffed wrists down over his hips. His knees were bent up with his wrists cuffed behind them. He looked up at Bosch with a red and sweating face.

“I’m stuck,” Maxwell said. “Help me out.”

Bosch almost laughed.

“In a minute.”

He walked out the front door and went to the car, where he retrieved the files containing the SID crime scene reports and photos. He had put the copy of the e-mailed photo of Alicia Kent in there as well.

As he walked back into the house and headed toward the hallway to the rear rooms, Maxwell called out to him.

“Come on, help me out, man.”

Bosch ignored him. He walked down the hallway and glanced into the home office as he passed. Ferras was going through the drawers of the desk, stacking things he wanted to look at on top of it.

In the bedroom Bosch got the e-mail photo out and put the files down on the bed. He held the photo up so he could compare it to the room. He then went to the mirrored closet door and opened it at an angle that matched the photograph. He noticed in the photo the white terry-cloth robe draped over a lounge chair in the corner of the room. He stepped into the closet and looked for the robe, found it and put it in the same position on the lounge chair.

Bosch moved to the place in the room from which he believed the e-mail photo had been taken. He scanned the room, hoping something would poke through and speak to him. He noticed the dead clock on the bed table and then checked it against the e-mail photo. The clock was dead in the photo, too.

Bosch walked over to the table, crouched and looked behind it. The clock was unplugged. He reached behind the table and plugged it back in. The digital screen started flashing 12:00 in red numerals. The clock worked. It just needed to be set.

Bosch thought about this and knew it would be something to ask Alicia Kent about. He assumed the men who were in the house had unplugged the clock. The question was why. Perhaps they didn’t want Alicia Kent to know how much or how little time had gone by while she waited tied up on the bed.

Bosch put the clock issue aside and moved to the bed, where he opened one of the files and took out the crime scene photographs. He studied these and noticed that the closet door was open at a slightly different angle from the one in the e-mail photo and that the robe was gone, obviously because Alicia Kent had put it on after her rescue. He stepped over to the closet, matched the door’s angle to the one in the crime scene photograph, and then stepped back to the door and scanned the room.

Nothing broke through. The transfer still eluded him. He felt discomfort in his gut. He felt as though he was missing something. Something that was right there in the room with him.

Failure brings pressure. Bosch checked his watch and saw that the federal meeting—if there was actually going to be one—was to begin in less than three hours.

He left the bedroom and made his way down the hall toward the kitchen, stopping in each room and checking closets and drawers and finding nothing suspicious or amiss. In the workout room he opened a closet door and found it lined with musty cold-weather clothes on hangers. The Kents had obviously migrated to L.A. from colder climes. And like most people who came from somewhere else, they refused to part with their winter gear. Nobody ever knew for sure how much of L.A. they could take. It was always good to be ready to run.

He left the contents of the closet untouched and closed the door. Before leaving the room he noticed a rectangular discoloration on the wall next to the hooks where rubber workout mats hung. There were slight tape marks indicating that a poster or maybe a large calendar had been taped to the wall.

When he got to the living room Maxwell was still on the floor, red-faced and sweating from struggling. He now had one leg through the loop created by his cuffed wrists, but he apparently couldn’t get the other through in order to bring his hands to the front of his body. He was lying on the tiled floor with his wrists bound between his legs. He reminded Bosch of a five-year-old holding himself in an effort to maintain bladder control.

“We’re almost out of here, Agent Maxwell,” Bosch said.

Maxwell didn’t respond.

In the kitchen Bosch went to the back door and stepped out onto a rear patio and garden. Seeing the yard in daylight changed his perspective. It was on an incline and he counted four rows of rosebushes going up the embankment. Some were in bloom and some weren’t. Some relied on support sticks that carried markers identifying the different kinds of roses. He stepped up the hillside and studied a few of these, then returned to the house.

After locking the door behind him, he walked across the kitchen and opened another door, which he knew led to the adjoining two-car garage. A bank of cabinets stretched along the back wall of the garage. One by one he opened them and surveyed the contents. There were mostly tools for gardening and household chores, and several bags of fertilizer and soil nutrients for growing roses.

There was a wheeled trash can in the garage. Bosch opened it and saw one plastic trash bag in it. He pulled it out, loosened the pull strap and discovered it contained what appeared to be only basic kitchen trash. On top was a cluster of paper towels that were stained purple. It looked like someone had cleaned up a spill. He held one of the towels up and smelled grape juice on it.

After returning the trash to the container Bosch left the garage and ran into his partner in the kitchen.

“He’s trying to get loose,” Ferras said of Maxwell.

“Let him try. Are you finished in the office?”

“Just about. I was wondering where you were.”

“Go finish up and we’ll be out of here.”

After Ferras was gone Bosch checked the kitchen cabinets and the walk-in pantry and studied all the groceries and supplies stacked on the shelves. After that he went to the guest bathroom in the hall and looked at the spot where the cigarette ash had been collected. On the white porcelain tank top there was a brown discoloration about half the length of a cigarette.

Bosch stared at the mark, curious. It had been seven years since he had smoked but he didn’t remember ever leaving a cigarette to burn like that. If he had finished it he would have thrown it into the toilet and flushed it away. It was clear that this cigarette had been forgotten.

With his search complete, he stepped back into the living room and called to his partner.

“Ignacio, you ready? We’re leaving.”

Maxwell was still on the floor but looked tired from his struggle and resigned to his predicament.

“Come on, damn it!” he finally cried out. “Uncuff me!”

Bosch stepped close to him.

“Where’s your key?” he asked.

“Coat pocket. Left side.”

Bosch bent over and worked his hand into the agent’s coat pocket. He pulled out a set of keys and fingered through them until he found the cuff key. He grabbed the chain between the two cuffs and pulled up so he could work the key in. He wasn’t gentle about it.

“Now be nice if I do this,” he said.

“Nice? I’m going to kick your fucking ass.”

Bosch let go of the chain and Maxwell’s wrists dropped to the floor.

“What are you doing?” Maxwell yelled. “Undo me!”

“Here’s a tip, Cliff. Next time you threaten to kick my ass, you might want to wait until after I’ve cut you loose.”

Bosch straightened up and tossed the keys onto the floor on the other side of the room.

“Uncuff yourself.”

Bosch headed to the front door. Ferras was already going through it. As Bosch was pulling it closed he looked back at Maxwell sprawled on the floor. The agent’s face was as red as a stop sign as he sputtered one last threat in Bosch’s direction.

“This isn’t over, asshole.”

“Got it.”

Bosch closed the door. When he got to the car he looked over the roof at his partner. Ferras looked as mortified as some of the suspects who had ridden in the backseat.