Angels Flight

by Michael Connelly

  ‘Okay, Margie. Give me your number.’

  He took the number and was about to hang up when she spoke again.

  ‘Harry, he told me you got married and divorced already.’

  ‘Well, I’m not divorced but ... you know.’

  ‘Yes, I know. Take care, Harry. Find Francis and then one of you call me back.’

  ‘Okay.’

  He put down the phone, opened the slider and went out onto the deck. The beer bottles were empty. He turned to his right and there, lying on the chaise longue, was the body of Francis Sheehan. Hair and blood were splattered on the cushion above his head and on the wall next to the slider.

  ‘Jesus,’ Bosch whispered out loud.

  He stepped closer. Sheehan’s mouth was open. Blood had pooled in it and spilled over his bottom lip. There was a saucer-sized exit wound at the crown of his head. Rain had matted the hair down, exposing the horrible wound even more. Bosch took one step back and looked around the deck planking. He saw a pistol lying just in front of the chaise’s front left leg.

  Bosch stepped forward again and looked down at his friend’s body. He blew his breath out with a loud animal-like sound.

  ‘Frankie,’ he whispered.

  A question went through his mind but he didn’t say it out loud.

  Did I do this?

  Bosch watched one of the coroner’s people close the body bag over Frankie Sheehan’s face while the other two held umbrellas. They then put the umbrellas aside and lifted the body onto a gurney, covered it with a green blanket and began wheeling it into the house and toward the front door. Bosch had to be asked to step out of the way. As he watched them head to the front door the crushing weight of the guilt he was feeling took hold again. He looked up into the sky and saw there were no helicopters, thankfully. The notifications and call outs had all been made by landline. No radio reports meant the media had yet to pick up on the suicide of Frankie Sheehan. Bosch knew that the ultimate insult to his former partner would have been for a news chopper to hover over the house and film the body lying on the deck.

  ‘Detective Bosch?’

  Bosch turned. Deputy Chief Irving beckoned from the open slider. Bosch went inside and followed Irving to the dining room table. Agent Roy Lindell was already standing there.

  ‘Let us talk about this,’ Irving said. ‘Patrol is outside with a woman who says she is your neighbor. Adrienne Tegreeny?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes what?’

  ‘She lives next door.’

  ‘She said she heard three or four shots from the house earlier tonight. She thought it was you. She did not call the police.’

  Bosch just nodded.

  ‘Have you fired weapons in the house or off the deck before?’

  Bosch hesitated before answering.

  ‘Chief, this isn’t about me. So let’s just say that there could be reason for her to have thought it was me.’

  ‘Fine. The point I’m making is that it appears Detective Sheehan was drinking — drinking heavily — and firing his weapon. What is your interpretation of what happened?’

  ‘Interpretation?’ Bosch said, staring blankly at the table.

  ‘Accidental or intentional.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Bosch almost laughed but held back.

  ‘I don’t think there’s much of a doubt about it,’ he said. ‘He killed himself. Suicide.’

  ‘But there is no note.’

  ‘No note, just a lot of beers and wasted shots into the sky. That was his note. That said all he had to say. Cops go out that way all the time.’

  ‘The man had been cut loose. Why do this?’

  ‘Well ... I think it’s pretty clear ...’

  ‘Then make it clear for us, would you please?’

  ‘He called his wife tonight. I talked to her after. She said he might have been cut loose but he thought that it wouldn’t last.’

  ‘The ballistics?’ Irving asked.

  ‘No, I don’t think that’s what he meant. I think he knew that there was a need to hook somebody up for this. A cop.’

  ‘And so then he kills himself? That does not sound plausible, Detective.’

  ‘He didn’t kill Elias. Or that woman.’

  ‘Right now that is only your opinion. The only fact we have is that it appears this man killed himself the night before the day we would get the ballistics. And you, Detective, talked me into cutting him loose so that he could do it.’

  Bosch looked away from Irving and tried to contain the anger that was building inside.

  ‘The weapon,’ Irving said. ‘An old Beretta twenty-five. Serial number acid-burned. Untraceable, illegal. A throw-down gun. Was it your weapon, Detective Bosch?’

  Bosch shook his head.

  ‘Are you sure, Detective? I would like to handle this now, without the need for an internal investigation.’

  Bosch looked back at him.

  ‘What are you saying? I gave him the gun so he could kill himself? He was my friend — the only friend he had today. It’s not my gun, okay? We stopped by his house so he could get some things. He must’ve gotten it then. I might have helped him do it but that didn’t include giving him the gun.’

  Bosch and Irving held each other’s stares.

  ‘You’re forgetting something, Bosch,’ Lindell said, interrupting the moment. ‘We searched Sheehan’s place today. There was no weapon found there.’

  Bosch broke away from Irving and looked at Lindell.

  ‘Then your people missed it,’ he said. ‘He came here with that gun in his bag because it wasn’t mine.’

  Bosch moved away from them before he let his anger and frustration get the better of him and he said something that might bring departmental charges. He slid down into one of the stuffed chairs in the living room. He was wet but didn’t care about the furniture. He stared blankly out the glass doors.

  Irving stepped over but didn’t sit down.

  ‘What did you mean when you said you helped him?’

  Bosch looked up at him.

  ‘Last night I had a drink with him. He told me things. Told me about how he got carried away with Harris, how the things Harris claimed in his lawsuit — the things he said the cops did to him — were true. All of it was true. You see, he was sure Harris had killed the girl, there was no doubt in him about that. But it bothered him what he had done. He told me that in those moments in the room with Harris that he had lost it. He said he became the very thing he had hunted all these years. A monster. It bothered him a lot. I could see it had been eating at him. Then I come along tonight and drive him home ...’

  Bosch felt the guilt rising up like a tide in his throat. He had not been thinking. He had not seen the obvious. He had been too consumed with the case, with Eleanor and his empty house, with things other than Frankie Sheehan.

  ‘And?’ Irving prompted.

  ‘And I knocked down the one thing he believed in all these months, the one thing that kept him safe. I told him we had cleared Michael Harris. I told him he was wrong about Harris and that we could prove it. I didn’t think about what ,it would do to him. I was only thinking about my case.’

  ‘And you think that put him over,’ Irving said.

  ‘Something happened to him in that room with Harris. Something bad. He lost his family after that, he lost the case ... I think the one thread he held on to was his belief that he’d had the right guy. When he found out he was wrong — when I stumbled into his world and told him it was bullshit — the thread snapped.’

  ‘Look, this is bullshit, Bosch,’ Lindell said. ‘I mean, I respect you and your friendship with this guy, but you aren’t seeing what is right here in front of us. The obvious. This guy did himself because he’s the guy and he knew we’d come back to him. This suicide is a confession.’

  Irving stared at Bosch, waiting for him to come back at Lindell. But Bosch said nothing. He was tired of fighting it.

  ‘I find myself agreeing with Agent Lindell on this,’ the d
eputy chief finally said.

  Bosch nodded. He expected as much. They didn’t know Sheehan the way Bosch did. He and his former partner had not been close in recent years but they had been close enough at one time for Bosch to know that Lindell and Irving were wrong. It would have been easier for him to agree. It would lift a lot of the guilt off him. But he couldn’t agree.

  ‘Give me the morning,’ he said instead.

  ‘What?’ Irving asked.

  ‘Keep this wrapped up and away from the press for half a day. We proceed with the warrants and the plan for tomorrow morning. Give me time to see what comes up and what Mrs Kincaid says.’

  ‘If she talks.’

  ‘She’ll talk. She’s dying to talk. Let me have the morning with her. See how things go. If I don’t come up with a connection between Kincaid and Elias, then you do what you have to do with Frankie Sheehan. You tell the world what you think you know.’

  Irving thought about this for a long moment and then nodded.

  ‘I think that would be the most cautious route,’ he said. ‘We should have a ballistics report by then as well.’

  Bosch nodded his thinks. He looked out through the open doors to the deck again. It was starting to rain harder. He looked at his watch and saw how late it was getting. And he knew what he still needed to do before he could sleep.

  30

  Bosch felt the obligation to go to Margaret Sheehan in person and tell her what Frankie had done to himself. It didn’t matter that the couple had been separated. She and Frankie had been together a long time before that happened. She and their two girls deserved the courtesy of a visit from a friend instead of a stranger’s dreadful phone call in the middle of the night. Irving had suggested that the Bakersfield Police Department be prevailed upon to send an officer to the house, but Bosch knew that would be just as clumsy and callous as a phone call. He volunteered to make the drive.

  Bosch did prevail upon the Bakersfield cop shop, but only to run down an address for Margaret Sheehan. He could have called her to ask for directions. But that would have been telling her without telling her, an old cop’s trick for making the job easier. It would have been cowardly.

  The northbound Golden State Freeway was almost deserted, the rain and the hour of night having cleared out all but those motorists with no choice but to be on the road. Most of these were truckers hauling their loads north toward San Francisco and even further or returning empty to the vegetable fields of the midstate to pick up more. The Grapevine — the steep and winding stretch of the freeway up and over the mountains lying north of Los Angeles — was littered with semis that had slid off the roadway or whose drivers had chosen to pull over rather than risk the already treacherous run in the pounding rain. Bosch found that once he cleared this obstacle course and came down out of the mountains that he was finally able to pick up some speed and lost time. As he drove he watched branches of lightning spread across the purple horizon to the east. And he thought about his old partner. He tried to think about old cases and the old Irish jokes that Sheehan used to tell. Anything to keep from thinking about what he had done and Bosch’s own guilt and culpability.

  He had brought a homemade tape with him and played it on the car stereo. It contained recordings of saxophone pieces Bosch particularly liked. He fast-forwarded until he found the one he wanted. It was Frank Morgan’s ‘Lullaby.’ It was like a sweet and soulful funeral dirge to Bosch, a good-bye and apology to Frankie Sheehan. A good-bye and apology to Eleanor. It went well with the rain. Bosch played it over and over as he drove.

  He got to the house where Margaret Sheehan and her two daughters were living before two: There was an outside light still on and light could be seen through the curtains of the front windows. Bosch got the idea that Margie was in there waiting for his call, or maybe for him to show up. He hesitated at the door, wondering about how many times he had made this kind of call, then finally knocked.

  When Margie answered the door Bosch was reminded of how there was never any planning for these things. She stared at him for a moment and he thought she didn’t recognize him. It had been a lot of years.

  ‘Margie, it’s — ’

  ‘Harry? Harry Bosch? We just — ’

  She stopped and put it together. Usually they did.

  ‘Oh, Harry, no. Oh no. Not Francis!’

  She brought both hands up to her face. Her mouth was open and she looked like that famous painting of someone on a bridge screaming.

  ‘I’m sorry, Margie. I really am. I think maybe I should come in.’

  She was stoic about the whole thing. Bosch gave her the details and then Margie Sheehan made coffee for him so he wouldn’t fall asleep on the ride back. That was a cop’s wife thinking. In the kitchen Bosch leaned against a counter as she brewed the coffee.

  ‘He called you tonight,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, I told you.’

  ‘Tell me how he seemed.’

  ‘Bad. He told me what they did to him. He seemed so ... betrayed? Is that the right word? I mean, his own people, fellow cops, had taken him in. He was very sad, Harry.’

  Bosch nodded.

  ‘He gave his life to that department ... and this is what they did to him.’

  Bosch nodded again.

  ‘Did he say anything about ... ’

  He didn’t finish.

  ‘About killing himself? No, he didn’t say that ... I read up on police suicide once. Long time ago. In fact, back when Elias sued him the first time over that guy he killed. Frankie got real depressed then and I got scared. I read up on it. And what I read said that when people tell you about it or say they’re going to do it, what they are really doing is asking you to stop them.’

  Bosch nodded.

  ‘I guess Frankie didn’t want to be stopped,’ she continued. ‘He didn’t say anything about it to me.’

  She pulled the glass coffeepot out of the brewer and poured some into a mug. She then opened a cabinet and took down a silver Thermos. She started filling it.

  ‘This is for the road home. I don’t want you falling asleep on the clothesline.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I mean the Grapevine. I’m not thinking straight here.’

  Bosch stepped over and put his hand on her shoulder. She put the coffee pot down and turned to him to be hugged.

  ‘This last year,’ she said. ‘Things ... things just went haywire.’

  ‘I know. He told me.’

  She broke away from him and went back to filling the Thermos.

  ‘Margie, I have to ask you something before I head back,’ Bosch said. ‘They took his gun from him today to run ballistics. He used another. Do you know anything about that one?’

  ‘No. He only had the one he wore on the job. We didn’t have other guns. Not with two little girls. When Frankie would come home he’d lock his job gun up in a little safe on the floor of the closet. And only he had the key. I just didn’t want any more guns than were required in the house.’

  Bosch understood that if it was her edict that there be no more weapons than the one Sheehan was required to carry, then that left a hole. He could have taken a weapon in and hidden it from her — in a spot so obscure even the FBI didn’t find it when they searched his house. Maybe it was wrapped in plastic and buried in the yard. Sheehan also could have gotten the weapon after she and the girls moved out and up to Bakersfield. She would never have known about it.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, deciding not to pursue it.

  ‘Why, Harry, are they saying it was your gun? Are you in trouble?’

  Bosch thought a moment before answering.

  ‘No, Margie, I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.’

  31

  The rain continued through Monday morning and slowed Bosch’s drive into Brentwood to a frustrating crawl. It wasn’t heavy rain, but in Los Angeles any rain at all can paralyze the city. It was one of the mysteries Bosch could never fathom. A city largely defined by the automobile yet full of drivers unable to cope with even
a mild inclemency. He listened to KFWB as he drove. There were far more reports of traffic tie-ups than incidents of violence or unrest during the night. Unfortunately, the skies were expected to clear by midday.

  He arrived twenty minutes late for his appointment with Kate Kincaid. The house from which Stacey Kincaid had allegedly been kidnapped was a sprawling white ranch house with black shutters and a slate-gray roof. It had a broad green lawn stretching back from the street and a driveway that cut across the front of the house, and then back around to the garage in the side yard. When Bosch pulled in there was a silver Mercedes Benz parked near the covered entryway. The front door of the house was open.

  When he got to the threshold Bosch called out a hello and he heard Kate Kincaid’s voice telling him to enter. He found her in the living room, sitting on a couch that was covered in a white sheet. All the furniture was covered in this way. The room looked like a meeting of big, heavy ghosts. She noticed Bosch’s eyes taking in the room.

  ‘When we moved we didn’t take a single piece of furniture,’ she said. ‘We decided just to start over. No reminders.’

  Bosch nodded and then studied her. She was dressed completely in white, with a silk blouse tucked into tailored linen pants. She looked like a ghost herself. Her large black leather purse, which was on the couch next to her, seemed to clash with her outfit and the sheets covering the furniture.

  ‘How are you, Mrs Kincaid?’

  ‘Please call me Kate.’

  ‘Kate then.’

  ‘I am very fine, thank you. Better than I have been in a long, long time. How are you?’

  ‘I’m just so-so today, Kate. I had a bad night. And I don’t like it when it rains.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that. It does look like you haven’t slept.’

  ‘Do you mind if I look around a little bit before we start talking?’

  He had a signed search warrant for the house in his briefcase but he didn’t want to bring it up yet.

  ‘Please do,’ she said. ‘Stacey’s room is down the hall to your left. First door on the left.’