A Darkness More Than Night

by Michael Connelly

  He carried the baby down to the cart and secured her in the safety seat. He put her bouncing chair in the rear storage compartment. Graciela came down with Raymond a few minutes later. Her eyes were swollen from the crying. McCaleb put his hand on Raymond’s shoulder and walked him to the front passenger seat.

  “Raymond, you’re going to have to watch the second game without me. I have some work I have to do.”

  “I can go with you. I can help you.”

  “No, it’s not a charter.”

  “I know, but I can still help you.”

  McCaleb knew Graciela was looking at him and he felt the guilt like the sun on his back.

  “Thanks but maybe next time, Raymond. Put on your seat belt.”

  Once the boy was safely in, McCaleb stepped back from the cart. He looked at Graciela, who was no longer looking at him.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. And I’ll have the phone with me if you want to call.”

  Graciela didn’t acknowledge him. She pulled the cart away from the curb and headed up Marilla Avenue

  . He watched them until they were out of sight.

  33

  On the walk back to the pier his cell phone chirped. It was Jaye Winston returning his call. She was talking very quietly and said she was calling from her mother’s house. McCaleb had difficulty hearing so he sat down on one of the benches along the casino walk. He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, one hand holding the phone tightly to one ear, his other hand clasped over the other.

  “We missed something,” he said. “I missed something.”

  “Terry, what are you talking about?”

  “In the murder book. In Gunn’s arrest record. He was —”

  “Terry, what are you doing? You’re off the case.”

  “Says who, the FBI? I don’t work for them anymore, Jaye.”

  “Then says me. I don’t want you getting any further —”

  “I don’t work for you, either, Jaye. Remember?”

  There was a long silence on the phone.

  “Terry, I don’t know what you are doing but it’s got to stop. You have no authority, no standing in this case anymore. If those guys Twilley and Friedman find out you’re still snooping around on this, they can arrest you for interference. And you know they’re just the type that will.”

  “You want standing, I have standing.”

  “What? I withdrew my authorization to you yesterday. You can’t use me on this.”

  McCaleb hesitated and then decided to tell her.

  “I have standing. I guess you could say I’m working for the accused.”

  Now Winston’s silence was even longer. Finally she spoke, her words delivered very slowly.

  “Are you telling me that you went to Bosch with this?”

  “No. He came to me. He showed up on my boat this morning. I was right about the other night. The coincidence; me showing up at his place, then the call from his partner about you. He put it together. The reporter from the New Times called him, too. He knew what was going on without me having to tell him a thing. The point is, Jaye, none of that matters. What matters is that I think I jumped on Bosch too soon. I missed something and now I’m not so sure. There’s a chance all of this could be a setup.”

  “He’s convinced you.”

  “No, I convinced myself.”

  There were voices in the background and Winston told McCaleb to hold on. He then heard voices muffled by a hand over the phone. It sounded like arguing. McCaleb stood up and continued walking toward the pier. Winston came back on in a few seconds.

  “Sorry,” she said. “This is not a good time. I’m in the middle of something right now.”

  “Can we meet tomorrow morning?”

  “What are you talking about?” Winston said, her voice almost shrill. “You just told me you are working for the target of an investigation. I’m not going to meet with you. How the fuck would that look? Hold on —”

  He heard her muffled voice apologizing for her language to someone. She then came back on the line.

  “I really have to go.”

  “Look, I don’t care how it would look. I’m interested in the truth and I thought you would be, too. You don’t want to meet me, fine, don’t meet me. I’ve gotta go myself.”

  “Terry, wait.”

  He listened. She said nothing. He sensed that she was distracted by something there.

  “What, Jaye?”

  “What is this thing you said we missed?”

  “It was in the arrest package from Gunn’s last duice. I guess after Bosch told you he had spoken to him in lockup you pulled all the records. I just scanned through it the first time I looked at the book.”

  “I pulled the records,” she said in a defensive tone. “He spent the night of December thirtieth in the Hollywood tank. That’s where Bosch saw him.”

  “And he bonded out in the morning. Seven-thirty.”

  “Yeah. Okay? I don’t get it.”

  “Look who bailed him out.”

  “Terry, I’m at my parents’. I don’t have —”

  “Right, sorry. He was bailed out by Rudy Tafero.”

  Silence. McCaleb was at the pier. He walked out toward the gangway that led down to the skiff dock and leaned on the railing. He cupped his free hand over his ear again.

  “Okay, he was bailed out by Rudy Tafero,” Winston said. “I assume he is a licensed bail bondsman. What does that mean?”

  “You haven’t been watching your TV. You’re right, Tafero is a licensed bail bondsman — at least he put a license number on the bail sheet. But he’s also a PI and security consultant. And — ready for this — he works for David Storey.”

  Winston didn’t say anything but McCaleb could hear her breathing into the phone.

  “Terry, I think you better slow down. You are reading too much into this.”

  “No coincidences, Jaye.”

  “What coincidence? The man’s a bail bondsman. It’s what he does. He gets people out of jail. I’ll bet you a box of doughnuts his office is right across the street from Hollywood station with all the others. He probably bails every third drunk and fourth prostitute out of the tank there.”

  “You don’t believe it’s that simple and you know it.”

  “Don’t tell me what I believe.”

  “This was when he was in the middle of preparing for Storey’s trial. Why would Tafero come over and write a duice ticket himself?”

  “Because maybe he’s a one-man show and maybe, like I said, all he had to do was cross the street.”

  “I don’t buy it. And there’s something else. On his booking slip it says Gunn got his one phone call at three A.M. December thirty-first. The number’s on the slip — he called his sister in Long Beach.”

  “Okay, what about it? We knew that.”

  “I called her today and asked if she’d called a bondsman for him. She said no. She said she was tired of getting calls in the middle of the night and literally bailing him out all the time. She told him he was on his own this time.”

  “So he went with Tafero. What about it?”

  “How’d he get him? He already used his call.”

  Winston had no answer for that. They were both silent for a while. McCaleb looked out across the harbor. The yellow taxi boat was moving slowly down one of the fairways, empty except for the man at the wheel. Men alone in their boats, McCaleb thought.

  “What are you going to do?” Winston finally asked. “Where are you going with this?”

  “I’m coming back across tonight. Can you meet me in the morning?”

  “Where? When?”

  The tone of her voice revealed that she was put out by the prospect of a meeting.

  “Seven-thirty, out front at the Hollywood station.”

  There was a pause and then Winston said, “Wait a minute, wait a minute. I can’t do this. If Hitchens gets wind of it, that will be the end. He’ll ship me out to Palmdale. I’ll spend the rest of my care
er pulling bones out of the desert sand.”

  McCaleb was ready for that protest.

  “You said the bureau guys want the murder book back, right? You meet me, I’ll have it with me. What’s Hitchens going to say about that?”

  There was silence as Winston considered this.

  “Okay, that’ll work. I’ll be there.”

  34

  When Bosch got home that evening he found the message light on his phone machine was blinking. He pushed the button and listened to two messages, one from each of the prosecutors on the Storey case. He decided to call Langwiser back first. As he punched her number into the phone, he wondered what urgency had caused both members of the prosecution team to call him. He thought maybe they had been contacted by the FBI agents McCaleb had mentioned. Or possibly by the reporter.

  “What’s up?” he asked when Langwiser answered. “With both of you guys calling me I know it must be big and bad.”

  “Harry? How are you?”

  “Hanging in. What do you two have cooking?”

  “It’s funny you should mention that. Roger’s on his way over and I’m going to cook tonight. We’re going to go over Annabelle Crowe’s grand jury testimony one more time. You want to come by?”

  He knew she lived up in Agua Dulce, an hour’s drive north.

  “Uh, you know what, I’ve been driving all day. Down to Long Beach and back. You think you really need me there?”

  “Totally optional. Just didn’t want you to feel left out. But that’s not why we were calling.”

  “What was the reason?”

  He was in the kitchen, sliding a six-pack of Anchor Steam onto a shelf in the refrigerator. He pulled one bottle out of its sleeve and closed the door.

  “Roger and I have been conferencing all weekend about this. We also talked to Alice Short about it.”

  Alice Short was a chief deputy who was in charge of major trials. Their boss. It sounded as though they had been contacted about the Gunn case.

  “What’s the ‘it’ you’re talking about?” Bosch asked. He slid the bottle into the opener and yanked down, popping the cap.

  “Well, we think the case has really gone by the numbers. Really fallen together. In fact, it’s bulletproof, Harry, and we think we should pull the trigger tomorrow.”

  Bosch was quiet a moment while he tried to decipher all the weaponry coding.

  “You’re saying you’re going to rest tomorrow?”

  “We think so. We’ll probably talk about it again tonight but we have Alice’s blessing and Roger really thinks it’s the right move. What we’d do is put on a bunch of cleanup wits in the morning and then bring Annabelle Crowe out after lunch. We’d end with her — a human story. She’ll be our closer.”

  Bosch was speechless. It might be the right move from a prosecutorial point of view. But that would put J. Reason Fowkkes in control of things as early as Tuesday.

  “Harry, what do you think?”

  He took a long pull on the bottle. The beer wasn’t that cold. It had been in the car for a while.

  “I think you only get one shot,” he said, continuing the weaponry imagery. “You two better think long and hard about it tonight while you’re making the pasta. You don’t get a second chance to put on a case.”

  “We know, Harry. And how’d you know I was making pasta?”

  He could hear the smile in her voice.

  “Lucky guess.”

  “Well, don’t worry, we’ll think long and hard. We have been.”

  She paused, allowing him a chance to respond but he was silent.

  “In case we go this way, what’s the status on Crowe?”

  “She’s waiting in the wings. Good to go.”

  “Can you reach her tonight?”

  “No problem. I’ll tell her to be there by noon tomorrow.”

  “Thanks, Harry. See you in the morning.”

  They hung up. Bosch thought about things. He wondered if he should call McCaleb and tell him what was happening. He decided to wait. He walked out into the living room and turned on the stereo. The Art Pepper CD was still in the play slot. The music soon filled the room.

  35

  McCaleb was leaning against the Cherokee parked in front of the LAPD’s Hollywood station when Winston pulled up in a BMW Z 3 and parked. When she got out she saw McCaleb studying her car.

  “I was running late. I didn’t have time to pick up a company car.”

  “I like your wheels. You know what they say about L.A., you are what you drive.”

  “Don’t start profiling me, Terry. It’s too fucking early. Where’s the book and the tape?”

  He noted her profanity but kept his thoughts on that to himself. He pushed off the car and went around to the passenger side. He opened the door and took out the murder book and the crime scene tape. He handed them to her and she took them back to her car. McCaleb closed and locked the Cherokee, looking down through the window to the floor of the backseat where he had covered the Kinko’s box with the morning newspaper. Before coming to the rendezvous he had gone to the twenty-four-hour shop on Sunset and photocopied the entire murder book. The tape was a problem; he didn’t know where to get it dubbed on short notice. So he’d simply bought a videocassette at the Rite-Aid near the marina and slipped the blank tape into the case Winston had given him. It was his guess that she wouldn’t check to make sure he had returned the correct tape.

  When she came back from her car he pointed with his chin across the street.

  “I guess I owe you a box of doughnuts.”

  She looked. Across Wilcox from the station was a shabby two-story building with a handful of storefront bail bond operations with phone numbers advertised in each window in cheap neon, maybe to help prospective clients memorize them from the backseat of passing patrol cars. The middle business had a painted sign above the window: Valentino Bonds.

  “Which one?” Winston asked.

  “Valentino. As in Rudy Valentino Tafero. That’s what they used to call him when he worked this side of the street.”

  McCaleb appraised the small business again and shook his head.

  “I still don’t see how a neon bondsman and David Storey ever hooked up.”

  “Hollywood is just street trash with money. So what are we doing here? I don’t have a lot of time.”

  “You bring your badge?”

  She gave him a don’t-fuck-with-me look and he explained what he wanted to do. They went up the steps and into the station. At the front desk Winston flashed her badge and asked for the A.M. watch sergeant. A man with Zucker on his name plate and sergeant’s stripes on the sleeve of his uniform came out from the small office. Winston showed her badge again, introduced herself and then introduced McCaleb as her associate. Zucker knitted his healthy set of eyebrows together but didn’t ask what associate meant.

  “We’re working a homicide case from New Year’s Eve. The victim spent the night before in your tank. We —”

  “Edward Gunn.”

  “Right. You knew him?”

  “He’d been in a few times. And of course I heard he won’t be coming back.”

  “We need to talk to whoever runs the tank on A.M. watch.”

  “Well, that would be me, I guess. We don’t have a specific duty. It’s sort of catch as catch can around here. What do you want to know?”

  McCaleb took a set of photocopies from the murder book out of his jacket pocket and spread them on the counter. He noticed Winston’s look but ignored it.

  “We’re interested in how he made bail,” he said.

  Zucker turned the pages around so he could read them. He put his finger on Rudy Tafero’s signature.

  “Says it right here. Rudy Tafero. He’s got a place across the street. He came over and bailed him out.”

  “Did someone call him?”

  “Yeah, the guy did. Gunn.”

  McCaleb tapped his finger on the copy of the booking slip.

  “It says here that when he got his call he called th
is number. It’s his sister.”

  “Then she must’ve called Rudy for him.”

  “So nobody gets two calls.”

  “Nope, ’round here we’re usually so busy they’re lucky if they get the one.”