“Dr. Hinojos.”
“Detective Bosch, how are you?”
It was the hair. Almost seven years earlier, when Bosch had been a regular visitor to Hinojos’s office, her hair had been a deep brown without a hint of gray. She was still an attractive woman, gray or brown. But the change was startling.
“I’m doing okay. How’re things in the psych shop?”
She smiled.
“They’re fine.”
“I hear you run the whole show now.”
She nodded. Bosch felt himself getting nervous. When he had known her before, he had been on an involuntary stress leave. In twice-a-week sessions he had told her things he had never told anyone before or since. And once he was returned to duty he had never spoken to her again.
Until now.
“Did you know Julia Brasher?” he asked.
It wasn’t unusual for a department shrink to attend a line-of-duty funeral; to offer on-the-spot counseling to those close to the deceased.
“No, not really. Not personally. As head of the department I reviewed her academy application and screening interview. I signed off on it.”
She waited a moment, studying Bosch for a reaction.
“I understand you were close to her. And that you were there. You were the witness.”
Bosch nodded. People leaving the funeral were passing on both sides of them. Hinojos took a step closer to him so that she would not be overheard.
“This is not the time or place but, Harry, I want to talk to you about her.”
“What’s there to talk about?”
“I want to know what happened. And why.”
“It was an accident. Talk to Chief Irving.”
“I have and I’m not satisfied. I doubt you are, either.”
“Listen, Doctor, she’s dead, okay? I’m not going to—”
“I signed off on her. My signature put that badge on her. If we missed something—if I missed something—I want to know. If there were signs, we should have seen them.”
Bosch nodded and looked down at the grass between them.
“Don’t worry, there were signs I should’ve seen. But I didn’t put it together either.”
She took another step closer. Now Bosch could look nowhere but directly at her.
“Then I am right. There is something more to this.”
He nodded.
“Nothing overt. It’s just that she lived close to the edge. She took risks—she crossed the tube. She was trying to prove something. I don’t think she was even sure she wanted to be a cop.”
“Prove something to who?”
“I don’t know. Maybe herself, maybe somebody else.”
“Harry, I knew you as a man of great instincts. What else?”
Bosch shrugged.
“It’s just things she did or said. . . . I have a scar on my shoulder from a bullet wound. She asked me about it. The other night. She asked how I got shot and I told her how I had been lucky that it hit me where it did because it was all bone. Then . . . where she shot herself, it’s the same spot. Only with her . . . it ricocheted. She didn’t expect that.”
Hinojos nodded and waited.
“What I’ve been thinking I can’t stand thinking, know what I mean?”
“Tell me, Harry.”
“I keep replaying it in my head. What I saw and what I know. She pointed her gun at him. And I think if I hadn’t been there and yelled that maybe she would have shot him. Once he was down she would have wrapped his hands around the gun and fired a shot into the ceiling or maybe a car. Or maybe into him. It wouldn’t matter as long as he ended up dead with paraffin on his hands and she could claim he went for her gun.”
“What are you suggesting, that she shot herself in order to kill him and make herself look like a hero?”
“I don’t know. She talked about the world needing heroes. Especially now. She said she hoped to get a chance to be a hero one day. But I think there was something else in all of this. It was like she wanted the scar, the experience of it.”
“And she was willing to kill for it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m even right about any of this. All I know is that she might have been a rookie but she had already reached the point where there was a line between us and them, where everybody without a badge is a scumbag. She saw it happening to herself. She might have been just looking for a way out . . .”
Bosch shook his head and looked off to the side. The cemetery was almost deserted now.
“I don’t know. Saying it out loud makes it sound . . . I don’t know. It’s a crazy world.”
He took a step back from Hinojos.
“I guess you never really know anybody, do you?” he asked. “You might think you do. You might be close enough to sleep with somebody but you’ll never know what’s really going on inside.”
“No, you won’t. Everybody’s got secrets.”
Bosch nodded and was about to step away.
“Wait, Harry.”
She lifted her purse and opened it. She started digging through it.
“I still want to talk about this,” she said as she came out with a business card and handed it to him. “I want you to call me. Completely unofficial, confidential. For the good of the department.”
Bosch almost laughed.
“The department doesn’t care about it. The department cares about the image, not the truth. And when the truth endangers the image, then fuck the truth.”
“Well, I care, Harry. And so do you.”
Bosch looked down at the card and nodded and put it in his pocket.
“Okay, I’ll call you.”
“My cell phone’s on there. I carry it with me all the time.”
Bosch nodded. She stepped forward and reached out. She grasped his arm and squeezed it.
“What about you, Harry? Are you okay?”
“Well, other than losing her and being told by Irving to start thinking about retiring, I’m doing okay.”
Hinojos frowned.
“Hang in there, Harry.”
Bosch nodded, thinking about how he had used the same words with Julia at the end.
Hinojos went off and Bosch continued his trek to the grave. He thought he was alone now. He grabbed a handful of dirt from the fill mound and walked over and looked down. A whole bouquet and several single flowers had been dropped on top of the casket. Bosch thought about holding Julia in his bed just two nights before. He wished he had seen what was coming. He wished he had been able to take the hints and put them into a clear picture of what she was doing and where she was going.
Slowly, he raised his hand out and let the dirt slide through his fingers.
“City of bones,” he whispered.
He watched the dirt fall into the grave like dreams disappearing.
“I assume you knew her.”
Bosch quickly turned. It was her father. Smiling sadly. They were the only two left in the cemetery. Bosch nodded.
“Just recently. I got to know her. I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Frederick Brasher.”
He put out his hand. Bosch started to take it but then held up.
“My hand’s dirty.”
“Don’t worry. So is mine.”
They shook hands.
“Harry Bosch.”
Brasher’s hand stopped its shaking movement for a moment as the name registered.
“The detective,” he said. “You were there yesterday.”
“Yes. I tried . . . I did what I could to help her. I . . .”
He stopped. He didn’t know what to say.
“I’m sure you did. It must’ve been an awful thing to be there.”
Bosch nodded. A wave of guilt passed through him like an X-ray lighting his bones. He had left her there, thinking she would be all right. Somehow it hurt almost as bad as the fact she had died.
“What I don’t understand is how it happened,” Brasher said. “A mistake like that, how could it kill her? And then the Di
strict Attorney’s Office today saying this man Stokes would not face any charge in the shooting. I’m a lawyer but I just don’t understand. They are letting him go.”
Bosch studied the older man, saw the misery in his eyes.
“I’m sorry, sir. I wish I could tell you. I have the same questions as you.”
Brasher nodded and looked into the grave.
“I’m going now,” he said after a long moment. “Thank you for coming, Detective Bosch.”
Bosch nodded. They shook hands again and Brasher started to walk away.
“Sir?” Bosch asked.
Brasher turned back.
“Do you know when someone from the family will be going to her house?”
“Actually, I was given her keys today. I was going to go now. Take a look at things. Try to get a sense of her, I guess. In recent years we hadn’t . . .”
He didn’t finish. Bosch stepped closer to him.
“There’s something that she had. A picture in a frame. If it’s not . . . if it’s okay with you, I’d like to keep it.”
Brasher nodded.
“Why don’t you come now? Meet me there. Show me this picture.”
Bosch looked at his watch. Lt. Billets had scheduled a one-thirty meeting to discuss the status of the case. He probably had just enough time to make it to Venice and back to the station. There would be no time for lunch but he couldn’t see himself eating anything anyway.
“Okay, I will.”
They parted and headed toward their cars. On the way Bosch stopped on the grass where the salute had been fired. Combing the grass with his foot, he looked until he saw the glint of brass and bent down to pick up one of the ejected rifle shells. He held it on his palm and looked at it for a few moments, then closed his hand and dropped it into his coat pocket. He had picked up a shell from every cop funeral he had ever attended. He had a jar full of them.
He turned and walked out of the cemetery.
35
JERRY Edgar had a warrant knock that sounded like no other Bosch had ever heard. Like a gifted athlete who can focus the forces of his whole body into the swinging of a bat or the dunking of a basketball, Edgar could put his whole weight and six-foot-four frame into his knock. It was as though he could call down and concentrate all the power and fury of the righteous into the fist of his large left hand. He’d plant his feet firmly and stand sideways to the door. He’d raise his left arm, bend the elbow to less than thirty degrees and hit the door with the fleshy side of his fist. It was a backhand knock, but he was able to fire the pistons of this muscle assembly so quickly that it sounded like the staccato bark of a machine gun. What it sounded like was Judgment Day.
Samuel Delacroix’s aluminum-skinned trailer seemed to shudder from end to end when Edgar hit its door with his fist at 3:30 on Thursday afternoon. Edgar waited a few seconds and then hit it again, this time announcing “POLICE!” and then stepping back off the stoop, which was a stack of unconnected concrete blocks.
They waited. Neither had a weapon out but Bosch had his hand under his jacket and was gripping his gun in its holster. It was his standard procedure when delivering a warrant on a person not believed to be dangerous.
Bosch listened for movements from inside but the hiss from the nearby freeway was too loud. He checked the windows; none of the closed curtains were moving.
“You know,” Bosch whispered, “I’m starting to think it comes as a relief when you yell it’s just the cops after that knock. At least then they know it’s not an earthquake.”
Edgar didn’t respond. He probably knew it was just nervous banter from Bosch. It wasn’t anxiety about the door knock—Bosch fully expected Delacroix to be easy. He was anxious because he knew the case was all coming down to the next few hours with Delacroix. They would search the trailer and then have to make a decision, largely communicated in partners’ code, on whether to arrest Delacroix for his son’s murder. Somewhere in that process they would need to find the evidence or elicit the confession that would change a case largely built on theory into one built on lawyer-resistant fact.
So in Bosch’s mind they were quickly approaching the moment of truth, and that always made him nervous.
Earlier, in the case status meeting with Lt. Billets, it had been decided that it was time to talk to Sam Delacroix. He was the victim’s father, he was the chief suspect. What little evidence they had still pointed to him. They spent the next hour typing up a search warrant for Delacroix’s trailer and taking it to the downtown criminal courts building to a judge who was normally a soft touch.
But even this judge took some convincing. The problem was the case was old, the evidence directly linking the suspect was thin and the place Bosch and Edgar wanted to search was not where the homicide could have occurred and was not even occupied by the suspect at the time of the death.
What the detectives had in their favor was the emotional impact that came from the list in the warrant of all the injuries that the boy’s bones indicated he had sustained over his short life. In the end, it was all those fractures that won the judge over and he signed the warrant.
They had gone to the driving range first but were informed that Delacroix was finished driving the tractor for the day.
“Give him another shot,” Bosch told Edgar outside the trailer.
“I think I can hear him coming.”
“I don’t care. I want him rattled.”
Edgar stepped back up onto the stoop and hit the door again. The concrete blocks wobbled and he didn’t plant his feet firmly. The resulting knock didn’t carry the power and terror of the first two assaults on the door.
Edgar stepped back down.
“That wasn’t the police,” Bosch whispered. “That was a neighbor complaining about the dog or something.”
“Sorry, I—”
The door came open and Edgar shut up. Bosch went into high alert. Trailers were tricky. Unlike most structures, their doors opened outward so that the interior space didn’t have to accommodate the swing. Bosch was positioned on the blind side, so that whoever answered was looking at Edgar but couldn’t see Bosch. The problem was Bosch couldn’t see whoever had opened the door either. If there was trouble Edgar’s job was to yell a warning to Bosch and get himself clear. Without hesitation Bosch would empty his gun into the door of the trailer, the bullets tearing through the aluminum and whoever was on the other side like they were paper.
“What?” a man’s voice said.
Edgar held up his badge. Bosch studied his partner for any warning sign of trouble.
“Mr. Delacroix, police.”
Seeing no sign of alarm, Bosch stepped forward and grabbed the knob and pulled the door all the way open. He kept his jacket flipped back and his hand on the grip of his gun.
The man he had seen on the golf range the day before was standing there. He wore an old pair of plaid shorts and a washed-out maroon T-shirt with permanent stains under the arms.
“We have a warrant allowing us to search these premises,” Bosch said. “Can we come in?”
“You guys,” Delacroix said. “You guys were at the range yesterday.”
“Sir,” Bosch said forcefully, “I said that we have a search warrant for this trailer. Can we come in and conduct the search?”
Bosch took the folded warrant out of his pocket and held it up, but not within Delacroix’s reach. That was the trick. To get the warrant they had to show all their cards to a judge. But they didn’t want to show the same cards to Delacroix. Not just yet. So while Delacroix was entitled to read and study the warrant before granting the detectives entrance, Bosch was hoping to get inside the trailer without that happening. Delacroix would soon know the facts of the case, but Bosch wanted to control the delivery of information to him so that he could take readings and make judgments based on the suspect’s reactions.
Bosch started putting the warrant back into his inside coat pocket.
“What’s this about?” Delacroix asked in muted protest. “Can I at le
ast see that thing?”
“Are you Samuel Delacroix?” Bosch replied quickly.
“Yes.”
“This is your trailer, correct, sir?”
“It’s my trailer. I lease the spot. I want to read the—”
“Mr. Delacroix,” Edgar said. “We’d rather not stand out here in the view of your neighbors discussing this. I’m sure you don’t want that either. Are you going to allow us to lawfully execute the search warrant or not?”
Delacroix looked from Bosch to Edgar and then back to Bosch. He nodded his head.
“I guess so.”
Bosch was first onto the stoop. He entered, squeezing by Delacroix on the threshold and picking up the odor of bourbon and bad breath and cat urine.
“Starting early, Mr. Delacroix?”
“Yeah, I’ve had a drink,” Delacroix said with a mixture of so-what and self-loathing in his voice. “I’m done my work. I’m entitled.”
Edgar came in then, a much tighter squeeze past Delacroix, and he and Bosch scanned what they could see of the dimly lit trailer. To the right from the doorway was the living room. It was wood paneled and had a green Naugahyde couch and a coffee table with pieces of the wood veneer scraped off, exposing the particleboard beneath. There was a matching lamp table with no lamp on it and a television stand with a TV awkwardly stacked on top of a videocassette recorder. There were several videotapes stacked on top of the television. Across from the coffee table was an old recliner with its shoulders torn open—probably by a cat—and stuffing leaking out. Under the coffee table was a stack of newspapers, most of them gossip tabloids with blaring headlines.
To the left was a galley-style kitchen with sink, cabinets, stove, oven and refrigerator on one side and a four-person dining booth on the right. There was a bottle of Ancient Age bourbon on the table. On the floor under the table were a few crumbs of cat food on a plate and an old plastic margarine tub half full of water. There was no sign of the cat, other than the smell of its urine.
Beyond the kitchen was a narrow hallway leading back to one or two bedrooms and a bathroom.
“Let’s leave the door open and open up a few windows,” Bosch said. “Mr. Delacroix, why don’t you sit down on the couch there?”
Michael Connelly Page 23
