The Last Coyote (1995)

by Michael Connelly

  “Yes, it was brutal. I think almost all of them are. Somebody dies, it’s brutal. For them.”

  “And you took the suspect into custody?”

  “Yes, my partner and I. I mean, no. He came in voluntarily to answer questions.”

  “Did this case affect you more than, say, other cases have in the past?”

  “Maybe, I don’t know.”

  “Why would that be?”

  “You mean why did I care about a prostitute? I didn’t. Not more than any other victim. But in homicide there is one rule that I have when it comes to the cases I get.”

  “What is that rule?”

  “Everybody counts or nobody counts.”

  “Explain it.”

  “Just what I said. Everybody counts or nobody counts. That’s it. It means I bust my ass to make a case whether it’s a prostitute or the mayor’s wife. That’s my rule.”

  “I understand. Now, let’s go to this specific case. I’m interested in hearing your description of what happened after the arrest and the reasons you may have for your violent actions at the Hollywood Division.”

  “Is this being taped?”

  “No, Detective, whatever you tell me is protected. At the end of these sessions I will simply make a recommendation to Assistant Chief Irving. The details of the sessions will never be divulged. The recommendations I make are usually less than half a page and contain no details from the dialogues.”

  “You wield a lot of power with that half page.”

  She didn’t respond. Bosch thought for a moment while looking at her. He thought he might be able to trust her but his natural instinct and experience was that he should trust no one. She seemed to know his dilemma and waited him out.

  “You want to hear my side of it?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Okay, I’ll tell you what happened.”

  Chapter Two

  BOSCH SMOKED ALONG the way home but realized that what he really wanted was not a cigarette, but a drink to deaden his nerves. He looked at his watch and decided it was too early to stop at a bar. He settled for another cigarette and home.

  After negotiating the drive up Woodrow Wilson, he parked at the curb a half block from the house and walked back. He could hear gentle piano music, something classical, coming from the home of one of his neighbors but he couldn’t tell which house. He didn’t really know any of his neighbors or which one might have a piano player in the family. He ducked under the yellow tape strung in front of the property and entered through the door in the carport.

  This was his routine, to park down the street and hide the fact that he lived in his own house. The house had been red-tagged as uninhabitable after the earthquake and ordered demolished by a city inspector. But Bosch had ignored both orders, cut the lock on the electric box, and had been living in it for three months.

  It was a small house with redwood siding that stood on steel pylons anchored in the sedimentary bedrock folded and formed as the Santa Monica Mountains rose out of the desert during the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras. The pylons had held true in their moorings during the quake, but the overlying house had shifted atop them, breaking partially free of the pylons and seismic bolts. It slid. All of about two inches. Still, it was enough. Though short on distance the slide was long on damage. Inside, the woodframe house flexed and window and door frames lost their square. The glass shattered, the front door became terminally closed, frozen in a frame that had canted to the north with the rest of the house. If Bosch wanted to open that door, he would probably need to borrow the police tank with the battering ram. As it was, he’d had to use a crowbar to open the carport door. Now that door served as the main entrance to his home.

  Bosch had paid a contractor five thousand dollars to jack the house up and then over the two inches it had moved. It was then put down in its proper space and rebolted to the pylons. After that, Bosch was content to work as time allowed on reframing windows and interior doors himself. The glass came first and in the months after that he reframed and rehung the interior doors. He worked from books on carpentry and often had to do individual projects two and three times until he had them reasonably correct. But he found the work enjoyable and even therapeutic. Working with his hands became a respite from his job in homicide. He left the front door as it was, thinking that somehow it was fitting, that it was a salute to the power of nature. And he was content to use the side door.

  All of his efforts did not save the house from the city’s list of condemned structures. Gowdy, the building inspector who had been assigned to this section of the hills, kept it red-tagged as condemned, despite Bosch’s work, and so began the hiding game in which Bosch made his entrances and exits as surreptitiously as a spy’s to a foreign embassy. He tacked black plastic tarps over the inside of the front windows so they would emit no telltale light. And he always watched for Gowdy. Gowdy was his nemesis.

  In the meantime, Bosch hired a lawyer to appeal the inspector’s edict.

  The carport door granted entry directly into the kitchen. After he came in, Bosch opened the refrigerator and retrieved a can of Coca-Cola, then stood in the doorway of the aging appliance letting its breath cool him while he studied its contents for something suitable for dinner. He knew exactly what was on the shelves and in the drawers but still he looked. It was as if he hoped for the surprise appearance of a forgotten steak or chicken breast. He followed this routine with the refrigerator often. It was the ritual of a man who was alone. He knew this also.

  On the back deck Bosch drank the soda and ate a sandwich consisting of five-day-old bread and slices of meat from plastic packages. He wished he had potato chips to go with it because he would undoubtedly be hungry later after having only the sandwich for dinner.

  He stood at the railing looking down at the Hollywood Freeway, near capacity now with the Monday-evening commute. He had gotten out of downtown just before the crest of the rush-hour wave had broken. He would have to guard against going overtime on the sessions with the police psychologist. They were scheduled for 3:30 P.M. on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Did Carmen Hinojos ever let a session go over? he wondered. Or was hers a nine-to-five mission?

  From his vantage on the mountain, he could see almost all northbound lanes of the freeway as it cut through the Cahuenga Pass to the San Fernando Valley. He was reviewing what had been said during the session, trying to decide whether it was a good or bad session, but his focus drifted and he began to watch the point where the freeway came into view as it crested the pass. Absentmindedly, he would choose two cars that came over about even with each other and follow them through the mile-long segment of the freeway that was visible from the deck. He’d pick one or the other and follow the race, unknown to its drivers, until the finish line, which was the Lankershim Boulevard exit.

  After a few minutes of this he realized what he was doing and spun around, away from the freeway.

  “Jesus,” he said out loud.

  He knew then that keeping his hands busy would not be enough while he was away from his job. He went back inside and got a bottle of Henry’s from the refrigerator. Right after he opened the beer the phone rang. It was his partner, Jerry Edgar, and the call was a welcome distraction from the silence.

  “Harry, how’s things in Chinatown?”

  Because every cop secretly feared that he or she might one day crack from the pressures of the job and become a candidate for therapy sessions at the department’s Behavioral Sciences Section, the unit was rarely spoken of by its formal name. Going to BSS sessions was more often referred to as “going to Chinatown” because of the unit’s location there on Hill Street, several blocks from Parker Center. If it became known about a cop that he was going there, the word would spread that he had the Hill Street blues. The six-story bank building where the BSS was located was known as the “Fifty-One-Fifty” building. This was not its address. It was the police radio code number for describing a crazy person. Codes like this were part of the protective structure used to be
little and, therefore, more easily contain their own fears.

  “Chinatown was great,” Bosch said sarcastically. “You ought to try it some day. It’s got me sitting here counting cars on the freeway.”

  “Well, at least you won’t run out.”

  “Yeah. What’s going on with you?”

  “Pounds finally did it.”

  “Did what?”

  “Stuck me with somebody new.”

  Bosch was silent a moment. The news gave him a sense of finality. The thought that maybe he would never get his job back began to creep into his mind.

  “He did?”

  “Yeah, he finally did. I caught a case this morning. So he stuck one of his suckups with me. Burns.”

  “Burns? From autos? He’s never worked homicide. Has he ever even worked CAPs?”

  Detectives usually followed one of two paths in the department. One was property crimes and the other was crimes against persons. The latter included specializing in homicide, rape, assault and robbery. CAPs detectives had the higher-profile cases and usually viewed property crime investigators as paper pushers. There were so many property crimes in the city that the investigators spent most of their time taking reports and processing the occasional arrest. They actually did little detective work. There was no time to.

  “He’s been a paper guy all the way,” Edgar said. “But with Pounds that doesn’t matter. All he cares about is having somebody on the homicide table who isn’t going to give his shit back to him. And Burns is just the guy. He probably started lobbying for the job the minute the word went out about you.”

  “Well, fuck him. I’m gonna get back to the table and then he goes back to autos.”

  Edgar took his time before answering. It was as if Bosch had said something that made no sense to him.

  “You really think that, Harry? Pounds ain’t going to stand for you coming back. Not after what you did. I told him when he told me I was with Burns that, you know, no offense but I’d wait until Harry Bosch came back and he said if I wanted to handle it that way, then I’d be waitin’ until I was an old man.”

  “He said that? Well, fuck him, too. I still got a friend or two in the department.”

  “Irving still owes you, doesn’t he?”

  “I guess maybe I’ll find out.”

  He didn’t go further with it. He wanted to change the subject. Edgar was his partner but they had never gotten to the point where they completely confided in each other. Bosch played the mentor role in the relationship and he trusted Edgar with his life. But that was a bond that held fast on the street. Inside the department was another matter. Bosch had never trusted anyone, never relied on anyone. He wasn’t going to start now.

  “So, what’s the case?” he asked, to divert the conversation.

  “Oh, yeah, I wanted to tell you about it. This was weird, man. First the killing’s weird, then what happened after. The call out was to a house on Sierra Bonita. This is about five in the A.M. The citizen reports he heard a sound like a gunshot, only muffled-like. He grabs his deer rifle out of the closet and goes outside to take a look. This is a neighborhood that’s been picked clean lately by the hypes, you know? Four B and Es on his block alone this month. So, he was ready with the rifle. Anyway, he goes down his driveway with the gun—the garage is in the back—and he sees a pair of legs hanging out of the open door of his car. It was parked in front of the garage.”

  “He shoots him?”

  “No, that’s the crazy thing. He goes up with his gun but the guy in his car is already dead. Stabbed in the chest with a screwdriver.”

  Bosch didn’t get it. He didn’t have enough of the facts. But he said nothing.

  “The air bag killed him, Harry.”

  “What do you mean, the air bag killed him?”

  “The air bag. This goddamn hype was stealing the air bag out of the steering wheel and somehow the thing went off. It inflated instantly, like it was supposed to, and drove the screwdriver right into his heart, man. I’ve never seen anything like it. He must’ve been holding the screwdriver backwards or he was using the butt-end to bang on the wheel. We haven’t exactly figured out that part yet. We talked to a guy at Chrysler. He says that you take the protective cover off, like this dude had, and even static electricity can set the thing off. Our dead guy was wearing a sweater. I don’t know, could’ve been it. Burns says it’s the first death by static cling.”

  While Edgar chuckled at his new partner’s humor, Bosch thought about the scenario. He remembered a department info bulletin going out on air bag thefts the year before. They had become a hot commodity in the underground market, with thieves getting as much as three hundred dollars apiece for air bags from unscrupulous body shops. The body shops would buy them for three hundred and turn around and charge a customer nine hundred to install one. That was double the profit derived when ordering from the manufacturer.

  “So it goes down as accidental?” Bosch asked.

  “Yeah, accidental death. But the story ain’t over. Both doors of the car were open.”

  “The dead guy had a partner.”

  “That’s what we figure. And so if we find the fucker we can charge him. Under the felony homicide law. So we had SID laser the inside of the car and pull all the prints they could. I took ’em down to Latents and talked one of the techs into scanning them and running them on the AFIS. And bingo.”

  “You got the partner?”

  “Dead bang. That AFIS computer has got a long reach, Harry. One of the nets is the U.S. Military Identification Center in St. Louis. We got a match on our guy outta there. He was in the Army ten years ago. We got his ID from that, then got an address from the DMV and picked him up today. He copped on the ride in. He’s gonna go away for a while.”

  “Sounds like a good day, then.”

  “Didn’t end there, though. I haven’t told you the weird part yet.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “Remember I said we lasered the car and took all the prints?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, we got another match, too. This one on the crime indexes. A case outta Mississippi. Man, all days should be like this one was.”

  “What was the match?” Bosch asked. He was growing impatient with the way Edgar was parceling out the story.

  “We matched prints put on the net seven years ago by something called the Southern States Criminal Identification Base. It’s like five states that don’t add up in population to half of L.A. Anyway, one of the prints we put through today matched the doer on a double homicide in Biloxi all the way back in ’seventy-six. Some guy the papers there called the Bicentennial Butcher on account he killed two women on the Fourth of July.”

  “The car’s owner? The guy with the rifle?”

  “Damn right. His fingerprints were on the cleaver left in one girl’s skull. He was a bit surprised when we came back to his house this afternoon. We said, ‘Hey, we caught the partner of the guy who died in your car. And by the way, you’re under arrest for a two-bagger, motherfucker.’ I think it blew his mind, Harry. You shoulda been there.”

  Edgar laughed loudly into the phone and Bosch knew, after only one week of being grounded, how much he missed the job.

  “Did he cop?”

  “No, he kept quiet. You can’t be that stupid and get away with a double murder for almost twenty years. That’s a nice run.”

  “Yeah, what’s he been doing?”

  “Looks like he’s just been laying low. Owns a hardware on Santa Monica. Married and has a kid and a dog. A total reform case. But he’s going back to Biloxi. I hope he likes southern cooking ’cause he won’t be coming back here anytime soon.”

  Edgar laughed again. Bosch said nothing. The story was depressing because it was a reminder of what he was no longer doing. It also reminded him about what Hinojos had asked about defining his mission.

  “Got a couple of Mississippi state troopers comin’ out tomorrow,” Edgar said. “Talked to them a little while ago and they are ha
ppy campers.”

  Bosch didn’t say anything for a while.

  “Harry, you still there?”

  “Yeah, I was just thinking about something…Well, it sounds like a hell of a day of crime fighting. How’s the fearless leader taking it?”

  “Pounds? Jesus, he’s got a hard-on over this the size of a Louisville slugger. You know what he’s doing? He’s trying to figure out a way to take credit for all three clearances. He’s trying to put the Biloxi cases on our rate.”

  It didn’t surprise Bosch. It was a widespread practice among department managers and statisticians to add positive credit to crime clearance levels whenever and wherever possible. In the air bag case, there was no actual murder. It was an accident. But because the death occurred during the commission of a crime, California law held that an accomplice to the crime could be charged with his partner’s death. Bosch knew that based on the partner’s arrest for murder, Pounds intended to add a case to the murder clearance chart. He would not balance this by adding a case to the murder occurrence chart because the death by air bag was an accident. This little statistical two-step would result in a nice little boost for the Hollywood Division’s overall homicide clearance rate, which in recent years had continually threatened to dip below fifty percent.