The Last Coyote (1995)

by Michael Connelly

  “Detective—is it Borsch?”

  “Bosch.”

  “Detective Bosch, let me explain something to you. Just because you work for the city does not give you access to confidential files. I work for the city but I don’t go over to Parker Center and say let me see this or let me see that. People have a right to privacy. Now, this is what I can do. And it is all I can do. If you give me the two names, I will send a letter to each person asking them to call you. That way, you get your information, I protect the files. Would that work for you? They’ll go out in the mail today. I promise.”

  She smiled but it was the phoniest smile Bosch had seen in days.

  “No, that wouldn’t work at all, Mona. You know, I’m really disappointed.”

  “I can’t help that.”

  “But you can, don’t you see?”

  “I have work to do, Detective. If you want me to send the letter, give me the names. If not, that’s your decision.”

  He nodded that he understood and brought his briefcase up from the floor to his lap. He saw her jump when he angrily unsnapped the locks. He opened it and took out his phone. He flipped it open and dialed his home number, then waited for the machine to pick up.

  Mona looked annoyed.

  “What are you doing?”

  He held his hand up for silence.

  “Yes, can you transfer me to Whitey Springer?” he said to his tape.

  He watched her reaction while acting like he wasn’t. He could tell, she knew the name. Springer was the City Hall columnist for the Times. His specialty was writing about the small bureaucratic nightmares, the little guy against the system. Bureaucrats could largely create these nightmares with impunity, thanks to civil service protections, but politicians read Springer’s column and they wielded tremendous power when it came to patronage jobs, transfers and demotions at City Hall. A bureaucrat vilified in print by Springer might be safe in his or her job but there likely would never be advancement, and there was nothing stopping a city council member from calling for an audit on an office or a council observer to sit in the corner. The word to the wise was to stay out of Springer’s column. Everybody knew that, including Mona.

  “Yeah, I can hold,” Bosch said into the phone. Then to Mona, he said, “He’s gonna love this one. He’s got a guy trying to solve a murder, the victim’s family waiting for thirty-three years to know who killed her, and some bureaucrat sitting in her office sucking on a quart of fruit punch isn’t giving him the addresses he needs just to talk to the other cops who worked the case. I’m not a newspaper man but I think that’s a column. He’ll love it. What do you think?”

  He smiled and watched her face flush almost as red as her fruit punch. He knew it was going to work.

  “Okay, hang up the phone,” she said.

  “What? Why?”

  “HANG UP! Hang up and I’ll get the information.”

  Bosch flipped the phone closed.

  “Give me the names.”

  He gave her the names and she got up angrily and silently to leave the room. She could barely fit around the desk but made the maneuver like a ballerina, the pattern instilled in her body’s memory by repeated practice.

  “How long will this take?” he asked.

  “As long as it takes,” she answered, regaining some of her bureaucratic bluster at the door.

  “No, Mona, you got ten minutes. That’s all. After that, you better not come back ’cause Whitey’s gonna be sitting here waiting for you.”

  She stopped and looked at him. He winked.

  After she left he got up and went around the side of the desk. He pushed it about two inches closer to the opposite wall, narrowing her path back to her chair.

  She was back in seven minutes, carrying a piece of paper. But Bosch could see it was trouble. She had a triumphant look on her face. He thought of that woman who had been tried a while back for cutting off her husband’s penis. Maybe it was the same face she had when she ran out the door with it.

  “Well, Detective Borsch, you’ve got a little problem.”

  “What is it?”

  She started around the desk and immediately rammed her thick thigh into its Formica-topped corner. It looked more embarrassing than painful. She had to flail her arms for balance and the impact of the collision shook the desk and knocked her container over. The red liquid began leaking out of the straw onto the blotter.

  “Shit!”

  She quickly moved the rest of the way around the desk and righted the container. Before sitting down she looked at the desk, suspicious that it had been moved.

  “Are you all right?” Bosch asked. “What is the problem with the addresses?”

  She ignored his first question, forgot her embarrassment and looked at Bosch and smiled. She sat down. She spoke as she opened a desk drawer and took out a wad of napkins stolen from the cafeteria.

  “Well, the problem is you won’t be talking to former detective Claude Eno anytime soon. At least, I don’t think you will.”

  “He’s dead.”

  She started wiping up the spill.

  “Yes. The checks go to his widow.”

  “What about McKittrick?”

  “Now McKittrick is a possibility. I have his address here. He’s over in Venice.”

  “Venice? So what’s the problem with that?”

  “That’s Venice, Florida.”

  She smiled, delighted with herself.

  “Florida,” Bosch repeated.

  He had no idea there was a Venice in Florida.

  “It’s a state, over on the other side of the country.”

  “I know where it is.”

  “Oh, and one other thing. The address I have is only a P.O. box. Sorry about that.”

  “Yeah, I bet. What about a phone?”

  She tossed the wet napkins into a trash can in the corner of the room.

  “We have no phone number. Try information.”

  “I will. Does it say there when he retired?”

  “You didn’t ask me to get that.”

  “Then give me what you’ve got.”

  Bosch knew he could get more, that they’d have to have a phone number somewhere, but he was handicapped because this was an unauthorized investigation. If he pushed things too far, then he’d only succeed in having his activities discovered and then halted.

  She floated the paper across the desk to him. He looked at it. It had two addresses on it, the P.O. box for McKittrick and the street address in Las Vegas for Eno’s widow. Her name was Olive.

  Bosch thought of something.

  “When do the checks go out?”

  “Funny you should ask.”

  “Why?”

  “Because today’s the last day of the month. They always go out the last day of the month.”

  That was a break and he felt like he deserved it, that he had worked for it. He picked up the paper she had given him and slipped it into his briefcase, then he stood up.

  “Always a pleasure to do work with the public servants of the city.”

  “Likewise. And, uh, Detective? Could you return the chair to the place you found it? As I said, Cassidy will need it.”

  “Of course, Mona. Pardon my forgetfulness.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  AFTER THE BOUT with bureaucratic claustrophobia, Bosch decided he needed some air to recover. He took the elevator down to the lobby and out the main doors to Spring Street. As he walked out, he was directed by a security officer to walk down the right side of the wide-staired entrance to the great building because there was a film location shoot taking place on the left side. Bosch watched what they were doing as he stepped down the stairs and then decided to take a break and have a smoke.

  He sat down on one of the concrete sidings along the stairs and lit a cigarette. The film shoot involved a group of actors posing as reporters who rushed down the stairs of City Hall to meet and question two men getting out of a car at the curb. They rehearsed it twice and then shot it twice while Bosch sat ther
e and smoked two cigarettes. Each time, the reporters all yelled the same thing at the two men.

  “Mr. Barrs, Mr. Barrs, did you do it? Did you do it?”

  The two men refused to answer and pushed through the pack and up the stairs with the reporters backtracking. On one of the takes one of the reporters stumbled as he moved backwards, fell on his back on the stairs and was partially trampled by the others. The director kept the scene going, perhaps thinking that the fall added a touch of realism to the scene.

  Bosch figured that the filmmakers were using the steps and front facade of City Hall as a courthouse setting. The men coming from the car were the defendant and his high-priced lawyer. He knew that City Hall was frequently used for such shots because it actually looked more like a courthouse than any real courthouse in the city.

  Bosch was bored after the second take, though he guessed there would be many more. He got up and walked down to First and then over to Los Angeles Street. He took that back to Parker Center. Along the way he was asked for spare change only four times, which he thought was a low count for downtown and possibly a sign of improving economic times. In the lobby of the police building he passed the bank of pay phones and on a whim stopped, picked one of the phones off the hook and dialed 305-555-1212. He had dealt with Metro-Dade Police in Miami several times over the years and 305 was the only Florida area code that readily came to mind. When the operator came on he asked for Venice and she informed him that 813 was the proper area code.

  He then redialed and got information in Venice. First he asked the operator what the nearest large city to Venice was. She told him that was Sarasota and he asked what the nearest large city was to that. When she said St. Petersburg, he finally started getting his bearings. He knew where St. Petersburg was on a map—the west coast of Florida—because he knew the Dodgers occasionally played spring training games there and he had looked it up once.

  He finally gave the operator McKittrick’s name and promptly got a tape recording saying the number was unlisted at the customer’s request. He wondered if any of the detectives he had dealt with by phone at Metro-Dade could get the number for him. He still had no idea exactly where Venice was or how far it was from Miami. Then he decided to leave it alone. McKittrick had taken steps to make it difficult to be contacted. He used a P.O. box and had an unlisted phone. Bosch didn’t know why a retired cop would take such steps in a state three thousand miles away from where he had worked but he felt sure that the best approach to McKittrick was going to have to be in person. A telephone call, even if Bosch got the number, was easy to avoid. Someone standing right at your door was different. Besides, Bosch had caught a break; he knew McKittrick’s pension check was in the mail to his P.O. box. He was sure he could use it to find the old cop.

  He clipped his ID card to his suit and went up to the Scientific Investigation Division. He told the woman behind the counter that he had to talk to someone in Latent Prints and pushed through the half door and down the hall to the print lab like he always did, without waiting for her go-ahead.

  The lab was a large room with two rows of work tables with overhead fluorescent lights. At the end of the room were two desks with AFIS computer terminals on them. Behind them was a glass-walled room with the mainframes inside. There was condensation on the glass because the mainframe room was kept cooler than the rest of the lab.

  Because it was lunchtime there was only one technician in the lab and Bosch didn’t know him. He was tempted to turn around and come back later when someone else might be there, but the tech looked up from one of the computer terminals and saw him. He was a tall, skinny man with glasses and a face that had been ravaged by acne when he was younger. The damage gave him a permanently sullen expression.

  “Yes?”

  “Yeah, hi, howya doin’?”

  “I’m doing fine. What can I do for you?”

  “Harry Bosch, Hollywood Division.”

  He put out his hand and the other man hesitated, then shook it tentatively.

  “Brad Hirsch.”

  “Yeah, I think I’ve heard your name. We’ve never worked together but that probably won’t last. I work homicide so it seems I basically get around to working with everybody in here eventually.”

  “Probably.”

  Bosch sat down on a chair to the side of the computer module and pulled his briefcase onto his lap. He noticed that Hirsch was looking into his blue computer screen. He seemed more comfortable looking there than at Bosch.

  “Reason I’m here is, at the moment, it’s kind of slow out in Tinseltown. And so I’ve been going through some old cases. I came across this one from nineteen sixty-one.”

  “Nineteen sixty-one?”

  “Yeah, it’s old. A female…cause of death blunt force trauma, then he made it look like a strangulation, a sex crime. Anyway, nobody was ever popped for it. It never went anywhere. In fact, I don’t think anyone’s really looked at it since the due diligence in sixty-two. A long time. Anyway, the thing is, the reason I’m here, is that back then the cops on this pulled a decent set of prints at the crime scene. They got a bunch of partials and some full rounds. And I’ve got them here.”

  Bosch took the yellowed print card out of the briefcase and held it out to the man. Hirsch looked at it but didn’t take it. He looked back at the computer screen and Bosch placed the print card down on the keyboard in front of him.

  “And, well, as you know, that was before we had these fancy computers and all of this technology you got here. All they did with this back then was use it to compare these to a suspect’s prints. They got no match, they let the guy go and then they just shoved these in an envelope. They’ve been sitting in the case file ever since. So what I was thinking was, we could—”

  “You want to run them through AFIS.”

  “Yeah, right. You know, take a shot at it. Spin the dice, maybe we get lucky and pick up a hitchhiker on the information highway. It’s happened before. Edgar and Burns out on the Hollywood table nailed an old one this week with an AFIS run. I was talking to Edgar and he said one of you guys down here—I think it was Donovan—said the computer has access to millions of prints from all across the country.”

  Hirsch nodded unenthusiastically.

  “And that’s not just criminal print files, right?” Bosch asked. “You’ve got military, law enforcement, civil service, everything. That right?”

  “Yes, that’s right. But, look, Detective Bosch, we—”

  “Harry.”

  “Okay, Harry. This is a great tool that’s getting better all the time. You’re correct about that but there still are human and time elements here. The comparison prints have to be scanned and coded and then those codes have to be entered into the computer. And right now we have a backup that’s running twelve days.”

  He pointed to the wall above the computer. There was a sign with changeable numbers on it. Like the signs in the union office that said X number of days since the last death in the line of duty.

  AUTOMATED FINGERPRINT IDENTIFICATION SYSTEM

  Search Requests Will Take 12 Days To Process No Exception!

  “So, you see, we can’t take everybody who walks in here and put them at the front of the pack, okay? Now if you want to fill out a search request form, I can—”

  “Look, I know there are exceptions. Especially in homicide cases. Somebody made that run for Burns and Edgar the other day. They didn’t wait twelve days. They were put through right away and they cleared three homicides just like that.”

  Bosch snapped his fingers. Hirsch looked at him and then back to the computer.

  “Yes, there are exceptions. But that comes from on high. If you want to talk to Captain LeValley, maybe she’ll approve it. If you—”

  “Burns and Edgar didn’t talk to her. Somebody just did it for them.”

  “Well, then that was against the rules. They must have known somebody who did it for them.”

  “Well, I know you, Hirsch.”

  “Why don’t you just f
ill out a request and I’ll see what—”

  “I mean, what’s it take, ten minutes?”

  “No. In your case much longer. This print card you have is an antique. It’s obsolete. I’d have to run it through the Livescan machine, which would then assign codes to the prints. Then I’d have to hand-enter the codes it gives me. Then depending on the restrictions on the run you want, it could take—”

  “I don’t want any restrictions. I want it compared to all data bases.”

  “Then the computer time can run as long as thirty, forty minutes.”