The Last Coyote (1995)

by Michael Connelly

  Bosch quietly placed his overnighter and the sandwich bag on the kitchen floor and reached to his waist. Old habits died hard. He still had no gun and he knew his backup was on the shelf in the closet near the front door. For a moment he thought about running out to the street in hopes of catching the patrol car but he knew it was long gone.

  Instead, he opened a drawer and quietly withdrew a small paring knife. There were longer blades in there but the small knife would be easier to handle. He stepped toward the archway that led from the kitchen to the house’s front entry. At the threshold, still hidden from whoever might be out there, he stopped, tilted his head forward and listened. He could hear the low hiss of the freeway down the hill behind the house, but nothing from within. Nearly a minute of silence passed. He was about to step out of the kitchen when he heard a sound. It was the slight whisper of cloth moving. Maybe the crossing or uncrossing of legs. He knew someone was in the living room. And he knew by now that they would know that he knew.

  “Detective Bosch,” a voice said from the silence of the house. “It is safe for you. You can come out.”

  Bosch knew the voice but was operating at such an acute level of intensity, he couldn’t immediately compute it and place it. All he knew was that he had heard it before.

  “It’s Assistant Chief Irving, Detective Bosch,” the voice said. “Could you please step out? That way you don’t get hurt and we don’t get hurt.”

  Yes, that was the voice. Bosch relaxed, put the knife down on the counter, the sandwich bag in the refrigerator and stepped out of the kitchen. Irving was there, sitting in the living room chair. Two men in suits whom Bosch didn’t recognize sat on the couch. Looking around, Bosch could see his box of letters and cards from the closet sitting on the coffee table. He saw the murder book that he had left on the dining room table was sitting on the lap of one of the strangers. They had been searching his house, going through his things.

  Bosch suddenly realized what had happened outside.

  “I saw your lookout. Anybody want to tell me what’s going on?”

  “Where’ve you been, Bosch?” one of the suits asked.

  Bosch looked at him. Not a single glimmer of recognition hit him.

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  He bent down and picked the box of cards and letters up off the coffee table, where it had been in front of the man.

  “Detective,” Irving said, “This is Lieutenant Angel Brockman and this is Earl Sizemore.”

  Bosch nodded. He recognized one of the names.

  “I’ve heard of you,” he said, looking at Brockman. “You’re the one who sent Bill Connors to the closet. That must’ve been good for IAD man of the month. Quite an honor.”

  The sarcasm in Bosch’s voice was unmistakable, as he intended it to be. The closet was where most cops kept their guns while off duty; going to the closet was department slang for a cop killing himself. Connors was an old beat cop in Hollywood Division who had killed himself the year before while he was under IAD investigation for trading dime bags of heroin to runaway girls for sex. After he was dead, the runaways had admitted making up the complaints because Connors was always hassling them to move off his beat. He had been a good man but saw everything stacked against him and decided to go to the closet.

  “That was his choice, Bosch. And now you’ve got yours. You want to tell us where you’ve been the last twenty-four?”

  “You want to tell me what this is about?”

  He heard a clunking sound coming from the bedroom.

  “What the hell?” He walked to the door and saw another suit in his bedroom, standing over the open drawer of the night table. “Hey, fuckhead, get out of there. Get out now!”

  Bosch stepped in and kicked the drawer closed. The man stepped back, raised his hands like a prisoner and walked out to the living room.

  “And this is Jerry Toliver,” Irving added. “He’s with Lieutenant Brockman, IAD. Detective Sizemore has joined us here from RHD.”

  “Fantastic,” Bosch said. “So everybody knows everybody. What’s going on?”

  He looked at Irving as he said this, believing if he was going to get a straight answer from anyone here, it would be him. Irving was generally a straight shooter when it came to his dealings with Bosch.

  “De—Harry, we have got to ask you some questions,” Irving said. “It would be best if we explain things later.”

  Bosch could tell this one was serious.

  “You got a warrant to be in here?”

  “We’ll show it to you later,” Brockman said. “Let’s go.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Downtown.”

  Bosch had had enough run-ins with the Internal Affairs Division to know things were being handled differently here. Just the fact that Irving, the second-highest-ranking officer in the department, was with them was an indication of the gravity of the situation. He guessed it was more than their simply finding out about his private investigation. If it was just that, Irving wouldn’t have been here. There was something terribly wrong.

  “All right,” Bosch said, “who’s dead?”

  All four looked at him with faces of stone, confirming that in fact someone was dead. Bosch felt his chest tighten and for the first time he began to be scared. The names and faces of people he had involved flashed through his mind. Meredith Roman, Jake McKittrick, Keisha Russell, the two women in Las Vegas. Who else? Jazz? Could he have possibly put her in some kind of danger? Then it hit him. Keisha Russell. The reporter had probably done what he told her not to. She had gone to Conklin or Mittel and asked questions about the old clip she had pulled for Bosch. She had walked in blindly and was now dead because of her mistake.

  “Keisha Russell?” he asked.

  He got no reply. Irving stood up and the others followed. Sizemore kept the murder book in his hand. He was going to take it. Brockman went into the kitchen, picked up the overnighter and carried it to the door.

  “Harry, why don’t you ride with Earl and I?” Irving said.

  “How ’bout I meet you guys down there.”

  “You ride with me.”

  It was said sternly. It invited no further debate. Bosch raised his hands, acknowledging he had no choice, and moved toward the door.

  Bosch sat in the back of Sizemore’s LTD, directly behind Irving. He looked out the window as they went down the hill. He kept thinking of the young reporter’s face. Her eagerness had killed her but Bosch couldn’t help but share the blame. He had planted the seed of mystery in her mind and it had grown until she couldn’t resist it.

  “Where’d they find her?” he asked.

  He was met only with silence. He couldn’t understand why they said nothing, especially Irving. The assistant chief had led him to believe in the past that they had an understanding, if not a liking, between each other.

  “I told her not to do anything,” he said. “I told her to sit on it a few days.”

  Irving turned his body so that he could partially see Bosch behind him.

  “Detective, I don’t know who or what you’re talking about.”

  “Keisha Russell.”

  “Don’t know her.”

  He turned back around. Bosch was puzzled. The names and faces went through his mind again. He added Jasmine but then subtracted her. She knew nothing about the case.

  “McKittrick?”

  “Detective,” Irving said and again struggled to turn around to look at Bosch. “We are involved in the investigation of the homicide of Lieutenant Harvey Pounds. These other names are not involved. If you think they are people that should be contacted, please let me know.”

  Bosch was too stunned to answer. Harvey Pounds? That made no sense. He had nothing to do with the case, didn’t even know about it. Pounds never left the office, how could he have gotten into danger? Then it came to him, washing over him like a wave of water that brought with it a chill. He understood. It made sense. And in the moment that he saw that it did, he also saw his own respo
nsibility as well as his own predicament.

  “Am I…?”

  He couldn’t finish.

  “Yes,” Irving said. “You are currently considered a suspect. Now maybe you will be quiet until we can set up a formal interview.”

  Bosch leaned his head against the window glass and closed his eyes.

  “Ah, Jesus…”

  And in that moment he realized he was no better than Brockman was for having sent a man to the closet. For Bosch knew in the dark part of his heart that he was responsible. He didn’t know how or when it had happened but he knew.

  He had killed Harvey Pounds. And he carried Pounds’s badge in his pocket.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  BOSCH WAS NUMB to most of what was going on around him. After they reached Parker Center he was escorted up to Irving’s office on the sixth floor and then placed in a chair in the adjoining conference room. He was in there alone for a half hour before Brockman and Toliver came in. Brockman sat directly across from Bosch, Toliver to Harry’s right. It was obvious to Bosch by their being in Irving’s conference room instead of an IAD interview room that Irving wanted to keep a tight control on this one. If it turned out to be a cop-killed-cop case, he’d need all the control he could muster to contain it. It could be a publicity debacle to rival those of the Rodney King days.

  Through his daze and the jarring images of Pounds being dead, a pressing thought finally got Bosch’s attention: he was in serious trouble himself. He told himself he couldn’t retreat into a shell. He must be alert. The man sitting across from him would like nothing better than to hang a killing on Bosch and he was willing to go to any extreme to do it. It wasn’t good enough that Bosch knew in his own mind that he had not, at least physically, killed Pounds. He had to defend himself. And so he resolved that he would show Brockman nothing. He would be just as tough as anybody in the room. He cleared his throat and began before Brockman got the chance.

  “When did it happen?”

  “I’m asking the questions.”

  “I can save you time, Brockman. Tell me when it happened and I’ll tell you where I was. We’ll get this over with. I understand why I’m a suspect. I won’t hold it against you but you’re wasting your time.”

  “Bosch, don’t you feel anything at all? A man is dead. You worked with him.”

  Bosch stared at him a long moment before answering in an even voice.

  “What I feel doesn’t matter. Nobody deserves to be killed, but I’m not going to miss him and I certainly won’t miss working for him.”

  “Jesus.” Brockman shook his head. “The man had a wife, a kid in college.”

  “Maybe they won’t miss him, either. You never know. The guy was a prick at work. No reason to expect him to be anything else at home. What’s your wife think about you, Brockman?”

  “Save it, Bosch. I’m not falling for any of your—”

  “Do you believe in God, Brickman?”

  Bosch used Brockman’s nickname in the department, awarded to him for his methodical way of building cases against other cops, like the late Bill Connors.

  “This isn’t about me or what I believe in, Bosch. We’re talking about you.”

  “That’s right, we’re talking about me. So, I’ll tell you what I think. I’m not sure what I believe. My life’s more than half over and I still haven’t figured it out. But the theory I’m leaning toward is that everybody on this planet has some kind of energy that makes them what they are. It’s all about energy. And when you die, it just goes somewhere else. And Pounds? He was bad energy and now it’s gone somewhere else. So I don’t feel too bad about him dying, to answer your question. But I’d like to know where that bad energy went. Hope you didn’t get any, Brickman. You already have a lot.”

  He winked at Brockman and saw the momentary confusion in the IAD detective’s face as he tried to interpret what the jibe had meant. He seemed to shake it off and go on.

  “Enough of the bullshit. Why did you confront Lieutenant Pounds in his office on Thursday? You know that was off limits while you are on leave.”

  “Well, it was kind’ve like one of those Catch-22 situations. I think that’s what they call ’em. It was off limits to go there but then Pounds, my commanding officer, called me up and told me I had to turn in my car. See, it was that bad energy working. I was already on involuntary leave but he couldn’t leave well enough alone. He had to take my car, too. So I brought him in the keys. He was my supervisor and it was an order. So going there broke one of the rules but not going would have broken one, too.”

  “Why’d you threaten him?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “He filed an addendum to the assault complaint of two weeks earlier.”

  “I don’t care what he filed. There was no threat. The guy was a coward. He probably felt threatened. But there was no threat. There is a difference.”

  Bosch looked over at the other suit. Toliver. It looked as if he was going to be silent the whole time. That was his role. He just stared at Bosch as if he were a TV screen.

  Bosch looked around the rest of the room and for the first time noticed the phone on the banquette to the left of the table. The green light signaled a conference call was on. The interview was being piped out of the room. Probably to a tape recorder. Probably to Irving in his office next door.

  “There is a witness,” Brockman said.

  “To what?”

  “The threat.”

  “I’ll tell you what, Lieutenant, why don’t you tell me exactly what the threat was so I know what we’re talking about. After all, if you believe I made it, what’s wrong with me knowing what it was I said?”

  Brockman gave it some thought before answering.

  “Very simple, as most are, you told him if he ever, quote, fucked with you again, you’d kill him. Not too original.”

  “But damning as hell, right? Well, fuck you, Brockman, I never said that. I don’t doubt that that asshole wrote up an addendum, that was just his style, but whoever this wit is you got, they’re full of shit.”

  “You know Henry Korchmar?”

  “Henry Korchmar?”

  Bosch had no idea whom he was talking about. Then he realized Brockman meant old Henry of the Nod Squad. Bosch had never known his last name and so hearing it in this context had confused him.

  “The old guy? He wasn’t in the room. He’s no witness. I told him to get out and he did. Whatever he told you, he probably backed Pounds because he was scared. But he wasn’t there. You go ahead with it, Brockman. I’ll be able to pull twelve people out of that squadroom who watched the whole thing through the glass. And they’ll say Henry wasn’t in there, they’ll say Pounds was a liar and everybody knew it, and then where’s your threat?”

  Brockman said nothing into the silence so Bosch continued.

  “See, you didn’t do your work. My guess is that you know everybody who works in that squadroom thinks people like you are the bottom feeders of this department. They’ve got more respect for the people they put in jail. And you know that, Brickman, so you were too intimidated to go to them. Instead, you rely on some old man’s word and he probably didn’t even know Pounds was dead when you talked to him.”

  Bosch could tell by the way Brockman’s eyes darted away that he had nailed him. Empowered with the victory, he stood up and headed toward the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To get some water.”

  “Jerry, go with him.”

  Bosch paused at the door and looked back.

  “What, do you think I’m going to run, Brockman? You think that and you don’t know the first thing about me. You think that and you haven’t prepared for this interview. Why don’t you come over to Hollywood one day and I’ll teach you how to interview murder suspects. Free of charge.”

  Bosch walked out, Toliver following. At the water fountain down the hall, he took a long drink of water and then wiped his mouth with his hand. He felt nervous, frayed. He didn’t know how long it woul
d be before Brockman could see through the front he was putting up.

  As he walked back to the conference room, Toliver stayed a silent three paces behind him.

  “You’re still young,” Bosch said over his shoulder. “There might be a chance for you, Toliver.”

  Bosch stepped back into the conference room just as Brockman stepped through a door from the other side of the room. Bosch knew it was a direct entrance to Irving’s office. He had once worked an investigation of a serial killer out of this room and under Irving’s thumb.