Angels Flight (1998)

by Michael Connelly

  “And I knocked down the one thing he believed in all these months, the one thing that kept him safe. I told him we had cleared Michael Harris. I told him he was wrong about Harris and that we could prove it. I didn’t think about what it would do to him. I was only thinking about my case.”

  “And you think that put him over,” Irving said.

  “Something happened to him in that room with Harris. Something bad. He lost his family after that, he lost the case . . . I think the one thread he held on to was his belief that he’d had the right guy. When he found out he was wrong — when I stumbled into his world and told him it was bullshit — the thread snapped.”

  “Look, this is bullshit, Bosch,” Lindell said. “I mean, I respect you and your friendship with this guy, but you aren’t seeing what is right here in front of us. The obvious. This guy did himself because he’s the guy and he knew we’d come back to him. This suicide is a confession.”

  Irving stared at Bosch, waiting for him to come back at Lindell. But Bosch said nothing. He was tired of fighting it.

  “I find myself agreeing with Agent Lindell on this,” the deputy chief finally said.

  Bosch nodded. He expected as much. They didn’t know Sheehan the way Bosch did. He and his former partner had not been close in recent years but they had been close enough at one time for Bosch to know that Lindell and Irving were wrong. It would have been easier for him to agree. It would lift a lot of the guilt off him. But he couldn’t agree.

  “Give me the morning,” he said instead.

  “What?” Irving asked.

  “Keep this wrapped up and away from the press for half a day. We proceed with the warrants and the plan for tomorrow morning. Give me time to see what comes up and what Mrs. Kincaid says.”

  “If she talks.”

  “She’ll talk. She’s dying to talk. Let me have the morning with her. See how things go. If I don’t come up with a connection between Kincaid and Elias, then you do what you have to do with Frankie Sheehan. You tell the world what you think you know.”

  Irving thought about this for a long moment and then nodded.

  “I think that would be the most cautious route,” he said. “We should have a ballistics report by then as well.”

  Bosch nodded his thanks. He looked out through the open doors to the deck again. It was starting to rain harder. He looked at his watch and saw how late it was getting. And he knew what he still needed to do before he could sleep.

  30

  BOSCH felt the obligation to go to Margaret Sheehan in person and tell her what Frankie had done to himself. It didn’t matter that the couple had been separated. She and Frankie had been together a long time before that happened. She and their two girls deserved the courtesy of a visit from a friend instead of a stranger’s dreadful phone call in the middle of the night. Irving had suggested that the Bakersfield Police Department be prevailed upon to send an officer to the house, but Bosch knew that would be just as clumsy and callous as a phone call. He volunteered to make the drive.

  Bosch did prevail upon the Bakersfield cop shop, but only to run down an address for Margaret Sheehan. He could have called her to ask for directions. But that would have been telling her without telling her, an old cop’s trick for making the job easier. It would have been cowardly.

  The northbound Golden State Freeway was almost deserted, the rain and the hour of night having cleared out all but those motorists with no choice but to be on the road. Most of these were truckers hauling their loads north toward San Francisco and even further or returning empty to the vegetable fields of the midstate to pick up more. The Grapevine — the steep and winding stretch of the freeway up and over the mountains lying north of Los Angeles — was littered with semis that had slid off the roadway or whose drivers had chosen to pull over rather than risk the already treacherous run in the pounding rain. Bosch found that once he cleared this obstacle course and came down out of the mountains he was finally able to pick up some speed and lost time. As he drove he watched branches of lightning spread across the purple horizon to the east. And he thought about his old partner. He tried to think about old cases and the Irish jokes that Sheehan used to tell. Anything to keep from thinking about what he had done and Bosch’s own guilt and culpability.

  He had brought a homemade tape with him and played it on the car stereo. It contained recordings of saxophone pieces Bosch particularly liked. He fast-forwarded until he found the one he wanted. It was Frank Morgan’s “Lullaby.” It was like a sweet and soulful funeral dirge to Bosch, a good-bye and apology to Frankie Sheehan. A good-bye and apology to Eleanor. It went well with the rain. Bosch played it over and over as he drove.

  He got to the house where Margaret Sheehan and her two daughters were living before two. There was an outside light still on and light could be seen through the curtains of the front windows. Bosch got the idea that Margie was in there waiting for his call, or maybe for him to show up. He hesitated at the door, wondering about how many times he had made this kind of call, then finally knocked.

  When Margie answered the door Bosch was reminded of how there was never any planning for these things. She stared at him for a moment and he thought she didn’t recognize him. It had been a lot of years.

  “Margie, it’s — ”

  “Harry? Harry Bosch? We just — ”

  She stopped and put it together. Usually they did.

  “Oh, Harry, no. Oh no. Not Francis!”

  She brought both hands up to her face. Her mouth was open and she looked like that famous painting of someone on a bridge screaming.

  “I’m sorry, Margie. I really am. I think maybe I should come in.”

  • • •

  She was stoic about the whole thing. Bosch gave her the details and then Margie Sheehan made coffee for him so he wouldn’t fall asleep on the ride back. That was a cop’s wife thinking. In the kitchen Bosch leaned against a counter as she brewed the coffee.

  “He called you tonight,” he said.

  “Yes, I told you.”

  “Tell me how he seemed.”

  “Bad. He told me what they did to him. He seemed so . . . betrayed? Is that the right word? I mean, his own people, fellow cops, had taken him in. He was very sad, Harry.”

  Bosch nodded.

  “He gave his life to that department . . . and this is what they did to him.”

  Bosch nodded again.

  “Did he say anything about . . .”

  He didn’t finish.

  “About killing himself? No, he didn’t say that . . . I read up on police suicide once. Long time ago. In fact, back when Elias sued him the first time over that guy he killed. Frankie got real depressed then and I got scared. I read up on it. And what I read said that when people tell you about it or say they’re going to do it, what they are really doing is asking you to stop them.”

  Bosch nodded.

  “I guess Frankie didn’t want to be stopped,” she continued. “He didn’t say anything about it to me.”

  She pulled the glass coffeepot out of the brewer and poured some into a mug. She then opened a cabinet and took down a silver Thermos. She started filling it.

  “This is for the road home. I don’t want you falling asleep on the clothesline.”

  “What?”

  “I mean the Grapevine. I’m not thinking straight here.”

  Bosch stepped over and put his hand on her shoulder. She put the coffee pot down and turned to him to be hugged.

  “This last year,” she said. “Things . . . things just went haywire.”

  “I know. He told me.”

  She broke away from him and went back to filling the Thermos.

  “Margie, I have to ask you something before I head back,” Bosch said. “They took his gun from him today to run ballistics. He used another. Do you know anything about that one?”

  “No. He only had the one he wore on the job. We didn’t have other guns. Not with two little girls. When Frankie would come home he’d lock his jo
b gun up in a little safe on the floor of the closet. And only he had the key. I just didn’t want any more guns than were required in the house.”

  Bosch understood that if it was her edict that there be no more weapons than the one Sheehan was required to carry, then that left a hole. He could have taken a weapon in and hidden it from her — in a spot so obscure even the FBI didn’t find it when they searched his house. Maybe it was wrapped in plastic and buried in the yard. Sheehan also could have gotten the weapon after she and the girls moved out and up to Bakersfield. She would never have known about it.

  “Okay,” he said, deciding not to pursue it.

  “Why, Harry, are they saying it was your gun? Are you in trouble?”

  Bosch thought a moment before answering.

  “No, Margie, I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.”

  31

  THE rain continued through Monday morning and slowed Bosch’s drive into Brentwood to a frustrating crawl. It wasn’t heavy rain, but in Los Angeles any rain at all can paralyze the city. It was one of the mysteries Bosch could never fathom. A city largely defined by the automobile yet full of drivers unable to cope with even a mild inclemency. He listened to KFWB as he drove. There were far more reports of traffic tie-ups than incidents of violence or unrest during the night. Unfortunately, the skies were expected to clear by midday.

  He arrived twenty minutes late for his appointment with Kate Kincaid. The house from which Stacey Kincaid had allegedly been kidnapped was a sprawling white ranch house with black shutters and a slate-gray roof. It had a broad green lawn stretching back from the street and a driveway that cut across the front of the house, and then back around to the garage in the side yard. When Bosch pulled in there was a silver Mercedes Benz parked near the covered entryway. The front door of the house was open.

  When he got to the threshold Bosch called out a hello and he heard Kate Kincaid’s voice telling him to enter. He found her in the living room, sitting on a couch that was covered in a white sheet. All the furniture was covered in this way. The room looked like a meeting of big, heavy ghosts. She noticed Bosch’s eyes taking in the room.

  “When we moved we didn’t take a single piece of furniture,” she said. “We decided just to start over. No reminders.”

  Bosch nodded and then studied her. She was dressed completely in white, with a silk blouse tucked into tailored linen pants. She looked like a ghost herself. Her large black leather purse, which was on the couch next to her, seemed to clash with her outfit and the sheets covering the furniture.

  “How are you, Mrs. Kincaid?”

  “Please call me Kate.”

  “Kate then.”

  “I am very fine, thank you. Better than I have been in a long, long time. How are you?”

  “I’m just so-so today, Kate. I had a bad night. And I don’t like it when it rains.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. It does look like you haven’t slept.”

  “Do you mind if I look around a little bit before we start talking?”

  He had a signed search warrant for the house in his briefcase but he didn’t want to bring it up yet.

  “Please do,” she said. “Stacey’s room is down the hall to your left. First door on the left.”

  Bosch left his briefcase on the tiled entryway floor and headed the way she had directed. The furniture in the girl’s room was not covered. The white sheets that had covered everything were in piles on the floor. It looked like someone — probably the dead girl’s mother — had visited here on occasion. The bed was unmade. The pink bedspread and matching sheets were twisted into a knot — not as if by someone sleeping, but maybe by someone who had lain on the bed and gathered the bedclothes to her chest. It made Bosch feel bad seeing it that way.

  Bosch stepped to the middle of the room, keeping his hands in the pockets of his raincoat. He studied the girl’s things. There were stuffed animals and dolls, a shelf of picture books. No movie posters, no photos of young television stars or pop singers. It was almost as if the room belonged to a girl much younger than Stacey Kincaid had been at the end. Bosch wondered if the design was her parents’ or her own, as if maybe she had thought by holding on to the things of her past she could somehow avoid the horror of the present. The thought made him feel worse than when he had studied the bedclothes.

  He noticed a hairbrush on the bureau and saw strands of blond hair caught in it. It made him feel a little easier. He knew that the hair from the brush could be used, if it ever came to the point of connecting evidence — possibly from the trunk of a car — to the dead girl.

  He stepped over and looked at the window. It was a slider and he saw the black smudges of fingerprint powder still on the frame. He unlocked the window and pulled it open. There were splinter marks where the latch had supposedly been jimmied with a screwdriver or similar tool.

  Bosch looked out through the rain at the back yard. There was a lima bean–shaped pool that was covered with a plastic tarp. Rainwater was collecting on the tarp. Again Bosch thought of the girl. He wondered if she ever dove into the pool to escape and to swim to the bottom to scream.

  Past the pool he noticed the hedge that surrounded the back yard. It was ten feet high and insured backyard privacy. Bosch recognized the hedge from the computer images he had seen on the Charlotte’s Web Site.

  Bosch closed the window. Rain always made him sad. And this day he didn’t need it to feel that way. He already had the ghost of Frankie Sheehan in his head, he had a crumbled marriage he didn’t have time to think about, and he had haunting thoughts about the little girl with the lost-in-the-woods face.

  He took his hand from his pocket to open the closet door. The girl’s clothes were still there. Colorful dresses on white plastic hangers. He looked through them until he found the white dress with the little semaphore flags. He remembered that from the web site, too.

  He went back out into the hallway and checked the other rooms. There was what looked like a guest bedroom, which Bosch recognized as the room from the photos on the web page. This was where Stacey Kincaid had been assaulted and filmed. Bosch didn’t stay long. Further down the hall were a bathroom, the master suite and another bedroom, which had been converted into a library and office.

  He went back out to the living room. It did not look as though Kate Kincaid had moved. He picked up his briefcase and walked into the room to join her.

  “I’m a little damp, Mrs. Kincaid. All right if I sit down?”

  “Of course. And it’s Kate.”

  “I was thinking that I’d rather keep things on a formal basis for the moment, if you don’t mind.”

  “Suit yourself, Detective.”

  He was angry at her, angry at what had happened in this house and how the secret had been locked away. He had seen enough during his tour of the place to confirm in his own mind what Kizmin Rider had fervently believed the night before.

  He sat down on one of the covered chairs across from the couch and put his briefcase on his knees. He opened it and started going through some of the contents, which from her angle Kate Kincaid could not see.

  “Did you find something of interest in Stacey’s bedroom?”

  Bosch stopped what he was doing and looked over the top of the briefcase at her for a moment.

  “Not really,” he said. “I was just getting a feel for the place. I assume it was thoroughly searched before and there isn’t anything in there that I could find. Did Stacey like the pool?”

  He went back to his work inside the briefcase while she told him what a fine swimmer her daughter had been. Bosch really wasn’t doing anything. He was just following an act he had rehearsed in his head all morning.

  “She could go up and back without having to come up for air,” Kate Kincaid said.

  Bosch closed the case and looked at her. She was smiling at the memory of her daughter. Bosch smiled but without any warmth.

  “Mrs. Kincaid, how do you spell innocence?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Th
e word. Innocence. How do you spell it?”

  “Is this about Stacey? I don’t understand. Why are you — ”

  “Indulge me for a moment. Please. Spell the word.”

  “I’m not a good speller. With Stacey I always kept a dictionary in my purse in case she asked about a word. You know, one of those little ones that — ”

  “Go ahead. Try it.”

  She paused to think. The confusion was evident on her face.

  “I-double n, I know there’s two. I-double n-o-c-e-n-s-e.”

  She looked at him and raised her eyebrows in a question. Bosch shook his head and reopened the briefcase.