The Best American Mystery Stories, Volume 17

by Lisa Scottoline

  “Soto did. Confirmed her position and that she was indeed late to work on the day of the killing. She had called ahead and said she was running late because she had been at the police station. She called her boss.”

  “What about the restaurant? I don’t see it in here.”

  “Then I probably didn’t have that information.”

  “So you never checked it.”

  “You mean did I check to see if she ate there the night before the murder? No, Harry, I didn’t and that’s a bullshit question. She was—”

  “It’s just that if she was setting up a cover story, she could’ve crunched her own car and—”

  “Come on, Harry. You’re kidding me, right?”

  “I don’t know. We’re still going to talk to her.”

  “I know that, Harry. I’ve known that since you called. You’re going to have to see for yourself. Just like always. So just tell me how you want to go in, rattlesnake or cobra?”

  Bosch considered for a moment, remembering the code they’d used back when they were partners. A rattlesnake interview was when you shook your tail and hissed. It was confrontational and useful for getting immediate reactions. Going cobra was the quiet approach. You’d slowly move in, get close, and then strike.

  “Let’s go cobra.”

  “You got it.”

  Diane Gables wasn’t home. They had timed their arrival for 5:30 P.M., figuring that with the stock market closing at 1 P.M., Gables would easily have finished work for the day.

  “What do you want to do?” Edgar said as they stood at the door.

  “Go back to the car. Wait a while.”

  Back in the car, they talked about old cases and detective bureau pranks. Edgar revealed that it had been he who had cut ads for penile-enhancement surgery out of the sports pages and slipped them into an officious lieutenant’s jacket pocket while it had been hanging on a rack in his office. The lieutenant had subsequently mounted an investigation focused squarely on Bosch.

  “Now you tell me,” Bosch said. “Pounds tried to bust me to burglary for that one.”

  Edgar was a clapper. He backed his laughter with his own applause but cut the display short when Bosch pointed through the windshield.

  “There she is.”

  A late-model Range Rover pulled into the driveway.

  Bosch and Edgar got out and crossed the front lawn to meet Gables as she took the stone path from the driveway to her front door. Bosch saw her recognize Edgar, even after five years, and saw her eyes immediately start scanning, going from the front door of her house to the street and the houses of her neighbors. Her head didn’t move, only her eyes, and Bosch recognized it as a tell. Fight or flight. It might have been a natural reaction for a woman with two strange men approaching her, but Bosch didn’t think that was the situation. He had seen the recognition in her eyes when she looked at Edgar. A pulse of electricity began moving in his blood.

  “Ms. Gables,” Edgar said. “Jerry Edgar. You remember me?”

  As planned, Edgar was taking the lead before passing it off to Bosch.

  Gables paused on the path. She was carrying a stylish red leather briefcase. She acted as though she were trying to place Edgar’s face, and then she smiled.

  “Of course, Detective. How are you?”

  “I’m fine. You must have a very good memory.”

  “Well, it’s not every day that you meet a real live detective. Is this coincidence or...”

  “Not a coincidence. I’m with Detective Bosch here and we would like to ask you a few questions about the Randolph case, if you don’t mind.”

  “It was so long ago.”

  “Five years,” Bosch said, asserting himself now. “But it’s still an open case.”

  She registered the information and then nodded.

  “Well, it’s been a long day. I start at six in the morning, when the market opens. Could we—”

  Bosch cut her off. “I start at six too, but not because of the stock market.”

  He wasn’t backing down.

  “Then fine, you’re welcome to come in,” she said. “But I don’t know what help I can be after so long. I didn’t really think I was much help five years ago. I didn’t see anything. Didn’t hear anything. I just happened to be in the neighborhood after I was at the police station.”

  “We’re investigating the case again,” Bosch said. “And we need to talk to everybody we talked to five years ago.”

  “Well, like I said, come on in.”

  She unlocked the front door and entered first, greeted by the beeping of an alarm warning. She quickly punched a four-digit combination into an alarm-control box on the wall. Bosch and Edgar stepped in behind her and she ushered them into the living room.

  “Why don’t you gentlemen have a seat? I’m going to put my things down and be right back out. Would either of you like something to drink?”

  “I’ll take a bottle of water if you got it,” Edgar said.

  “I’m fine,” Bosch said.

  “You know what?” Edgar said quickly. “I’m fine, too.”

  Gables glanced at Bosch and seemed to register that he was the power in the room. She said she’d be right back.

  After she was gone Bosch looked around the room. It was a basic living room setup with a couch and two chairs surrounding a glass-topped coffee table. One wall was made up entirely of built-in bookshelves, all filled with what looked by their titles to be crime novels. He noticed there were no personal displays. No framed photographs anywhere.

  They remained standing until Gables came back and pointed them to the couch. She took a chair directly across the table from them.

  “Now, what can I tell you? Frankly, I forgot the whole incident.”

  “But you remembered Detective Edgar. I could tell.”

  “Yes, but seeing him out of context, I knew I recognized him but I could not remember from where.”

  According to the DMV, Gables was now forty-one years old. And Edgar had been right: she was a looker, attractive in a professional sort of way. A short, no-nonsense cut to her brown hair. Slim, athletic build. She sat straight and looked straight at one or the other of them, no longer scanning because she was inside her comfort zone. Still, there were tells: Bosch knew through his training in interview techniques that normal eye contact between individuals lasted an average of three seconds, yet each time Gables looked at Bosch, she held his eyes a good ten seconds. That was a sign of stress.

  “I was rereading the reports,” Bosch said. “They included your explanation for being in the area—you were at the police station filling out a report.”

  “That’s right.”

  “It didn’t say, though, where your car was when it got damaged the night before.”

  “I had been at a restaurant on Franklin. I told them that. And when I came out after, the back taillight was smashed and the paint scraped.”

  “You didn’t call the police then?”

  “No, I didn’t. No one was there. It was a hit-and-run; they didn’t even leave a note on the car. They just took off, and I thought I was out of luck.”

  “What was the name of the restaurant?”

  “I can’t remember—oh, it was Birds. I love the roasted chicken.”

  Bosch nodded. He knew the place and the roasted chicken.

  “So what made you come back to Hollywood the next day and file the report on the hit-and-run?”

  “I called my insurance company first thing in the morning and they said I needed it if I wanted to file a claim to cover the damages.”

  Bosch was covering ground that was already in the reports. He was looking for variations, changes. Stories told five years apart often had inconsistencies and contradictions. But Gables wasn’t changing the narrative at all.

  “When you drove by Orange Grove, you heard no shots or anything like that?”

  “No, nothing. I had my windows up.”

  “And you were driving fast.”

  “Yes, I was going to be la
te for work.”

  “Now, when Detective Edgar came to see you, was that unsettling?”

  “Unsettling? Well, yes, I guess so, until I realized what he was there for, and of course I knew I had nothing to do with it.”

  “Was it the first time you’d ever encountered a detective or the police like that? You know, on a murder case.”

  “Yes, it was very unusual. To say the least. Not a normal part of my life.”

  She shook her shoulders as if to intimate a shiver, imply that police and murder investigations were foreign to her. Bosch stared at her for a long moment. She had either forgotten about seeing the armed man with a ski mask coming out of the garage where Roy Alan McIntyre was murdered or she was lying.

  Bosch thought the latter. He thought that Diane Gables was a killer.

  “How do you pick them?” he asked.

  She turned directly toward him, her eyes locking on his.

  “Pick what?”

  Bosch paused, squeezing the most out of her stare and the moment.

  “The stocks you recommend to people,” he said.

  She broke her eyes away and looked at Edgar.

  “Due diligence,” she said. “Careful analysis and prognostication. Then, I have to say, I throw in my hunches. You gentlemen use hunches, don’t you?”

  “Every day,” Bosch said.

  They were silent for a while as they drove away. Bosch thought about the carefully worded answers Gables had given. He was feeling stronger about his hunch every minute.

  “What do you think?” Edgar finally asked.

  “I think it’s her.”

  “How can you say that? She didn’t make a single false move in there.”

  “Yes, she did. Her eyes gave her away.”

  “Oh, come on, Harry. You’re saying you know she’s a stone-cold killer because you can read it in her eyes?”

  “Pretty much. She also lied. She didn’t mention the case in 1999 because she thought we didn’t know about it. She didn’t want us going down that path, so she lied and said you were the only detective she’d ever met.”

  “At best, that’s a lie by omission. Weak, Harry.”

  “A lie is a lie. Nothing weak about it. She was hiding it from us and there’s only one reason to do that. I want to get inside her house. She’s gotta have a place where she studies and plans these things.”

  “So you think she’s a pro? A gun for hire?”

  “Maybe; I don’t know. Maybe she reads the paper and picks her targets, people she thinks need killing. Maybe she’s on some kind of vigilante trip. Dark justice and all of that.”

  “A regular angel of vengeance. Sounds like a comic book, man.”

  “If we get inside that place, we’ll know.”

  Edgar drove silently while he composed a response. Bosch knew what was coming before he said it.

  “Harry, I’m just not seeing it. I respect your hunch, man, I have seen that come through more than once. But there ain’t enough here. And if I don’t see it, then there’s no judge that’s going to give you a warrant to go back in there.”

  Bosch took his time answering. He was grinding things down, coming up with a plan.

  “Maybe, maybe not,” he finally said.

  Two days later at 9 A.M., Bosch pulled up to Diane Gables’s house. The Range Rover was not in the driveway. He got out and went to the front door. After two loud knocks went unanswered he walked around the house to the back door.

  He knocked again. When there was no reply, he removed a set of lock picks that he kept behind his badge in his leather wallet and went to work on the deadbolt. It took him six minutes to open the door. He was greeted by the beeping of the burglar alarm. He located the box on the wall to the left of the back door and punched in the four numbers he had seen Gables enter at the front door two evenings before. The beeping stopped. Bosch was in. He left the door open and started looking around the house.

  It was a post–World War II ranch house. Bosch had been in a thousand of them over the years and all the investigations. After a quick survey of the entire house he started his search in a bedroom that had been converted to a home office. There was a desk and a row of file cabinets along the wall where a bed would have been. There was a line of windows over the cabinets.

  There was also a metal locker with a padlock on it. Bosch opened the venetian blinds over the file cabinets, and light came into the room. He moved to the metal locker and started there, pulling his picks out once again.

  He knelt on the floor so he could see the lock closely. It turned out to be a three-pin breeze, taking less than a minute for him to open. A moment after the hasp snapped free he heard a voice come from behind him.

  “Detective, don’t move.”

  Bosch froze for a moment. He recognized the voice. Diane Gables. She had known he would come back. He slowly started to raise his hands, holding his fingers close together so he could hide the picks between them.

  “Easy,” Gables commanded. “If you attempt to reach for your weapon I will put two bullets into your skull. Do you understand?”

  “Yes. Can I stand up? My knees aren’t what they once were.”

  “Slowly. Your hands always in my sightline.”

  “Absolutely.”

  Bosch started to get up slowly, turning toward her at the same time. She was pointing a handgun with a suppressor attached to the barrel.

  “Easy,” he said. “Just take it easy here.”

  “No, you take it easy. I could shoot you where you stand and be within my rights.”

  Bosch shook his head.

  “No, that’s not true. You know I’m a cop.”

  “Yeah, a rogue cop. What did you think you were going to find here?”

  “Evidence.”

  “Of what?”

  “Randolph and McIntyre. Maybe others. You killed them.”

  “And, what, you thought I’d just keep the evidence around? Hide it in a locker in my home?”

  “Something like that. Can I sit down?”

  “The chair behind the desk. Keep your hands where I can see them.”

  Bosch slowly sat down. She was still standing in the doorway. He now had 60 percent of his body shielded by the desk. He had his back to the file cabinets. The light was coming in from behind and above him. He noticed she had now lowered the muzzle to point at his chest. This was good, though from this range he doubted the Kevlar would completely stop a bullet from a nine-millimeter, even with the suppressor slowing it down. He kept his hands up and close to his face.

  “So now what?” he asked.

  “So now you tell me what you think you’ve got on me.”

  Bosch shook his head as if to say, Not much. “You lied. The other day. You didn’t mention the McIntyre case. You didn’t want us linking the cases through you. The trouble is we already had.”

  “And that’s it? Are you kidding me?”

  “That’s it. Till now.”

  He nodded at her weapon. It seemed to confirm all hunches.

  “So without a real case and the search warrant to go with it, of course you decided to break in here to see what you could find.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “We have a problem, Detective Bosch.”

  “No, you have the problem. You’re a killer and I’m onto you. Put the weapon down. You’re under arrest.”

  She laughed and waggled the gun in her hand.

  “You forget one thing. I have the gun.”

  “But you won’t use it. You don’t kill people like me. You kill the abusers, the predators.”

  “I could make an exception. You’ve broken the law by breaking in here. There are no gray areas. Who knows, maybe you came to plant evidence here, not find it. Maybe you are like them.”

  Bosch started lowering his hands to the desktop.

  “Be careful, Detective.”

  “I’m tired of holding them up. And I know you’re not going to shoot me. It’s not part of your program.”

  “I
told you, programs change.”

  “How do you pick them?”

  She stared at him a long time, then finally answered.

  “They pick themselves. They deserve what they get.”

  “No judge, no jury. Just you.”

  “Don’t tell me you haven’t wished you could do the same thing.”

  “Sure, on occasion. But there are rules. We don’t live by them, then where does it all go?”

  “Right here, I guess. What am I going to do about you?”

  “Nothing. You kill me and you know it’s over. You’ll be like one of them—the abusers and the predators. Put the gun down.”

  She took two steps into the room. The muzzle came up toward his face. Bosch saw that deadly black eye rising in slow motion.

  “You’re wearing a vest, aren’t you?”

  He nodded.

  “I could see it in your eyes. The fear comes up when the gun comes up.”

  Bosch shook his head.

  “I’m not afraid. You won’t shoot me.”

  “I still see fear.”

  “Not for me. It’s for you. How many have there been?”

  She paused, maybe to decide what to tell him, or maybe just to decide what to do. Or maybe she was stuck on his answer about the fear.

  “More than you’ll ever know. More than anybody will ever know. Look, I’m sorry, you know?”

  “About what?”

  “About there being only one real way out of this. For me.”

  The muzzle steadied, its aim at his eyes.

  “Before you pull that trigger, can I show you something?”

  “It won’t matter.”

  “I think it will. It’s in my inside jacket pocket.”

  She frowned, then made a signal with the gun.

  “Show me your wrists. Where’s your watch?”

  Bosch raised his hands and his jacket sleeves came down, showing his watch on his right wrist. He was left-handed.

  “Okay, take out whatever it is you need to show me with your right hand. Slowly, Detective, slowly.”

  “You got it.”

  Bosch reached in and with great deliberation pulled out the folded document. He handed it across the desk to her.

  “Just put it down and then lean away.”