Angels Flight Page 10

  ‘Close your eyes, Robert.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just close your eyes and relax. Think of the man you saw. Tell me what he looks like.’

  Courtland did as he was told and after a moment came up with an improved but still sketchy description.

  ‘He’s about the same height as Mr Elias. But he had his head shaved. It was slick. He got one of them soul chips, too.’

  ‘Soul chip?’

  ‘You know, like a little beard under his lip.’

  He opened his eyes.

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘That’s it?’ Bosch said in a friendly, cajoling tone. ‘Robert, how’re you going to make it into the cops? We need more than that. How old was this guy?’

  ‘I don’t know. Thirty or forty.’

  ‘That’s a help. Only ten years’ difference. Was he thin? Fat?’

  ‘Thin but with muscles. You know, the guy was built.’

  ‘I think he’s describing Michael Harris,’ Rider said.

  Bosch looked at her. Harris was the plaintiff in the Black Warrior case.

  ‘It fits,’ Rider said. ‘The case starts Monday. They were probably working late, getting ready for court.’

  Bosch nodded and was about to dismiss Courtland when Langwiser suddenly spoke while still reading the last page of the search warrant.

  ‘I think we have a problem with the warrant.’

  Now everyone looked at her.

  ‘Okay, Robert,’ Bosch said to Courtland. ‘We’ll be all right from here. Thanks for your help.’

  ‘You sure? You want me to go up with you, unlock the door or something?’

  ‘No, we have a key. We’ll be all right.’

  ‘Okay, then. I’ll be in the security office around behind the stairs if you need anything.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Courtland started walking back the way he had come but then stopped and turned around.

  ‘Oh, you know, all five of you better not take the elevator up at once. That’s probably too much weight on that old thing.’

  ‘Thanks, Robert,’ Bosch said.

  He waited until the guard had gone around the staircase and was out of sight before turning back to Langwiser.

  ‘Miss Langwiser, you probably haven’t gone out on too many crime scenes before,’ he said. ‘But here’s a tip, never announce that there is a problem with a search warrant in front of somebody who isn’t a cop.’

  ‘Oh, shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t — ’

  ‘What’s wrong with the warrant?’ Dellacroce said, his voice showing he was upset by the apparent challenge to his work. ‘The judge didn’t see anything wrong with it. The judge said it was fine.’

  Langwiser looked down at the three-page warrant in her hand and waved it, its pages fluttering like a falling pigeon.

  ‘I just think that with a case like this we better be damn sure of what we’re doing before we go in there and start opening up files.’

  ‘We have to go into the files,’ Bosch said. ‘That’s where most of the suspects will be.’

  ‘I understand that. But these are confidential files relating to lawsuits against the police department. They contain privileged information that only an attorney and his client should have. Don’t you see? It could be argued that by opening a single file you’ve violated the rights of Elias’s clients.’

  ‘All we want is to find the man’s killer. We don’t care about his pending cases. I hope to Christ that the killer’s name isn’t in those files and that it isn’t a cop. But what if it is and what if in those files Elias kept copies or notes on threats? What if through his own investigations he learned something about somebody that could be a motive for his killing? You see, we need to look at the files.’

  ‘All of that is understandable. But if a judge later rules the search was inappropriate you won’t be able to use anything you find up there. You want to run that risk?’

  She turned away from them and looked toward the door.

  ‘I have to find a phone and make a call about this,’ she said. ‘I can’t let you open that office yet. Not in good conscience.’

  Bosch blew out his breath in exasperation. He silently chastised himself for calling in a lawyer too soon. He should have just done what he knew he had to do and dealt with the consequences later.

  ‘Here.’

  He opened his briefcase and handed her his cell phone. He listened as she called the DA’s office switchboard and asked to be connected to a prosecutor named David Sheiman, who Bosch knew was the supervisor of the major crimes unit. After she had Sheiman on the line she began summarizing the situation and Bosch continued to listen to make sure she had the details right.

  ‘We’re wasting a lot of time standing around, Harry,’ Rider whispered to him. ‘You want Edgar and me to pick up Harris and have a talk with him about last night?’

  Bosch almost nodded his approval but then hesitated as he considered the possible consequences.

  Michael Harris was suing fifteen members of the Robbery-Homicide Division in a highly publicized case set to begin trial on Monday. Harris, a car-wash employee with a record of burglary and assault convictions, was seeking $10 million in damages for his claims that members of the RHD had planted evidence against him in the kidnapping and murder of a twelve-year-old girl who was a member of a well-known and wealthy family. Harris claimed the detectives had abducted, held and tortured him over a three-day period in hopes of drawing a confession from him as well as learning the location of the missing girl. The lawsuit alleged that the detectives, frustrated by Harris’s unwillingness to admit his part in the crime or lead them to the missing girl, pulled plastic bags over Harris’s head and threatened to suffocate him. He further claimed that one detective pushed a sharp instrument — a Black Warrior Number 2 pencil — into his ear, puncturing the ear drum. But Harris never confessed and on the fourth day of the interrogation the girl’s body was found decomposing in a vacant lot just one block from his apartment. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled.

  The murder became one more in a long line of crimes that gripped public attention in Los Angeles. The victim was a beautiful blonde, blue-eyed girl named Stacey Kincaid. She had been spirited from her bed while she slept in her family’s large and seemingly safe Brentwood home. It was the kind of crime that sent a chilling message across the city: Nobody is safe.

  As horrible as it was in itself, the murder of the little girl was exponentially magnified by the media. Initially, this was because of who the victim was and where she came from. She was the stepdaughter of Sam Kincaid, scion of a family that owned more automobile dealerships in Los Angeles County than it was possible to count on two hands. Sam was the son of Jackson Kincaid, the original ‘car czar,’ who had built the family business from a single Ford dealership his father had passed on to him after World War II. Like Howard Elias after him, Jack Kincaid had seen the merit in local television marketing and in the I960s became a fixture of late-night TV advertising. On camera, he showed a folksy charm, exuding honesty and friendship. He seemed as reliable and trustworthy as Johnny Carson and he was in the living rooms and bedrooms of Los Angeles just as often. If Los Angeles was seen as an ‘autotopia’ then Jack Kincaid was certainly seen as its unofficial mayor.

  Off camera, the car czar was a calculating businessman who always played both sides of politics and mercilessly drove competitors out of business or at least away from his dealerships. His dynasty grew rapidly, his car lots spreading across the southern California landscape. By the I980s Jack Kincaid’s reign was done and the moniker of car czar was turned over to his son. But the old man remained a force, though a mostly unseen one. And this was never more clear than when Stacey Kincaid disappeared and old Jack returned to TV, this time to appear on newscasts and put up a million-dollar reward for her safe return. It was another surrealistic episode in Los Angeles murder lore. The old man everyone had grown up with on TV was back on once again and tearfully begging for his granddaughter
’s life.

  It was all for naught. The reward and the old man’s tears became moot when the girl was found dead by passersby in the vacant lot close to Michael Harris’s apartment.

  The case went to trial based solely on evidence consisting of Harris’s fingerprints being found in the bedroom from which the girl had been abducted and the proximity of the body’s disposal to his apartment. The case held the city rapt, playing live every day on Court TV and local news programs. Harris’s attorney, John Penny, a lawyer as skilled as Elias when it came to manipulating juries, mounted a defense that attacked the body’s disposal location as coincidental and the fingerprints — found on one of the girl’s schoolbooks — as simply being planted by the LAPD.

  All the power and money the Kincaids had amassed over generations was no match against the tide of anti-police sentiment and the racial underpinnings of the case. Harris was black, the Kincaids and the police and prosecutors on the case were white. The case against Harris was tainted beyond repair when Penny elicited what many perceived as a racist comment from Jack Kincaid during testimony about his many dealerships. After Kincaid detailed his many holdings, Penny asked why one of the dealerships was not in South Central Los Angeles. Without hesitation and before the prosecutor could object to the irrelevant question, Kincaid said he would never place a business in an area where the inhabitants had a propensity to riot. He said he made the decision after the Watts riots of I965 and it was confirmed after the more recent riots of I992.

  The question and answer had little if anything to do with the murder of a twelve-year-old girl but proved to be the pivotal point in the trial. In later interviews jurors said Kincaid’s answer was emblematic of the city’s deep racial gulf. With that one answer sympathy swayed from the Kincaid family to Harris. The prosecution was doomed.

  The jury acquitted Harris in four hours. Penny then turned the case over to his colleague, Howard Elias, for civil proceedings and Harris took his place next to Rodney King in the pantheon of civil rights victims and heroes in South L.A. Most of them deserved such honored status, but some were the creations of lawyers and the media. Whichever Harris was, he was now seeking his payday — a civil rights trial in which $I0 million would be just the opening bid.

  Despite the verdict and all the attached rhetoric, Bosch didn’t believe Harris’s claims of innocence or police brutality. One of the detectives Harris specifically accused of brutality was Bosch’s former partner, Frankie Sheehan, and Bosch knew Sheehan to be a total professional when dealing with suspects and prisoners. So Bosch simply thought of Harris as a liar and murderer who had walked away from his crime. He would have no qualms about rousting him and taking him downtown for questioning about Howard Elias’s murder. But Bosch also knew as he stood there with Rider that if he now brought Harris in, he would run the risk of compounding the alleged wrongs already done to him — at least in the eyes of much of the public and the media. It was a political decision as much as a police decision that he had to make.

  ‘Let me think about this for a second,’ he said.

  He walked off by himself through the atrium. The case was even more perilous than he had realized. Any misstep could result in disaster — to the case, to the department, to careers. He wondered if Irving had realized all of this when he had chosen Bosch’s team for the case. Perhaps, he thought, Irving’s compliments were just a front for a real motive — leaving Bosch and his team dangling in the wind. Bosch knew he was now venturing into paranoia. It was unlikely that the deputy chief could have come up with such a plan so quickly. Or that he would even care about Bosch’s team with so much else at stake.

  Bosch looked up and saw the sky was much brighter now. It would be a sunny and hot day.

  ‘Harry?’

  He turned. It was Rider.

  ‘She’s off.’

  He walked back to the group and Langwiser handed him his phone.

  ‘You’re not going to like this,’ she said. ‘Dave Sheiman wants to bring in a special master to look at the files before you do.’

  ‘Special master?’ Dellacroce asked. ‘What the hell is that?’

  ‘It’s an attorney,’ Langwiser said. ‘An independent attorney appointed by a judge who will oversee the files. He will be hired to protect the rights of those clients while still giving you people what you need. Hopefully.’

  ‘Shit,’ Bosch said, his frustration finally getting the better of him. ‘Why don’t we just stop the whole thing now and drop the damn case? If the DA’s office doesn’t care about us clearing it then we won’t care either.’

  ‘Detective Bosch, you know it’s not like that. Of course we care. We just want to be safe. The warrant you have is still good for searching the office. Sheiman said you can even go through completed case files — which I am sure you need to look at as well. But the special master will have to come in and look at all pending files first. Remember, this person is not an adversary to you. He will give you everything you are entitled to see.’

  ‘And when will that be? Next week? Next month?’

  ‘No. Sheiman is going to go to work on that this morning. He’ll call Judge Houghton, apprise him of the situation, and see if he has any recommendations for a special master. With any luck, the appointment will be made today and you’ll have what you need from the files this afternoon. Tomorrow, at the very latest.’

  ‘Tomorrow at the latest is too late. We need to keep moving on this.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Chastain chimed in. ‘Don’t you know an investigation is like a shark? It’s got to keep — ’

  ‘All right, Chastain,’ Bosch said.

  ‘Look,’ Langwiser said. ‘I’ll make sure Dave understands the urgency of the situation. In the meantime you’ll just have to be patient. Now do you want to keep standing down here talking about it or do you want to go up and do what we can in the office?’

  Bosch looked at her for a long moment, annoyed by her chiding tone. The moment ended when the phone in his hand rang. It was Edgar and he was whispering. Bosch held a hand over his ear so he could hear.

  ‘I didn’t hear that. What?’

  ‘Listen, I’m in the bedroom. There’s no phone book in the bed table. I checked both bed tables. It’s not here.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The phone book, it’s not here, man.’

  Bosch looked at Chastain, who was looking back at him. He turned and walked away, out of earshot of the others. Now he whispered to Edgar.

  ‘You sure?’

  “Course I’m sure. I woulda found it if it was here.’

  ‘You were first in the bedroom?’

  ‘Right. First one in. It’s not here.’

  ‘You’re in the bedroom to the right when you come down the hall.’

  ‘Yeah, Harry. I’m in the right place. It’s just not here.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Nothing. Continue the search.’

  Bosch flipped the phone closed and put it in his pocket. He walked back to the others. He tried to act calm, as if the call had only been a minor annoyance.

  ‘Okay, let’s go up and do what we can up there.’

  They moved to the elevator, which was an open wrought-iron cage with ornate flourishes and polished brass trim.

  ‘Why don’t you take the ladies up first,’ Bosch said to Dellacroce. ‘We’ll come up after. That ought to distribute the weight pretty evenly.’

  He took Elias’s key ring out of his pocket and handed it to Rider.

  ‘The office key should be on there,’ he said. ‘And never mind about that other thing with Harris for the time being. Let’s see what we’ve got in the office first.’

  ‘Sure, Harry.’

  They got on and Dellacroce pulled the accordion gate closed. The elevator rose with a jerking motion. After it was up one floor and those on it could not see them, Bosch turned to Chastain. The anger and frustration of everything going wrong flooded him then. He dropped his briefcase and with both
hands grabbed Chastain by the collar of his jacket. He roughly pushed him against the elevator cage and spoke in a low, dark voice that was full of rage.

  ‘Goddammit, Chastain, I’m only asking this one time. Where’s the fucking phone book?’

  Chastain’s face flushed crimson and his eyes grew wide in shock.

  ‘What? What the fuck are you talking about?’

  He brought his hands up to Bosch’s and tried to free himself but Bosch maintained the pressure, leaning all of his weight into the other man.

  ‘The phone book in the apartment. I know you took it and I want it back. Right the fuck now.’

  Finally, Chastain tore himself loose. His jacket and shirt and tie were wrenched askew. He stepped away from Bosch as if he was scared and adjusted himself. He then pointed a finger at him.

  ‘Stay away from me! You’re fucking nuts! I don’t have any phone book. You had it. I saw you put it in the goddamn drawer next to the bed.’

  Bosch took a step toward him.

  ‘You took it. When I was on the bal — ’

  ‘I said stay away! I didn’t take it. If it’s not there, then somebody came in and took it after we left.’

  Bosch stopped. It was an obvious explanation but it hadn’t even entered his mind. He had automatically thought of Chastain. He looked down at the tiles, embarrassed by how he’d let an old animosity cloud his judgment. He could hear the elevator gate opening on the fifth floor. He raised his eyes, fixed Chastain with a bloodless stare and pointed at his face.

  ‘I find out otherwise, Chastain, I promise I’ll take you apart.’

  ‘Fuck you! I didn’t take the book. But I am going to take your badge for this.’

  Bosch smiled but not in a way that had any warmth.

  ‘Go ahead. Write your ticket, Chastain. Anytime you can take my badge you can have it.’

  11

  The others were inside Howard Elias’s law offices by the time Bosch and Chastain made it up to the fifth floor. The office was essentially three rooms: a reception area with a secretary’s desk, a middle room where there was a clerk’s desk and two walls of file cabinets, and then the third and largest room, Elias’s office.