The Black Ice hb-2 Read online

  It was a photocopy of a telex to the consulate by a State Judicial Police officer named Carlos Aguila. Bosch studied the letter, which was written in English

  Seeking information regarding the disappearance of Fernal Gutierrez-Llosa, 55, day laborer, Mexicali. Whereabouts unknown. Last sighting: 12/17-Mexicali.

  Description: 5-foot-8, 145 pounds. Brown eyes, brown hair, some gray. Tattoo right upper chest (blue ink ghost symbol-City of Lost Souls barrio).

  Contact: Carlos Aguila, 57-20-13, Mexicali, B.C.

  Bosch reread the page. There wasn’t much there but it was enough. Fernal Gutierrez-Llosa disappeared in Mexicali on the seventeenth and early the next morning the body of Juan Doe #67 was found in Los Angeles. Bosch looked quickly at the other two pages Capetillo had but they dealt with men who were too young to be Juan Doe #67. He went back to the first sheet. The tattoo was the clincher.

  “I think this is it,” he said. “Can I get a copy?”

  “Of course. You want me to call down there? See if they can send some prints up?”

  “Nah, not yet. I want to check a few other things out.” Actually, he wanted to limit Capetillo’s involvement to just the help he had given.

  “There’s one thing,” Bosch said. “You know what this City of Lost Souls description means? This reference to the tattoo.”

  “Yeah. Basically, the tattoo is a barrio symbol. Fernal Gutierrez-Llosa resided in the barrio Ciudad de los Personas Perdidos-City of Lost Souls. Many of the barrio dwellers down there do this. Mark themselves. It’s similar to graffiti up here. Only down there, they mark themselves and not the frigging walls as much. The police down there know what tattoos symbolize what barrios. It is fairly common in Mexicali. When you contact Aguila he can tell you. Maybe he can send you a photo, if you need it.”

  Bosch was silent for a moment as he pretended to reread the consulate paper. City of Lost Souls, he thought. A ghost. He tumbled this piece of information in his mind the way a boy who has found a baseball turns it in his hands to study the seams for wear. He was reminded of the tattoo on Moore’s arm. The devil with a halo. Was that from a Mexicali barrio?

  “You say the cops there keep track of these tattoos?”

  “That’s right. It’s one of the few decent jobs they do.”

  “How d’you mean?”

  “I mean, have you ever been down there? On a detail? It’s third world, man. The police, uh, apparatus, I guess you’d call it, is very primitive by our standards. Fact, it would not surprise me if they have no fingerprints on this man to send you. I’m surprised they even sent anything to the consul here in the first place. This Aguila, he must’ve had a hunch like you.”

  Bosch took one last look at the poster on the wall, thanked Capetillo for his help and the copy of the consulate’s telex and then left the office.

  * * *

  He got on an elevator to go down and saw Sheehan already on it. The car was crowded and Sheehan was at the back, behind the pile. They didn’t talk until they got off on three.

  “Hey, Frankie,” Bosch said. “Didn’t get a chance to talk to you Christmas night.”

  “What’re you doing here, Harry?”

  “I’m waiting for you. You must be running late, or do you check in on the fifth floor nowadays?”

  That was a little poke at Sheehan. The IAD squads were on the fifth floor. It was also to let Sheehan know that Harry had an idea of what was going on with the Moore case. Since Sheehan was going down, he had come from either the fifth or sixth floors. That was either IAD or Irving’s office. Or maybe both.

  “Don’t fuck with me, Bosch. Reason I haven’t been in is I’ve been busy this morning, thanks to the games you like to play.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t worry about it. Look, I don’t like you being seen with me in here, anyway. Irving gave me specific instructions about you. You are not in this investigation. You helped out the other night but it ended there.”

  They were in the hallway outside the RHD offices. Bosch didn’t like the sound of Sheehan’s tone. He had never known Frankie to bow his head to the brass like this.

  “C’mon, Frankie, let’s go get a cup. You can tell me what’s bugging you.”

  “Nothing’s bugging me, man. You forget, I worked with you. I know how you get your teeth on something and won’t let go. Well, I’m telling you where things stand. You were there the night we found him. It ended there. Go back to Hollywood.”

  Bosch took a step toward him and lowered his voice. He said, “But we both know it didn’t end there, Frankie. And it’s not going to end there. So if you feel you gotta do it, go tell Irving I said it’s so.”

  Sheehan stared at him for a few seconds and then Bosch saw the resolve fade away.

  “Awright, Harry, c’mon in. I’m going to be kicking myself for this later.”

  They walked to Sheehan’s desk and Bosch pulled a chair from another desk alongside it. Sheehan took off his coat and put it on a hanger on a rack next to the desk. After he sat down, adjusted his shoulder holster and folded his arms, he said:

  “Know where I’ve been all morning? The ME’s, trying to work out a deal to keep a lid on this a few hours. Seems overnight we sprang a leak and already this morning Irving’s getting calls that we are sitting on a homicide of one of our own officers. You wouldn’t know anything about this, would you?”

  Harry said, “Only thing I know is I’ve been thinking about the scene out at the motel and the autopsy being inconclusive, like they say, and I’m not thinking suicide anymore.”

  “You’re not thinking anything. You’re not on it. Remember? And what about this?”

  He opened a drawer and brought a file up. It was the Zorrillo file Rickard had shown him the day before.

  “Don’t bother telling me you haven’t seen this before. Because then I might take it over to SID and have ’em run prints on it. I’d bet my wife’s diaphragm I’d find yours.”

  “You’d lose, Frankie.”

  “Then I’d have more kids. But I wouldn’t lose, Harry.”

  Bosch waited a beat for him to settle down.

  “All this huffin’ and puffin’ at me tells me one thing: you don’t see a suicide, either. So quit with the bullshit.”

  “You’re right. I don’t. But I got an assistant chief sitting on my ass and he’s gotten the bright idea of sticking me with an IAD suit on this. So it’s like I got both my feet in buckets of shit before I even start off.”

  “You saying they don’t want this to go anywhere?”

  “No, I am not saying that.”

  “What are they going to tell theTimes? ”

  “Press conference this afternoon. Irving’s going to give it to everybody. He’ll say we are looking at the possibility-thepossibility -of homicide. Fuck giving it to theTimes. Who said it was theTimes making the noise anyway?”

  “Lucky, I guess.”

  “Yeah, be careful, Bosch. You slip like that with Irving and he’ll fry your ass. He’d love to, with your record and all the history going back with you. I already have to figure out about this file. You told Irving you didn’t know the guy and now we have a file that shows he was doing some digging for you.”

  Bosch realized he had forgotten to remove the Post-it tag Moore had placed on the file.

  “Tell Irving whatever you want. Think I care?” Bosch looked down at the file. “What do you think?”

  “About this file? I think nothing out loud.”

  “C’mon, Frankie, I ask Moore to look around on this dope killing and he ends up in a motel with his head in the tub in small pieces. It was a very smooth job, right down to not a single lift belonging to anybody else being found in that room.”

  “So what if it was smooth and there’s no other prints? In my book some guys deserve what they got coming, you know?”

  There was the break in Sheehan’s defense. Whether intentional or not, he was telling Bosch that Moore had crossed.

  “I need more than tha
t,” he said in a very low voice. “You got the weight on you but I don’t. I’m a free agent and I’m going to put it together. Moore might’ve crossed, yeah, but nobody should’ve put him down on the tiles like that. We both know that. Besides, there are other bodies.”

  Harry could see this had grabbed Sheehan’s attention.

  “We can trade,” Bosch said quietly.

  Sheehan stood up and said, “Yeah, let’s go get that coffee.”

  Five minutes later they were at a table in the second-floor cafeteria and Bosch was telling him about Jimmy Kapps and Juan Doe #67. He outlined the connections between Moore and Juan Doe, Juan Doe and Mexicali, Mexicali and Humberto Zorillo, Zorillo and black ice, black ice and Jimmy Kapps. On and on it went. Sheehan asked no questions and took no notes until Harry was done.

  “So what do you think?” he asked then.

  “I think what you think,” Bosch said. “That Moore had crossed. Maybe he was fronting up here for Zorillo, the ice man, and got so deep he couldn’t get out. I don’t know how it all ties up yet but I still have some ideas I am playing with. I’m thinking a number of things. Maybe he wanted out and the ice man whacked him. Maybe he was working that file, going to give me something, and they whacked him.”

  “Possibilities.”

  “There’s also the possibility that word of the IAD investigation your partner Chastain was conducting got around, and they saw Moore as a danger and whacked him.”

  Sheehan hesitated. It was the moment of truth. If he discussed the IAD investigation he would be breaking enough departmental regs to get shipped permanently out of RHD. Like Harry.

  “I could get busted for talking about that,” Sheehan said. “Could end up like you, out there in the cesspool.”

  “It’s all a cesspool, man. Doesn’t matter if you’re on the bottom or the top. You’re still swimming in shit.”

  Sheehan took a sip of his coffee.

  “IAD had taken a report, this was about two months ago, that Moore was some way involved in the traffic on the Boulevard. Possibly offering protection, possibly a deeper involvement. The source was not clear on that.”

  “Two months ago?” Bosch asked. “Didn’t they get anything? I mean, Moore was still working the street all this time. Wasn’t there enough to at least put him on a desk?”

  “Look, you’ve got to remember that Irving put Chastain with me on this. But I’m not with Chastain. He doesn’t do much talking to me. All he would tell me was the investigation was in its infancy when Moore disappeared. He had no proof substantiating or discrediting the claim.”

  “You know how hard he worked it?”

  “I assume very hard. He’s IAD. He’s always looking for a badge to pull. And this looked like more than just departmental charges. This would have gone to the DA. So I assume he had a hard-on for it. He just didn’t get anything. Moore must’ve been very good.”

  Not good enough, Bosch thought. Obviously.

  “Who was the source?”

  “You don’t need that.”

  “You know I do. If I’m going to be a free agent on this I have to know what’s what.”

  Sheehan hesitated but didn’t make a good show of it.

  “It was anonymous-a letter. But Chastain said it was the wife. That’s what he figured. She turned him in.”

  “How’s he so sure?”

  “The details of the letter, whatever they were, Chastain said they would only be known by someone close to him. He told me it wasn’t unusual. It often comes from the spouse. But he said that a lot of times it’s bogus. A wife or husband will report something totally false, you know, if they are going through a divorce or something, just to fuck the other up with work. So, he spent a lot of time just seeing if that was the case here. ’Cause Moore and his wife were splitting up. He said she never admitted it but he was sure she sent it. He just never got very far with substantiating what was in it.”

  Bosch thought of Sylvia. He was sure they were wrong.

  “Did you talk to the wife, tell her the ID was confirmed?”

  “No, Irving did that last night.”

  “He tell her about the autopsy, ’bout it not being suicide?”

  “I don’t know about that. See, I don’t get to sit down with Irving like you with me here and ask him everything that comes into my head.”

  Bosch was wearing out his welcome.

  “Just a few more, Frankie. Did Chastain focus on black ice?”

  “No. When we got this file of yours yesterday, he about shit his pants. I got the feeling he was hearing about all that side of it for the first time. I kind of enjoyed that, Harry. If there was anything to enjoy about any of this.”

  “Well, now, you can tell him all the rest I told you.”

  “No chance. This conversation didn’t take place. I gotta try to put it all together like it was my own before I hand anything over to him.”

  Bosch was thinking quickly. What else was there to ask?

  “What about the note? That’s the part that doesn’t fit now. If it was no suicide then where’s this note come from?”

  “Yeah, that’s the problem. That’s why we gave the coroner such a hard time. Far as we can guess, he either had it all along in his back pocket or whoever did him made him write it. I don’t know.”

  “Yeah.” Bosch thought a moment. “Would you write a note like that if somebody was about to put you down on the floor?”

  “I don’t know, man. People do things you’d never expect when they’ve got the gun on them. They always’ve got hope that things might turn out all right. That’s the way I see it.”

  Bosch nodded. But he didn’t know if he agreed or not.

  “I gotta go,” Sheehan said. “Let me know what comes up.”

  Bosch nodded and Sheehan left him there with two cups of coffee on the table. A few moments later Sheehan was back.

  “You know, I never told you, it was too bad about what happened with you. We could use you back here, Harry. I’ve always thought that.”

  Bosch looked up at him.

  “Yeah, Frankie. Thanks.”

  Chapter 14

  The Medfly Eradication Project Center was at the edge of East L.A., on San Fernando Road not far from County-USC Med Center, which housed the morgue. Bosch was tempted to drop by to see Teresa but he figured he should give her time to cool. He also figured that decision was cowardly but he didn’t change it. He just kept driving.

  The project center was a former county psychiatric ward which had been abandoned to that cause years earlier when Supreme Court rulings made it virtually impossible for the government-in the form of the police-to take the mentally ill off the streets and hold them for observation and public safety. The San Fernando Road ward was closed as the country consolidated its psych centers.

  It had been used since for a variety of purposes, including a set for a slasher movie about a haunted nuthouse and even a temporary morgue when an earthquake damaged the facility at County-USC a few years back. Bodies had been stored in two refrigerated trucks in the parking lot. Because of the emergency situation, county administrators had to get the first trucks they could get their hands on. Painted on the side of one of them had been the words “Live Maine Lobsters!” Bosch remembered reading about it in the “Only in L.A.” column in theTimes.

  There was a check-in post at the entry manned by a state police officer. Bosch rolled down the window, badged him and asked who the head medfly eradicator was. He was directed to a parking space and an entrance to the administration suite.

  The door to the suite still said No Unescorted Patients on it. Bosch went through and down a hallway, nodding to and passing another state officer. He came to a secretary’s desk where he identified himself again to the woman sitting there and asked to see the entomologist in charge. She made a quick phone call to someone and then escorted Harry into a nearby office, introducing him to a man named Roland Edson. The secretary hovered near the door with a shocked look on her face until Edson finally tol
d her that would be all.

  When they were alone in the office, Edson said, “I kill flies for a living, not people, Detective. Is this a serious visit?”

  Edson laughed hard and Bosch forced a smile to be polite. Edson was a small man in a short-sleeved white shirt and pale green tie. His bald scalp had been freckled by the sun and was scarred by misjudgments. He wore thick, rimless glasses that magnified his eyes and made him somewhat resemble his quarry. Behind his back his subordinates probably called him “The Fly.”

  Bosch explained that he was working a homicide case and could not tell Edson a lot of the background because the investigation was of a highly confidential nature. He warned him that other investigators might be back with more questions. He asked for some general information about the breeding and transport of sterile fruit flies into the state, hoping that the appeal for expert advice would get the bureaucrat to open up.

  Edson responded by giving him much of the same information Teresa Corazon had already provided, but Bosch acted as if it was all new to him and took notes.

  “Here’s the specimen here, Detective,” Edson said, holding up a paperweight. It was a glass block in which a fruit fly had been perpetually cast, like a prehistoric ant caught in amber.

  Bosch nodded and steered the interview specifically toward Mexicali. The entomologist said the breeding contractor there was a company called EnviroBreed. He said EnviroBreed shipped an average of thirty million flies to the eradication center each week.

  “How do they get here?” Bosch asked.

  “In the pupal stage, of course.”

  “Of course. But my question is how?”

  “This is the stage in which the insect is nonfeeding, immobile. It is what we call the transformation stage between larva and imago-adult. This works out quite well because it is an ideal point for transport. They come in incubators, if you will. Environment boxes, we call them. And then, of course, shortly after they get here metamorphosis is completed and they are ready to be released as adults.”

  “So when they get here, they have already been dyed and irradiated?”