The Last Coyote (1995) Read online

  But unsatisfied with the modest jump this accounting deception would provide, Pounds intended to boldly add the two Biloxi murders to the clearance chart as well. After all, it could be argued, his homicide squad did clear two more cases. Adding a total of three cleared cases to one side of the chart without adding any to the other would likely give a tremendous boost to the overall clearance rate—as well as to the image of Pounds as a detective bureau commander. Bosch knew that Pounds was probably delighted with himself and the accomplishments of the day.

  “He said our rate would jump six points,” Edgar was saying. “He was a very pleased man, Harry. And my new partner was very pleased he had pleased his man.”

  “I don’t want to hear any more.”

  “I didn’t think so. So what are you doing to keep busy, besides counting cars on the freeway? You must be bored stiff, Harry.”

  “Not really,” Bosch lied. “Last week I finished fixing the deck. This week I’ll—”

  “Harry, I’m telling you, you’re wasting your time and money. The inspectors are going to find you in there and kick you out on your ass. Then they’ll tear the place down themselves and hand you the bill. Your deck and the whole house will be in the back of a dump truck then.”

  “I hired a lawyer to work on it.”

  “What’s he gonna do?”

  “I don’t know. I want to appeal the red tag. He’s a land use guy. He said he can work it out.”

  “I hope so. I still think you ought to tear it down and start over.”

  “I didn’t win the lotto yet.”

  “The feds’ve got disaster loans. You could get one and—”

  “I’ve applied, Jerry, but I like my house the way it is.”

  “Okay, Harry. I hope your lawyer works it out. Anyway, I gotta go. Burns wants to have a beer over at the Short Stop. He’s there waiting.”

  The last time Bosch had been at the Short Stop, a hole-in-the-wall cop bar near the academy and Dodger Stadium, it had still had I SUPPORT CHIEF GATES bumper stickers on the wall. For most cops, Gates was a dying ember of the past, but the Short Stop was a place where old-liners went to drink and remember a department that no longer existed.

  “Yeah, have fun over there, Jerry.”

  “Take care, man.”

  Bosch leaned against a counter and drank his beer. He came to the conclusion that Edgar’s call had been a cleverly disguised way of telling Bosch that he was choosing sides and cutting him loose. That was okay, Bosch thought. Edgar’s first allegiance was to himself, to surviving in a place that could be treacherous. Bosch couldn’t hold that against him.

  Bosch looked at his reflection in the glass of the oven door. The image was dark but he could see his eyes in the shadow and the line of his jaw. He was forty-four years old and in some ways looked older. He still had a full head of curly brown hair but both the hair and the mustache were going to gray. His black-brown eyes seemed to him tired and used up. His skin had the pallor of a night watchman’s. Bosch was still leanly built but sometimes his clothes hung on him as if they had been issued at one of the downtown missions or he had recently been through a bad illness.

  He broke away from his reflection and grabbed another beer out of the refrigerator. Outside on the deck, he saw the sky was now brightly lit with the pastels of dusk. It would be dark soon, but the freeway below was a bright river of moving lights, its current never ebbing for a moment.

  Looking down on the Monday night commute, he saw the place as an anthill with the workers moving along in lines. Someone or some force would soon come along and kick the hill again. Then the freeways would fall, the houses would collapse and the ants would just rebuild and get in line again.

  He was bothered by something but was not quite sure what it was. His thoughts swirled and mixed. He began to see what Edgar had told him about his case in the context of his dialogue with Hinojos. There was some connection there, some bridge, but he couldn’t get to it.

  He finished his beer and decided that two would be enough. He went to one of the lounge chairs and sat down with his feet up. What he wanted to do was give everything a rest. Mind and body. He looked up and saw the clouds had now been painted orange by the setting sun. They looked like molten lava moving slowly across the sky.

  Just before he dozed off a thought pushed through the lava. Everybody counts or nobody counts. And then, in the last moment of clarity before sleep, he knew what the connecting ribbon that had run through his thoughts had been. And he knew what his mission was.

  Chapter Three

  IN THE MORNING Bosch dressed without showering so he could immediately begin work on the house and blank out the lingering thoughts from the night before with sweat and concentration.

  But clearing the thoughts away was not easy. As he dressed in old lacquer-stained jeans, he caught a glimpse of himself in the cracked mirror over the bureau and saw that his T-shirt was on backward. Printed across his chest on the white shirt was the homicide squad’s motto.

  OUR DAY BEGINS WHEN YOUR DAY ENDS

  It was supposed to be on the back of the shirt. He pulled it off, turned it and put it back on. Now in the mirror he saw what he was supposed to see. A replica of a detective’s badge on the left breast of the shirt and the smaller printing that said LAPD HOMICIDE.

  He brewed a pot of coffee and took it and a mug out to the deck. Next he lugged out his toolbox and the new door he had bought at Home Depot for the bedroom. When he was finally ready and had the mug filled with steaming black coffee, he sat on the footrest of one of the lounge chairs and placed the door on its side in front of him.

  The original door had splintered at the hinges during the quake. He had tried to hang the replacement a few days earlier but it was too large to fit the door jamb. He figured he needed to shave no more than an eighth of an inch off the opening side to make the fit. He set to work with the plane, moving the instrument slowly back and forth along the edge as the wood peels fell away in paper-thin curls. Occasionally he would stop and study his progress and run his hand along the area of his work. He liked being able to see the progress he was making. Few other tasks in life seemed that way to him.

  But still, he could not concentrate for long. His focus on the door was interrupted by the same intrusive thought that had haunted him the night before. Everybody counts or nobody counts. It was what he had told Hinojos. It was what he had told her he believed. But did he? What did it mean to him? Was it merely a slogan like the one on the back of his shirt or was it something he lived by? These questions mingled with the echoes of the conversation he’d had the night before with Edgar. And with a deeper thought that he knew he had always had.

  He took the plane off the door edge and ran his hand along the smooth wood again. He thought he had it right and carried it inside. Over a drop cloth in an area of the living room he had reserved for woodworking, he ran a sheet of small-grain sandpaper over the door edge until it was perfectly smooth to his touch.

  Holding the door vertically and balancing it on a block of wood, he eased it into the hinges and then dropped the pins in. He tapped them home with a hammer and they went in easily. He had oiled the pins and hinges earlier and so the bedroom door opened and closed almost silently. Most important, though, was that it closed evenly in the jamb. He opened and closed it several more times, just staring at it, pleased with his accomplishment.

  The glow of his success was short-lived, for having completed the project left his mind open to wander. Back out on the deck the other thoughts came back as he swept the wood shavings into a small pile.

  Hinojos had told him to stay busy. Now he knew how he would do it. And in that moment he realized that no matter how many projects he found to take his time, there was one job he still had to do. He leaned the broom against the wall and went inside to get ready.

  Chapter Four

  THE LAPD STORAGE facility and aerosquad headquarters known as Piper Tech was on Ramirez Street in downtown, not far from Parker Center. Bosch, in a
suit and tie, arrived shortly before eleven at the gate. He held his LAPD identification card out the window and was quickly waved in. The card was all he had. The card, along with his gold badge and gun, had been taken from him when he was placed on leave the week before. But it was later returned so that he could gain entry to the BSS offices for the stress therapy sessions with Carmen Hinojos.

  After parking, he walked to the beige-painted storage warehouse that housed the city’s history of violence. The quarter-acre building contained the files of all LAPD cases, solved or unsolved. This was where the case files came when nobody cared anymore.

  At the front counter a civilian clerk was loading files onto a cart so that they could be wheeled back into the expanse of shelves and forgotten. By the way she studied Bosch, he knew it was rare that anyone ever showed up here in person. It was all done by telephones and city couriers.

  “If you’re looking for city council minutes, that’s building A, across the lot. The one with brown trim.”

  Bosch held up his ID card.

  “No, I want to pull a case.”

  He reached into his coat pocket while she walked up to the counter and bent forward to read his card. She was a small black woman with graying hair and glasses. The name tag affixed to her blouse said her name was Geneva Beaupre.

  “Hollywood,” she said. “Why didn’t you just ask for it to be sent out in dispatch? There ain’t no hurry on these cases.”

  “I was downtown, over at Parker…I wanted to see it as soon as I could, anyway.”

  “Well, you got a number?”

  From his pocket he pulled a piece of notebook paper with the number 61-743 written on it. She bent to study it and then her head jerked up.

  “Nineteen sixty-one? You want a case from—I don’t know where nineteen sixty-one is.”

  “It’s here. I’ve looked at the file before. I guess there was someone else clerking here back then, but it was here.”

  “Well, I’ll look. You’re going to wait?”

  “Yeah, I’ll wait.”

  This seemed to disappoint her but Bosch smiled at her in the most friendly way he could muster. She took the paper with her and disappeared into the stacks. Bosch walked around the small waiting area by the counter for a few minutes and then stepped outside to smoke a cigarette. He was nervous for a reason he could not exactly place. He kept moving, pacing.

  “Harry Bosch!”

  He turned and saw a man approaching him from the helicopter hangar. He recognized him but couldn’t immediately place him. Then it hit him: Captain Dan Washington, a former Hollywood patrol skipper who was now commander of the aerosquadron. They shook hands cordially and Bosch immediately hoped Washington did not know of his ISL situation.

  “Howzit going in the ’wood?”

  “Same old same old, Captain.”

  “You know, I miss that place.”

  “You’re not missing much. How is it with you?”

  “Can’t complain. I like the detail but it’s more like being an airport manager than a cop, I guess. It’s as good a place to lay low as any other.”

  Bosch recalled that Washington had gotten into a political scrap with the department weight and taken the transfer as a means of survival. The department had dozens of out-of-the-way jobs like Washington’s, where you could lay up and wait for your political fortunes to change.

  “What’re you doing over here?”

  There it was. If Washington knew Bosch was on leave, then admitting he was pulling an old case file would be admitting he was violating the leave order. Still, as his position in the aerosquad attested, Washington was not a straight-line company man. Bosch decided to run the risk.

  “I’m just pulling an old case. I got some free time and thought I’d check a few things.”

  Washington narrowed his eyes and Bosch knew that he knew.

  “Yeah…well, listen, I gotta run, but hang in there, man. Don’t let the book men get you down.”

  He winked at Bosch and moved on.

  “I won’t, Captain. You either.”

  Bosch felt reasonably sure Washington wouldn’t mention their meeting to anybody. He stepped on his cigarette and went back inside to the counter, privately chastising himself anyway for having gone outside and advertised that he was there. Five minutes later he started hearing a squeaking sound coming from one of the aisles between the stacks. In a moment Geneva Beaupre appeared pushing a cart with a blue three-ring binder on it.

  It was a murder book. It was at least two inches thick, dusty, and with a rubber band around it. The band held an old green checkout card to the binder.

  “Found it.”

  There was a note of triumph in her voice. It would be the major accomplishment of her day, Bosch guessed.

  “Great.”

  She dropped the heavy binder on the counter.

  “Marjorie Lowe. Homicide, 1961. Now…” She took the card off the binder and looked at it. “Yes, you were the last to take this out. Let’s see, that was five years ago. You were with Robbery-Homicide then…”

  “Yes. And now I’m in Hollywood. You want me to sign for it again?”

  She put the card down in front of him.

  “Yes. Put your ID number there, too, please.”

  He quickly did as he was told and he could tell she was studying him as he wrote.

  “A lefty.”

  “Yeah.”

  He slid the card back across the counter to her.

  “Thanks, Geneva.”

  He looked at her, wanting to say something else, but decided it might be a mistake. She looked back at him and a grandmotherly smile formed on her face.

  “I don’t know what you’re doing, Detective Bosch, but I wish you good luck. I can tell it’s important, you coming back to this after five years.”

  “It’s been longer than that, Geneva. A lot longer.”

  Chapter Five

  BOSCH CLEARED ALL the old mail and carpentry books off the dining room table and placed the binder and his own notebook on top of it. He went to the stereo and loaded a compact disc, “Clifford Brown with Strings.” He went to the kitchen and got an ashtray, then he sat down in front of the blue murder book and looked at it for a long time without moving. The last time he’d had the file, he had barely looked at it as he skimmed through its many pages. He hadn’t been ready then and had returned it to the archives.

  This time, he wanted to be sure he was ready before he opened it, so he sat there a long time just studying the cracked plastic cover as if it held some clue to his preparedness. A memory crowded into his mind. A boy of eleven in a swimming pool clinging to the steel ladder at the side, out of breath and crying, the tears disguised by the water that dripped out of his wet hair. The boy felt scared. Alone. He felt as if the pool were an ocean that he must cross.

  Brownie was working through “Willow Weep for Me,” his trumpet as gentle as a portrait painter’s brush. Bosch reached for the rubber band he had put around the binder five years earlier and it broke at his touch. He hesitated only another moment before opening the binder and blowing off the dust.

  The binder contained the case file on the October 28, 1961, homicide of Marjorie Phillips Lowe. His mother.

  The pages of the binder were brownish yellow and stiff with age. As he looked at them and read them, Bosch was initially surprised at how little things had changed in nearly thirty-five years. Many of the investigative forms in the binder were still currently in use. The Preliminary Report and the Investigating Officer’s Chronological Record were the same as those presently used, save for word changes made to accommodate court rulings and political correctness. Description Boxes marked NEGRO had sometime along the line been changed to BLACK and then AFRICAN-AMERICAN. The list of motivations on the Preliminary Case Screening chart did not include DOMESTIC VIOLENCE or HATRED/PREJUDICE classifications as they did now. Interview summary sheets did not include boxes to be checked after Miranda warnings had been given.

  But aside from those
kinds of changes, the reports were the same and Bosch decided that homicide investigation was largely the same now as back then. Of course, there had been incredible technological advances in the past thirty-five years but he believed there were some things that were always the same and always would remain the same. The legwork, the art of interviewing and listening, knowing when to trust an instinct or a hunch. Those were things that didn’t change, that couldn’t.