Two Kinds of Truth Page 3

  Bosch looked at Valdez and waited for the chief to give him the nod. He was asking to take charge of the investigation and he wanted it clear to all parties.

  “Take it, Harry,” Valdez said.

  Bosch got the attention of the patrol officers huddled together and signaled them over as well.

  “Okay, listen up everybody,” Bosch said. “Our number one priority here is to protect the crime scene, and we’re not doing that. Patrol, I want you guys to move your cars out and shut down this block on both ends. Tape it up. Nobody comes in without authorization. I then want clipboards on both ends, and you write down the name of every cop or lab rat that comes into the crime scene. You write down the license-plate number of every car you let out too.”

  Nobody moved.

  “You heard him,” Valdez said. “Let’s move it, people. We’ve got two citizens on the floor in there. We need to do this right by them and the department.”

  The patrol officers quickly returned to their cars to carry out Bosch’s orders. Bosch and the other detectives then split up and started moving the gathered onlookers back up the street. Some shouted questions in Spanish but Bosch did not reply. He scanned the faces of those he was pushing back. He knew the killer could be among them. It wouldn’t be the first time.

  After a two-zone crime scene had been established, Bosch and the chief and the three detectives reconvened by the door of the pharmacy. Bosch once more looked at Valdez for confirmation of his authority, because he didn’t expect his next moves to go over well.

  “I still have this, Chief?” he asked.

  “All yours, Harry,” Valdez said. “How do you want to do it?”

  “Okay, we want to limit people inside the crime scene,” Bosch said. “We get this thing into court and a defense lawyer sees all of us crammed in there, wandering around, and it just gives him more targets to potshot, more confusion to throw at a jury. So there’s only going to be two people inside and that’s going to be Lourdes and me. Sisto and Luzon, you’ve got the exterior crime scene. I want you going down the street in both directions. We’re looking for witnesses and cameras. We—”

  “We got here first,” Luzon said, pointing to himself and Sisto. “It should be our case and us inside.”

  At about forty, Luzon was the oldest of the three full-time investigators, but he had the least experience as a detective. He was moved into the unit six months earlier after spending twelve years in patrol. He had gotten the promotion to fill the void left by Lourdes’s leave of absence and then Valdez found the money in the budget to keep him on board at a time when there was a spike in property crimes attributed to a local gang called the SanFers. Bosch had observed him since he’d gotten the promotion and concluded he was a good and earnest detective—a good choice by Valdez. But Bosch had not yet worked with him on a case and he had had that experience with Lourdes. He wanted her to take the lead on this.

  “That’s not how it works,” Bosch said. “Lourdes is going to be lead. I need you and Sisto to go two blocks in both directions. We’re looking for the getaway vehicle. We’re also looking for video and I need you guys to go find it. It’s important.”

  Bosch could see Luzon fighting back the urge to again argue Bosch’s orders. But he looked at the chief, who stood with his arms folded in front of his chest, and saw no indication that the man ultimately in charge disagreed with Bosch.

  “You got it,” he said.

  He went in one direction, while Sisto headed off in the other. Sisto did not bother to complain about the assignment but had a hangdog look on his face.

  “Hey, guys?” Bosch said.

  Luzon and Sisto looked back. Bosch gestured to Lourdes and the chief to include them.

  “Look, I’m not trying to be an arrogant ass,” he said. “My experience comes with a lot of fuckups. We learn from our mistakes, and in over thirty years of working homicides, I’ve made many. I’m just trying to use what I’ve learned the hard way. Okay?”

  Reluctant nods came from Luzon and Sisto and they headed off to their assignments.

  “Take down plates and phone numbers,” Bosch called after them, immediately realizing it was an unneeded directive.

  Once they were gone, the chief stepped away from the huddle.

  “Harry,” Valdez said. “Let’s talk for a second.”

  Bosch followed him, awkwardly leaving Lourdes alone on the sidewalk. The chief spoke quietly.

  “Look, I get what you’re doing with those two and what you said about learning the hard way. But I want you on lead. Bella’s good but she’s just back and getting her feet wet. This—homicide—is what you’ve been doing for thirty years. This is why you’re here.”

  “I get that, Chief. But you don’t want me on lead. We have to think about when this gets into court. Everything’s about building a case for trial, and you don’t want a part-timer on lead. You want Bella. They try character assassination on her, and she’ll eat their lunch after what happened last year, what she went through and then her coming back to the job. She’s a hero and that’s who you want on the witness stand. On top of that, she’s good and she’s ready for this. And besides, I may have some problems coming up soon from downtown. Problems that could be a big distraction. You don’t want me on lead.”

  Valdez looked at him. He knew that “downtown” meant from outside the SFPD, from Bosch’s past.

  “I heard you had visitors this morning,” he said. “We’ll talk about that later. Where do you want me?”

  “Media relations,” Bosch said. “They’ll get wind of this soon enough and will start showing up. ‘Two Dead on Main Street’ will be a story. You need to set up a command post and corral them when they start coming in. We want to control what information gets out there.”

  “Understood. What else? You need more bodies for the canvass. I can pull people in from patrol, take one officer out of every car and run solo patrols till we get a handle on this.”

  “That would be good. There were people in all of these shops. Somebody saw something.”

  “You got it. What if I can get the old Penney’s open and we use that as the CP? I know the guy who owns the building.”

  Bosch looked across the street and down half a block at the facade of the long-closed department store.

  “We’re going to be out here late. If you can get lights on in there, go for it. What about Captain Trevino? Is he around?”

  “I have him covering the shop while I am here. You need him?”

  “No, I can fill him in on things later.”

  “Then I’ll leave you to it. We really need a quick conclusion to this, Harry. If there is one.”

  “Roger that.”

  The chief headed off and Lourdes came up to Bosch.

  “Let me guess, he didn’t want me as lead,” she said.

  “He wanted me,” Bosch said. “But it was no reflection on you. I said no. I said it was your case.”

  “Does that have something to do with the three visitors you had this morning?”

  “Maybe. And it has to do with you being able to handle it. Why don’t you go in and watch over Gooden and Sanders? I’ll call the sheriff’s lab and get an ETA. First thing we want are photos. Don’t let those guys move the bodies around until we get the full photo spread.”

  “Roger that.”

  “The bodies belong to the coroner. But the crime scene is ours. Remember that.”

  Lourdes headed toward the door of the farmacia and Bosch pulled his phone. The SFPD was so small, it did not have its own forensics team. It relied on the sheriff’s department crime scene unit and that often put it in second position for services. Bosch called the liaison at the lab and was told a team was on the road to San Fernando as they spoke. Bosch reminded the liaison that they were working a double murder and asked for a second team, but he was denied and told there wasn’t a second team to spare. They were getting two techs and a photographer/videographer, and that was it.

  As he hung up, Bosch noticed one
of the patrol officers he had given orders to earlier was standing at the new crime scene perimeter at the end of the block. Yellow tape had been strung completely across, closing the road through the mall. The patrol officer had his hands on his belt buckle and was watching Bosch.

  Bosch put his phone away and walked up the street to the yellow tape and the officer manning it.

  “Don’t look in,” Bosch said. “Look out.”

  “What?” the officer asked.

  “You’re watching the detectives. You should be watching the street.”

  Bosch put his hand on the officer’s shoulder and turned him toward the tape.

  “Look outward from a crime scene. Look for people watching, people who don’t fit. You’d be surprised how many times the doer comes back to watch the investigation. Anyway, you’re protecting the crime scene, not watching it.”

  “Got it.”

  “Good.”

  The sheriff’s forensics team arrived shortly after that and Bosch ordered everyone out of the pharmacy so the photographer could go in and take a preliminary photo-and-video sweep of the crime scene with only the bodies in view.

  While waiting outside, Bosch pulled on gloves and a pair of paper booties. Once the all clear came from the photographer, the whole team entered the farmacia, passing through a plastic crime scene containment curtain that had been hung by the techs over the door.

  Gooden and Sanders separated and continued to process the bodies. Lourdes and Bosch first went behind the pharmacy counter, where Gooden and one of the crime scene techs were examining the first body. Lourdes had a notebook out and was writing down a description of what she was seeing. Bosch leaned close to his partner’s ear and whispered.

  “Take the time to just observe. Notes are good but clear visuals are good to keep in your mind.”

  “Okay. I will.”

  When Bosch was a young homicide detective, he worked with a partner named Frankie Sheehan, who always kept an old milk crate in the trunk of their unmarked car. He’d carry it into every scene, find a good vantage point, and put the crate down. Then he’d sit on it and just observe the scene, studying its nuances and trying to take the measure and motive of the violence that had occurred there. Sheehan had worked the Danielle Skyler case with Bosch and had sat on his crate in the corner of the room where the body was left nude and viciously violated on the floor. But Sheehan was long dead now and would not be taking the free fall that was awaiting Bosch on the case.

  4

  La Farmacia Familia was a small operation that appeared to Bosch to rely mostly on the business of filling prescriptions. In the front section of the store, there were three short aisles of shelved retail items relating to home remedies and care, almost all of them in Spanish-language boxes imported from Mexico. There were no racks of greeting cards, point-of-purchase candy displays, or cold cases stocked with sodas and water. The business was nothing like the chain pharmacies scattered across the city.

  The entire back wall of the store was the actual pharmacy, where there was a counter that fronted the storage area of medicines and a work area for filling prescriptions. The front section of the store seemed completely untouched by the crime that had occurred here.

  Bosch moved down the aisle to the left, which brought him to a half door leading to the rear of the pharmacy counter. He saw Gooden squatting down behind the counter next to the first body, that of a man who appeared to be in his early fifties. He was lying on his back just behind the counter, his hands up and palms out by his shoulders. He was wearing a white pharmacist’s jacket with a name embroidered on it.

  “Harry, meet José,” Gooden said. “At least he’s José until we confirm it with fingerprints. Through-and-through gunshot to the chest.”

  He formed a gun with his thumb and finger as he gave the report and pointed the barrel against his chest.

  “Point-blank?” Bosch asked.

  “Almost,” Gooden said. “Six to twelve inches. Guy probably had his hands up and they still shot him.”

  Bosch didn’t say anything. He was in observation mode. He would form his own impressions about the scene and determine if the victim’s hands were up or down when he was shot. He didn’t need that information from Gooden.

  Bosch squatted and looked across the floor around the body and bent down further to look under the counter.

  “What is it?” Lourdes asked.

  “No brass,” Bosch said.

  No ejected bullet casings indicated one of two things to Bosch. Either the killer had taken the time to pick up the casings or he had used a revolver—which did not eject bullet casings. Either way, it was notable to Bosch. Picking up critical evidence showed a cool calculation to the crime. Using a revolver could indicate the same—a weapon chosen because it would not leave critical evidence behind.

  He and Lourdes moved into the hallway to the left of the pharmacy counter. The twenty-foot passageway led to the work and storage areas and a restroom. There was a door at the end of the hall with double locks and an exit sign as well as a peephole. It presumably led to the back alley from which deliveries would come.

  Just short of the door, Sanders, the second coroner’s tech, was on his knees next to the other body, also a male wearing a pharmacist’s coat. The body was chest down, one arm reaching out toward the door. There was a trail of blood smears on the floor, leading to the body. Lourdes walked down the side edge of the hallway, careful not to step in the blood.

  “And here we have José Jr.,” Sanders said. “We have three points of impact: the back, the rectum, the head—most likely in that order.”

  Bosch stepped away from Lourdes and crossed over the blood smears to the other side of the hallway so he could get an unobstructed view of the body. José Jr. was lying with his right cheek against the floor, eyes partially open. He looked like he was in his early twenties, a meager growth of whiskers on his chin.

  The blood and bullet wounds told the tale. At the first sign of trouble, José Jr. had made a break for the rear door, running for his life down the hallway. He was knocked down with the first shot to the upper back. On the floor, he turned to look behind him, spilling his blood on the tiles. He saw the shooter coming and turned to try to crawl toward the door, his knees slipping on and smearing the blood. The shooter had come up and shot him again, this time in the rectum, then stepped up and ended it with the shot to the back of the head.

  Bosch had seen the rectum shot in prior cases, and it drew his attention.

  “The shot up the pipe—how close?” he asked.

  Sanders reached over and used one gloved hand to pull the seat of the victim’s pants out taut so the bullet entry could be clearly seen. With the other hand he pointed to where the cloth had been burned.

  “He got up in there,” Sanders said. “Point-blank.”

  Bosch nodded. His eyes tracked up to the wounds on the back and head. It appeared to him that the two entrance wounds he could see were neater and smaller than the one shot to José Sr.’s chest.

  “You thinking two different weapons?” he asked.

  Sanders nodded.

  “If I were betting,” he said.

  “And no brass?”

  “None evident. We’ll see when we roll the body but that would be a miracle if three shells ended up underneath.”

  Bosch nodded in reply.

  “Okay, do what you have to do,” he said.

  He carefully stepped back down the hallway and moved into the pharmacy’s work- and drug-storage area. He started by looking up and immediately saw the camera mounted in the corner of the ceiling over the door.

  Lourdes entered the room behind him. He pointed up and she saw the camera.

  “Need the feed,” he said. “Hopefully off-site or to a website.”

  “I can check that,” she said.

  Bosch surveyed the room. Several of the plastic drawers where stores of pills were kept were pulled out and dropped to the floor, and loose pills were scattered across it. He knew a dif
ficult task of inventorying what had been in the pharmacy and what had been taken lay ahead. Some of the drawers on the floor were larger than others and he guessed that they had contained more commonly prescribed drugs.

  On the worktable, there was a computer. There were also tools for measuring out and bottling pills in plastic vials as well as a label printer.

  “Can you go out and talk to the photographer?” he asked Lourdes. “Make sure he got all of this stuff in here before we start stepping on pills and crunching them. Tell him he can start videoing the crime scene processing now, too.”

  “On it,” Lourdes said.

  After Lourdes went out, Bosch moved into the hallway again. He knew they would need to collect and document every pill and piece of evidence in the place. A homicide case always moved slowly from the center out.

  In the old days, he would have stepped out at this point to smoke a cigarette and contemplate things. This time, he went out through the plastic curtain to just think. Almost immediately his phone vibrated in his pocket. The caller ID was blocked.

  “That wasn’t cool, Harry,” Lucia Soto said when he answered.

  “Sorry, we had an emergency,” he said. “Had to go.”

  “You could have told us. I’m not your enemy on this. I’m trying to run interference for you, keep it below the radar. If you play this right, the blame will go on the lab or your former partner—the one who’s dead.”

  “Are Kennedy and Tapscott with you right now?”

  “No, of course not. This is just you and me.”

  “Can you get me a copy of the report you turned in to Kennedy?”

  “Harry…”

  “I thought so. Lucia, don’t say you’re on my side, running interference for me, if you’re not. You know what I mean?”

  “I can’t just share active files with—”

  “Look, I’m in the middle of things here. Give me a call back if you change your mind. I remember there was a case that meant a lot to you once. We were partners and I was right there for you. I guess things are different now.”

  “That’s not fair and you know it.”