Angle of Investigation: Three Harry Bosch Stories Page 7

  “No, Kiz. I was in that room the whole time he was. He said, ‘Let’s get out of here,’ and he was the first one out. He did not go back in. We called in the detectives and then stood outside keeping the neighbors away when everybody showed up.”

  “Thirty-three years is a long time, Harry.”

  Bosch waited a moment before responding.

  “I know this sounds sad and sick but your first DB is like your first love. You remember the details. Plus…”

  He didn’t finish.

  “Plus what?”

  “Plus my mother was murdered when I was a kid. I think it’s why I became a cop. So finding that woman-my second day on the job-was sort of like finding my mother. I can’t explain it. But what I can tell you is that I remember being in that house like it was yesterday. And Eckersly never touched a thing in there, let alone put his hand on the wall over the toilet.”

  Now she was silent for a long moment before responding.

  “Okay, Harry.”

  Ten Thousand Palms was on the outskirts of Joshua Tree. They made good time and pulled into the visitor parking space in front of the tiny police station shortly before one. They had worked out how they would handle Eckersly in the last half hour of the drive.

  They went in and I rwent inasked a woman who was sitting behind a front counter if they could speak with Eckersly. They flashed the gold and told her they were from the Open-Unsolved Unit. The woman picked up a phone and communicated the information to someone on the other end. Before she hung up, a door behind her opened and there stood Ron Eckersly. He was thicker and his skin a dark and worn brown from the desert. He still had a full head of hair, which was cut short and silver. Bosch had no trouble recognizing him. But it didn’t appear that he recognized Bosch.

  “Detectives, come on back,” he said.

  He held the door and they walked into his office. He was wearing a blue blazer with a maroon tie over a white shirt. It did not appear to Bosch that he had a gun on his belt. Maybe in a little desert town a gun wasn’t needed.

  The office was a small space with LAPD memorabilia and photographs on the wall behind the desk. Rider introduced herself and shook Eckersly’s hand and then Bosch did the same. There was a hesitation in Eckersly’s shake and then Bosch knew. Instinctively, he knew. He was holding the hand of June Wilkins’s killer.

  “Harry Bosch,” Eckersly said. “You were one of my boots, right?”

  “That’s right. I came on the job in ’seventy-two. We rode Wilshire patrol for nine months.”

  “Imagine that, one of my boots coming back to see me.”

  “Actually, we want to talk to you about a case from ’seventy-two,” Rider said.

  As planned, she took the lead. They took seats and Bosch once again tried to determine if Eckersly was armed. There was no telltale bulge beneath the blazer.

  Rider explained the case to Eckersly and reminded him that he and Bosch had been the patrol officers who discovered the body. She asked if he remembered the case at all.

  Eckersly leaned back in his desk chair, his jacket falling to his sides and revealing no holster or weapon on his belt. He looked for an answer on the ceiling. Finding nothing, he leaned forward and shook his head.

  “I’m drawing a blank, Detectives,” he said. “And I’m not sure why you would come all the way out here to ask an old patrol dog about a DB. My guess is we were in and out, and we cleared the way for the dicks. Isn’t that right, partner?”

  He looked at Bosch, his last word a reminder that they had once protected each other’s back.

  “Yes, we were in and out.”

  “But we have information-newly discovered information-that you apparently had a relationship with the victim,” Rider said matter-of-factly. “And that this relationship was not brought to light during the initial investigation.”

  Eckersly looked closely at her, wondering how to read the situation. Bosch knew this wase wnew thi the pivotal moment. If Eckersly were to make a mistake, it would be now.

  “What information?” Eckersly asked.

  “We’re not at liberty to discuss it, Chief,” Rider responded. “But if you have something to tell us, tell us now. It would be best for you to clear this up before we go down the road with it.”

  Eckersly’s face cracked into a smile and he looked at Bosch.

  “This is a joke, right? Bosch, you’re putting her up to this, right?”

  Bosch shook his head.

  “No joke,” Bosch said. “You’re in a spot here, Chief.”

  Eckersly shook his head as if not comprehending the situation.

  “You said Open-Unsolved, right? That’s cold case stuff. DNA. This a DNA case?”

  Bosch felt things tumbling into place. Eckersly had made the mistake. He had taken the bait and was fishing for information. It wasn’t what an innocent man would do. Rider felt it, too. She leaned toward his desk.

  “Chief, do you mind if I give you a rights warning before we go further with this?”

  “Oh, come on,” Eckersly protested. “You can’t be serious. What relationship?”

  Rider read Eckersly the standard Miranda rights warning from a card she pulled out of a pocket in her blazer.

  “Chief Eckersly, do you understand your rights as I have read them?”

  “Of course, I understand them. I’ve only been a cop for forty years. What the hell is going on here?”

  “What’s going on is that we are giving you the opportunity to explain the relationship you had with this woman. If you choose not to cooperate, then it’s not going to work out well for you.”

  “I told you. There was no relationship and you can’t prove there was. That body had been in that tub for a week. From what I heard, it practically came apart when they were taking it out of there. You got no DNA. Nobody even knew about DNA back then.”

  Rider made a quick glance toward Bosch and this was her signal that he could step in if he wanted. He did.

  “You worked Wilshire for four years before that morning,” Bosch said. “Did you meet her on patrol? When she was out walking the dog? Where did you meet her, Chief? You told me you were working solo for four months before I was put in the car with you. Is that when you met her? When you were out working alone?”

  Eckersly angrily grabbed the phone out of its cradle on his dellyle on hsk.

  “I still know some people at Parker Center. I’m going to see if they are aware of what you two people are doing. Coming to my office to accuse me of this crap!”

  “If you call anyone, you better call your lawyer,” Bosch said.

  Eckersly slammed the phone back down into its cradle.

  “What do you want from me? I did not know that woman. Just like you, I saw her for the first time floating with her dog in the bathtub. First and last time. And I got out of there as fast as I goddamn could.”

  “And you never went back in.”

  “That’s right, boot. I never went back in.”

  There, they had him.

  “Then how come your palm print was on the wall over the toilet?”

  Eckersly froze. Bosch read his eyes. He remembered the moment he had put his hand on the wall. He knew they had him.

  Eckersly glanced out the office’s only window. It was to his left and it offered a view of a fire department equipment yard. He then looked back at Bosch and spoke in a quiet voice.

  “You know how often I wondered when somebody like you would show up here… how many years I’ve been waiting?”

  Bosch nodded.

  “It must have been a burden,” he said without sympathy.

  “She wanted more, she wanted something permanent,” Eckersly said. “Christ, she was fifteen years older than me. She was just a patrol pal, that’s what we called them. But then she got the wrong idea about things and when I had to set her straight she said she was going to make a complaint about me. She was going to go to the captain. I was married back then. I couldn’t…”

  He said nothing else. His eyes
were downcast. He was looking at the memory. Bosch could put the rest of it together. Eckersly hatched a plan that would throw the investigation off, send it in the wrong direction. His only mistake was the moment he put his hand on the wall over the toilet.

  “You have to come with us now, Chief,” Rider said.

  She stood up. Eckersly looked up at her.

  “With you?” he said. “No, I don’t.”

  With his right hand he pulled open the desk drawer in front of him and quickly reached in with his left. He withdrew a black, steel pistol and brought it up to his neck.

  “No!” Rider yelled.

  ›

  Eckersly pressed the muzzle deep into the left side of his neck. He angled the weapon upward and pulled the trigger. The weapon’s contact against his skin muffled the blast. His head snapped back and blood splattered across the wall of police memorabilia behind him.

  Bosch never moved in his seat. He just watched it happen. Pretty soon the woman from the front counter came running in and she screamed and held her hands up to her mouth.

  Bosch turned and looked at Rider.

  “That was a long time coming,” he said.

  Laura was already rented at Eddie’s Saturday Matinee, so Bosch rented Sharky’s Machine instead. He watched it at home that night while drinking beer and eating peanut butter sandwiches, and trying to keep his mind away from what had happened in Eckersly’s office. It wasn’t a bad movie, though he could see almost everything coming. Burt Reynolds and Bernie Casey made pretty good cops and Rachel Ward was the call girl with a heart of gold. Bosch saw what Burt saw in her. He thought he could easily fall in love with her, too. Call girl or not, dead or alive.

  Near the end of the movie, there was a shootout and Bernie Casey got wounded. Bleeding and out of bullets, he used a Zen mantra to make himself invisible to the approaching shooter.

  It worked. The shooter walked right by him, and Bernie lived to tell about it. Bosch liked that. At the end of the movie he remembered that moment the best. He wished there were a Zen chant he could use now so Ronald Eckersly could just walk on by him, too. But he knew there was no such thing. Eckersly would take his place with the others that came to him at night. The ones he remembered.

  Bosch thought about calling Kiz and telling her what he thought of the movie. But he knew it was too late and she would get upset with him. He killed the TV instead and turned off the lights.

  About the Author

  Michael Connelly is the author of the recent #1 New York Times bestsellers The Fifth Witness, The Reversal, The Scarecrow, The Brass Verdict, and The Lincoln Lawyer, as well as the bestselling Harry Bosch series of novels. He is a former newspaper reporter who has won numerous awards for his journalism and his novels. He spends his time in California and Florida.

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