Two Kinds of Truth Page 7

  “Okay,” Trevino said. “Then where’s our focus?”

  “On the son,” Lourdes said.

  “How so?” the captain asked.

  “Well, as far as we can tell, the kid was a straight shooter. He graduated last year from the pharmacy school at Cal State–Northridge. No arrest record, no known gang affiliation. ‘Most likely to succeed’ in his high school class. But Mrs. Esquivel said he was going through a rough patch relating to the family business and his living at home.”

  “Do we know any more than that and how it might connect?”

  “Not at the moment but we’re working on it. I need to take another run at Mrs. Esquivel. Last night was not the right time.”

  “Then why do we think it’s about the kid?”

  Bosch pointed to the screen where the image was frozen on a shot that showed José Sr. sprawled dead on the floor of his business.

  “The video,” he said. “It looks like the father recognized what was about to happen and tried to get his son out of there. Then you have the overkill—the father shot once, the kid shot three times.”

  “Plus nothing says it’s personal like a shot up the ass,” added Sisto.

  Trevino computed all of this and nodded.

  “Okay, what about next moves?” he asked.

  The caseload was then chopped up, with Luzon assigned the autopsies and ballistics, with a rush order to find out what weapons were used in the killings and if they matched other cases in the databases containing ballistic profiles. Sisto got video duty, with instructions to go back through video from the farmacia to look for indications that the two gunmen had cased the place earlier in the month as well as to study the relationship between father and son. Sisto would also check in with the LAPD about the two similar pharmacy robberies and see if he could look at video from those crimes.

  Lourdes said she would follow up on backgrounding the son and checking out the complaint he had made to the state’s medical board. Bosch would serve as case coordinator and back Lourdes when her inquiries took her out of the station.

  Picking up on that, Trevino gave the final instruction to all.

  “This is a murder investigation, so the stakes are higher,” he said. “That goes for everybody, including our shooters. I know we are a small department, but nobody should go out on the street on this case without a partner. You never know what you might walk into. Roger that?”

  He received a chorus of confirmations back.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s find these guys.”

  9

  After the war room meeting, Bosch left the station, while Lourdes attempted to get hold of someone in the investigations unit of the state medical board. He walked two blocks to a shopping plaza on Truman and into a bodega that sold throwaway phones to new immigrants who could not establish addresses and the credit histories required by the big service providers. He bought a throwaway with texting capability and a full charge. He then stepped out of the store and sent a two-word text to Lucia Soto.

  Thank you.

  Less than a minute later he got a response.

  Who is this?

  He typed in,

  Go to a private spot. 5 minutes.

  He checked his watch and started walking back to the station. Five minutes later he was standing in the side parking lot and made the call. Soto took the call but said nothing.

  “Lucia, it’s me.”

  “Harry? What are you doing? Where’s your phone?”

  “This is a burner. I thought you wouldn’t want to have any record of talking to me.”

  “Don’t be silly. What is going on? What are you thanking me for?”

  “For the file.”

  “What file?”

  “Okay, if that’s how you want to play it, fine. I get it. I have to tell you, I got through the old case—my part in it—and it’s all there, Lucia. It was a solid case. Circumstantial, yes, but solid down the line to the verdict. You need to stop this whole thing and not put this guy back on the street.”

  “Harry…”

  She didn’t finish.

  “What, Lucia? Look, don’t you understand? I’m trying to save you from getting caught in the middle of a big problem here. Somehow, some way, this is a scam. Can you get me a copy of that video Tapscott showed me of you two opening the box?”

  There was another long pause before Soto responded.

  “I think the only one with a big problem here is you, Harry.”

  Bosch had nothing to say to that. He sensed that something had changed in her view of him. He had fallen in her eyes, and she had sympathy for him but not the respect she’d once had. He was missing something here. He had to get back to the investigative file he knew she had stuffed into his mailbox, whether she acknowledged it or not. He now had to consider that she had done so not to help him but to warn him about what lay ahead.

  “Listen to me,” Soto said. “I’m putting my neck out here for you because…because we were partners. You need to let this play out without setting a fire. If you don’t, you are going to get hurt in a big way.”

  “You don’t think it’s going to hurt in a big way to see that guy—that killer—walk out of San Quentin a free man?”

  “I need to go now. I suggest you read the whole file.”

  She disconnected and Bosch was left holding a phone that he’d just spent forty dollars for and would probably never use again.

  He headed toward his car. He had brought the Skyler file with him from the house and left it on the rear floorboard. Soto had clearly just directed him back to the file. There was something in the new investigation that she was pushing him toward and that, at least in Alex Kennedy’s mind, invalidated the old investigation. Bosch suspected it was more than DNA.

  Before he made it to the car, the side door of the station opened and Lourdes stepped out.

  “Harry, I was coming to get you. Where are you going?”

  “Just getting something from my car. What’s up?”

  “Let’s take a ride. I talked to an investigator for the state medical board.”

  Bosch shoved the burner into his pocket and followed her to her city ride. He got in the passenger side and she started backing out. He saw that she had put a piece of scratch paper down on the center console that said “S.F. and Terra Bella,” which he knew was an intersection in the nearby Pacoima neighborhood of Los Angeles. It was to the immediate south of San Fernando.

  “Pacoima?” he asked.

  “José Jr. sent an e-mail to the medical board, complaining that a clinic down in Pacoima was overprescribing oxycodone,” she said. “I just want to do a drive-by, check the place out.”

  “Got it. When did Junior send the e-mail?”

  “Two months ago. He sent it to the Central Complaint Unit in Sacramento, where it sat for a while before being sent down to the enforcement unit in L.A. I tracked down the guy who caught it there. He said he was early stages with it. Never talked to José Jr. and was gathering data before making any sort of enforcement move.”

  “Gathering data? You mean like how much the clinic was prescribing?”

  “Yes, identifying the clinic, what doctors were in there, licensing, prescription counts, all of that kind of stuff. Early stages, which I think was his way of saying nothing had happened yet. He did say that this clinic was not on their radar and that it sounded like a fly-by-night pill mill. Here today, gone as soon as authorities take notice. The thing is, he said, most of the time they don’t use legit pharmacies. Usually the pharmacies are in cahoots, or at least willing to look the other way and fill the prescriptions.”

  “So, let’s say José Sr. was looking the other way. The son graduates from pharmacy school all wide-eyed and naive and thinks he’s doing a good thing, pointing his finger at a shady clinic.”

  Lourdes nodded.

  “Exactly,” she said. “I told you he was a straight shooter. He saw what was going on and made the complaint to the board.”

  “So this is what the
father and son were having issues with—why they were fighting,” Bosch added. “Either José Sr. liked the money the bogus prescriptions brought in, or he was afraid of the danger the complaint might bring in.”

  “Not only that, Junior said in his e-mail that he was going to stop filling prescriptions from the clinic. That could have been the most dangerous move of all.”

  Bosch felt a dull pain in his chest. It was guilt and embarrassment. He had underestimated José Esquivel Jr. He had first asked about gang affiliation and jumped to the conclusion that Junior’s activities and associations would be the motivating factor in the murders. He was probably correct in one sense, but he was far off the mark about the young man. The truth revealed that he was an idealist who saw something wrong and was blindly trying to do the right thing. And it cost him his life.

  “Damn,” he said. “He didn’t know what he was doing if he stopped filling scrips.”

  “Which makes it so sad,” added Lourdes.

  Bosch was silent after that as he thought about his mistake. It bothered him deeply because a relationship was always established between a victim and the detective charged with solving the crime. Bosch had doubted the goodness of his victim and let him down. In doing so he had let himself down as well. It made him want to double-down on his efforts to find the two men who had moved so swiftly and lethally through the pharmacy the morning before.

  Bosch thought about the terror José Jr. must have felt as he tried to make it down the hallway to the exit door. The horror of knowing he had left his father behind.

  Bosch couldn’t be sure, because there was no sound on the video and the shooting of José Jr. was off camera, but he guessed that the father had been shot first, and in the hallway his son had heard it as he tried to escape. Just before he too was shot and his killer came up on him to commit a final indignity and finish the job.

  They took Truman south to where it merged with San Fernando Road and soon they crossed the city limits and into Pacoima. There was no “Welcome to Los Angeles” sign and the difference between the two communities was stark. The streets here were trash-strewn, the walls marked with graffiti. The medians were brown and weed-filled. Plastic bags were snagged on the fence line that guarded the Metro tracks that paralleled the road. To Bosch it was depressing. Though Pacoima had the same ethnic makeup as San Fernando, there was a visible disparity in the economic levels of the side-by-side communities.

  Soon they were driving along the south perimeter of Whiteman Airport, a small general-aviation field ironically named, considering that it was surrounded by a community that was overwhelmingly brown and black. Lourdes slowed the car as they approached Terra Bella. Bosch could see a white one-story building on the corner. It stood out because its paint was fresh and shining in the sun and because there was no door or any signage announcing it as a clinic or anything else.

  Lourdes made the turn on Terra Bella so they could check the side of the building. They spotted the double-door entrance on the side but there was no indication that the clinic was in operation. The new paint and lack of signage made it appear to be a clinic not quite open for business.

  Lourdes kept driving south.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Bosch said. “You want to watch for a while, see if we can tell if it’s even open for business? Or you could just pull over and I could go try that door.”

  Lourdes pondered what to do, while the car continued down the street.

  “I don’t like barging in there when we don’t know what we’ve got,” she finally said.

  She turned into the entrance drive of a company that manufactured fire sprinkler systems, then backed out to turn the car around.

  “Let’s watch for a while,” she said. “See what happens.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Bosch said.

  She drove a half block back up Terra Bella and then parked at the curb behind a sedan. It gave them a blind but still allowed them to keep eyes on the clinic’s door. They sat in comfortable silence for almost fifteen minutes before Lourdes spoke.

  “You still tight with Lucy Soto?” she asked.

  Bosch had forgotten that Lourdes and Soto knew each other at least casually through a Latina law enforcement organization.

  “We talk now and then but I think yesterday was the first time I’d seen her in a couple years,” Bosch said.

  He knew that Lourdes was angling to find out what the visit from downtown the day before was all about, but he wasn’t interested in talking about it. He changed the subject.

  “Your son excited about the Dodgers this year?” he asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” Lourdes said. “He picked his games and I need to get the tickets. He thinks they are going to win it all this year.”

  “About time.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know that Soto’s never been to a Dodgers game? Her grandparents and her father were kicked out of Chavez Ravine back in the fifties and she’ll never set foot in that place. She doesn’t even like going to the academy.”

  Bosch was talking about the forced relocation of an entire Latino neighborhood to make way for the baseball stadium near downtown. The bitterness of the move—including many tearful and violent evictions recorded on news cameras—still blemished the history of the much-loved team. The LAPD academy was on the edge of one of the stadium’s vast parking lots.

  “I guess I understand all of that,” Lourdes said. “But it was a long time ago. Baseball is baseball. Like I’m going to deny a little boy his love of baseball because of something that happened before his mother was even born?”

  “His mother’s love of baseball too,” Bosch said.

  He smiled. Before Lourdes could formulate a comeback, they both saw a van turn the corner from San Fernando onto Terra Bella. Bosch at first thought it was heading to the sprinkler manufacturer, but it stopped directly in front of the door to the clinic. Bosch and Lourdes watched silently as the side door of the van slid open and people started climbing out and heading to the door of the clinic.

  Bosch counted eleven people, not including the driver, who remained in the van. They disappeared into the clinic.

  “So what was that?” Lourdes asked.

  “Got me,” Bosch said. “Maybe they picked people up at an old folks home or something.”

  “They weren’t all old.”

  “Mostly old.”

  “And they looked more like they were homeless than from a home.”

  Bosch nodded and they dropped back into silence as they continued to watch. The van’s driver remained in place behind the wheel and the side door remained open.

  About twenty minutes after they disembarked from the van, the passengers started coming out of the clinic and getting in line to get back in the van. Bosch looked more closely this time. They were diverse in gender and race but consistent in the scruffy clothing that hung loose on their bony frames. To Bosch it looked like a line for a soup kitchen on 5th Street in downtown.

  “What do you think?” Lourdes asked.

  “I don’t know,” Bosch said. “What kind of clinic doesn’t have a sign out front?”

  “The illegitimate kind.”

  “And those are patients?”

  “Maybe pill shills. Jerry, the medical board investigator, called them that. They go to the so-called clinic, get a prescription, and then go collect the pills at the pharmacy. They’re paid a dollar a pill. I guess it’s not bad if you’re picking up sixty pills a pop.”

  “But then what do the pills sell for on the street?”

  “He said that depends on dosage and what you’re buying. Generally, a dollar a milligram. Oxycodone scrips usually come in thirty-milligram pills. But he said the holy grail of hillbilly heroin these days is the eighty-meg dose. Also something called oxymorphone. It’s the next big thing. The high is supposedly ten times as powerful as you get with oxycodone.”

  Bosch took out his phone and opened up the camera app. Steadying the phone
on the dashboard, he started taking photos of the clinic and the van. He used the zoom to get a closer look at the people waiting to climb in but their features blurred.

  “You think the van’s going to start taking them around to pharmacies now?” he asked.

  “Maybe,” Lourdes said. “Jerry said old people make the best shills. They’re prized.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because they want people who look old enough to be on Medicare. They give them counterfeit Medicare D cards—they buy the names of legit cardholders—and then they don’t have to pay full price for the prescriptions they fill.”

  Bosch shook his head in disbelief.

  “So Medicare pays the pharmacy back for the drugs,” he said. “In other words, the federal government finances the operation.”

  “A lot of it,” Lourdes said. “According to Jerry.”

  One last man came out of the clinic’s door and headed toward the van. By Bosch’s count, twelve men and women were now crammed into the back. They were white, black, and brown, the one unifying factor being that they all looked like they had been down rough roads. They had gaunt faces and a shabbiness about them that unmistakably came from the hard life. The driver, wearing sunglasses and a black golf shirt, got out and went around the front of the van to slide the door closed. By the time Bosch had zoomed in his camera, it was too late to get the shot. The driver was in the van and hidden behind reflections on the windshield.

  The van pulled away from the clinic and headed down Terra Bella in the direction of the two detectives. Bosch pulled his phone down below the dashboard.

  “Shit,” Lourdes said.

  There was no disguising that Bosch and Lourdes were in an unmarked police car. It was black and had government hubs and flashers mounted behind the front grille.

  But the van went by without slowing, the driver preoccupied with a call on his cell phone. Bosch noticed he had a goatee and a gold ring on the hand that held his phone.

  Lourdes watched in her side-view mirror until the van went two blocks down to El Dorado and turned right.