Lost Light (2003) Page 8

  10

  It was 4:15 by the time I got to the federal building in Westwood. As I was heading through the parking lot toward the security entrance my cell phone rang. It was Keisha Russell.

  “Hey, Harry Bosch,” she said. “Wanted to let you know, I printed out everything and put it in the mail. But I was wrong about something.”

  “What was that?”

  “There was an update on the case. It ran a couple months ago. I was on vacation. You stick around here long enough and they give you four weeks paid vacation. I took it all at once and went to London. While I was gone it was the third anniversary of Martha Gessler’s disappearance. People were poaching on my beat right and left, I tell you. David Ferrell did an update. Nothing new, though. She’s still in the wind.”

  “In the wind? That suggests you—or the bureau—think she’s still alive. Before, you said she was presumed dead.”

  “Just an expression, mon. I don’t think anybody’s holding their breath for her, if you know what I mean.”

  “Yeah. Did you put that update in the clips you’re sending me?”

  “It’s all there. And you remember who sent it. Ferrell’s a nice guy but I don’t want you calling him if something you’re doing breaks big.”

  “Never happen, Keisha.”

  “I know you are up to something. I did my homework on you.”

  That made me pause as I was halfway across the building’s front plaza. If she had called the bureau and spoken to Nunez, the agent wasn’t going to be happy about me involving a nosy reporter.

  “What do you mean?” I asked calmly. “What did you do?”

  “I did more than just check the clips. I called Sacramento. The state licensing board. I found out that you applied for and received a private investigator’s license.”

  “Yeah, so? Every cop who retires does that. It’s part of the process of letting go of the badge. You think, Oh, well, I’ll just get a PI ticket and keep on catching the bad guys. My ticket is in a drawer in my house, Keisha. I’m not in business and I’m not working for anybody.”

  “Okay, Harry, okay.”

  “Thanks for the clips. I’ve gotta go.”

  “Bye, Harry.”

  I closed the phone and smiled. I liked sparring with her. Ten years covering cops and she seemed no more cynical than the first day I talked to her. That was amazing for a journalist, even more so for a black journalist.

  I looked up at the building. It was a concrete monolith that eclipsed the sun from the angle I had. I was thirty feet from the entrance. But I walked over to a row of benches to the right of the entranceway and sat down. I checked my watch and saw that I was very late for my appointment with Nunez. The trouble was I didn’t know what I was walking into up there and that made me reluctant to go through the doors. The federals always had a way of putting you off balance, of making it clear that it was their world and you were only an invited visitor. I assumed that now without a badge I would be treated more like an uninvited visitor.

  I opened the phone back up and called the general number for Parker Center, one of the few numbers I still remembered. I asked for Kiz Rider in the chief’s office and was transferred. She picked up immediately.

  “Kiz, it’s me, Harry.”

  “Hello, Harry.”

  I tried to read something in her tone but she had flat-lined her response. I couldn’t tell how much of the morning’s anger and animosity remained.

  “How are you doing? You feeling any . . . uh, better?”

  “Did you get my message, Harry?”

  “Message? No, what did it say?”

  “I called your house a little while ago. I apologized. I shouldn’t have let personal feelings get mixed in with the reason I had come out there. I’m sorry.”

  “Hey, it’s okay, Kiz. I apologize, too.”

  “Really? For what?”

  “I don’t know. For the way I left, I guess. You and Edgar didn’t deserve that. Especially you. I should have talked about it with you guys. That’s what partners do. I guess I wasn’t a very good partner at that moment.”

  “Don’t worry about it. That’s what I said on the message. Water under the bridge. Let’s just be friends now.”

  “I’d like to. But . . .”

  I waited for her to pick up the invitation.

  “But what, Harry?”

  “Well, I don’t know how friendly you’ll want to be after this because I’ve got to ask you a question and you’re probably not going to like it.”

  She groaned into the phone so loud that I had to hold it away from my ear.

  “Harry, you’re killing me. What is it?”

  “I’m sitting outside the federal building in Westwood. I’m supposed to go in and see some guy named Nunez. A bureau man. And something’s not feeling right about this. So I was wondering, are these the people you warned me were working the Angella Benton case? A guy named Nunez? Is it connected to Martha Gessler, the agent who disappeared a few years ago?”

  There was a long silence on the phone. Too long.

  “Kiz?”

  “I’m here. Look, Harry, it’s just like I told you at your house. I can’t talk to you about the case. All I can tell you is what I did tell you. It is open and active and you should stay away from it.”

  Now it was my turn not to respond. She was like a complete stranger. Less than a year earlier I would have gone into combat with her and trusted her to take my back while I took hers. Now I wasn’t sure I could trust her to tell me if the sun was out, unless she cleared it first with the sixth floor.

  “Harry, you there?”

  “Yeah, I’m here. I’m just kind of speechless, Kiz. I thought if there was somebody in the department who would always level with me, it was going to be you. That’s all.”

  “Look, Harry, have you done anything illegal while running this little freelance operation of yours?”

  “No, but thanks for asking.”

  “Then you have nothing to worry about with Nunez. Go in and see what they want. I don’t know anything about Martha Gessler. And that’s all I can tell you.”

  “Okay, Kiz, thanks,” I said, putting my voice on a flat line now. “You take care of yourself up there on the sixth floor. And I’ll talk to you later.”

  Before she could throw in the last word I closed the phone. I got up from the bench and headed to the building’s entrance. Inside, I had to go through a metal detector, take off my shoes and spread my arms wide for a search with the magic wand. I could barely understand the man with the wand when he told me to raise my arms. He looked more like a terrorist than I did, but I didn’t protest. You have to pick your battles. Finally, I got to the elevator and took it to the twelfth floor, which was really the thirteenth since the elevator didn’t count the lobby. I stepped into a waiting area where there was a large glass and presumably bullet-proof window separating the public area from the bureau’s inner sanctum. I said my name and who I wanted to see into a microphone and the woman on the other side of the glass told me to have a seat.

  Instead I walked over to the window and looked down at the veterans cemetery across Wilshire Boulevard. I recalled that I was in the exact same position more than twelve years earlier when I first met the woman who would later become my wife, ex-wife and lasting infatuation.

  I turned away from the window and sat down on the plastic couch. There was a magazine with Brenda Barstow’s photo on its cover on a beat-up coffee table. Under the picture the caption read “Brenda, America’s Sweetheart.” I was reaching for the magazine when the door to the interior offices opened and a man with a white shirt and tie stepped out.

  “Mr. Bosch?”

  I stood up and nodded. He reached his right hand forward while he used the left to keep the security door from closing and locking.

  “Ken Nunez, thanks for coming in.”

  The handshake was quick and then Nunez turned and led the way inside. He said nothing as he walked. He wasn’t what I had expected. On the phon
e he had sounded like a tired veteran who had seen it all twice. But he was young, just a year or two past thirty. And he didn’t really walk down the hallway. He strode. He was a young go-getter, still out to prove something to himself and others. I wasn’t sure which—old or new agent—I would have preferred.

  He opened a door on the left and stepped back to allow me in. When I saw that the door opened outward and that there was a peephole I knew I was going into an interrogation room. And I knew then that this was not going to be a polite little meet-and-greet. More likely, I was about to get my ass kicked—federal style.

  11

  As I made the turn into the doorway I saw a square table positioned in the middle of the interrogation room. Sitting at the table, his back to me, was a man wearing a black shirt and jeans. He had close-cropped blond hair. As I entered I looked over his heavily muscled shoulder and saw he was reading an open investigative file. He closed it and looked up as I moved around the table to the other chair, opposite him.

  It was Roy Lindell. He smiled at my reaction.

  “Harry Bosch,” he said. “Long time no see there, podjo.”

  I paused for a moment but then pulled the chair out and sat down. Meantime, Nunez closed the door, leaving me alone with Lindell.

  Roy Lindell was about forty now. The heavy muscles I remembered were still in place, pressing his shirt to its boundaries. He still had the Las Vegas tan and the bleached teeth to go with it. I had first met him on a case that took me to Vegas and right into the middle of an undercover FBI operation. Forced to work together, we had managed to put aside jurisdictional and agency animosities to a certain extent and we closed the case, the bureau taking all the credit of course. That had been six or seven years earlier. I ran into him on a case in L.A. once after that, but we never stayed in touch. Not because the bureau had thieved the credit on that first case. Because cops and feds just don’t mix.

  “Almost didn’t recognize you without the ponytail, Roy.”

  He stuck his big hand across the table and I slowly reached out and shook it. He had the confident demeanor that big men often have. And he had the rascal’s smile that often comes with it. The ponytail line had been a crack. When I first met him—and before I knew his status as an undercover agent—I took the liberty of cutting the tail off the back of his head with a penknife.

  “How you been? You told Nunez you’re retired, huh? I hadn’t heard about that.”

  I nodded but otherwise didn’t respond. This was his play. I wanted to let him make all the first moves.

  “So what’s it like being retired from the force?”

  “I’m not complaining.”

  “We ran a check. You’re a licensed private eye now, huh?”

  Big day in Sacramento.

  “Yeah, I got a license. For the hell of it.”

  I almost gave him the same story I gave Keisha Russell about it being part of the letting-go process but decided not to bother.

  “Must be nice to have a little business, make your own hours, work for whoever you want to work for.”

  That was enough for me as far as preliminaries went.

  “Tell you what, let’s not talk about me, Roy. Let’s get to the point. What am I doing here?”

  Lindell nodded as if to say fair enough.

  “Well, what happened is that you called up and asked about an agent who used to work here, and doing that sort of raised a bunch of flags for us.”

  “Martha Gessler.”

  “That’s right. Marty Gessler. So you knew who you were calling about when you told Nunez you didn’t know who you were calling about?”

  I shook my head.

  “No. I put it together off his reaction. I remembered a female agent who went missing without a trace. Took me a while, then I remembered her name. What’s the latest with her? Gone but not forgotten, I suppose.”

  Lindell leaned forward and brought his massive arms together over the closed file. His wrists were as thick as the legs of the table. I remembered the struggle I had putting cuffs on them. Back in Vegas when he was under and I still didn’t know it.

  “Harry, I consider us to be like old friends. We haven’t talked in a while but we’ve sort of been through a battle or two together so I don’t want to jerk you around too bad here. But the way this is going to work is that I’m going to ask you the questions. That okay?”

  “To a point.”

  “We’re talking about a missing agent here. A female.”

  “And you’re not fucking around.”

  Paraphrasing the warning from Kiz Rider. Lindell didn’t seem to appreciate it.

  “Let’s start with the reason you called,” he said. “What are you up to?”

  I waited for a long moment, trying to work out how I should handle this. I wasn’t working for anybody other than myself. There was no confidentiality agreement. But I had always been resistant to bending over for the imperialist forces of the FBI. It had been part of the inbred LAPD culture. It wasn’t going to change now. I respected Lindell—like he said, we had been in the trenches together and I knew he ultimately would deal fairly with me. But the agency he worked for liked to play with a marked deck. I had to be careful. I had to remember that.

  “I told Nunez what I was doing when I called. I’m just checking out a case that I worked a few years back and that has always sort of stuck with me. There a problem with that?”

  “Who’s your client?”

  “I don’t have one. I got the private license right after I pulled the pin to keep my options open. But I started looking into this thing for myself.”

  He didn’t believe me. I could read it in his eyes.

  “But this movie caper thing wasn’t even your case.”

  “It was. For about four days. Then I got pulled. But I still remember the girl. The victim. I didn’t think anybody cared anymore so I started poking around.”

  “So who told you to call the bureau?”

  “Nobody.”

  “You just thought it up on your own.”

  “Not exactly. But you asked me who told me to call. Nobody told me to call. I did it all on my own, Roy. I learned about the call Gessler made to one of the detectives on the case. This was information that was new to me and I’m not sure it was ever followed up. It may have sort of fallen through the cracks. So I made a call to check it out. I didn’t have a name at the time. I talked to Nunez and here I am.”

  “How do you know that Gessler called one of the detectives on the case?”

  It seemed to me that the answer would be obvious. It also would mean nothing to Lawton Cross if I told Lindell about something that he freely had told me and that was probably part of the official investigative file.

  “I was told about your agent’s call by Lawton Cross. He was one of the Robbery-Homicide guys who took the case from me once it blew up big. He told me his partner, Jack Dorsey, was the one who got the call from your agent.”

  Lindell was writing the names down on a piece of paper he had pulled out of the file. I continued.

  “This was well into the case when Gessler called him up. Months. Cross and Dorsey weren’t even working it full-time at that point. And it didn’t sound like they were too impressed with whatever it was Gessler had to say.”

  “You talk to Dorsey about this?”

  “No, Roy. Dorsey’s dead. Killed in a robbery in a bar in Hollywood. Cross was hit, too. He’s in a wheelchair with tubes in his arms and up his nose.”

  “When was this?”

  “About three years ago. It was big news.”

  Lindell’s eyes showed his mind working. He was doing the math, checking dates. It reminded me that I had to put together a timeline for the case. It was getting too unwieldy.

  “What’s the prevailing theory on Gessler? Dead or alive?”

  Lindell looked down at the file on the table and shook his head.

  “I can’t answer that, Harry. You are not a cop, you have no standing. You’re just some guy who can’t let
go of his badge and gun, out there running around like a loose cannon. I can’t bring you into this.”

  “Fine. Answer me one question then. And don’t worry. It won’t be giving anything away.”

  He shrugged his shoulders. His answer would depend on the question.

  “Was my call today the first connection you’ve come across between the movie money thing and Gessler?”