The Crossing (13 page)

“No time,” she said, moving toward the door.

“Maddie, I’m starting to get worried about this.”

“Don’t. Just worry about that killer guy you’re working for.”

“Oh, come on, Mads. Don’t be so dramatic. If the guy’s a killer he won’t be going anywhere. Trust me, okay?”

“Okay. Bye.”

She went through the front door, letting it bang loudly behind her. Bosch just stood there.

After an hour of waiting for Soto to call, Bosch started to worry that something had gone wrong with the captain when she went into his office to look at the murder journal. He started pacing, wondering if he should call to check on her but knowing that an ill-timed call from him—if she was in a jam with the captain—might make matters worse. Besides, if she was in a jam, there was nothing he could do about it. He was an outsider now.

Finally, after another twenty minutes, his phone buzzed and he saw on the screen that she was calling from her desk phone. He’d expected that when she called, it would be on her cell and from outside the building, or at least from a stall in the women’s room.

“Lucia?”

“Hi, Harry. I got you some information.”

“You’re at your desk. Where’s the Steamer?”

“Oh, he’s probably off filing a complaint or something. He came in and then mysteriously left without saying anything. He does that a lot.”

“Well, at least that means he’s out of your hair. So you got a look at the journal?”

Bosch sat down at the dining room table and opened his notebook. He took out a pen and got ready to write.

“I did and I’m pretty sure I found your case.”

“No problem with the captain?”

“No, I said what you told me to say and he sort of waved me off, told me to have at it. No problem. To make it look good I took a couple of the other journals, too. The first one goes back to eighteen ninety-nine.”

“Simon Christenson.”

“God, how do you remember that?”

“I don’t really know. I just do. Killed on a bridge and nobody ever charged.”

“Not a good start for LAPD homicide, huh?”

“No, not good. So, what did you find for me?”

“March twenty-first, the body of James Allen, white male, age twenty-six, was found in an alley running parallel to Santa Monica Boulevard at El Centro. It was behind an auto repair shop. Victim was a prostitute with multiple hits for solicitation, drug possession, the usual stuff. That’s all it says in the journal other than that the case was assigned to RHD and detectives Stotter and Karim.”

Bosch stopped writing. Robbery-Homicide Division comprised the elite detective squads that worked out of the PAB and usually handled cases that were politically or media sensitive or considered too complex for divisional detective squads because of the time commitment needed. Mike Stotter and Ali Karim were assigned to Homicide Special, the elite of the elite. To Bosch it seemed unusual for the murder of a Hollywood prostitute to be assigned to RHD. In a perfect world all murder victims would be treated equally. Everybody counts or nobody counts. But it wasn’t a perfect world and some murders were big and some were small.

“RHD?” Bosch asked.

“Yeah, I thought that was strange, too,” Soto said. “So I wandered over to that side of the room and Ali was at his desk and so I asked him what was with that. He—”

“Lucia, you shouldn’t have done that. You can’t let anybody know you have any interest in this case or it might come back to bite you on the ass if I end up making waves with it. Ali’s going to know I sent you to him.”

“Harry, relax, I’m not that stupid. Give me a little credit here, okay? I didn’t go blundering over to Homicide Special and start asking questions about the case. Besides Ali and I are pals. He was called out the night of my thing in Rampart and handled the scene till the shooting team got there. He was very nice to me that night, calmed me down, coached me up on how to deal with the shooting team. And when I got here after that, he was one of the few people who didn’t look down their nose at me, you know what I mean? In fact, it was just Ali and you, to be exact.”

She was talking about her path to RHD and the Open-Unsolved Unit. Less than two years earlier she was a slick sleeve assigned to patrol in Rampart Division. But her bravery and deadly calm in surviving a shoot-out with four armed robbers that left her partner dead catapulted her into the media spotlight. She was dubbed Lucky Lucy in a profile published by the
Times
, and the department quickly took advantage of the rare bit of positive attention she was drawing. The chief of police offered her a promotion and told her she could pick her spot. She chose the RHD’s Open-Unsolved Unit and was elevated to homicide detective before she had logged five years on the job.

The media loved it but it didn’t go over so well with those in the department who had been waiting years and even decades for a slot on a homicide squad anywhere, let alone the elite Robbery-Homicide Division. Soto came in with that kind of enmity in her backpack and had to deal with a squad room where more than half of her colleagues didn’t think she belonged there or had earned it. While the media called her Lucky Lucy, some in RHD referred to her as FasTrak, after the electronic pass that allows motorists to use express lanes to blow by traffic on the city’s crowded freeways.

“I finessed it, Harry,” Soto said. “I stopped by his cube to shoot the shit and, sure enough, he had the murder book right on his desk. I asked what he was working on and he spilled. I also asked what was so special about it that made it a Homicide Special assignment and he said the case got kicked to him and Mike because everybody in West Bureau was tied up on a training day the morning the body was found.”

Bosch nodded. It made sense. The murder rate in the city had fallen so much in recent years that many of the divisional homicide teams were consolidated. Hollywood Homicide was gone and the few murders that occurred in the area were now assigned to a squad that worked out of the West Bureau. This created a higher likelihood for cases to get kicked over to RHD because of backups and other conflicts. Satisfied that the case had not drawn any unusual attention from the department, Bosch now wanted to know what Soto had learned.

“So you asked him about it?”

“Yeah, I asked him, and you know Ali, he’s a storyteller. He told me the whole thing. The victim was a transvestite who usually worked out of a room at the Haven House near Gower. There’s a whole book on him at Hollywood Vice.”

“Did he say what room?”

“He didn’t but I saw the photos. Room six, bottom floor.”

“So what’s their theory?”

“Ali said they figure the odds just caught up to him and some john he picked up probably did him in. They’ve got no suspects but they think it might be a serial.”

“Did he say why they think that?”

“Yeah, because fifteen months before, another pro got offed and left in the same alley.”

“How similar are the cases?”

“I didn’t really ask.”

“You ask about cause of death?”

“Didn’t have to. Like I said, Ali showed me the pictures. The guy was strangled from behind with a wire. One thin line across the front of the neck. It broke the skin. Ali said that when they checked out his room at the motel they found a framed picture of Marilyn Monroe on the floor, leaning against the wall. They saw there was a nail in the wall but when they checked the back of the picture, the wire for hanging it was gone. They think that’s what the killer used.”

“Was that where he was killed? The room?”

“That’s the theory. Ali said no signs of a struggle in the room but the picture frame missing the wire is kind of a marker, you know? He thinks that the john met the victim there and things went sideways and he got killed. The body was moved to a car and then taken to the alley and dumped. Because of the one fourteen months before, they got a profile from Behavioral and it says the killer was probably some guy with a wife and kids at home and he somehow blamed the victim for his crossing the line into that kind of activity. So he killed Allen, dumped him, and went back to his normal life in the Valley or wherever. Pure psychopath.”

Bosch didn’t correct her but he didn’t think there was enough information in the profile or case summary to declare the suspect a pure psychopath. It was a young detective’s easy response. But based on the facts known to him, the murder looked spontaneous. The killer had not brought a weapon and there was no other evidence of prior planning. The possibility that the killing of Allen was connected to a prior murder was the only real indication of psychopathy.

“So have they officially connected this one and the one fourteen months before?” he asked.

“Not yet,” Soto said. “West Bureau still has the first one. Ali said there’s a bit of a tug-of-war but that there are elements of the cases that don’t match.”

It was not unusual for the divisional detective squads to fight against having to turn over investigations to the big shots downtown. People who worked homicide were not timid people. They were confident investigators who believed they could crack any case, given enough time and support.

“Did Ali say whether they got DNA off the body?” he asked.

“No, no DNA directly on the body. The victim was into safe sex—I saw photos of the room and the guy had a big ol’ industrial-size container of condoms. Like what they used to put licorice and candy in in the clinic waiting room. But they swept the room and got what you’d expect from a room like that, a ton of hair and fiber. None of it has led to anything.”

Bosch thought for a moment about what else he could ask. He felt there was something he had missed, maybe a follow-up on the information she had just given him. It didn’t come to him and he decided to leave it at that. She had helped enough.

“Thanks, Lucia,” he finally said. “I owe you one.”

“Not at all,” she said. “Did it help?”

Bosch nodded even though she could not see this.

“I think so.”

“Then call me for lunch sometime.”

“I don’t know if you want to be seen with me. I’m persona non grata, remember?”

“Fuck ’em, Harry. Just call me.”

Bosch laughed.

“Will do.”

B
osch read the notes he had taken during the phone call and tried to put things in context. Two days after Da’Quan Foster was arrested for killing Lexi Parks in West Hollywood, the man he would claim was his alibi for the time of that murder was himself murdered in Hollywood, possibly by a serial killer. There was no evidence or even suggestion that this was anything other than a grim coincidence—Allen’s profession put him at a higher probability of becoming a murder victim than most. But Bosch only accepted coincidence grudgingly.

From victim profile to crime scene to method of murder the two killings were different, at least as far as Bosch had seen from photos of one and a verbal description of the other. Still, the possible connection bore further scrutiny. Bosch considered what Lucia had told him about the investigation of the Allen case. The motel room had been processed by a forensic team. Bosch wondered, What were the chances that hair and fiber left behind six weeks earlier by Foster could have been collected during the sweep of the room. What about DNA? What about fingerprints?

Regardless, he knew that the six-week time difference between Allen’s death and the night of Lexi Parks’s murder would render any such evidence inconclusive in terms of the law. It would not be viable in establishing an alibi, and no judge would allow it into court. There would be no way of establishing when the evidence was put in the motel room. But Bosch was not a court of law. He worked on instinct. If Da’Quan Foster had left any microscopic trace in Allen’s motel room, it would go a long way toward assuring Bosch that Foster’s account of his whereabouts on the night Lexi Parks died was true.

Bosch got up from the table and went out to the back deck. As he slid open the glass door he was greeted by the ever-present sound of the freeway at the bottom of the Cahuenga Pass. He put his elbows on the wood railing and looked down, not really seeing the spectacle of the crowded freeway below. He was thinking. Lucia had said that Mike Stotter and Ali Karim had had the case profiled. He wanted to read the profile to compare it with the Parks profile and see if there were any psychological links between the two killings. The problem was he couldn’t go to Stotter and Karim without revealing what he was up to and he knew that he could not go back to Soto. Asking her to do anything further might put her in jeopardy.

In his mind Bosch pulled up a visual of the massive RHD squad room and moved across the rows of cubicles, remembering who sat where, trying to conjure a face of somebody he could reach out to and ask for help. Suddenly he realized he was looking in the wrong place. He went back inside to the table where he had left his phone.

He scrolled through his contacts list until he came to the name he wanted and made the call. He was expecting to have to leave a message and was surprised when the call was picked up live.

“Dr. Hinojos.”

“Doctor, it’s Harry Bosch.”

“Well, Harry … how are you? How is retirement?”

“Uh, retirement’s not so bad. How are you doing?”

“I’m okay, but you know I’m mad at you.”

“Me? What for?”

“I didn’t get an invite to your retirement dinner. I thought for sure you would have—”

“Doc, nobody got invited to my retirement dinner. I didn’t have one.”

“What? Why not? Every detective has a retirement party.”

“And at every one of them people stand around telling stories everybody else has heard a hundred times before. I didn’t want that. Besides I went out under a cloud, you know? I didn’t want to put anybody on the spot by asking them to come to my retirement party.”

“I’m sure they all would have come. How is your daughter?”

“She’s good. She’s actually the reason I’m calling.”

Bosch and Hinojos had known each other twenty years. She was head of the Behavioral Science Unit now, but when they had first met, she was a department shrink charged with determining whether Bosch was fit to return to duty after a suspension incurred when he had pushed a supervisor through a glass window for interfering with Bosch’s interview of a murder suspect. It wouldn’t be the last time she would have to make the return-to-duty call with him.