Authors: Michael Connelly
“This says both guest rooms are fourteen by twelve,” she said. “This room probably just feels smaller because of the bookcase.”
Bosch looked at the shelves behind the desk and nodded.
“Oh, okay,” he said. “That makes sense.”
She handed him the listing sheet. He looked at it as if he were genuinely interested.
“Do you want to check out the barbecue now?” she asked.
“Sure,” he said. “But is someone here? I heard you talking.”
“It was the owner. He thought we would be finished by now but I told him we got a late start.”
“Oh, I can leave.”
“No, it’s fine. And he’s fine. Let’s go out on the deck.”
Bosch followed her through the house to the sliding door off the kitchen. He did not see Harrick anywhere. They stepped onto a planked deck with a vine-covered latticework sun cover and a built-in barbecue station. It was all in good shape but didn’t look like it had been used in a long time. The yard beyond was tiny but private. The front hedge ran along the sides and turned to continue along the property lines of the back, giving the yard and the back of the house complete privacy.
“There is probably just enough room for a hot tub, if you were interested,” Mitchell said.
“Yeah, but I wonder how they’d get it in here,” Bosch said. “Take down the hedge, I guess.”
“No, they would crane it over. They do it all the time.”
Behind him Bosch heard the glass door roll open.
“Taylor?” a man said. “Can I talk to you for a second?”
“Of course,” Mitchell responded.
Bosch turned to see Vincent Harrick standing in the open door. Bosch nodded and he nodded back.
“Sorry. I won’t keep her long,” Harrick said.
“I’ll be fine,” Bosch said.
Mitchell went through the door and Harrick shut it behind her so Bosch would not hear their conversation. Bosch felt sweat start to pop on his scalp as he wondered if he had put the watch box in the wrong position or had somehow been seen.
Before he could worry further about it, the sliding door came open and Mitchell stepped back out.
“So, what do you think?” she asked.
Bosch nodded.
“It’s nice,” he said. “Very nice. I’ll have to think about it and talk to my girls.”
He looked through the glass into the kitchen as he spoke but didn’t see Harrick.
“I’ll call you tomorrow,” he added.
“Just let me know if they would like to take a look for themselves,” she said cheerily. “I’m only a block away and can make that happen pretty quickly.”
“Great.”
Bosch headed toward the door. He was still holding the listing sheet, which he folded lengthwise and put into the inside pocket of his sport coat. He hesitated before going back into the house.
“You think I should just go around the house so I don’t intrude on the owner?” he asked.
“Oh, he left,” Mitchell said. “When I told him we weren’t finished, he said he was going to run up the street to get something at Gelson’s.”
She came up next to Bosch and opened the slider. He stepped in and walked through the house to the front door. He then thanked Mitchell again and left.
As Bosch passed through the archway cut into the hedge and walked out to the sidewalk he saw a man leaning against the front of his Cherokee across the street. It was Harrick and he was waiting for Bosch, his arms folded across his chest.
Bosch crossed the street toward his car, unsure how he was going to handle what might be about to turn ugly.
“It’s Bosch, right?” Harrick said.
“That’s right,” Bosch said. “Sorry we took so long in—”
“Save your bullshit.”
Bosch stopped in front of him. There wasn’t much sense in continuing the play since Harrick wasn’t buying it. Bosch held his hands out as if to signal
you got me
.
“I thought you were a fucking reporter,” Harrick said. “Piece-of-shit car like this, you can’t afford a house like that. So I run your plate and it’s got an LAPD block on it. I make a couple calls and I get the story. Retired cop. Retired
homicide
cop. So tell me, Detective Bosch, what the fuck are you doing in my house?”
Bosch knew that the situation could quickly go sideways. He was acting as an extension of Haller’s defense of Da’Quan Foster. A complaint that brought the ethics of his scam with Taylor Mitchell before a judge could cause blowback for Haller. He had to salvage this somehow.
“Look, I’ll be honest with you,” he said. “I’ve been asked to look into the case privately by someone who has reason to believe Da’Quan Foster was set up and that he didn’t kill your wife.”
Harrick’s eyes disappeared in the creases of his squint. His ruddy complexion turned a darker shade.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” he said. “Who has reason to believe that?”
“I can’t tell you that,” Bosch said. “It’s a matter of client confidentiality. I agreed to look into the case and I wanted to see the crime scene. I apologize. I didn’t expect you to be here and to be confronted by this. It was a mistake.”
Before Harrick could respond, Mitchell called from across the street while on her walk back to her house.
“Do you need me for anything, gentlemen?”
Both Bosch and Harrick turned to her.
“We’re fine, Taylor,” Harrick called back. “Thank you.”
He added a wave to keep her going. She was one house from the corner. As soon as she got there she turned left and disappeared from sight.
“Put your hands on the hood,” Harrick said.
“Excuse me?” Bosch asked.
“On the hood. Assume the position.”
“No, I’m not going to do that.”
“You want to go to jail, Bosch?”
“You can take me to jail but I don’t think I’ll be staying there long. I haven’t committed any crime.”
“You’ve got a choice here. Put your hands on the hood so I can check for weapons. Or go to jail.”
He took a phone out of his pocket and got ready to make a call.
“I’m unarmed,” Bosch said and he stepped forward, put his hands on the front hood, and spread his feet.
Harrick quickly frisked him and found no weapons. Bosch didn’t like the way this was heading. He had to change the course.
“What happened to her watch?” he asked.
Harrick’s hands froze for a moment as he was patting down Bosch’s front pants pockets. He then stood straight up, put a hand on Bosch’s arm, and turned him away from the hood of the car.
“What did you say?” Harrick asked.
“Her watch,” Bosch said calmly. “The one you gave her. The Audemars Piguet—if I am saying that right. It wasn’t on her wrist and it wasn’t on any property report from the crime scene. It didn’t turn up in the search of Da’Quan Foster’s house, studio, or van. It’s not in its box either. So, what happened to it?”
Harrick took a half step back as he considered what Bosch had just said. Bosch recognized it as a move to create space between them and a potential prelude to a punch. He braced himself to block but Harrick managed to control his rage and the swing never came.
“Just go,” Harrick said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Get out of here.”
Bosch reached in his pocket for his keys and stepped around the front of the car. When he got to the driver’s-side door, he looked back at Harrick, who had not moved.
“It doesn’t matter who I’m working for if I’m trying to find the truth,” he said. “If Foster didn’t do it, somebody else did. And he’s still out there. Think about that.”
Harrick shook his head.
“Who are you, fucking Batman?” he said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. The watch was broken. It was being fixed. It’s got nothing to do with anything.”
“Then, where is it? Did you get it back?”
Harrick opened his mouth to say something, then paused and shook his head.
“I’m not talking to you.”
He turned, checked for traffic, and then crossed the street toward his house.
Bosch watched him disappear through the archway, then got in the Cherokee and drove off. He angrily banged his palm on the steering wheel. He knew that his anonymity on the case had just come to an end. Harrick didn’t know who Bosch worked for but he would soon enough find out. A complaint might follow. Whether it did or it didn’t, Bosch needed to get ready for the onslaught of anger that would come his way.
T
he Haven House was an aging two-story motel with neon promises of free HBO and Wi-Fi. It was the kind of place that probably looked shabby on the day it opened in the 1940s and had only gone downhill from there. The kind that served as a last-stop shelter before the car became primary domicile. Bosch pulled into the parking lot off Santa Monica and cruised slowly. The motel was situated on what was known as a flag lot. A narrow fronting on Santa Monica led into a bigger, wider piece of property in the rear that ran behind other businesses. This afforded the rear parking lot and motel rooms significant privacy. It was no wonder that it had become a place favored by people engaged in illicit sexual transactions.
He saw a door with a 6 painted on it and parked in the spot in front of it. He realized it was the same sort of move he would make when he worked cold cases. Visit the scene of the crime long after the crime had been committed. He called it looking for ghosts. He believed every murder left a trace on the environment, no matter how old.
In this case only a few months had passed but that still made it a cold case.
Bosch got out and looked around. There were a few cars parked in the lot and it was surrounded by the windowless rear side of the businesses fronting Santa Monica on one side and an L-shaped apartment building on two others. There was a row of tall and mature cypress trees buffering the line between the parking lot and the apartment building. The fourth side was lined by wood fencing that ran along the backyard of a private residence.
Bosch thought about Lucia Soto’s report on the James Allen case. The supposition was that Allen had been murdered in room 6 and then his body was removed and dumped in the alley off El Centro. Putting aside the question of why the body was moved, Bosch now saw that it could have been accomplished without great risk. In the middle of the night the parking lot would have been deserted and unseen from the outside. He looked around for any cameras and saw none. It wasn’t the kind of place where customers wanted to be photographed.
Bosch walked back around the corner to the office at the front of the building. The office was not open to the public. The door had a shelf below a sliding window. There was a push-button bell there and Bosch used his palm to ring it three quick times. He waited and was about to hit it again when an Asian man slid the glass window open and looked at Bosch through watery eyes.
“I need a room,” Bosch said. “I want number six.”
“Check-in at three,” the man said.
That would be in four hours. Bosch looked back at the parking lot and saw a total of six cars including his own. He looked back at the man.
“I need it now. How much?”
“Check-in three, check-out twelve noon. Rules.”
“How about I check in yesterday at three, check out today at noon?”
The man studied him. Bosch didn’t look like his usual clientele.
“You cop?”
Bosch shook his head.
“No, no cop. I just want to look at room six. How much? I’ll be out by twelve. Less than an hour.”
“Forty dollar.”
“Deal.”
Bosch pulled out his cash.
“Sixty,” the man said.
Bosch looked up from his money at him and silently communicated the message that the man was fucking with the wrong guy.
“Okay, forty,” the man said.
Bosch put two twenties down on the window’s counter. The man slid out a 3 × 5 registration card but didn’t ask for any formal identification confirming the information Bosch quickly wrote on it.
The man then slid out a key attached to a diamond-shaped piece of plastic with the number 6 on it.
“One hour,” he said.
Bosch nodded and took the key.
“You betcha,” he said.
He walked back around the corner of the building and used the key to open room 6. He stepped in and closed the door behind him. He stood there, taking the whole room in. The first thing he noticed was the rectangular discoloration on the wall where the picture of Marilyn Monroe had obviously hung. It was gone now, most likely taken as evidence.
He turned his head and slowly swept the room, looking for anything unusual about it but committing its well-worn furnishings and drab curtains to memory. Anything that had belonged to James Allen was long gone. It was just a threadbare room with its aging furnishings. It was depressing to think someone had lived here. Even more so to think someone may have died here.
His phone buzzed and he saw that it was Haller.
“Yeah.”
“Where are we?”
“We? We are in a shabby-as-shit room in a hot-sheet motel in Hollywood. The place Da’Quan claims he was at when Lexi Parks was murdered.”
“And?”
“And nothing. A big fat nothing. Mighta helped if he’d scratched his initials into the bed table or put some gang graffiti on the shower curtain. You know, to show he was here.”
“I meant, ‘and what are you doing there?’”
“My job. Covering all the bases. Absorbing, thinking. Looking for ghosts.”
Bosch’s words were clipped. He didn’t like the interruption. He was in the middle of an established process. He was also annoyed with himself for what he had to say next.
“Look, I may have messed up.”
“How so?”
“I posed as a real-estate buyer and got inside the victim’s house. I wanted to look around.”
“And look for ghosts? What happened?”
“Her husband, the deputy sheriff, came by and ran my plate because he thought I was a reporter or something. Instead, he found out I was a retired cop and I was working on the case.”
“That’s not a mess-up. That’s a full-fledged fuckup. You know if the guy makes a complaint, it goes on me with the judge, right?”
“I know. I messed up—I fucked up. I just wanted to see—”
“You sure did. But nothing we can do about it now. What’s next? Why are you at the motel?”