Authors: Michael Connelly
“Okay, I guess.”
Bosch moved on to the next set of photos. These were taken inside room 6 at the Haven House. This was when the room was still crowded with James Allen’s belongings. There were clothes in the closet, several pairs of shoes and high heels on the floor. Two wigs—one blond, one brunette—on stands on the bureau. There were several candles in the room—on the bureau, on both bed tables, and on the shelf above the headboard of the bed. Also on the shelf was a large clear plastic container half full of condoms. The brand label on the container was Rainbow Pride. The label advertised that the container held three hundred lubricated condoms in six different colors. Bosch took out his notebook and wrote down the details to give to Haller later. He noted that Soto’s observation when reporting on the photos the day before was correct. The condom container was similar to the candy containers he remembered seeing in doctors’ offices and at convenience store cash registers.
Bosch closely scanned the photos of the motel room for any sign of a cell phone but didn’t see one. He knew there had to be one somewhere, because Da’Quan Foster had told Bosch during the interview at county jail that he had called Allen to arrange to meet him the night of the Lexi Parks killing.
Bosch flipped over to section five of the murder book, which he knew would contain the property report. He studied the lists of items retrieved by investigators at both crime scenes—the alley and the motel room where Foster lived. There was no mention of a phone on either list.
The conclusion: The killer had taken Allen’s phone because the phone contained a record of contact with him.
Bosch quickly went through the book to see if Karim and Stotter had subpoenaed any phone records. There were none and no record that a subpoena had been written or filed, and this led Bosch to believe that Allen either used a legit phone that was registered to someone else or used a throwaway that would be impossible to procure records for without either the phone or its number and service provider in hand.
Bosch made a note about going back to Da’Quan Foster and getting the number he used to contact Allen. That would be a start in tracing Allen’s phone activities.
“Sorry,” Bosch said.
“What are you talking about?” Soto said.
“I’m sure you weren’t planning on spending your evening sitting in my car.”
“It’s okay. Things don’t really get going in there until later. That’s when people start dancing on the bar and taking off their clothes.”
“Right.”
“I’m serious.”
“Oh, then I’ll hurry up here so you don’t miss that.”
“Maybe you should stay so you don’t miss it. Maybe loosen you up some, Harry.”
Bosch glanced at her and then back at the book. He was looking for the autopsy report.
“You think I’m too stiff, huh?”
“Well, around me. I think you always thought I was too fragile for the work. Deep down, I think you think it’s men’s work.”
“No, not true. For a long time my daughter wanted to do what you do. What I did. I didn’t discourage it.”
“But now she wants to be a profiler, right?”
“I think, but you never know.”
“She probably got the same message I got from you. ‘You are not suited for this.’”
“Yeah, well, maybe I’m old-fashioned. I kind of hate the idea of women seeing the evil men do. Something like that.”
He found the autopsy. He had read a thousand autopsy reports in his time. He knew the form of the document by heart and that form had barely changed in the last four decades. He quickly paged through to the measurements of the body. He didn’t need any of the conclusions. He just wanted to know what the victim weighed.
“Here it is,” he said. “Guy weighed a buck and a half. That’s not a lot but I’m thinking a lone killer drags a hundred fifty pounds. He doesn’t carry it.”
“I’ll tell Ali and Mike,” Soto said.
“No, you can’t. You never had this conversation.”
“Right, right.”
Bosch checked his watch. They had already been in the car an hour. He would have liked nothing more than to spend several hours scouring the murder book. He had yet to look at any records from the earlier murder, in which the victim was left in the same alley. But he knew he had to let Soto go soon. She had already gone above and beyond the call of duty to a former partner. Especially one who was no longer a cop.
“Let me just take a quick run through the rest of this and then I’ll get you out of here,” he said.
“It’s okay, Harry,” Soto said. “You know, after you walked out the door of the squad, I thought I’d never get a chance to see you work again. I like this. I learn from you.”
“What, just sitting there watching me read a murder book?”
“Yes. I learn what you think is important, how you put things together, make conclusions. You remember you told me once that all the answers are usually in the murder book. We just don’t see them.”
Bosch nodded.
“Yeah, I remember.”
He was looking at James Allen’s lengthy arrest record. It was six pages in the book. He scanned them quickly because they were routinely repetitive with several prostitution and loitering arrests plus a few drug possession busts spanning the last seven years. It was a very common rap sheet for a prostitute. Several of the arrests were suspended or not prosecuted as Allen was initially diverted into pre-trial sex-worker and drug-rehab programs. Once that string was played out, his arrests started resulting in convictions and jail time. Never anything in a state correctional facility, always short stints in county jail. Thirty days here, forty-five there, the jail becoming not so much a deterrent as a revolving door—the sad norm for a recidivist sex worker.
The only unusual thing about Allen’s rap sheet was his last arrest—a loitering-with-intent-to-commit-prostitution bust. What caught Bosch’s eye was that the arrest came fourteen months prior to his death and had resulted in a nolle pros—meaning no charges were ever filed against him. Allen was simply released.
“Wait a minute,” Bosch said.
He flipped to the front of the murder book and scanned the crime report and then the first summary filed by Karim and Stotter.
“What is it?” Soto asked.
“This guy hadn’t been arrested in over a year,” Bosch said as he was reading.
“So?”
“Well, he was sort of camped out there on Santa Monica …”
“So?”
Bosch flipped back to the rap sheet and turned the book so she could see it. He started flipping through the pages.
“This guy gets busted three or four times a year for five years and then nothing for the last fourteen months before he gets killed,” he said. “That makes me think he had a guardian angel.”
“What do you mean, someone in the LAPD watching out for him?”
“Yeah, that he was working for somebody. But there’s nothing in here about him being a snitch. No CI number, no report.”
There were protocols for dealing with confidential informants, including in the event that an informant was murdered. But there was nothing in the murder book that clearly indicated that James Allen was an informant.
“Maybe he just got lucky and avoided arrest in that last year,” Soto said. “I mean, arrests have been down across the board the last year. All these shootings with cops and Ferguson and Baltimore and all of that, the uniforms are doing the minimum required. Nobody’s proactive anymore.”
“Do the math,” Bosch said. “These fourteen months go back way before Baltimore, way before Ferguson.”
Bosch shook his head. He had now counted seventeen arrests in five years for Allen on the rap sheet, then more than a year of clean living.
“I think he was working for somebody,” he said. “Off book.”
It was a violation of department policy for an officer to work a snitch without registering the individual with a supervisor and entering the name in the CI Tracking System database. But Bosch knew it regularly occurred. Snitches were procured over time and often used in test situations. Still, fourteen months seemed like a long time to test whether Allen would be a reliable informant.
Stotter and Karim had pulled all of the arrest reports and Bosch started going through these. The names of arresting officers were not on the abbreviated summaries but their unit call signs were listed. He noted that one number was the same on three of Allen’s last five arrests before the fourteen months of non-activity. It was 6-Victor-55. Hollywood Division was denoted by the 6, Victor meant Vice, and 55 indicated it was a two-officer undercover team. He wrote it down on a page of his notebook, then wrote it again on the next page. He tore the second page out and handed it to Soto.
“I think these are probably the guys that were working him,” he said. “Next time you’re on the company computer, see if you can get me their names out of Hollywood Vice. I want to talk to them.”
She looked at the number, then folded the piece of paper and put it into the pocket of her jeans.
“Sure.”
Bosch closed the murder book and handed it to her. She returned it to the red tote bag.
“You sure you can get that back without causing a stir?” he asked.
“They’ll never know,” she said.
“That’s good. And thanks, Lucia. It’s going to help a lot.”
“Anytime. You want to go back in and get another beer?”
Bosch thought for a moment and then shook his head.
“Nah, I got the vibe on this thing. I should stay with it.”
“Big Mo, huh?”
“Yeah, I got momentum back—thanks to you.”
“Okay, Harry, roll with it. Stay safe.”
“You, too.”
She opened the door and got out. Bosch started the engine but didn’t move the car until he watched her walk safely through the back door of the bar.
B
osch pulled into the alley off El Centro and checked his watch. It was 10:40 p.m. and he knew that he was inside the window of time during which it was estimated that James Allen was murdered and left propped against the wall behind the car repair shop on the night of March 21. Though time of death in the autopsy was estimated to have been anywhere from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m., he knew he would be encountering the same general environmental conditions as on the night of the murder. Evening temperatures in L.A. did not fluctuate much between March and May. But beyond climate, Bosch was interested in ambient light and its sources, a sense of how sound carried in the alley, and any other factors that might have been in play the night James Allen’s body was left behind.
Bosch drove past the repair shop and stopped in the parking lot behind the loft building. The lot was deserted. He killed the engine, took a flashlight out of the glove box, and got out of the car.
Walking back toward the repair shop, he stopped once to take a wide shot of the alley and the scene of the crime with his phone. He then proceeded to the rear wall of the repair shop. To his disappointment, he found that the graffiti on the wall had been painted over since the night James Allen’s body had been left in the alley. There was only one tag so far on the fresh paint, a depiction of a snake that formed the number 18—the mark of the notorious 18th Street gang out of Rampart that had sets all over the city, including Hollywood.
He pulled up the photo of the wall that he had copied from the murder book earlier and using a portion of the crumbled asphalt in the picture was still able to place the spot where James Allen’s body had been propped up.
He stepped over to the spot and put his back to the wall. He looked up and down the alley, then up at the apartment building across from him. One of the small bathroom windows on the second floor had a light on. It was cracked open a few inches. Bosch grew annoyed with himself. He had been so concerned about not robbing Soto of her whole evening that he had not taken the proper time—or at least as much time as she would have allowed—to read through all sections of the murder book. He had not seen a report on the canvass of the neighborhood following the discovery of the body. Now he was looking at a lighted and open window that conceivably had a view of the crime scene. Had the resident there been questioned by police? Probably, but Bosch didn’t know for sure.
He considered calling Soto and asking her to look in the book for him but decided he had already asked too much of her. With each call and request, he was putting her in more danger of being found consorting with the enemy. He thought about the sign he used to hang on the partition in his cubicle when he had worn a badge:
Get Off Your Ass and Knock On Doors
.
Bosch pushed off the wall and walked out of the alley onto El Centro. The apartment building that backed the alley was a pink stucco affair built quickly and cheaply during a boom in the eighties. Its architectural flourishes were few, unless the filigreed design of the gated entrance counted. Bosch had to step back and look up at the two-story structure to try to figure out which apartment the lighted bathroom might belong to and then what number that unit would be.
The directory next to the gate’s phone listed eight units—101 through 104 and 201 through 204. He went with the twos and decided on unit 203 first. He picked up the phone and followed the prompts and the call went unanswered. He tried 204 next and this time got a response.
“Qué?”
“Hola,”
Bosch said haltingly.
“Policía. Abierto por favor.”
He realized that he only had his policeman’s Spanish. He didn’t know how to say that he was a private investigator.
The person on the other end of the line—a woman—said something too quickly to understand. He responded with the old standby said more sternly.
“Policía. Abierto.”
The lock on the metal door buzzed and he pulled it open. He stepped in. There were stairs on either end of the building. He took the set on the right and they delivered him to a walkway leading to two apartment doors on the side of the building that backed up to the alley. Though it had been the person in 204 who had let him through the gate, Bosch now could confirm that unit 203 was the one with the open window and light on in the bathroom. He went to that door first and knocked. While he waited for a response, the door to 204 opened and an old woman stuck her head out to look at him. Bosch knocked again, louder this time, on the door to 203 but then walked over to the woman in the open doorway.