The Crossing (28 page)

Bosch walked slowly through the lot until he saw the two officers heading toward the back door with their handcuffed charges. He then picked up speed to catch up. He knew that if he acted like he belonged, then chances were good that he would be taken as such. The department had more than a thousand detectives and they rotated in and out of squads all over the city all the time. There was no way anyone could know everyone. He was counting on that. Playing a detective would be the easiest role of his life.

He got to the back door just as one of the patrol officers used his key card to unlock it. As the officer started to pull the door open, Bosch moved around behind him.

“I got it,” he said.

He grabbed the door by the steel handle and pulled it all the way open. He then stood back to allow the officers to walk in the two disheveled men in handcuffs.

“Welcome, gentlemen,” he said, sweeping his hand toward the opening. “Please enter.”

“Thank you, sir,” one of the patrol cops said.

“Fuck you, sir,” one of the disheveled men said.

Bosch took that as another test passed. The foursome entered the station and started down the hallway toward the booking room and jail. Bosch entered right behind them and then immediately split off to the right to the rear hallway. It was empty and he quickly moved down to the end and glanced into the detective squad room. It was deserted and only two of the four room-length rows of overhead lights were on, casting the vast room in a dim glow.

Bosch backed away and then went to the stairs. He stood at the first step and leaned forward, straining to hear any noise from the second level. If there were people in vice or the roll-call or break rooms, he would be able to hear the murmur of conversation, but he heard nothing. He then turned to the entrance to the suite of command staff offices. These included private offices for two captains and then an open area containing three desks for secretaries and adjutants. This was Bosch’s destination. On a corkboard that covered one wall of this area was the division’s personnel pyramid, complete with photos and names of every officer assigned to the station, from captain to rookie. The photo display was often referred to by the division’s personnel as the “lineup board” because it was often used to identify officers when citizens came to the front desk of the station to complain about an officer’s conduct but didn’t have the officer’s name. The complainant was taken to the board and asked to find the offending officer.

The bottom two rows of the pyramid were dedicated to the various patrol shifts. Above these rungs were the members of the detective squads and the Special Services Unit, which Bosch knew was the designation for specialized groups, including vice. He looked at these photos and immediately came upon the face shots of Don Ellis and Kevin Long. Both were white, both had the practiced dead-eyed stare of veteran street warriors—cops who have seen it all three times over. Ellis was the older of the two and something about the way he stared coldly at the camera told Bosch he was the alpha of this street team.

The photos were pinned to the board. Personnel shifted too often to make a permanent installation of anyone on the pyramid. Bosch unpinned the photos of Ellis and Long and took them over to the color copier next to the desk of the station commander’s secretary. He put them side by side on the glass and made two copies, blowing them up larger than the original face shots. When he reached down to the tray for them and saw the enlarged photos, he was struck with a familiarity about Ellis. He straightened up and looked at the photocopy for a moment and tried to place where he had seen or known him before. The vice cop looked like he was in his early forties and probably had twenty years in with the department. It could easily be the case that he and Bosch had crossed paths somewhere. A crime scene, a police station, a retirement party. There were myriad possibilities.

Suddenly Bosch heard approaching voices in the back hallway. He reached for the knob on the commander’s office door but it was locked. He then quickly moved to the wall of file cabinets that separated one secretary’s desk from another. He crouched down but knew that if the voices were coming this way, he would be found. He waited and listened and realized the discussion was about how to word the probable-cause statement on a search warrant. It had to be two detectives heading to the squad room at the end of the rear hallway.

Bosch folded the photocopies and put them in the inside pocket of his sport coat. He waited and heard the voices go by the opening to the command suite. As soon as he judged it was clear, he stood up and headed out of the suite into the back hallway, maintaining his pose of familiarity and belonging.

There was no one in the hallway. He had a clear shot to the exit. He moved quickly but not like a man trying to escape. He turned the last corner and pushed through the heavy steel door and out into the night. The drive-up/drop-off alley was clear but out in the lot were two patrol officers closing shop—that is, finishing their shift and taking the shotgun and personal equipment out of their car. They were too busy with the process of going off shift to pay any attention to Bosch as he crossed the lot to his rental car.

The parking lot gate automatically opened for cars approaching from the inside. Bosch didn’t breathe easy until the Chrysler rolled through the gate and out onto Wilcox. He turned north toward Sunset Boulevard. When he caught the light at Sunset, he pulled out his phone and called Haller once again.

“Twice in one night, Bosch?” he protested. “Are you kidding me? It’s after midnight.”

“Put on your bathrobe,” Bosch said. “I’m coming by.”

He disconnected the call before Haller could protest further.

H
aller was indeed wearing a white terry-cloth robe when he opened his front door. Bosch could see the words
Ritz Carlton
in gold over the breast pocket. Haller’s hair was unkempt and he was wearing black-framed glasses. Bosch realized for the first time that he must wear contact lenses during normal waking hours.

“What is so important that it can’t wait for the morning?” Haller asked. “I’ve got an eight-o’clock motions hearing tomorrow and I would like to get some sleep so I am fully functioning.”

“Motions on Foster?” Bosch asked.

“No, another case. Unrelated. But it doesn’t matter, I still need to—”

“Just take a look at these.”

Bosch pulled the photocopies out of his pocket, unfolded the sheets, and handed one to Haller. He refolded the other and put it back in his pocket.

“Are those the guys?” he asked.

“What guys?” Haller asked.

“The cops who pulled you over on the deuce.”

Bosch said it in a tone that implied that he was frustrated by Haller’s inability to follow Bosch’s own logic.

“Why do you care who pulled me over that night?” Haller said. “It’s not your con—”

“Just look at the pictures,” Bosch commanded. “Are those the guys?”

Haller held the photocopy at arm’s length. Bosch guessed that his glasses carried an old prescription.

“Well, one guy stayed in the car and I didn’t really see him,” Haller said. “The other … this one on the right … this guy could’ve been … yes, it’s him. This is the one that came up to the car.”

Haller flipped the page over so Bosch could see his choice. It was Ellis, the one Bosch thought had looked familiar.

“So, what’s going on, Harry?” Haller asked. “Why are we standing here in the middle of the night with this?”

“Those guys pulled you over,” Bosch said. “They also arrested James Allen several times, and I think they were using him as an informant.”

Haller nodded but showed no excitement.

“Okay,” he said. “They’re Hollywood vice cops. It’s not surprising that they would have popped Allen a few times or that they used him as an informant. And as far as my thing goes, they picked off the radio broadcast because they were in the area. That area being Hollywood, where they work.”

It sounded like a different tune from Haller. Outside the jail after he was bailed out, he was spinning tales of conspiracy and lying-in-wait to the media. Now he was giving reasons for why the conspiracy Bosch was beginning to see was perfectly explainable.

“I’ve got a witness who heard two car doors close in the alley the night Allen’s body was dumped there,” Bosch said. “And you heard Dick Sutton a few hours ago. They think it might have been two guys who went in there and killed the Nguyen brothers. The deuces are wild on this, Mick. I think we’re looking for two people.”

They were still standing in the entryway of Haller’s house. Mickey looked down at the photocopies, one in each hand.

“You drink bourbon?” he asked.

“On occasion,” Bosch said.

“Let’s sit down and work this through some Woodford Reserve.”

He stepped back and let Bosch enter the living room.

“Have a seat,” Haller said. “I’ll get a couple of glasses. You take it with ice?”

“A couple cubes is all,” Bosch said.

He took a seat on a couch that gave him a view through the picture window to the lights of the city. Haller’s house sat on the shoulder of Laurel Canyon and offered unobstructed views of the city to the west and out toward Catalina.

Haller was back soon with two glasses with amber liquid and easy on the ice. He put them down on the coffee table along with the photocopy but didn’t sit down.

“I gotta go put in my contacts,” he said. “These things give me a headache.”

He disappeared down a hallway toward the back of the house. Bosch took a sip of the Woodford and felt it burn on the way down. It was good stuff, a better bottle of bourbon than he ever kept on hand at his house for unscheduled visitors.

He took another sip and then studied the photos of the two vice cops. He wondered if they had put the GPS locator on his Cherokee. Thinking about the Cherokee in regard to the two men brought a focus, and Bosch suddenly realized where he had seen Don Ellis. It was in the parking lot behind Musso’s. Bosch had passed him when he had left the bar the night Haller would get pulled over on the DUI. It meant Haller was right. The DUI was a setup. Ellis and Long had been lying in wait for him.

When Haller came back, the glasses and the bathrobe were gone. He was in blue jeans and a maroon Chapman T-shirt. He took the chair across the table from Bosch with no view of the city. He took a healthy pull from his glass of fine bourbon and followed it with his best impression of Jack Nicholson drinking whiskey and flapping an arm like a chicken wing in
Easy Rider
. He then settled back in his chair and looked at Bosch.

“So,” he said. “What do we do?”

“A couple things first,” Bosch said. “Tomorrow morning, after your driver drops you at court? Have your driver or somebody you trust get your car checked for a GPS tag. There’s one on my car and I think these two guys put it there.”

He pointed toward the photocopy on the coffee table.

“It was already on my to-do list,” Haller said.

“Well, get it done,” Bosch said. “And if something’s found under there, don’t remove it. Don’t let them know we’re onto them. We can possibly use this to our advantage. I rented a car tonight. I’ll use that for when I don’t want them to know where I’m going.”

“Okay,” Haller said. “First thing.”

“I also want to talk to your investigator.”

“Cisco? Why?”

Bosch reached down, grabbed his glass, and took a large gulp. It burned all his breathing passages and brought tears to his eyes.

“Easy, boy,” Haller said. “This is sipping bourbon.”

“Right,” Bosch said. “Look, you need to see the big picture here. Your man, Cisco, was working on this case and he gets sent into oncoming traffic and taken out. You’re on the case and you get pulled over on a setup DUI. The Nguyen brothers get whacked for reasons we don’t yet know—less than an hour after I talk to them. We can believe it’s all coincidence or we can look at it in its entirety and see a bigger picture. I want to ask Cisco what he was working on the day somebody knocked him out of the game.”

Haller nodded.

“He has physical therapy every morning at the Veterans in Westwood.”

“Good,” Bosch said. “I’ll see him there.”

“What else?”

Pointing to Ellis and Long, Bosch said, “One of us should talk to DQ and see if he’s ever had any interaction with these two guys. Just to be sure.”

“I can do it,” Haller said. “I need to see him about some pretrial stuff and get his measurements for a trial suit. Hope I got something that fits in my client closet.”

He pointed to the photocopy on the table.

“Can I take that, show it to him?” he asked.

“I’ve got another,” Bosch said.

Bosch remembered something.

“When you see him, ask him if he remembers James Allen’s phone number. Cops never found Allen’s phone. If I can get the number we might be able to pull records that will show the two of them in contact.”

“And bolster the alibi. Good one. What about you?”

“I still think the watch is the key to all of this. I need to get to the original buyer.”

“The guy in Beverly Hills?”

“Yeah. I went by his house tonight. Nice spread. He’s got money. I need to corner him and see where the connections are.”

“Good luck with that.”

“Thanks.”

They sat there for the next few minutes without talking. They sipped bourbon and worked their own thoughts. Finally, it was Haller who spoke.

“This is good stuff,” he said.

Bosch looked at his glass and rolled the ice around the bottom of it.

“Better than I got at home,” he said.

“Well, don’t get me wrong, the bourbon is good, but I’m talking about everything you’ve pulled together these last few days. There’s a lot here. A lot I can work with. We’re going to be able to mount an actual alternate-theory defense. This stuff goes beyond reasonable doubt.”

Bosch finished the remaining bourbon in his glass. He realized that he and Haller would always have a fundamental difference in how they looked at evidence and the other nuances of an investigation. Haller had to put things in the context of trial and how it might be used to knock down the prosecution’s case. Bosch only had to look at the evidence as a bridge to the truth. This is why he knew he had not really crossed to the dark side. He could never work a case from Haller’s angle.