Authors: Michael Connelly
37
O
N THE WAY OUT OF TOWN I could have avoided the traffic of the strip but I decided not to. I thought all the lights might cheer me up. I knew I was leaving my daughter behind. I was going to Los Angeles to rejoin the department. I would see my daughter again but I wouldn’t be able to spend the kind of time with her I needed and wanted to. I was leaving to join the depressing legions of weekend fathers, the men who have to compress their love and duty into twenty-four-hour stands with their children. The thought of it raised a dark dread in my chest that a billion kilowatts of light could not cut through. There was no doubt I was leaving Las Vegas as a loser.
Once I cleared the lights and the city limits the traffic grew sparse and the skies dark. I tried to ignore the depression my choice had put upon me. Instead, I worked the case as I drove, following the logic of the moves from the perspective of Backus, grinding it down until the story was smooth powder and I had only unanswered questions left. I saw it the same way the bureau did. Backus, having adopted the name Tom Walling, was living in Clear and preying on the customers he drove from the brothels. He operated with impunity for years because he chose the perfect victims. That is until the numbers went against him and investigators from Vegas started to see a pattern and put together their list of six missing men. Backus probably knew that it was only a matter of time before the connection might be made to Clear. He probably knew that that time would be even shorter once he saw Terry McCaleb’s name in the newspaper. Maybe he even got wind that McCaleb had gone to Vegas. Maybe McCaleb had even gone up to Clear. Who knows? Most of the answers died with McCaleb and then in that trailer in the desert.
There were so many unknowns in this story. But what did seem obvious from this point was that Backus had closed up shop. He made plans to end his desert run in a blaze of glory—to take out his two prot??, McCaleb and Rachel, in a pathological display of mastery, and to leave behind in his trailer a burned and destroyed body that would beg the question of whether he was alive or dead. In recent years Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden had gotten good mileage by leaving behind the same question. Maybe Backus saw himself on the same stage.
The books in the fire barrel bothered me the most. Despite Rachel’s dismissing them because the circumstances of their burning were unknown, it still seemed like an important piece of the investigation to me. I wished I had spent more time studying the book I had pulled out, maybe even identifying it. The burned book gave an indication of a part of the Poet’s plan nobody knew about yet.
Remembering the partial receipt I had seen in the book, I opened my cell phone, checked to make sure I had service and called information for Las Vegas. I asked if there was a listing for a business called Book Car and the operator told me there was not. I was about to hang up when she told me there was, however, a listing for a store called Book Caravan on Industry Road. I told her I would try it and she connected me.
I guessed that the store would be closed because it was late. I was hoping for a message machine on which I could ask the owner to call me in the morning. But the call was answered after two rings by a gruff voice.
“You’re open?”
“Twenty-four hours. How can I help you?”
I got an idea what kind of store it was by the hours. I took a shot anyway.
“You don’t sell any books of poetry there, do you?”
The gruff man laughed.
“Very funny,” he said. “There once was a man from Timbuktu. As far as poetry goes, fuck you.”
He laughed again and hung up on me. I closed the phone and had to smile at his on-the-spot rhyming skill.
Book Caravan seemed like a dead end but I would call Rachel in the morning and tell her it might be worth checking for connections to Backus.
A green highway sign came out of the darkness and into the spray of my headlights.
ZZYZX ROAD
1 MILE
I thought about pulling off and driving down the bouncing desert road into the darkness. I wondered if there was still a forensic crew on duty at the burial site. But what would the point of going down that road be other than to engage with the ghosts of the dead? The mile came and went and I drove on by the exit, leaving the ghosts alone.
The beer and a half I’d had with Rachel proved to be a mistake. By Victorville I was growing fatigued. Too much thinking with the added mix of alcohol. I pulled off for coffee in a McDonald’s that was open late and designed to look like a train depot. I bought two coffees and two sugar cookies and sat in a booth in an old train car reading through Terry McCaleb’s file on the Poet investigation. I was getting to know the order of reports and their summaries just about by heart.
After one cup of coffee I had nothing going and closed the file. I needed something new. I needed to either let it go and hope and believe the bureau would get the job done or find a new angle to pursue.
I’m not against the bureau. My take is that it’s the most thorough, well-equipped and relentless law enforcement agency in the world. Its problems lie in its size and the many cracks in communication between offices, squads and so on down the line to the agents themselves. It only takes a debacle like 9/ 11 to make clear to the world what most people in the law enforcement world, including the FBI agents, already know.
As an institution it cares too much about its reputation and it carries too much weight in politics, going all the way back to J. Edgar Hoover himself. Eleanor Wish once knew an agent who had been assigned to Washington headquarters back during the time J. Edgar ruled the place. He said the unspoken law was that if an agent was in an elevator and the director got on, the agent was not allowed to address him, even to say hello, and was required to immediately step off so the big man could ride alone and ponder his great responsibilities. That story always stuck with me for some reason. I think because it carries the perfect arrogance of the FBI.
The bottom line was I didn’t want to call Graciela McCaleb and tell her that her husband’s killer was still out there and that the FBI would handle it. I still wanted to handle it. I owed that to her and to Terry and I always paid what I owed.
Back on the road the coffee and sugar got me going again and I pressed on toward the City of Angels. When I hit the 10 freeway I also hit the rain and traffic slowed to a crawl. I flipped on the radio to KFWB and learned it had rained all day and wasn’t expected to stop until the end of the week. There was a live report from Topanga Canyon where residents were sandbagging their doors and garages, expecting the worst. Mud slides and flooding were the dangers. The catastrophic fires that swept through the hills the year before had left little ground cover to hold the rain or soil. It was all coming down.
I knew the weather would cost me an extra hour getting home. I checked my watch. It was just past midnight. I had planned to wait until getting home to call Kiz Rider but decided it might be too late to call by then. I opened my phone and called her at home. She picked up right away.
“Kiz, it’s Harry. You up?”
“Sure, Harry. I can’t sleep when it rains.”
“I know what you mean.”
“So what’s the good word?”
“Everybody counts or nobody counts.”
“Which means?”
“I’m in if you’re in.”
“Come on, Harry, don’t put that on me.”
“I’m in if you’re in.”
“Come on, man, I’m already in.”
“You know what I mean. This is your salvation, Kiz. We got sidetracked. We both did. You and I know what we should be doing. It’s time we both went back to it.”
I waited. There was a long period of silence from her, then finally she spoke.
“This is going to upset the man. He’s got me on a lot of things.”
“If he’s the man you say he is he’ll understand. He’ll get it. You’ll be able to make him get it.”
More silence.
“Okay, Harry, okay. I’m in.”
“All right then, I’ll come down tomorrow and sign up.”
“All right, Harry. I’ll see you then.”
“You knew I’d call, didn’t you?”
“Put it this way, I have the papers you have to fill out sitting on my desk.”
“You were always too smart for me.”
“I meant what I said about us needing you. That’s the bottom line. But I also didn’t think you’d last long out there on your own. I know guys who have pulled the pin and gone the PI route, sold real estate, cars, appliances, even books. It worked fine for most of them, but not you, Harry. I figured you knew that, too.”
I didn’t say anything. I was staring into the darkness beyond the reach of my lights. Something Kiz had just said triggered the avalanche.
“Harry, you still there?”
“Yeah, listen, Kiz, you just said
books
. You knew a guy who retired and sold books. Is that Ed Thomas?”
“Yeah, I came to Hollywood about six months before he put in his papers. He left and opened a bookstore down in Orange.”
“I know. You ever been there?”
“Yeah, one time he had Dean Koontz signing one of his books there. I saw it in the paper. He’s my favorite and he doesn’t sign books too many places. So I went down. There was a line out the door and down the sidewalk but as soon as Ed saw me he ushered me right on up to the front and he introduced me and I got my book signed. It was embarrassing, actually.”
“What’s the name of it?”
“Um . . . I think it was
Strange Highways
.”
That deflated me. I thought I was about to make a leap in logic and a connection.
“No, actually, it was after that,” Kiz said. “It was
Sole Survivor
—the plane crash story.”
I realized what she was saying and how we’d gotten confused.
“No, Kiz, what’s the name of Ed’s bookstore?”
“Oh, it’s called Book Carnival. I think that was what it was called when he bought the business. Otherwise I think he’d have called it something else, something mysterious, since he sells mostly mystery books there.”
Book Car as in Book Carnival. I involuntarily pressed the accelerator down harder.
“Kiz, I gotta go. I’ll talk to you later.”
I closed the phone without waiting for a good-bye from her. Glancing between the road and the phone’s display I scrolled through my recent calls list and pressed the connect button after highlighting Rachel Walling’s cell number. She answered before I even heard it ring.
“Rachel, it’s Harry. Sorry to call so late but it’s important.”
“I’m in the middle of something,” she whispered.
“You’re at the field office still?”
“That’s right.”
I tried to think of what would keep her there after midnight on a day that had started so early.
“Is it the trash barrel? The burned book?”
“No, we haven’t gotten there yet. It’s something else. I have to go.”
Her voice was somber and because she had not used my name I got the idea there were other agents present and that whatever she was in the middle of was not good.
“Rachel, listen, I have something. You have to come to L.A.”
Her tone changed. I think she could tell by the urgency in my voice that this was serious.
“What is it?”
“I know the Poet’s next move.”
38
“I
’LL HAVE TO CALL YOU BACK.”
Rachel closed her phone and slid it into the pocket of her blazer. Bosch’s last words echoed in her heart.
“Agent Walling, I’d appreciate it if you could stay in our conversation.”
She looked up at Alpert.
“Sorry.”
She looked past him at the telecommunication screen where Brass Doran’s face was larger than life. She was smiling.
“Agent Doran, continue,” Alpert said.
“Actually, I’m finished. That’s all we have at this time. We can confirm through the latents that Robert Backus was at that trailer. We cannot confirm that he was in it when it exploded.”
“What about the DNA?”
“The DNA evidence gathered by Agent Walling, at great danger, I might add, and later by the ERT will only be useful if we have something to compare it with. That is, if we somehow find a source of Robert Backus’s DNA. Or we use it to identify the body that was in the trailer as someone else.”
“What about Backus’s parents? Can’t we extract his DNA from —”
“We went that route before. His father was dead and cremated before we thought of it—the science wasn’t really there back then—and his mother has never been located. There is some thought that she might have been his first victim. She disappeared some years ago without the proverbial trace.”
“This guy thought of everything.”
“In the case of the mother it was more likely a revenge thing for her abandonment. It is hard to believe that he did something back then in order to prevent later DNA extraction.”
“All I meant was that we are genuinely fucked.”
“I am sorry, Randal, but the science can only go so far.”
“I know that, Agent Doran. Can you tell me anything else? Anything new?”
“I guess not.”
“Terrific. Okay, so then I will tell the director just that. That we know Backus was in that trailer—we have forensics and witness accounts to that effect. But as of this time we cannot take the next step and say he is dead and good riddance.”
“Is there no way we can convince the director to sit tight and give us more time to sew it all up? For the good of the investigation.”
Rachel almost laughed. She knew the good of the investigation would always take second place to political considerations in the Hoover Building in D.C.
“I have already tried,” Alpert said. “The answer is no. There is too much at stake. The cat is out of the bag on this—thanks to the explosion in the desert. If that was Backus blown to bits out there, then fine, we’ll eventually confirm it and everything will be fine. If that was not Backus and he has some other play in mind, the director has to get on record with this now or the consequences of the blowback could be fatal. So he is going on record with what we know now: Backus was there, Backus is the suspect in the killings in the desert, Backus may or may not be dead. There is no dissuading him at this point.”
Alpert had thrown Rachel a look when he said the cat was out of the bag, as if he held her responsible for everything. She thought about revealing what Bosch had just told her but in that instant decided against it. Not yet. Not until she knew more.
“Okay, people, that’s it,” Alpert announced abruptly. “Brass, we’ll see you on the big screen tomorrow morning. Agent Walling, can you stay behind for a moment?”
Rachel watched Brass leave the screen and then it went black, the transmission ended. Alpert then walked up close to the table where Rachel sat.
“Agent Walling?”
“Yes?”
“Your work is done here.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re finished. Go back to your hotel and pack your bags.”
“There’s still a lot to do here. I want to —”
“I don’t care what you want. I want you out of here. You have undermined this investigation since you arrived. Tomorrow morning I want you on the first plane back to wherever it is you come from. Understand?”
“You are making a mistake. I should be a part of —”
“You are making a mistake arguing with me about it. I can’t make it any clearer for you. I want you out of here. Turn in your paperwork and get on a plane.”
She stared at him, trying to communicate all the anger that was behind her eyes. He held a hand up as if to ward something off.
“Be careful what you say. It could come back to bite you on the ass.”
Rachel swallowed back her anger. She spoke in a controlled and calm voice.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Alpert looked like his eyes might pop out of his head. He turned and waved Dei out of the room. He then turned back to Rachel and waited for the sound of the door closing.
“Excuse me? What did you just say?”
“I said I am not going anywhere. I am staying on this case. Because if you put me on a plane, I won’t go back to South Dakota. I’ll go to D.C. headquarters and right into the Office of Professional Responsibility to file on you.”
“For what? What are you going to file?”
“You’ve used me as bait since the beginning. Without my knowledge or consent.”
“You don’t know what you are talking about. Go ahead. Go to the OPR. They’ll laugh you back to the Badlands and put you down for another ten years out there.”
“Cherie made a mistake and then you did, too. When I called in from Clear she asked me why we took Bosch’s car. Then in the hangar you did the same thing. You knew I had gone up there in Bosch’s car. I started thinking about that and then I figured out why. You put a GPS tag on my car. I went underneath it tonight and found it. Standard bureau issue, even has the code label still on it. There will be a record of who checked it out.”
“I have no idea what you are talking about.”
“Well, I’m sure the OPR will be able to figure it out. My guess is Cherie will help them. I mean if I were her I wouldn’t tie my career to you. I’d tell the truth. That you brought me out here as bait, that you thought I would draw Backus out. I bet you had a shadow team on me the whole time. There will be a record of that, too. What about my phone and my hotel room? Did you bug them?”
Rachel saw Alpert’s eyes change. He went inward, his mind no longer consumed by her accusations but by the future consequences of an ethics complaint and investigation. She saw him recognize his own doom. One agent bugging and following another agent, using her as unwitting bait in a high-stakes gamble. Under the current climate of media scrutiny and bureau-wide avoidance of any controversy, his actions wouldn’t hold up. It would be he who would go down, not her. Quickly and quietly he would be dealt with. Maybe, if he was lucky, he’d end up working side by side with Rachel in the Rapid City office.
“The Badlands are really quite beautiful in the summer,” she said.
She stood up and headed to the door.
“Agent Walling?” Alpert said to her back. “Hold on a second.”