Authors: Michael Connelly
My phone started to buzz. The ID screen said
UNKNOWN
.
“Speak of the devil,” Maggie said.
I looked at Sarah.
“You might be on that plane home tonight after all.”
I opened the phone and said my name.
“Mickey, District Attorney Williams here. How are you?”
I shook my head at the others. It wasn’t Royce.
“I’m doing fine, Gabe. How are you?”
My informality didn’t seem to faze him.
“I’m hearing good things out of court this morning.”
His statement confirmed what I had thought all along. While Williams had never once showed his face in the courtroom, he had a plant in the gallery watching.
“Well, I hope so. I think we’ll know more about which way this will go after lunch.”
“Are you considering a disposition?”
“Well, not yet. I haven’t heard from opposing counsel, but I assume that we may soon enter into discussions. He’s probably talking to his client about it right now. I would be if I were him.”
“Well, keep me in the loop on that before you sign off on anything.”
I paused as I weighed this last statement. I saw Bosch put his hand inside his jacket and pull out his own phone to take a call.
“Tell you what, Gabe. As independent counsel I prefer to stay independent. I’ll inform you of a disposition if and when I have an agreement.”
“I want to be part of that conversation,” Williams insisted.
I saw some sort of darkness move into Bosch’s eyes. Instinctively, I knew it was time to get off my call.
“I’ll get back to you on that, Mr. District Attorney. I’ve got another call coming in here. It could be Clive Royce.”
I closed the phone just as Bosch closed his and started to stand up.
“What is it?” Maggie asked.
Bosch’s face looked ashen.
“There’s been a shooting over at Royce’s office. There’s four on the floor over there.”
“Is Jessup one of them?” I asked.
“No… Jessup’s gone.”
Thursday, April 8, 1:05
P.M
.
B
osch drove and McPherson insisted on riding with him. Haller had split off with Gleason to head back to court. Bosch pulled a card out of his wallet and got Lieutenant Stephen Wright’s number off it. He handed the card and his phone to McPherson and told her to punch in the number.
“It’s ringing,” she said.
He took the phone and got it to his ear just as Wright answered.
“It’s Bosch. Tell me your people are on Jessup.”
“I wish.”
“Damn it! What the hell happened? Why wasn’t SIS on him?”
“Hold your horses, Bosch. We
were
on him. That’s one of my people on the floor in Royce’s office.”
That hit like a punch. Bosch hadn’t realized a cop was one of the victims.
“Where are you?” he asked Wright.
“On my way there. I’m three minutes out.”
“What do you know so far?”
“Not a hell of a lot. We had a light tail on him during court hours. You knew that. One team during court and full coverage before and after. Today they followed him from the courthouse to Royce’s office at lunchtime. Jessup and Royce’s team walked over. After they were in there a few minutes my guys heard gunshots. They called it in and then went in. One was knocked down, the other pinned down. Jessup went out the back and my guy stayed to try CPR on his partner. He had to let Jessup go.”
Bosch shook his head. The thought of his daughter pushed through everything. She was at school for the next ninety minutes. He felt that she would be safe. For now.
“Who else was hit?” he asked.
“As far as I know,” Wright said, “it was Royce and his investigator and then another lawyer. A female. They were lucky it was lunchtime. Everybody else in the office was gone.”
Bosch didn’t see much that was lucky about a quadruple murder and Jessup out there somewhere with a gun. Wright kept talking.
“I’m not going to shed a tear over a couple of defense lawyers but my guy on the floor in there’s got two little kids at home, Bosch. This is not a good goddamn thing at all.”
Bosch turned onto First, and up ahead he could see the flashing lights. Royce’s office was in a storefront on a dead-end street that ran behind the Kyoto Grand Hotel on the edge of Japantown. Easy walking distance to the courthouse.
“Did you get Jessup’s car out on a broadcast?”
“Yes, everybody has it. Somebody will see it.”
“Where’s the rest of your crew?”
“Everybody’s heading to the scene.”
“No, send them out looking for Jessup. At all the places he’s been. The parks, everywhere, even my house. There’s no use for them at the scene.”
“We’ll meet there and I’ll send them out.”
“You’re wasting time, Lieutenant.”
“You think I can stop them from coming to the scene first?”
Bosch understood the impossibility of Wright’s situation.
“I’m pulling up now,” he said. “I’ll see you when you get here.”
“Two minutes.”
Bosch closed the phone. McPherson asked him what Wright had said and he quickly filled her in as he pulled the car to a stop behind a patrol car.
Bosch badged his way under the yellow tape and McPherson did the same. Because the shooting had occurred only twenty-five minutes earlier, the crime scene was largely inhabited by uniformed officers—the first responders—and was chaotic. Bosch found a patrol sergeant issuing orders regarding crime scene protection and went to him.
“Sergeant, Harry Bosch, RHD. Who is taking this investigation?”
“Isn’t it you?”
“No, I’m on a related case. But this one won’t be mine.”
“Then I don’t know, Bosch. I was told RHD will handle.”
“Okay, then they’re still on their way. Who’s inside?”
“Couple guys from Central Division. Roche and Stout.”
Babysitters, Bosch thought. As soon as RHD moved in, they would be moved out. He pulled his phone and called his lieutenant.
“Gandle.”
“Lieutenant, who’s taking the four on the floor by the Kyoto?”
“Bosch? Where are you?”
“At the scene. It was my guy from the trial. Jessup.”
“Shit, what went wrong?”
“I don’t know. Who are you sending and where the hell are they?”
“I’m sending four. Penzler, Kirshbaum, Krikorian and Russell. But they were all at lunch up at Birds. I’m coming over, too, but you don’t have to be there, Harry.”
“I know. I’m not staying long.”
Bosch closed the phone and looked around for McPherson. He had lost her in the confusion of the crime scene. He spotted her crouching down next to a man sitting on the sidewalk curb in front of the bail-bonds shop next door to Royce’s office. Bosch recognized him from the night he and McPherson rode on the surveillance of Jessup. There was blood on his hands and shirt from his efforts to save his partner. Bosch went to them.
“… he went to his car when they got back here. For just a minute. Got in and then got out. He then went into the office. Right away we heard shots. We moved and Manny got hit as soon as we opened the door. I got off a couple rounds but I had to try to help Manny…”
“So Jessup must’ve gotten the gun from his car, right?”
“Must’ve. They’ve got the metal detectors at the courthouse. He didn’t have it in court today.”
“But you never saw it?”
“No, never saw the weapon. If we had seen it, we would’ve done something.”
Bosch left them there and went to the door of Royce and Associates. He got there just as Lieutenant Wright did. Together they entered.
“Oh, my God,” Wright said when he saw his man on the floor just inside the front door.
“What was his name?” Bosch asked.
“Manuel Branson. He’s got two kids and I have to go tell his wife.”
Branson was on his back. He had bullet entry wounds on the left side of his neck and upper left cheek. There had been a lot of blood. The neck shot appeared to have sliced through the carotid artery.
Bosch left Wright there and moved past a reception desk and down a hallway on the right side. There was a wall of glass that looked into a boardroom with doors on both ends. The rest of the victims were in here, along with two detectives who wore gloves and booties and were taking notes on clipboards. Roche and Stout. Bosch stood in the first doorway of the room but did not enter. The two detectives looked at him.
“Who are you?” one asked.
“Bosch, RHD.”
“You taking this?”
“Not exactly. I’m on something related. The others are coming.”
“Christ, we’re only two blocks from the PAB.”
“They weren’t there. They were at lunch up in Hollywood. But don’t worry, they’ll get here. It’s not like these people are going anywhere.”
Bosch looked at the bodies. Clive Royce sat dead in a chair at the head of a long board table. His head was snapped back as if he were looking at the ceiling. There was a bloodless bullet hole in the center of his forehead. Blood from the exit wound at the back of his head had poured down the back of his jacket and chair.
The investigator, Karen Revelle, was on the floor on the other side of the room near the other door. It appeared that she had tried to make a run for it before being hit by gunfire. She was facedown and Bosch could not see where or how many times she had been hit.
Royce’s pretty associate counsel, whose name Bosch could not remember, was no longer pretty. Her body was in a seat diagonal to Royce, her upper body down on the table, an entry wound at the back of her head. The bullet had exited below her right eye and destroyed her face. There was always more damage coming out than going in.
“What do you think?” asked one of the Central guys.
“Looks like he came in shooting. Hit these two first and then tagged the other as she made a run for the door. Then backed into the hall and opened up on the SIS guys as they came in.”
“Yeah. Looks that way.”
“I’m going to check the rest of the place out.”
Bosch continued down the hall and looked through open doors into empty offices. There were nameplates on the wall outside the doors and he was reminded that Royce’s associate was named Denise Graydon.
The hallway ended at a break room, where there was a kitchenette with a refrigerator and a microwave. There was another communal table here. And an exit door that was three inches ajar.
Bosch used his elbow to push the door open. He stepped into an alley lined with trash bins. He looked both ways and saw a pay parking lot a half block down to his right. He assumed it was the lot where Jessup had parked his car and had gone to retrieve the gun.
He went back inside and this time took a longer look in each of the offices. He knew from experience that he was treading in a gray area here. This was a law office, and whether the lawyers were dead or not, their clients were still entitled to privacy and attorney-client privilege. Bosch touched nothing and opened no drawer or file. He simply moved his eyes over the surface of things, seeing and reading what was in plain sight.
When he was in Revelle’s office he was joined by McPherson.
“What are you doing?”
“Just looking.”
“We might have a problem going into any of their offices. As an officer of the court I can’t—”
“Then wait outside. Like I said, I’m just looking. I am making sure the premises are secure.”
“Whatever. I’ll be out front. The media’s all over the place out there now. It’s a circus.”
Bosch was leaning over Revelle’s desk. He didn’t look up.
“Good for them.”
McPherson left the room at the same moment Bosch read something off a legal pad that was on top of a stack of files on the side of the desk near the phone.
“Maggie? Come back here.”
She returned.
“Take a look at this.”
McPherson came around the desk and bent over to read the notes on the top page of the pad. The page was covered with what looked like random notes, phone numbers and names. Some were circled, others scratched out. It looked like a pad Revelle jotted on while on the phone.
“What?” McPherson asked.
Without touching the pad, Bosch pointed to a notation in the bottom right corner. All it said was
Checkers—804
. But that was enough.
“Shit!” McPherson said. “Sarah isn’t even registered under her name. How did Revelle get this?”
“She must’ve followed us back after court, paid somebody for the room number. We have to assume that Jessup has this information.”
Bosch pulled his phone and called Mickey Haller on speed dial.
“It’s Bosch. You still have Sarah with you?”
“Yes, she’s here in court. We’re waiting for the judge.”
“Look, don’t scare her but she can’t go back to the hotel.”
“All right. How come?”
“Because there’s an indication here that Jessup has that location. We’ll be setting up on it.”
“What do I do, then?”
“I’ll be sending a protection team to the court—for both of you. They’ll know what to do.”
“They can cover her. I don’t need it.”
“That’ll be your choice. My advice is you take it.”
He closed the phone and looked at McPherson.
“I gotta get a protection team over there. I want you to take my car and get my daughter and your daughter and go somewhere safe. You call me then and I’ll send a team to you, too.”
“My car’s two blocks from here. I can just—”
“That’ll waste too much time. Take mine and go now. I’ll call the school and tell them you’re coming for Maddie.”
“Okay.”
“Thank you. Call me when you have—”
They heard shouting from the front of the office suite. Angry male voices. Bosch knew they came from the friends of Manny Branson. They were seeing their fallen comrade on the floor and getting fueled with outrage and the scent of blood for the hunt.
“Let’s go,” he said.
They moved back through the suite to the front. Bosch saw Wright standing just outside the front door, consoling two SIS men with angry, tear-streaked faces. Bosch made his way around Branson’s body and out the door. He tapped Wright on the elbow.
“I need a moment, Lieutenant.”