Michael Connelly: Suicide Run: Three Harry Bosch Stories

Bosch shook his head.

“I don’t know. You’re probably not missing anything. Things just don’t seem right to me. Do you know if David Blitzstein is left-handed or right-handed?”

“I don’t know. Do you want me to call my partner? He’s probably still delivering him. He could ask.”

“No, that would tip him off. Let that go for now. Until we…”

He didn’t finish. Until we what? He didn’t know yet.

“What doesn’t seem right about the scene?” Gunn said, pressing him. “Teach me something.”

“Just a feeling, that’s all. The door was locked on that car when she pulled in. I know, I have a Mustang and the doors automatically lock.”

“Okay, it was locked, but she opened it.”

Bosch shook his head.

“That’s what I don’t see. I know this kind of woman. I was married to one. Someone like her, somebody who moves in a man’s world, somebody who plays cards all night and wins big… somebody who knows the dangers that comes with all of that… I don’t see her swinging that door open before she takes off the seat belt. She wouldn’t open that door until she was ready to move.”

Gunn digested Bosch’s ramble and nodded.

“But she would open it for someone she trusted,” she said.

Bosch pointed a finger at her like a gun and nodded his head.

“Only one problem with that scenario,” she said. “Where’s the gun? I’ve got about a dozen witnesses who saw Blitzstein in the middle of the street in his blue jeans and nothing else.”

Bosch was ready for that argument.

“The gun could be anywhere. It could be in the house or the canal behind the house. It doesn’t matter because the gun and the gunshot do not set the time of the killing. The witnesses didn’t look out their windows because they heard a shot. They looked because Blitzstein was out there screaming in the street.”

Bosch saw recognition flare in Gunn’s eyes.

“You’re saying he had time to get rid of the gun because nobody knows how long it was between when she was capped with the silencer and when he went into the street and started waking up the neighborhood.”

Bosch nodded.

“That’s the other thing. Him going into the street and yelling for help-like he wanted the neighbors to see him. I don’t know, if that was my wife in that car with her brains all over the place… I don’t think I’d end up in the middle of the street with no blood on me. I don’t see that at all.”

His phone buzzed and he started digging it out of his pocket.

“See if Dussein’s done with the purse,” he said. “I’ve got a guy at Parker Center waiting to go to work. I’ll get him on the search warrant for the house.”

“You got it.”

Bosch opened his phone. It was Ignacio Ferras.

“Harry, I’ve looked at all the tapes from the casino’s entrance area and the parking lot. It looks to me like she had a follower.”

Bosch felt a sudden pause. A follower would completely contradict the theory he had just spun with Gunn.

“Are you sure, Ignacio?”

“Well, nothing’s for sure but I have her on tape leaving the casino with a security escort. The guy walked her out to her car. He then stood in the lot until she pulled out. Everything was copacetic. But then in thirty-second intervals two more cars pulled out and headed in the same direction she did. Toward the freeway entrance down the block.”

“Two cars…”

“Yeah, two.”

“Okay, but aren’t cars pulling in and out of there at a regular clip? Even in the middle of the night? And probably most of the cars that leave go to the freeway, right?”

“Yeah, they do. At all hours-the casino’s open twenty-four hours. But after I saw these two cars follow her out, I went back through the tapes to trace the drivers. I found one of them came out a couple minutes before the victim. He got in his car and took a little time before pulling out. I think he was smoking. That allowed the victim to leave first.”

“Okay, and what about the second car?”

“That’s the thing, Harry. I couldn’t find anybody walking out of the casino that connects with that car. Not at first. So I had to go all the way back an hour to find the guy. He left an hour before the victim and he sat out there in his car waiting for her.”

Bosch started to pace in the street as all of this registered.

“Did you also look at the tapes from inside the casino with this guy?” he asked.

“I did. And the guy wasn’t playing, Harry. He was just watching. He was walking around, acting like he was a player but he never actually played. He was watching the tables and in the last hour he was watching her play. The victim. He zeroed in on her, then he left and waited for her in the parking lot.”

Bosch nodded slowly. He was seeing the case turning completely in a new direction. Kimber Gunn walked up to him then but he held up a finger so he could finish the call.

“Ignacio, did you get plates off the cars that left after Tracey Blitzstein?”

“Yeah, we got the plates on the tape. The first car was registered to a Douglas Pennington of Beverly Hills. The second car’s registered to a Charles Turnbull of Hollywood.”

Beverly Hills and Hollywood were on the west side, same as Venice. If Pennington and Turnbull were heading home from the casino in Commerce, they would have gone in the same direction as Tracey Blitzstein. That was explainable-at least as far as Pennington went. But Turnbull’s activity in the casino and then his waiting in the parking lot for an hour wasn’t-yet.

“And you put them through the box?” Bosch asked his partner.

“Yeah, both clean. I mean, Turnbull’s got a lot of parking and moving violations but that’s it.”

Bosch looked into Gunn’s eyes while he tried to think about what to do. Her eyebrows were raised. He could tell she sensed a change in the winds of the investigation.

“Harry, what do you want me to do?” Ferras asked.

“Head to Parker Center. I’m going to put Sauer on a search warrant for the victim’s house. Hopefully he’ll have it signed and ready to go by the time you get there. Pick it up and come out here to the scene. We’ll figure out things then.”

“What about Turnbull?”

“Give me his address. I’m going to take a run by there now.”

After he finished the call and hung up, Gunn spoke first.

“I checked the purse. The money’s gone. What’s happening?”

“You have a company car here?”

“Yeah, I’ve got a piece-of-shit cruiser from the barn at Pacific.”

“Good. You drive. I’ll tell you what’s happening on the way. Everything I just told you-that we talked about-it all just went down the tubes.”

The address Ferras had given Bosch for the home of Charles Turnbull led to a brick apartment building on Franklin. On the way there Bosch filled Gunn in on what Ferras had come up with at the casino in Commerce.

They had no background on Turnbull other than what Ferras had given them but when they got to the entrance to the apartment building, another new dimension was added. Next to the button for apartment 4B it said Turnbull Investigations. Before pushing the button, Bosch called Jim Sauer at Parker Center and asked him to run the name Charles Turnbull through the state corporations and licensing computer. A few minutes later he hung up.

“He’s held a PI license for sixteen years,” he told Gunn. “Before that he was a Santa Monica cop.”

Bosch pushed the button next to Turnbull Investigations. After getting no response he pushed it two more times, each time longer than the time before. He had opened his phone again and was asking directory assistance for a number for Turnbull when a sleepy and annoyed voice sounded from the speaker above the entrance buttons.