Michael Connelly - The Last Coyote

He had no idea there was a Venice in Florida.

“It’s a state, over on the other side of the country.”

“I know where it is.”

“Oh, and one other thing. The address I have is only a P.O. box. Sorry about that.”

“Yeah, I bet. What about a phone?”

She tossed the wet napkins into a trash can in the corner of the room.

“We have no phone number. Try information.”

“I will. Does it say there when he retired?”

“You didn’t ask me to get that.”

“Then give me what you’ve got.”

Bosch knew he could get more, that they’d have to have a phone number somewhere, but he was handicapped because this was an unauthorized investigation. If he pushed things too far, then he’d only succeed in having his activities discovered and then halted.

She floated the paper across the desk to him. He looked at it. It had two addresses on it, the P.O. box for McKittrick and the street address in Las Vegas for Eno’s widow. Her name was Olive.

Bosch thought of something.

“When do the checks go out?”

“Funny you should ask.”

“Why?”

“Because today’s the last day of the month. They always go out the last day of the month.”

That was a break and he felt like he deserved it, that he had worked for it. He picked up the paper she had given him and slipped it into his briefcase, then he stood up.

“Always a pleasure to do work with the public servants of the city.”

“Likewise. And, uh, Detective? Could you return the chair to the place you found it? As I said, Cassidy will need it.”

“Of course, Mona. Pardon my forgetfulness.”

A FTER THE BOUT with bureaucratic claustrophobia, Bosch decided he needed some air to recover. He took the elevator down to the lobby and out the main doors to Spring Street. As he walked out, he was directed by a security officer to walk down the right side of the wide-staired entrance to the great building because there was a film location shoot taking place on the left side. Bosch watched what they were doing as he stepped down the stairs and then decided to take a break and have a smoke.

He sat down on one of the concrete sidings along the stairs and lit a cigarette. The film shoot involved a group of actors posing as reporters who rushed down the stairs of City Hall to meet and question two men getting out of a car at the curb. They rehearsed it twice and then shot it twice while Bosch sat there and smoked two cigarettes. Each time, the reporters all yelled the same thing at the two men.

“Mr. Barrs, Mr. Barrs, did you do it? Did you do it?”

The two men refused to answer and pushed through the pack and up the stairs with the reporters backtracking. On one of the takes one of the reporters stumbled as he moved backwards, fell on his back on the stairs and was partially trampled by the others. The director kept the scene going, perhaps thinking that the fall added a touch of realism to the scene.

Bosch figured that the filmmakers were using the steps and front facade of City Hall as a courthouse setting. The men coming from the car were the defendant and his high-priced lawyer. He knew that City Hall was frequently used for such shots because it actually looked more like a courthouse than any real courthouse in the city.

Bosch was bored after the second take, though he guessed there would be many more. He got up and walked down to First and then over to Los Angeles Street. He took that back to Parker Center. Along the way he was asked for spare change only four times, which he thought was a low count for downtown and possibly a sign of improving economic times. In the lobby of the police building he passed the bank of pay phones and on a whim stopped, picked one of the phones off the hook and dialed 305-555-1212. He had dealt with Metro-Dade Police in Miami several times over the years and 305 was the only Florida area code that readily came to mind. When the operator came on he asked for Venice and she informed him that 813 was the proper area code.

He then redialed and got information in Venice. First he asked the operator what the nearest large city to Venice was. She told him that was Sarasota and he asked what the nearest large city was to that. When she said St. Petersburg, he finally started getting his bearings. He knew where St. Petersburg was on a map-the west coast of Florida-because he knew the Dodgers occasionally played spring training games there and he had looked it up once.

He finally gave the operator McKittrick’s name and promptly got a tape recording saying the number was unlisted at the customer’s request. He wondered if any of the detectives he had dealt with by phone at Metro-Dade could get the number for him. He still had no idea exactly where Venice was or how far it was from Miami. Then he decided to leave it alone. McKittrick had taken steps to make it difficult to be contacted. He used a P.O. box and had an unlisted phone. Bosch didn’t know why a retired cop would take such steps in a state three thousand miles away from where he had worked but he felt sure that the best approach to McKittrick was going to have to be in person. A telephone call, even if Bosch got the number, was easy to avoid. Someone standing right at your door was different. Besides, Bosch had caught a break; he knew McKittrick’s pension check was in the mail to his P.O. box. He was sure he could use it to find the old cop.

He clipped his ID card to his suit and went up to the Scientific Investigation Division. He told the woman behind the counter that he had to talk to someone in Latent Prints and pushed through the half door and down the hall to the print lab like he always did, without waiting for her go-ahead.

The lab was a large room with two rows of work tables with overhead fluorescent lights. At the end of the room were two desks with AFIS computer terminals on them. Behind them was a glass-walled room with the mainframes inside. There was condensation on the glass because the mainframe room was kept cooler than the rest of the lab.

Because it was lunchtime there was only one technician in the lab and Bosch didn’t know him. He was tempted to turn around and come back later when someone else might be there, but the tech looked up from one of the computer terminals and saw him. He was a tall, skinny man with glasses and a face that had been ravaged by acne when he was younger. The damage gave him a permanently sullen expression.

“Yes?”

“Yeah, hi, howya doin’?”

“I’m doing fine. What can I do for you?”

“Harry Bosch, Hollywood Division.”

He put out his hand and the other man hesitated, then shook it tentatively.

“Brad Hirsch.”

“Yeah, I think I’ve heard your name. We’ve never worked together but that probably won’t last. I work homicide so it seems I basically get around to working with everybody in here eventually.”

“Probably.”

Bosch sat down on a chair to the side of the computer module and pulled his briefcase onto his lap. He noticed that Hirsch was looking into his blue computer screen. He seemed more comfortable looking there than at Bosch.

“Reason I’m here is, at the moment, it’s kind of slow out in Tinseltown. And so I’ve been going through some old cases. I came across this one from nineteen sixty-one.”

“Nineteen sixty-one?”

“Yeah, it’s old. A female…cause of death blunt force trauma, then he made it look like a strangulation, a sex crime. Anyway, nobody was ever popped for it. It never went anywhere. In fact, I don’t think anyone’s really looked at it since the due diligence in sixty-two. A long time. Anyway, the thing is, the reason I’m here, is that back then the cops on this pulled a decent set of prints at the crime scene. They got a bunch of partials and some full rounds. And I’ve got them here.”