Michael Connelly - The Black Echo

The deputy chief in charge of the Internal Affairs Division leaned forward and said, “Yes, I believe I did not have it transferred to archives because I had a feeling we had not seen the last of Detective Bosch. Let me see, that would be Lewis and Clarke, I believe.”

He opened the file and read the notations on the inside of the jacket.

“Yes. Mary, will you have Lewis and Clarke come in, please.”

“Chief, I saw them in the squad. They were getting ready for a BOR. I’m not sure which case.”

“Well, Mary, they will have to cancel the Board of Rights-and please do not talk to me in abbreviations. I am a slow-moving, careful policeman. I do not like shortcuts. I do not like abbreviations. You will learn that. Now, tell Lewis and Clarke I want them to delay the hearing and report to me forthwith.”

He flexed his jaw muscles and held them, hard as tennis balls, at their full width. Grosso scurried from the office. Irving relaxed and paged through the file, reacquainting himself with Harry Bosch. He noted Bosch’s military record and his fast advance through the department. From patrol to detectives to the elite Robbery-Homicide Division in eight years. Then the fall: administrative transfer last year from Robbery-Homicide to Hollywood homicide. Should have been fired, Irving lamented as he studied the entries on Bosch’s career chronology.

Next, Irving scanned the evaluation report on a psychological given Bosch the year before to determine if he should be allowed to return to duty after killing an unarmed man. The department psychologist wrote:

Through his war and police experiences, most notably including the aforementioned shooting resulting in fatality, the subject has to a high degree become desensitized to violence. He speaks in terms of violence or the aspect of violence being an accepted part of his day-to-day life, for all of his life. Therefore, it is unlikely that what transpired previously will act as a psychological deterrent should he again be placed in circumstances where he must act with deadly force in order to protect himself or others. I believe he will be able to act without delay. He will be able to pull the trigger. In fact, his conversation reveals no ill effects at all from the shooting, unless his sense of satisfaction with the outcome of the incident-the suspect’s death-should be deemed inappropriate.

Irving closed the file and tapped it with a manicured nail. He then picked a strand of long brown hair-Officer Mary Grosso’s, he presumed-off the glass desk top and dropped it into a wastebasket next to the desk. Harry Bosch was a problem, he thought. A good cop, a good detective-actually, Irving grudgingly admired his homicide work, particularly his affinity for serial slayers. But in the long run, the deputy chief believed, outsiders did not work well inside the system. Harry Bosch was an outsider, always would be. Not part of the LAPD Family. And now the worst had come to Irving’s attention. Bosch had not only left the family but appeared to be engaged in activities that would hurt the family, embarrass the family. Irving decided that he would have to move swiftly and surely. He swiveled in his chair and looked out the window at City Hall across Los Angeles Street. Then his gaze dropped, as it always did, to the marble fountain in front of Parker Center, the memorial to officers killed in the line of duty. There was family, he thought. There was honor. He clenched his teeth powerfully, triumphantly. Just then the door opened.

Detectives Pierce Lewis and Don Clarke strode into the office and presented themselves. Neither spoke. They could have been brothers. They shared close-cropped brown hair, the arms-splayed build of weight lifters, conservative gray silk suits. Lewis’s had a thin charcoal stripe, Clarke’s maroon. Each man was built wide and low to the ground for better handling. Each had a slightly forward tilt to his body, as if he were wading out to sea, crashing through breakers with his face.

“Gentlemen,” said Irving, “we have a problem-a priority problem-with an officer who has come across our threshold before. An officer you two worked with some degree of success before.”

Lewis and Clarke glanced at each other and Clarke allowed himself a small, quick smile. He couldn’t guess who it could be, but he liked going after repeaters. They were so desperate.

“Harry Bosch,” Irving said. He waited a moment to let the name sink in, then said, “You need to take a little ride up to Hollywood Division. I want to open a one point eighty-one on him right away. Complainant will be the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

“FBI?” Lewis said. “What did he do with them?”

Irving corrected him for using the abbreviation for the bureau and told them to sit down in the two chairs in front of his desk. He spent the next ten minutes recounting the telephone call he had received minutes earlier from the bureau.

“The bureau says it is too coincidental,” he concluded. “I concur. He may be dirty in this, and the bureau wants him off the Meadows case. At the very least, it appears he intervened to help this suspect, his former military comrade, avoid a jail term last year, possibly so he could accomplish this bank burglary. Whether Bosch knew this, or if there was further involvement in the crime, I do not know. But we are going to find out what Detective Bosch is up to.”

Irving delayed here to drive home his point with a full jaw flex. Lewis and Clarke knew better than to interrupt. Irving then said, “This opportunity opens the door for the department to do what it was unable to accomplish before with Bosch. Eliminate him. You will report directly to me. Oh, and I want Bosch’s supervisor, a Lieutenant Pounds, copied with your daily reports. On the quiet. But you will do more than copy me. I want telephonic reports twice daily, morning and evening.”

“We’re on our way,” Lewis said as he stood up.

“Aim high, gentlemen, but be careful,” Irving counseled them. “Detective Harry Bosch is no longer the celebrity he once was. But, nevertheless, do not let him slip away.”

Bosch’s embarrassment at being unceremoniously dismissed by Agent Wish had turned to anger and frustration as he rode down the elevator. It was like a physical presence in his chest that jumped into his throat as the stainless steel cell descended. He was alone, and when the pager on his belt started to chirp, he let it go on for its allotted fifteen seconds rather than turn it off. He swallowed his anger and embarrassment and formed it into resolve. As he stepped out of the elevator car, he looked down at the phone number on the pager’s digital display. An 818 area code-the Valley, but he didn’t recognize the number. He stepped to a pod of pay phones in the courtyard in front of the Federal Building and dialed the number. Ninety cents, an electronic voice said. Luckily he had the loose change. He dumped it in and the call was picked up on a half ring by Jerry Edgar.

“Harry,” he began without a hello, “I’m still up here at the VA and I’m getting the runaround, man. They don’t have any files on Meadows. They say I have to go through D.C. or I gotta get a warrant. I tell them I know there is a file, you know, on account of what you told me. I say, ‘Look, if I was to get a search warrant, can you look and make sure you know where this file is?’ And so they’re lookin’ for a while and what they finally come out saying is, yes, they had a file but it’s gone. Guess who came and got it with a court order last year?”

“The FBI.”

“You know something I don’t know?”

“I haven’t exactly been sitting on my ass. They say when the bureau took it or why?”

“They weren’t told why. FBI agent just came in with the warrant and took it. Checked it out last September and hasn’t brought it back since. Didn’t give a reason. The Fucking-B-I doesn’t have to.”