Michael Connelly - The Black Echo

She emptied her glass, seemingly to give Bosch time to stop her from continuing. He didn’t.

“It only took one mistake,” she said. “You killed a man last year. He was a killer himself but that didn’t matter. According to the reports, you thought he was reaching under a pillow on the bed for a gun. Turned out he was reaching for his toupee. Almost laughable, but IAD found a witness who said she told you beforehand that the suspect kept his hair under the pillow. Since she was a street whore, her credibility was in question. It wasn’t enough to bounce you, but it cost you your position. Now you work Hollywood, the place most people in the department call the sewer.”

Her voice trailed off. She was finished. Bosch didn’t say anything, and there was a long period of silence. The waitress cruised by the booth but knew better than to speak to them.

“When you get back to the office,” he finally began, “you tell Rourke to make one more call. He got me off the case, he can get me back on.”

“I can’t do it. He won’t do it.”

“Yes, he’ll do it, and tell him he has until tomorrow morning to do it.”

“Or what? What can you do? I mean, let’s be honest. With your record, you’ll probably be suspended by tomorrow. As soon as Pounds got off the phone with Rourke he probably called IAD, if Rourke didn’t do it himself.”

“Doesn’t matter. Tomorrow morning I hear something, or tell Rourke he’ll be reading a story in the Times about how an FBI suspect in a major bank heist, a subject of FBI surveillance no less, was murdered right under the bureau’s nose, taking with him the answers to the celebrated WestLand tunnel caper. All the facts might not be right or in the correct order, but it will be close enough. More important than that, it will be a good read. And it’ll make waves all the way to D.C. It’ll be embarrassing and it’ll also be a warning to whoever did Meadows. You’ll never get them then. And Rourke will always be known as the guy who let them get away.”

She looked at him, shaking her head as if she were above this whole mess. “It’s not my call. I’ll have to go back to him and let him decide what to do. But if it was me, I’d call your bluff. And I will tell you straight out that’s what I’ll tell him to do.”

“It’s no bluff. You’ve checked me out, you know I’ll go to the media and the media will listen to me and like it. Be smart. You tell him it’s no bluff. I’ll have nothing to lose by doing it. He’ll have nothing to lose by bringing me in.”

He began to slide out of the booth. He stopped and threw a couple of dollar bills on the table.

“You’ve got my file. You know where you can reach me.”

“Yes, we do,” she said, and then, “Hey, Bosch?”

He stopped and looked back at her.

“The street whore, was she telling the truth? About the pillow?”

“Don’t they all?”

Bosch parked in the lot behind the station on Wilcox and smoked right up until he reached the rear door. He killed the butt on the ground and went in, leaving behind the odor of vomit that wafted from the mesh windows at the rear of the station holding tank. Jerry Edgar was pacing in the back hall waiting for him.

“Harry, we’ve got a forthwith from Ninety-eight.”

“Yeah, what about?”

“I don’t know, but he’s been coming out of the glass box every ten minutes looking for you. You got your beeper and the Motorola turned off. And I saw a couple of the IAD silks up from downtown go in there with him a while ago.”

Bosch nodded without saying anything comforting to his partner.

“What’s going on?” Edgar blurted. “If we’ve got a story, let’s get it straight before we go in there. You’ve had experience with this shit, not me.”

“I’m not sure what’s going on. I think they’re kicking us off the case. Me, at least.” He was very nonchalant about the whole thing.

“Harry, they don’t bring IAD in to do that. Something’s on, and, man, I hope whatever you did, you didn’t fuck me up, too.”

Edgar immediately looked embarrassed.

“Sorry, Harry, I didn’t mean it that way.”

“Relax. Let’s go see what the man wants.”

Bosch headed toward the detective squad room. Edgar said he’d cut through the watch office and then come in from the front hall so it wouldn’t look like they had collaborated on a story. When Bosch got to his desk, the first thing he noticed was that the blue murder book on the Meadows case was gone. But he also noticed that whoever had taken it had missed the cassette tape with the 911 call on it. Bosch picked up the cassette and put it in his coat pocket just as Ninety-eight’s voice boomed out of the glass office at the head of the squad room. He yelled just one word: “Bosch!” The other detectives in the squad room looked around. Bosch got up and slowly walked toward the glass box, as the office of Lieutenant Harvey “Ninety-eight” Pounds was called. Through the windows he could see the backs of two suits sitting in there with Pounds. Bosch recognized them as the two IAD detectives who had handled the Dollmaker case. Lewis and Clarke.

Edgar came into the squad through the front hallway just as Bosch passed and they walked into the glass box together. Pounds sat dull-eyed behind his desk. The men from Internal Affairs did not move.

“First thing, no smoking, Bosch, you got that?” Pounds said. “In fact, the whole squad stunk like an ashtray this morning. I’m not even going to ask if it was you.”

Department and city policy outlawed smoking in all community-shared offices such as squad rooms. It was okay to smoke in a private office if it was your office or if the office’s occupant allowed visitors to smoke. Pounds was a reformed smoker and militant about it. Most of the thirty-two detectives he commanded smoked like junkies. When Ninety-eight wasn’t around, many of them would go into his office for a quick fix, rather than have to go out to the parking lot, where they’d miss phone calls and where the smell of piss and puke migrated from the rear windows of the drunk tank. Pounds had taken to locking his office door, even on quick trips up the hall to the station commander’s office, but anybody with a letter opener could pop the door in three seconds. The lieutenant was constantly returning and finding his office space fouled by smoke. He had two fans in the ten-by-ten room and a can of Glade on the desk. Since the frequency of the fouling had increased with the reassignment of Bosch from Parker Center to Hollywood detectives, Ninety-eight Pounds was convinced Bosch was the major offender. And he was right, but he had never caught Bosch in the act.

“Is that what this is about?” Bosch asked. “Smoking in the office?”

“Just sit down,” Pounds snapped.

Bosch held his hands up to show there were no cigarettes between his fingers. Then he turned to the two men from Internal Affairs.

“Well, Jed, it looks like we might be off on a Lewis and Clarke expedition here. I haven’t seen the great explorers on the move since they sent me on a no-expense-paid vacation to Mexico. Did some of their finest work on that one. Headlines, sound bites, the whole thing. The stars of Internal Affairs.”

The two IAD cops’ faces immediately reddened with anger.

“This time, you might do yourself a favor and keep your smart mouth shut,” Clarke said. “You’re in serious trouble, Bosch. You get it?”

“Yeah, I get it. Thanks for the tip. I got one for you, too. Go back to the leisure suit you used to wear before you became Irving’s bendover. You know, the yellow thing that matched your teeth. The polyester does more for you than the silk. In fact, one of the guys out there in the bullpen mentioned that the ass end of that suit is getting shiny, all the work you do riding a desk.”