Michael Connelly - A Darkness More Than Night

“What was the reason?”

He was in the kitchen, sliding a six-pack of Anchor Steam onto a shelf in the refrigerator. He pulled one bottle out of its sleeve and closed the door.

“Roger and I have been conferencing all weekend about this. We also talked to Alice Short about it.”

Alice Short was a chief deputy who was in charge of major trials. Their boss. It sounded as though they had been contacted about the Gunn case.

“What’s the ‘it’ you’re talking about?” Bosch asked. He slid the bottle into the opener and yanked down, popping the cap.

“Well, we think the case has really gone by the numbers. Really fallen together. In fact, it’s bulletproof, Harry, and we think we should pull the trigger tomorrow.”

Bosch was quiet a moment while he tried to decipher all the weaponry coding.

“You’re saying you’re going to rest tomorrow?”

“We think so. We’ll probably talk about it again tonight but we have Alice’s blessing and Roger really thinks it’s the right move. What we’d do is put on a bunch of cleanup wits in the morning and then bring Annabelle Crowe out after lunch. We’d end with her – a human story. She’ll be our closer.”

Bosch was speechless. It might be the right move from a prosecutorial point of view. But that would put J. Reason Fowkkes in control of things as early as Tuesday.

“Harry, what do you think?”

He took a long pull on the bottle. The beer wasn’t that cold. It had been in the car for a while.

“I think you only get one shot,” he said, continuing the weaponry imagery. “You two better think long and hard about it tonight while you’re making the pasta. You don’t get a second chance to put on a case.”

“We know, Harry. And how’d you know I was making pasta?”

He could hear the smile in her voice.

“Lucky guess.”

“Well, don’t worry, we’ll think long and hard. We have been.”

She paused, allowing him a chance to respond but he was silent.

“In case we go this way, what’s the status on Crowe?”

“She’s waiting in the wings. Good to go.”

“Can you reach her tonight?”

“No problem. I’ll tell her to be there by noon tomorrow.”

“Thanks, Harry. See you in the morning.”

They hung up. Bosch thought about things. He wondered if he should call McCaleb and tell him what was happening. He decided to wait. He walked out into the living room and turned on the stereo. The Art Pepper CD was still in the play slot. The music soon filled the room.

McCaleb was leaning against the Cherokee parked in front of the LAPD’s Hollywood station when Winston pulled up in a BMW Z 3 and parked. When she got out she saw McCaleb studying her car.

“I was running late. I didn’t have time to pick up a company car.”

“I like your wheels. You know what they say about L.A., you are what you drive.”

“Don’t start profiling me, Terry. It’s too fucking early. Where’s the book and the tape?”

He noted her profanity but kept his thoughts on that to himself. He pushed off the car and went around to the passenger side. He opened the door and took out the murder book and the crime scene tape. He handed them to her and she took them back to her car. McCaleb closed and locked the Cherokee, looking down through the window to the floor of the backseat where he had covered the Kinko’s box with the morning newspaper. Before coming to the rendezvous he had gone to the twenty-four-hour shop on Sunset and photocopied the entire murder book. The tape was a problem; he didn’t know where to get it dubbed on short notice. So he’d simply bought a videocassette at the Rite-Aid near the marina and slipped the blank tape into the case Winston had given him. It was his guess that she wouldn’t check to make sure he had returned the correct tape.

When she came back from her car he pointed with his chin across the street.

“I guess I owe you a box of doughnuts.”

She looked. Across Wilcox from the station was a shabby two-story building with a handful of storefront bail bond operations with phone numbers advertised in each window in cheap neon, maybe to help prospective clients memorize them from the backseat of passing patrol cars. The middle business had a painted sign above the window: Valentino Bonds.

“Which one?” Winston asked.

“Valentino. As in Rudy Valentino Tafero. That’s what they used to call him when he worked this side of the street.”

McCaleb appraised the small business again and shook his head.

“I still don’t see how a neon bondsman and David Storey ever hooked up.”

“Hollywood is just street trash with money. So what are we doing here? I don’t have a lot of time.”

“You bring your badge?”

She gave him a don’t-fuck-with-me look and he explained what he wanted to do. They went up the steps and into the station. At the front desk Winston flashed her badge and asked for the A.M. watch sergeant. A man with Zucker on his name plate and sergeant’s stripes on the sleeve of his uniform came out from the small office. Winston showed her badge again, introduced herself and then introduced McCaleb as her associate. Zucker knitted his healthy set of eyebrows together but didn’t ask what associate meant.

“We’re working a homicide case from New Year’s Eve. The victim spent the night before in your tank. We -”

“Edward Gunn.”

“Right. You knew him?”

“He’d been in a few times. And of course I heard he won’t be coming back.”

“We need to talk to whoever runs the tank on A.M. watch.”

“Well, that would be me, I guess. We don’t have a specific duty. It’s sort of catch as catch can around here. What do you want to know?”

McCaleb took a set of photocopies from the murder book out of his jacket pocket and spread them on the counter. He noticed Winston’s look but ignored it.

“We’re interested in how he made bail,” he said.

Zucker turned the pages around so he could read them. He put his finger on Rudy Tafero’s signature.

“Says it right here. Rudy Tafero. He’s got a place across the street. He came over and bailed him out.”

“Did someone call him?”

“Yeah, the guy did. Gunn.”

McCaleb tapped his finger on the copy of the booking slip.

“It says here that when he got his call he called this number. It’s his sister.”

“Then she must’ve called Rudy for him.”

“So nobody gets two calls.”

“Nope, ’round here we’re usually so busy they’re lucky if they get the one.”

McCaleb nodded. He folded the photocopies and was about to put them back in his pocket when Winston took them from his hand.

“I’ll hang on to those,” she said.

She slipped the folded copies into a back pocket of her black jeans.

“Sergeant Zucker,” she said. “You wouldn’t be the kind of nice guy who would call Tafero, being that he’s former LAPD, and tip him that he had a potential fish over here in the tank, would you?”

Zucker stared at her for a moment, his face a stone.

“It’s very important, Sergeant. If you don’t tell us, it could come back on you.”

The stone cracked into a humorless smile.

“No, I’m not that kind of nice guy,” Zucker said. “And I don’t have any nice guys like that on A.M. watch. And speaking of which, I just got off shift which means I don’t have to be talking to you anymore. Have a nice day.”

He started to step away from the counter.

“One last thing,” Winston said quickly.

Zucker turned back to her.

“Were you the one who called Harry Bosch and told him Gunn was in the tank?”

Zucker nodded.

“I had a standing request from him. Any and every time Gunn was brought in here, Bosch wanted to know about it. He’d come in and talk to the guy, try to get him to say something about that old case. Bosch wouldn’t give up on it.”