Michael Connelly - A Darkness More Than Night

Bosch shook his shoulders in a gesture of ambivalence.

“What about him?”

“I don’t know. How well do you know him? How well did you know him?”

“Well, I knew him when he was on our team. He worked Hollywood detectives about five years while I was there. Then he pulled the pin, got his twenty-year pension and moved across the street. Started working on getting people we put in the bucket out of the bucket.”

“When you were both on the same team, both in Hollywood, were you close?”

“I don’t know what close means. We weren’t friends, we weren’t drinking buddies, he worked burglaries and I worked homicides. What are you asking so much about him for? What’s he got to do with -”

He stopped and looked at McCaleb, the wheels obviously turning inside. Rod Stewart was now singing “Twisting the Night Away.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Bosch finally asked. “You’re looking at -”

“Let me just ask some questions,” McCaleb interjected. “Then you can ask yours.”

Bosch drained his bottle and held it up until the bartender noticed.

“No table service, guys,” she called over. “Sorry.”

“Fuck that,” Bosch said.

He slid out of the booth and went to the bar. He came back with four more Rocks, though McCaleb had barely begun to drink his first one.

“Ask away,” Bosch said.

“Why weren’t you two close?”

Bosch put both elbows on the table and held a fresh bottle with both hands. He looked out of the booth and then at McCaleb.

“Five, ten years ago there were two groups in the bureau. And to a large extent it was this way in the department, too. It was like the saints and the sinners – two distinct groups.”

“The born agains and the born againsts?”

“Something like that.”

McCaleb remembered. It had become well known in local law enforcement circles a decade earlier that a group within the LAPD known as the “born agains” had members in key positions and was holding sway over promotions and choice assignments. The group’s numbers – several hundred officers of all ranks – were members of a church in the San Fernando Valley where the department’s deputy chief in charge of operations was a lay preacher. Ambitious officers joined the church in droves, in hopes of impressing the deputy chief and enhancing their career prospects. How much spirituality was involved was in question. But when the deputy chief delivered his sermon every Sunday at the 11 o’clock service, the church would be packed to standing room only with off-duty cops casting their eyes fervently on the pulpit. McCaleb had once heard a story about a car alarm going off in the parking lot during an 11 o’clock service. The hapless hype rummaging through the vehicle’s glove compartment soon found himself surrounded by a hundred guns pointed by off-duty cops.

“I take it you were on the sinners’ team, Harry.”

Bosch smiled and nodded.

“Of course.”

“And Tafero was on the saints’.”

“Yeah. And so was our lieutenant at the time. A paper pusher named Harvey Pounds. He and Tafero had their little church thing going and so they were tight. I think anybody who was tight with Pounds, whether because of church or not, wasn’t somebody I was going to gravitate toward, if you know what I mean. And they weren’t going to gravitate toward me.”

McCaleb nodded. He knew more than he was letting on.

“Pounds was the guy who messed up the Gunn case,” he said. “The one you pushed through the window.”

“He’s the one.”

Bosch dropped his head and shook it in self-disgust.

“Was Tafero there that day?”

“Tafero? I don’t know, probably.”

“Well, wasn’t there an IAD investigation with witness reports?”

“Yeah, but I didn’t look at it. I mean, I pushed the guy through a window in front of the squad. I wasn’t going to deny it.”

“And later – what, a month or so? – Pounds ends up dead in the tunnel up in the hills.”

“Griffith Park, yeah.”

“And it’s still open…”

Bosch nodded.

“Technically.”

“You said that before. What does that mean?”

“It means it’s open but nobody’s working it. The LAPD has a special classification for cases like it, cases they don’t want to touch. It’s what is called closed by circumstances other than arrest.”

“And you know those circumstances?”

Bosch finished his second bottle, slid it to the side and pulled a fresh bottle in front of him.

“You’re not drinking,” he said.

“You’re doing enough for both of us. Do you know those circumstances?”

Bosch leaned forward.

“Listen, I’m going to tell you something very few people know about, okay?”

McCaleb nodded. He knew better than to ask a question now. He would just let Bosch tell it.

“Because of that window thing I went on suspension. When I got tired of walking around my house staring at the walls, I started investigating an old case. A cold case. A murder case. I went freelancing on it and I ended up following a blind trail to some very powerful people. But at the time I had no badge, no real standing. So a few times, when I made some calls, I used Pounds’s name. You know, I was trying to hide what I was doing.”

“If the department found out you were working a case while on suspension things would’ve gotten worse for you.”

“Exactly. So I used his name when I made what I thought were some routine, innocuous calls. But then one night somebody called Pounds up and told him that they had something for him, some urgent information. He went to the meet. By himself. Then they found him later in that tunnel. He’d been beaten pretty bad. Like they had tortured him. Only he couldn’t answer their questions because he was the wrong guy. I was the one who had used his name. I was the one they wanted.”

Bosch dropped his chin to his chest and was silent for a long moment.

“I got him killed,” he said without looking up. “The guy was a pure-bred asshole but my actions got him killed.”

Bosch suddenly jerked his head up and drank from his bottle. McCaleb saw his eyes were dark and shiny. They looked weary.

“Is that what you wanted to know, Terry? Does that help you?”

McCaleb nodded.

“How much of this would Tafero have known?”

“Nothing.”

“Could he have thought you were the one who called Pounds out that night?”

“Maybe. There were people who did and probably still do. But what does it mean? What’s it got to do with Gunn?”

McCaleb took his first long drink of beer. It was cold and he felt the chill in his chest. He put the bottle down and decided it was time to give something back to Bosch.

“I need to know about Tafero because I need to know about reasons, motives. I have no proof of anything – yet – but I think Tafero killed Gunn. He did it for Storey. He set you in the frame.”

“Jesus…”

“Nice perfect frame. The crime scene is connected to the painter Hieronymus Bosch, the painter is connected to you as his namesake and then you are connected to Gunn. And you know when Storey probably got the idea for it?”

Bosch shook his head. He looked too stunned to talk.

“The day you tried to interview him in his office. You played the tape in court last week. You identified yourself on it by your full first name.”

“I always do. I…”

“He then connects with Tafero and Tafero has the perfect victim to put in the frame. Gunn – a man he knew walked away from you and a murder charge six years ago.”

Bosch lifted his bottle a couple of inches off the table and brought it back down hard.

“I think the plan was twofold. If they got lucky the connection would be made quickly and you’d be fighting a murder charge before Storey’s trial even started. If that didn’t happen, then plan B. They would still have it to crush you with at trial. Destroy you, they destroy the case. Fowkkes already took out that woman today and pot-shotted a few of the other wits. What does the case rest on? You, Harry. They knew it would come down to you.”