Michael Connelly - Angels Flight

“What about Chastain? He was with you, wasn’t he?”

“I’m not worried about Chastain.”

He flipped the phone closed and got up and went to the window. He hated the feeling growing inside – that he was being worked by the case, rather than the other way around.

He blew out his breath and went back to the desk and the last notebook that Howard Elias had kept. As he paged through, he came across repeated notes regarding someone referred to as “Parker.” Bosch did not believe this to be a person’s real name, but rather a code name for a person inside Parker Center. The notations were mostly lists of questions Elias apparently intended to ask “Parker,” as well as what looked like notes on conversations with this person. They were mostly in abbreviated form or the lawyer’s own version of shorthand and therefore difficult to decipher. But in other instances the notes were clear to Bosch. One notation clearly indicated to Bosch that Elias had a deeply connected source inside Parker Center.

PARKER:

GET ALL 51S – UNSUSTAINED

SHEEHAN

COBLENZ

ROOKER

ROOKER

STANWICK

Bosch recognized the names as belonging to four RHD detectives who were among the defendants in the Black Warrior case. Elias wanted the 51 reports – or citizen complaint files – on the four detectives. More specifically, Elias wanted the unsustained files, meaning he was interested in complaints against the four that had been investigated by the IAD but not substantiated. Such unsustained complaints were removed from officers’ personnel files as a matter of department policy and were therefore out of reach of a subpoena from a lawyer like Elias. The notation in the notebook told Bosch that Elias somehow knew that there were unsubstantiated prior complaints against the four and that he had a source in Parker Center who had access to the old files on those complaints. The first assumption was not a major leap; all cops had unsubstantiated complaints. It was part of being a cop. But someone with access to that sort of file was different. If Elias had such a source, it was a well-placed source.

One of the last references to Parker in the notebook appeared to be notes of a conversation, which Bosch assumed to have been a phone call to Elias at his desk. It appeared that Elias was losing his source.

PARKER WON’T

JEOPARDY/EXPOSURE

FORCE THE ISSUE?

Parker won’t what? Bosch wondered. Turn over the files Elias wanted? Did Parker believe that getting the files to Elias would expose him as a source? There wasn’t enough there for him to make a conclusion. There wasn’t enough for him to understand what “force the issue” meant either. He wasn’t sure what any of the notes might have to do with the killing of Howard Elias. Nevertheless, Bosch was intrigued. One of the department’s most vocal and successful critics had a mole inside Parker Center. There was a traitor inside the gate and it was important to know this.

Bosch put the last notebook into his briefcase and wondered if the discoveries he had made through the notes, particularly about Elias’s source inside the department, now placed him in the area Janis Langwiser feared might be an infringement of attorney-client privilege. After mulling it over for a few moments he decided not to go out into the file room and ask her for an interpretation. He moved on with the search.

Bosch turned the chair to a side desk that had a personal computer and laser printer set up on it. The machines were off. There were two small drawers in this desk. The top contained the computer keyboard while the bottom contained office supplies with a single manila file on top. Bosch took out the file and opened it. It contained a color printout of a photo of a partially nude woman. The printout had two crease marks indicating it had been folded at one time. The photo itself did not have the technical quality of those in skin magazines found on the newsstand. There was an amateurish, badly lit quality to it. The woman in the picture was white and had short, white-blond hair. She wore thigh-high leather boots with three-inch heels and a G-string, nothing else. She stood with her rear to the camera, one foot up on a chair, her face turned mostly away. There was a tattoo of a ribbon and bow at the center of the small of her back. Bosch also saw at the bottom of the picture a notation that had been printed by hand. http:/www.girlawhirl.com/gina Bosch knew little about computers but he knew enough to understand he was looking at an Internet address.

“Kiz?” he called.

Rider was the resident computer expert on his team. Before coming to Hollywood Homicide she had worked a fraud unit in Pacific Division. A lot of the work she had done was on computers. She walked in from the file room and he waved her over to the desk.

“How is it going out there?”

“Well, we’re just stacking files. She won’t let me look through anything until we hear from the special master. I hope Chastain brings back a lot of boxes because we have a-what is that?”

She was looking at the open file and the printout of the blond woman.

“It was in the drawer. Take a look. It’s got an address on it.”

Rider came around the desk and looked down at the printout.

“It’s a web page.”

“Right. So how do we get to it and take a look?”

“Let me get in there.”

Bosch got up and Rider sat in front of the computer. Bosch stood behind the chair and watched as she turned the computer on and waited for it to boot up.

“Let’s see what Internet provider he’s got,” she said. “Did you see any letterhead around?”

“What?”

“Letterhead. Stationery. Sometimes people put their E-mail address on it. If we know Elias’s E-mail address we’re halfway there.”

Bosch understood now. He hadn’t seen any letterhead during his search.

“Hold on.”

He went out to the reception room and asked Chastain, who was sitting behind the secretary’s desk, if he’d seen any stationery. Chastain opened a drawer and pointed to an open box of letterhead stationery. Bosch grabbed a page off the top. Rider had been correct. Elias’s E-mail address was printed beneath his postal address on the top center of the page. helias@lawyerlink.net Bosch took the page with him back to Elias’s office. When he got there he saw Rider had closed the file that contained the printout of the blond woman. Bosch realized it must have been embarrassing to her.

“I got it,” he said.

She looked at the page Bosch placed on the desk next to the computer.

“Good. That’s the user name. Now we just need his password. He’s got the whole computer password protected.”

“Shit.”

“Well,” she said as she began typing, “most people choose something pretty easy – so even they won’t forget.”

She stopped typing and watched the screen. The cursor had turned into an hourglass as it worked. A message then printed across the screen informing Rider she had used an improper password.

“What did you use?” Bosch asked.

“His DOB. You did next of kin, right? What was his wife’s name?”

“Millie.”

Rider typed it in and after a few seconds got the same rejection message.

“What about his son?” Bosch asked. “His name’s Martin.”

Rider didn’t type anything.

“What’s the matter?”

“A lot of these password gates give you three strikes. If you don’t get in on the third one they go into automatic lockdown.”

“Forever?”

“No. For however long Elias would have set it at. Could be fifteen minutes or an hour or even longer. Let’s think about this for a – ”

“V-S-L-A-P-D.”

Rider and Bosch turned. Chastain was in the doorway.

“What?” Bosch asked.