Michael Connelly - Angels Flight

“Detective, have a seat,” he said as Bosch opened the door. “Where are the others?”

“Uh,” Bosch said, putting his briefcase down flat on the table. “They’re still in the field. Chief, I was just going to drop my case off and then run down to get a cup of coffee. Can I get you something?”

“No, and you do not have time for coffee. The media calls are starting. They know it was Elias. Somebody leaked. Probably in the coroner’s office. So it’s about to get crazy. I want to hear what is happening, starting right now. I have to brief the police chief, who will lead a press conference that has been scheduled for eleven. Sit down.”

Bosch took a seat opposite Irving. He had worked a case out of the conference room once before. That seemed like a long time ago but he remembered it as the time he had earned Irving’s respect and probably as much trust as the deputy chief was willing to give to anyone else who carried a badge. His eyes moved across the surface of the table and he saw the old cigarette scar that he had left during the investigation of the Concrete Blonde case. That had been a difficult case but it seemed almost routine beside the investigation he was involved in now.

“When are they coming in?” Irving asked.

He still had his fingers together like a steeple. Bosch had read in an interrogation manual that such body language denoted a feeling of superiority.

“Who?”

“The members of your team, Detective. I told you I wanted them here for the briefing and then the press conference.”

“Well, they’re not. Coming in. They are continuing the investigation. I thought that it didn’t make sense that all seven of us should just drop things to come in here when one of us could easily tell you the status of things.”

Bosch watched angry flares of red explode high on Irving’s cheeks.

“Once again we seem to have either a communication problem or the chain of command remains unclear to you. I specifically told you to have your people here.”

“I must’ve misunderstood, Chief,” Bosch lied. “I thought the important thing was the investigation. I remembered that you wanted to be brought up to date, not that you wanted everybody here. In fact, I doubt there is enough room in here for everybody. I – ”

“The point is I wanted them here. Do your partners have phones?”

“Edgar and Rider?”

“Who else?”

“They have phones but they’re dead. We’ve been running all night. Mine’s dead.”

“Then page them. Get them in here.”

Bosch slowly got up and headed to the phone which was on top of the storage cabinet that ran along one wall of the room. He called Rider and Edgar’s pagers, but when he punched in the return number he added an extra seven at the end. This was a long-standing code they used. The extra seven – as in code seven, the radio call for out of service – meant they should take their time in returning the pages, if they returned them at all.

“Okay, Chief,” Bosch said. “Hopefully, they’ll call in. What about Chastain and his people?”

“Never mind them. I want your team back here by eleven for the press conference.”

Bosch moved back to his seat.

“How come?” he asked, though he knew exactly why. “I thought you said the police chief was going – ”

“The chief will lead it. But we want to have a show of force. We want the public to know we have top-notch investigators on this case.”

“You mean top-notch black investigators, don’t you?”

Bosch and Irving held hard stares for a moment.

“Your job, Detective, is to solve this case and solve it as quickly as you can. You are not to concern yourself with other matters.”

“Well, that’s kind of hard to do, Chief, when you are pulling my people out of the field. Can’t solve anything quickly if they’ve got to be here for every dog and pony show you people cook up.”

“That is enough, Detective.”

“They are top-notch investigators. And that’s what I want to use them for. Not as cannon fodder for the department’s race relations. They don’t want to be used that way, either. That in itself is ra – ”

“Enough, I said! I do not have time to debate racism, institutional or otherwise with you, Detective Bosch. We are talking about public perceptions. Suffice it to say that if we mishandle this case or its perceptions from the outside, this city could be burning again by midnight.”

Irving paused to look at his watch.

“I meet the police chief in twenty minutes. Could you please begin to enlighten me with the accomplishments of the investigation up to this point?”

Bosch reached over and opened his briefcase. Before he could reach for his notebook the phone on the cabinet rang. He got up and went to it.

“Remember,” Irving said, “I want them here by eleven.”

Bosch nodded and picked up the phone. It wasn’t Edgar or Rider and he had not expected that it would be.

“This is Cormier downstairs in the lobby. This Bosch?”

“Yeah.”

“You just got a message here. Guy wouldn’t give a name. He just said to tell you that what you need is in a trash can in the MetroLink station, First and Hill. It’s in a manila envelope. That’s it.”

“Okay, thanks.”

He hung up and looked at Irving.

“It was something else.”

Bosch sat back down and took his notebook out of his briefcase along with the clipboard with the crime scene reports, sketches and evidence receipts attached to it. He didn’t need any of it to summarize the case but he thought it might be reassuring to Irving to see the accumulation of paper the case was engendering.

“I’m waiting, Detective,” the deputy chief said by way of prompting him.

Bosch looked up from the paperwork.

“Where we are is pretty much point zero. We have a good idea what we have. We don’t have much of a handle on the who and why.”

“Then what have we got, Detective?”

“We’re going with Elias being the primary target in what looks like an outright assassination.”

Irving brought his head down so that his clasped hands hid his face.

“I know that’s not what you want to hear, Chief, but if you want the facts, that’s what the facts point to. We have – ”

“The last thing Captain Garwood told me was that it looked like a robbery. The man was wearing a thousand-dollar suit, walking through downtown at eleven o’clock at night. His watch and wallet are missing. How can you discount the possibility of a robbery?”

Bosch leaned back and waited. He knew Irving was venting steam. The news Bosch was giving him was guaranteed to put ulcers on his ulcers once the media picked it up and ran.

“The watch and wallet have been located. They weren’t stolen.”

“Where?”

Bosch hesitated, though he had already anticipated the question. He hesitated because he was about to lie to a superior on the behalf of four men who did not deserve the benefit of the risk he was taking.

“In his desk drawer at the office. He must’ve forgotten them when he closed up and headed to his apartment. Or maybe he left them on purpose in case he got robbed.”

Bosch realized he would still need to come up with an explanation in his reports when the autopsy on Elias revealed the postmortem scratches on his wrist. He would have to write it off to having occurred while the body was being manipulated or moved by the investigators.

“Then perhaps it was an armed robber who shot Elias when he did not turn over a wallet,” Irving said, oblivious to Bosch’s internal discomfort. “Perhaps it was a robber who shot first and searched for valuables second.”

“The sequence and manner of the shots suggests otherwise. The sequence suggests a personal tie – rage transmitted from one person to Elias. Whoever did this knew Elias.”