Michael Connelly - Angels Flight

“Did you find something of interest in Stacey’s bedroom?”

Bosch stopped what he was doing and looked over the top of the briefcase at her for a moment.

“Not really,” he said. “I was just getting a feel for the place. I assume it was thoroughly searched before and there isn’t anything in there that I could find. Did Stacey like the pool?”

He went back to his work inside the briefcase while she told him what a fine swimmer her daughter had been. Bosch really wasn’t doing anything. He was just following an act he had rehearsed in his head all morning.

“She could go up and back without having to come up for air,” Kate Kincaid said.

Bosch closed the case and looked at her. She was smiling at the memory of her daughter. Bosch smiled but without any warmth.

“Mrs. Kincaid, how do you spell innocence?”

“Excuse me?”

“The word. Innocence. How do you spell it?”

“Is this about Stacey? I don’t understand. Why are you – ”

“Indulge me for a moment. Please. Spell the word.”

“I’m not a good speller. With Stacey I always kept a dictionary in my purse in case she asked about a word. You know, one of those little ones that – ”

“Go ahead. Try it.”

She paused to think. The confusion was evident on her face.

“I-double n, I know there’s two. I-double n-o-c-e-n-s-e.”

She looked at him and raised her eyebrows in a question. Bosch shook his head and reopened the briefcase.

“Almost,” he said. “But there’s two c’s, no s.”

“Darn. I told you.”

She smiled at him. He took something out of the briefcase, closed it and put it down on the floor. He got up and walked across to the couch. He handed her a plastic document envelope. Inside it was one of the anonymous letters that had been sent to Howard Elias.

“Take a look,” he said. “You spelled it wrong there, too.”

She stared at the letter for a long time and then took a deep breath. She spoke without looking up at Bosch.

“I guess I should have used my little dictionary. But I was in a hurry when I wrote this.”

Bosch felt a lifting inside. He knew then that there would be no fight, no difficulty. The woman had been waiting for this moment. Maybe she knew it was coming. Maybe that was why she had said she felt better than she had in a long, long time.

“I understand,” Bosch said. “Would you like to talk to me about this, Mrs. Kincaid? About everything?”

“Yes,” she said, “I would.”

• • •

Bosch put a fresh battery into the tape recorder, then turned it on and put it down on the coffee table, the microphone pointed up so that it would capture his voice as well as Kate Kincaid’s.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

He then identified himself and said who she was, noted the date, time and location of the interview. He read off a constitutional rights advisement from a printed form he had taken from his briefcase.

“Do you understand these rights as I have just read them?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Do you wish to talk with me, Mrs. Kincaid, or do you wish to contact an attorney?”

“No.”

“No what?”

“No attorney. An attorney can’t help me. I want to talk.”

This gave Bosch pause. He was thinking about how best to keep hair off the cake.

“Well, I can’t give you legal advice. But when you say, ‘An attorney can’t help me,’ I’m not sure that that is going to constitute a waiver. You see what I mean? Because it is always possible that an attorney could – ”

“Detective Bosch, I don’t want an attorney. I fully understand my rights and I don’t want an attorney.”

“Okay, then I need you to sign this paper at the bottom and then sign again where it says that you do not request an attorney.”

He put the rights form down on the coffee table and watched her sign it. He then took it back and made sure she had signed her own name. He then signed it himself as the witness and put it in one of the slots of the accordion file in the briefcase. He sat back down in the chair and looked at her. He thought for a moment about talking to her about a spousal waiver but decided that could wait. He’d let the district attorney’s office handle that – when and if the time came.

“Then I guess this is it,” he said. “You want to start, Mrs. Kincaid, or do you want me to ask you questions?”

He was using her name frequently on purpose – in case the tape was ever played before a jury there would be no misunderstanding of whom the voices belonged to.

“My husband killed my daughter. I guess that’s what you want to know first. That’s why you are here.”

Bosch froze for a moment and then slowly nodded.

“How do you know this?”

“For a long time it was a suspicion… then it became my belief based on things I had heard. Eventually, he actually told me. I finally confronted him and he admitted it.”

“What exactly did he tell you?”

“He said that it was an accident – but you don’t strangle people by accident. He said she threatened him, said that she was going to tell her friends what he… what he and his friends did to her. He said he was trying to stop her, to talk her out of doing it. He said things got out of hand.”

“This occurred where?”

“Right here. In the house.”

“When?”

She gave the date of her daughter’s reported abduction. She seemed to understand that Bosch had to ask some questions that had obvious answers. He was building a record.

“Your husband had sexually abused Stacey?”

“Yes.”

“He admitted this to you?”

“Yes.”

She started to cry then and opened her purse for a tissue. Bosch let her alone for a minute. He wondered if she was crying because of grief or guilt or out of relief that the story was finally being told. He thought it was probably a combination of all three.

“Over how long a period was she abused?” he finally asked.

Kate Kincaid dropped the tissue to her lap.

“I don’t know. We were married five years before… before she died. I don’t know when it started.”

“When did you become aware of it?”

“I would rather not answer that question, if you don’t mind.”

Bosch studied her. Her eyes were downcast. The question was at the foundation of her guilt.

“It’s important, Mrs. Kincaid.”

“She came to me once.” She got a fresh tissue from her purse for a fresh torrent of tears. “About a year before… She said that he was doing things she didn’t think were right… At first, I didn’t believe her. But I asked him about it anyway. He denied it, of course. And I believed him. I thought it was an adjustment problem. You know, to a stepfather. I thought maybe this was her way of acting out or something.”

“And later?”

She didn’t say anything. She looked down at her hands. She pulled her purse onto her lap and held it tightly.

“Mrs. Kincaid?”

“And later there were things. Little things. She never wanted me to go out and leave her with him – but she’d never tell me why. Looking back, it is obvious why. It wasn’t so obvious then. One time he was taking a long time in her room saying good night. I went to see what was wrong and the door was locked.”

“Did you knock on the door?”

She sat frozen for a long moment before shaking her head no.

“Is that a no?”

Bosch had to ask it for the tape.

“Yes, no. I did not knock.”

Bosch decided to press on. He knew that mothers of incest and molestation victims often didn’t see the obvious or take the obvious steps to save their daughters from jeopardy. Now Kate Kincaid lived in a personal hell in which her decision to give up her husband – and herself – to public ridicule and criminal prosecution would always seem like too little too late. She had been right. A lawyer couldn’t help her now. No one could.