Michael Connelly: Trunk Music

Edgar and Rider walked over.

“What’ve we got?” Bosch asked.

Rider answered.

“One in the trunk. White male. Gunshots. We haven’t checked him out much further than that. We’ve been keeping the lid closed. We’ve got everybody rolling, though.”

Bosch started walking toward the Rolls, going around the charred remnants of an old campfire that had burned in the center of the clearing. The other two followed.

“This okay?” Bosch asked as he got close to the Rolls.

“Yeah, we did the search,” Edgar said. “Nothing much. Got some leakage underneath the car. That’s about it, though. Cleanest scene I’ve been at in a while.”

Jerry Edgar, called in from home like everybody else on the team, was wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt. On the left breast of the shirt was a drawing of a badge and the words LAPD Homicide. As he walked past Bosch, Harry saw that the back of the shirt said Our Day Begins When Your Day Ends. The tight-fitting shirt contrasted sharply with Edgar’s dark skin and displayed his heavily muscled upper body as he moved with an athletic grace toward the Rolls. Bosch had worked with him on and off for six years but they had never become close outside of the job. This was the first time it had dawned on Bosch that Edgar actually was an athlete, that he must regularly work out.

It was unusual for Edgar not to be in one of his crisp Nordstrom’s suits. But Bosch thought he knew why. His informal dress practically guaranteed he would avoid having to do the dirty work, next-of-kin notification.

They slowed their steps when they got close to the Rolls, as if perhaps whatever was wrong here might be contagious. The car was parked with its rear end facing south and visible to the spectators in the upper levels of the Bowl across the way. Bosch considered their situation again.

“So you want to pull this guy out of there with all those people with their wine and box lunches from the Grill watching?” he asked. “How do you think that’s going to play on the TV tonight?”

“Well,” Edgar replied, “we thought we’d kind of leave that decision to you, Harry. You being the three.”

Edgar smiled and winked.

“Yeah, right,” Bosch said sarcastically. “I’m the three.”

Bosch was still getting used to the idea of being a so-called team leader. It had been almost eighteen months since he had officially investigated a homicide, let alone headed up a team of three investigators. He had been assigned to the Hollywood Division burglary table when he returned to work from his involuntary stress leave in January. The detective bureau commander, Lieutenant Grace Billets, had explained that his assignment was a way of gradually easing him back into detective work. He knew that explanation was a lie and that she had been told where to put him, but he took the demotion without complaint. He knew they would come for him eventually.

After eight months of pushing papers and making the occasional burglary arrest, Bosch was called into the CO’s office and Billets told him she was making changes. The division’s homicide clearance rate had dipped to its lowest point ever. Fewer than half of the killings were cleared. She had taken over command of the bureau nearly a year earlier, and the sharpest decline, she struggled to admit, had come under her own watch. Bosch could have told her that the decline was due in part to her not following the same statistical deceptions practiced by her predecessor, Harvey Pounds, who had always found ways of pumping up the clearance rate, but he kept that to himself. Instead, he sat quietly while Billets laid out her plan.

The first part of the plan was to move Bosch back to the homicide table as of the start of September. A detective named Selby, who barely pulled his weight, would go from homicide to Bosch’s slot on the burglary table. Billets was also adding a young and smart detective transfer she had previously worked with in the Pacific Division detective bureau, Kizmin Rider. Next, and this was the radical part, Billets was changing the traditional pairing of detectives. Instead, the nine homicide detectives assigned to Hollywood would be grouped into three teams of three. Each of the three teams would have a detective third grade in charge. Bosch was a three. He was named team leader of squad one.

The reasoning behind the change was sound-at least on paper. Most homicides are solved in the first forty-eight hours after discovery or they aren’t solved at all. Billets wanted more solved so she was going to put more detectives on each one. The part that didn’t look so good on paper, especially to the nine detectives, was that previously there had been four pairs of partners working homicide cases. The new changes meant each detective would be working every third case that came up instead of every fourth. It meant more cases, more work, more court time, more overtime, and more stress. Only the overtime was considered a positive. But Billets was tough and didn’t care much for the complaints of the detectives. And her new plan quickly won her the obvious nickname.

“Anybody talk to Bullets yet?” Bosch asked.

“I called,” Rider said. “She was up in Santa Barbara for the weekend. Left a number with the desk. She’s coming down early but she’s still at least an hour and a half from us. She said she was going to have to drop the hubby off first and would probably just roll to the bureau.”

Bosch nodded and stepped to the rear of the Rolls. He picked up the smell right away. It was faint but it was there, unmistakable. Like no other. He nodded to no one in particular again. He placed his briefcase on the ground, opened it and took a pair of latex gloves from the cardboard box inside. He then closed the case and placed it a few feet behind him and out of the way.

“Okay, let’s take a look,” he said while stretching the gloves over his hands. He hated how they felt. “Let’s stand close, we don’t want to give the people in the Bowl more of a show than they paid for.”

“It ain’t pretty,” Edgar said as he stepped forward.

The three of them stood together at the back end of the Rolls to shield the view from the concertgoers. But Bosch knew that anybody with a decent pair of field glasses would know what was going on. This was L.A.

Before opening the trunk, he noticed the car’s personalized license plate. It said TNA. Before he could speak, Edgar answered his unasked question.

“Comes back to TNA Productions. On Melrose.”

“T and A?”

“No, the letters, T-N-A, just like on the plate.”

“Where on Melrose?”

Edgar took a notebook out of his pocket and looked through the pages. The address he gave was familiar to Bosch but he couldn’t place it. He knew it was down near Paramount, the sprawling studio that took up the entire north side of the fifty-five-hundred block. The big studio was surrounded by smaller production houses and ministudios. They were like sucker fish that swam around the mouth of the big shark, hoping for the scraps that didn’t get sucked in.

“Okay, let’s do it.”

He turned his attention back to the trunk. He could see that the lid had been lightly placed down so it would not lock closed. Using one rubber-coated finger, he gently lifted it.

As the trunk was opened, it expelled a sickeningly fetid breath of death. Bosch immediately wished he had a cigarette but those days were through. He knew what a defense lawyer could do with one ash from a cop’s smoke at a crime scene. Reasonable doubts were built on less.

He leaned in under the lid to get a close look, careful not to touch the bumper with his pants. The body of a man was in the trunk. His skin was a grayish white and he was expensively dressed in linen pants sharply pressed and cuffed at the bottom, a pale blue shirt with a flowery pattern and a leather sport coat. His feet were bare.