Michael Connelly: The Closers

“Listen to me, Bosch. Don’t ever break the law to enforce the law. At all times you do your job constitutionally and compassionately. I will accept it no other way. This city will accept it no other way. Are we okay on that?”

“We are okay.”

“Then we are good to go.”

Bosch took his cue and stood up. The chief surprised him by also standing and extending his hand. Bosch thought he wanted to shake hands and extended his own. The chief put something in his hand and Bosch looked down to see the gold detective’s shield. He had his old number back. It had not been given away. He almost smiled.

“Wear it well,” the police chief said. “And proudly.”

“I will.”

Now they shook hands, but as they did so the chief didn’t smile.

“The chorus of forgotten voices,” he said.

“Excuse me, Chief?”

“That’s what I think about when I think of the cases down there in Open-Unsolved. It’s a house of horrors. Our greatest shame. All those cases. All those voices. Every one of them is like a stone thrown into a lake. The ripples move out through time and people. Families, friends, neighbors. How can we call ourselves a city when there are so many ripples, when so many voices have been forgotten by this department?”

Bosch let go of his hand and didn’t say anything. There was no answer for the chief’s question.

“I changed the name of the unit when I came into the department. Those aren’t cold cases, Detective. They never go cold. Not for some people.”

“I understand that.”

“Then go down there and clear cases. That’s what your art is. That’s why we need you and why you are here. That’s why I am taking a chance with you. Show them we do not forget. Show them that in Los Angeles cases don’t go cold.”

“I will.”

Bosch left him there, still standing and maybe a little haunted by the voices. Like himself. Bosch thought that maybe for the first time he had actually connected on some level with the man at the top. In the military it is said that you go into battle and fight and are willing to die for the men who sent you. Bosch never felt that when he was moving through the darkness of the tunnels in Vietnam. He had felt alone and that he was fighting for himself, fighting to stay alive. That had carried with him into the department and he had at times adopted the view that he was fighting in spite of the men at the top. Now maybe things would be different.

In the hallway he punched the elevator button harder than he needed to. He had too much excitement and energy and he understood this. The chorus of forgotten voices. The chief seemed to know the song they were singing. And Bosch certainly did, too. Most of his life had been spent listening to that song.

BOSCH RODE THE ELEVATOR just one flight down to five. This, too, was new territory for him. Five had always been a civilian floor. It primarily housed many of the department’s mid- and low-level administrative offices, most of them filled with nonsworn employees, budgeters, analysts, pencil pushers. Civilians. Before now there had been no reason to come to the fifth.

There were no placards in the elevator lobby that pointed the way to specific offices. It was the kind of floor where you knew where you were going before you stepped off the elevator. But not Bosch. The hallways on the floor formed the letter H and he went the wrong way twice before finally finding the door marked 503. There was nothing else on the door. He paused before opening it and thought about what he was doing and what he was starting. He knew it was the right thing. It was almost as if he could hear the voices coming through the door. All eight thousand of them.

Kiz Rider was sitting on a desk just inside, sipping a cup of steaming coffee. The desk looked like a place for a receptionist but Bosch knew from his frequent calls in the prior weeks that there was no receptionist in this squad. There was no money for such a luxury. Rider raised her wrist and shook her head as she checked her watch.

“I thought we agreed on eight o’clock,” she said. “Is that how it’s going to be, partner? You waltzing in every morning whenever you feel like it?”

Bosch looked at his watch. It was five minutes after eight. He looked back at her and smiled. Rider smiled and said, “We’re over here.”

Rider was a short woman who carried a few extra pounds. Her hair was short and now had some gray in it. She was very dark complected, which made her smile all the more brilliant. She slipped off the desk, and from behind where she had perched she raised a second cup of coffee to him.

“See if I remembered that right.”

He checked and nodded.

“Black, just like I like my partners.”

“Funny. I’ll have to write you up for that.”

She led the way. The office seemed to be empty. It was large, even for a squad room serving nine investigators-four teams and an OIC. The walls were painted a light shade of blue, like Bosch often saw on the screens of computers. It was carpeted in gray. There were no windows. At the positions on the walls where there should have been windows there were bulletin boards or nicely framed crime scene photos from many years back. Bosch could tell that in these black and whites the photographers had often put their artistic skills ahead of their clinical duties. The shots were heavy on mood and shadows. Not many of the crime scene details were apparent.

Rider must have known he was looking at the photos.

“They told me that writer James Ellroy picked these out and had them framed for the office,” she said.

She led him around a partial wall that broke the room in two and into an alcove where two gray steel desks were pushed together so the detectives who sat at them would face each other. Rider put her coffee down on one. There were already files stacked on it and personal things like a coffee mug full of pens and a picture frame at an angle that hid the photo it held. A laptop computer was open and humming on the desk. She had moved into the squad the week before while Bosch was still clearing customs-customs being the medical exam and final paperwork that brought him back onto the job.

The other desk was clean, empty and waiting for him. He moved behind it and put his coffee down. He suppressed a smile as well as he could.

“Welcome back, Roy,” Rider said.

That made the smile break through. It made Bosch feel good to be called Roy again. It was a tradition carried by many of the city’s homicide detectives. There was a legendary homicide man named Russell Kuster who had worked out of Hollywood Division many years back. He was the ultimate professional, and many of the detectives working murders in the city today had come under his tutelage at one point or another. He was killed in an off-duty shootout in 1990. But his habit of calling people Roy-no matter their real name-was carried on. Its origin had become obscure. Some said it was because Kuster once had a partner who loved Roy Acuff and it had started with him. Others said it was because Kuster liked the idea of the homicide cop being the Roy Rogers type, wearing the white hat and riding to the rescue, making things right. It didn’t matter anymore. Bosch knew it was an honor just to be called Roy again.

He sat down. The chair was old and lumpy, guaranteed to give him a backache if he spent too much time in it. But he hoped that would not be the case. In his first run as a homicide detective he had lived by the adage Get off your ass and knock on doors . He didn’t see any reason that should change this time around.

“Where is everybody?” he asked.

“Having breakfast. I forgot. They told me last week that the routine is that on Monday mornings everybody meets early for breakfast. They usually go over to the Pacific. I didn’t remember until I got in here this morning and found the place dead, but they should be back here soon.”