Michael Connelly - The Closers

Garcia pointed an angry finger at Bosch.

“How fucking dare you? You are on thin ice here, Bosch. I could make one call to the sixth floor and you’d be out on the street before sundown. You understand me? I know about you. You’re just back from retirement and that makes you expendable with one phone call. You understand me?”

“Sure. I understand you.”

Bosch sat down in one of the chairs in front of the desk, hoping it might defuse the tension in the room a little bit. Garcia hesitated and then he sat down as well.

“I find what you have just said to me completely insulting,” he said, his voice juiced with anger.

“I’m sorry, Commander. I was trying to see what you knew.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I am sorry, sir, but the case was definitely stonewalled by chain of command. I don’t want to get into names with you at this point. Some of them are still active. But I think this case revolved on race-the connection to Mackey and now Burkhart proves it. And you didn’t have Mackey or Burkhart back then, but you had the gun and there were other things. I needed to find out if you were part of it. I would say by your reaction that you weren’t.”

“But you are telling me my partner was, and that he kept it from me.”

Bosch nodded.

“Impossible,” Garcia protested. “Ron and I were close.”

“All partners are close, Commander. But not that close. From what I understand, you took care of the book and Green pressed the case forward. If he encountered resistance from within the department, he might have chosen to keep it from you. I think he did. Maybe he was protecting you, maybe he was humiliated about being vulnerable to the push. ”

Garcia dropped his eyes from Bosch and looked down at his desk. Bosch could tell he was looking at a memory. Something in the stone wall of his face broke and gave way.

“I think maybe I knew something was wrong,” he said quietly. “About halfway through.”

“How so?”

“Early on we decided to split up the parents. Ron took the father and I took the mother. You know, to establish relationships. Ron was having trouble with the father. He was volatile. He had been passive and then all of a sudden he’s on Ron’s ass wanting results. But there was something more there and Ron kept it from me.”

“Did you ask about it?”

“Yeah. I asked. He just told me the father was a handful. He said he was paranoid about race, that he thought his daughter was killed because of the race thing. And then he said something that I still remember. He said, ‘We can’t go there.’ That’s all he said, but it stuck with me because that didn’t sound like the Ron Green I knew. We can’t go there. The Ron Green I knew would go wherever it led. There were no can’t-go-theres with him. Not until that case.”

Garcia raised his eyes to Bosch and Bosch nodded, his way of thanking him for opening up.

“You think it had something to do with what happened later?” Bosch asked.

“You mean the suicide?”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Anything’s possible. After this case we sort of went in different directions. The thing about partners is that once the work stops, there isn’t a whole lot to talk about.”

“True,” Bosch said.

“I was in a command staff meeting at Seventy-seventh-I was assigned there after making lieutenant. That was when I found out he was dead. It came across in a staff notice. I guess that shows how far apart we had gotten. I found out he had killed himself a week after he did it.”

Bosch just nodded. There was nothing he could say to that.

“I think I have a staff meeting now, Detective,” Garcia said. “It’s time for you to go.”

“Yes, sir. But you know, I was thinking, in order for them to push Ron Green so hard, they must have already had something to push him with. You remember anything like that? Did he have an IAD beef running at the time?”

Garcia shook his head. He wasn’t saying no to Bosch’s question. He was saying something else.

“You know, this department has always had more cops assigned to investigating cops than it has to investigating murders. I always thought that if I reached the top, I would change that.”

“Are you saying there was an investigation?”

“I’m saying it was rare in the department not to have something on your record. There was a file on Ron, sure. He had been accused of assaulting a suspect. It was bullshit. The kid bumped his head and needed stitches when Ron was putting him in the back of the car. Big deal, right? Turned out the kid had connections and the IAD wasn’t letting it go away.”

“So they could have used that to push this case.”

“Could have, depending on how much a believer in conspiracy theories you are.”

When it comes to the LAPD I am a believer, Bosch thought but didn’t say.

“Okay, sir, I think I have the picture,” he said instead. “I’ll get out of here now.”

Bosch stood up to leave.

“I understand your need to know all of this,” Garcia said. “I just don’t appreciate how you sandbagged me.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“No you’re not, Detective Bosch. Not really.”

Bosch said nothing. He moved to the door and opened it. He looked back at Garcia and tried to think of something to say. He came up blank. He turned and left, closing the door behind him.

KIZ RIDER WAS STILL sitting in the waiting area outside Judge Anne Demchak’s chambers when Bosch got there. He had been caught in mid-afternoon traffic coming back to downtown from Van Nuys and thought he might have missed the conference with the judge. Rider was reading a magazine, but Bosch’s first thought was that at this point in the case he would be unable to leisurely start flipping through a magazine. At this point his focus could not be split. He was all about one thing. In a strange way, he likened it to surfing, a pursuit he had not followed since the summer of 1964, when he ran away from a foster home and lived on the beach. Many years had passed since then but he still remembered the water tunnel. The goal was to tuck yourself into the tube, the place where water swirled completely around you, where there was nothing but the water and the ride. Bosch was in the tube now. There was nothing but the case.

“How long you been here?” he asked.

Rider checked her watch.

“About forty minutes.”

“Has she been in there with it the whole time?”

“Yup.”

“You worried?”

“No. I’ve gone to her before. Once on a Hollywood case after you left. She’s just thorough. She reads every page. It takes a while but she’s one of the good ones.”

“The story’s running tomorrow. We need her to sign this today.”

“I know, Harry. Relax. Sit down.”

Bosch stayed standing. The judges rotated warrant duty. Getting Demchak was luck of the draw.

“I’ve never dealt with her before,” he said. “Was she a DA?”

“No. Other side. Public defender.”

Bosch groaned. His experience had been that criminal defense attorneys who became judges always brought at least the shadow of their allegiance to the defendant with them to the bench.

“We’re in trouble,” he said.

“No we’re not. We’ll be okay. Please sit down. You’re making me nervous.”

“Is Judy Champagne still on the bench? Maybe we can take it into her.”

Judy Champagne was a former prosecutor married to a former cop. They used to say he hooked them and she cooked them. Once she became a judge she was Bosch’s favorite for taking warrants to. Not because she leaned toward the cops. She didn’t. She was down-the-line fair, and that’s what Bosch could count on.

“She’s still a judge but we can’t shop search warrants around the building. You know that, Harry. Now would you please sit down? I’ve got something to show you.”