Michael Connelly - The Closers

Edgar finally smiled and Bosch knew everything was all right between them.

“A little of both,” Bosch said. “I need to pull an old file. Where do they keep them now in this palace?”

“How old is it? They started shipping stuff downtown to be microfilmed.”

“Would’ve been in two thousand. You remember Michael Allen Smith?”

Edgar nodded.

“Of course I do. Someone like me isn’t going to forget Smith. What do you want with him?”

“I just want his picture. That file still here?”

“Yeah, anything that fresh is still around. Follow me.”

He led Bosch to a locked door. Edgar had a key and soon they were in a small room lined with shelves crowded with blue binders. Edgar located the Michael Allen Smith murder book and pulled it off a shelf. He dropped it into Bosch’s hands. It was heavy. It had been a tough case.

Bosch took the murder book to the cubicle next to Edgar’s and started flipping through it until he came to a section of photographs that showed Smith’s upper torso and several close-ups of his tattoos. His markings had been used to identify and charge him with the murders of three prostitutes five years earlier. Bosch, Edgar and Rider had worked the case. Smith was an avowed white supremacist who secretly hired black transvestite prostitutes he picked up on Santa Monica Boulevard. Then out of guilt for crossing both racial and sexual lines, he would kill them. It somehow made him feel better about his transgressions. The key break in the case came when Rider found a prostitute who had seen one of the victims get into a van with a customer. He was able to describe a distinctive tattoo on the john’s hand. That eventually led them to Smith, who had collected a variety of tattoos while in various prisons around the country. He was tried, convicted and sent to death row, where he was still dodging the needle with a barrage of legal appeals.

Bosch removed the photos that showed Smith’s neck, hands and upper left arm, all of which were festooned with prison ink.

“I need these while I’m upstairs. If you’re leaving and need to lock the file room I can just leave these on your desk.”

Edgar nodded.

“That’ll be fine. So what are you getting into, man? You’re going to put that shit on yourself?”

“That’s right. I want to be like Mike.”

Edgar narrowed his eyes.

“This connected to that Chatsworth Eights stuff we were talking about yesterday?”

Bosch smiled.

“You know, Jerry, you ought to be a detective. You’re good at it.”

Edgar nodded like he was merely putting up with another sarcastic assault.

“You going to get the haircut, too?” he asked.

“Nah, I wasn’t planning on going that far,” Bosch said. “I’m going to be sort of a reformed skinhead, I think.”

“I get it.”

“So, listen, are you busy tonight? This shouldn’t take too long up there. If you want to wait and finish your puzzle, we could go grab a steak over at Musso’s.”

Just saying it made Bosch hungry for it. That and a vodka martini.

“Nah, Harry, I gotta go over the hill to the Sportsmen’s Lodge for Sheree Riley’s retirement gig. That’s why I was killing time here. I was just waiting out the traffic.”

Sheree Riley was a sex crimes investigator. Bosch had worked with her on occasion but they had never been close. When sex and murder entwined, the cases were usually so brutal and difficult there wasn’t much room for anything but the work. Bosch didn’t know she was retiring.

“Maybe we can get that steak some other time,” Edgar said. “That cool?”

“Everything’s cool, Jerry. Have a good time up there and tell her I said hello and good luck. And thanks for the pictures. They’ll be on your desk.”

Bosch headed back toward the hallway but heard Edgar curse. He turned around and saw his old partner standing and looking into his cubicle with his arms wide.

“Where’d my damn pencil go?”

Bosch scanned the floor and didn’t see it. Eventually his eyes rose and he saw the pencil stuck into the sound-absorption tiles in the ceiling above Edgar’s head.

“Jerry, sometimes what goes up doesn’t come down.”

Edgar looked up and saw his pencil. It took him two jumps to grab it.

The door to the vice unit on the second floor was locked but this was not unusual. Bosch knocked and it was quickly answered by an undercover officer Bosch didn’t recognize.

“Is Vicki here? She’s expecting me.”

“Then come on in.”

The officer stepped back and let Bosch enter. He saw that this room had not been changed dramatically during the retrofitting. It was a long room with work counters running down both sides. Above each vice officer’s space was a framed movie poster. In Hollywood Division, only posters from movies actually filmed in the division were allowed to grace the walls. He found Vicki Landreth at a workspace under a poster from Blue Neon Night, a film Bosch had not seen. She and the other officer were the only ones in the office. Bosch guessed everybody else was already out on the streets for the night shift.

“Hey, Bosch,” Landreth said.

“Hey, Vic. You still have time to do this?”

“For you, honey, I will always make time.”

Landreth was a former Hollywood makeup artist. One day twenty years earlier she was talked into taking a ride-along with one of the off-duty officers working security on the set. The guy was just trying to make time with her, hoping maybe she’d catch a thrill on the ride-along and it would lead to something else. What it led to was Landreth’s enrollment in the police academy and her becoming a reserve officer, working two shifts a month on patrol, filling in where needed. Then someone in vice found out about her daytime job and asked her to work her two shifts in vice, where she could be used to make undercover officers look more like prostitutes and pimps and drug users and street people. Soon Vicki found the cop work more interesting than the movie work. She quit the industry and became a full-time cop. Her makeup skills were highly coveted and her niche in Hollywood Division was secure.

Bosch showed her the photos of Michael Allen Smith’s tattoos and she studied them for a few moments.

“Nice guy, huh?” she finally said.

“One of the best.”

“And you want all of this done tonight?”

“No. I was thinking about the lightning bolts on the neck. And maybe the bicep, if you could do it.”

“It’s all jailhouse. No real art to it. One color. I can do it. Sit down over here and take off your shirt.”

She led him to a makeup station, where he sat on a stool next to a rack of various body paints and powders. On an upper shelf there were mannequin heads with wigs and beards on them. Below these someone had taped the names of various supervisors in the division.

Bosch took off his shirt and tie. He was wearing a T-shirt underneath.

“I want these to be seen but I don’t want to be too obvious about it,” he said. “I was thinking that you could work it so if I had on a T-shirt like this you would sort of see parts of the tats sticking out. Enough to know what they are and what they mean.”

“Not a problem. Hold still.”

She used a piece of chalk to mark the lines on his skin where the shirt’s sleeve and neck reached.

“These will be the visibility lines,” she explained. “You just tell me how much you want to go above and below them.”

“Got it.”

“Now take it all off, Harry.”

She said it with undisguised sensuality in her voice. Bosch pulled his shirt over his head and tossed it over a chair with his other shirt and the tie. He turned back to her and Landreth was studying his chest and shoulders. She reached over and touched the scar on his left shoulder.