Michael Connelly - The Black Ice

“Maybe he went north,” Bosch said.

“No way he’d try to cross. He knows if we get him up there, he’ll never see daylight again. He went south, where’s he’s safe.”

There were several other agents in the factory with clipboards, cataloging and searching. They had found a machine that hollowed out table legs so that they could be filled with contraband, recapped and sent across the border. Earlier they had found the second tunnel opening in the barn and followed it through to EnviroBreed. There had been no explosives on the trapdoor and they had gone in. The place was empty except for the two dogs outside. They killed them.

The operation had closed down a major smuggling network. Agents had left for Calexico to arrest the head of EnviroBreed, Ely. There were fourteen arrests made on the ranch. Others would follow. But all of that wasn’t enough for Corvo or anybody. Not when agents were dead and Zorrillo was in the wind. Corvo had been wrong if he thought Bosch would be satisfied that Arpis was dead. Bosch wanted Zorrillo, too. He was the man who had called the hits.

Bosch got up so he wouldn’t have to witness the agent’s anguish anymore. He had enough of his own. Aguila must have felt the same. He, too, stood and began to walk listlessly around the machines and the furniture. Basically, they were waiting for one of the militia cars to take them back to the airport to Bosch’s car. The DEA would be here until well after sunup. But Bosch and Aguila were finished.

Harry watched Aguila go back into the storage room and approach the tunnel entrance. He had told him about Grena and the Mexican had simply nodded. He hadn’t shown a thing. Now Aguila dropped to his haunches and seemed to be studying the floor, as if the sawdust were a spread of tea leaves in which he could read Zorrillo’s location.

After a few moments, he said, “The pope has new boots.”

Bosch walked over and Aguila pointed to the footprints in the sawdust. There was one that was not from Aguila’s or Bosch’s shoes. It was very clear in the dust and Harry recognized the elongated heel of a bulldog boot. Inside it was the letter “S” formed by a curving snake. The edges of the print were sharp in the dust, the head of the snake clearly imprinted.

Aguila had been right. The pope had new boots.

All the way to the border crossing, Bosch contemplated how it had been done, how all the parts now seemed to fit, and how it might have gone unnoticed if not for Aguila noticing the footprint. He thought about the Snakes box in the closet of the apartment in Los Feliz. A clue so obvious, yet he had missed it. He had seen only what he wanted to see.

It was still early, just the first hint of dawn’s light was fighting its way up the eastern horizon, and there was not yet much of a line at the crossing. Nobody was cleaning windshields. Nobody was selling junk. Nobody was there at all. Bosch badged the bored-looking Border Patrol agent and was waved through.

He needed a phone and some caffeine. He drove two minutes to the Calexico Town Hall, got a Coke from the machine in the police department’s cramped lobby and took it out to the pay phone on the front wall. He looked at his watch and knew she would be at home, probably awake and getting ready for work.

He lit a cigarette and dialed, charging the call to his own PacTel card. While he waited for it to go through he looked across the street into the fog. He saw the shapes of sleeping figures under blankets scattered about the park. The ground fog gave the images a ghostly, lonely resonance.

Teresa picked up after two rings. She sounded like she had been awake already.

“Hi.”

“Harry? What is it?”

“Sorry to wake you up.”

“You didn’t. What’s the matter?”

“Are you getting dressed up to go to Moore’s funeral today?”

“Yes. What is this? You called me at ten minutes before six to ask-”

“That isn’t Moore they’ll be putting in the ground.”

There was a long silence during which Bosch looked into the park and saw a man standing there, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, staring back at him in the fog. Harry looked away.

“What are you saying? Harry, are you all right?”

“I’m tired but never better. What I’m saying is he’s still alive. Moore. I just missed him this morning.”

“Are you still in Mexico?”

“At the border.”

“That doesn’t make sense. What you said. There were matches made on the latents, we got dental, and his own wife ID’d a photograph of the tattoo on the body. His identification was confirmed.”

“It’s all bullshit. He set it up.”

“Why, Harry, are you calling me now and telling me this?”

“I want you to help me, Teresa. I can’t go to Irving. Only you. You help me and you’ll help yourself. If I’m right.”

“That’s a big if, Harry.”

Bosch looked back into the park and the man in the blanket was gone.

“Just tell me how it could be possible,” she said. “Convince me.”

Bosch was silent a moment, like a lawyer composing himself before a cross-examination. He knew that every word he spoke now had to stand the test of her scrutiny or he would lose her.

“Besides the prints and dental, Sheehan told me they also matched his handwriting to the I-found-out-who-I-was note. He said they compared it to a change-of-address card Moore had put in his personnel file a few months ago after he and his wife separated.”

He took a deep drag on the cigarette and she thought he had finished.

“So? I don’t see-what about it?”

“One of the concessions the protective league won a few years back during contract negotiations was guaranteed access to your personnel file. So cops could check if there were beefs on their record, commendations, letters of complaint, anything like that. So Moore had access to his P-file. He went into Personnel a few months back and asked for it because he had just moved and needed to update it with his new address.”

Bosch held it there a moment, to compose the rest of it in his mind.

“Okay, okay,” she said.

“The P-files also contain print cards. Moore had access to the print card Irving took to you on the day of the autopsy. That was the card your tech used to identify the prints. You see? While Moore had the file, he could have switched his card for someone else’s. Then you used the bogus card to identify his body. But, see, it wasn’t his body. It was the other person’s.”

“Who?”

“I think it was a man from down here named Humberto Zorrillo.”

“This seems too farfetched. There were other IDs. I remember that day in the suite. What’s his name, Sheehan, he got a call from SID saying they matched prints in the motel room to Moore. They used a different set than we did. It’s a double-blind confirmation, Harry. Then we have the tattoo. And the dental. How do you explain all of that?”

“Look, Teresa, listen to me. It all can be explained. It all works. The dental? You told me you only found one usable fragment, part of a root canal. That meant no root was left. It was a dead tooth so you could not tell how long it had been out, only that it matched his dentist’s charts. That’s fine, but one of Moore’s crew told me he once saw Moore get punched during a Boulevard brawl and he lost a tooth. That could’ve been it, I don’t know.”

“Okay, what about the prints in the room? Explain that?”

“Easy. Those were his prints. Donovan, the SID guy, told me he pulled prints from the Department of Justice computer. Those would have been Moore’s real prints. That meant he was really in the room. It doesn’t mean it’s his body. Normally, one set of exemplars-the ones from the DOJ computer-would be used to do all the match work, but Irving screwed it up by going to the P-file. And that’s the beauty of Moore’s plan. He knew Irving or someone in the department would do it this way. He could count on it because he knew the department would put a rush on the autopsy, the ID, everything, because it was a fellow officer. It’s been done before and he knew they would do it for him.”