Michael Connelly - The Overlook

Meantime, Gandle said he would send another update through the department’s chain of command. With the latest revelation of the word Allah cropping up in the investigation, it was incumbent upon him to make sure the growing gravity of the case was communicated upward.

With his mug full he went back to his desk and started going through the evidence collected from the murder scene and the house where Alicia Kent had been held while her husband did the bidding of her captors.

He was already aware of most of what had been found at the murder scene. He started removing Stanley Kent ’s personal belongings from the evidence bags and examining them. At this stage they had been processed by Forensics and it was okay to handle them.

The first item was the physicist’s BlackBerry. Bosch was not adept in a digital world and readily acknowledged this. He had mastered his own cell phone but it was a basic model that made and received calls, stored numbers in a directory, and did nothing else-as far as he knew. This meant that he was quite lost as he tried to manipulate the higher-evolution device.

“Harry, you need help with that?”

Bosch looked up and saw Ferras smiling at him. Bosch was embarrassed by his lack of technological skill but not to the point where he wouldn’t accept help. That would turn his personal flaw into something worse.

“You know how to work this?”

“Sure.”

“It has e-mail, right?”

“It should.”

Bosch had to get up to hand the phone across both of their desks.

“About six o’clock yesterday Kent was sent an e-mail that was marked urgent from his wife. It had the photo in it of her tied up on their bed. I want you to find it and see if there is a way you can somehow print it out with the photo. I want to look at the photo again but bigger than on that little screen.”

As Bosch had been speaking, Ferras had already been working the BlackBerry.

“No problem,” he said. “What I can do is just forward the e-mail to my own e-mail account here. Then I’ll open it up and print it out.”

Ferras started using his thumbs to type on the phone’s tiny keyboard. It looked like some sort of child’s toy to Bosch. Like the ones he had seen kids use on planes. He didn’t understand why people were always typing feverishly on their phones. He was sure it was some sort of warning, a sign of the decline of civilization or humanity but he couldn’t put his finger on the right explanation for what he felt. The digital world was always billed as a great advancement but he remained skeptical.

“Okay, I found it and sent it,” Ferras said. “It’ll probably come through in a couple minutes and I will print it. What else?”

“Does that show what calls he made and what calls came in?”

Ferras didn’t answer. He manipulated the controls on the phone.

“How far back do you want to go?” he asked.

“For now, how about going back till about noon yesterday,” Bosch replied.

“Okay, I’m on the screen. You want me to show you how to use this thing or do you want me to just give you the numbers?”

Bosch got up and came around the row of desks so he could look over his partner’s shoulder at the phone’s small screen.

“Just give me an overview for now and we’ll run the whole picture down later,” he said. “If you tried to teach me we’d be here forever.”

Ferras nodded and smiled.

“Well,” he said, “if he made or received a call to or from a number that was in his address book it is listed by the name associated with the number in the address book.”

“Got it.”

“It shows a lot of calls to and from the office and various hospitals and address book names-probably doctors he worked with-all through the afternoon. Three calls are marked ‘Barry’ and I am assuming that was his partner. I looked up the state corporate records online, and K and K Medical Physicists is owned by Kent and someone named Barry Kelber.”

Bosch nodded.

“Yeah,” he said, “that reminds me that we have to talk to the partner first thing this morning.”

Bosch leaned across Ferras’s desk to reach the notepad on his own desk. He then wrote the name Barry Kelber down while Ferras was continuing to scroll through the cell phone’s call log.

“Now, here we are after six and he starts alternately calling his home and his wife’s cell phone. I get the feeling that these weren’t answered because he’s got ten calls logged in three minutes. He was calling and calling. And these were all made after he received that urgent e-mail from his wife’s account.”

Bosch saw the picture beginning to fill in a little bit. Kent had a routine day on the job, handled a lot of calls to and from people and places familiar to him and then got the e-mail from his wife’s account. He saw the photo attached and started calling home. She didn’t answer, which only alarmed him further. Finally, he went out and did what the e-mail instructed him to do. But for all his efforts and following of orders, they still killed him on the overlook.

“So, what went wrong?” he asked out loud.

“What do you mean, Harry?”

“Up at the overlook. I still don’t understand why they killed him. He did what they wanted. He turned over the stuff. What went wrong?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they killed him because he saw one of their faces.”

“The witness says the shooter was wearing a mask.”

“Well, then maybe nothing went wrong. Maybe the plan was to kill him all along. They made that silencer, remember? And the way the guy yells out Allah doesn’t make it sound like something went wrong. Makes it sound like part of a plan.”

Bosch nodded.

“Then if that was the plan, why kill him and not her? Why leave a witness?”

“I don’t know, Harry. But don’t those hardcore Muslims have a rule about hurting women? Like it keeps them out of nirvana or heaven or whatever they call it?”

Bosch didn’t answer the question because he didn’t know about the cultural practices his partner had crudely referred to. But the question underlined for him how out of his element he was on the case. He was used to chasing killers motivated by greed or lust or any one of the big seven sins. Religious extremism wasn’t often on the list.

Ferras put the BlackBerry down and turned back to his computer. Like many detectives he preferred to use his own laptop because the computers provided by the department were old and slow and most of them carried more viruses than a Hollywood Boulevard hooker.

He saved what he had been working on and opened up his e-mail screen. The e-mail forwarded from Kent ’s account was there. Ferras opened the e-mail and whistled when he saw the embedded photograph of Alicia Kent naked and tied up on the bed.

“Yeah, that would do it,” he said.

Meaning that he understood why Kent had turned over the cesium. Ferras had been married for less than a year and had a baby on the way. Bosch was just starting to get to know his young partner but knew already that he was deeply in love with his wife. Under the glass top of his desk Ferras had a collage of photos of his bride. Under the glass on his side of the work-station Bosch had photos of murder victims whose killers he was still looking for.

“Make me a printout of that,” Bosch said. “Blow it up if you can. And go ahead and keep playing with that phone. See what else you can find.”

Bosch went back to his side of the workstation and sat down. Ferras enlarged and printed out the e-mail and photo on a color printer located at the back of the squad room. He went over and retrieved it and then brought it to Bosch.

Bosch already had his reading glasses on but from a desk drawer he pulled a rectangular magnifying glass he’d bought when he noticed that his prescription was no longer strong enough for the close-up work. He never used the magnifying glass when the squad room was crowded with detectives. He didn’t want to give the others something to ridicule him with-either in jest or not.