The Harry Bosch Novels Vol Ii Part 112

"The phone book, it's not here, man."

Bosch looked at Chastain, who was looking back at him. He turned and walked away, out of earshot of the others. Now he whispered to Edgar.

"You sure?"

"Course I'm sure. I woulda found it if it was here."

"You were first in the bedroom?"

"Right. First one in. It's not here."

"You're in the bedroom to the right when you come down the hall."

"Yeah, Harry. I'm in the right place. It's just not here."

"s.h.i.t."

"What do you want me to do?"

"Nothing. Continue the search."

Bosch flipped the phone closed and put it in his pocket. He walked back to the others. He tried to act calm, as if the call had only been a minor annoyance.

"Okay, let's go up and do what we can up there."

They moved to the elevator, which was an open wrought-iron cage with ornate flourishes and polished bra.s.s trim.

"Why don't you take the ladies up first," Bosch said to Dellacroce. "We'll come up after. That ought to distribute the weight pretty evenly."

He took Elias's key ring out of his pocket and handed it to Rider.

"The office key should be on there," he said. "And never mind about that other thing with Harris for the time being. Let's see what we've got in the office first."

"Sure, Harry."

They got on and Dellacroce pulled the accordion gate closed. The elevator rose with a jerking motion. After it was up one floor and those on it could not see them, Bosch turned to Chastain. The anger and frustration of everything going wrong flooded him then. He dropped his briefcase and with both hands grabbed Chastain by the collar of his jacket. He roughly pushed him against the elevator cage and spoke in a low, dark voice that was full of rage.

"G.o.ddammit, Chastain, I'm only asking this one time. Where's the f.u.c.king phone book?"

Chastain's face flushed crimson and his eyes grew wide in shock.

"What? What the f.u.c.k are you talking about?"

He brought his hands up to Bosch's and tried to free himself but Bosch maintained the pressure, leaning all of his weight into the other man.

"The phone book in the apartment. I know you took it and I want it back. Right the f.u.c.k now."

Finally, Chastain tore himself loose. His jacket and shirt and tie were wrenched askew. He stepped away from Bosch as if he was scared and adjusted himself. He then pointed a finger at him.

"Stay away from me! You're f.u.c.king nuts! I don't have any phone book. You had it. I saw you put it in the G.o.dd.a.m.n drawer next to the bed."

Bosch took a step toward him.

"You took it. When I was on the bal -"

"I said stay away! I didn't take it. If it's not there, then somebody came in and took it after we left."

Bosch stopped. It was an obvious explanation but it hadn't even entered his mind. He had automatically thought of Chastain. He looked down at the tiles, embarra.s.sed by how he'd let an old animosity cloud his judgment. He could hear the elevator gate opening on the fifth floor. He raised his eyes, fixed Chastain with a bloodless stare and pointed at his face.

"I find out otherwise, Chastain, I promise I'll take you apart."

"f.u.c.k you! I didn't take the book. But I am going to take your badge for this."

Bosch smiled but not in a way that had any warmth.

"Go ahead. Write your ticket, Chastain. Anytime you can take take my badge you can have it." my badge you can have it."

11

The others were inside Howard Elias's law offices by the time Bosch and Chastain made it up to the fifth floor. The office was essentially three rooms: a reception area with a secretary's desk, a middle room where there was a clerk's desk and two walls of file cabinets, and then the third and largest room, Elias's office.

As Bosch and Chastain moved through the offices the others stood silently and didn't look at them. It was clear that they had heard the commotion in the lobby as they had taken the elevator up. Bosch didn't care about that. He had already put the confrontation with Chastain behind him and was thinking about the search. He was hoping something would be found in the office that would give the investigation a focus, a specific path to follow. He walked through the three rooms making general observations. In the last room he noticed that through the windows behind Elias's large polished wood desk he could see the huge face of Anthony Quinn. It was part of a mural depicting the actor with arms outstretched on the brick wall of a building across the street from the Bradbury.

Rider came into the office behind him. She looked out the window, too.

"You know every time I'm down here and see that I wonder who that is."

"You don't know?"

"Cesar Chavez?"

"Anthony Quinn. You know, the actor."

He got a nonresponse from her.

"Before your time, I guess. The mural is called the Pope of Broadway, like he's watching over all the homeless around here."

"Oh, I see." She didn't sound impressed. "How you want to do this?"

Bosch was still staring at the mural. He liked it, even though he had a hard time seeing Anthony Quinn as a Christlike figure. But the mural seemed to capture something about the man, a raw masculine and emotional power. Bosch stepped closer to the window and looked down. He saw the forms of two homeless people sleeping under blankets of newspapers in the parking lot beneath the mural. Anthony Quinn's arms were outstretched over them. Bosch nodded. The mural was one of the little things that made him like downtown so much. Just like the Bradbury and Angels Flight. Little pieces of grace were everywhere if you looked.

He turned around. Chastain and Langwiser had entered the room behind Rider.

"I'll work in here. Kiz and Janis, you two take the file room."

"And what?" Chastain said. "Me and Del get the secretary's desk?"

"Yeah. While you're going through it, see if you can come up with her name and the name of the intern or clerk. We'll need to talk to them today."

Chastain nodded but Bosch could see he was annoyed about getting the weakest a.s.signment.

"Tell you what," Bosch added, "why don't you go out first and see if you can find some boxes. We're going to be taking a lot of files out of here."

Chastain left the office without a word. Bosch glanced at Rider and saw her give him a look that told him he was acting like an a.s.shole.

"What?"

"Nothing. I'll be in the file room."

She left then, leaving just Langwiser and Bosch.

"Everything okay, Detective?"

"Everything's fine. I'm going to get to work now. Do what I can until we hear about your special master."

"Look, I'm sorry. But you called me out here to advise you and this is what I advise. I still think it is the right way to go."

"Well, we'll see."

For most of the next hour Bosch methodically went through Elias's desk, studying the man's belongings, appointment calendar and paperwork. Most of his time was spent reading through a series of notebooks in which Elias had kept reminders to himself, lists of things to do, pencil drawings and general notes from phone calls. Each notebook was dated on the outside cover. It appeared that Elias filled the pages of one book every week or so with his voluminous notations and doodles. Nothing in the books jumped out at Bosch as being pertinent to the investigation. But he also knew that so little about the circ.u.mstances of Elias's murder was known that something seeming unimportant in the notebooks at the moment might become important later.

Before starting to page through the most recent notebook, Bosch was interrupted by another call from Edgar.

"Harry, you said there was a message on the phone machine?"

"That's right."

"There ain't now."

Bosch leaned back in Elias's chair and closed his eyes.

"G.o.ddammit."

"Yeah, it's been cleared. I d.i.c.ked around with it and it's not a tape. Messages are stored on a microchip. The chip was cleared."

"Okay," Bosch replied, angrily. "Continue the search. When you're done, talk to the security people about who's been in and out of that place. See if they've got any video points in the lobby or parking garage. Somebody went in there after I left."

"What about Chastain? He was with you, wasn't he?"

"I'm not worried about Chastain."

He flipped the phone closed and got up and went to the window. He hated the feeling growing inside-that he was being worked by the case, rather than the other way around.

He blew out his breath and went back to the desk and the last notebook that Howard Elias had kept. As he paged through, he came across repeated notes regarding someone referred to as "Parker." Bosch did not believe this to be a person's real name, but rather a code name for a person inside Parker Center. The notations were mostly lists of questions Elias apparently intended to ask "Parker," as well as what looked like notes on conversations with this person. They were mostly in abbreviated form or the lawyer's own version of shorthand and therefore difficult to decipher. But in other instances the notes were clear to Bosch. One notation clearly indicated to Bosch that Elias had a deeply connected source inside Parker Center.

Parker: Get all 51s-unsustained 1. Sheehan 2. Coblenz 3. Rooker 4. Stanwick Bosch recognized the names as belonging to four RHD detectives who were among the defendants in the Black Warrior case. Elias wanted the 51 reports-or citizen complaint files-on the four detectives. More specifically, Elias wanted the unsustained files, meaning he was interested in complaints against the four that had been investigated by the IAD but not substantiated. Such unsustained complaints were removed from officers' personnel files as a matter of department policy and were therefore out of reach of a subpoena from a lawyer like Elias. The notation in the notebook told Bosch that Elias somehow knew that there were unsubstantiated prior complaints against the four and that he had a source in Parker Center who had access to the old files on those complaints. The first a.s.sumption was not a major leap; all cops had unsubstantiated complaints. It was part of being a cop. But someone with access to that sort of file was different. If Elias had such a source, it was a well-placed source.

One of the last references to Parker in the notebook appeared to be notes of a conversation, which Bosch a.s.sumed to have been a phone call to Elias at his desk. It appeared that Elias was losing his source.

Parker won't Jeopardy/exposure Force the issue?

Parker won't what? Bosch wondered. Turn over the files Elias wanted? Did Parker believe that getting the files to Elias would expose him as a source? There wasn't enough there for him to make a conclusion. There wasn't enough for him to understand what "force the issue" meant either. He wasn't sure what any of the notes might have to do with the killing of Howard Elias. Nevertheless, Bosch was intrigued. One of the department's most vocal and successful critics had a mole inside Parker Center. There was a traitor inside the gate and it was important to know this.

Bosch put the last notebook into his briefcase and wondered if the discoveries he had made through the notes, particularly about Elias's source inside the department, now placed him in the area Janis Langwiser feared might be an infringement of attorney-client privilege. After mulling it over for a few moments he decided not to go out into the file room and ask her for an interpretation. He moved on with the search.

Bosch turned the chair to a side desk that had a personal computer and laser printer set up on it. The machines were off. There were two small drawers in this desk. The top contained the computer keyboard while the bottom contained office supplies with a single manila file on top. Bosch took out the file and opened it. It contained a color printout of a photo of a partially nude woman. The printout had two crease marks indicating it had been folded at one time. The photo itself did not have the technical quality of those in skin magazines found on the newsstand. There was an amateurish, badly lit quality to it. The woman in the picture was white and had short, white-blond hair. She wore thigh-high leather boots with three-inch heels and a G-string, nothing else. She stood with her rear to the camera, one foot up on a chair, her face turned mostly away. There was a tattoo of a ribbon and bow at the center of the small of her back. Bosch also saw at the bottom of the picture a notation that had been printed by hand.

http:/ www.girlawhirl.com/gina Bosch knew little about computers but he knew enough to understand he was looking at an Internet address.

"Kiz?" he called.

Rider was the resident computer expert on his team. Before coming to Hollywood Homicide she had worked a fraud unit in Pacific Division. A lot of the work she had done was on computers. She walked in from the file room and he waved her over to the desk.

"How is it going out there?"

"Well, we're just stacking files. She won't let me look through anything until we hear from the special master. I hope Chastain brings back a lot of boxes because we have a-what is that?"

She was looking at the open file and the printout of the blond woman.

"It was in the drawer. Take a look. It's got an address on it."

Rider came around the desk and looked down at the printout.

"It's a web page."

"Right. So how do we get to it and take a look?"

"Let me get in there."

Bosch got up and Rider sat in front of the computer. Bosch stood behind the chair and watched as she turned the computer on and waited for it to boot up.

"Let's see what Internet provider he's got," she said. "Did you see any letterhead around?"

"What?"

"Letterhead. Stationery. Sometimes people put their E-mail address on it. If we know Elias's E-mail address we're halfway there."

Bosch understood now. He hadn't seen any letterhead during his search.

"Hold on."

He went out to the reception room and asked Chastain, who was sitting behind the secretary's desk, if he'd seen any stationery. Chastain opened a drawer and pointed to an open box of letterhead stationery. Bosch grabbed a page off the top. Rider had been correct. Elias's E-mail address was printed beneath his postal address on the top center of the page.

Bosch took the page with him back to Elias's office. When he got there he saw Rider had closed the file that contained the printout of the blond woman. Bosch realized it must have been embarra.s.sing to her.