After a stop for a combined lunch and dinner at Art’s Deli in Studio City, Bosch got to Woodrow Wilson Drive late in the evening. He parked as usual around the bend and then walked back to his house. He pulled a week’s worth of deliveries out of the mailbox, including a small box that had been stuffed in as well.
He went into the house and dumped the envelopes onto the dining room table to be dealt with later. But he opened the box and found the GPS detector/jammer he had ordered.
He grabbed a beer out of the fridge and stripped off his jacket before taking the device over to the reclining chair in front of the living room TV. Normally, he would have put on a disc but he wanted to check the news and see if they were still pumping the Screen Cutter story.
He turned on channel 5 because it was a local independent channel that paid attention to news stories outside of Hollywood. Bosch had seen a news van with a 5 on the side at the police station on Friday when the press conference took place.
The news was already under way when he turned the television on. He started reading through the instruction manual that came with the GPS device and kept one ear on the TV.
He was halfway through learning how to identify a GPS tracker and jam its signal when the drone of the news anchor caught his attention.
“…Vance was instrumental in the development of stealth technologies.”
He looked up and saw a photo of a much younger Whitney Vance on the screen and then it was gone and the anchor was on to the next story.
Bosch leaned forward in his chair, fully alert. He grabbed the remote and switched over to channel 9 but there was nothing on Vance. Bosch got up and went to the laptop on the dining room table. He went to the home page of the Los Angeles Times. The top headline read:
Report: Billionaire Whitney Vance Dies Steel
Tycoon Also Left Mark on Aviation
The story was short because information was short. It simply said that Aviation Week was reporting on its website that Whitney Vance had died after a brief illness. The report cited unnamed sources and gave no details other than to say Vance had died peacefully at his home in Pasadena.
Bosch slammed the laptop closed.
“Goddamn it,” he said.
The report in the Times didn’t even confirm the report in Aviation Week. Bosch got up and paced the living room, not sure what he could do but feeling guilty in some way and not trusting the report that Vance died peacefully in his home.
As he came back toward the dining room table he saw the business card Vance had given him. He pulled his phone and called the number. This time it was answered.
“Hello?”
Bosch knew the voice did not belong to Whitney Vance. He didn’t say anything.
“Is this Mr. Bosch?”
Bosch hesitated but then answered.
“Who is this?”
“It’s Sloan.”
“Is he really dead?”
“Yes, Mr. Vance has passed on. And that means your services are no longer needed. Goodbye, Mr. Bosch.”
“Did you kill him, you bastards?”
Sloan hung up halfway through the question. Bosch almost hit the redial button but knew that Sloan would not take the call. The number would soon be dead and so too would Bosch’s connection to the Vance empire.
“Goddamn it,” he said again.
His words echoed through the empty house.
23
Bosch stayed up half the night jumping from CNN to Fox News and then online to the Times website, hoping for an update on the death of Whitney Vance. But he came away disappointed in the supposed twenty-four-hour news cycle. There were no updates on the cause of or details about the death. All each entity did was add backstory, digging out old clips and adding them to the tail of the very thinly reported breaking news of the death. At about 2 a.m. CNN reran the 1996 interview Larry King did with Vance on his book publication. Bosch watched this with interest because it showed a much more spry and engaging version of Vance.
Sometime after that Bosch fell asleep in the leather chair in front of the television, four empty bottles on the table next to him. The TV was still on when he awoke and the first image he saw was the Coroner’s van exiting through the gate of the Vance estate on San Rafael and driving past the camera. The camera then held on the black steel gate rolling closed.
In the video, it was dark on the street but there was no time stamp. Because Vance would get the VIP treatment from the Coroner’s Office, Bosch guessed that the body was not removed until the middle of the night after a thorough investigation that would have included detectives from the Pasadena Police Department.
It was 7 a.m. in Los Angeles and that meant the eastern media was already well into the Vance story. The CNN anchor flipped the story to a financial reporter who talked about Vance’s majority holdings in the company his father had founded and what could happen now that he had died. The reporter said that Vance had no “known heirs” and so it remained to be seen what instructions he left in his will for the distribution of his wealth and holdings. The reporter intimated that there could be surprises in the will. He added that Vance’s probate attorney, a Century City lawyer named Cecil Dobbs, could not be reached for comment because of the early hour in Los Angeles.
Bosch knew he had to get up to San Fernando to continue working through the latest call-in tips and leads on the Screen Cutter case. He slowly climbed out of the leather chair, felt his back protest in a half dozen places, and made his way to his bedroom to shower and prepare for the day.
The shower made him feel crisp—at least temporarily. As he dressed he realized he was famished.
In the kitchen he brewed a half pot of coffee and then began searching for something to eat. Without his daughter living in the house anymore, Bosch had fallen off on keeping the cabinets and refrigerator stocked. All he found was a box of Eggo waffles in the freezer containing two last soldiers exhibiting freezer burn. Bosch put them both in the toaster and hoped for the best. He checked the cabinets and refrigerator a second time and found no syrup, butter, or even peanut butter anywhere. He was going to have to go dry with the waffles.
He took the coffee in a mug left over from his LAPD homicide days. Printed around its circumference was Our Day Begins When Your Day Ends. And he learned that eating waffles without syrup or other additives made them portable. He sat down at the dining room table and ate them by hand while sorting through the mail that had accumulated on the table. It was an easy process because four out of every five pieces were junk mail that he could easily identify without opening them. He put these in a pile to the left and the mail he would have to open and deal with to the right. This included pieces of correspondence addressed to his neighbors but mistakenly stuffed into his box.
He was halfway through the pile when he came to an 8 x 5 padded manila envelope with a heavy object in it. There was no return address and his own address was scrawled in an unsteady hand. The envelope had a South Pasadena postmark. He opened it and slid out the object, a gold pen he immediately recognized. It now had a cap but he knew it was Whitney Vance’s. There were also two separately folded pieces of stationery of a high-grade pale yellow stock. Bosch unfolded the first one and found himself looking at a handwritten letter to him from Whitney Vance. The stationery had Vance’s name and the San Rafael Avenue address printed across the bottom.
The letter had the previous Wednesday’s date on it. The day after Bosch had gone to Pasadena to meet Vance.
Detective Bosch,
If you are reading this then my most loyal and trusted Ida has been successful in getting this envelope to you. I am placing my trust in you as I have done with her for many decades.
It was a pleasure to meet you yesterday and I can sense that you are an honorable man who will do what is right in any circumstance. I am counting on your integrity. No matter what happens to me I want you to continue your search. If there is an heir to what I have on this earth then I want that person to have what is mine. I want you to find that person and I trust that you will. It gives an old man a sense of redemption to know he has done the right thing at last.
Be safe. Be vigilant and determined.