“And you don’t think those cases are affected by this?” Bosch said. “You open the door to this guy and you might as well open it for every one of the people I sent away. If you put it on the lab—same thing. It taints everything.”
Bosch leaned back and stared at his old partner. He had at one time been her mentor. She had to know what this was doing to him.
“It is what it is,” Kennedy said. “We have an obligation. ‘Better that one hundred guilty men go free than one innocent man be imprisoned.’”
“Spare me your bastardized Ben Franklin bullshit,” Bosch said. “I put Borders in the vicinity of all three of those women’s disappearances and your office passed on two of them, some snot-nosed prosecutor saying there was not enough. This doesn’t fucking make sense. I want the nine days and I want access to everything you have and everything you’ve done.”
He looked at Soto as he said it but Kennedy responded.
“Not going to happen, Detective,” he said. “As I said, we’re here as a courtesy. But you’re not on this case anymore.”
Before Bosch could counter, there was a sharp knock on the door and it was cracked open. Bella Lourdes stood there. She waved him out.
“Harry,” she said. “We need to talk right now.”
There was an urgency in her voice that Bosch could not ignore. He looked back at the others seated at the table and started to get up.
“Hold on a second,” he said. “We’re not done.”
He stood up and went to the door. Lourdes signaled him all the way out with her fingers. She closed the door behind him. He noticed that the squad room was empty—no one in the module, the captain’s door open and his desk chair empty.
“Harry, we’ve got two down in a robbery at a farmacia on the mall.”
“Two what? Officers?”
“No, people there. Behind the counter. Two one-eighty-sevens. The chief wants all hands on this. Are you okay? You want to ride with me?”
The California Penal Code designation for murder was 187. Bosch looked back at the closed door of the war room and thought about what had been said in there. What was he going to do about it? How was he going to handle it?
“Harry, come on, I gotta go. You in or out?”
Bosch looked at her.
“Okay, let’s go.”
They moved quickly toward the door to the lobby and the side entrance of the station. He pulled his phone out of his shirt pocket and turned off the recording app.
“What about them?” Lourdes said.
“Fuck them,” Bosch said. “They’ll figure it out.”
3
San Fernando was a municipality barely two and a half square miles and surrounded on all sides by the city of Los Angeles. To Harry Bosch it was the proverbial needle in the haystack, the tiny place he had found when his time with the LAPD ended with him still believing he had more to give and a mission unfulfilled. Racked by budgetary shortfalls in the years that followed the 2008 recession, and having laid off a quarter of its forty officers, the Police Department actively pursued the creation of a voluntary corps of retired law officers to work in every section of the department, from patrol to communications to detectives.
When Chief Valdez reached out to Bosch and said he had an old jail cell full of cold cases and no one to work them, it was like a lifeline had been thrown to a drowning man. Bosch was alone and certainly adrift, having unceremoniously left the department he had served for almost forty years at the same time that his daughter left home for college. Most of all, the offer came at a time he felt unfinished. After all the years he had put in, he never expected to walk out the door one day at the LAPD and not be allowed back in.
At a period in their lives when most men took up golf or bought a boat, Bosch felt resolutely incomplete. He was a closer. He needed to work cases, and setting up shop as a private eye or a defense investigator wasn’t going to suit him. He took the offer from the chief and soon was proving he was a closer at the SFPD. And he quickly went from part-time hours working cold cases to mentoring the entire detective bureau. Huey, Dewey, and Louie were dedicated investigators but together they had a total of less than ten years’ experience as detectives. Captain Trevino was only part-time in the unit himself, responsible for supervising both the communications unit and the jail. It fell to Bosch to teach Lourdes, Sisto, and Luzon the mission.
The mall was a two-block stretch of San Fernando Road that went through the middle of town and was lined with small shops, businesses, bars, and restaurants. It was in a historic part of town and was anchored on one end by a large department store that had been closed and vacant for several years, the JC Penney sign still on the front facade. Most of the other signs were in Spanish and the businesses catered to the city’s Latino majority.
It was a three-minute drive from the police station to the scene of the shooting. Lourdes drove her unmarked city car. Bosch tried his best to put the Borders case and what had been discussed in the war room behind him so that he could concentrate on the task at hand.
“So what do we know?” he asked.
“Two dead at La Farmacia Familia,” Lourdes said. “Called in by a customer who went in and saw one of the victims. Patrol found the second in the back. Both employees. Looks like a father and son.”
“The son an adult?”
“Yes.”
“Gang affiliation?”
“No word.”
“What else?”
“That’s it. Gooden and Sanders headed out when we got the call. Sheriff’s forensics have been called.”
Gooden and Sanders were the two coroner’s investigators who worked out of the sub-leased office in the detective bureau. It was a lucky break having them so close, since they would have to examine the bodies before the detectives and forensics techs could take over the scene. While Bosch had solved three cold case murders since coming to work for San Fernando, this would be the first live murder investigation, so to speak, since his arrival. The protocol and pace would be quite different.
As Lourdes turned in to the mall, Bosch looked ahead and saw that the investigation was already starting off wrong. Three patrol cars were parked directly in front of the farmacia, and that was too close. Traffic through the two-lane mall had not been stopped and drivers were going slowly by the business, hoping to catch a glimpse of the horrors that were inside.
“Pull in here,” he said. “Those cars are too close and I’m going to move them back and shut down the street.”
Lourdes did as he instructed and parked the car in front of a bar called the Tres Reyes and well behind a growing crowd of onlookers gathering near the drugstore.