Edson was pleased with himself on that one. But Bosch didn’t buy it. It did not fit with the facts. But he nodded, indicating to Edson that he would give it some consideration and thought. Then he said, “Tell me, how do these deliveries from the breeders get here? For example, how do they get here from the place down in Mexicali you deal with?”
Edson said that at the breeding facility thousands of pupae were packed into plastic tubes resembling six-foot-long sausages. The tubes were then strung in cartons complete with incubators and humidifiers. The environment boxes were sealed at the EnviroBreed lab under the scrutiny of a USDA inspector and then trucked across the border and north to Los Angeles. The deliveries from EnviroBreed came two to three times a week, depending on availability of supply.
“The cartons are not inspected at the border?” Bosch asked.
“They are inspected but not opened. It could endanger the product if the cartons were opened. Each carton contains a carefully controlled environment, you understand. But as I said, the cartons are sealed under the eye of government inspectors, and each carton is reinspected upon the breaking of such seals at the eradication center to make sure there has been no tampering. Um, at the border, the Border Patrol checks the seal numbers and cartons against the driver’s bill of lading and our separate notification of transport crossing. It’s very thorough, Detective Bosch. The system was all hashed out at the highest levels.”
Bosch said nothing for a while. He wasn’t going to debate the security of the system, but he wondered who designed it at the highest levels, the scientists or the Border Patrol.
“If I was to go down there, to Mexicali, could you get me into EnviroBreed?”
“Impossible,” Edson said quickly. “You have to remember these are private contractors. We get all our bred flies from privately owned facilities. Though we have a state USDA inspector at each facility and state entomologists, such as myself, make routine visits, we cannot order them to open their doors to an inquiry by police or anyone, for that matter, without showing notice of an infraction of our contract.
“In other words, Detective Bosch, tell me what they did and I will tell you if I can get you in there.”
Bosch didn’t answer. He wanted to tell Edson as little as possible. He changed the subject.
“These environment boxes that the bug tubes come in, how big are they?” he asked.
“Oh, they’re a pretty decent size. We generally use a forklift when unloading deliveries.”
“Can you show me one?”
Edson looked at his watch and said, “I suppose that is possible. I don’t know what has come in, if anything.”
Bosch stood up to force the issue. Edson finally did, too. He led Harry out of the office and down another hallway past more offices and labs that had once been the holding pens for the insane, the addicted and the abandoned. Harry recalled that once while a patrolman he had walked down this same hallway escorting a woman he had arrested on Mount Fleming, where she was climbing the steel frame behind the firstO of the Hollywood sign. She had a nylon cord with her, already tied into a noose at one end. A few years later he read in the newspaper that after getting out of Patton State Hospital she had gone back to the sign and done the job he had interrupted.
“Must be tough,” Edson said. “Working homicides.”
Bosch said what he always said when people said that to him.
“Sometimes it’s not so bad. At least the victims I deal with are out of their misery.”
Edson didn’t say anything else. The hall ended at a heavy steel door, which he pushed open. They walked out onto a loading dock that was inside a large hangarlike building. About thirty feet away, there were a half dozen or so workers, all Latinos, placing white plastic boxes on wheeled dollies and then pulling them through a set of double doors on the other side of the unloading area. Bosch noted that each of the boxes was just about the size of a coffin.
The boxes were first being removed from a white van with a mini-forklift. On the side of the van the word “EnviroBreed” was painted in blue. The driver’s door was open and a white man stood watching the work. Another white man with a clipboard was at the end of the truck, bending down to check numbers on the seals of each of the boxes and then making notes on the clipboard.
“We’re in luck,” Edson said. “A delivery in process. The environment boxes are taken into our lab where the M amp;M process, that’s what we call metamorphosis around here, is completed.”
Edson pointed through the open garage doors to a row of six orange pickup trucks parked outside in the lot.
“The mature flies are placed in covered buckets and we use our fleet to take them to the attack areas. They are released by hand. Right now the attack zone is about one hundred square miles. We are dropping fifty million sterile flies a week. More if we can get them. Ultimately, the steriles will overwhelm the wild fly population and breed it out of existence.”
There was a note of triumph in the entomologist’s voice.
“Would you like to speak with the EnviroBreed driver?” Edson said. “I am sure he would be ha-”
“No,” Bosch said. “I just wanted to see how it is done. I’d appreciate it, Doctor, if you kept my visit confidential.”
As he said this, Bosch noticed the EnviroBreed driver was looking right at him. The man’s face was deeply lined and tanned and his hair was white. He wore a straw plantation hat and smoked a brown cigarette. Bosch returned the stare, knowing full well that he had been made. He thought he saw a slight smile on the driver’s face, then the man finally broke away his stare and went back to watching the unloading process.
“Then is there anything else I can do for you, Detective,” Edson said.
“No, Doc. Thanks for your cooperation.”
“I’m sure you know your way out.”
Edson turned and went back in through the steel door. Harry put a cigarette in his mouth but left it unlit. He waved a nattering of flies, probably pink medflies, he thought, away from his face, went down the loading-dock stairs and walked out through the garage door.
Driving back toward downtown, Bosch decided to get it over with and face Teresa. He pulled into the County-USC parking lot and spent ten minutes looking for a spot big enough to put the Caprice in. He finally found one in the back where the lot is on a rise overlooking the old railroad yard. He sat in the car for a few moments thinking about what to say and smoking and looking down at all the rusted boxcars and iron tracks. He saw a group ofcholos in their oversized white T-shirts and baggy pants making their way through the yard. The one carrying a spray can dropped back from the others and along one of the old boxcars sprayed a scrip. It was in Spanish but Bosch understood it. It was the gang’s imprimatur, its philosophy:
LAUGH NOW CRY LATER
He watched them until they had moved behind another line of boxcars. He got out and went into the morgue through the rear door, where the deliveries are made. A security guard nodded after seeing his badge.
Today was a good day inside. The smell of disinfectant had the upper hand over the odor of death. Harry walked past the doors to refrigeration rooms one and two and then through a door to a set of stairs that led up to the second-floor administration offices.
Bosch asked the secretary in the chief medical examiner’s office if Dr. Corazón could see him. The woman, whose pale skin and pinkish hair made her resemble some of the clients around the place, spoke quietly on the phone and then told him to go in. Teresa was standing behind her desk, looking out the window. She had the same view Bosch had of the railroad yard and may have even seen him coming. But from the second floor, she also had a view that spanned the area from the towers of downtown to Mt Washington. Bosch noticed how clear the towers were in the distance. It was a good day outside as well.