“I’m not talking to you,” Teresa announced without turning around.
“C’mon.”
“I’m not.”
“Then why’d you let me in?”
“To tell you I am not talking to you and that I am very angry and that you have probably compromised my position as chief medical examiner.”
“C’mon, Teresa. I hear you have a press conference later today. It will work out.”
He couldn’t think of anything else to say. She turned around and leaned back against the windowsill. She looked at him with eyes that could’ve carved his name on a tombstone. He could smell her perfume all the way across the room.
“And, of course, I have you to thank for that.”
“Not me. I heard Irving called the press con-”
“Don’t fuck with me, Harry. We both know what you did with what I told you. And we both know that little shit Irving automatically thinks I did it. I now have to consider myself seriously fucked as far as the permanent job goes. Take a good look around the office, Harry. Last time you’ll ever see me here.”
Bosch had always noticed how many of the professional women he encountered, mostly cops and lawyers, turned profane when arguing. He wondered if they felt it might put them on the same level as the men they were battling.
“It will work out,” he said.
“What are you talking about? All he has to do is tell a few commissioners that I leaked information from a confidential, uncompleted investigation to the press and that will eliminate me completely from consideration.”
“Listen, he can’t be sure it was you and he’ll probably think it was me. Bremmer, theTimes guy who stirred this all up, we go back some. Irving will know. So quit worrying about it. I came to see if you want to have lunch or something.”
Wrong move. He saw her face turn red with pure anger.
“Lunch or something? Are you kidding? Are you-you just told me we are the two likely suspects on this leak and you want me to sit with you in a restaurant? Do you know what could-”
“Hey, Teresa, have a nice press conference,” Bosch cut in. He turned around and headed to the door.
On the way into downtown, his pager went off and Bosch noticed the number was Ninety-eight’s direct line. He must be worried about his statistics, Harry thought. He decided to ignore the page. He also turned the Motorola radio in the car off.
He stopped at amariscos truck parked on Alvarado and ordered two shrimp tacos. They were served on corn tortillas, Baja style, and Bosch savored the heavy cilantro in the salsa.
A few yards from the truck stood a man reciting scripture verses from memory. On top of his head was a cup of water that nestled comfortably in his seventies-style Afro and did not spill. He reached up for the cup and took a drink from time to time but never stopped bouncing from book to book of the New Testament. Before each quote, he gave his listeners the chapter and verse numbers as a reference. At his feet was a glass fishbowl half full of coins. When he was done eating, Bosch ordered a Coke to go and then dropped the change into the fishbowl. He got a “God bless you” back.
15
The Hall of Justice took up an entire block across from the criminal courts building. The first six floors housed the sheriff’s department and the top four the county jail. Anyone could tell this from the outside. Not just because of the bars behind the windows, but because the top four floors looked like an abandoned, burned-out shell. As if all the hate and anger held in those un-air-conditioned cells had turned to fire and smoke and stained the windows and concrete balustrades forever black.
It was a turn-of-the-century building and its stone-block construction gave it an ominous fortresslike appearance. It was one of the only buildings in downtown that still had human elevator operators. An old black woman sat on a padded stool in the corner of each of the wood-paneled cubicles and pulled the doors open and worked the wheel that leveled the elevator with each floor it stopped at.
“Seven thousand,” Bosch said to the operator as he stepped on. It had been some time since he had been in the Hall and he could not remember her name. But he knew she had been working the elevators here since before Harry was a cop. All of the operators had. She opened the door on the sixth floor where Bosch saw Rickard as soon as he stepped out. The narc was standing at the glass window at the check-in counter, putting his badge case into a slide drawer.
“Here you go,” Bosch said and quickly put his badge in the drawer.
“He’s with me,” Rickard said into the microphone.
The deputy behind the glass exchanged the badges for two visitor clearance badges and slid them out. Bosch and Rickard clipped them to their shirts. Bosch noticed they were cleared to visit the High Power block on the tenth floor. High Power was where the most dangerous criminal suspects were placed while awaiting trial or to be shipped out to state prisons following guilty verdicts.
They began walking down a hall to the jail elevator.
“You got the kid in High Power?” Bosch asked.
“Yeah. I know a guy. Told him one day, that’s all we needed. The kid’s going to be shitless. He’s going to tell you everything he knows about Dance.”
They took the security elevator up, this one operated by a deputy. Bosch figured it had to be the worst job in law enforcement. When the door opened on ten they were met by another deputy, who checked their badges and had them sign in. Then they moved through two sets of sliding steel doors to an attorneys’ visiting area, which consisted of a long table with benches running down both sides of it. There was also a foot-high divider running lengthwise down the table. At the far end of the table a female attorney sat on one side, leaning toward the divider and whispering to a client, who cupped his ears with his hands to hear better. The muscles on the inmate’s arms bulged and stretched the sleeves of his shirt. He was a monster.
On the wall behind them was a sign that readNO TOUCHING,KISSING,REACHING ACROSS THE DIVIDER. There was also another deputy at the far end, leaning against the wall, his own massive arms folded, and watching the lawyer and her client.
As they waited for the deputies to bring out Tyge, Bosch became aware of the noise. Through the barred door behind the visiting table he could hear a hundred voices competing and echoing in a metallic din. There were steel doors banging somewhere and occasionally an unintelligible shout.
A deputy walked up to the barred door and said, “It’ll be a few minutes, fellas. We have to get him out of medical.”
The deputy was gone before either of them could ask what happened. Bosch didn’t even know the kid but felt his stomach tighten. He looked over at Rickard and saw he was smiling.
“We’ll see how things have changed now,” the narc cop said.
Bosch didn’t understand the delight Rickard seemed to take in this. For Bosch, it was the low end of the job, dealing with desperate people and using desperate tactics. He was here because he had to be. It was his case. But he didn’t get it with Rickard.
“So, how come you’re doing this? What do you want?”
Rickard looked over at him.
“What do I want? I want to know what’s going on. I think you’re the only one that might know. So if I can help out, I’ll help out. If it costs this kid his asshole, then that’s the cost. But what I want to know from you is what is happening here. What did Cal do and what’s going to be done about it?”
Bosch leaned back and tried to think for a few moments about what to say. He heard the monster at the end of the table start to raise his voice, something about not accepting the offer. The deputy took a step toward him, dropping his arms to his sides. The inmate went quiet. The deputy’s sleeves were rolled up tight to reveal his impressive biceps. On his bulging left forearm Bosch could see the “CL,” tattoo, almost like a brand on his white skin. Harry knew that, publicly, deputies who had the tattoo claimed the letters stood for Club Lynwood, after the sheriff’s station in the gang-infested L.A. suburb. But he knew the letters also stood forchango luchador, monkey fighter. The deputy was a gang member himself, albeit one sanctioned to carry weapons and paid by the county.