“How is it?”
“It’s like an insurance office now. We have pods and sound filters between the desks. All done up in government gray. Nice but not the same.”
“I know what you mean.”
“Then they gave the D-threes double-wides-desks with two sides of drawers. The rest of us get one side.”
Bosch smiled. Little slights like that got magnified in the department and the administrators who made such decisions never learned. Like when most of Internal Affairs moved out of Parker Center and into the old Bradbury Building and the word spread through the ranks that the captain over there had a fireplace in his office.
“So what are you gonna do, Jerry?”
“Same old same old, that’s what I’m gonna do. Get off my ass and knock on doors.”
“I hear you, man.”
“Watch your six, Harry.”
“Always.”
After hanging up, Bosch sat motionless at his desk for a few moments as he thought through the conversation and the new meanings it brought to the case. If there was a connection between the case and PDU then they had a whole new ball game.
He looked down at the murder book, still open to the burglary report, and stared at the scrawled signature of John McClellan. He picked up the phone and called the Department of Operations in Parker Center and asked the duty officer for an assignment location for a detective named John McClellan. He read McClellan’s badge number off the burglary report. He was put on hold and expected that he would be told that McClellan was long retired. It had been seventeen years.
But when the duty officer came back on the line he reported that an officer named John McClellan with the badge number Bosch provided was now a lieutenant assigned to the Office of Strategic Planning. The synapse connections in Bosch’s brain started tripping. Seventeen years ago McClellan worked for Irving in the PDU. Now the assignment and rank were different but he was still working for him. And Irving just happened to run into Bosch in the Parker Center cafeteria on the day Bosch caught a case with ties to the PDU.
“High jingo,” Bosch whispered to himself as he hung up.
Like a battleship going into a turn, the case was slowly, surely and unstoppably moving in a new direction. Bosch could feel something building inside his chest. He thought about the coincidence of Irving crossing his path. If it was a coincidence. Bosch wondered if the deputy chief already knew at that moment what case they had pulled the cold hit on and where it was going to lead.
The department buried secrets every day. It was a given. But who would have thought seventeen years ago that a chemical test run one day in a DOJ lab in Sacramento might put a shovel into the greasy dirt and turn over the past, bringing this secret to light.
17
DRIVING HOME Bosch thought about the many different tendrils of the investigation that were wrapping around the body of Rebecca Verloren. He knew he had to keep his eyes on the prize. The evidence was the key. The elements of departmental politics and possible corruption and cover-up all amounted to what was known as high jingo. It could be threatening and distracting from the intended goal. He had to avoid this at the same time that he had to be wary of it.
Eventually he was able to push thoughts of Irving ’s shadow over the investigation aside and concentrate on the case. His thoughts somehow led him to Rebecca’s bedroom and how her mother had left it unchanged by time. He wondered if it was the loss of the daughter that did it or was it the circumstances of the loss? What if you lost a child by natural causes or accident or circumstances like divorce? Bosch had a daughter he rarely saw. It weighed on him. He knew that near or far his daughter left him completely vulnerable, that he could end up like the mother who preserved a daughter’s bedroom like a museum, or the father who was long lost to the world.
More so than this question, something about the bedroom bothered him. He couldn’t quite reach what it was but he knew it was there and it nagged at him. He looked from the elevated freeway out across Hollywood to his left. There was still some light in the sky but the evening was starting. Darkness had waited long enough. Searchlights that he knew could be traced down to the corner of Hollywood and Vine were crisscrossing the horizon. To him it looked nice. To him it looked like home.
When he got to his house on the hill he checked the mail and the phone for messages and then changed out of the suit he had bought for his return to the job. He carefully hung it in the closet, thinking he could wear it at least once more before having to take it in to the cleaners. He put on blue jeans, black sneakers and a black pullover shirt. He put on a sport coat that was fraying on the right shoulder from his cutting corners too close. He transferred his gun and badge and wallet. Then he got back into his car and headed downtown to the Toy District.
He decided to park in Japantown in the museum lot so he wouldn’t have to worry about the car being broken into or vandalized. From there he walked over to Fifth Street, encountering an increasing density of homeless people as he progressed. The city’s primary homeless encampments and the missions that catered to them lined a five-block stretch of Fifth Street south of Los Angeles Street. The sidewalks outside the missions and cheap residence hotels were lined with cardboard boxes and shopping carts filled with the dirty and meager belongings of lost people. It was as if some sort of social disintegration bomb had gone off and the shrapnel of damaged, disenfranchised lives had been hurled everywhere. Up and down the street there were men and women yelling, their shouts unintelligible or simply eerie non sequiturs in the night. It felt like a city with its own rule and reason, a hurt city with a wound so deep that the bandages the missions applied could not stop the bleeding.
As he walked, Bosch noted that he was not asked once for money or cigarettes or any kind of handout. The irony was not lost on him. It appeared that the place with the highest concentration of homeless people in the city was also the place where a citizen was safest from their entreaties, if nothing else.
The Los Angeles Mission and the Salvation Army had major help centers here. Bosch decided to start with them. He had a twelve-year-old driver’s license photo of Robert Verloren and an even older photograph of him at his daughter’s funeral. He showed these to the people operating the help centers and the kitchen workers who put free food on hundreds of plates every day. He got little response until a kitchen worker remembered Verloren as a “client” who came through the chow line pretty regularly a few years before.
“It’s been a while,” the man said. “Haven’t seen him.”
After spending an hour in each center Bosch started working his way down the street, stepping into the smaller missions and flop hotels and showing the photos. He got a few recognitions of Verloren but nothing fresh, nothing to lead him to the man who had completely dropped off the human radar screen so many years before. He worked it until ten-thirty and decided he would return the next day to finish canvassing the street. As he walked back toward Japantown he was depressed by what he had just immersed himself in and by the dwindling hopes of finding Robert Verloren. He walked with his head down, hands in his pockets, and therefore didn’t see the two men until they had already seen him. They stepped out of the alcoves of two side-by-side toy stores as Bosch passed. One blocked his path. The other stepped out behind him. Bosch stopped.
“Hey, missionary man,” said the one in front of him.
In the dim glow from a streetlight half a block away Bosch saw the glint of a blade down at the man’s side. He turned slightly to check the man behind him. He was smaller. Bosch wasn’t sure but it looked like he was simply holding a chunk of concrete in his hand. A piece of broken curb. Both men were dressed in layers, a common sight in this part of the city. One was black and one was white.