“Like what?”

“First of all, she’s a lot smaller than he is. I don’t see her coming at him with a knife. Then there’s the knife itself. It’s a serrated steak knife, ’bout eight inches long, and she had one of those little purses without a strap.”

“A clutch.”

“Yeah, I guess. Anyway, that knife wouldn’t’ve fit in it, so how’d she bring it in? As they say on the street, her clothes fit tighter than the rubbers in her purse, so she wasn’t hiding it on her, either. And there was more. If her purpose was to rip the guy off, why have sex first? Why not pull the knife, take his shit and go? But that didn’t happen. His story was that they did it first, then she came at him, which explained why she was still naked. Which, of course, raised another question. Why rob the guy when you’re naked? Where you going to run like that?”

“The guy was lying.”

“Seemed obvious. Then we got something else. In her purse-the clutch-was a piece of paper on which she had written down the motel’s name and the room number. It was consistent with a right-handed person. Like I said, the stab was to the upper right chest of the victim. So it doesn’t add up. If she came at him, the chances are the knife would be in her right hand. If the john then turns it into her, it’s likely the wound would be on the left side of the chest, not the right.”

Bosch made a motion of pulling his right hand toward his chest, showing how awkward it would be for it to stab his right side.

“There was all kinds of stuff that wasn’t right. It was a downward-grade wound, also inconsistent with it being in her hand. That would have been upward-grade.”

Hinojos nodded that she understood.

“The problem was, we had no physical evidence contradicting his story. Nothing. Just our feeling that she wouldn’t have done it the way he said. The wound stuff wasn’t enough. And then, in his favor, was the knife. It was on the bed, we could see it had fingerprints in the blood. I had no doubt they’d be hers. That’s not hard to do once she’s dead. So while it didn’t impress me, that didn’t matter. It’s what the DA would think and then what a jury would think after that. Reasonable doubt is a big black hole that swallows cases like this. We needed more.”

“So what happened?”

“It’s what we call a he-said-she-said. One person’s word against the other, but only the other is dead in this case. Makes it even harder. We had nothing but his story. So what you do in a case like that is you sweat the guy. You turn him. And there’s a lot of ways to do it. But, basically, you gotta break him down in the rooms. We-”

“The rooms?”

“The interrogation rooms. In the bureau. We took this guy into a room. As a witness. We didn’t formally arrest him. We asked if he’d come down, said that we had to straighten a few things out about what she did, and he said sure. You know, Mr. Cooperative. Still cool. We stuck him in a room and then Edgar and I went down to the watch office to get some of the good coffee. They’ve got good coffee there, one of those big urns that was donated by some restaurant that got wrecked in the quake. Everybody goes in there to get coffee. Anyway, we’re takin’ our time, talkin’ about how we’re going to go at this guy, which one of us wanted him first, and so on. Meantime, fuckin’ Pounds-excuse me-sees the guy in the room through the little window and goes in and informs him. And-”

“What do you mean, informs him?”

“Reads him his rights. This is our goddamn witness and Pounds, who doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing, thinks he’s gotta go in there and give the guy the spiel. He thinks like we forgot or something.”

Bosch looked at her with outrage on his face but immediately saw she didn’t understand.

“Wasn’t that the right thing to do?” she asked. “Aren’t you required by law to inform people of their rights?”

Bosch struggled to contain his anger, reminding himself that Hinojos might work for the department, but she was an outsider. Her perceptions of police work were likely based more on the media than on the actual reality.

“Let me give you a quick lesson on what’s the law and what’s real. We-the cops-have the deck stacked against us. What Miranda and all the other rules and regs amount to is that we have to take some guy we know is, or at least think is, guilty and basically say, ‘Hey, look, we think you did it and the Supreme Court and every lawyer on the planet would advise you not to talk to us, but, how about it, will you talk to us?’ It just doesn’t work. You gotta get around that. You gotta use guile and some bluffing and you gotta be sneaky. The rules of the courts are like a tightrope that you’re walking on. You have to be very careful but there is a chance you can walk on it to get to the other side. So when some asshole who doesn’t know shit walks in on your guy and informs him, it can pretty much ruin your whole day, not to mention the case.”

He stopped and studied her. He still saw skepticism. He knew then that she was just another citizen who would be scared shitless if she ever got a dose of the way things really were on the street.

“When someone is informed, that’s it,” he said. “It’s over. Me and Edgar came back in from coffee and the john sits there and says he thinks he wants his lawyer. I said, ‘What lawyer, who’s talking about lawyers? You’re a witness, not a suspect,’ and he tells us that the lieutenant just read him his rights. I don’t know at that moment who I hated more, Pounds for blowing it or this guy for killing the girl.”

“Well, tell me this, what would have happened if Pounds had not done what he did?”

“We would’ve made friendly with the guy, asked him to tell his story in as much detail as possible and hoped there would be inconsistencies when compared to what he’d told the uniforms. Then we would have said, ‘The inconsistencies in your statements make you a suspect.’ Then we would have informed him and hopefully clubbed the shit out of him with the inconsistencies and the problems we found with the scene. We would have tried, and maybe succeeded, in finessing a confession. Most of what we do is just get people to talk. It’s not like the stuff on TV. It’s a hundred times harder and dirtier. But just like you, what we do is get people to talk…Anyway, that’s my view. But we’ll never know now what could’ve happened because of Pounds.”

“Well, what did happen after you found out he’d been informed?”

“I left the room and walked straight into where Pounds was in his office. He knew something was wrong because he stood up. I remember that. I asked him if he’d informed my guy and when he said yes, we got into it. Both of us, screaming…then I don’t really remember how it happened. I’m not trying to deny anything. I just don’t remember the details. I must’ve grabbed him and pushed him. And his face went through the glass.”

“What did you do when that happened?”

“Well, some of the guys came running in and pulled me out of there. The station commander sent me home. Pounds had to go to the hospital to fix his nose. IAD took a statement from him and I was suspended. And then Irving stepped in and changed it to ISL. Here I am.”

“What happened with the case?”

“The john never talked. He got his lawyer and waited it out. Edgar went with what we had to the DA last Friday and they kicked it. They said they weren’t going into court with a no-witness case with a few minor inconsistencies…Her prints were on the knife. Big surprise. What it came down to is that she didn’t count. At least not enough for them to take the chance of losing.”

Neither of them spoke for a few moments. Bosch guessed that she was thinking about the corollaries between this case and his mother’s.

“So what we’ve got,” he finally said, “is a murderer out there on the street and the guy who allowed him to go free is back behind his desk, the broken glass already replaced, business as usual. That’s our system. I got mad about it and look what it got me. Stress leave and maybe the end of my job.”