“It was bullshit. The case went to trial a few months after the Rodney King thing. There was no way a white cop who had shot a black man was going to get a clean verdict in this town back then.”
“Be careful, Detective, you’re revealing too much of yourself.”
“Look, what I said was the truth. Deep down, you know it was the truth. How come the moment the truth might be uncomfortable people raise the race card?”
“Let’s just drop this, Detective Bosch. You have your belief in your friend and I admire that. I guess we’ll see what happens when the lawyer who inherits this case from Howard brings it to trial.”
Bosch nodded and was thankful for the truce. The accusatory discussion had made him feel uncomfortable.
“What else have you held back?” he asked, to try to move on.
“That’s pretty much it. Spent all day in here to basically hold one file back.”
She blew her breath out and suddenly seemed very tired.
“You doing okay?” he asked.
“Fine. I think it was good for me to stay busy. I haven’t had much time to think about what has happened. I’m sure I will tonight.”
Bosch nodded.
“Any more reporters come around?”
“A couple. I gave them a sound bite and they went on their merry way. They all think the city’s going to cut loose over this.”
“What do you think?”
“I think if a cop did this, there’s no telling what’s going to happen. And if a cop didn’t do it, there will be people who just won’t believe it. But you already know that.”
Bosch nodded.
“One thing you should know about the trial map.”
“What’s that?”
“Despite what you said about Frank Sheehan a moment ago, Howard was out to prove Harris innocent.”
Bosch hiked his shoulders.
“I thought he already was in the criminal trial.”
“No, he was found not guilty. There’s a difference. Howard was going to prove his innocence by proving who did it.”
Bosch stared at her a long moment, wondering how he should proceed.
“Does it say in that trial map who that was?”
“No. Like I said, there was just an outline of the opener. But it’s in there. He was going to tell the jury that he would deliver the murderer to them. Those were his words. ‘Deliver the murderer to you.’ He just didn’t write who that was. It would have been a bad opener, if he did. It would give it away to the defense and make for an anticlimactic moment later in trial when he revealed who this person was.”
Bosch was silent as he thought about this. He didn’t know how much weight to give what she had told him. Elias was a showman, in and out of court. Revealing a killer in court was Perry Mason stuff. It almost never happened.
“I’m sorry but I probably shouldn’t have told you that,” she said.
“Why did you?”
“Because if others knew this was his strategy, it could have been a motive.”
“You mean the real killer of that little girl came back to kill Elias.”
“That’s a possibility.”
Bosch nodded.
“Did you read the depos?” he asked.
“No, not enough time. I’m giving all depositions to you because the defense – in this case the city attorney’s office – would have been furnished copies. So I’m not giving you something you wouldn’t already have access to.”
“What about the computer?”
“I looked through it very quickly. It appears to be depositions and other information out of the public file. Nothing privileged.”
“Okay.”
Bosch started to get up. He was thinking about how many trips down to the car it would take him to move the files.
“Oh, one other thing.”
She reached down to the box on the floor and came up with a manila file. She opened it on the desk, revealing two envelopes. Bosch leaned over the desk to see.
“This was in the Harris stuff. I don’t know what it means.”
Both envelopes were addressed to Elias at his office. No return addresses. Both were postmarked Hollywood, one mailed five weeks earlier and the other three weeks earlier.
“There’s a single page with a line in each. Nothing that makes sense to me.”
She started opening one of the envelopes.
“Uh…,” Bosch began.
She stopped, holding the envelope in her hand.
“What?”
“I don’t know. I was thinking about prints.”
“I already handled these. I’m sorry.”
“Okay, go ahead, I guess.”
She finished opening the envelope, unfolded the page on the desk and turned it so Bosch could read it. There was one typed line at the top of the page. dot the i humbert humbert “Humbert humbert…,” Bosch said.
“It’s the name of a character from literature – or what some people consider literature,” Entrenkin said. “Lolita, by Nabokov.”
“Right.”
Bosch noticed that a notation had been written in pencil at the bottom of the page.
#2 – 3/12
“That was probably Howard’s marking,” Entrenkin said. “Or someone in his office.”
She opened the next envelope, the more recently mailed of the two, and unfolded the letter. Bosch leaned over again. license plates prove his innocense “Looks to me like they’re obviously from the same person,” Entrenkin said. “Also, notice that innocence is spelled wrong.”
“Right.”
There was also a pencil notation at the bottom of the page.
#3 – 4/5
Bosch pulled his briefcase up onto his lap and opened it. He took out the evidence envelope that contained the letter Elias had been carrying in his inside suit pocket when gunned down.
“Elias was carrying this when he… when he got on Angels Flight. I forgot that the crime scene people gave it to me. It might be good if you are here observing when I open it. It’s got the same postmark as those two. It was mailed to him Wednesday. This one I want to preserve for prints.”
He took a pair of rubber gloves out of the cardboard dispenser in his case and put them on. He then carefully removed the letter and opened it. He unfolded a piece of paper similar to the first two. Again there was one line typed on the page. he knows you know As Bosch stared at the page he felt the slight flutter in his heart that he knew came with the surge of adrenaline.
“Detective Bosch, what does this mean?”
“I don’t know. But I sure wish I had opened it sooner.”
There was no pencil notation on the bottom of the third page. Elias hadn’t gotten around to it, apparently.
“It looks like we’re missing one,” Bosch said. “These are marked two and three and this one came after – this one would be four.”
“I know. But I haven’t found anything that would be number one. Nothing in the files. Maybe he threw it out, not realizing it meant something until the second one came.”
“Maybe.”
He thought about the letters for a moment. He was mostly going on instinct and premonition, but he felt the charge sustaining in his blood. He felt he had found his focus. This exhilarated him but at the same time he also felt a bit foolish at having unknowingly carried such a potentially key piece of the case around in his briefcase now for about twelve hours.
“Did Howard ever talk to you about this case?” he asked.
“No, we never talked about each other’s work,” Entrenkin said. “We had a rule. You see, we knew that what we were doing was… something that wouldn’t be understood – the inspector general with one of the department’s most vocal and well-known critics.”
“Not to mention him being married and all.”
Her face turned hard.
“Look, what is wrong with you? One minute we’re getting along fine and maybe making some progress on this and the next you just want to antagonize me.”
“What’s wrong is that I wish you would save the we-knew-it-was-wrong sermon for somebody else. I find it hard to believe you two didn’t talk about the LAPD when you were alone up in that apartment.”
Bosch saw pure fire in her eyes.