“And you think that put him over,” Irving said.
“Something happened to him in that room with Harris. Something bad. He lost his family after that, he lost the case… I think the one thread he held on to was his belief that he’d had the right guy. When he found out he was wrong – when I stumbled into his world and told him it was bullshit – the thread snapped.”
“Look, this is bullshit, Bosch,” Lindell said. “I mean, I respect you and your friendship with this guy, but you aren’t seeing what is right here in front of us. The obvious. This guy did himself because he’s the guy and he knew we’d come back to him. This suicide is a confession.”
Irving stared at Bosch, waiting for him to come back at Lindell. But Bosch said nothing. He was tired of fighting it.
“I find myself agreeing with Agent Lindell on this,” the deputy chief finally said.
Bosch nodded. He expected as much. They didn’t know Sheehan the way Bosch did. He and his former partner had not been close in recent years but they had been close enough at one time for Bosch to know that Lindell and Irving were wrong. It would have been easier for him to agree. It would lift a lot of the guilt off him. But he couldn’t agree.
“Give me the morning,” he said instead.
“What?” Irving asked.
“Keep this wrapped up and away from the press for half a day. We proceed with the warrants and the plan for tomorrow morning. Give me time to see what comes up and what Mrs. Kincaid says.”
“If she talks.”
“She’ll talk. She’s dying to talk. Let me have the morning with her. See how things go. If I don’t come up with a connection between Kincaid and Elias, then you do what you have to do with Frankie Sheehan. You tell the world what you think you know.”
Irving thought about this for a long moment and then nodded.
“I think that would be the most cautious route,” he said. “We should have a ballistics report by then as well.”
Bosch nodded his thanks. He looked out through the open doors to the deck again. It was starting to rain harder. He looked at his watch and saw how late it was getting. And he knew what he still needed to do before he could sleep.
Chapter 30
BOSCH felt the obligation to go to Margaret Sheehan in person and tell her what Frankie had done to himself. It didn’t matter that the couple had been separated. She and Frankie had been together a long time before that happened. She and their two girls deserved the courtesy of a visit from a friend instead of a stranger’s dreadful phone call in the middle of the night. Irving had suggested that the Bakersfield Police Department be prevailed upon to send an officer to the house, but Bosch knew that would be just as clumsy and callous as a phone call. He volunteered to make the drive.
Bosch did prevail upon the Bakersfield cop shop, but only to run down an address for Margaret Sheehan. He could have called her to ask for directions. But that would have been telling her without telling her, an old cop’s trick for making the job easier. It would have been cowardly.
The northbound Golden State Freeway was almost deserted, the rain and the hour of night having cleared out all but those motorists with no choice but to be on the road. Most of these were truckers hauling their loads north toward San Francisco and even further or returning empty to the vegetable fields of the midstate to pick up more. The Grapevine – the steep and winding stretch of the freeway up and over the mountains lying north of Los Angeles – was littered with semis that had slid off the roadway or whose drivers had chosen to pull over rather than risk the already treacherous run in the pounding rain. Bosch found that once he cleared this obstacle course and came down out of the mountains he was finally able to pick up some speed and lost time. As he drove he watched branches of lightning spread across the purple horizon to the east. And he thought about his old partner. He tried to think about old cases and the Irish jokes that Sheehan used to tell. Anything to keep from thinking about what he had done and Bosch’s own guilt and culpability.
He had brought a homemade tape with him and played it on the car stereo. It contained recordings of saxophone pieces Bosch particularly liked. He fast-forwarded until he found the one he wanted. It was Frank Morgan’s “Lullaby.” It was like a sweet and soulful funeral dirge to Bosch, a good-bye and apology to Frankie Sheehan. A good-bye and apology to Eleanor. It went well with the rain. Bosch played it over and over as he drove.
He got to the house where Margaret Sheehan and her two daughters were living before two. There was an outside light still on and light could be seen through the curtains of the front windows. Bosch got the idea that Margie was in there waiting for his call, or maybe for him to show up. He hesitated at the door, wondering about how many times he had made this kind of call, then finally knocked.
When Margie answered the door Bosch was reminded of how there was never any planning for these things. She stared at him for a moment and he thought she didn’t recognize him. It had been a lot of years.
“Margie, it’s – ”
“Harry? Harry Bosch? We just – ”
She stopped and put it together. Usually they did.
“Oh, Harry, no. Oh no. Not Francis!”
She brought both hands up to her face. Her mouth was open and she looked like that famous painting of someone on a bridge screaming.
“I’m sorry, Margie. I really am. I think maybe I should come in.”
• • •
She was stoic about the whole thing. Bosch gave her the details and then Margie Sheehan made coffee for him so he wouldn’t fall asleep on the ride back. That was a cop’s wife thinking. In the kitchen Bosch leaned against a counter as she brewed the coffee.
“He called you tonight,” he said.
“Yes, I told you.”
“Tell me how he seemed.”
“Bad. He told me what they did to him. He seemed so… betrayed? Is that the right word? I mean, his own people, fellow cops, had taken him in. He was very sad, Harry.”
Bosch nodded.
“He gave his life to that department… and this is what they did to him.”
Bosch nodded again.
“Did he say anything about…”
He didn’t finish.
“About killing himself? No, he didn’t say that… I read up on police suicide once. Long time ago. In fact, back when Elias sued him the first time over that guy he killed. Frankie got real depressed then and I got scared. I read up on it. And what I read said that when people tell you about it or say they’re going to do it, what they are really doing is asking you to stop them.”
Bosch nodded.
“I guess Frankie didn’t want to be stopped,” she continued. “He didn’t say anything about it to me.”
She pulled the glass coffeepot out of the brewer and poured some into a mug. She then opened a cabinet and took down a silver Thermos. She started filling it.
“This is for the road home. I don’t want you falling asleep on the clothesline.”
“What?”
“I mean the Grapevine. I’m not thinking straight here.”
Bosch stepped over and put his hand on her shoulder. She put the coffee pot down and turned to him to be hugged.
“This last year,” she said. “Things… things just went haywire.”
“I know. He told me.”
She broke away from him and went back to filling the Thermos.
“Margie, I have to ask you something before I head back,” Bosch said. “They took his gun from him today to run ballistics. He used another. Do you know anything about that one?”
“No. He only had the one he wore on the job. We didn’t have other guns. Not with two little girls. When Frankie would come home he’d lock his job gun up in a little safe on the floor of the closet. And only he had the key. I just didn’t want any more guns than were required in the house.”
Bosch understood that if it was her edict that there be no more weapons than the one Sheehan was required to carry, then that left a hole. He could have taken a weapon in and hidden it from her – in a spot so obscure even the FBI didn’t find it when they searched his house. Maybe it was wrapped in plastic and buried in the yard. Sheehan also could have gotten the weapon after she and the girls moved out and up to Bakersfield. She would never have known about it.