I smacked the table. “It was a scam, right? One of those trolls?”
I heard her strike a match, the sipping sound of a cigarette. “The bald guy has a record. He did time for molesting his own daughter. There was a court order prohibiting him from using the Internet. That did a fuck of a lot of good, huh?”
“They catch him?” Although Iris was only three years gone, I couldn’t quite remember what it was like, worrying about your daughter in a world where there was a boogeyman behind every door.
“Yeah, in some strip club in Whitehall. Tony said he was throwing himself a going-away party. He’d been passing rocks of crack around like they were jelly beans, had himself quite a posse.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah, boy. You want to get some breakfast? I’m off at eight.”
I begged off, claiming I’d taken a Vicodin and was ready to crash. In truth, I was in pain, but not the kind a painkiller would help with. I was afraid to leave the house, since the bars were calling to me again. Also, Texaco had left half a bottle of cheap merlot in the fridge, although I’d asked him when he moved in to keep any booze in his room, and I wanted to reserve my option to uncap it.
The knock on the door an hour later caught me standing at the fridge with the door open, staring at the wine. I slammed the door closed and limped over to the peephole. Sandy stood there, her cheap pile jacket wrapped around her black and yellow uniform. I let her in.
“Jesus,” she said, “what a pigpen.” She smelled faintly of grease and flour. The room looked messy in a way you only notice when someone you care about enters. Papers stacked against the wall, CDs in disorder, lint on the couch. The windows hadn’t been washed for at least a decade.
She fixed a pot of coffee; out of habit, I suppose. “You know what I don’t get?” she said as she filled the pot with water.
I played along. “What’s that?”
“Where the hell are the girl’s parents? How could you walk away from your own baby? What do they expect to find in their lives that they think is going to be better than sleeping next to your own baby?” She lit a cigarette, although she knew I didn’t allow smoking in the apartment. “And the grandmother. What kind of cunt lets her kid go to a Waffle House in the middle of the night to meet some pervert?”
When Iris was killed, we were on our way to visit Sandy at work. On her break.
She walked to the back door, pulled the blind to one side, and looked across the backyard fence like Texaco did, watching a truck upend one dumpster after another. I pretended to resume the crossword I’d given up on twenty minutes before.
When the coffee was ready, she poured herself a cup and took a chair across from me at the kitchen table. She picked up the metro section of the paper and began to leaf through it, licking her finger before each page turn.
I took some relief from the page interposed between us. Then I heard the clunk of metal on the linoleum tabletop.
I reached over and lifted the paper a few inches, until I could see the revolver. I recognized it as the one Sandy had shown me one night, when the manager forgot to lock his bottom desk drawer. A.38, five-shot, cheap. I could see the shells in the cylinder.
“Have you lost your mind?” I said.
She picked up the gun by the end of the grip, letting it dangle in front of my face.
“So what-you’re Jack Ruby all of a sudden?” I said.
“Who?” She slugged back the rest of the coffee in her cup.
“Never mind.” I thought to myself I used to know what to do with her. I didn’t anymore.
“You owe me,” she said, swinging the gun like a hypnotist’s watch. “You owe me this.”
“You want me to walk into the police station and murder this guy? I owe that to you?”
She shook her head as though I’d made a bad joke. “No, asshole. I expect you to kill Grandma. Tony promised me the bald guy’s going to get what’s coming to him. She’s the one that’s going to walk away.”
Sandy cocked the trigger. “She was supposed to look out for the girl. Instead, she went partying. The bald guy was the boogeyman. There’s a boogeyman under every bed. Anybody knows that. But that’s why we’re on this earth, right? To stand between our kids and the bad guys?”
I didn’t know what to say.
“Right?” she said again, challengingly. She stuck the barrel in my face. “Right?”
A Fine Mist of Blood by Michael Connelly
FROM Vengeance
THE DNA HITS came in the mail, in yellow envelopes from the regional crime lab’s genetics unit. Fingerprint matches were less formal; notification usually came by e-mail. Case-to-case data hits were rare birds and were handled in yet a different manner-direct contact between the synthesizer and the submitting investigator.
Harry Bosch had a day off and was in the waiting area outside the school principal’s office when he got the call. More like a half a day off. His plan was to head downtown to the PAB after dealing with the summons from the school’s high command.
The buzzing of his phone brought an immediate response from the woman behind the gateway desk.
“There’s no cell phones in here,” she said.
“I’m not a student,” Bosch said, stating the obvious as he pulled the offending instrument from his pocket.
“Doesn’t matter. There’s no cell phones in here.”
“I’ll take it outside.”
“I won’t come out to find you. If you miss your appointment, then you’ll have to reschedule, and your daughter’s situation won’t be resolved.”
“I’ll risk it. I’ll just be in the hallway, okay?”
He pushed through the door into the hallway as he connected to the call. The hallway was quiet, as it was the middle of the fourth period. The ID on the screen had said simply LAPD data, but that had been enough to give Bosch a stirring of excitement.
The call was from a tech named Malek Pran. Bosch had never dealt with him and had to ask him to repeat his name twice. Pran was from Data Evaluation and Theory-known internally as the DEATH squad-which was part of a new effort by the Open- Unsolved Unit to clear cases through what was called data synthesizing.
For the past three years the DEATH squad had been digitizing archived murder books-the hard-copy investigative records-of unsolved cases, creating a massive database of easily accessible and comparable information on unsolved crimes. Suspects, witnesses, weapons, locations, word constructions-anything that an investigator thought important enough to note in an investigative record was now digitized and could be compared with other cases.
The project had actually been initiated simply to create space. The city’s records archives were bursting at the seams with acres of files and file boxes. Shifting it all to digital would make room in the cramped department.
Pran said he had a case-to-case hit. A witness listed in a cold case Bosch had submitted for synthesizing had come up in another case, also a homicide, as a witness once again. Her name was Diane Gables. Bosch’s case was from 1999 and the second case was from 2007, which was too recent to fall under the purview of the Open-Unsolved Unit.
“Who submitted the 2007 case?”
“Uh, it was out of Hollywood Division. Detective Jerry Edgar made the submission.”
Bosch almost smiled in the hallway. He went a distance back with Jerry Edgar.
“Have you talked to Edgar yet about the hit?” Bosch asked.
“No. I started with you. Do you want his contact info?”
“I already have it. What’s the vic’s name on that case?”
“Raymond Randolph, DOB six, six, sixty-one-that’s a lot of sixes. DOD July second, 2007.”
“Okay, I’ll get the rest from Edgar. You did good, Pran. This gives me something I can work with.”
Bosch disconnected and went back into the principal’s office. He had not missed his appointment. He checked his watch. He’d give it fifteen minutes, and then he’d have to start moving on the case. His daughter would have to go without her confiscated cell phone until he could get another appointment with the principal.