Before contacting Jerry Edgar at Hollywood Division, Bosch pulled up the files-both hard and digital-on his own case. It involved the murder of a precious-metals swindler named Roy Alan McIntyre. He had sold gold futures by phone and Internet. It was the oldest story in the book: there was no gold, or not enough of it. It was a Ponzi scheme through and through, and like all of them, it finally collapsed upon itself. The victims lost tens of millions. McIntyre was arrested as the mastermind, but the evidence was tenuous. A good lawyer came to his defense and was able to convince the media that McIntyre was a victim himself, a dupe for organized-crime elements that had pulled the strings on the scheme. The DA started floating a deal that would put McIntyre on probation-provided he cooperated and returned all the money he still had access to. But word leaked about the impending deal, and hundreds of the scam’s victims organized to oppose it. Before the whole thing went to court, McIntyre was murdered in the garage under the Westwood condominium tower where he lived. Shot once between the eyes, his body found on the concrete next to the open door of his car.
The crime scene was clean; not even a shell casing from the nine-millimeter bullet that had killed him was recovered. The investigators had no physical evidence and a list of possible suspects that numbered in the hundreds. The killing looked like a hit. It could have been McIntyre’s unsavory backers in the gold scam or it could have been any of the investors who’d gotten ripped off. The only bright spot was that there was a witness. She was Diane Gables, a twenty-nine-year-old stockbroker who happened to be driving by McIntyre’s condo on her way home from work. She’d reported seeing a man wearing a ski mask and carrying a gun at his side run from the garage and jump into the passenger seat of a black SUV waiting in front. Panicked by the sight of the gun, she didn’t get an exact make or model of the SUV or its license plate number. She’d pulled to the side of the road rather than following the vehicle as it sped off.
Bosch had not interviewed Gables when he had reevaluated the case in the Open-Unsolved Unit. He had simply reviewed the file and submitted it to the DEATH squad. Now, of course, he would be talking to her.
He picked the phone up and dialed a number from memory. Jerry Edgar was at his desk.
“It’s me-Bosch. Looks like we’re going to be working together again.”
“Sounds good to me, Harry. What’ve you got?”
Diane Gables’s current address, obtained through the DMV, was in Studio City. Edgar drove while Bosch looked through the file on the 2007 case. It involved the murder of a man who had been awaiting trial for raping a seventeen-year-old girl who had knocked on his door to sell him candy bars as part of a fundraiser for a school trip to Washington, D.C.
As Bosch read through the murder book, he remembered the case. It had been in the news because the circumstances suggested it had been a crime of vigilante justice by someone who was not willing to wait for Raymond Randolph to go on trial. Randolph was intending to mount a defense that would acknowledge that he’d had sexual intercourse with the girl but state that it was consensual. He planned to claim that the victim offered him sex in exchange for his buying her whole carton of candy bars.
The forty-six-year-old Randolph was found in the single-car garage behind his bungalow on Orange Grove, south of Sunset. He had been on his knees when he was shot twice in the back of the head.
The crime scene was clean, but it was a hot day in July and a neighbor who had her windows open because of a broken air conditioner heard the two shots, followed by the high revving and rapid departure of a vehicle in the street. She called 911, which brought a near-immediate response from the police at Hollywood Station, three blocks away, and also served to peg the time of the murder almost to the minute.
Jerry Edgar was the lead investigator on the case. While obvious suspicion focused on the family and friends of the rape victim, Edgar cast a wide net-Bosch took some pride in seeing that-and in doing so came across Diane Gables. Two blocks from the Randolph home was an intersection controlled by a traffic signal and equipped with a camera that photographed vehicles that ran the red light. The camera took a double photo-one shot of the vehicle’s license plate, and one shot of the person behind the wheel. This was done so that when the traffic citation was sent to the vehicle’s owner, he or she could determine who’d been behind the wheel when the infraction occurred.
Diane Gables was photographed in her Lexus driving through the red light in the same minute as the 911 call reporting the gunshots was made. The photograph and registration were obtained from the DMV the day after the murder, and Gables, now thirty-seven, was interviewed by Edgar and his partner, Detective Manuel Soto. She was then dismissed as both a possible suspect and a witness.
“So, how well do you remember this interview?” Bosch asked.
“I remember it because she was a real looker,” Edgar said. “You always remember the lookers.”
“According to the book, you interviewed her and dropped her. How come? Why so fast?”
“She and her story checked out. Keep going. It’s in there.”
Bosch found the interview summary and scanned it. Gables had told Edgar and Soto that she had been cruising through the neighborhood after filling out a crime report at the nearby Hollywood Station on Wilcox. Her Lexus had been damaged by a hit-and-run driver the night before while parked on the street outside a restaurant on Franklin. In order to apply for insurance coverage on the repairs, she had to file a police report. After stopping at the station, she was running late for work and went through the light on what she thought was a yellow signal. The camera said otherwise.
“So she had filed the report?” Bosch asked.
“She had indeed. She checked out. And that’s what makes me think we’re dealing with just a coincidence here, Harry.”
Bosch nodded but continued to grind it down inside. He didn’t like coincidences. He didn’t believe in them.
“You checked her work too?”
“Soto did. Confirmed her position and that she was indeed late to work on the day of the killing. She had called ahead and said she was running late because she had been at the police station. She called her boss.”
“What about the restaurant? I don’t see it in here.”
“Then I probably didn’t have that information.”
“So you never checked it.”
“You mean did I check to see if she ate there the night before the murder? No, Harry, I didn’t and that’s a bullshit question. She was-”
“It’s just that if she was setting up a cover story, she could’ve crunched her own car and-”
“Come on, Harry. You’re kidding me, right?”
“I don’t know. We’re still going to talk to her.”
“I know that, Harry. I’ve known that since you called. You’re going to have to see for yourself. Just like always. So just tell me how you want to go in, rattlesnake or cobra?”
Bosch considered for a moment, remembering the code they’d used back when they were partners. A rattlesnake interview was when you shook your tail and hissed. It was confrontational and useful for getting immediate reactions. Going cobra was the quiet approach. You’d slowly move in, get close, and then strike.
“Let’s go cobra.”
“You got it.”
Diane Gables wasn’t home. They had timed their arrival for 5:30 P.M., figuring that with the stock market closing at 1 P.M., Gables would easily have finished work for the day.
“What do you want to do?” Edgar said as they stood at the door.