Patrick finished with the tape. He tossed the wad of it behind him and produced his cell. “I gotta call this in. I’d rather be bullshitting my way free of an attempted murder charge than an actual homicide rap, if you know what I mean, and he’s turning a funny shade.”
Bosch looked at the man lying at his feet. Looked like an aging nerd. Kinda guy did your taxes out of a strip mall storefront. Another little man with soiled desires and furious nightmares. Funny how the monsters always turned out to be little more than men. But Patrick was right — he’d die soon without attention.
Patrick dialed 911 but didn’t hit Send. Instead he held out his hand to Bosch. “If I’m ever in L.A.”
Bosch shook his hand. “Funny. I can’t picture you in L.A.”
Patrick said, “And I can’t picture you out of it, even though you’re standing right here. Take care, Harry.”
“You too. And thanks” — Bosch looked down at Paisley, on his way to critical care, minimum — “for, um, that.”
“Pleasure.”
Bosch headed toward the door, a door only accessible from the front of the cellar, not the back. Beat the hell out of the way he’d entered the room. He was reaching for the doorknob when he turned back.
“One last thing.”
Patrick had the phone to his ear and his free arm wrapped tight around Chiffon’s shoulders. “What’s that?”
“Is there a way to get back to the airport without going through that tunnel?”
Joseph D’Agnese
Harm and hammer
From Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine
once a month the man parks his car at the top of her cul-de-sac. He sits behind his steering wheel and plays with his phone until she arrives. She takes no obvious note of him as she drives home from the mall. No looking. No waves. She simply parks in the driveway of her crappy townhouse rental and heads inside, leaving her front door unlocked. She kicks off her shoes, runs to the kitchen, and turns the oven to 350 degrees. Then she dashes upstairs to her bedroom and strips off everything but her bra and panties and slips into the little black dress or sometimes the cute red one. She steps into her Mary Janes, puts on her earrings, and checks her hair and makeup in the mirror. By the time she pops the disks of cookie dough into the oven and begins heating the kettle, the man is already making the rounds of her small backyard. It isn’t much of a yard, but he always likes to check the perimeter and that makes her think sweetly of him.
Eventually he raps his knuckles on the door as he enters. He sits at the table while she serves him tea and cookies. Green tea because he once said it’s good for his cholesterol and he’s trying to cut down. He’s not heavy, but he can easily blow his good looks if he doesn’t watch out. She knows he and his wife have recently split, that his wife has taken the kids, that her lawyer is riding him hard.
She knows that she and he can never have a future. But that’s not the point. Thinking about him is a nice fantasy for her at this point in her life. And she trusts him. She likes the way he treats her. Like she’s a good person. Like she was simply caught up in something she didn’t know how to get out of.
Which is only half true.
Marshal Fred is good and kind, with somewhat sad eyes. He probably has a million cases like hers, but he behaves as if she is the only one in whom he can confide. She enjoys their time together, even if it comes only once a month.
But today, it’s not his voice she hears coming from the open doorway.
“Callie? Callie Rustan?”
A woman’s voice.
A woman calling her by that name. The name she’ll never get used to.
Fear grips her as she stands at the stove. Her eyes flick to the wooden block. She reaches for the chef’s knife.
“Drop it,” the voice says.
The dead, distorted faces of the women and children flash before her, and she thinks, Oh, my God — they found me.
She whirls to face a short, squat woman in a pantsuit who’s got her hand on her holstered weapon and is holding aloft the shield of a federal marshal.
“Where’s Fred?” is all Callie can think to say.
Callie sips her green tea alone because Federal Marshal Margaret Bryan coldly declines a cup. Already Callie can feel her spirits sinking.
“He’s been reassigned? To where?”
“That’s none of your concern, is it?”
This woman knows Callie all of two minutes and she’s already showing her who’s in charge. Fred was never this way.
“So I’m dealing with you now?”
“That’s right.”
“You read the file?”
The marshal nods.
“So you know I was coerced.”
The woman’s blouse is a little tight. She must be in her mid-thirties, Callie thinks. She’s the kind of slightly older woman Callie and her girlfriends would have mocked when they hit the clubs at night, back when she lived in the city. She regrets that now. Indeed, with each passing day she is beginning to hate the girl, the child, she was only months ago. Especially since the woman in ill-fitting clothes has the power to make Callie’s new life miserable.
“Let me ask you a question,” Bryan says. As she says this, she points at Callie’s teacup. Not so much accusing her as the cup of tea. “Did you know it was wrong?”
Did she know it was wrong to take a briefcase of cash each week from the tieless man in the Armani suit and beautiful chocolate shoes, and run them through the system, and credit each fresh infusion, minus Timball’s cut, into one of the client’s nine accounts? Sort of, yes. She didn’t need an accounting degree to know that. But she had trusted Eddie Timball. He was one of the top men at the brokerage firm, and she’d been rather flattered and awed by the attention he’d paid her when she first came to work for them. He was a slightly older, handsome man, not her direct supervisor. The other girls had said he was divorced but still played the field. The rumors about his wealth, his cars, his apartment, and his homes had seemed so enticing. It was true, of course. The rumor mill just hadn’t factored in that Eddie was in debt up to his slightly receding scalp.
He had said he could not trust just anyone with this, and that if she helped him she would be... rolling in commissions. His words. He also let her know that if she helped him, she could not breathe a word of this task to anyone. She had seen it as an opportunity. A way to advance. A way to shuck herself of her roommate and get a place of her own. A way to buy nice things for herself. By the time she had figured out what was really going on, she was in too deep. Only later did she realize that the mere act of Eddie’s asking had doomed her. She could not refuse. She was sentenced the second the words left the glib fellow’s lips.
“Yes, I knew,” she tells Margaret Bryan.
“But you did it anyway. You did it and you hid it for three years.”
Fred had never been like this. He had a way of making it all seem like some vast, unfortunate tragedy in which she was merely a bit player. Eight months ago, when he’d first confronted her in his office, he’d laid out those terrible photos on the table and pointed to each of the faces of the dead. “People always say that they’re victimless crimes. You slip them some cash. They give you something. You snort it, shoot it, or smoke it. What’s the harm, right? The harm is, it’s funding people who do this. And this. And this.”
One by one, he carefully pronounced the names of the beaten or bullet-ridden men, women, and children in the photos. Most of them foreigners.
Even when she’d accepted, even when she’d said yes to save her own life, Fred had never treated her like a criminal. He had never once suggested that her actions had led to what happened to the people in those photographs. But she had made the leap. It was only logical. He’d tucked those images away almost immediately. But she saw them still. She was sure she always would.