Bosch stared for a few moments at the file after closing it. He had a jumble of differing thoughts. He was a man who didn’t believe in coincidences, and so he had to wonder about how Cal Moore’s presence had come to throw a shadow across everything on his own plate. He looked at his watch and saw it would soon be time to get going to meet Teresa Corazón. But, finally, all the movement in his mind could not distract him from the thought that was pushing through: Frankie Sheehan at RHD should have the information in the Zorrillo file. Bosch had worked with Sheehan at RHD. He was a good man and a good investigator. If he was conducting a legitimate investigation, he should have the file. If he wasn’t, then it didn’t matter.
He got out of the car and headed back to the diner. This time he walked in through the kitchen door on the alley. The BANG crew was still there, the four young narcs sitting as quietly as if they were in the back room at a funeral home. Bosch’s chair was still there, too. He sat down again.
“What’s up?” Rickard said.
“You read this, right? Tell me about the Dance bust.”
“What’s to tell?” Rickard said. “We kick ass, the DA kicks the case. What’s new? It’s a different drug, man, but it’s the same old thing.”
“What made you set up on Dance? How’d you know he was making deliveries there?”
“Heard it around.”
“Look, it’s important. It involves Moore.”
“How?”
“I can’t tell you now. You have to trust me until I put a few things together. Just tell me who got the tip. That’s what it was, right?”
Rickard seemed to weigh the choices he had.
“Yeah, it was a tip. It was my snitch.”
“Who was it?”
“Look, man, I can’t-”
“Jimmy Kapps. It was Jimmy Kapps, wasn’t it?”
Rickard hesitated again and that confirmed it for Bosch. It angered him that he was finding this out almost by accident and only after a cop’s death. But the picture was clearing. Kapps snitches off Dance as a means of knocking out some of the competition. Then he flies back to Hawaii, picks up a bellyful of balloons and comes back. But Dance isn’t in lockup anymore and Jimmy Kapps gets taken down before he can sell even one of his balloons.
“Why the fuck didn’t you come talk to me when you heard Kapps got put down? I’ve been trying to get a line on this and all the-”
“What’re you talking about, Bosch? Moore met you that night on the Kapps thing. He…”
It became apparent to everybody at the table that Moore had not told Bosch everything he knew that night at the Catalina. The silence fell heavy on them. If they hadn’t known it before, they knew it now: Moore had been up to something. Bosch finally spoke.
“Did Moore know your snitch was Kapps?”
Rickard hesitated once more, but then nodded.
Bosch stood up and slid the file across the table to a spot in front of Rickard.
“I don’t want this. You call Frank Sheehan at RHD and tell him you just found it. It’s up to you but I wouldn’t say that you let me look at it first. And I won’t, either.”
Harry made a move to step away from the table but then stopped.
“One other thing. This guy Dance, any of you seen him around?”
“Not since the bust,” Fedaredo said.
The other three shook their heads.
“If you can dig him up, let me know. You got my number.”
Outside the diner’s kitchen door Bosch looked again at the spot in the alley where Moore had found Juan Doe #67. Supposedly. He didn’t know what to believe about Moore anymore. But he couldn’t help but wonder what the connection was between the Juan Doe and Dance and Kapps, if there was a connection at all. He knew the key was to find out who the man with the worker’s hands and muscles had been. Then he would find the killer.
8
At Parker Center, Harry walked past the memorial sculpture in front and into the lobby where he had to badge the officer at the front counter to get in. The department was too big and impersonal. The cops at the counter would recognize no one below the rank of commander.
The lobby was crowded with people coming and going. Some were in uniform, some in suits, some withVISITOR stickers on their shirts and the wide-eyed look of citizens venturing into the maze for the first time. Harry had come to regard Parker Center as a bureaucratic labyrinth that hindered rather than eased the job of the cop on the street. It was eight floors with fiefdoms on every hallway on every floor. Each was jealously guarded by commanders and deputy chiefs and assistant chiefs. And each group had its suspicions about the others. Each was a society within the great society.
Bosch had been a master of the maze during his eight years in Robbery-Homicide. And then he crashed and burned under the weight of an Internal Affairs investigation into his shooting of an unarmed suspect in a series of killings. Bosch had fired as the man reached under a pillow in his killing pad for what Harry thought was a gun. But there was no gun. Beneath the pillow was a toupee. It was almost laughable, except for the man who took the bullet. Other RHD investigators tied him to eleven killings. His body was shipped in a cardboard box to a crematorium. Bosch was shipped out to Hollywood Division.
The elevator was crowded and smelled like stale breath. He got out on the fourth floor and walked into the Scientific Investigations Division offices. The secretary had already left. Harry leaned over the countertop and reached the button that buzzed open the half door. He walked through the ballistics lab and into the squad room. Donovan was still there, sitting at his desk.
“How’d you get in here?”
“Let myself in.”
“Harry, don’t do that. You can’t go around breaching security like that.”
Bosch nodded his contrition.
“What do you want?” Donovan asked. “I don’t have any of your cases.”
“Sure you do.”
“What one?”
“Cal Moore.”
“Bullshit.”
“Look, I’ve got a part of it, okay? I just have a few questions. You can answer them if you want. If you don’t, that’s fine, too.”
“What’ve you got?”
“I’m running down some things that came up on a couple cases I’m working and they run right across Cal Moore’s trail. And so I just… I just want to be sure about Moore. You know what I mean?”
“No, I don’t know what you mean.”
Bosch pulled a chair away from another desk and sat down. They were alone in the squad room but Bosch spoke low and slow, hoping to draw the SID tech in.
“Just for my own knowledge I need to be sure. What I am wondering is, can you tell me if all the stuff checked out.”
“Checked out to what?”
“Come on, man. Was it him and was there anybody else in that room?”
There was a long silence and then Donovan cleared his throat. He finally said, “What do you mean, you’re working cases that cross his trail?”
Fair enough question, Bosch thought. There was a small window of opportunity there.
“I got a dead drug dealer. I had asked Moore to do some checking on the case. Then, I got a dead body, a Juan Doe, in an alley off Sunset. Moore ’s the one who found the body. The next day he checks into that dump and does the number with the shotgun. Or so it looks. I just want some reassurances it’s the way it looks. I heard they got an ID over at the morgue.”
“So what makes you think these two cases are connected with Moore ’s thing?”
“I don’t think anything right now. I’m just trying to eliminate possibilities. Maybe it’s all the coincidences. I don’t know.”
“Well,” Donovan said. “I don’t know what they got over at the ME’s, but I got lifts in the room that belonged to him. Moore was in that room. I just got finished with it. Took me all day.”
“How come?”
“The DOJ computer was down all morning. Couldn’t get prints. I went up to personnel to get Moore ’s prints from his package and they told me Irving had already raided it. He took the prints out and took ’em over to the coroner. You know, you’re not supposed to do that, but who’s gonna tell him, get on his shit list. So I had to wait for the Justice computer to come back on line. Got his prints off of that after lunch and just finished with it a little while ago. That was Moore in the room.”