“How d’you mean?”
“I mean, have you ever been down there? On a detail? It’s third world, man. The police, uh, apparatus, I guess you’d call it, is very primitive by our standards. Fact, it would not surprise me if they have no fingerprints on this man to send you. I’m surprised they even sent anything to the consul here in the first place. This Aguila, he must’ve had a hunch like you.”
Bosch took one last look at the poster on the wall, thanked Capetillo for his help and the copy of the consulate’s telex and then left the office.
He got on an elevator to go down and saw Sheehan already on it. The car was crowded and Sheehan was at the back, behind the pile. They didn’t talk until they got off on three.
“Hey, Frankie,” Bosch said. “Didn’t get a chance to talk to you Christmas night.”
“What’re you doing here, Harry?”
“I’m waiting for you. You must be running late, or do you check in on the fifth floor nowadays?”
That was a little poke at Sheehan. The IAD squads were on the fifth floor. It was also to let Sheehan know that Harry had an idea of what was going on with the Moore case. Since Sheehan was going down, he had come from either the fifth or sixth floors. That was either IAD or Irving ’s office. Or maybe both.
“Don’t fuck with me, Bosch. Reason I haven’t been in is I’ve been busy this morning, thanks to the games you like to play.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t worry about it. Look, I don’t like you being seen with me in here, anyway. Irving gave me specific instructions about you. You are not in this investigation. You helped out the other night but it ended there.”
They were in the hallway outside the RHD offices. Bosch didn’t like the sound of Sheehan’s tone. He had never known Frankie to bow his head to the brass like this.
“C’mon, Frankie, let’s go get a cup. You can tell me what’s bugging you.”
“Nothing’s bugging me, man. You forget, I worked with you. I know how you get your teeth on something and won’t let go. Well, I’m telling you where things stand. You were there the night we found him. It ended there. Go back to Hollywood.”
Bosch took a step toward him and lowered his voice. He said, “But we both know it didn’t end there, Frankie. And it’s not going to end there. So if you feel you gotta do it, go tell Irving I said it’s so.”
Sheehan stared at him for a few seconds and then Bosch saw the resolve fade away.
“Awright, Harry, c’mon in. I’m going to be kicking myself for this later.”
They walked to Sheehan’s desk and Bosch pulled a chair from another desk alongside it. Sheehan took off his coat and put it on a hanger on a rack next to the desk. After he sat down, adjusted his shoulder holster and folded his arms, he said:
“Know where I’ve been all morning? The ME’s, trying to work out a deal to keep a lid on this a few hours. Seems overnight we sprang a leak and already this morning Irving ’s getting calls that we are sitting on a homicide of one of our own officers. You wouldn’t know anything about this, would you?”
Harry said, “Only thing I know is I’ve been thinking about the scene out at the motel and the autopsy being inconclusive, like they say, and I’m not thinking suicide anymore.”
“You’re not thinking anything. You’re not on it. Remember? And what about this?”
He opened a drawer and brought a file up. It was the Zorrillo file Rickard had shown him the day before.
“Don’t bother telling me you haven’t seen this before. Because then I might take it over to SID and have ’em run prints on it. I’d bet my wife’s diaphragm I’d find yours.”
“You’d lose, Frankie.”
“Then I’d have more kids. But I wouldn’t lose, Harry.”
Bosch waited a beat for him to settle down.
“All this huffin’ and puffin’ at me tells me one thing: you don’t see a suicide, either. So quit with the bullshit.”
“You’re right. I don’t. But I got an assistant chief sitting on my ass and he’s gotten the bright idea of sticking me with an IAD suit on this. So it’s like I got both my feet in buckets of shit before I even start off.”
“You saying they don’t want this to go anywhere?”
“No, I am not saying that.”
“What are they going to tell theTimes? ”
“Press conference this afternoon. Irving ’s going to give it to everybody. He’ll say we are looking at the possibility-thepossibility -of homicide. Fuck giving it to theTimes. Who said it was theTimes making the noise anyway?”
“Lucky, I guess.”
“Yeah, be careful, Bosch. You slip like that with Irving and he’ll fry your ass. He’d love to, with your record and all the history going back with you. I already have to figure out about this file. You told Irving you didn’t know the guy and now we have a file that shows he was doing some digging for you.”
Bosch realized he had forgotten to remove the Post-it tag Moore had placed on the file.
“Tell Irving whatever you want. Think I care?” Bosch looked down at the file. “What do you think?”
“About this file? I think nothing out loud.”
“C’mon, Frankie, I ask Moore to look around on this dope killing and he ends up in a motel with his head in the tub in small pieces. It was a very smooth job, right down to not a single lift belonging to anybody else being found in that room.”
“So what if it was smooth and there’s no other prints? In my book some guys deserve what they got coming, you know?”
There was the break in Sheehan’s defense. Whether intentional or not, he was telling Bosch that Moore had crossed.
“I need more than that,” he said in a very low voice. “You got the weight on you but I don’t. I’m a free agent and I’m going to put it together. Moore might’ve crossed, yeah, but nobody should’ve put him down on the tiles like that. We both know that. Besides, there are other bodies.”
Harry could see this had grabbed Sheehan’s attention.
“We can trade,” Bosch said quietly.
Sheehan stood up and said, “Yeah, let’s go get that coffee.”
Five minutes later they were at a table in the second-floor cafeteria and Bosch was telling him about Jimmy Kapps and Juan Doe #67. He outlined the connections between Moore and Juan Doe, Juan Doe and Mexicali, Mexicali and Humberto Zorillo, Zorillo and black ice, black ice and Jimmy Kapps. On and on it went. Sheehan asked no questions and took no notes until Harry was done.
“So what do you think?” he asked then.
“I think what you think,” Bosch said. “That Moore had crossed. Maybe he was fronting up here for Zorillo, the ice man, and got so deep he couldn’t get out. I don’t know how it all ties up yet but I still have some ideas I am playing with. I’m thinking a number of things. Maybe he wanted out and the ice man whacked him. Maybe he was working that file, going to give me something, and they whacked him.”
“Possibilities.”
“There’s also the possibility that word of the IAD investigation your partner Chastain was conducting got around, and they saw Moore as a danger and whacked him.”
Sheehan hesitated. It was the moment of truth. If he discussed the IAD investigation he would be breaking enough departmental regs to get shipped permanently out of RHD. Like Harry.
“I could get busted for talking about that,” Sheehan said. “Could end up like you, out there in the cesspool.”
“It’s all a cesspool, man. Doesn’t matter if you’re on the bottom or the top. You’re still swimming in shit.”
Sheehan took a sip of his coffee.
“IAD had taken a report, this was about two months ago, that Moore was some way involved in the traffic on the Boulevard. Possibly offering protection, possibly a deeper involvement. The source was not clear on that.”