“Two months ago?” Bosch asked. “Didn’t they get anything? I mean, Moore was still working the street all this time. Wasn’t there enough to at least put him on a desk?”
“Look, you’ve got to remember that Irving put Chastain with me on this. But I’m not with Chastain. He doesn’t do much talking to me. All he would tell me was the investigation was in its infancy when Moore disappeared. He had no proof substantiating or discrediting the claim.”
“You know how hard he worked it?”
“I assume very hard. He’s IAD. He’s always looking for a badge to pull. And this looked like more than just departmental charges. This would have gone to the DA. So I assume he had a hard-on for it. He just didn’t get anything. Moore must’ve been very good.”
Not good enough, Bosch thought. Obviously.
“Who was the source?”
“You don’t need that.”
“You know I do. If I’m going to be a free agent on this I have to know what’s what.”
Sheehan hesitated but didn’t make a good show of it.
“It was anonymous-a letter. But Chastain said it was the wife. That’s what he figured. She turned him in.”
“How’s he so sure?”
“The details of the letter, whatever they were, Chastain said they would only be known by someone close to him. He told me it wasn’t unusual. It often comes from the spouse. But he said that a lot of times it’s bogus. A wife or husband will report something totally false, you know, if they are going through a divorce or something, just to fuck the other up with work. So, he spent a lot of time just seeing if that was the case here. ’Cause Moore and his wife were splitting up. He said she never admitted it but he was sure she sent it. He just never got very far with substantiating what was in it.”
Bosch thought of Sylvia. He was sure they were wrong.
“Did you talk to the wife, tell her the ID was confirmed?”
“No, Irving did that last night.”
“He tell her about the autopsy, ’bout it not being suicide?”
“I don’t know about that. See, I don’t get to sit down with Irving like you with me here and ask him everything that comes into my head.”
Bosch was wearing out his welcome.
“Just a few more, Frankie. Did Chastain focus on black ice?”
“No. When we got this file of yours yesterday, he about shit his pants. I got the feeling he was hearing about all that side of it for the first time. I kind of enjoyed that, Harry. If there was anything to enjoy about any of this.”
“Well, now, you can tell him all the rest I told you.”
“No chance. This conversation didn’t take place. I gotta try to put it all together like it was my own before I hand anything over to him.”
Bosch was thinking quickly. What else was there to ask?
“What about the note? That’s the part that doesn’t fit now. If it was no suicide then where’s this note come from?”
“Yeah, that’s the problem. That’s why we gave the coroner such a hard time. Far as we can guess, he either had it all along in his back pocket or whoever did him made him write it. I don’t know.”
“Yeah.” Bosch thought a moment. “Would you write a note like that if somebody was about to put you down on the floor?”
“I don’t know, man. People do things you’d never expect when they’ve got the gun on them. They always’ve got hope that things might turn out all right. That’s the way I see it.”
Bosch nodded. But he didn’t know if he agreed or not.
“I gotta go,” Sheehan said. “Let me know what comes up.”
Bosch nodded and Sheehan left him there with two cups of coffee on the table. A few moments later Sheehan was back.
“You know, I never told you, it was too bad about what happened with you. We could use you back here, Harry. I’ve always thought that.”
Bosch looked up at him.
“Yeah, Frankie. Thanks.”
14
The Medfly Eradication Project Center was at the edge of East L.A., on San Fernando Road not far from County-USC Med Center, which housed the morgue. Bosch was tempted to drop by to see Teresa but he figured he should give her time to cool. He also figured that decision was cowardly but he didn’t change it. He just kept driving.
The project center was a former county psychiatric ward which had been abandoned to that cause years earlier when Supreme Court rulings made it virtually impossible for the government-in the form of the police-to take the mentally ill off the streets and hold them for observation and public safety. The San Fernando Road ward was closed as the country consolidated its psych centers.
It had been used since for a variety of purposes, including a set for a slasher movie about a haunted nuthouse and even a temporary morgue when an earthquake damaged the facility at County-USC a few years back. Bodies had been stored in two refrigerated trucks in the parking lot. Because of the emergency situation, county administrators had to get the first trucks they could get their hands on. Painted on the side of one of them had been the words “Live Maine Lobsters!” Bosch remembered reading about it in the “Only in L.A. ” column in theTimes.
There was a check-in post at the entry manned by a state police officer. Bosch rolled down the window, badged him and asked who the head medfly eradicator was. He was directed to a parking space and an entrance to the administration suite.
The door to the suite still said No Unescorted Patients on it. Bosch went through and down a hallway, nodding to and passing another state officer. He came to a secretary’s desk where he identified himself again to the woman sitting there and asked to see the entomologist in charge. She made a quick phone call to someone and then escorted Harry into a nearby office, introducing him to a man named Roland Edson. The secretary hovered near the door with a shocked look on her face until Edson finally told her that would be all.
When they were alone in the office, Edson said, “I kill flies for a living, not people, Detective. Is this a serious visit?”
Edson laughed hard and Bosch forced a smile to be polite. Edson was a small man in a short-sleeved white shirt and pale green tie. His bald scalp had been freckled by the sun and was scarred by misjudgments. He wore thick, rimless glasses that magnified his eyes and made him somewhat resemble his quarry. Behind his back his subordinates probably called him “The Fly.”
Bosch explained that he was working a homicide case and could not tell Edson a lot of the background because the investigation was of a highly confidential nature. He warned him that other investigators might be back with more questions. He asked for some general information about the breeding and transport of sterile fruit flies into the state, hoping that the appeal for expert advice would get the bureaucrat to open up.
Edson responded by giving him much of the same information Teresa Corazón had already provided, but Bosch acted as if it was all new to him and took notes.
“Here’s the specimen here, Detective,” Edson said, holding up a paperweight. It was a glass block in which a fruit fly had been perpetually cast, like a prehistoric ant caught in amber.
Bosch nodded and steered the interview specifically toward Mexicali. The entomologist said the breeding contractor there was a company called EnviroBreed. He said EnviroBreed shipped an average of thirty million flies to the eradication center each week.
“How do they get here?” Bosch asked.
“In the pupal stage, of course.”
“Of course. But my question is how?”
“This is the stage in which the insect is nonfeeding, immobile. It is what we call the transformation stage between larva and imago-adult. This works out quite well because it is an ideal point for transport. They come in incubators, if you will. Environment boxes, we call them. And then, of course, shortly after they get here metamorphosis is completed and they are ready to be released as adults.”