They began walking down a hall to the jail elevator.
“You got the kid in High Power?” Bosch asked.
“Yeah. I know a guy. Told him one day, that’s all we needed. The kid’s going to be shitless. He’s going to tell you everything he knows about Dance.”
They took the security elevator up, this one operated by a deputy. Bosch figured it had to be the worst job in law enforcement. When the door opened on ten they were met by another deputy, who checked their badges and had them sign in. Then they moved through two sets of sliding steel doors to an attorneys’ visiting area, which consisted of a long table with benches running down both sides of it. There was also a foot-high divider running lengthwise down the table. At the far end of the table a female attorney sat on one side, leaning toward the divider and whispering to a client, who cupped his ears with his hands to hear better. The muscles on the inmate’s arms bulged and stretched the sleeves of his shirt. He was a monster.
On the wall behind them was a sign that readNO TOUCHING,KISSING,REACHING ACROSS THE DIVIDER. There was also another deputy at the far end, leaning against the wall, his own massive arms folded, and watching the lawyer and her client.
As they waited for the deputies to bring out Tyge, Bosch became aware of the noise. Through the barred door behind the visiting table he could hear a hundred voices competing and echoing in a metallic din. There were steel doors banging somewhere and occasionally an unintelligible shout.
A deputy walked up to the barred door and said, “It’ll be a few minutes, fellas. We have to get him out of medical.”
The deputy was gone before either of them could ask what happened. Bosch didn’t even know the kid but felt his stomach tighten. He looked over at Rickard and saw he was smiling.
“We’ll see how things have changed now,” the narc cop said.
Bosch didn’t understand the delight Rickard seemed to take in this. For Bosch, it was the low end of the job, dealing with desperate people and using desperate tactics. He was here because he had to be. It was his case. But he didn’t get it with Rickard.
“So, how come you’re doing this? What do you want?”
Rickard looked over at him.
“What do I want? I want to know what’s going on. I think you’re the only one that might know. So if I can help out, I’ll help out. If it costs this kid his asshole, then that’s the cost. But what I want to know from you is what is happening here. What did Cal do and what’s going to be done about it?”
Bosch leaned back and tried to think for a few moments about what to say. He heard the monster at the end of the table start to raise his voice, something about not accepting the offer. The deputy took a step toward him, dropping his arms to his sides. The inmate went quiet. The deputy’s sleeves were rolled up tight to reveal his impressive biceps. On his bulging left forearm Bosch could see the “CL,” tattoo, almost like a brand on his white skin. Harry knew that, publicly, deputies who had the tattoo claimed the letters stood for Club Lynwood, after the sheriff’s station in the gang-infested L.A. suburb. But he knew the letters also stood forchango luchador, monkey fighter. The deputy was a gang member himself, albeit one sanctioned to carry weapons and paid by the county.
Bosch looked away. He wished he could light a cigarette but the county had passed a no-smoking code, even in the jail. It had nearly caused an inmate riot.
“Look,” he said to Rickard, “I don’t know what to tell you about Moore. I’m working on it but I’m not, you know what I mean? Thing is, it runs across two cases I do have. So, it’s unavoidable. If this kid can give me Dance, then it’s a help. I could look at Dance for my two cases, maybe even Moore’s. But I don’t know that. I do know, and they will go public with this today, that Moore looks like a homicide. What they won’t go public with is that he crossed. That’s why IAD was sniffing around. He crossed.”
“Can’t be,” Rickard said, but there was no conviction in it. “I’d’ve known.”
“You can’t know people that well, man. Everybody’s got a private room.”
“So what’s Parker Center going to do?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think they know what to do. I think they wanted to let it go as suicide. But the ME started making waves, so they’ll call it homicide. But I don’t think they are going to put the dirty laundry basket out there on Spring Street for every reporter in town to pick through.”
“Well, they better get their shit together. I’m not going to stand by. I don’t care if he crossed, man. I’ve seen him do things. He was a good cop. I’ve seen him go into a gallery and take out four dealers without a backup. I’ve seen him step between a pimp and his property and take the punch meant for her, pop his teeth right onto the sidewalk. I been with him when he blew nine stoplights trying to get a wretched old hype to the hospital before he went out on a heroin overdose.
“Those aren’t things a cop on the pad does. So what I’m saying is that if he crossed, then I think he was trying to cross back and that’s why somebody did him.”
He stopped then and Bosch didn’t interrupt the silence. They both knew that once you cross, you can never come back. Bosch could hear footsteps coming toward the bars.
Rickard said, “They better show me something down there at Parker, not let this thing go. Or I’ll show them something.”
Bosch wanted to say something but the deputy was at the door with Tyge. He looked like he had aged ten years in the last ten hours. Now he had a distance in his eyes that reminded Bosch of men he had seen and known in Vietnam. There was also a bruise high on his left cheekbone.
The door was slid open by means of unseen electronics and the boy/man walked to the bench after the deputy pointed the way. He sat down tentatively and seemed purposely to keep his eyes away from Rickard.
“How’s it hanging, Kerwin?” Rickard asked.
Now the boy looked at Rickard and his eyes made Bosch’s stomach knot. He remembered the first night he had spent in McLaren Youth Hall as a boy. The pure fear and screaming loneliness. And there he had been surrounded by kids, most of them nonviolent. This boy had been surrounded for the last twelve hours by wild animals. Bosch felt ashamed to be part of this but said nothing. It was Rickard’s show.
“Look, my man, I know you’re probably having a not-so-fun time in there. That’s why we came by, t’see if you changed your mind any about what we discussed last night.”
Rickard was speaking very low so the monster at the end would not hear.
When the boy said nothing, gave no indication that he even heard, Rickard pressed on.
“Kerwin, you want out of here? Here’s your man. Mr. Harry Bosch. He’ll let me drop the whole thing, even though it was a righteous bust, if you talk to us about this cat Dance. Here, look-it here.”
Rickard unfolded a piece of white paper from his shirt pocket. It was a standard case-filing form from the district attorney’s office.
“Man, I have forty-eight hours to file a case on you. ’Cause of the weekend, that’s puts it over ’til Monday. This here is the paperwork about you. I haven’t done nothing with it ’cause I wanted to check with you one more time to see if you wanted to help yourself out. If you don’t, then I’ll go file it and this will be your home for the next-probably you’re looking at a year with good time.”
Rickard waited and nothing happened.
“A year. What do you think you’ll be like after a year back in there, Kerwin?”
The boy looked down for a moment and then the tears rolled down his cheeks.
“Go to hell,” he managed to say in a strangled voice.