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“I think the cases are related, that’s why.”

“Are you-” Then Pounds held up his hand, signaling Bosch not to speak. “Better come into my office for this.”

After sitting down behind his glass-topped desk, Pounds immediately picked up his ruler and began manipulating it in his hand.

“Okay, Harry, what’s going on?”

Bosch was going to wing it. He tried to make his voice sound as though he had hard evidence to back everything he was saying. Truth was it was all a lot of speculation and not a lot of glue. He sat down in the chair in front of the lieutenant’s desk. He could smell the baby powder on the other man.

“Jimmy Kapps was a payback. Found out yesterday that he set up a bust on a competitor named Dance. He was putting black ice out on the street. Jimmy apparently didn’t like that ’cause he’s trying to make Hawaiian ice the growth market. So he snitched Dance off to the BANG guys. Only after Dance got taken down, the DA kicked the case. A bad bust. He walked. Four days later Kapps gets the whack.”

“Okay, okay,” Pounds said. “Sounds good. Dance is your suspect then?”

“Until I come up with something better. He’s in the wind.”

“Okay, now how does this tie in with the Juan Doe case?”

“The DEA says the black ice that Dance was putting out comes from Mexicali. I got a tentative ID from the state police down there. Looks like our Juan Doe was a guy named Gutierrez-Llosa. He was from Mexicali.”

“A mule?”

“Possibly. Couple things don’t fit with that. The state police down there carried him as a day laborer.”

“Maybe he went for the big money. A lot of them do.”

“Maybe.”

“And you think he got whacked back, a payback for Kapps?”

“Maybe.”

Pounds nodded. So far so good, Bosch thought. They were both silent for a few moments. Pounds finally cleared his throat.

“That’s quite a lot of work for two days, Harry. Very good. Now where do you go from here?”

“I want to go after Dance and get the Juan Doe ID confirmed…” He trailed off. He wasn’t sure how much to give Pounds. He knew he was going to keep his trip to Mexicali out of it.

“You said Dance is in the wind.”

“I’m told that by a source. I’m not sure. I plan to go looking this weekend.”

“Fine.”

Bosch decided to open the door a little further.

“There’s more to it, if you want to hear it. It’s about Cal Moore.”

Pounds put the ruler down on the desk, folded his arms and leaned back. His posture signaled caution. They were stepping into an area where careers could be permanently damaged.

“Aren’t we getting on thin ice, here? The Moore case is not ours.”

“And I don’t want it, Lieutenant. I’ve got these two. But it keeps coming up. If you don’t want to know, fine. I can deal with it.”

“No, no, I want you to tell me. I just don’t like this kind of… uh, entanglement. That’s all.”

“Yeah, entanglement is a good word. Anyway, like I said, it was the BANG crew that made the Dance bust. Moore wasn’t there until after it went down, but it was his crew.

“After that, you have Moore finding the body on the Juan Doe case.”

“Cal Moore found the body?” Pounds said. “I didn’t see that in Porter’s book.”

“He’s in there by badge number. Anyway, he was the one that found the body dumped there. So you’ve got his presence around both of these cases. Then, the day after he finds Juan Doe in the alley he checks into that motel and gets his brains splattered in the bathtub. I suppose you’ve heard RHD now says it was no suicide.”

Pounds nodded. But he had a paralysed look on his face. He had thought he was going to get a summary of a couple of case investigations. Not this.

“Somebody whacked him, too,” Bosch continued. “So now you have three cases. You have Kapps, then Juan Doe, then Moore. And you have Dance in the wind.”

Bosch knew he had said enough. He could now sit back and watch Pounds’s mind go to work. He knew that the lieutenant knew that he should probably pick up the phone and call Irving to ask for assistance or at least direction. But Pounds knew that a call like that would result in RHD taking jurisdiction over the Kapps and Juan Doe cases. And the RHD dicks would take their sweet-ass time about it. Pounds wouldn’t see any of the cases closed out for weeks.

“What about Porter? What’s he say about all of this?”

Bosch had been doing his best to keep Porter clear. He didn’t know why. Porter had fallen and had lied, but somewhere inside Bosch still felt something. Maybe it was that last question.Harry, you going to take care of me on this?

“I haven’t found Porter,” Bosch lied. “No answer on his phone. But I don’t think he’d had much time to put all of this together.”

Pounds shook his head disdainfully.

“Of course not. He probably was on a drunk.”

Bosch didn’t say anything. It was in Pounds’s court now.

“Listen, Harry, you’re not… you’re being straight with me here, right? I can’t afford to have you running around like a loose cannon. I’ve got it all, right?”

Bosch knew that what he meant was he wanted to know how badly he could be fucked if this went to shit.

Bosch said, “You know what I know. There are two cases, probably three, including Moore, out there to be cleared. You want ’em cleared in six, eight weeks, then I’ll write up the paper and you can ship it to Parker Center. If you want to get them cleared by the first like you said, then let me have the four days.”

Pounds was staring off somewhere above Bosch’s head and using the ruler to scratch himself behind the ear. He was making a decision.

“Okay,” he finally said. “Take the weekend and see what you can do. We’ll see where things stand Monday. We might have to call in RHD then. Meantime, I want to hear from you tomorrow and Sunday. I want to know your movements, what’s happening, what progress has been made.”

“You got it,” Bosch said. He stood up and turned to leave. He noticed that above the door was a small crucifix. He wondered if that had been what Pounds had been staring at. Most said he was a political born-again. There were a lot in the department. They all joined a church up in the Valley because one of the assistant chiefs was a lay preacher there. Bosch guessed they all went there Sunday mornings and gathered around him, told him what a great guy he was.

“I’ll talk to you tomorrow, then,” Pounds said from behind.

“Right. Tomorrow.”

A short while after that, Pounds locked his office and went home. Bosch hung around the office alone, drinking coffee and smoking and waiting for the six o’clock news. There was a small black-and-white television on top of the file cabinet behind the autos table. He turned it on and played with the rabbit ears until he got a reasonably clear picture. A couple of the uniforms walked down from the watch office to watch.

Cal Moore had finally made the top of the news. Channel 2 led with a report on the press conference at Parker Center in which Assistant Chief Irvin Irving revealed new developments. The tape showed Irving at a cluster of microphones. Teresa stood behind him. Irving credited her with finding new evidence during the autopsy that pointed to homicide. Irving said a full-scale homicide investigation was underway. The report ended with a photograph of Moore and a voiceover from the reporter.

“Investigators now have the task, and they say the personal obligation, to dig deep into the life of Sergeant Calexico Moore to determine what it was that led him to the beat-up motel room where someone executed him. Sources tell me the investigators do not have much to start with, but they do start with a debt of thanks to the acting chief medical examiner, who discovered a murder that had been written off… as a cop’s lonely suicide.”

The camera zoomed in closer on Moore’s face here and the reporter ended it, “And so, the mystery begins…”