didn’t get it.
“They were hard-boiled eggs. The ones with dates on them had been hard-boiled. I took one over to the sink and cracked it. It was hard-boiled.”
“Okay.”
He still didn’t get it.
“The date on the eggs was probably the date she had boiled them,” Bosch said. “You know, so she could tell the boiled ones from the others and she’d know how old they were. And it just hit me then. You don’t boil a bunch of eggs so they’re ready for when you want them and then go kill yourself. I mean, what’s the point?”
“So it was a hunch.”
“More than that.”
“But you just knew. Homicide.”
“It changed things. We started to look at things differently. We began a homicide investigation. It took a few days but we got it. Friends told us about some guy who was giving her trouble. Harassing her, stalking her because she turned him down on a date. We asked around the apartment and we started looking at the apartment manager.”
“Shit, I shoulda guessed it was him.”
“We talked to him and he fucked up just enough for us to convince a judge to sign a search warrant. In his place we found the notebook that the supposed suicide note had been torn from. It was like a diary where she wrote down her thoughts and things. This guy found a page where she was talking about life being bad and knew he could use it as a suicide note. We found other stuff that was hers.”
“Why’d he keep the stuff?”
“Because people are stupid, that’s why, Chastain. You want clever killers, watch TV. He kept the stuff because he never thought we’d think it wasn’t a suicide. And because he was in the notebook. She wrote about him stalking her, about how she was sort of flattered and scared of him at the same time. He probably got off on reading it. He kept it.”
“When’s the trial?”
“Couple months.”
“Sounds like a slam dunk.”
“Yeah, we’ll see. So was O.J.”
“What did he do, drug her somehow, then put her in the tub and cut her?”
“He was letting himself in her apartment when she was out. There was stuff in the diary about her thinking someone had been creeping her place. She was a runner – did three miles a day. We think that was when he liked to go in. She had prescription painkillers in the medicine cabinet – she got hurt playing racquetball a couple years before. We think he took the pills on one of his visits and dissolved them in orange juice. The next time he went in he poured it into the juice bottle in her fridge. He knew her habits, knew that after jogging she liked to sit on the steps out front, drink her juice and cool down. She may have realized she had been drugged and looked around for help. It was him who came. He took her back inside.”
“He rape her first?”
Bosch shook his head.
“He probably tried but he couldn’t get it up.”
They drove in silence for a few moments.
“You’re cool, Bosch,” Chastain said. “Nothing gets by you.”
“Yeah, I wish.”
Chapter 7
CHASTAIN parked the car in the passenger loading zone in front of the modern high-rise building called The Place. Before they were out of the car the night doorman came through the glass entrance to either greet them or tell them to move. Bosch got out and explained that Howard Elias had been murdered less than a block away and that they needed to check his apartment to make sure there were no additional victims or someone needing help. The doorman said no problem but wanted to go along. Bosch told him in a tone that invited no debate to wait in the lobby for other officers who would be arriving.
Howard Elias’s apartment was on the twentieth floor. The elevator moved quickly but the silence between Bosch and Chastain made the trip seem longer.
They found their way to 20E and Bosch knocked on the door and rang the doorbell on the wall next to it. After getting no response, Bosch stooped and opened his briefcase on the floor, then took the keys out of the evidence bag Hoffman had given him earlier.
“You think we ought to wait on the warrant?” Chastain asked.
Bosch looked up at him as he closed the briefcase and snapped the locks.
“No.”
“That was a line of bullshit you gave the doorman, that people maybe needed help.”
Bosch stood up and started trying keys in the door’s two locks.
“Remember what you said before about me eventually having to trust you? This is where I start to trust you, Chastain. I don’t have the time to wait on a warrant. I’m going in. A homicide case is like a shark. It’s gotta keep moving or it drowns.”
He turned the first lock.
“You and your fucking fish. First fighting fish, now a shark.”
“Yeah, you keep sticking around, Chastain, you might even learn how to catch something.”
Just as he said the line he turned the second lock. He looked at Chastain and winked, then opened the door.
They entered a medium-sized living room with expensive leather furnishings, cherrywood bookcases, and windows and a balcony with an expansive southern view across downtown and the civic center. The place was neatly kept except for sections of Friday morning’s Times spread across the black leather couch and an empty coffee mug on the glass-topped coffee table.
“Hello?” Bosch called out, just to be sure the place was empty. “Police. Anyone home?”
No answer.
Bosch put his briefcase down on the dining room table, opened it and took a pair of latex gloves out of a cardboard box. He asked Chastain if he wanted a pair but the IAD man declined.
“I’m not going to be touching anything.”
They separated and began moving through the apartment on a quick initial survey. The rest of the place was as neat as the living room. It was a two-bedroom and had a master suite with its own balcony facing west. It was a clear night. Bosch could see all the way to Century City. Past those towers the lights dropped off in Santa Monica to the sea. Chastain came into the bedroom behind him.
“No home office,” he said. “The second bedroom looks like a guest room. Maybe for stashing witnesses.”
“Okay.”
Bosch scanned the contents of the top of the bureau. There were no photos or anything of a strong personal nature. Same with the small tables on either side of the bed. It looked like a hotel room and in a way it was – if Elias only used it for overnight stays while readying cases for court. The bed was made and this stood out to Bosch. Elias was in the middle of preparations for a major trial, working day and night, yet he had stopped to make his bed that morning when supposedly it would just be he returning at the end of the day. No way, Bosch thought. Either he made the bed because there would be someone else in the apartment or someone else made the bed.
Bosch ruled out a maid because a maid would have picked up the strewn newspaper and the empty coffee cup in the living room. No, it was Elias who had made the bed. Or someone who was with him. It was gut instinct based on his long years of delving into human habits, but at that moment Bosch felt reasonably sure that there now was another woman in the mix.
He opened the drawer of the bed table where a phone sat and found a personal phone book. He opened it and
