Chastain nodded but Bosch could see he was annoyed about getting the weakest assignment.
“Tell you what,” Bosch added, “why don’t you go out first and see if you can find some boxes. We’re going to be taking a lot of files out of here.”
Chastain left the office without a word. Bosch glanced at Rider and saw her give him a look that told him he was acting like an asshole.
“What?”
“Nothing. I’ll be in the file room.”
She left then, leaving just Langwiser and Bosch.
“Everything okay, Detective?”
“Everything’s fine. I’m going to get to work now. Do what I can until we hear about your special master.”
“Look, I’m sorry. But you called me out here to advise you and this is what I advise. I still think it is the right way to go.”
“Well, we’ll see.”
For most of the next hour Bosch methodically went through Elias’s desk, studying the man’s belongings, appointment calendar and paperwork. Most of his time was spent reading through a series of notebooks in which Elias had kept reminders to himself, lists of things to do, pencil drawings and general notes from phone calls. Each notebook was dated on the outside cover. It appeared that Elias filled the pages of one book every week or so with his voluminous notations and doodles. Nothing in the books jumped out at Bosch as being pertinent to the investigation. But he also knew that so little about the circumstances of Elias’s murder was known that something seeming unimportant in the notebooks at the moment might become important later.
Before starting to page through the most recent notebook, Bosch was interrupted by another call from Edgar.
“Harry, you said there was a message on the phone machine?”
“That’s right.”
“There ain’t now.”
Bosch leaned back in Elias’s chair and closed his eyes.
“Goddammit.”
“Yeah, it’s been cleared. I dicked around with it and it’s not a tape. Messages are stored on a microchip. The chip was cleared.”
“Okay,” Bosch replied, angrily. “Continue the search. When you’re done, talk to the security people about who’s been in and out of that place. See if they’ve got any video points in the lobby or parking garage. Somebody went in there after I left.”
“What about Chastain? He was with you, wasn’t he?”
“I’m not worried about Chastain.”
He flipped the phone closed and got up and went to the window. He hated the feeling growing inside – that he was being worked by the case, rather than the other way around.
He blew out his breath and went back to the desk and the last notebook that Howard Elias had kept. As he paged through, he came across repeated notes regarding someone referred to as “Parker.” Bosch did not believe this to be a person’s real name, but rather a code name for a person inside Parker Center. The notations were mostly lists of questions Elias apparently intended to ask “Parker,” as well as what looked like notes on conversations with this person. They were mostly in abbreviated form or the lawyer’s own version of shorthand and therefore difficult to decipher. But in other instances the notes were clear to Bosch. One notation clearly indicated to Bosch that Elias had a deeply connected source inside Parker Center.
PARKER:
GET ALL 51S – UNSUSTAINED
SHEEHAN
COBLENZ
ROOKER
ROOKER
STANWICK
Bosch recognized the names as belonging to four RHD detectives who were among the defendants in the Black Warrior case. Elias wanted the 51 reports – or citizen complaint files – on the four detectives. More specifically, Elias wanted the unsustained files, meaning he was interested in complaints against the four that had been investigated by the IAD but not substantiated. Such unsustained complaints were removed from officers’ personnel files as a matter of department policy and were therefore out of reach of a subpoena from a lawyer like Elias. The notation in the notebook told Bosch that Elias somehow knew that there were unsubstantiated prior complaints against the four and that he had a source in Parker Center who had access to the old files on those complaints. The first assumption was not a major leap; all cops had unsubstantiated complaints. It was part of being a cop. But someone with access to that sort of file was different. If Elias had such a source, it was a well-placed source.
One of the last references to Parker in the notebook appeared to be notes of a conversation, which Bosch assumed to have been a phone call to Elias at his desk. It appeared that Elias was losing his source.
PARKER WON’T
JEOPARDY/EXPOSURE
FORCE THE ISSUE?
Parker won’t what? Bosch wondered. Turn over the files Elias wanted? Did Parker believe that getting the files to Elias would expose him as a source? There wasn’t enough there for him to make a conclusion. There wasn’t enough for him to understand what “force the issue” meant either. He wasn’t sure what any of the notes might have to do with the killing of Howard Elias. Nevertheless, Bosch was intrigued. One of the department’s most vocal and successful critics had a mole inside Parker Center. There was a traitor inside the gate and it was important to know this.
Bosch put the last notebook into his briefcase and wondered if the discoveries he had made through the notes, particularly about Elias’s source inside the department, now placed him in the area Janis Langwiser feared might be an infringement of attorney-client privilege. After mulling it over for a few moments he decided not to go out into the file room and ask her for an interpretation. He moved on with the search.
Bosch turned the chair to a side desk that had a personal computer and laser printer set up on it. The machines were off. There were two small drawers in this desk. The top contained the computer keyboard while the bottom contained office supplies with a single manila file on top. Bosch took out the file and opened it. It contained a color printout of a photo of a partially nude woman. The printout had two crease marks indicating it had been folded at one time. The photo itself did not have the technical quality of those in skin magazines found on the newsstand. There was an amateurish, badly lit quality to it. The woman in the picture was white and had short, white-blond hair. She wore thigh-high leather boots with three-inch heels and a G-string, nothing else. She stood with her rear to the camera, one foot up on a chair, her face turned mostly away. There was a tattoo of a ribbon and bow at the center of the small of her back. Bosch also saw at the bottom of the picture a notation that had been printed by hand. http:/www.girlawhirl.com/gina Bosch knew little about computers but he knew enough to understand he was looking at an Internet address.
“Kiz?” he called.
Rider was the resident computer expert on his team. Before coming to Hollywood Homicide she had worked a fraud unit in Pacific Division. A lot of the work she had done was on computers. She walked in from the file room and he waved her over to the desk.
“How is it going out there?”
“Well, we’re just stacking files. She won’t let me look through anything until we hear from the special master. I hope Chastain brings back a lot of boxes because we have a-what is that?”
She was looking at the open file and the printout of the blond woman.
“It was in the drawer. Take a look. It’s got an address on it.”
Rider came around the desk and looked down at the printout.
“It’s a web page.”
“Right. So how do we get to it and take a look?”
