“I’d like to take a look at it, at her room. Tomorrow, if possible. We’ll have a search warrant by then. I know you’re a busy man, Mr. Kincaid. Maybe, Mrs. Kincaid, you could meet me there, show me around. Show me Stacey’s room. If that won’t be too difficult.”
Kate Kincaid looked as if she dreaded the possibility of returning to the Brentwood house. But she nodded her head yes in a disengaged sort of way.
“I’ll have D.C. drive her,” Sam Kincaid announced. “And you can have the run of the place. And you won’t need a search warrant. We give you our permission. We have nothing to hide.”
“Sir, I didn’t mean to imply that you did. The search warrant will be necessary so there will be no questions later. It is more a protection for us. If something new in the house is found and leads to the real killer, we don’t want that person to be able to challenge the evidence on any legal grounds.”
“I understand.”
“And we appreciate you offering the help of Mr. Richter but that won’t be necessary.” Bosch looked at Kate Kincaid.“I would prefer it if just you came, Mrs. Kincaid. What time would be good?”
While she thought about this Bosch looked down at his pager. The number on it was one of the homicide lines. But there was a 911 added after the phone number. It was code from Kiz Rider: Call immediately.
“Uh, excuse me,” Bosch said. “It looks like this call is important. Do you have a phone I could use? I have a cell phone in the car but in these hills I’m not sure I’ll be able to get – ”
“Of course,” Sam Kincaid said. “Use my office. Go back out to the entry hall and go left. The second door on the left. You’ll have privacy. We’ll wait here with Detective Edwards.”
Bosch stood.
“It’s Edgar,” Edgar said.
“I’m sorry. Detective Edgar.”
As Bosch headed to the entry hall another pager sounded. This time it was Edgar’s. He knew it was Rider sending the same message. Edgar looked down at his pager and then at the Kincaids.
“I better go with Detective Bosch.”
“Sounds like something big,” Sam Kincaid offered. “Hope it’s not a riot.”
“Me, too,” Edgar said.
• • •
Kincaid’s home office would have been able to accommodate the entire Hollywood homicide squad. It was a huge room with towering ceilings and bookcases along two walls that went all the way up to the ceiling. The centerpiece of the room was a desk that would have dwarfed Howard Elias’s. It looked as if you could build a nice-sized office inside it.
Bosch came around behind it and picked up the phone. Edgar came into the room behind him.
“You get one from Kiz?” Bosch asked.
“Yeah. Something’s happening.”
Bosch punched in the number and waited. He noticed that on the desk was a gold-framed photo of Kincaid holding his stepdaughter on his lap. The girl was indeed beautiful. He thought about what Frankie Sheehan had said about her looking like an angel, even in death. He looked away and noticed the computer set up on a worktable to the right of the desk. There was a screen saver on the tube. It showed a variety of different cars racing back and forth across the screen. Edgar noticed it, too.
“The car czar,” Edgar whispered. “More like the smog wog.”
Rider answered before the first ring was finished.
“It’s Bosch.”
“Harry, did you talk to the Kincaids yet?”
“We’re here now. We’re in the middle of it. What’s going – ”
“Did you advise them?”
Bosch was silent a moment. When he spoke again his voice was very low.
“Advise them? No. What for, Kiz?”
“Harry, back out of there and come back to the station.”
Bosch had never heard Rider’s voice with such a serious tone. He looked at Edgar, who just raised his eyebrows. He was in the dark.
“Okay, Kiz, we’re on our way. You want to tell me why?”
“No. I have to show you. I found Stacey Kincaid in afterlife.”
Chapter 26
BOSCH couldn’t put his finger on the look he saw on Kizmin Rider’s face when he and Edgar returned to the squad room. She sat alone at the homicide table, her laptop in front of her, the glow of the screen reflecting slightly on her dark face. She looked both horrified and energized. Bosch knew the look but didn’t have the words for it. She had seen something horrible but at the same time she knew she was going to be able to do something about it.
“Kiz,” Bosch said.
“Sit down. I hope you didn’t leave hair on the cake with the Kincaids.”
Bosch pulled out his seat and sat down. Edgar did likewise. The phrase Rider had used referred to making a miscue that tainted a case with constitutional or procedural error. If a suspect asks for a lawyer but then confesses to a crime before the lawyer arrives, there is hair on the cake. The confession is tainted. Likewise, if a suspect is not advised of his rights before questioning, it is unlikely anything he says in that conversation can be used against him later in court.
“Look, neither one was a suspect when we walked in there,” Bosch said. “There was no reason to advise. We told them the case was open again and asked a few basic questions. Nothing came out of any consequence anyway. We told them Harris has been cleared and that’s it. What do you have, Kiz? Maybe you should just show us.”
“Okay, bring your chairs around here. I’ll school you.”
They moved their chairs to positions on either side of her. Bosch checked her computer and saw the Mistress Regina web page was on the screen.
“First off, either of you guys know Lisa or Stacey O’Connor in Major Fraud downtown?”
Bosch and Edgar shook their heads.
“They’re not sisters. They just have the same last name. They work with Sloane Inglert. You know who she is, right?”
Now they nodded. Inglert was a member of a new computer fraud unit working out of Parker Center. The team, and Inglert in particular, had gotten a lot of play in the media earlier that year when they bagged Brian Fielder, a hacker of international reputation who headed a crew of hackers known as the “Merry Pranksters.” Fielder’s exploits and Inglert’s chase of her quarry across the Internet had played in the paper for weeks and were now destined to be filmed by Holywood.
“All right,” Rider said. “Well, they’re friends of mine from when I worked Fraud. I called them and they were happy to come in to work this because otherwise they’d have to put on uniforms and work twelve hours tonight.”
“They came here?” Bosch asked.
“No, their office at Parker. Where the real computers are. Anyway, we talked over the phone once they got there. I told them what we had – this web address that we knew was important but at the same time didn’t make any sense. I told them about going to Mistress Regina’s place and I think I pretty much creeped them out. Anyway, they told me there was a good chance that what we were looking for had nothing to do with Regina herself, just her web page. They said the page could have been hijacked and that we should be looking for a hidden hypertext link somewhere in the image.”
Bosch raised his hands palms up but before he could say anything Rider kept going.
