Chapter 5
THE number of detectives outside the station had finally begun to decrease. Bosch watched as Garwood and a group of his men crossed the plaza toward their cars. He then saw Irving standing to the side of the train car talking to Chastain and three detectives. Bosch didn’t know them but assumed they were IAD. The deputy chief was animated in his discussion but kept his voice so low that Bosch couldn’t hear what he was saying. Bosch wasn’t sure exactly what the IAD presence was all about, but he was getting an increasingly bad feeling about it.
He saw Frankie Sheehan hanging back behind Garwood and his group. He was about to leave but was hesitating. Bosch nodded at him.
“I see what you mean now, Frankie,” he said.
“Yeah, Harry, some days you eat the bear…”
“Right. You taking off?”
“Yeah, the cap told us all to get out of here.”
Bosch stepped over and kept his voice low.
“Any ideas I could borrow?”
Sheehan looked at the train car as if considering for the first time who might have killed the two people inside it.
“None other than the obvious and I think that will be a waste of time. But then again, you have to waste it, right? Cover all the bases.”
“Yeah. Anybody you think I should start with?”
“Yeah, me.” He smiled broadly. “I hated the douche bag. Know what I’m gonna do? I’m going now to try and find an all-night liquor store and buy the best Irish whiskey they got. I’m going to have a little celebration, Hieronymus. Because Howard Elias was a motherfucker.”
Bosch nodded. With cops the word motherfucker was rarely used. It was heard a lot by them but not used. With most cops it was reserved as being the worst thing you could say about someone. When it was said it meant one thing: that the person had crossed the righteous, that the person had no respect for the keepers of the law and therefore the rules and bounds of society. Cop killers were always motherfuckers, no questions asked. Defense lawyers got the call, most of the time. And Howard Elias was on the motherfucker list, too. Right at the top.
Sheehan gave a little salute and headed off across the plaza. Bosch turned his attention toward the interior of the train while he put on rubber gloves. The lights were back on and the techs were finished with the laser. Bosch knew one of them, Hoffman. He was working with a trainee Bosch had heard about but not met. She was an attractive Asian woman with a large bust. He had overheard other detectives in the squad room discussing her attributes and questioning their authenticity.
“Gary, is it cool to come in?” Bosch asked, leaning in through the door.
Hoffman looked up from the tackle box in which he kept his tools. He was organizing things and was about to close it.
“It’s cool. We’re wrapping up. This one yours, Harry?”
“It is now. Got anything good for me? Gonna make my day?”
Bosch stepped into the car, followed by Edgar and Rider. Since the car was on an incline, the floor was actually a series of steps down to the other door. The seats also were on graduated levels on either side of the center aisle. Bosch looked at the slatted bench seats and suddenly remembered how hard they had been on his skinny behind as a boy.
“ ’Fraid not,” Hoffman said. “It’s pretty clean.”
Bosch nodded and moved down a few more steps to the first body. He studied Catalina Perez the way someone might study a sculpture in a museum. There was no feeling for the object in front of him as human. He was studying details, gaining impressions. His eyes fell to the bloodstain and the small tear the bullet had made in the T-shirt. The bullet had hit the woman dead center. Bosch thought about this and envisioned the gunman in the doorway of the train twelve feet away.
“Hell of a shot, huh?”
It was the tech Bosch didn’t know. He looked at her and nodded. He had been thinking the same thing, that the shooter was someone with some expertise in firearms.
“Hi, I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Sally Tam.”
She put out her hand and Bosch shook it. It felt weird. They were both wearing rubber gloves. He told her his name.
“Oh,” she said. “Somebody was just talking about you. About the hard-boiled eggs case.”
“It was just luck.”
Bosch knew he was getting a longer ride out of that case than he deserved. It was all because a Times reporter had heard about it and written a story that exaggerated Bosch’s skills to the point where he seemed like a distant relative of Sherlock Holmes.
Bosch pointed past Tam and said he needed to get by to take a look at the other body. She stepped to the side and leaned back and he slid by, careful not to allow himself to rub against her. He heard her introducing herself to Rider and Edgar. He dropped into a crouch so he could study the body of Howard Elias.
“Is this still as is?” he asked Hoffman, who was squatting next to his tackle box near the feet of the dead man.
“Pretty much. We turned him to get into his pockets but then put him back. There are some Polaroids over on that seat behind you if you want to double-check. Coroner’s people took those before anybody touched him.”
Bosch turned and saw the photos. Hoffman was right. The body was in the same position in which it had been found.
He turned back to the body and used both hands to turn the head so that he could study the wounds. Garwood’s interpretation had been correct, Bosch decided. The entry wound at the back of the head was a contact wound. Though partially obscured by blood that had matted the hair, there were still powder burns and stippling visible in a circular pattern around the wound. The face shot, however, was clean. This did not refer to the blood – there was a good amount of that. But there were no powder burns on the skin. The bullet to the face had come from a distance.
Bosch picked up the arm and turned the hand so he could study the entry wound in the palm. The arm moved easily. Rigor mortis had not yet begun – the cool evening air was delaying this process. There was no discharge burn on the palm. Bosch did some computing. No powder burns on the palm meant the firearm was at least three to four feet away from the hand when the bullet was discharged. If Elias had his arm extended with his palm out, then that added another three feet.
Edgar and Rider had made their way to the second body. Bosch could feel their presence behind him.
“Six to seven feet away, through the hand and still right between the eyes,” he said. “This guy can shoot. Better remember that when we take him down.”
Neither of them answered. Bosch hoped they picked up on the confidence in his last line as well as the warning. He was about to place the dead man’s hand down on the floor when he noticed the long scratch mark on the wrist and running along the side of the palm. He guessed the wound had occurred when Elias’s watch had been pulled off. He studied the wound closely. There was no blood in the track. It was a clean white laceration along the surface of the dark skin, yet it seemed deep enough to have drawn blood.
He thought about this for a moment. There were no shots to the heart, only to the head. The blood displacement from the wounds indicated the heart had continued to pump for at least several seconds after Elias had gone down. It would seem that the shooter would have yanked the watch off Elias’s wrist very quickly after the shooting – there was obviously no reason to hang around. Yet, the scratch on the hand had not bled. It was as if it had occurred well after the heart had stopped pumping.
“What do you think about the lead enema?” Hoffman asked, interrupting Bosch’s thoughts.
As Hoffman got out of the way, Bosch stood and gingerly stepped around the body until he was down by the feet. He crouched again and looked at the third bullet wound. Blood had soaked the seat of the pants. Still, he could see the tear and tight burn pattern where the bullet went through the cloth and into Howard Elias’s anus. The weapon had been pressed in deep at the point where the seams of the pants were joined and then fired. It
