Bosch tried to read the FBI agent but couldn’t. He knew that something was not being said.
“What?”
“Edgar pulled his file from the police academy this morning.”
“Right. He was a washout way back. How come?”
“Turned out the guy was blind in one eye. The left eye. He was trying to make it through with nobody noticing. He did all right until the weapons course. He couldn’t shoot for shit on the range. That’s how they found out. Then they washed him out.”
Bosch nodded. He thought of the expert shooting that had taken place on Angels Flight and he knew this new information on Richter changed things. He knew it was unlikely Richter could have been the shooter.
His thoughts were disrupted by the muted roar of a helicopter. He looked up at the windows and saw a helicopter from Channel 4 drifting down and hovering outside the house, about fifty yards away. Through the rain Bosch could barely make out the cameraman in the open sliding door.
“Fucking vultures,” Lindell said. “You’d think the rain would keep them inside.”
He stepped back to the doorway where there was a panel of light switches and other electronic controls. He pushed a round button and kept his finger on it. Bosch heard the whine of an electric motor and watched an automatic window shade drop down over the windows.
“They can’t get near this place on the ground,” Bosch said. “Because of the gates. So the air’s their only shot.”
“I don’t care. Let’s see what they get now.”
Bosch didn’t care either. He looked back down at the bodies. Judging by the coloring and the slight odor already apparent in the room, he guessed that the two men had been dead for several hours. He wondered if this meant that Kate Kincaid had been in the house all that time with the bodies or had gone to Brentwood and spent the night in her daughter’s bed. He guessed the latter.
“Anybody come up with a TOD?” he asked.
“Yeah. Coroner puts time of death at sometime last night, anywhere from nine to midnight. He said the blood flow indicates they could have been alive as long as a couple hours from first to last bullet. It looks like she wanted some information from them but they didn’t want to give it up – at first.”
“Her husband talked. I don’t know about Richter – she probably didn’t care about him. But her husband told her everything about Stacey. Then, I guess, she finished him. Finished them both. It wasn’t her husband with the girl on the site images. You should get the coroner to take torso photos of Richter and do a comparison. It might have been him.”
Lindell gestured toward the bodies.
“Will do. So what do you think? She did this last night and then what, went up to bed?”
“Probably not. I think she spent the night in the Brentwood house. It looked to me like the girl’s bed had been slept in. She had to see me and tell the story before she could finish her plan.”
“The finish being her suicide.”
“Right.”
“That’s hard-core, man.”
“Living with her daughter’s ghost, what she let happen to her, that was even more hard-core. Suicide was the easy way out.”
“Not if you ask me. Like I keep thinking about Sheehan, man, and wondering. I mean, how dark out could it have been for him to do that?”
“Just hope you never know. Where are my people?”
“Down the hall in the office. They’re handling that.”
“I’ll be in there.”
Bosch left Lindell then and went down the hall to the office. Edgar and Rider were silently conducting a search. The items they wished to seize were being piled on top of the desk. Bosch nodded his hello and they did the same. A quiet pallor hung over the investigation now. There would be no prosecution, no trial. It would be left to them to explain what had happened. And they all knew the media would be skeptical and the public might not believe them.
Bosch approached the desk. There was a lot of computer equipment with connecting wires. There were boxes of thick disks used for data storage. There was a small video camera and an editing station.
“We’ve got a lot, Harry,” Rider said. “We would have had Kincaid cold on the pedo net. He’s got a Zip drive with all the images from the secret web site on it. He’s got this camera – we think it’s what was used to take the videos of Stacey.”
Rider, who was wearing gloves, lifted the camera up to show him.
“It’s digital. You take your movie, plug the camera into this dock here and download what you want. Then you upload it on your computer and put it out on the pedo net. All from the privacy of your home. It’s literally as easy as – ”
She didn’t finish. Bosch turned to see what the distraction was and saw Deputy Chief Irving standing in the doorway of the room. Behind him stood Lindell and Irving’s adjutant, Lieutenant Tulin. Irving moved into the office and handed his wet raincoat to Tulin. He told him to take it and to wait in another room of the house.
“Which room, Chief?”
“Any room.”
Irivng closed the door after Tulin left. That left him, Lindell and Bosch’s team in the office. Bosch had an idea what was coming. The fixer was here now. The investigation was about to go through the spin cycle where decisions and public pronouncements would be made based on what best served the department, not the truth. Bosch folded his arms and waited.
“I want to finish this up now,” Irving said. “Take what you have found and clear out.”
“Chief,” Rider said, “we still have a lot of the house to cover.”
“I do not care. I want the bodies removed and then I want the police removed.”
“Sir,” she persisted, “we still haven’t found the weapon. We need that weapon to – ”
“And you are not going to find it.”
Irving stepped further into the room. He looked around and when his eyes finally came to Bosch’s face they stopped.
“I made a mistake listening to you. I hope the city does not have to pay for it.”
Bosch paused a moment before responding. Irving never took his eyes off him.
“Chief, I know that you are thinking in… political terms about this. But we have to continue our searches of this house and other locations related to the Kincaids. We need to find the weapon in order to prove that – ”
“I just told you, you are not going to find the weapon. Not here or anywhere else related to the Kincaids. All this was, Detective, was a diversion. A diversion that caused three deaths.”
Bosch didn’t know what was going on but he felt defensive. He gestured toward the equipment on the desk.
“I wouldn’t call this a diversion. Kincaid was involved in a major pedophile ring and we – ”
“Your assignment was Angels Flight. I obviously gave you people too much latitude and now here we are.”
“This is Angels Flight. That’s why we need the weapon. It will tie it all – ”
“Damn it, man, we have the weapon! We have had it for twenty-four hours! We had the killer as well. HAD! We let him go and now we will never get him back.”
Bosch could only stare at him. Irving’s face had turned the deep red of anger.
“The ballistics analysis was completed less than an hour ago,” Irving said. “The three slugs taken from the body of Howard Elias were matched unequivocally to bullets test-fired in the firearms lab from Detective Francis Sheehan’s nine-millimeter Smith and Wesson pistol. Detective Sheehan killed those people on that train. End of story. There are those of us who believed in that possibility but were talked out of it. The possibility is now fact but Detective Sheehan is long gone.”
Bosch was speechless and had to work hard to keep his jaw from dropping open.
“You,” he managed to say. “You’re doing this for the old man. For Kincaid. You are – ”
Rider grabbed Bosch by the arm to try to stop him from committing career suicide. He shrugged off her grip and pointed in the direction of the living room where the bodies were.
