“Are you taking over his office, too? Is that where I should bring everything?”
“Yes. That’s the plan. That would be fine.”
Bosch nodded but he knew she couldn’t see this.
“Well,” he said. “Thanks for your help. I don’t know if Irving has said anything, but the lead to Sheehan came out of the files. One of the old cases. I guess you heard about that.”
“Actually… no. But you’re welcome, Detective Bosch. I’m curious, though. About Sheehan. He was your former partner…”
“Yes. He was.”
“Does all of this seem plausible? That he would first kill Howard and then himself? That woman on the train, too?”
“If you asked me that yesterday I would have said never in a million years. But today I feel like I couldn’t read myself let alone anybody else. We have a saying when we can’t explain things. The evidence is what it is… And we leave it at that.”
Bosch leaned back on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. He held the phone to his ear. After a long moment she spoke.
“But is it possible that there is another interpretation of the evidence?”
She said it slowly, concisely. She was a lawyer. She chose her words well.
“What are you saying, Inspector?”
“It’s just Carla now.”
“What are you saying, Carla? What are you asking me?”
“You have to understand, my role is different now. I am bound by attorney-client ethics. Michael Harris is now my client in a lawsuit against your employer and several of your colleagues. I have to be care – ”
“Is there something that clears him? Sheehan? Something you held back before?”
Bosch sat up and now leaned forward. He was staring wide-eyed at nothing. He was all internal, trying to remember something he could have missed. He knew Entrenkin had held back the trial strategy file. There must have been something in there.
“I can’t answer your – ”
“The strategy file,” Bosch cut in excitedly. “It was something in there that puts the lie to this. It…”
He stopped. What she was suggesting – or the suggestion he was reading in her words – did not make sense. Sheehan’s service weapon had been linked to the Angels Flight shootings. There was a ballistics match. Three bullets from the body of Howard Elias, three matches. End of argument, end of case. The evidence is what it is.
That was the hard fact he was up against, yet his gut instinct still told him Sheehan was all wrong for this, that he wouldn’t have done it. Yes, he would have gladly danced on Elias’s grave but he wouldn’t have put the lawyer in that grave. There was a big difference. And Bosch’s instincts – though abandoned in light of the facts – were that Frankie Sheehan, no matter what he had done to Michael Harris, was still too good a man at his core to have done the latter. He had killed before, but he was not a killer. Not like that.
“Look,” he said. “I don’t know what you know or think you know, but you’ve got to help me. I can’t – ”
“It’s there,” she said. “If you have the files, it’s there. I held something back that I was bound to hold back. But part of it was in the public files. If you look, you’ll find it. I’m not saying your partner is clear. I’m just saying there was something else here that probably should have been looked at. It wasn’t.”
“And that’s all you are going to tell me?”
“That’s all I can tell you – and even that I shouldn’t have.”
Bosch was silent for a moment. He didn’t know whether to be angry with her for not telling him specifically what she knew or just happy that she had given him the clue and the direction.
“All right,” he finally said. “If it’s here I’ll find it.”
Chapter 35
IT took Bosch nearly two hours to make his way through the Black Warrior case files. Many of the folders he had opened previously, but some had been viewed by Edgar and Rider or left to others on the squad Irving had put together at Angels Flight less than seventy-two hours earlier. He looked at each file as if he had never seen it before, looking for the thing that had been missed – the telling detail, the boomerang that would change his interpretation of everything and send it in a new direction.
That was the problem with gang-banging a case – putting multiple investigative teams on it. No single pair of eyes saw all of the evidence, all of the leads or even all of the paperwork. Everything was split up. Though one detective was nominally in charge, it was rare that everything crossed his radar screen. Now Bosch had to make sure it did.
He found what he believed he was looking for – and what Carla Entrenkin had hinted at – in the subpoena file, the folder where receipts from the process server were stored. These receipts were received by Howard Elias’s office after the subject of the subpoena had been served with the summons to appear for a deposition or as a witness in court. The file was thick with the thin white forms. The stack was in chronological order of service. The first half of the stack consisted of subpoenas for depositions and these dated back several months. The second half of the stack consisted of witness subpoenas for the court case that had been scheduled to start that day. These were summonses to the cops being sued as well as other witnesses.
Bosch remembered that Edgar had looked through this file earlier – he had come across the subpoena for the car wash records. But that discovery must have distracted him from other things in the file. As Bosch looked through the subpoenas another filing caught his eyes as being worthy of a second look. It was a subpoena for Detective John Chastain of the Internal Affairs Division. This was surprising because Chastain had never mentioned any involvement in the lawsuit. Chastain had headed the internal investigation of Michael Harris’s allegations that had cleared the RHD detectives of any wrongdoing, so the fact that he had been called wasn’t unusual. It would stand to reason that he would be called as a witness in defense of the detectives accused of wrongdoing by Michael Harris. But the fact that Chastain had not told anyone he was a subpoenaed witness for the plaintiffs in the lawsuit was. If that had been known he might have been disqualified from the team investigating the murders for the same reason that the RHD bulls had been removed. There was a clear conflict. The subpoena needed explanation. And Bosch’s interest in it increased further when he saw that the date of service was Thursday, the day before Elias’s murder. But curiosity turned to suspicion when Bosch saw the note handwritten by the process server at the bottom of the subpoena.
Det. Chastain refused acceptance at vehicle. Server placed under wiper.
The note made it very clear that Chastain didn’t want any part of the case. And it turned Bosch’s attention into a sharp focus. The city could have been burning from Dodger Stadium to the beach and he probably wouldn’t have noticed the television now.
He realized as he stared at the subpoena that the subject – Chastain – had been given a specific date and time to appear in court to give testimony. He shuffled through the court subpoenas and realized that they were placed in the file in order of service, not in the order that those summoned would appear in trial. He knew then that by placing them in order according to the appearance dates and times, he would have the chronological order of Elias’s case and a better understanding of how he planned the trial.
It took him two minutes to put the subpoenas in the proper order. When he was done, he looked at the documents one by one, envisioning the process of the trial. First Michael Harris would testify. He would tell his story. Next would come Captain John Garwood, head of RHD. Garwood would testify about the investigation, giving the sanitized version. The next subpoena was for Chastain. He would follow Garwood. Reluctantly – he had tried to refuse service – he would follow the RHD captain.
Why?
Bosch put the question aside for the moment and began going through the other subpoenas. It became clear that Elias was following an age-old strategy of alternating positive and negative witnesses. He was planning to alternate the testimony of the RHD men, the defendants, with witnesses who would obviously benefit Michael Harris. There was Harris, the doctor who treated his ear, Jenkins Pelfry, his boss at the car wash, the two
