“See what I mean?” Edgar said. “They gotta be real.”
“Jerry,” Bosch said.
Edgar raised his hands in surrender.
“I’m a trained observer. Just filing a report.”
“Well, you better keep it to yourself,” Bosch whispered. “Unless you want to file it with the chief.”
Edgar turned just in time to see Irving come up to them.
“Well, initial conclusions, Detectives?”
Bosch looked at Edgar.
“Jerry? What were you just saying you observed?”
“Uh, well, uh, at the moment we’re still kind of thinking about all we saw in there.”
“Nothing that doesn’t really jibe with what Captain Garwood told us,” Bosch said quickly, before Rider could say anything that would reveal their true conclusions. “At least, preliminarily.”
“What next, then?”
“We’ve got plenty to do. I want to talk to the train operator again and we’ve got to canvass that residential building for wits. We’ve got next-of-kin notification and we’ve got to get into Elias’s office. When is that help you promised us going to show up, Chief?”
“Right now.”
Irving raised an arm and beckoned Chastain and the three others he stood with. Bosch had known that was probably what they were doing at the scene but seeing Irving waving them over still put a tight feeling in his chest. Irving was well aware of the animosity between IAD and the rank and file, and the enmity that existed between Bosch and Chastain in particular. To put them together on the case told Bosch that Irving wasn’t as interested in finding out who killed Howard Elias and Catalina Perez as he had outwardly expressed. This was the deputy chief’s way of appearing to be conscientious but actually working to cripple the investigation.
“Are you sure you want to do this, Chief?” Bosch asked in an urgent whisper as the IAD men approached. “You know Chastain and I don’t – ”
“Yes, it is how I want to do it,” Irving said, cutting Bosch off without looking at him. “Detective Chastain headed up the internal review of the Michael Harris complaint. I think he is an appropriate addition to this investigation.”
“What I’m saying is that Chastain and I have a history, Chief. I don’t think it’s going to work out with – ”
“I do not care if you two do not like each other. Find a way to work together. I want to go back inside now.”
Irving led the entourage back into the station house. It was close quarters. No one said anything by way of a greeting to one another. Once inside, they all looked expectantly at Irving.
“Okay, we are going to set some ground rules here,” the deputy chief began. “Detective Bosch is in charge of this investigation. The six of you report to him. He reports to me. I do not want any confusion about that. Detective Bosch runs this case. Now I have arranged for you to set up an office in the conference room next to my office on the sixth floor at Parker Center. There will be added phones and a computer terminal in there by Monday morning. You men from IAD, I want you to be primarily used in the areas of interviewing police officers, running down alibis, that part of the investigation. Detective Bosch and his team will handle the traditional elements of homicide investigation, the autopsy, witness interviews, that whole part of it. Any questions so far?”
The room went stone silent. Bosch was quietly seething. It was the first time he had thought of Irving as a hypocrite. The deputy chief had always been a hard-ass but ultimately a fair man. This move was different. He was maneuvering to protect the department when the rot they were seeking might be inside it. But what Irving didn’t know was that Bosch had accomplished everything in his life by channeling negatives into motivation. He vowed to himself that he would clear the case in spite of Irving’s maneuvers. And the chips would fall where they would fall.
“A word of warning about the media. It will be all over this case. You are not to be distracted or deterred. You are not to talk to the media. All such communications will come through my office or Lieutenant Tom O’Rourke in media relations. Understood?”
The seven detectives nodded.
“Good. That means I will not have to fear picking the Times up off the driveway in the morning.”
Irving looked at his watch and then back at the group.
“I can control you people but not the coroner’s people or anyone else who learns about this through official channels in the next few hours. I figure by ten hundred the media will be all over this with full knowledge of the victims’ identities. So I want a briefing in the conference room at ten hundred. After I am up-to-date I will brief the chief of police and one of us will address the media with the bare minimum of information we wish to put out. Any problem with that?”
“Chief, that barely gives us six hours,” Bosch said. “I don’t know how much more we’ll know by then. We’ve got a lot of legwork to do before we can sit down and start sifting through – ”
“That is understood. You are to feel no pressure from the media. I do not care if the press conference is merely to confirm who is dead and nothing else. The media will not be running this case. I want you to run with it full bore, but at ten hundred I want everyone back at my conference room. Questions?”
There were none.
“Okay, then I will turn it over to Detective Bosch and leave you people to it.”
He turned directly to Bosch and handed him a white business card.
“You have all my numbers there. Lieutenant Tulin’s as well. Anything comes up that I should know about, you call me forthwith. I do not care what time it is or where you are at. You call me.”
Bosch nodded, took the card and put it in his jacket pocket.
“Go to it, people. As I said before, let the chips fall where they may.”
He left the room and Bosch heard Rider whisper, “Yeah, right.”
Bosch turned and looked at the faces of the new team, coming to Chastain’s last.
“You know what he’s doing, don’t you?” Bosch said. “He thinks we can’t work together. He thinks we’ll be like those fighting fish that you put in the same bowl and they go nuts trying to get at each other. Meantime, the case is never cleared. Well, it’s not going to happen. Anything anybody in here’s ever done to me or anyone else, forget about it. I let it go. This case is the thing. There are two people in that train that somebody blew away without so much as a second thought. We’re going to find that person. That’s all I care about now.”
He held Chastain’s eyes until he finally saw a slight nod of agreement. Bosch nodded back. He was sure all the others had seen the exchange. He then took out his notebook and opened it to a fresh page. He handed it to Chastain.
“Okay, then,” he said. “I want everybody to write down their names followed by their home and pager numbers. Cell phones, too, if you got ’em. I’ll make a list up and everybody will get copies. I want everybody in communication. That’s the trouble with these big gang bangs. If everybody isn’t on the same wavelength, something can slip through. We don’t want that.”
Bosch stopped and looked at the others. They were all watching him, paying attention. It seemed that for the moment the natural animosities were relaxed, if not forgotten.
“Okay,” he said. “This is how we’re going to break this down from here on out.”
Chapter 6
ONE of the men from IAD was a Latino named Raymond Fuentes. Bosch sent him along with Edgar to the address on Catalina Perez’s identification cards to notify her next of kin and to handle the questions about her. It was most likely the dead-end part of the investigation – it seemed apparent that Elias was the primary target – and Edgar tried to protest. But Bosch cut him off. The explanation he would share privately with Edgar later was that he needed to spread the IAD men out in order to give him better control of things. So Edgar went with Fuentes. And Rider was sent with a second IAD man, Loomis Baker, to interview Eldrige Peete at Parker Center and then bring him back to the scene. Bosch wanted the train operator at the scene to go over what he had seen and to operate the train as he had before discovering the bodies.
