McCaleb nodded. He thought it was a risk that had to be taken.
“You know anybody who knows him?” he said.
She shook her head in annoyance.
“Look, don’t you remember? Cops are paranoid people. The minute I ask one question about Harry Bosch, people are going to know what we are doing.”
“Not necessarily. Use the Storey case. It’s high profile. Maybe you’ve been watching the guy on TV and he doesn’t look so good. ‘Is he all right? What’s going on with him?’ Like that. Make it like you’re gossiping.”
She didn’t look mollified. She stepped over to the sliding door and looked out across the marina. She leaned her forehead against the glass.
“I know his former partner,” she said. “There’s an informal group of women who get together once a month. We all work homicide from all the local departments. About a dozen of us. Harry’s old partner Kiz Rider just got moved from Hollywood to Robbery-Homicide. The big time. But I think they were close. He was kind of a mentor. I might be able to hit on her. If I use a little finesse.”
McCaleb nodded and thought of something.
“Harry told me he was divorced. I don’t know how long ago but you could ask Rider about him like, you know, you’re interested and what’s he like, that sort of thing. You ask like that and she might give you the real lowdown.”
Winston looked away from the slider and back at McCaleb.
“Yeah, that will make us good friends when she finds out it was all bullshit and I was setting up on her ex- partner – her mentor.”
“If she’s a good cop she’ll understand. You had to either clear him or bag him and either way you wanted to do it as quietly as possible.”
Winston looked back out the door.
“I’m going to need deniability on this.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning if we do this and you go in there and it all blows up, I need to be able to walk away.”
McCaleb nodded. He wished she hadn’t said it but he could see her need to protect herself.
“I’m just telling you up front, Terry. If it all goes to hell it’s going to look like you overstepped, that I asked you to take a look at the book and you went off on your own. I’m sorry but I have to protect myself here.”
“I understand, Jaye. I can live with it. I’ll take my chances.”
Chapter 18
Winston was silent for a long time while she stared out the salon’s door. McCaleb sensed that she was building up to something and just waited.
“I’ll tell you a story about Harry Bosch,” she finally said. “The first time I ever met him was about four years ago. It was a joint case. Two kidnap-murders. The one in Hollywood was his, the one in West Hollywood was mine. Young women, girls really. Physical evidence tied the cases together. We were basically working them separately but would meet for lunch every Wednesday to compare notes.”
“Did you profile it?”
“Yeah. This was when Maggie Griffin was still out here at the bureau. She worked something up for us. The usual. Anyway, things heated up when a third one disappeared. A seventeen-year-old this time. The evidence from the first two indicated the doer was keeping them alive four or five days before he got tired of them and killed them. So we had a big clock on us. We got reinforcements and we were running down common denominators.”
McCaleb nodded. It sounded as though they were going by the book on tracking a serial.
“A long shot came up,” she said. “All three of the victims used the same dry cleaner on Santa Monica near La Cienega. The latest – the girl – had a summer job at Universal and took her uniforms in for dry cleaning. Anyway, before we even went in there to the management we went into the employee parking lot and took down tags to run, just in case we got something before we had to go in and announce ourselves. And we got a hit. The manager himself. He’d gotten popped about ten years before on a public indecency. We pulled the jacket and it was a garden-variety flasher case. He pulled up in a car next to a bus stop and opened the door so the woman on the bench could get a look at his johnson. Turned out she was an undercover – they knew a wagger was working the neighborhood and put out decoys. Anyway, he got probation and counseling. He lied about it on his application at the job and over the years worked his way up to manager of the shop.”
“Higher job, higher stress, higher level of offense.”
“That’s what we thought. But we didn’t have any evidence. So Bosch had an idea. He said all of us – me, him and our partners – would go see this guy, his name was Hagen, at his home. He said an FBI agent once told him to always brace a suspect at home if you get the chance because sometimes you get more from the surroundings than you get from their mouths.”
McCaleb suppressed a smile. It had been a lesson Bosch learned on the Cielo Azul case.
“So we followed Hagen home. He lived over in Los Feliz in a big old rundown house off Franklin. This was the fourth day of the third woman’s disappearance, so we knew we were running out of time. We knocked on his door and the plan was to act like we didn’t know about his record and that we were just there to enlist his help in checking out employees in the shop. You know, to see how he reacted or if he made a slip.”
“Right.”
“Well, we were in there in this guy’s living room and I was doing most of the talking because Bosch wanted to see how the guy took it. You know, a woman in control. And we weren’t there but five minutes when Bosch suddenly stood up and said, ‘It’s him. She’s here somewhere.’ And when he said that, Hagen up and bolted for the door. He didn’t get far.”
“Was it a bluff or part of the plan?”
“Neither. Bosch just knew. On this little table next to the couch was one of those baby monitor things, you know? Bosch saw that and he just knew. It was the wrong end. It was the transmitter part. It meant the receiver was somewhere else. If you have a kid it’s the other way around. You listen in the living room for noise from the baby room. But this was backwards. The profile from Griffin said this guy was a controller, that he likely used verbal coercion on his victim. Bosch saw that transmitter and something just clicked; this guy had her somewhere and got off on talking to her.”
“He was right?”
“Dead on. We found her in the garage in an unplugged freezer with three air holes drilled in it. It was like a coffin. The receiver part of the monitor was in there with her. She later told us that Hagen talked to her incessantly whenever he was in the house. He sang to her, too. Top forties. He’d change the words and sing about raping and killing her.”
McCaleb nodded. He wished he had been there on the case, for he knew what Bosch had felt, that sudden moment of coalescing, when the atoms smash together. When you just knew. A moment as thrilling as it was dreadful. The moment every homicide detective privately lives for.
“The reason I tell this story is because of what Bosch did and said after. Once we had Hagen in the back seat of one of the cars and started searching the house, Bosch stayed in the living room with that baby monitor. He turned it on and he spoke to her. He never stopped until we found her. He said, ‘Jennifer, we’re here. It’s all right, Jennifer, we’re coming. You’re safe and we’re coming for you. Nobody’s going to hurt you.’ He never stopped talking to her, soothing her like that.”
She stopped for a long moment and McCaleb saw her eyes were on the memory.
“After we found her we all felt so good. It was the best high I’ve ever had on this job. I went to Bosch and said, ‘You must have kids. You spoke to her like she was one of your own.’ And he just shook his head and said no. He said, ‘I just know what it’s like to be alone and in the dark.’ Then he sort of walked away.”
She looked from the door back at McCaleb.
“Your talking about darkness reminded me of that.”
He nodded.
