were in all likelihood the follower’s.”
Sheehan smiled at Bosch and Bosch smiled back. Sheehan held his hands together as if waiting for handcuffs.
“Here I am boys,” he said. “That’s my brand.”
“Mine, too,” Bosch said. “But I’ve got you beat. I’m left-handed, too. I better get an alibi working.”
The men at the table smiled. Bosch dropped his smile when he suddenly thought of something but knew he could not say anything yet. He looked at the files stacked at the center of the table.
“Shit, every cop smokes Marlboros or Camels,” Opelt said.
“It’s a dirty habit,” Irving said.
“I agree,” said Rollenberger, a little too quickly.
It brought silence back to the table.
“Who’s your suspect?”
It was Irving who asked it. He was looking at Bosch again with those eyes Harry couldn’t decipher. The question shocked Bosch. Irving knew. Somehow he knew. Harry didn’t answer.
“Detective, it is clear you’ve had a handle on what’s going on for a day. You’ve also been on this case from the start. I think you’ve got someone in mind. Tell us. We need to start somewhere.”
Bosch hesitated again but finally said, “I’m not sure… and I don’t want…”
“To ruin someone’s career if you’re wrong? To set the dogs on a possibly innocent man? That’s understood. But we can’t have you pursuing this on your own. Haven’t you learned anything from this trial? I believe ‘cowboying’ was the term Money Chandler used to describe it.”
They were all looking at him. He was thinking of Mora. The vice cop was strange but was he that strange? Over the years Bosch had often been investigated by the department and did not want to bring that kind of weight down on the wrong person.
“Detective?” Irving prompted. “Even if all you have is a hunch, then you must tell us. Investigations start with hunches. You want to protect one person but what are we going to do? We are about to go out and investigate cops. What difference is it if we start with this person or come to him in time? Either way we will get to him. Give us the name.”
Bosch thought about everything Irving had said. He wondered what his own motive was. Was he protecting Mora or simply keeping him for himself? He thought a few more moments and finally said, “Give me five minutes alone in here with the files. If there is something there that I think is there, then I’ll tell you.”
“Gentlemen,” Irving said, “let’s go get some coffee.”
After the room was cleared, Bosch looked at the files for nearly a minute without moving. He felt confused. He wasn’t sure whether he wanted to find something that would convince him Mora was the follower or convince him he was not. He thought about what Chandler had said to the jury about monsters and the black abyss where they dwell. Whoever fights monsters, he thought, should not think too hard about it.
He lit a cigarette and pulled the stack close to him and began looking for two files. The chronologies file was near the top. It was thin. It was basically a quick guide to important dates in the investigation. He found the task force personnel file at the bottom of the stack. It was thicker than the first he pulled out because it contained the weekly shifts schedule for the detectives assigned to the task force and the overtime approval forms. As the detective-three in charge of the B squad, Bosch had been in charge of keeping the personnel file up to date.
From the chronologies file, Bosch quickly looked up the times and dates that the first two porno actresses were murdered and other pertinent information about the way they were lured to their death. Then he looked up the same information about the lone survivor. He wrote it all down in order on a page of his pocket notebook.
– June 17, 11P.M.
Georgia Stern aka Velvet Box
survivor
– July 6, 11:30P.M.
Nicole Knapp aka Holly Lere
W. Hollywood
– Sept. 28, 4A.M.
Shirleen Kemp aka Heather Cumhither
Malibu
Bosch opened the personnel file and pulled the shift schedules for the weeks the women were attacked or murdered. June seventeenth, the night Georgia Stern was attacked, was a Sunday, which was the B squad’s night off. Mora could’ve done it, but so could anyone else who was on the squad.
On the Knapp case, Bosch got a hit and his fingers trembled a little as he held the schedule for the week of July 1. His adrenaline was moving faster now. July sixth, the day Knapp was sent on an outcall request at 9P.M. and was found dead on the sidewalk on Sweetzer in West Hollywood at 11:30P.M., was a Friday. Mora was on the schedule to be working the three-to-midnight shift with the B squad, but there next to his name in Bosch’s own writing was the word “sick.”
Bosch quickly pulled out the schedule for the week of September twenty-second. The nude body of Shirleen Kemp had been found at the side of the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu at four in the morning on Friday, September twenty-eighth. He realized that wasn’t enough information and looked for the file that contained the investigation of her death.
He quickly read through the file and learned that Kemp had a phone service that had logged a call for her services at the Malibu Inn at 12:55A.M. When detectives went there they learned from phone records that at 12:55A.M. a call had been placed by the occupant of room 311. The front desk staff could not provide a good description of the man in 311 and the identification he gave proved to be false. He had paid in cash. The one thing the desk people could say with absolute accuracy was that he checked in at 12:35A.M. Each registration card was punched with the time. The man had called for Heather Cumhither twenty minutes after he checked in.
Bosch referred back to the work schedule. On the Thursday night before Kemp was murdered, Mora had worked. But he had apparently come in and left early. He had signed in at 2:40P.M. and out at 11:45P.M.
That gave him fifty minutes to get from the Hollywood station to the Malibu Inn and checked into room 311 at 12:35A.M., Friday. Bosch knew that it could be done. Traffic would be light on the PCH that late at night.
It could be Mora.
He noticed that the cigarette he had set on the edge of the table had burned down to the butt and it had discolored the Formica edge. He quickly dropped the cigarette into a pot containing a ficus plant in the corner of the room and turned the table around so the burn mark was positioned at the spot where Rollenberger had been sitting. He waved one of the files in the air to disperse the smoke and then opened the door to Irving’s office.
“Raymond Mora.”
Irving had said the name out loud apparently to see how it sounded. He said nothing else when Bosch was finished telling what he knew. Bosch watched him and waited for more but the assistant chief only sniffed at the air, identified the cigarette smoke and frowned.
