Once Bosch had cleared the rover channel, Rollenberger came up almost immediately.
“Bosch! Sheehan-Team One! What is happening there. What is-report immediately.”
After a long moment went by, Bosch answered calmly.
“This is Six. Team Leader, be advised you should proceed to the subject’s twenty.”
“His home? What-did we have shots fired?”
“Team Leader, be advised to keep the channel open. And all task force units, disregard the callout. All units are ten-seven until further notice. Unit Five, are you up?”
“Five,” Edgar responded.
“Five, could you meet me at our subject’s twenty?”
“On my way.”
“Six out.”
Bosch turned off the rover before Rollenberger could get back on the channel.
It took the lieutenant a half hour to get from the Parker Center operations post to the house on Sierra Linda. By the time he arrived, Edgar was already there and a plan was in place. Bosch opened the front door just as Rollenberger reached it. The lieutenant strode through the entrance with a face turned red with equal parts of anger and befuddlement.
“Okay, Bosch, what the hell is going on here? You had no authority to cancel the call out, to countermand my order.”
“I thought the less people that know, the better, Lieutenant. I called out Edgar. I thought that would be enough to handle it and that way not too many would-”
“Know what, Bosch? Handle what? What is going on here?”
Bosch looked at him a moment before answering, then in an even voice said, “One of the men in your command conducted an illegal search of the suspect’s residence. He was caught in the act when the suspect eluded the surveillance you were supervising. That’s what happened.”
Rollenberger reacted as if he had been slapped.
“Are you crazy, Bosch? Where’s the phone? I want-”
“You call Chief Irving and you can forget about ever running a task force again. You can forget about a lot of things.”
“Bullshit! I had nothing to do with this. You went freelancing on your own and got your fingers caught in the jar. Where’s Mora?”
“He’s upstairs in the room to the right, handcuffed to the Nautilus machine.”
Rollenberger looked around at the others standing in the living room. Sheehan, Opelt, Edgar. They all gave him deadpan looks. Bosch said, “If you knew nothing about it,
“Bosch, you were talking in codes, I didn’t-I knew nuh-”
Rollenberger suddenly sprang wildly at Bosch, his hands up and going for his neck. Bosch was ready and reacted more aggressively. He pounded both palms into the other man’s chest and slammed him back against a hallway wall. A picture two feet to his side slid off the wall and clattered to the floor.
“Bosch, you fool, the bust is ruined now,” he said while slumped against the wall. “It was all il-”
“There’s no bust. He’s the wrong man. I think. But we have to be sure. You want to help us search the place and think about how to contain this, or do you want to call out the chief and explain how badly you handled your command?”
Bosch stepped away, adding, “The phone’s in the kitchen.”
The search of the house took more than four hours. The five of them, working methodically and silently, searched every room, every drawer, every cabinet. What little evidence they gathered of Detective Ray Mora’s secret life they put on the dining room table. All the while, their host remained in the upstairs gym room, cuffed to one of the chrome bars of the weight machine. He was accorded fewer rights than a murderer would have received had he been arrested in his home. No phone call. No lawyer. No rights. This was always the case when cops investigated cops. Every cop knew the most flagrant abuses of police power occurred when cops turned on their own.
Occasionally, as they began the initial work, they would hear Mora call out. He called for Bosch most often, sometimes Rollenberger. But no one came to him until finally Sheehan and Opelt-concerned that the neighbors would hear and maybe call the police-went into the room and gagged him with a bathroom towel and black electrical tape.
The silence of the searchers was not in deference to the neighbors, however. The detectives worked quietly because of the tensions among them. Though Rollenberger was visibly angry with Bosch, most of the tension was derived from Sheehan and Opelt having blown the surveillance, which directly led to Mora’s discovery of Bosch inside his house. No one except Rollenberger was upset by Bosch’s illegal entry of the house. Bosch’s own home had been similarly violated at least twice that he knew about during times when he had been the focus of internal investigations. Just like the badge, it came with the job.
When they completed the search the dining room table was stacked with the porno magazines and store-bought tapes, the video equipment, the wig, the women’s clothing and Mora’s personal phone book. The television that had been hit by Mora’s stray shot was also there. By then Rollenberger had cooled somewhat, having apparently used the hours to consider his situation as well as to search.
“All right,” he said as the other four convened around the table and surveyed its contents. “What have we got? Number one, are we confident Mora is not our man?”
Rollenberger looked around the room and his eyes stopped on Bosch.
“What do you think, Bosch?”
“You heard my story. He denied it and what was on the last tape before he made me erase it doesn’t fit with the Follower. Looked completely consensual, though the boy and girl with him were obviously underage. He isn’t the Follower.”
“Then what is he?”
“Somebody with problems. I think he got bent by staying too long in vice and started making his own flicks.”
“Was he selling them?”
“I don’t know. I doubt it. No evidence of that here. He didn’t go very far in hiding himself in the tape I saw. I think it was just his own stuff. He wasn’t in it for money. It was something deeper.”
No one said anything, so Bosch continued.
“My guess is that he made our tail sometime after we set up on him and began getting rid of the evidence. Tonight he was probably playing around with the tail, trying to figure what we were on him for. He got rid of most of the evidence, but if you put somebody on that phone book, my bet is you’ll put it together. Some of those listings with only a first name. You track them and you’ll probably find some of the kids he used in his videos.”
Sheehan made a move to pick up the phone book.
“Leave it,” Rollenberger said. “If anybody continues this it will be Internal Affairs.”
“How they going to do that?” Bosch asked.
“What do you mean?”
“It’s all fruit of the poison tree. The search, everything. All of it’s illegal. We can’t move against Mora.”
“And we can’t let him carry a badge, either,” Rollenberger said testily. “The man should be in jail.”
