elsewhere in the city. Rider lived down near Inglewood, in the same neighborhood where she had grown up.
“That’s cool. Give me a call and I’ll have it. There’s a box down at the bottom of the hill from my place.”
Rider opened one of her desk drawers and pulled out her purse. She looked at Bosch and did her eyebrow thing once again.
“You sure about doing this, marking yourself like that?”
She was talking about their plan for pushing Mackey the next day. Bosch nodded.
“I have to be able to sell it,” he said. “Besides, I can wear long sleeves for a while. It isn’t summer yet.”
“But what if it’s not necessary? What if he sees the story in the paper and gets on the phone and starts talking a blue streak?”
“Something tells me that isn’t going to happen. Anyway, it isn’t permanent. Vicki Landreth told me it lasts a couple weeks at the most, depending on how often you shower. It’s not like those henna tattoos kids get on the Santa Monica pier. They last longer.”
She nodded her agreement.
“Okay, Harry. I’ll catch you in the a.m., then.”
“See ya, Kiz. Have a good one.”
She started walking out of the alcove.
“Hey, Kiz?” Bosch called after her.
“What?” she said, stopping and looking back at him.
“What do you think? You happy to be back on it?”
She knew what he was talking about. Being back in homicide.
“Oh yeah, Harry, I’m happy. I’ll be downright giddy once we take this pale rider down and solve the mystery.”
“Yeah,” Bosch said.
After she left, Bosch thought for a few moments about what she meant by calling Mackey a pale rider. He thought it might be some sort of biblical reference but he couldn’t place it. Maybe in the south end it was what some people called racists. He decided to ask her about it the next day. He started to look through the probation file again but soon gave up. He knew it was time to focus on the here and now. Not the past. Not the choices made and the paths not taken. He got up and stacked the file and the murder book under his arm. If things were slow on the surveillance the next day, they might make for good reading. He stuck his head in Abel Pratt’s office to say good- bye.
“Good luck, Harry,” Pratt said. “Close it out.”
“We’re going to.”
26
BOSCH PARKED in the rear lot and walked in through the back doors of Hollywood Division. It had been a long time since he had been in the place and he immediately found it different. The earthquake renovation that Edgar had spoken of had seemingly touched every space in the building. He found the watch office in the place where a holding tank had been located. He found a report writing room for patrol officers, whereas before they’d had to steal space in the detective bureau.
Before going upstairs to the vice unit he had to go by the detective bureau to see if he could pull a file. He went down the rear hallway, passing a patrol sergeant named McDonald whose first name he couldn’t remember.
“Hey, Harry, you back? Long time no see, man.”
“I’m back, Six.”
“Good deal.”
Six was the radio designation for Hollywood Division. Calling the patrol sergeant Six was like calling a homicide detective Roy. It worked and it got Bosch past his awkward memory loss. By the time he got to the end of the hallway he remembered that the sergeant’s name was Bob.
The homicide unit was at the back end of the vast detective squad room. Edgar had been right. It didn’t look like any detective bureau Bosch had ever seen. It was gray and sterile. It looked like a warehouse where yaks made cold calls and ripped off businesses and old ladies for overpriced pens or time-share units. He recognized the top of Edgar’s head just cresting above one of the sound partitions between the cubicles. It looked like he was the only one left in the whole bureau. It was late in the day but not that late.
He walked over and looked over the partition and down on Edgar. He had his head down and was working on the
Edgar hadn’t noticed Bosch’s presence. Bosch quietly stepped back and ducked into the cubicle next to Edgar’s. He carefully lifted the steel trash can out of the desk’s foot well and duck-walked out of the cubicle to a position right behind Edgar. He stood up and let the trash can fall to the new gray linoleum from about four feet. The resulting sound was loud and sharp, almost like a shot. Edgar leaped out of his seat, his crossword pencil flying toward the ceiling. He was about to yell something when he saw it was Bosch.
“Goddamn it, Bosch!”
“How you doin’, Jerry?” Bosch said, barely getting it out while laughing.
“Goddamn it, Bosch!”
“Yeah, you said that. I take it things are pretty slow in Hollywood tonight.”
“What the fuck you doing here? I mean, besides scaring the shit out of me.”
“I’m working, man. I’ve got an appointment with the vice artist upstairs. What are you doing?”
“I’m finishing up. I was about to get out of here.”
Bosch leaned forward and saw that the grid of the crossword was almost entirely filled out with words. There were several erasure marks. Edgar never worked a crossword in ink. Bosch noticed his old red dictionary was off the shelf and on the desk.
“Cheating again, Jerry? You know you aren’t supposed to be using the dictionary like that.”
Edgar dropped back into his seat. He looked exasperated by the scare and now the questions.
“Bullshit. I can do whatever I want. There aren’t any rules, Harry. Why don’t you get on upstairs and leave me alone? Have her put some eyeliner on you and put you out on the stroll.”
“Yeah, you wish. You’d be my first customer.”
“All right, all right. Is there something you need here or did you just drop by to bust my chops?”
Edgar finally smiled and Bosch knew everything was all right between them.
“A little of both,” Bosch said. “I need to pull an old file. Where do they keep them now in this palace?”
“How old is it? They started shipping stuff downtown to be microfilmed.”
“Would’ve been in two thousand. You remember Michael Allen Smith?”
Edgar nodded.
“Of course I do. Someone like me isn’t going to forget Smith. What do you want with him?”
“I just want his picture. That file still here?”
“Yeah, anything that fresh is still around. Follow me.”
He led Bosch to a locked door. Edgar had a key and soon they were in a small room lined with shelves crowded with blue binders. Edgar located the Michael Allen Smith murder book and pulled it off a shelf. He dropped it into Bosch’s hands. It was heavy. It had been a tough case.
Bosch took the murder book to the cubicle next to Edgar’s and started flipping through it until he came to a section of photographs that showed Smith’s upper torso and several close-ups of his tattoos. His markings had been used to identify and charge him with the murders of three prostitutes five years earlier. Bosch, Edgar and Rider had worked the case. Smith was an avowed white supremacist who secretly hired black transvestite prostitutes he picked up on Santa Monica Boulevard. Then out of guilt for crossing both racial and sexual lines, he would kill them. It somehow made him feel better about his transgressions. The key break in the case came when Rider found a prostitute who had seen one of the victims get into a van with a customer. He was able to describe a distinctive tattoo on the john’s hand. That eventually led them to Smith, who had collected a variety of tattoos while in various
