“We’ve both seen it done for less and we don’t know if he intended to kill him or not. It was a shallow grave, dug by hand. Nothing premeditated about that. Maybe he just pushed him and knocked him down. Maybe he hit him with a rock. Maybe there was something else going on between them we don’t even know about.”
Edgar didn’t say anything for a long moment and Bosch thought maybe they were finished and he could get some food.
“What did the foster parents think about your theory?”
Bosch sighed.
“I didn’t really spin it for them. But put it this way, they weren’t too surprised when I started asking questions about Stokes.”
“You know something, Harry, we’ve been spinning our wheels is what we’ve been doing.”
“What do you mean?”
“This whole case. It comes down to what?-a thirteen-year-old killing a twelve-year-old over a fucking toy. Stokes was a juvy when this went down. Ain’t nobody going to prosecute him now.”
Bosch thought about this for a moment.
“They might. Depends on what we get out of him after we pick him up.”
“You just said yourself there was no sign of premed. They’re not going to file it, partner. I’m telling you. We’ve been chasing our tail. We close the case but nobody goes away for it.”
Bosch knew Edgar was probably right. Under the law, it was rare that adults were prosecuted for crimes committed while they were juveniles as young as thirteen. Even if they pulled a full confession out of Stokes he would probably walk.
“I should have let her shoot him,” he whispered.
“What’s that, Harry?”
“Nothing. I’m going to grab something to eat and get on the road. You going to be there?”
“Yeah, I’m here. I’ll let you know if anything happens.”
“All right.”
He hung up and got out of the car, thinking about the likelihood of Stokes walking away from his crime. As he entered the warm diner and was hit with the smells of grease and breakfast, he suddenly realized he had lost his appetite.
Chapter 52
BOSCH was just coming down out of the squiggle of treacherous freeway called The Grapevine when his phone chirped. It was Edgar.
“Harry, I’ve been trying to call you. Where y’at?”
“I was in the mountains. I’m less than an hour out. What’s going on?”
“They’ve got a fix on Stokes. He’s squatting in the Usher.”
Bosch thought about this. The Usher was a 1930s hotel a block off Hollywood Boulevard. For decades it was a weekly flophouse and prostitution center until redevelopment on the boulevard pushed up against it and suddenly made it a valuable property again. It was sold, closed and readied to go through a major renovation and restoration that would allow it to rejoin the new Hollywood as an elegant grand dame. But the project had been delayed by city planners who held final approval. And in that delay was an opportunity for the denizens of the night.
While the Hotel Usher awaited rebirth, the rooms on its thirteen floors became the homes of squatters who snuck past the fences and plywood barriers to find shelter. In the previous two months Bosch had been inside the Usher twice while searching for suspects. There was no electricity. There was no water, but the squatters used the toilets anyway and the place smelled like an aboveground sewer. There were no doors on any of the rooms and no furniture. People used rolled-up carpets in the rooms as their beds. It was a nightmare to try to search safely. You moved down the hall and every doorway was open and a possible blind for a gunman. You kept your eyes on the openings and you might step on a needle.
Bosch flipped on the car’s emergency lights and put his foot hard on the pedal.
“How do we know he’s in there?” he asked.
“From last week when we were looking for him. Some guys in narcs were working something in there and got a line on him squatting all the way up on the thirteenth floor. You gotta be scared of something to go all the way to the top in a place with the elevators shut down.”
“Okay, what’s the plan?”
“We’re going to go in big. Four teams from patrol, me and the narcs. We start at the bottom and work our way up.”
“When do you go?”
“We’re about to go into roll call now and talk it out, then we go. We can’t wait for you, Harry. We have to take this guy before he gets out and about.”
Bosch wondered for a moment if Edgar’s hurry was legitimate or simply an effort to get even with Bosch for his cutting him out of several of the investigative moves on the case.
“I know,” he finally said. “You going to have a rover with you?”
“Yeah, we’re using channel two.”
“Okay, I’ll see you there. Put your vest on.”
He said the last not because he was concerned about Stokes being armed, but because he knew a heavily armed team of cops in the enclosed confinement of a dark hotel hallway had danger written all over it.
Bosch closed the phone and pushed the pedal down even harder. Soon he crossed the northern perimeter of the city and was in the San Fernando Valley. Saturday traffic was light. He switched freeways twice and was cruising through the Cahuenga Pass into Hollywood a half hour after hanging up with Edgar. As he exited onto Highland he could see the Hotel Usher rising a few blocks to the south. Its windows were uniformly dark, the curtains stripped out in preparation for the work ahead.
Bosch had no rover with him and had forgotten to ask Edgar where the command post for the search would be located. He didn’t want to simply drive up to the hotel in his slickback and risk exposing the operation. He took out his phone and called the watch office. Mankiewicz answered.
“Mank, you ever take a day off?”
“Not in January. My kids celebrate Christmas and Chanukah. I need the OT. What’s up?”
“Can you get me the CP location on the thing at the Usher?”
“Yeah, it’s the parking lot at Hollywood Presbyterian.”
“Got it. Thanks.”
Two minutes later Bosch pulled into the church parking lot. There were five squad cars parked there along with a slickback and a narc car. The cars were parked up close to the church so that they were shielded from view of the windows of the Usher, which rose into the sky on the other side of the church.
Two officers sat in one of the patrol cars. Bosch parked and walked over to the driver side window. The car was running. Bosch knew it was the pickup car. When the others grabbed Stokes in the Usher, a radio call would go out for the pickup. They would drive over and pick up the prisoner.
“Where are they?”
“Twelfth floor,” said the driver. “Nothing yet.”
“Let me borrow your rover.”
The cop handed his radio out the window to Bosch. Bosch called Edgar on channel two.
“Harry, you here?”
“Yeah, I’m coming up.”
“We’re almost done.”
“I’m still coming up.”
He gave the radio back to the driver and started walking out of the parking lot. When he got to the construction fence that surrounded the Usher property he went to the north end, where he knew he would find the seam in the fence the squatters used to get in. It was partially hidden behind a construction sign announcing the arrival soon of historic luxury apartments. He pulled back the loose fence and ducked through.
