really think I was much help five years ago. I didn’t see anything. Didn’t hear anything. I just happened to be in the neighborhood after I was at the police station.”
“We’re investigating the case again,” Bosch said. “And we need to talk to everybody we talked to five years ago.”
“Well, like I said, come on in.”
She unlocked the front door and entered first, greeted by the beeping of an alarm warning. She quickly punched a four-digit combination into an alarm-control box on the wall. Bosch and Edgar stepped in behind her and she ushered them into the living room.
“Why don’t you gentlemen have a seat? I’m going to put my things down and be right back out. Would either of you like something to drink?”
“I’ll take a bottle of water if you got it,” Edgar said.
“I’m fine,” Bosch said.
“You know what?” Edgar said quickly. “I’m fine too.”
Gables glanced at Bosch and seemed to register that he was the power in the room. She said she’d be right back.
After she was gone Bosch looked around the room. It was a basic living room setup with a couch and two chairs surrounding a glass-topped coffee table. One wall was made up entirely of built-in bookshelves, all filled with what looked by their titles to be crime novels. He noticed there were no personal displays. No framed photographs anywhere.
They remained standing until Gables came back and pointed them to the couch. She took a chair directly across the table from them.
“Now, what can I tell you? Frankly, I forgot the whole incident.”
“But you remembered Detective Edgar. I could tell.”
“Yes, but seeing him out of context, I knew I recognized him but I could not remember from where.”
According to the DMV, Gables was now forty-one years old. And Edgar had been right: She was a looker, attractive in a professional sort of way. A short, no-nonsense cut to her brown hair. Slim, athletic build. She sat straight and looked straight at one or the other of them, no longer scanning because she was inside her comfort zone. Still, there were tells: Bosch knew through his training in interview techniques that normal eye contact between individuals lasted an average of three seconds, yet each time Gables looked at Bosch, she held his eyes a good ten seconds. That was a sign of stress.
“I was rereading the reports,” Bosch said. “They included your explanation for being in the area — you were at the police station filling out a report.”
“That’s right.”
“It didn’t say, though, where your car was when it got damaged the night before.”
“I had been at a restaurant on Franklin. I told them that. And when I came out after, the back taillight was smashed and the paint scraped.”
“You didn’t call the police then?”
“No, I didn’t. No one was there. It was a hit-and-run; they didn’t even leave a note on the car. They just took off and I thought I was out of luck.”
“What was the name of the restaurant?”
“I can’t remember — oh, it was Birds. I love the roasted chicken.”
Bosch nodded. He knew the place and the roasted chicken.
“So what made you come back to Hollywood the next day and file the report on the hit-and-run?”
“I called my insurance company first thing in the morning and they said I needed it if I wanted to file a claim to cover the damages.”
Bosch was covering ground that was already in the reports. He was looking for variations, changes. Stories told five years apart often had inconsistencies and contradictions. But Gables wasn’t changing the narrative at all.
“When you drove by Orange Grove, you heard no shots or anything like that?”
“No, nothing. I had my windows up.”
“And you were driving fast.”
“Yes, I was going to be late for work.”
“Now, when Detective Edgar came to see you, was that unsettling?”
“Unsettling? Well, yes, I guess so, until I realized what he was there for, and of course I knew I had nothing to do with it.”
“Was it the first time you’d ever encountered a detective or the police like that? You know, on a murder case.”
“Yes, it was very unusual. To say the least. Not a normal part of my life.”
She shook her shoulders as if to intimate a shiver, imply that police and murder investigations were foreign to her. Bosch stared at her for a long moment. She had either forgotten about seeing the armed man with a ski mask coming out of the garage where Roy Alan McIntyre was murdered, or she was lying.
Bosch thought the latter. He thought that Diane Gables was a killer.
“How do you pick them?” he asked.
She turned directly toward him, her eyes locking on his.
“Pick what?”
Bosch paused, squeezing the most out of her stare and the moment.
“The stocks you recommend to people,” he said.
She broke her eyes away and looked at Edgar.
“Due diligence,” she said. “Careful analysis and prognostication. Then, I have to say, I throw in my hunches. You gentlemen use hunches, don’t you?”
“Every day,” Bosch said.
THEY WERE SILENT for a while as they drove away. Bosch thought about the carefully worded answers Gables had given. He was feeling stronger about his hunch every minute.
“What do you think?” Edgar finally asked.
“I think it’s her.”
“How can you say that? She didn’t make a single false move in there.”
“Yes, she did. Her eyes gave her away.”
“Oh, come on, Harry. You’re saying you know she’s a stone-cold killer because you can read it in her eyes?”
“Pretty much. She also lied. She didn’t mention the case in 1999 because she thought we didn’t know about it. She didn’t want us going down that path, so she lied and said you were the only detective she’d ever met.”
“At best, that’s a lie by omission. Weak, Harry.”
“A lie is a lie. Nothing weak about it. She was hiding it from us and there’s only one reason to do that. I want to get inside her house. She’s gotta have a place where she studies and plans these things.”
“So you think she’s a pro? A gun for hire?”
“Maybe; I don’t know. Maybe she reads the paper and picks her targets, people she thinks need killing. Maybe she’s on some kind of vigilante trip. Dark justice and all of that.”
“A regular angel of vengeance. Sounds like a comic book, man.”
“If we get inside that place, we’ll know.”
Edgar drove silently while he composed a response. Bosch knew what was coming before he said it.
“Harry, I’m just not seeing it. I respect your hunch, man, I have seen that come through more than once. But there ain’t enough here. And if I don’t see it, then there’s no judge that’s going to give you a warrant to go back in there.”
Bosch took his time answering. He was grinding things down, coming up with a plan.
“Maybe, maybe not,” he finally said.
TWO DAYS LATER at 9:00 a.m., Bosch pulled up to Diane Gables’s house. The Range Rover was not in the driveway. He got out and went to the front door. After two loud knocks went unanswered he walked around the
