Bosch glanced into the lieutenant’s office just to make sure Chu wasn’t closeted with O’Toole. He wasn’t. O’Toole was hunched over his desk, writing something.
Bosch moved over to his own desk. There were no printouts left for him but he did see a card left by Nancy Mendenhall, detective III, of the Professional Standards Bureau.
“So, Harry . . .,” Jackson said in a low voice. “I hear the Tool filed a beef on you.”
“Yeah.”
“Is it bullshit?”
“Yeah.”
Jackson shook his head.
“I figured. What an ass.”
Jackson had been around longer than anybody in the squad except Bosch. He knew that the play by O’Toole would ultimately hurt him more than it would Bosch. Now nobody in the squad would trust him. Nobody would tell him more than the minimum required. Some supervisors inspired their squad’s best work. Now the detectives of the Open-Unsolved Unit would give their best effort in spite of the man in charge.
Bosch pulled his chair out and sat down. He looked at Mendenhall’s card and considered calling her, confronting the bullshit beef head-on and dealing with it. He opened the middle drawer of his desk and pulled out the old leather address book he’d had for going on three decades. He found the number he could not remember before and called the League’s Defense Assistance line. He gave his name, rank, and assignment within the department and said he needed to speak to a defense rep. The unit’s supervisor told him there wasn’t a rep available at the moment but that he would get a call back without delay. He almost pointed out that there was already a delay but just thanked the supervisor and disconnected.
Almost immediately a shadow loomed over his desk, and Bosch looked up to see O’Toole hovering. He had his suit jacket on, and that told Bosch he was probably heading up to the tenth floor.
“Where have you been, Detective?”
“At the gun shop running ballistics.”
O’Toole paused as if committing the answer to memory so he could check on Bosch’s veracity later.
“Pete Sargent,” Bosch said. “Call him. We had lunch, too. Hope that wasn’t against the rules.”
O’Toole shrugged off the shot and leaned forward, tapping his finger on Mendenhall’s card on the desk.
“Call her. She needs to set up an interview.”
“Sure. When I get to it.”
Bosch saw Chu come through the doorway from the exterior hallway. He stopped when he saw O’Toole in the cubicle, acted like he had suddenly forgotten something, and pirouetted and went back out through the door.
O’Toole didn’t notice.
“It was not my intention to have a situation like this,” he said. “My hope had been to promote strong and trusting relationships with the detectives in my squad.”
Bosch replied without looking up at O’Toole.
“Yeah, well, that didn’t last long, did it?” he said. “And it’s not
He said it loud enough for some of the others in the squad to hear it.
“If that sentiment had come from someone without a file drawer full of past complaints and internal investigations, I might be insulted.”
Bosch leaned back in his chair and finally looked up at O’Toole.
“Yeah, all of those complaints and yet I’m still sitting here. And I’ll still be sitting here after they’re finished with yours.”
“We’ll see.”
O’Toole was about to walk away but he couldn’t help himself. He put a hand on Bosch’s desk and leaned down to speak in a low, venomous voice.
“You are the worst kind of police officer, Bosch. You are arrogant, you are a bully, and you think the laws and regulations simply don’t apply to you. I’m not the first to attempt to rid this department of you. But I will be the last.”
Finished having his say, O’Toole took his hand off the desk and rose to his full height. He straightened his jacket by pulling it down from the bottom with a sharp tug.
“You left something out, Lieutenant,” Bosch said.
“What was that?” O’Toole asked.
“You forgot that I close cases. Not for the stats you send up to the tenth-floor PowerPoint shows. For the victims. And their families. And that’s something you’ll never understand because you’re not out there like the rest of us.”
Bosch gestured to the rest of the squad room. Jackson was obviously listening to the conversation and he stared at O’Toole with unblinking judgment.
“We do the work, we clear the cases, and you ride up the elevator to get the pat on the back.”
Bosch stood up, coming face-to-face with O’Toole.
“That’s why I don’t have time for you or your bullshit.”
He walked away, heading to the door Chu had gone through, while O’Toole headed to the door leading to the elevator alcove.
Bosch pushed through the door and into the hallway. One side was a wall of glass, affording a view of the front plaza and off toward the heart of the civic center. Chu was standing at the glass, looking toward the familiar spire of City Hall.
“Chu, what’s going on?”
Chu was startled by his sudden appearance.
“Hey, Harry, sorry, I forgot something and . . . then I . . . uh . . .”
“What, you forget to wipe your ass? I’ve been waiting. What happened with the DOJ?”
“Yeah, no hits, Harry. Sorry.”
“No hits? Did you run all ten possibles?”
“I did, but no California transactions. The gun wasn’t sold in the state. Somebody brought it here and it was never registered.”
Bosch put his hand on the railing and leaned his forehead on the glass. He could see City Hall reflected in the long wall of glass running on the perpendicular hallway. He was resigned that his luck couldn’t get any worse.
“You got anybody at ATF?” he asked.
“Not really,” Chu said. “Don’t you?”
“Not really. Nobody who can expedite. I waited four months just for them to run the casing through their computer.”
Bosch didn’t mention that he also had a checkered history of interactions with federal law enforcement agencies. He couldn’t count on anyone doing him a favor at the ATF or anywhere else. He knew if he went through standard procedure and filled out the forms, he might hear something back in six weeks minimum.
He had one shot he could try. He stepped away from the glass wall and headed back to the squad room door.
“Harry, where are you going?” Chu asked.
“Back to work.”
Chu started following him.
“I wanted to talk to you about one of my cases. We have to do a pickup in Minnesota.”
Bosch stopped at the door to the squad room. A “pickup” was what they called going to another state to confront and arrest a suspect in a cold case. Usually, the suspect had been connected to an old murder through DNA or fingerprint evidence. There was a map on the wall in the squad room with red pins marking all the pickup locations the squad had been to in the ten years since it was established. Dozens of pins were scattered across the map.
“Which case?” Bosch asked.
“Stilwell. I finally located him in Minneapolis. When can you go?”
“Talk about a cold case. We’re going to freeze our butts off up there.”
