Angels Flight

Chapter 29

IT had started to rain. Bosch pulled into his carport and shut off his car. He was looking forward to a couple of beers to take the caffeine edge off his nerves. Judge Baker had served them coffee while she reviewed the search warrant petitions. She had reviewed the search warrants slowly and thoroughly and Bosch had drunk two full cups. In the end, though, she had signed every warrant and Bosch didn’t need the caffeine to feel jazzed. The next morning they would be “hunting and confronting,” as Kiz Rider called it – the put-up or shut-up phase of an investigation, the point where theories and hunches culminated in hard evidence and charges. Or they disintegrated.

Bosch went in through the kitchen door. Besides the beer, he was already thinking about Kate Kincaid and how he would handle her the next day. He was looking forward to it the way a confident quarterback who has digested all the film and known strategies of the opposition looks forward to the next day’s game.

The light was already on in the kitchen. Bosch put his briefcase on the counter and opened the refrigerator. There was no beer.

“Shit,” he said.

He knew there had been at least five bottles of Anchor Steam in the refrigerator. He turned and saw the five bottle caps on the counter. He started further into the house.

“Hey, Frankie!” he called. “Don’t tell me you drank everything!”

There was no reply. Bosch moved through the dining room and then the living room. The place appeared as he had left it earlier that evening, as if Sheehan had not made himself at home. He checked the rear deck through the glass doors. The light was off outside and he saw no sign of his former partner. He walked down the hallway and leaned close to the closed door of the guest room. He heard nothing. He looked at his watch. It wasn’t yet eleven.

“Frankie?” he whispered.

No reply, only the sound of the rain on the roof. He knocked lightly on the door.

“Frankie?” he said louder.

Still nothing. Bosch reached to the knob and slowly opened the door. The lights were off in the room but light from the hallway cut across the bed and Bosch could see it was not occupied. He flicked the wall switch and a bed table lamp came on. The bag Sheehan had carried his belongings in was empty on the floor. His clothes had been dumped onto the bed in a pile.

Bosch’s curiosity turned into a low-grade concern. He quickly moved back into the hallway and made a quick search of his own bedroom and the bathrooms. There was no sign of Sheehan.

Back in the living room Bosch paced about for a few moments wondering what Sheehan might have done. He had no car. It was unlikely he would have tried to walk down the hill into the city and where would he be going anyway? Bosch picked up the phone and hit redial to see if by chance Sheehan had called a cab. It sounded like more than seven tones to Bosch but the redial was so fast he wasn’t sure. After one ring the phone was answered by the sleepy voice of a woman.

“Yes?”

“Uh, who is this, please?”

“Who is this?”

“I’m sorry. My name is Detective Harry Bosch of the LAPD. I am trying to trace a call that was made from – ”

“Harry, it’s Margie Sheehan.”

“Oh… Margie…”

He realized he should have guessed Sheehan would have called her.

“What’s wrong, Harry?”

“Nothing, Margie, nothing. I’m trying to find Frankie and I thought maybe he called a cab or something. I’m sorry to – ”

“What do you mean, find him?”

He could read the rising concern in her voice.

“It’s nothing to worry about, Margie. He was staying with me tonight and I had to go out. I just got home and he isn’t here. I’m just trying to figure out where he went. He talked to you tonight?”

“Earlier.”

“How’d he seem, okay?”

“He told me what they did to him. How they’re trying to blame him.”

“No, not anymore. That’s why he’s staying with me. We got him out of there and he’s going to hide out here a few days, till it blows over. I’m really sorry that I woke – ”

“He said they’d come back for him.”

“What?”

“He doesn’t believe they’re going to let him go. He doesn’t trust anybody, Harry. In the department. Except you. He knows you’re his friend.”

Bosch was silent. He wasn’t sure what to say.

“Harry, find him, would you? Then call me back. I don’t care what time it is.”

Bosch looked through the glass doors to the deck and from this angle saw something on the deck railing. He stepped over to the wall and flipped on the outside light. He saw five amber beer bottles lined up on the railing.

“Okay, Margie. Give me your number.”

He took the number and was about to hang up when she spoke again.

“Harry, he told me you got married and divorced already.”

“Well, I’m not divorced but… you know.”

“Yes, I know. Take care, Harry. Find Francis and then one of you call me back.”

“Okay.”

He put down the phone, opened the slider and went out onto the deck. The beer bottles were empty. He turned to his right and there, lying on the chaise lounge, was the body of Francis Sheehan. Hair and blood were splattered on the cushion above his head and on the wall next to the slider.

“Jesus,” Bosch whispered out loud.

He stepped closer. Sheehan’s mouth was open. Blood had pooled in it and spilled over his bottom lip. There was a saucer-sized exit wound at the crown of his head. Rain had matted the hair down, exposing the horrible wound even more. Bosch took one step back and looked around the deck planking. He saw a pistol lying just in front of the lounge’s front left leg.

Bosch stepped forward again and looked down at his friend’s body. He blew his breath out with a loud animal-like sound.

“Frankie,” he whispered.

A question went through his mind but he didn’t say it out loud.

Did I do this?

Bosch watched one of the coroner’s people close the body bag over Frankie Sheehan’s face while the other two held umbrellas. They then put the umbrellas aside and lifted the body onto a gurney, covered it with a green blanket and began wheeling it into the house and toward the front door. Bosch had to be asked to step out of the way. As he watched them head to the front door the crushing weight of the guilt he was feeling took hold again. He looked up into the sky and saw there were no helicopters, thankfully. The notifications and call outs had all been made by landline. No radio reports meant the media had yet to pick up on the suicide of Frankie Sheehan. Bosch knew that the ultimate insult to his former partner would have been for a news chopper to hover over the house and film the body lying on the deck.

“Detective Bosch?”

Bosch turned. Deputy Chief Irving beckoned from the open slider. Bosch went inside and followed Irving to the dining room table. Agent Roy Lindell was already standing there.

“Let us talk about this,” Irving said. “Patrol is outside with a woman who says she is your neighbor. Adrienne Tegreeny?”

“Yes.”

“Yes what?”

“She lives next door.”

“She said she heard three or four shots from the house earlier tonight. She thought it was you. She did not call the police.”

Bosch just nodded.

“Have you fired weapons in the house or off the deck before?”

Bosch hesitated before answering.

“Chief, this isn’t about me. So let’s just say that there could be reason for her to have thought it was me.”

“Fine. The point I’m making is that it appears Detective Sheehan was drinking – drinking heavily – and firing his weapon. What is your interpretation of what happened?”

“Interpretation?” Bosch said, staring blankly at the table.

“Accidental or intentional.”

“Oh.”

Bosch almost laughed but held back.

“I don’t think there’s much of a doubt about it,” he said. “He killed himself. Suicide.”

“But there is no note.”

“No note, just a lot of beers and wasted shots into the sky. That was his note. That said all he had to say. Cops go out that way all the time.”

“The man had been cut loose. Why do this?”

“Well… I think it’s pretty clear…”

“Then make it clear for us, would you please?”

“He called his wife tonight. I talked to her after. She said he might have been cut loose but he thought that it wouldn’t last.”

“The ballistics?” Irving asked.

“No, I don’t think that’s what he meant. I think he knew that there was a need to hook somebody up for this. A cop.”

“And so then he kills himself? That does not sound plausible, Detective.”

“He didn’t kill Elias. Or that woman.”

“Right now that is only your opinion. The only fact we have is that it appears this man killed himself the night before the day we would get the ballistics. And you, Detective, talked me into cutting him loose so that he could do it.”

Bosch looked away from Irving and tried to contain the anger that was building inside.

“The weapon,” Irving said. “An old Baretta twenty-five. Serial number acid-burned. Untraceable, illegal. A throw-down gun. Was it your weapon, Detective Bosch?”

Bosch shook his head.

“Are you sure, Detective? I would like to handle this now, without the need for an internal investigation.”

Bosch looked back at him.

“What are you saying? I gave him the gun so he could kill himself? I was his friend – the only friend he had today. It’s not my gun, okay? We stopped by his house so he could get some things. He must’ve gotten it then. I might have helped him do it but that didn’t include giving him the gun.”

Bosch and Irving held each other’s stares.

“You’re forgetting something, Bosch,” Lindell said, interrupting the moment. “We searched Sheehan’s place today. There was no weapon found there.”

Bosch broke away from Irving and looked at Lindell.

“Then your people missed it,” he said. “He came here with that gun in his bag, because it wasn’t mine.”

Bosch moved away from them before he let his anger and frustration get the better of him and he said something that might bring departmental charges. He slid down into one of the stuffed chairs in the living room. He was wet but didn’t care about the furniture. He stared blankly out the glass doors.

Irving stepped over but didn’t sit down.

“What did you mean when you said you helped him?”

Bosch looked up at him.

“Last night I had a drink with him. He told me things. Told me about how he got carried away with Harris, how the things Harris claimed in his lawsuit – the things he said the cops did to him – were true. All of it was true. You see, he was sure Harris had killed the girl, there was no doubt in him about that. But it bothered him what he had done. He told me that in those moments in the room with Harris he had lost it. He said he became the very thing he had hunted all these years. A monster. It bothered him a lot. I could see it had been eating at him. Then I come along tonight and drive him home…”

Bosch felt the guilt rising up like a tide in his throat. He had not been thinking. He had not seen the obvious. He had been too consumed with the case, with Eleanor and his empty house, with things other than Frankie Sheehan.

“And?” Irving prompted.

“And I knocked down the one thing he believed in all these months, the one thing that kept him safe. I told him we had cleared Michael Harris. I told him he was wrong about Harris and that we could prove it. I didn’t think about what it would do to him. I was only thinking about my case.”

“And you think that put him over,” Irving said.

“Something happened to him in that room with Harris. Something bad. He lost his family after that, he lost the case… I think the one thread he held on to was his belief that he’d had the right guy. When he found out he was wrong – when I stumbled into his world and told him it was bullshit – the thread snapped.”

“Look, this is bullshit, Bosch,” Lindell said. “I mean, I respect you and your friendship with this guy, but you aren’t seeing what is right here in front of us. The obvious. This guy did himself because he’s the guy and he knew we’d come back to him. This suicide is a confession.”

Irving stared at Bosch, waiting for him to come back at Lindell. But Bosch said nothing. He was tired of fighting it.

“I find myself agreeing with Agent Lindell on this,” the deputy chief finally said.

Bosch nodded. He expected as much. They didn’t know Sheehan the way Bosch did. He and his former partner had not been close in recent years but they had been close enough at one time for Bosch to know that Lindell and Irving were wrong. It would have been easier for him to agree. It would lift a lot of the guilt off him. But he couldn’t agree.

“Give me the morning,” he said instead.

“What?” Irving asked.

“Keep this wrapped up and away from the press for half a day. We proceed with the warrants and the plan for tomorrow morning. Give me time to see what comes up and what Mrs. Kincaid says.”

“If she talks.”

“She’ll talk. She’s dying to talk. Let me have the morning with her. See how things go. If I don’t come up with a connection between Kincaid and Elias, then you do what you have to do with Frankie Sheehan. You tell the world what you think you know.”

Irving thought about this for a long moment and then nodded.

“I think that would be the most cautious route,” he said. “We should have a ballistics report by then as well.”

Bosch nodded his thanks. He looked out through the open doors to the deck again. It was starting to rain harder. He looked at his watch and saw how late it was getting. And he knew what he still needed to do before he could sleep.