Dark Sacred Night

23

Bosch waited for Lourdes in the Starbucks a block from the station. He sat at a tall bar table that allowed him to keep his left leg straight. He had just come from Dr. Zhang’s and the knee was feeling good for the first time in two weeks. He knew that bending the joint might cut that relief short. That was inevitable with walking, but for now he kept it straight.

He had gotten Lourdes a latte and himself a straight black. They had agreed to meet away from the station after she did some preliminary intelligence gathering while he was getting needles stuck in his leg.

Lourdes arrived before the latte got cold.

“How’s the knee?” she asked.

“Feeling pretty good at the moment,” Bosch said. “But it won’t last. It never does.”

“Have you ever gotten a cortisone shot?”

“No, but I’m ready to try anything but a knee replacement.”

“Sorry, Harry.”

“Nothing to be sorry about. What did you find out?”

The night before, LAPD SWAT had moved in on the house Bosch and Lourdes had located in Sylmar and arrested four men, all SanFers gang members, and including one man who was found in a bed, suffering from a gunshot wound to the stomach. He was thirty-eight-year-old Carlos Mejia and he was the suspected shooter of Martin Perez. The other three were low-level gangsters most likely assigned to watch over Mejia and bring the doctor to him. All four were arrested on various gun and drug charges as well as probation violations.

Mejia was not charged yet with the Perez killing because the evidence was only circumstantial at the moment: he had been shot, and it was believed that Perez’s killer had been shot. The upward trajectory of the wound trail through Mejia’s lower intestine fit with the ricochet-in-the-shower theory as well. But it wasn’t enough to take to the District Attorney’s Office. The bullet had been removed from Mejia’s gut and disposed of — there would be no ballistics match to the bullet taken from Perez’s brain. However, the forensic team that processed the Perez crime scene had found that the blood spattered in the shower stall had come from two individuals — Perez and presumably his shooter after he caught the bouncing bullet. Confidence was high that a DNA comparison between Mejia’s blood and that found in the shower would lead to a match and Mejia would be charged with murder. He was now in the hospital ward of the county jail while a rush was put on the DNA comparison.

The intel gathering that Lourdes had undertaken that morning was related to Mejia and any connections he might have with those who knew about the renewed investigation of the Uncle Murda case and that Martin Perez had flipped.

“I really hate this,” Lourdes said. “What if we’re wrong?”

“We make sure we aren’t,” Bosch said. “What did you find out?”

She opened a small notebook she always carried with her.

“Okay,” she said, reading her notes. “I talked to my cousin and a couple other guys in gang intel. They say Mejia is a SanFer OG known as El Brujo.”

“What’s that, ‘sorcerer’?”

“More like ‘witch doctor,’ but it doesn’t matter. He got the moniker because of his ability to find and get to people who supposedly can’t be gotten to.”

“Case in point, Perez. But somebody told him.”

“I’m getting to that. The intel guys said that Mejia pretty much had his own set in the gang and would have been on equal footing with Tranquillo Cortez. So you can see how this is all cinching up. El Brujo hears somehow that Perez flipped and decides to take care of it for Cortez. End result, Cortez owes Mejia.”

“Got it. The question is, how did he hear that Perez was flipping?”

Lourdes nodded and a painful frown creased her face again.

“What is it?” Bosch asked.

“Well,” she said. “When the intel guys were talking to me, one of them says, ‘Maybe you should talk to your buddy Oscar about El Brujo. He grew up with him.’ I said, ‘Oscar Luzon?’ to confirm, and they said, ‘Yeah, Luzon.’ They said Oscar and Mejia went all the way back to Gridley.”

Bosch knew that Gridley was an elementary school on 8th Street.

“So, was this connection in the gang book?” Bosch asked.

Because of the unavoidable connections between some homegrown SFPD officers and local gangs, the department had a registry known as the “gang book” in which officers named acquaintances in the gangs. It allowed the officers to avoid suspicion should the connections become known through the course of investigations, wiretaps, and street gossip. The book was also a resource for gang intel officers when they wanted to target a particular gang member. If there was a connection in the book, it could be exploited, by using the officer to initiate communication with the gang member or even cross paths with him in a seemingly coincidental way.

“No, they said Luzon never put it in the book,” Lourdes said. “They only knew because they have class photos from all the schools in the city going back to the seventies. They have photos of Luzon and Mejia in the same classes at Gridley and then Lakeview. But a few years ago, when they asked Oscar why he never put it in the book, he said it was because he didn’t really know Mejia.”

“Did they believe him?” Bosch asked.

“Well, they accepted it. The question is, do we believe it?”

“The same class through elementary and high school, and Luzon says they didn’t know each other? No, I don’t believe it.”

Lourdes nodded. She didn’t believe it either.

“So, how do we do this?” she asked.

“We need to talk to him,” Bosch said.

“I know that, but how?”

“Does he still take his gun off when he works at his desk?”

“I think so.”

They needed to separate Luzon from his weapon before they confronted him. They didn’t want to risk his harming them or himself.

Luzon was a muffin top. He cinched his belt tight around a growing waistline, creating an overflow roll of bulk that circled his body. This caused him to remove his sidearm when he worked in his pod so that the arm of his desk chair didn’t drive the hard-edged weapon into his side. He usually placed the gun in the top drawer of his desk.

“Okay, we draw him out without his gun,” Bosch said. “Then we brace him.”

“But he always takes his gun when he leaves the office,” Lourdes said. “It’d be a violation if he didn’t.”

“We get him over to the old jail, to come see me.”

“That could work. We just need the reason.”

They were both silent as they thought about a way to draw Luzon across the street from the station without his gun.

Soon they concocted a two-part plan. But it would involve the police chief’s cooperation. This was not a deterrent, because they knew they could not carry out any confrontation with Luzon without alerting command staff. They finished their coffees and walked back to the station, going directly to the chief of police’s office and asking for an audience.

Chief Valdez was not happy with what Bosch and Lourdes told him but agreed that an investigation had to be carried out. The chief was particularly pained because seventeen years before, when Luzon came into the department, Valdez had been his training officer. They had been close at one time.

“He knew several SanFers,” Valdez said. “He grew up with them. And it worked in our favor. We would stop and talk to these guys and we always picked up good intel we shot back to the gang team.”

“Look, Chief, we’re not accusing him of being a double agent,” Bosch said. “He could have been used or tricked and he might not even be the source. That’s what we have to talk about with him. But the bottom line is, he never put Mejia in the book — and Mejia took out our witness.”

“I get it, I get it,” Valdez said. “It has to be done. What’s your plan?”

It was simple. The chief would have his secretary call Luzon to his office to pick up some paperwork relating to a training day scheduled for the next month. It was likely that Luzon would not clip on his firearm just for a short jaunt down the hall from the detective bureau. While he was picking up the paperwork from the secretary, the chief would step out of his office to say hello. He would then ask Luzon to take a printed memo over to Bosch in the old jail. The direct route to the jail would not be through the detective bureau. The plan pivoted on the idea that Luzon would proceed directly to Bosch — without going out of his way back to his desk to pick up his weapon.

They also allowed for a quick abort if the chief saw that Luzon was armed or if Luzon cut back to the detective bureau to retrieve his gun before leaving the station and crossing the street.

“Now, does he carry a backup?” Valdez asked.

“If he does, it’s not registered,” Bosch said.

“We checked the registry,” Lourdes said.

Department regulations allowed an officer to carry a boot gun or some other backup weapon as long as it was on an approved list of firearms and the officer notified command staff and entered the details in the weapons registry.

“Did you ever know him to carry a throw-down?” Bosch asked.

“No, never,” Valdez said.

“So do we do this?” Bella asked.

“We do it,” Valdez said. “But Bella, I want you over there with Harry. As backup.”

“Got it,” she said.

An hour later they went forward with the plan. Lourdes confirmed that Luzon was at his desk and was not wearing his weapon before she sent Valdez the go-ahead text. The chief then told his secretary to summon Luzon, and when the detective left the bureau, Lourdes confirmed that he had left his weapon behind. She then headed out the side door and crossed the street to the old jail.

Bosch was sitting at his makeshift desk in the old drunk tank when Luzon walked in carrying a memo from the chief with the schedule for the upcoming training days. He put it down on the old door that Bosch used as a desktop.

“That’s from the chief,” he said. “Asked me to drop it by.”

“Thanks,” Bosch said.

Luzon turned to go back.

“Did you hear about Sylmar last night?” Bosch asked.

Luzon reversed himself and was facing Bosch again.

“Sylmar?” he asked. “What about it?”

“They got the guy who hit our witness,” Bosch said.

Luzon just looked at him, revealing nothing.

“He took a shot in the gut himself,” Bosch said. “So he’s not doing too good. They’re hoping to stabilize him and have him ready to talk in a day or two.”

“Good,” Luzon said. “I’m going back to the bureau.”

He once more moved toward the cell’s exit.

“That doesn’t worry you, Oscar?” Bosch asked.

Luzon once again turned back and looked at Bosch.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Luzon asked.

“It was your buddy the witch doctor, Carlos Mejia,” Bosch said. “And I lied. He’s already talking and he gave you up. Said you told him about Martin Perez.”

“That’s bullshit.”

Lourdes stepped out of the next cell down and into the hallway that ran in front of the old cells. She took a position behind Luzon. He felt her presence and turned to see her.

“What the fuck is this?” he said.

Bosch stood up.

“You know what it is?” he said. “This is your chance to get out in front of this. Tell us what happened, what you did, and maybe there’s a way out for you.”

“I didn’t do anything. I told you, this is bullshit.”

“You’re playing it wrong, man. You’re giving him the leverage. They’ll lock in his story and come for you.”

Luzon seemed to freeze. His eyes went blank as he tried to figure out his next move. Bosch said nothing. Lourdes said nothing. They waited.

“All right, look,” he finally said. “I made a mistake. You two weren’t saying shit about what the search warrant at the garage was about. I thought maybe I could come up with something that would help. All I did was ask him what that place had to do with the SanFers. That’s it. He figured everything out from there.”

“That story is what’s bullshit,” Bosch said. “How’d he find Perez in Alhambra?”

“I don’t know, but it wasn’t me. You’re the one who got Perez killed. Don’t look at me now.”

“No, man, it was you. You told Mejia. And the thing is, he’s going to give you up in a heartbeat as soon as they offer him a deal.”

Luzon stared at Bosch as he realized that Mejia wasn’t talking — yet — and that he had fallen for the oldest cop bluff in the book. He turned to Lourdes as if for help. Bosch was an outsider in the department, but Lourdes was not. He looked to her but the cold set of her eyes showed he would get no sympathy from her.

“I want a lawyer,” he said.

“You can call one as soon as you’re booked,” Bosch said.

He came around the desk as Lourdes pulled her handcuffs off her belt. He put his hand on Luzon’s shoulder and directed him toward the hallway where Lourdes was waiting. He walked him through.

“Hands behind your back,” he said. “You know the drill.”

Bosch gripped Luzon by the elbow and turned him to face away from Lourdes. At that moment, Luzon brought his hands up and shoved Bosch into the cell’s bars. He then rushed into the cell and with both hands slid the door shut with a heavy metal clang. He quickly pulled the chain and padlock through the bars into the cell and locked the door.

“Oscar, what are you doing?” Lourdes said. “There’s nowhere to go.”

Bosch had lost his balance against the bars. He righted himself and reached into his pocket for his key ring. It had the padlock key on it.

But the key ring wasn’t there and he looked through the bars and could see it on his desk. He looked at Luzon, who was pacing in the cell, a man looking for options where there weren’t any.

“Oscar, come on, settle down,” Lourdes said. “Come out of there.”

“The key’s on the desk, Oscar,” Bosch said. “Unlock the door.”

Luzon acted like he didn’t hear them. He paced back and forth a few times and then abruptly sat down on the end of the bench that ran almost the length of the cell. He bent over, put his elbows on his knees and dropped his face into his hands.

Bosch leaned over to Lourdes and cupped his hands around her ear.

“Go out into the yard and get a bolt cutter,” he whispered.

Lourdes immediately headed down the corridor in front of the cells to the door that led to the Public Works yard. That left Bosch looking through the bars at Luzon.

“Oscar, come on,” he said. “Open the door. We can work this out.”

Luzon was silent, face in his hands.

“Oscar?” Bosch said. “Talk to me. You want me to get the chief in here? I know you two go way back. You want to talk to him?”

Nothing, and then without a word Luzon dropped his hands and stood up. He reached up to his neck and started to pull off his tie. He then climbed up onto the bench and reached up to the cell’s ceiling, where there was a metal grate over an air vent. He pushed the skinny end of his tie up into the grate and worked it back out of the next opening.

“Oscar, come on, don’t do this,” Bosch said. “Oscar!”

Luzon knotted the two ends of the tie together and then twisted the loop into a figure eight. He stood on his toes to get his head through the makeshift noose and then without hesitation stepped off the end of the bench.

24

Bosch and Lourdes waited in the hallway. Only the chief of police and family members were allowed back into the critical care unit. For the most part they sat quietly and drank coffee from paper cups out of a machine. After two hours Chief Valdez emerged with the news.

“They say he only went a couple minutes without oxygen to the brain, so he should be all right,” he said. “It’s a waiting game on that. The bigger concern is the skull fracture from when he hit the ground when the grate gave way.”

Bosch had witnessed and heard the impact when Luzon’s swinging body brought the iron grate down and the back of his head hit the end of the bench. Like a high diver hitting the board after a flip.

“Is he conscious?” Lourdes asked.

“He was but then they went into surgery,” Valdez said. “They say he’s got a subdural hematoma and they had to evacuate it, which means they drilled a fucking hole in his skull to let the blood and pressure out.”

“Shit,” Lourdes said.

“Anyway, I want a full report on what happened in that cell and everything that led up to it,” Valdez said. “How did it go so far sideways, Harry?”

Bosch tried to compose an answer.

“He took me by surprise,” he finally said. “He must have known that that was the way some drunks did it back in the day.”

“Everybody knows that,” Valdez said. “You should have been prepared for it.”

Bosch nodded. He knew Valdez was right.

“It’s on me,” Bosch said. “But are we going to charge him? I have the whole thing on my phone. He tipped Mejia. He put it in terms of a mistake, but he’s responsible.”

“I’m not worried about that right now,” Valdez said. “We’ll look at that later.”

Bosch could see that the chief was having trouble concealing his anger about the whole thing.

“Bella, why don’t you go back to the station and start in on the paper,” Valdez said.

“Roger that,” Lourdes said.

Valdez stood there and was awkwardly silent as he waited for Lourdes to leave.

“See you guys back there,” she said.

Valdez watched her go down the hall toward the elevator alcove. When he judged she was far enough away, he spoke.

“Harry, we need to talk.”

“I know.”

“I’m going to ask the Sheriff’s Department to come in and take a look at this and how it was handled. I think an outside review would be a good thing.”

“I can save you the trouble, Chief. I fucked up. I know it.”

“You know as a reserve you don’t have the same protections the full-timers do.”

“I know. Are you firing me?”

“I think you should go home and let the Sheriff’s Department take a look at this.”

“I’m suspended, then.”

“Whatever. Just go home, Harry, and take a break. When and if the time is right, you’ll be back.”

“When and if... Okay, Chief. I’ll do that. I’ll send Lourdes the audio from the cell.”

“That would be good, yeah.”

Bosch turned and walked away, heading down the hallway in the direction Lourdes had gone.

He knew there was a very low chance that he would be back working for San Fernando after this. He thought about going by the city complex and gathering a few files and personal things from his office in the old jail but then decided against it. He just drove home.

He returned to a quiet house. He checked the porch first but there was no sign of Elizabeth. He then went down the hallway to her room and found the door open. The bed had been made and there were clean, folded towels on the bureau. He checked the closet. There were no clothes on the hangers and no sign of the suitcase she had used.

She was gone.

Bosch pulled his phone and called the number of the cell phone he had given her.

After a few seconds he heard its ring inside the house and found the phone left with a note on the dining room table. The note was brief.

A wave of emotion immediately went through him. He had to admit there was at first relief. Elizabeth had been right that her staying with him was damaging his relationship with his daughter. There was also the relief from the pressures of living with an addict, of not knowing when she might stumble or what would cause it.

But then that feeling was crowded out by concern. What did Elizabeth’s leaving mean? Was she going home to Modesto? Or was she going back to the addiction she had worked for months to leave behind? She had not had a single relapse in that time and Bosch had thought she was getting stronger every day.

Bosch had to consider that she had found clarity of mind and the access it gave her to guilt over her daughter’s death too difficult to continue to live with.

Bosch opened the sliding door and walked out onto the back deck of the house. He looked down on the freeway and the wide expanse of the city beyond it to the mountains that rimmed the Valley. Elizabeth could be out there somewhere.

He pulled his phone and ducked back in and away from the freeway hiss to make a call to Cisco Wojciechowski. They had not spoken in at least two months, since the last time Cisco had checked in on Elizabeth’s progress. He was a private investigator who worked for Mickey Haller, a defense attorney who was also Bosch’s half-brother. That had put him into Bosch’s orbit and he had been instrumental in getting Elizabeth Clayton straight.

Even more than Bosch, Wojciechowski was responsible for Elizabeth’s recovery. He had seen her through the immediate withdrawal from the grip of oxycodone. Formerly addicted himself, he had walked and talked her through it, monitored her every minute at first, then by hour and then by day. She had followed that detox with a one-month stint in a more traditional rehab center. After she moved into the room offered by Bosch, Cisco was her weekly monitor. The check-ins didn’t start to drop off until Elizabeth hit the three-month mark without a relapse.

Now Bosch told him that she was gone without much notice or any indication of where she was going.

“She answering her phone?” Cisco asked.

“She left it here,” Bosch said.

“That’s not good. She doesn’t want to be tracked.”

“What I was thinking.”

They were both silent for a while.

“If we take the worst-case scenario, she’s decided to go back to the life,” Bosch said. “The question is, where would she go?”

“Does she have money?” Cisco asked.

Bosch had to think about that. In the last two months, Elizabeth had gotten bored when Bosch went to work at the SFPD. Bosch let her use his credit card to install an Uber account on her phone. She had asked to take over the duties of shopping for food and household products. He had given her cash for that. Between the credit-card number and the possibility that she could have put aside small amounts from the grocery money, he had to assume she had the wherewithal to get back to Modesto or to buy her way back into addiction.

“Let’s say she does,” Bosch said. “Where would she go?”

“Addicts are creatures of habit,” Cisco said. “She’d go back to where she scored before.”

Bosch thought about the place he had rescued Elizabeth from the previous year. A clinic that was little more than a pill mill with examination rooms crowded with the items stolen and offered in trade by addicts. When he found her, Elizabeth had only herself to trade.

“The place I took her from — this so-called clinic in Van Nuys — has got to be closed by now,” he said. “My old partner from Hollywood detectives is now with the state medical board. He was there and saw that place. He was going to shut them down.”

“You sure?” Cisco asked. “Sometimes these doctors get a slap on the wrist and just open up across the street.”

Bosch recalled Jerry Edgar talking about how difficult it was to put charlatan doctors and pill mills out of business permanently.

“Let me call you back,” he said.

Without waiting for a reply, he disconnected and went to his contacts screen. He called his former partner, and Edgar picked up right away.

“Harry Bosch,” he said. “The man who said he would stay in touch but waited a lot of months to actually do it.”

“Sorry, Jerry, I’ve been kind of busy,” Bosch said. “I’ve got a question for you though. Remember that clinic where we found Elizabeth Clayton last year?”

“Yeah, Sherman Way.”

“You said you were going to close that down. Did that happen?”

“Wait a minute, I said I was going to try to close it down. It’s not an easy thing to do, Harry. I told you about how—”

“Yeah, I know, a lot of red tape. So, you’re telling me that seven months later that place is still operating?”

“I opened a file, did the work, and submitted it. The license to practice is under what we call administrative review. I’m waiting on the board to act on it.”

“So in the meantime, that guy we saw in there, that guy masquerading as a doctor, is still in there writing scrips.”

“I haven’t checked but that’s probably the case.”

“Thanks, Jerry, that’s all I needed. I gotta go.”

“Harry—”

Bosch disconnected. Before calling Cisco back he pulled his wallet and dug out the credit card he had given to Elizabeth to set up her Uber account. He called the phone number on the back and asked the service specialist to read him a list of his most recent charges. Other than an Uber charge from that morning, all the purchases had been his own.

Bosch grabbed the phone Elizabeth had left behind on the dining room table. He opened the Uber app and was greeted with a template for rating the driver who had picked Elizabeth up that morning. Bosch gave him five stars, then tapped the My Trips link and was taken to a map that showed the morning’s ride and the address of the destination. Elizabeth had obviously called for the Uber, then left the phone behind when the car arrived. The destination was the Greyhound bus terminal in North Hollywood.

It would seem that Elizabeth had left the city on a Greyhound bus, but Bosch was familiar with the area, having worked cases over the years that took him to the bus terminal and its surroundings, and he knew the neighborhood had a high transient population, many of whom were drug addicts, and had several clinics and mom-and-pop pharmacies that catered to them.

Bosch called Wojciechowski back.

“The place I pulled her out of is still in business,” he said. “But I just traced an Uber she took this morning to the bus station in North Hollywood. She could be back in Modesto by now. Or...”

“Or what?” Cisco prompted.

“You talked about addicts returning to the places they know. The area around the bus terminal is pretty gritty. Lots of clinics, lots of pharmacies, lots of addicts. There’s a park there next to the one seventy where they hang.”

There was a moment of silence before Cisco responded.

“I’ll meet you there,” he said.