The Black Ice

31

All the way to the border crossing, Bosch contemplated how it had been done, how all the parts now seemed to fit, and how it might have gone unnoticed if not for Aguila noticing the footprint. He thought about the Snakes box in the closet of the apartment in Los Feliz. A clue so obvious, yet he had missed it. He had seen only what he wanted to see.

It was still early, just the first hint of dawn’s light was fighting its way up the eastern horizon, and there was not yet much of a line at the crossing. Nobody was cleaning windshields. Nobody was selling junk. Nobody was there at all. Bosch badged the bored-looking Border Patrol agent and was waved through.

He needed a phone and some caffeine. He drove two minutes to the Calexico Town Hall, got a Coke from the machine in the police department’s cramped lobby and took it out to the pay phone on the front wall. He looked at his watch and knew she would be at home, probably awake and getting ready for work.

He lit a cigarette and dialed, charging the call to his own PacTel card. While he waited for it to go through he looked across the street into the fog. He saw the shapes of sleeping figures under blankets scattered about the park. The ground fog gave the images a ghostly, lonely resonance.

Teresa picked up after two rings. She sounded like she had been awake already.

“Hi.”

“Harry? What is it?”

“Sorry to wake you up.”

“You didn’t. What’s the matter?”

“Are you getting dressed up to go to Moore’s funeral today?”

“Yes. What is this? You called me at ten minutes before six to ask-”

“That isn’t Moore they’ll be putting in the ground.”

There was a long silence during which Bosch looked into the park and saw a man standing there, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, staring back at him in the fog. Harry looked away.

“What are you saying? Harry, are you all right?”

“I’m tired but never better. What I’m saying is he’s still alive. Moore. I just missed him this morning.”

“Are you still in Mexico?”

“At the border.”

“That doesn’t make sense. What you said. There were matches made on the latents, we got dental, and his own wife ID’d a photograph of the tattoo on the body. His identification was confirmed.”

“It’s all bullshit. He set it up.”

“Why, Harry, are you calling me now and telling me this?”

“I want you to help me, Teresa. I can’t go to Irving. Only you. You help me and you’ll help yourself. If I’m right.”

“That’s a big if, Harry.”

Bosch looked back into the park and the man in the blanket was gone.

“Just tell me how it could be possible,” she said. “Convince me.”

Bosch was silent a moment, like a lawyer composing himself before a cross-examination. He knew that every word he spoke now had to stand the test of her scrutiny or he would lose her.

“Besides the prints and dental, Sheehan told me they also matched his handwriting to the I-found-out-who-I-was note. He said they compared it to a change-of-address card Moore had put in his personnel file a few months ago after he and his wife separated.”

He took a deep drag on the cigarette and she thought he had finished.

“So? I don’t see-what about it?”

“One of the concessions the protective league won a few years back during contract negotiations was guaranteed access to your personnel file. So cops could check if there were beefs on their record, commendations, letters of complaint, anything like that. So Moore had access to his P-file. He went into Personnel a few months back and asked for it because he had just moved and needed to update it with his new address.”

Bosch held it there a moment, to compose the rest of it in his mind.

“Okay, okay,” she said.

“The P-files also contain print cards. Moore had access to the print card Irving took to you on the day of the autopsy. That was the card your tech used to identify the prints. You see? While Moore had the file, he could have switched his card for someone else’s. Then you used the bogus card to identify his body. But, see, it wasn’t his body. It was the other person’s.”

“Who?”

“I think it was a man from down here named Humberto Zorrillo.”

“This seems too farfetched. There were other IDs. I remember that day in the suite. What’s his name, Sheehan, he got a call from SID saying they matched prints in the motel room to Moore. They used a different set than we did. It’s a double-blind confirmation, Harry. Then we have the tattoo. And the dental. How do you explain all of that?”

“Look, Teresa, listen to me. It all can be explained. It all works. The dental? You told me you only found one usable fragment, part of a root canal. That meant no root was left. It was a dead tooth so you could not tell how long it had been out, only that it matched his dentist’s charts. That’s fine, but one of Moore’s crew told me he once saw Moore get punched during a Boulevard brawl and he lost a tooth. That could’ve been it, I don’t know.”

“Okay, what about the prints in the room? Explain that?”

“Easy. Those were his prints. Donovan, the SID guy, told me he pulled prints from the Department of Justice computer. Those would have been Moore’s real prints. That meant he was really in the room. It doesn’t mean it’s his body. Normally, one set of exemplars-the ones from the DOJ computer-would be used to do all the match work, but Irving screwed it up by going to the P-file. And that’s the beauty of Moore’s plan. He knew Irving or someone in the department would do it this way. He could count on it because he knew the department would put a rush on the autopsy, the ID, everything, because it was a fellow officer. It’s been done before and he knew they would do it for him.”

“Donovan never did a cross-match between our prints and the set he pulled?”

“Nope, because it wasn’t the routine. He might’ve gotten around to it later when he thought about it. But things were happening too fast on this case.”

“Shit,” she said. He knew he was winning her over. “What about the tattoo?”

“It’s a barrio insignia. A lot of people could have had them. I think Zorrillo had one.”

“Who is he?”

“He grew up with Moore down here. They might be brothers, I don’t know. Anyway, Zorrillo became the local drug kingpin. Moore went to L.A. and became a cop. But somehow Moore was working for him up there. The story goes on from there. The DEA raided Zorrillo’s ranch last night. He got away. But I don’t think it was Zorrillo. It was Moore.”

“You saw him?”

“I didn’t need to.”

“Is anyone looking for him?”

“The DEA is looking. They’re concentrating in interior Mexico. Then again, they’re looking for Zorrillo. Moore may never turn up again.”

“It all seems… You’re saying Moore killed Zorrillo and then traded places with him?”

“Yeah. Somehow he got Zorrillo to L.A. They meet at the Hideaway and Moore puts him down-the trauma to the back of the head you found. He puts his boots and clothes on the body. Then he blows the face away with the shotgun. He makes sure to leave some of his own prints around to make Donovan bite and puts the note in the back pocket.

“I think the note worked on a number of levels. It was taken as a suicide note at first. Authenticating the handwriting helped add to the identification. On another level, I think it was something personal between Moore and Zorrillo. Goes back to the barrio. ‘Who are you?’ ‘I found out who I was.’ That part of it is a long story.”

They were both silent for a while, rethinking all of what Bosch had just said. He knew there were still a lot of loose ends. A lot of deception.

“Why all the killings?” she asked. “Porter and Juan Doe, what did they have to do with anything?”

This is where he had few answers.

“I don’t know. They were somehow in the way, I guess. Zorrillo had Jimmy Kapps killed because he was an informant. I think Moore was the one who told Zorrillo. After that Juan Doe-his name, by the way, is Gutierrez-Llosa-gets beaten to death down here and taken up there. I don’t know why. Then Moore pops Zorrillo and takes his place. Why he had to do Porter, I don’t know. I guess he thought Lou might figure it out.”

“That’s so cold.”

“Yeah.”

“How could it happen?” she asked then, more to herself than Bosch. “They are about to bury him, this drug dealer… full honors, the mayor and chief there. The media.”

“And you’ll know the truth.”

She thought about that for a long time before asking the next question.

“Why did he do it?”

“I don’t know. We’re talking about different lives. The cop and the drug dealer. But there must’ve been something still between them, that bond-whatever it is-from the barrio. And somehow one day the cop crosses over, starts watching out for the dealer on the streets of L.A. Who knows what made him do it. Maybe money, maybe just something he had lost a long time ago when he was a kid.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. I’m still thinking.”

“If they were that close, why did he kill him?”

“I guess we’ll have to ask him. If we ever find him. Maybe he-maybe like you said it was just to take Zorrillo’s place. All that money. Or maybe it was guilt. He got in too far and he needed a way to end it… Moore was-or is-hung up on the past. His wife said that. Maybe he was trying to recapture something, go back. I don’t know yet.”

There was silence on the line again. Bosch took a last drag on his cigarette.

“The plan seems almost perfect,” he said. “He leaves a body behind in circumstances he knew would make the department not want to come looking.”

“But you did, Harry.”

“Yeah.”

And here I am, he thought. He knew what he had to do now. He had to finish it. He could see the ghostly figures of several people in the park now. They were waking to another day of desperation.

“Why did you call me, Harry? What do you want me to do?”

“I called because I have to trust someone. I could only think of you, Teresa.”

“Then what do you want me to do?”

“You have access to the DOJ prints in your office, right?”

“That’s how we make most of our IDs. That’s how we will make all of them after this. I have Irving by the balls now.”

“Do you still have the print card he brought over for the autopsy?”

“Um, I don’t know. But I’m sure the techs made a copy of it to keep with the body. You want me to do the cross-check?”

“Yeah, do a cross and you’ll see they don’t match.”

“You’re so sure.”

“Yeah. I’m sure but you might as well confirm it.”

“Then what?”

“Then, I guess, I’ll see you at the funeral. I’ve got one more stop to make and then I’m heading up.”

“What stop?”

“I want to check out a castle. It’s part of the long story. I’ll tell you later.”

“You don’t want to try to stop the funeral?”

Harry thought a few moments before answering. He thought of Sylvia Moore and the mystery she still held for him. Then he thought about the idea of a drug lord getting a cop’s farewell.

“No, I don’t want to stop it. Do you?”

“No way.”

He knew her reasons were far different from his. But he didn’t care about that. Teresa was well on her way to winning her assignment as permanent chief medical examiner. If Irving got in her way now, he’d end up looking like one of the customers in the autopsy suite. In that case, more power to her, he thought.

“I’ll see you in a little bit,” he said.

“Be careful, Harry.”

Bosch hung up and lit another cigarette. The morning sun was up now and beginning to burn the ground fog off the park. People were moving around over there. He thought he heard a woman laughing. But at the moment he felt very much alone in the world.