The Night Fire

12

Bosch parked his Jeep Cherokee on the north side of Fremont close enough to walk without his cane to Station 3 of the Los Angeles Fire Department. The station was of modern design and sat in the shadow of the towering Department of Water and Power Building. It was also less than six blocks from the Starbucks where Jeffrey Herstadt had suffered a seizure and had been treated by Rescue 3 EMTs on the day of the Judge Montgomery murder.

As he approached, Bosch saw that both of the double-wide garage doors were open and all of the station’s vehicles were in place. This meant nobody should be out on a call. The garage was two rows deep. A ladder truck took up one whole slot while the other three contained double rows of two fire engines and an EMT wagon. There was a man in a blue fireman’s uniform holding a clipboard as he inspected the ladder truck. Bosch interrupted his work.

“I’m looking for a paramedic named Albert Morales. Is he here today?”

Bosch noticed that the name over the man’s shirt pocket was SEVILLE.

“He’s here. Who should I tell him wants to see him?”

“He doesn’t know me. I’m just passing on a thank-you from someone he took care of on a call. I have...”

From an inside coat pocket Bosch produced a small square pink envelope with Morales’s name written on it. Bosch had bought it at the CVS in the underground mall by the federal building.

“You want me to give it to him?” Seville asked.

“No, it sort of comes with a story I need to tell him,” Bosch said.

“Okay, let me see if I can find him.”

“Thanks. I’ll wait here.”

Seville disappeared around the front of the ladder truck and went into the station house. Bosch turned and looked out from the station. There was an embankment supporting the 110 freeway and Bosch could hear the sound of traffic from above. He guessed that it was not moving very quickly up there. It was right in the middle of rush hour.

He raised his foot and bent his knee a few times. It was feeling stiff. “You wanted to see me?”

Bosch turned and saw a man in the blue LAFD uniform, the name MORALES above his shirt pocket.

“Yes, sir,” Bosch said. “You’re Albert Morales, Rescue Three?”

“That’s right,” Morales said. “What is—”

“Then this is for you.”

Bosch reached into an inside pocket of his jacket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. He handed it to Morales. The paramedic opened and looked at it. He seemed confused.

“What the hell is this?” he asked. “Seville said it was a thank-you note or something.”

“That’s a subpoena signed by a judge,” Bosch said. “You need to be in court tomorrow morning at nine sharp. Jeffrey Herstadt thanks you in advance.”

He offered the pink envelope to Morales, but he didn’t take it.

“Wait, these are supposed to be served at headquarters, across the street from City Hall,” Morales said. “Then they come to me. So take it over there.”

Morales held the subpoena out to Bosch.

“There was no time for that,” Bosch said. “Judge Falcone signed it today and he wants you there first thing tomorrow. You don’t show, he’ll issue a warrant.”

“This is bullshit,” Morales said. “I’m off tomorrow and going up to Arrowhead. I’ve got three days.”

“I think you’ll be in and out. You’ll still get to Arrowhead.”

“What case is this? You said Herstat?”

“Jeffrey Herstadt. Spelled H-E-R-S-T-A-D-T. You treated him for seizure at the Starbucks by Grand Park seven months ago.”

“That’s the guy who killed the judge.”

“Allegedly.”

Bosch pointed to the subpoena, still clutched in Morales’s hand.

“It says you need to bring any documentation of the call you have. And your rescue kit.”

“My kit? What the fuck for?”

“I guess you’ll find out tomorrow. Anyway, that’s all I know. You’ve been served and we’ll see you at nine a.m. tomorrow.”

Bosch turned and walked away, heading back toward his car and trying not to limp. Morales threw one more “This is bullshit” at his back. Bosch didn’t turn around when he responded.

“See you tomorrow.”

Bosch got back in his car and immediately called Mickey Haller.

“You get the subpoena?” Haller said.

“Yep,” Bosch replied. “In and out — thanks for greasing it.”

“Now tell me you served Morales.”

“Just did. He’s not too happy about it but I think he’ll be there.”

“He better or my ass will be in a sling with Falcone. You tell him the subpoena includes his kit?”

“I did, and it’s on the subpoena. Are you going to be able to get him on the stand?”

“The prosecutor is going to carp about it, but I’m not counting on any pushback from the judge.”

Bosch unlocked the Jeep and got in. He decided not to attempt the freeway at this hour. He would turn on First and take it to Beverly and ride that all the way into Hollywood.

“Your DNA lady get in?” he asked.

“Just got the word,” Haller said. “She says she’s in the car with Stace and heading to the hotel. She’ll be good to go tomorrow.”

“You talked to her about this? She knows the plan?”

“Ran it all by her. We’re good. It’s funny — today I was semi-bullshitting about her having a specialty and it turns out this is her specialty. She’s been doing transfer cases for five years. It’s like the gods of guilt are smiling on me today.”

“That’s great. But you’ve got nothing to smile about yet. Morales has to answer the way we think he’ll answer. If he doesn’t, we’re cooked.”

“I’ve got a good feeling. This is going to be fun.”

“Just remember, Morales has to go first, then your DNA lady.”

“Oh, I got it.”

Bosch turned on the Jeep’s engine and pulled away from the curb. He turned right on First Street and headed under the freeway. He changed the subject matter slightly.

“You told me that when you were prepping the case you had Cisco look into third-party culpability,” Bosch said.

Cisco Wojciechowski was Haller’s investigator. He had helped prep the Herstadt case but had to stop when he had an emergency appendectomy. He wasn’t due back on the job until the following week. Third-party culpability was a standard defense strategy: someone else did it.

“We took a look at it,” Haller said. “But to get it into court for the defense you need proof and we didn’t have any proof. You know that.”

“You focus on one subject?” Bosch asked.

“Shit, no. Judge Montgomery had lots of enemies out there. We didn’t know where to start. We came up with a list of names — mostly out of the murder book — and went from there but never got to where we could point a finger in court. Just wasn’t there.”

“I didn’t see any list in the material you gave me. And did you get a copy of the murder book?”

“Cisco had the copy we got in discovery. But if this thing goes down the way we think it will tomorrow, we won’t need to prove third-party culpability. We won’t even need it. We’ll have big-time reasonable doubt already.”

“You might not need it, but I will. See if you can get it from Cisco. I want to look at other avenues of investigation. The LAPD has to have looked at other persons of interest. I want to know who.”

“You got it, Broheim. I’ll get it. And thanks for today.”

Bosch disconnected. He felt uncomfortable being thanked for a ploy that might set an accused murderer free. He felt just as uncomfortable being an investigator for the defense, even if the defendant in this case was possibly an innocent man.

13

Bosch parked right in front of Margaret Thompson’s house. He thought about making the short walk to the house without his cane but he looked at the six steps leading up to the porch. His knee was aching from a full day of movement, with and without the cane. He decided not to push it, grabbed the cane off the passenger seat, and used it to amble up the front walk and stairs. It was getting dark now but there were no lights on that he could see. He knocked on the door but was thinking that he should have called ahead and avoided wasting time. Then the porch lights came on and Margaret opened the door.

“Harry?”

“Hello, Margaret. How are you doing?”

“I’m fine. What brings you here?”

“Well, I wanted to see how you were doing and I wanted to also ask about the case — the murder book you gave me. I was hoping I could get a look at John Jack’s office, see if there were any notes relating to his investigation.”

“Well, you’re welcome to look but I don’t think there is anything there.”

She led him into the house and turned on lights as they went. It made Bosch wonder whether she had been sitting in the dark when he had knocked on the door.

In the office Margaret signaled toward the desk. Bosch paused and studied the whole room.

“The murder book was sitting on top of the desk when I retrieved it,” he said. “Is that where it was, or did you find it somewhere?”

“It was in the bottom right side drawer,” Margaret said. “I found it when I was looking for the cemetery papers.”

“Cemetery papers?”

“He bought that plot at Hollywood Forever many years ago. He liked the name of it.”

Bosch moved around the desk and sat down. He opened the bottom right drawer. It was now empty.

“Did you clean this out?”

“No, I haven’t looked in there since the day I found the book.”

“So there was nothing else in the drawer? Just the murder book?”

“That was all.”

“Did John Jack spend a lot of time in here?”

“A day or two a week. When he did the bills and the taxes. Things like that.”

“Did he have a computer or a laptop?”

“No, he never got one. He said he hated using computers when he worked.”

Bosch nodded. He opened another drawer while talking.

“Had you ever seen the murder book before you found it in the drawer?”

“No, Harry, I hadn’t. What’s going on with it?”

The drawer had two checkbooks and rubber-banded stacks of envelopes from DWP and the Dish Network. It was all household billing records.

“Well, I gave it to a detective and she started checking into it. She said there was nothing added to it by John Jack. So we thought maybe he kept notes separate from it.”

He opened the top drawer and found it full of pens, paper clips, and Post-it pads. There was a pair of scissors, a roll of packing tape, a mini-light, and a magnifying glass with a bone handle with an inscription carved in it.

“It’s like he took the book with him when he retired but never worked it.”

From the desk Bosch saw a door on the opposite wall.

“You mind if I look in the closet?”

“No, go ahead.”

Bosch got up and walked over. The closet was for long-term storage of clothes. There was a set of golf clubs that looked like they had barely been used and Bosch remembered that they had been presented to John Jack at his retirement party.

On the shelf above the hanging bar Bosch saw a cardboard file box next to a stack of old LPs and a bobby’s helmet that had probably been given to John Jack by a visiting police officer from England.

“What’s in the file box?”

“I don’t know. This was his room, Harry.”

“Mind if I look?”

“Go ahead.”

Bosch pulled the box down. It was heavy and it was sealed. He carried it over to the desk and used the scissors from the drawer to cut the tape stretched across the top of the box.

The box was filled with police documents but they were not contained in files or murder books. At first glance they appeared to be haphazardly stored, from multiple cases. Bosch started taking out thick sheaves of documents and putting them on the desk.

“This might take a while,” he said. “I need to look through these to see what they are and if they’re connected to the murder book.”

“I’ll leave you here so you can work,” Margaret said. “Would you like me to make some coffee, Harry?”

“Uh, no. But a glass of water would be good. My knee is swelling and I have to take a pill.”

“Did you overwork it?”

“Maybe. It’s been a long day.”

“I’ll go get your water.”

Bosch finished taking the documents out of the box and started going through them from what would have been at the bottom. It quickly became clear they had nothing to do with the John Hilton case. What Bosch had in front of him were copies of partial case records and arrest reports as well as state parole-board notifications. John Jack Thompson had been keeping tabs on the people he had sent to prison as a detective, writing letters of opposition to the parole board, and keeping track of when prisoners were released.

Margaret came back into the room with a glass of water. Bosch thanked her and reached into his pocket for a prescription bottle.

“I hope that’s not that oxycodone that’s in the paper all the time,” Margaret said.

“No, nothing that strong,” Bosch said. “Just to help with the swelling.”

“Are you finding anything?”

“In this? Not really. It looks like old records of the people he put in prison. Did he ever say he was afraid that one of them might come looking for him?”

“No, he never said that. I asked him about it a few times but he always said we had nothing to worry about. That the baddest people were never getting out.”

Bosch nodded.

“Probably true,” he said.

“Then I’ll leave you to it,” Margaret said.

After she left the room, Bosch considered the documents in front of him. He decided he wasn’t going to spend two hours looking at every piece of paper from the box. He was confident that the contents were unrelated to Hilton. He started checking through a final sampling of papers just to make sure and came across a copy of a sixty-day summary report on a murder case that he recognized.

The victim was a nineteen-year-old student at Los Angeles City College named Sarah Freelander. She was found raped and stabbed to death in the fall of 1982. She had disappeared somewhere between the school on the east side of the 101 freeway and her apartment on Sierra Vista on the west side of the freeway after attending a night class. Her apartment was thirteen blocks from the school and she commuted by bike. Her roommate reported her missing but she was young and there was no indication of foul play. The report was not taken seriously.

Thompson and Bosch were called in when her body and bike were found beneath a stand of trees that lined the elevated free-way beyond the outfield fence of a ballfield at the Lemon Grove Recreation Center.

The small park ran along Hobart Boulevard on the west side of the freeway and was equidistant from Melrose Avenue to the south and Santa Monica Boulevard to the north, the two streets with free-way underpasses that Sarah likely would have chosen between for her ride home from school. They worked the case hard and Bosch remembered coming to Jack’s home office to get away from the station to discuss ideas and possibilities. John Jack had the internal fire going. Something about the dead girl pierced him and he had promised her parents he would find the killer. That was when Bosch first saw the fierceness his mentor brought to the job and to his search for the truth.

But they never cleared the case. They found a credible witness who saw Sarah on her bike riding toward the Melrose underpass but never were able to pick up her trail on the other side. They keyed on a fellow LACC student who had been rejected a month before when he asked Sarah for a second date. But they never broke him or his alibi, and the case eventually went nowhere. Yet John Jack always carried it with him. Even when their partnership was long over and Bosch would run into him at a retirement party or a training session, John Jack would bring up Sarah Freelander and the disappointment of not finding her killer. He still thought it was the other student.

Bosch put the summary back in the box and used the packing tape from the desk drawer to reseal it. He returned it to its place in the closet and left the room. He found Margaret sitting in the living room staring at the flames of a gas-powered fireplace.

“Margaret, thank you.”

“You didn’t find anything?”

“No, and there’s no other place in the house where he would have kept anything regarding the murder book, right? Anything in the garage?”

“I don’t think so. He kept tools in the garage and fishing poles. But you’re welcome to look.”

Bosch just nodded. He didn’t think there was anything here to find. Ballard might have been right: John Jack hadn’t taken the murder book to work it. There was something else.

“I don’t think I need to,” he said. “I’m going to go but I’ll circle back if anything comes up. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Margaret said. “I just get a little wistful and a little teary at night. I miss him.”

She was all alone. John Jack and Margaret had not had children. John Jack had once told Bosch he could not bring a child into the world he saw as a law officer.

“Of course,” Bosch said. “I understand. If you don’t mind, I’ll check in on you from time to time, see if you need anything.”

“That’s nice, Harry. In a way, you’re the closest we got to having a son. John Jack didn’t want us to have our own. Now I’m left alone.”

Bosch didn’t know what to say to that.

“Well, uh, if you need anything, you call me,” he mumbled. “Day or night. I’ll let myself out and lock the door.”

“Thank you, Harry.”

Back in his car, Bosch sat there and decompressed for a few minutes before calling Ballard to tell her that Thompson’s home office was a dead end.

“Nothing at all?”

“Not even a scratch pad. I think you’re right: he didn’t take the book to work it. He just didn’t want anyone else to work it.”

“But why?”

“That’s the question.”

“So, what are you doing tomorrow? Want to go with me out to Rialto?”

“I can’t. I have court in the morning. I might be able to go later. But what’s in Rialto? That’s a drive.”

“Elvin Kidd, the Rolling 60s street boss who told his dealers to clear the alley on the day Hilton got killed.”

“How’d you get that?”

“From the snitch Hunter and Talis didn’t get the chance to interview back in 1990.”

“Wait till I’m clear, then we go see him.”

There was a hesitation.

“You shouldn’t go out there without backup,” Bosch said.

“The guy’s like sixty and out of the game,” Ballard said. “Rialto’s two hours and a world away from South L.A. It’s where bangers go when they quit the streets.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’ll call you when I clear, then we go out. Maybe you should get some sleep until then.”

“Can’t. I’m going to check out the ballistics first thing tomorrow.”

“Then go home, wherever and whatever home is, and sleep.”

“Yes, Dad.”

“I told you about that.”

“I’ll make a deal with you. I’ll stop calling you ‘Dad’ and you stop telling me to ‘get some sleep.’”

“Okay, deal.”

“Have a nice night, Harry.”

“You too. Let me know about the ballistics tomorrow.”

“Will do.”

She disconnected. Bosch started the Jeep and headed home.