The Night Fire

26

Bosch sat at his dining room table with copies of documents from the Walter Montgomery case broken into six stacks in front of him. In the stacks were all the records of the LAPD investigation of the judge’s murder that Mickey Haller had received in discovery prior to trial. Knowing what he did about homicide detectives, prosecutors, and the rules of discovery, Bosch was pretty sure he didn’t have everything that had been accumulated during the investigation. But he had enough to at least begin his own.

And Bosch was also sure that he was the only one investigating the matter. Jerry Gustafson, the lead detective, had made it clear when the murder charge against Jeffrey Herstadt was dismissed that he felt the murderer had been set free. To take a new look at his investigation would be to disavow his prior conclusion. The sins of pride and self-righteousness left justice for Judge Montgomery swaying in the wind.

That bothered Bosch to no end.

The six stacks in front of him represented the five tracks of investigation being carried out by Gustafson and his partner, Orlando Reyes, up until they got the DNA hit on Herstadt from the judge’s fingernail scrapings. That stopped investigation of anyone other than Herstadt. This was a form of tunnel vision that Bosch had seen before and had probably been guilty of himself when he had been on LAPD homicide duty. With the advent of forensic DNA, he had repeatedly seen science take over investigations. DNA was the panacea. A match turned an investigation into a one-way street, a prosecution into a slam dunk. Gustafson and Reyes dropped all non-Herstadt avenues of investigation once they believed they had their man.

The sixth stack of documents included the case chrono and other ancillary reports on the murder, including the autopsy report and statements from witnesses who were in the park where the deadly attack occurred. The docs in the sixth stack were germane to all five of the other paths of investigation. Bosch had already separated out the documents regarding the Herstadt path and put them aside.

There were also several disks containing video from cameras in the area, including three that were focused on the park. Bosch was aware of these from the Herstadt trial but reviewed them in their entirety first. None of the cameras in the park had caught the actual murder because it had occurred in a blind spot — behind a small building that housed the elevators that carried people to and from the underground parking complex. Other disks turned over in discovery included video from cameras inside the two elevators and the five-floor garage, but these showed no suspects or even elevator riders at the time of the killing.

The park cameras were useful for one thing: they pinpointed the time of the murder. Judge Montgomery was seen walking down steps from Grand Street, where he had just had breakfast. He was trailing twenty feet behind a blond woman, who also was heading toward the courthouse, with what appeared to be a name tag clipped to her blouse. The woman walked behind the elevator building and Montgomery followed. A few seconds later the woman emerged and continued toward the courthouse. But Montgomery never came into camera view again. His attacker had been waiting in the blind. He was stabbed and then the attacker was believed to have used the elevator blind to slip into a stairwell next to the elevators and escape. There were no cameras in the stairwell, and the cameras in the five-floor garage below were either poorly placed, missing, or broken and awaiting replacement. The killer could have easily slipped through the camera net.

By manipulating the video, Gustafson and Reyes had been able to identify the name tag on the woman who had been walking ahead of Montgomery as a juror badge. On the afternoon of the murder, Reyes went to the jury-pool room at the courthouse and found her waiting to be called. He took her to the courthouse cafeteria and interviewed her. She was Laurie Lee Wells, a thirty-three-year-old actress from Sherman Oaks. But her statement, which Bosch read, provided no clues to the murder. She had been wearing Bluetooth earbuds and listening to music on her walk from the parking structure to the courthouse. She did not hear anything occur behind her when she passed by the elevators. The detectives dismissed her value as a witness.

Bosch’s starting point was the other tracks of the investigation that Gustafson and Reyes had been on prior to getting the DNA hit on Herstadt. He needed to see if they had been on the right path before the DNA led them astray.

The five tracks involved two cases that were currently on Montgomery’s civil docket, one he had recently ruled on, and two from his days in criminal court. The criminal cases entailed convicted defendants who had threatened the judge. The civil cases had large money stakes riding on the judge’s ruling or impending ruling.

It had been Bosch’s experience that threats made by criminals heading off to prison were mostly hollow. They were the last gasps of people crushed by the system and who had nothing left but the ability to throw empty promises of revenge at those they perceived as their tormentors. Bosch had been threatened many times in his years as a police officer and detective, and not once had the person who issued the remark acted on it.

And so he took up the two tracks involving threats from Montgomery’s days on the criminal bench first, not because he believed them to be the best shot but because he wanted to get through them quickly in order to concentrate on the cases involving large sums of money. Money was always the better motive.

He put a live recording of Charles Mingus at Carnegie Hall on the turntable, chosen for the twenty-four-minute version of “C Jam Blues” on side 1. The 1974 concert was up-tempo, high energy, and largely improvisational, and just what Bosch needed for wading through case reports. The concert, including Bosch favorite John Handy on tenor sax, helped put him into the proper groove.

The first threat involved a man sentenced to life without parole for the murder of his ex-girlfriend, who had been abducted and then tortured over a three-day period before perishing from loss of blood. There appeared to be no issue at trial that engaged the judge in any controversial decision against the defense. The suspect, Richard Kirk, had been arrested in possession of the knives and other tools linked forensically to the injuries sustained by the victim. He had also rented the warehouse where the torture-killing had taken place. A month after Kirk was sentenced to prison, the judge received an anonymous letter claiming that he would be eviscerated with a six-inch blade and would “bleed out like a slaughtered pig.” It was unsigned but had the hallmarks of Richard Kirk, who had committed much of his torture with a six-inch blade.

While Montgomery had not been eviscerated, he had been stabbed three times in a concentrated area of his torso under his right arm, suggesting a prison-style shanking — three quick thrusts with a blade.

When the threatening letter came in, a sheriff’s department investigation was opened and a fingerprint on the stamp attached to the anonymous letter was traced to a legal clerk who worked for Kirk’s defense attorney. When confronted, the defense attorney acknowledged taking the letter from Kirk while on a visit with his client to discuss an appeal. He said he never read the letter because it was in a sealed envelope. He simply handed it over to his clerk to mail. The investigation resulted in Kirk being placed in solitary confinement for a year and his attorney being quietly disciplined by the California Bar.

The incident also put Kirk on the radar of the detectives working Montgomery’s killing. Reyes requested a list of any prison associates of Kirk’s who had been released in the prior year, the theory being that Kirk might have somehow paid an inmate about to be paroled to hit Montgomery. The list included only one man who was paroled to Los Angeles a month before the Montgomery slaying. He was interviewed and alibied through cameras at the halfway house he was required to live in. Gustafson took the investigation no further once Herstadt became their primary suspect.

Bosch got up and flipped the record. The band Mingus had put together went into a song called “Perdido.” Bosch picked up the album cover and studied it. There were three photos of Mingus, his big arms around his stand-up bass, but none of the pictures fully revealed his face. In one shot his back was to the camera. It was the first time Bosch had noticed this and it was a curious thing. He went to his record stack and flipped through his other Mingus albums. Almost all of them clearly showed his face, including three where he was lighting or smoking a cigar. He wasn’t shy in life or on other album covers. The Carnegie Hall album photos were a mystery.

Bosch went back to work, moving on to the second threat from the criminal side of Montgomery’s history as a jurist. This one involved a case where a ruling by Montgomery was reversed on appeal and a new trial ordered because of an error the judge had made in his instructions to the jury.

The defendant was Thomas O’Leary, an attorney who had been convicted of two counts of cocaine possession. According to Gustafson’s summary of the case, O’Leary was snared in an undercover operation in which a Sheriff’s Department deputy posed as a drug dealer, engaged O’Leary to defend him, and paid for his services three different times with quantities of cocaine. Cameras in an undercover car recorded O’Leary receiving the drugs. At trial O’Leary conceded that he had received the drugs but put forward an entrapment defense, arguing that he had never previously accepted drugs in payment. He also claimed that the government was targeting him in retribution for his defending high-profile clients in other cases brought by the Sheriff’s narcotics unit. O’Leary’s contention was that he was not predisposed to break the law in such a way until the undercover deputy persuaded him to.

Part of the entrapment instruction Judge Montgomery gave to the jury was that O’Leary could not be convicted if the jury found that he had not been predisposed to commit the crime in the first incident. He erroneously refused to allow an additional instruction requested by the defense that if O’Leary was not convicted in the first incident then he could not be convicted in the following two because they were essentially the fruit of the first offense.

The jury found O’Leary not guilty of the first charge but convicted him on the second two, and Montgomery sentenced him to eleven years in prison. More than a year passed before the appellate court ruled in O’Leary’s favor, ordering him released from prison on bail and to face a new trial. The District Attorney’s Office decided not to pursue the case a second time and the charges against O’Leary were dropped. By that time he had been disbarred, and divorced by his wife. He was working as a legal assistant in a law firm. During the final hearing at which the charges were dropped and the case dismissed, O’Leary had lashed out at Montgomery, not specifically threatening him with violence but yelling in court that the judge would pay someday for the mistake that cost O’Leary his career, his marriage, and his life savings.

Gustafson and Reyes investigated O’Leary and checked out his alibi, determining that at the exact time of the murder, his employee ID for the law firm he worked at had registered at the security entrance to the company’s building. It wasn’t a complete alibi because there was no camera at the entrance. But Gustafson and Reyes did not pursue it further after Herstadt became suspect number one.

Bosch wrote a few notes down on a pad — ideas for how he might follow up on both of these tracks. But his gut told him that neither Kirk nor O’Leary was good for the killing, no matter how angry they were at Montgomery. He wanted to move on to the other three tracks to see if they were more viable.

He got up from the table to walk a bit before diving back in. His knee stiffened when he held it in a sitting position too long. He walked out onto the back deck of his house and checked out the view of the Cahuenga Pass. It was only midafternoon but the freeway down below was slow-moving and clogged in both directions. He realized he had worked straight through the morning. He was hungry but decided to put another hour into the case before going down the hill and getting something that would count as both lunch and dinner.

Back inside, the music had stopped and he went to the record stack to make another selection that would keep his momentum up. He decided to stay with a strong bass quarterbacking the band and started flipping through his Ron Carter albums.

He was interrupted by the doorbell.

27

Ballard was at the door.

“I need your help,” she said.

Bosch stepped back and let her enter. He then followed her in, noticing that she had a backpack over her shoulder. As she walked past the dining room table, she looked down at the documents stacked in separate piles.

“Is that the Montgomery case?” she asked.

“Uh, yes,” Bosch said. “We got a copy of the murder book in discovery. I’m just looking at the other—”

“Great, so you’re working here on it.”

“Where else would I—”

“No, that’s good. I want you to help me from here.”

She seemed nervous, ramped up. Bosch wondered if she had slept since finishing her shift.

“What are we talking about here, Renée?” he asked.

“I need you to monitor a wiretap when I’m not able to,” she said. “I have the software on my laptop and I can leave it with you.”

Bosch paused to gather his thoughts before replying.

“This is in regard to the Hilton case?” he asked.

“Yes, of course,” she said. “Our case. You can work on Montgomery, but when a call or text comes in you’ll get an alert on my laptop and you just need to monitor it. It’ll be good that you have something else to do while monitoring.”

She gestured toward the stacks spread on the table.

“Renée,” he said. “Is this a legal tap?”

Ballard laughed.

“Of course,” she said. “I got the search warrant signed this morning. Then spent the next two hours getting it set up with the providers — a landline and a cell. Text messages included. Then I went to the tech unit and had the software put on my laptop.”

“You went to Billy Thornton with this?” Bosch asked.

“Yes, Department 107. What’s wrong, Harry?”

“He wouldn’t have signed off on this without an approval from the department. I thought this was a case we were working. Now command staff knows about it?”

“I had a captain sign off on it and he won’t be a problem for us.”

“Who?”

“Olivas.”

“What?”

“Harry, all you need to know is that it’s a legit wire. We’re good to go.”

“Does Billy still have the jazz photo on his wall?”

“Jesus Christ, you don’t believe me, do you? Ben Webster, okay? ‘The Brute and the Beauty.’ Happy?”

“‘Beautiful.’”

“What?”

“Webster — they called him ‘the Brute and the Beautiful.’”

“Whatever. Are you satisfied?”

“Yeah, okay, I’m satisfied.”

“I can’t believe you’d think I’d forge a search warrant.”

Bosch knew he had to change the subject.

“Well, when did Olivas make captain?”

“Just got the bars.”

Bosch knew that Olivas was Ballard’s nemesis in the department — and she his. He decided he didn’t want to know how she got him to sign off on the warrant. Asking her would risk another rift between them.

“So, it’s been a long time since I worked a wiretap,” he said instead. “We used to have to go out to the wiretap room in Commerce to listen. You’re saying I can monitor it from here?”

“Totally,” Ballard said. “It’s all on the laptop.”

Bosch nodded.

“So, who are we listening to?” he asked.

“Elvin Kidd,” Ballard said. “Starting tomorrow. I want to get you set up and comfortable on it, and then after my shift tomorrow morning I’m going to go out to Rialto and shake his tree. Hopefully, he’ll get on the phone and call or text to ask his old friends in South L.A. what’s going on. We get an admission and we’ll take him down.”

Bosch nodded again.

“You hungry?” he asked.

“Starving,” Ballard said.

“Good. Let’s get something to eat and talk this through. When was the last time you slept?”

“I don’t remember. But we had a deal, remember?”

“Right.”

Bosch drove. They went down the hill, crossed the freeway on Barham and over to the Smoke House by the Warner Brothers studio. Ballard reported that she had not eaten anything since a meal break on her last shift. She ordered a steak, a baked potato, and garlic toast to share. Bosch ordered a salad with grilled chicken. Ballard had brought her backpack into the restaurant and while they waited for their food she updated Bosch on her investigation, detailing her interview with Hilton’s former roommate, Nathan Brazil, which confirmed that Hilton was gay and in love with an unattainable man.

“It all leads to Kidd,” she said. “He owned that alley and he cleared everybody out, set up the meeting with Hilton, and then executed him.”

“And the motive?” Bosch asked.

“Pride. He couldn’t have this infatuated kid threatening his reputation. Did you look at the phone records in the murder book when you had it?”

“Yes, but just in a cursory way.”

“There were several calls from Hilton’s apartment line to a payphone number in South Central. It was in a shopping plaza at Slauson and Crenshaw, the heart of Rolling 60s turf. The original investigators didn’t do anything with it, thought it was a dealer connection, but I think Hilton was calling Kidd there or trying to reach him, and it was becoming a problem for him.”

Bosch sat back and considered her theory as their food arrived. Once the waiter was gone, he summarized.

“Forbidden love,” he said. “Lovers in prison, but outside that was a threat to Kidd’s position and power. It could get him ousted — maybe even killed.”

Ballard nodded.

“Nineteen-ninety?” she said. “That wasn’t going to go over on the gang streets.”

“That wouldn’t go over now,” Bosch said. “I heard about this case a few years before I quit where guys on a no-knock search warrant hit a stash house and caught a guy from Grape Street in bed with another guy. They used it to turn him into an inside man in five minutes flat. That was more leverage than holding a five-year sentence over his head. They know they can do the time if necessary, come out and be an operator. But nobody wants a gay rap in the gang. They get that and they’re done.”

They started to eat, both so hungry that they stopped talking. Bosch ran everything through his filters while silent and spoke when his hunger had been pushed back into its cage.

“So, tomorrow,” he said. “How are you going to push his buttons?”

“For one, I hope to catch him at home,” Ballard answered, her mouth still full with the last bite of her steak. “He’s married now and his business is in his wife’s name. When I start mentioning Hilton and their prior relationship, I hope he panics. I doubt the wife knows about his gay relationships. I have the sketchbook. I start showing the drawings and he’ll shit a brick.”

“But how does that get him on the phone? You’re making it between him and her.”

“What do you suggest, then?”

“I’m not sure yet. But you have to tie it back to the gang.”

“I thought about that, but then I put the risk on Dennard Dorsey. He’s in the Rolling 60s module at Men’s Central. If Kidd gets the word to somebody in there, Dorsey’s toast.”

“We need to scheme it some other way. Don’t use Dorsey.”

“There was another guy in the murder book who worked the street with Dorsey: Vincent Pilkey. But he died a few years back.”

“That was after Kidd left South Central, right? Think he’d know that Pilkey’s dead?”

Ballard shrugged and attacked the garlic toast.

“Hard to say,” she answered. “It could be risky using his name. Kidd might see right through the scam.”

“He might,” Bosch conceded.

He watched her eat the toast. She looked worn down, like a homeless person who had found a pizza crust in a trash can.

“I assume you’re going out there without backup,” he said.

“There is none,” she said. “This is you and me, and I need you on the phones.”

“What if I’m nearby? Someplace with Wi-Fi. There’s gotta be a Starbucks near whatever place you’re going. Or you can show me how to make my phone a hot spot. Maddie does that.”

“It’s too risky. You lose signal and you lose any calls that get made. I’ll be fine. It’s an in-and-out operation. I go in, light the fire, I get out. He — hopefully — starts making calls. Maybe texts.”

“We still need to figure out how you light the fire.”

“I think I just tell him I work cold cases, was assigned this one, and saw that he was never interviewed back in the day. I let it drop that back then there was a witness who described a shooter that looked a lot like him. He’ll deny, deny, I’ll leave, and my bet is he gets on the phone to try to find out who this witness is.”

Bosch thought about that and decided it could work.

“Okay,” he said. “Good.”

But he knew that if that was the plan, he needed to say something about Ballard’s readiness.

“Look, I know we made a deal and all that, but we’re talking about a high-risk move here and you need to be ready,” he said. “So, I have to say it: you look tired — and you can’t be tired when you do this. I think you should put it off until you’re ready.”

“I am ready,” Ballard protested. “And I can’t put it off. It’s a seventy-two-hour tap. That’s all the judge would give me. It starts as soon as the service providers begin sending the signal — which is supposed to be end of day today. So, we have three days to get this going. We can’t put it off.”

“Okay, okay. Then you take a sick day tonight so you can sleep.”

“I’m not doing that either. I’m needed on the late show and I’m not going to leave them high and dry.”

“Okay, then we go back to my house. I have a spare room you can use. You sleep on a bed, not sand, until it’s time to go to work tonight.”

“No. I have too much to do.”

“Then that’s too bad. You think this guy is safe because he’s supposedly not in the gang anymore. Well, he’s not safe — he’s dangerous. And I’m not going to monitor anything if I think there’s something wrong with the setup.”

“Harry, you’re overreacting.”

“No, I’m not. And right now, the thing I think is wrong is you. Sleep deprivation leads to mistakes, sometimes deadly mistakes, and I’m not going to be part of that.”

“Look, I appreciate what you’re saying but I’m not your daughter.”

“I know you’re not, and that has nothing to do with this. But what I said holds. You use the guest room or you can get Olivas to monitor the tap for you.”

“Fine. I’ll sleep. But I want to take this garlic toast to go.”

“Not a problem.”

Bosch looked around for the waiter so he could get the check.

28

While Ballard slept, Bosch went back to the Montgomery case. He kept the music off so as not to disturb her. Not knowing when she might get up, he decided to dive into the shortest stack of documents relating to the three remaining cases he needed to review. These emanated from Judge Montgomery’s service in civil court during the last two years of his life.

The shortest stack was actually a hybrid case: it involved the judge in both criminal and civil courts. It started with a murder case in which a man named John Proctor was convicted in an intentional hit-and-run of a woman who had been struck while walking to her car after leaving a Burbank bar, where she had rejected several efforts by Proctor to buy her drinks and start a conversation.

Proctor was represented at trial by an attorney named Clayton Manley. Proctor fired him after the conviction and hired an attorney named George Grayson to handle his appeal. Prior to Proctor’s sentencing, Grayson filed a motion for a new trial based on ineffective assistance of counsel. It is a routine gambit to request a new trial based on poor lawyering, though it is rarely successful. But in this case the argument had merit. The motion described several things Manley failed to do in prepping for trial, including exploring a third-party culpability defense based on the fact that the victim was in the midst of a bitter divorce at the time of her death and that her estranged husband had been arrested twice for domestic abuse.

The appeal also included several instances at trial when Manley did not ask pertinent questions of prosecution witnesses or had to be prompted by the judge to object to the prosecutor’s witness questioning. Twice during the trial while the jury was not in the courtroom Judge Montgomery hammered Manley for his poor performance, one time directly asking him if he was on any medication that could explain his lack of focus on the case.

Manley worked for the downtown law firm of Michaelson & Mitchell, which had taken on the case and then assigned it to Manley to handle. Though he had handled other criminal matters for the firm, it was his first murder case.

In a one-in-a-hundred decision, Montgomery ordered a new trial, revealing his decision at Proctor’s scheduled sentencing. In open court he agreed with Grayson’s contention that Manley had blown the case with his inattentiveness and inaction. In canceling the sentencing and ordering a new trial, Montgomery went on record with his view of Manley’s performance, castigating the lawyer for his many failures and banning him from handling any future cases in his court.

A reporter from the Los Angeles Times was in the courtroom, there to report on the sentencing in a case that had drawn significant media attention because of the nature of the crime. Instead, he left with a story about Manley, which when published the next day included many of Judge Montgomery’s harshest quotes. Manley quickly became a courthouse whipping boy, the butt of many lawyer jokes traded in courthouse hallways; he soon even garnered the nickname “UnManley.”

At the new trial, the jury found John Proctor not guilty. No one else was ever charged in the killing.

Montgomery then was shifted by the chief judge to civil court and soon enough became embroiled in one himself. Clayton Manley sued the judge for defamation, seeking damages for the “unjust and untrue” statements Montgomery had made in court that were then disseminated by the media. Manley claimed in the filing that Montgomery had turned him into a courthouse pariah and destroyed his career. Manley said he still worked for Michaelson & Mitchell but was no longer assigned criminal cases and had not appeared in court in any capacity since the Proctor case.

The lawsuit was quickly dismissed on the grounds that a judge’s rulings and statements in court were not only protected by the First Amendment right to free speech but sacrosanct for the unbiased and unfettered administration of justice in court. Manley appealed the ruling, but higher courts similarly rejected it twice before he dropped the matter.

That was the end of it, but when Montgomery was murdered a year later his clerk gave the name Clayton Manley to detectives asking who the judge’s enemies might be. Gustafson and Reyes thought enough of it to investigate, and started by reviewing all matters regarding the Proctor case. They saw enough there to proceed to the next level: Reyes interviewed Manley at his office with his own attorney, William Michaelson, present. Manley provided a solid alibi for the morning of the murder. He was in Hawaii on vacation with his wife at a resort on Lanai. Manley gave the detective copies of his boarding passes, hotel and restaurant receipts, and even photos from his iPhone of him on a fishing charter, taken the day Montgomery was murdered. He also provided copies of e-mails from friends and associates, including Michaelson, who reported the murder to him because they knew he was thousands of miles away in Hawaii.

The interview with Manley had occurred a week before the DNA testing came back with the match to Herstadt. It explained why the Manley stack was the shortest. The detectives apparently accepted Manley’s denial of involvement and his alibi.

Still, something about the Manley angle bothered Bosch. There was no mention in the chronological record of the interview with Manley having been set up in advance. In fact, that would have been poor form. Investigators routinely approach subjects without warning. It is better to get extemporaneous answers to questions rather than prepared statements. It’s a basic rule of homicide work: don’t let them see you coming.

But with no indication in the documents that Reyes gave any prior warning that he was coming to talk to Manley, the attorney was apparently prepared for the interview: he had his own attorney present and alibi documentation ready to be turned over. Bosch wondered if that bothered Reyes or Gustafson. Because it bothered him.

True, Manley had had a protracted dispute with Montgomery, so he could probably assume the police would want to talk to him. That wasn’t suspicious to Bosch. Even having a lawyer present didn’t raise an eyebrow. It was a law firm, after all. But the detail of the alibi was what bothered Bosch the most. It appeared to be bulletproof, right down to his providing the digital time stamp with the Hawaii photo taken just a few minutes before Montgomery was bladed in L.A. It had been Bosch’s experience that an alibi — even a legitimate one — was seldom bulletproof. This one felt to Bosch like a setup. Like maybe Manley knew precisely when he would need an alibi.

Gustafson and Reyes apparently didn’t feel the same way. A week later they dropped Manley from consideration when the DNA report landed. Bosch didn’t think he would have done so, even with a direct DNA match to another suspect.

He wrote a note on his pad. It was just one word: Manley. Bosch was comfortable dropping the first two avenues of investigation he had reviewed, but he felt Manley warranted further follow-up.

Bosch got up from the table and worked the stiffness out of his knee. He grabbed the cane he had leaned into a corner next to the front door and went out for a short walk, up the hill for a block and then back down. The knee got loose and felt pretty strong. He looked forward to retiring the cane completely in a few more days.

When he got back inside the house he found Ballard sitting at the table where he had been working.

“Who’s Manley?” she said.

“Just a guy, maybe a suspect,” Bosch said. “I thought you were going to sleep longer than a couple hours.”

“Didn’t need to. I feel refreshed. Two hours on a bed is worth five on the sand.”

“When are you going to stop doing that?”

“I don’t know. I like being by the water. My father used to say that salt water cures everything.”

“There are other ways to accomplish that. You might be ‘refreshed’ now, but by tomorrow morning you’re going to be dragging ass when you go off to confront Kidd.”

“I’ll be fine. I do this all the time.”

“That’s not reassuring. We have to work out some kind of signal so I can get you backup if you need it. You going in by yourself is crazy.”

“I work every night by myself. This is nothing new.”

Bosch shook his head. He still wasn’t happy.

“Look,” Ballard said, “what I want to do now is show you the software on my laptop so you can monitor everything after I go out there and stir up his shit. I’m going to come by in the morning and leave my laptop with you before going out there.”

“You can’t just transfer it to my computer?” Bosch asked.

“Not possible. It’s proprietary. But it will only take a few minutes to bring you up to date on everything. I know you’re old school and never did it this way.”

“Just show me.”

Bosch cleared space on the table so she could sit next to him. She opened the monitoring program.

“Oh good, we’re up,” she said. “The tap is in place.”

“So the seventy-two-hour clock is already ticking,” Bosch said.

“Right. But of course nothing said today is going to be worth a shit, since he doesn’t even know he’s being investigated.”

Ballard showed him how to run the software. She set separate alarm tones for Elvin Kidd’s cell and landline, which would sound on the computer any time a call came in or went out. There was a third tone for text messages coming in or going out. She reiterated the rules of listening in. By law the police were forbidden from listening to personal calls. If a call was not specifically about the crime documented in the probable cause statement in the search warrant, the listener had to turn off the speaker but was allowed to check in briefly every thirty seconds to confirm the ongoing phone conversation was personal in nature.

The software recorded only what was live-monitored. Calls not listened to were not recorded. This was why a wiretap required around-the-clock monitoring. It had been at least ten years since Bosch had been involved in a wiretap case. The software was all new but the rules had not changed. He told Ballard that he understood all of that.

“What about the fact that I’m not a cop anymore?” he asked. “What if something good comes in after you shake his tree and I’m sitting here by myself?”

“You’re still a reserve with San Fernando PD, aren’t you?” Ballard asked.

After leaving the LAPD, Bosch had signed on as a reserve at the tiny city in the Valley’s police department to work cold cases. But his tenure there had ended almost a year before, when he was accused of cutting too many corners on cases.

“Well, sort of,” he said. “They haven’t gotten around to taking my badge because there’s still a couple cases I worked on that haven’t gotten to court. The prosecutors want me to have a badge and be a reserve when I have to testify. So, technically, yes, I’m a reserve officer but I’m not really doing—”

“Doesn’t matter. You have a badge, and a reserve is still a sworn officer. We’re good. You can do this.”

“Okay.”

“So, I’ll come by in the morning, leave this with you, and you just leave it on while you do your work. And when you hear any of the alarms just start listening and recording until you know what kind of call it is.”

“And you’ll call me as soon as you’re going in.”

“Yes.”

“And when you’re out. When you’re clear.”

“Roger that. You don’t have to worry.”

“Somebody does. What about using a couple Rialto PD uniforms for backup? To wait outside while you’re inside.”

“If you insist, I will do that.”

“I insist.”

“Okay, I’ll call on my way out there, see if they can spare a car.”

“Good.”

That made Bosch feel better about everything. He just had to make sure in the morning she did as she said she would.

Ballard was reaching for her laptop to close it, when one of the tones she had programmed sounded.

“Ooh, incoming call,” she said. “We get to see how this works.”

She moved her hand down to the touch screen and slid the cursor to the Record button. They heard a man’s voice answer.

“Hello?”

29

It was a collect call from the Men’s Central jail. A robot voice informed the recipient that the call was coming from “D-squared,” and that he needed to hit the number 1 button to accept the call and the number 2 button to decline it. The call had come in on Elvin Kidd’s cell. He accepted the call.

“Yo, E — that you, n____?”

“What you want, boy? I ain’t putting up no bail on you, man. I’m out. You know that.”

“No, no, no, my n____. I ain’t want nothin’ — they got me on a parole hold anyway. I just givin’ you a heads-up, man.”

“About what?”

Ballard grabbed the pad Bosch had written the name Manley on, scribbled a note, and slid it in front of Bosch.

Bosch nodded. He understood now who was calling Kidd. Kidd and Dorsey couldn’t hear them if Ballard and Bosch talked, but they maintained silence because they wanted not to miss anything.

“It’s ’bout that thing in the alley way back when, man. Some cop come in here asking all about that thing that happened with that white boy.”

“Asking what?”

“Like was I there and what was going on.”

“What you tell ’em?”

“I didn’t say shit. I wudn’t even there. But I thought, you know, I should tell you they still interested, you know what I mean? Keep your head down, n_____.”

“When was this?”

“She came up in here Tuesday. They put me in a room with her.”

“She?”

“A lady cop. Kind I’d like to see on my bone, too.”

“She got a name?”

“Something like Ballet or something. I didn’t properly catch it at the start ’cause I was like, What you want with me, motherfucker? But she knew some shit, man. She knew me and V-Dog worked that alley back in the day. You remember him? He died up in Folsom or some shit. It’s like one of them cold case things, you know?”

“Who told her about me?”

“I ’on’t know. She just got up in my shit and asked about you.”

“How’d you get this number?”

“I ain’t had no number. I had to call a couple OGs to get it. That’s why it took me a couple days to get to you.”

“Which OG?”

“Marcel. He had a number for—”

“Okay, dog, don’t call me no more. I’m outta the game.”

“I know that, but I still thought you’d—”

The call was disconnected by Kidd.

Ballard immediately got up from her seat and started pacing. “Holy shit,” she said. “Dorsey just did what I was going to drive out there and do tomorrow.”

“But Kidd didn’t give anything up,” Bosch cautioned. “He was careful.”

“True, but he asked a lot of questions. We got the right guy. It’s him and we were fucking lucky the wire got set up already. But now what? Do I still go out there tomorrow?”

“No way. He’ll be ready for you and you don’t want that.” Ballard nodded while she paced the living room. “Can you play it again?” Bosch asked.

Ballard came back to the table and replayed the call. Bosch listened closely for anything that might sound like a code passed between the two old gangbangers. But he concluded that Kidd had taken the call out of the blue and there had been no secret message or code imparted. As Dorsey had said, he was simply passing on a warning about a potentially threatening situation.

“What do you think?” Ballard asked.

Bosch thought a moment.

“I think we wait and see if Kidd makes a move,” he said.

“But now that he knows about the investigation he may go offline,” Ballard said. “He’ll go buy a burner. I would if I were him.”

“I could go out and watch him tonight.”

“I’m going with you.”

“That won’t work. It’s two hours out there easy with rush hour and you have your shift you said you can’t miss. You’d have to turn around almost as soon as we got there. I’ll go and you monitor the wire, just in case he’s stupid.”

The text-message tone sounded from Ballard’s laptop. “Speaking of which,” she said.

She pulled up the message. It was outgoing from Kidd’s phone.

They both stared at the screen, waiting for a reply.

“You think it’s the Marcel that Dorsey mentioned?” Ballard asked.

“I don’t know,” Bosch said. “Probably.”

A short reply came through.

Bosch got up from the table to loosen his knee again.

“I guess if we figure out who Dulan is, we could set up on him tomorrow,” he said.

“Dulan’s is a soul food kitchen,” Ballard said. “Good stuff. But there’s at least three of them that I know of in South L.A.”

Bosch nodded, impressed by her knowledge.

“Any of them in Rolling 60s turf?” he asked.

“There’s one on Crenshaw in the fifties,” Ballard said.

“That’s probably it. You eat there? Will we stand out if we’re in there?”

“You will. But I can pass for high yellow.”

It was true. Ballard was mixed race — part Polynesian for sure, though Bosch had never asked about her ancestry.

“So, you inside and me outside,” he said. “Not sure I like that.”

“They’re not going to make a move in a crowded restaurant,” Ballard said. “At one o’clock that place will be hopping.”

“Then how would you even get close to them to hear anything?”

“I’ll figure it out.”

“You gotta dress down.”

“What? Why?”

“Because of what D-squared told him on the call — that you were a looker.”

“Not exactly what he said. But I take the point. I’ll go get a couple hours on the beach after work and I’ll come dressed down. Don’t worry.”

“Maybe we should call in the troops. Go to your lieutenant, tell him what you’ve been doing, get more bodies on this.”

“I go in with a homicide and it will be taken off me faster than a pickpocket takes a wallet on the Venice boardwalk.”

Bosch nodded. He knew she was right. He pointed to her laptop.

“At work tonight, can you trace that number he texted to, find out who it is?”

“I can try but it’s probably a burner.”

“I don’t know. Kidd’s been out of the game. He used his own cell to text — that was a mistake. Out of the game might mean he’s got no burner. And people still in the game have burners and change them all the time. But this is a number Kidd had — that he knew. It might be a legit phone.”

Ballard nodded.

“Maybe,” she said. “I’ll see if I can run it down.”

Bosch moved to the sliding door and opened it, then stepped out onto the deck. Ballard followed him.

“Amazing view,” she said.

“I like it best at night,” Bosch said. “The lights and everything. Even makes the freeway look pretty.”

Ballard laughed.

“You know, we still don’t know why John Jack had this murder book or why he sat on it for twenty years,” Bosch said.

Ballard came up to the deck railing next to him. “Does it matter? We have a bead on the doer. And we have opportunity and motive.”

“It matters to me,” Bosch said. “I want to know.”

“I think we’ll get there,” Ballard said. “We’ll figure it out.”

Bosch just nodded, but he was doubtful. They — Ballard mostly — had accomplished in a week what John Jack had not been able to do in two decades. Bosch was beginning to subscribe to Ballard’s theory that there was something sinister about it — that John Jack Thompson took the murder book because he didn’t want the case solved.

And that created a whole new mystery to think about. And a painful one at that.