The Wrong Side of Goodbye

25

Twenty minutes later Bosch left the house. When he got to the rented Cherokee he used the GPS detector for the first time, walking completely around the SUV, holding the device down low with its antenna pointed toward the undercarriage and wheel wells. He got no response. He popped the front hood and went through a similar process as instructed in the manual. Again, nothing. He then switched the device to its jamming frequency as a precaution and got behind the wheel.

He took Wrightwood down to Ventura in Studio City and then jogged west to his bank, which was located in a shopping plaza off of Laurel Canyon Boulevard. He had not been to the safe deposit box in at least two years. It contained primarily his own documents-birth and marriage and divorce certificates and military service documentation. He kept his two Purple Hearts in a box in there along with a commendation he had received from the chief of police for pulling a pregnant woman out of a fiery wreck when he was a boot. He put one copy of the Vance documents in the box and then returned it to the handler from the bank.

Bosch checked his surroundings when he got back to the rental car and initially saw no sign of surveillance. But when he pulled out of the bank’s parking lot onto Laurel Canyon he saw in hisrearview a car with dark tinted windows pull out of the same lot but at a different exit point and fall in behind him a hundred yards back.

Bosch knew it was a busy shopping plaza so he didn’t immediately jump to the conclusion that he was being followed. But he decided to avoid the freeway and stay on Laurel Canyon so he could keep a better eye on the traffic behind him. Continuing north, he checked the mirror every block or so. By its distinctive grille work, he identified the dark green car trailing him as a BMW sedan.

After two miles he was still on Laurel Canyon, and the BMW was still in traffic behind him. Even though Bosch had slowed at times and sped up at others and the Beemer had occasionally changed lanes on the four-lane boulevard, it had never changed the distance between them.

Bosch became increasingly convinced he was being tailed. He decided to try to confirm it by doing a basic square-knot maneuver. He took the next right, pinned the accelerator, and drove down to the stop sign at the end of the block. He took another right and then turned right again at the next stop sign. He then drove at the speed limit back to Laurel Canyon Boulevard. He checked the mirrors. The Beemer had not followed him through the maneuver.

He turned back onto Laurel Canyon and continued north. He saw no sign of the Beemer. It was either well north of him because the driver was not tailing him, or it was gone because Bosch’s maneuver had revealed to the driver that he had spotted the tail.

Ten minutes later Bosch pulled into the employee lot at the San Fernando police station. He entered through the side door and found the detective bureau empty. He wondered if Sisto had gone with Lourdes to re-search the Sahagun house. Maybe Bella had told Sisto about Bosch’s poor review of Friday’s search and Sisto had insisted on going as a result.

At his desk, Bosch picked up the phone and called Lourdes to inquire about the search but the call rang through to voice mail and he left word for her to call back when she was free.

With no sign of Trevino around, he next ran a DMV search on Ida Townes Forsythe and picked up an address on Arroyo Drive in South Pasadena. He thought of the envelope from Vance having a South Pasadena postmark as he jumped over to Google Maps and plugged in the address. He pulled up a visual and saw that Forsythe had a very nice home on a street overlooking the Arroyo Seco Wash. It appeared that Vance had taken good care of his most trusted and long-term employee.

His last move in the detective bureau was to pull out the file on one of the unsolved murders he was working and fill out an evidence recovery form. He listed the evidence as “victim’s property,” then put the two original Vance documents and the gold pen, contained in the original mailing envelope, into a plastic evidence bag. He sealed the bag and put it into a cardboard evidence storage box. He sealed this as well with red breakaway tape, which would show any sign of tampering.

Bosch walked the box back to the evidence control room and checked it into the locker where other evidence accumulated during the investigation was already being stored. Bosch believed the original of the Vance will was now properly hidden and secured. The evidence control officer printed a receipt for him and he took it back to the bureau to put it in the case file. He was just locking his file drawer when his phone buzzed with a call on the intercom. It was the front desk officer.

“Detective Bosch, you have a visitor up front.”

Bosch guessed that it was somebody coming in with what they believed was a tip on the Screen Cutter. He knew that he couldn’t get bogged down with that case today. He hit the intercom button.

“Is it a tip about the Screen Cutter? Can you ask whoever it is to come back this afternoon and ask for Detective Lourdes?”

There was no immediate response and Bosch assumed the desk officer was asking the visitor to state his or her business. He knew that if it was another Screen Cutter victim, he would need to drop everything and handle it. He could not let a potential sixth victim walk out of the police station without being interviewed.

He went to his screen, clicked back to the DMV page on Ida Forsythe, and printed it out so he would have her address handy when he went to her home to talk to her. He was about to go retrieve it from the communal printer, when the desk man’s voice came back over the intercom.

“He’s asked for you specifically, Detective Bosch. He says it’s about the Vance case.”

Bosch stared at his desk phone for a long moment before responding.

“Tell him I’m coming out. One minute.”

Bosch signed off his computer and left the bureau. But he went out the side door rather than taking the main hallway to the front lobby of the station. He then walked around the outside of the station to the front, where he stood at the corner of the building and checked the street to try to determine if his visitor had come alone.

He noticed no one who looked suspicious but he did see a dark green BMW with near-black tinted windows parked at the curb in front of the Department of Public Works across from the police station. The car was as long as Haller’s Town Car and Bosch could see a driver waiting behind the wheel.

He quickly doubled back to the side entrance of the station and went back through to the front lobby. He was expecting the visitorto be Sloan, but when he got there he realized he had shot low. It was Creighton, the man who had sent him down the path to Vance in the first place.

“Having trouble following me?” Bosch said by way of a greeting. “You come in to get my itinerary?”

Creighton nodded his confirmation that he had been tailing Bosch.

“Yes, I should have known better,” he said. “You probably had us since the bank.”

“What do you want, Creighton?”

Creighton frowned. Bosch’s dispensing with first names and titles signaled that the old LAPD bonds were of no use to him here.

“I want you to stand down,” Creighton said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Bosch said. “Stand down from what?”

“Your employer has died. Your employment is now terminated. Speaking for the corporation, which is all there is now, stop what you’re doing.”

“What makes you think I’m doing anything?”

“We know what you’re doing and we know why. We even know what your low-rent attorney is doing. We’ve been watching you.”

Bosch had thoroughly scoured the street before leaving his house. He now knew that rather than looking for people and cars, he should have looked for cameras. He now wondered if they had been inside his home as well. And making the jump to Haller, Bosch assumed that the lawyer had made a call about the case that had put him on their radar as well.

He looked at Creighton without showing any indication of being intimidated.

“Well, I’ll take all of this under advisement,” he said. “You know your way out.”

He stepped away from Creighton but then the former deputy chief spoke again.

“I don’t think you really understand the position you’re in.”

Bosch turned and came back to him. He got up in his face.

“What position is that?”

“You are on very dangerous ground. You need to make careful decisions. I represent people who reward those who make careful decisions.”

“I don’t know if that is a threat or a bribe or maybe both.”

“Take it any way you want.”

“Okay, then, I will take it as a threat and a bribe and you are under arrest.”

Bosch grabbed him by the elbow and in one swift move directed him face-first to the tiled wall of the lobby. With one hand pressing against Creighton’s back, he snaked his other hand under his jacket and behind his own back to his handcuffs. Creighton tried to turn his head to face him.

“What the hell are you doing?” Creighton barked.

“You are under arrest for threatening a police officer and attempted bribery,” Bosch said. “Spread your legs and keep your face against that wall.”

Creighton seemed too stunned to react. Bosch kicked one of his heels and the man’s foot slipped across the tile. Bosch finished cuffing him and then did a hand search, coming up with a holstered pistol on Creighton’s right hip.

“You’re making a big mistake,” Creighton said.

“Maybe,” Bosch said. “But it feels right because you’re such a pompous ass, Cretin.”

“I’ll be out in fifteen minutes.”

“You know they always called you that, right? Cretin? Let’s go.”

Bosch nodded to the desk officer behind the plexiglass windowand he buzzed the door open. Bosch walked Creighton back to the holding section of the station, where he turned him over to the jail officer.

Bosch filled out an arrest report and booked the gun into a property locker, then took the jail officer aside and told him to take his time getting around to letting Creighton make his lawyer call.

The last he saw of Creighton was him being locked behind a solid steel door in a single-bed cell. He knew he wouldn’t be in there long but it would give Bosch enough time to head south without being followed.

Bosch decided to leave the interview with Ida Townes Forsythe for another day. He jumped on the 5 freeway, which would take him all the way to San Diego, with a possible stop in Orange.

He checked his watch and did some math, then called his daughter. As usual the call went straight to message. He told her he would be passing through her area between 12:30 and 1 p.m., and made the offer to take her to lunch or to grab a cup of coffee if she had the time and was up for it. He told her he had something to talk to her about.

A half hour later he was just moving past downtown L.A. when he got the call back from Maddie.

“Are you coming down the Five?” she asked.

“Hello to you too,” he said. “Yes, I’m on the Five. It’s moving pretty good so I think I’ll be down your way closer to twelve-fifteen.”

“Well, I can do lunch. What did you want to tell me?”

“Well, let’s talk at lunch. You want to meet or should I come in and pick you up?”

It would be about a fifteen-minute ride from the freeway to campus.

“I’ve got such a good parking spot, any chance you can come get me?”

“Yeah, I just offered to. What do you feel like eating?”

“There’s a place I wanted to try over on Bolsa.”

Bosch knew that Bolsa was in the heart of an area known as Little Saigon, and far from campus.

“Uh,” he said. “That’s kind of far out from the school. To come in to get you, then go out there and then back in to drop you is probably going to take too much time. I need to get down to-”

“Okay, I’ll drive. I’ll meet you there.”

“Can we just go someplace near the school, Mads? If it’s Vietnamese, you know that I don’t…”

“Dad, it’s been, like, fifty years. Why can’t you just eat the food? It’s really being racist.”

Bosch was quiet for a long moment while he composed an answer. He tried to speak calmly as he delivered it, but things were boiling up inside him. Not just what his daughter had said. But Creighton, the Screen Cutter, all of it.

“Maddie, racism has nothing to do with it and you should be very careful about throwing an accusation like that around,” he said. “When I was your age I was in Vietnam, fighting to protect the people over there. And I had volunteered to be there. Was that racist?”

“It wasn’t that simple, Dad. You were supposedly fighting communism. Anyway, it just seems weird that you put up this big stand against the food.”

Bosch was silent. There were things about himself and his life that he never wanted to share with her. The whole four years of his military service was one of them. She knew he had served but he had never spoken to her about details of his time in Southeast Asia.

“Look, for two years when I was over there I ate that food,” he said. “Every day, every meal.”

“Why? Didn’t they have regular American food on the base or something?”

“Yes, but I couldn’t eat it. If I did they would smell me in the tunnels. I had to smell like them.”

Now it was her turn to be silent.

“I don’t-what does that mean?” she finally said.

“You smell like what you eat. In enclosed spaces. It comes out of your pores. My job-I had to go into tunnels, and I didn’t want the enemy to know I was there. So I ate their food every day, every meal, and I can’t do it anymore. It brings it all back to me. Okay?”

There was only silence from her. Bosch held the top of the wheel and drummed his fingers against the dashboard beyond it. He immediately regretted telling her what he just had.

“Look, maybe we skip lunch today,” he said. “I’ll get to San Diego earlier and take care of my business, then maybe tomorrow on my way back up we get together for lunch or dinner. If I’m lucky down there and get everything done we might be able to do breakfast tomorrow.”

Breakfast was her favorite meal and the Old Towne near the college was full of good places to get it.

“I have morning classes,” Maddie said. “But let’s try it tomorrow for lunch or dinner.”

“You sure that’s okay?” he asked.

“Yes, sure. But what were you going to tell me?”

He decided he didn’t want to scare her by warning her to be extra careful because the case he was working might overlap into her world. He’d save that for the next day and an in-person conversation.

“It can wait,” he said. “I’ll call you in the morning to figure out what will work.”

They ended the conversation and Bosch brooded on it for the next hour as he made his way down through Orange County. He hated the idea of burdening his daughter with anything from his past or his present. He didn’t think it was fair.