Angels Flight (38 page)

When he got to the threshold Bosch called out a hello and he heard Kate Kincaid’s voice telling him to enter. He found her in the living room, sitting on a couch that was covered in a white sheet. All the furniture was covered in this way. The room looked like a meeting of big, heavy ghosts. She noticed Bosch’s eyes taking in the room.

“When we moved we didn’t take a single piece of furniture,” she said. “We decided just to start over. No reminders.”

Bosch nodded and then studied her. She was dressed completely in white, with a silk blouse tucked into tailored linen pants. She looked like a ghost herself. Her large black leather purse, which was on the couch next to her, seemed to clash with her outfit and the sheets covering the furniture.

“How are you, Mrs. Kincaid?”

“Please call me Kate.”

“Kate then.”

“I am very fine, thank you. Better than I have been in a long, long time. How are you?”

“I’m just so-so today, Kate. I had a bad night. And I don’t like it when it rains.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. It does look like you haven’t slept.”

“Do you mind if I look around a little bit before we start talking?”

He had a signed search warrant for the house in his briefcase but he didn’t want to bring it up yet.

“Please do,” she said. “Stacey’s room is down the hall to your left. First door on the left.”

Bosch left his briefcase on the tiled entryway floor and headed the way she had directed. The furniture in the girl’s room was not covered. The white sheets that had covered everything were in piles on the floor. It looked like someone — probably the dead girl’s mother — had visited here on occasion. The bed was unmade. The pink bedspread and matching sheets were twisted into a knot — not as if by someone sleeping, but maybe by someone who had lain on the bed and gathered the bedclothes to her chest. It made Bosch feel bad seeing it that way.

Bosch stepped to the middle of the room, keeping his hands in the pockets of his raincoat. He studied the girl’s things. There were stuffed animals and dolls, a shelf of picture books. No movie posters, no photos of young television stars or pop singers. It was almost as if the room belonged to a girl much younger than Stacey Kincaid had been at the end. Bosch wondered if the design was her parents’ or her own, as if maybe she had thought by holding on to the things of her past she could somehow avoid the horror of the present. The thought made him feel worse than when he had studied the bedclothes.

He noticed a hairbrush on the bureau and saw strands of blond hair caught in it. It made him feel a little easier. He knew that the hair from the brush could be used, if it ever came to the point of connecting evidence — possibly from the trunk of a car — to the dead girl.

He stepped over and looked at the window. It was a slider and he saw the black smudges of fingerprint powder still on the frame. He unlocked the window and pulled it open. There were splinter marks where the latch had supposedly been jimmied with a screwdriver or similar tool.

Bosch looked out through the rain at the back yard. There was a lima bean–shaped pool that was covered with a plastic tarp. Rainwater was collecting on the tarp. Again Bosch thought of the girl. He wondered if she ever dove into the pool to escape and to swim to the bottom to scream.

Past the pool he noticed the hedge that surrounded the back yard. It was ten feet high and insured backyard privacy. Bosch recognized the hedge from the computer images he had seen on the Charlotte’s Web Site.

Bosch closed the window. Rain always made him sad. And this day he didn’t need it to feel that way. He already had the ghost of Frankie Sheehan in his head, he had a crumbled marriage he didn’t have time to think about, and he had haunting thoughts about the little girl with the lost-in-the-woods face.

He took his hand from his pocket to open the closet door. The girl’s clothes were still there. Colorful dresses on white plastic hangers. He looked through them until he found the white dress with the little semaphore flags. He remembered that from the web site, too.

He went back out into the hallway and checked the other rooms. There was what looked like a guest bedroom, which Bosch recognized as the room from the photos on the web page. This was where Stacey Kincaid had been assaulted and filmed. Bosch didn’t stay long. Further down the hall were a bathroom, the master suite and another bedroom, which had been converted into a library and office.

He went back out to the living room. It did not look as though Kate Kincaid had moved. He picked up his briefcase and walked into the room to join her.

“I’m a little damp, Mrs. Kincaid. All right if I sit down?”

“Of course. And it’s Kate.”

“I was thinking that I’d rather keep things on a formal basis for the moment, if you don’t mind.”

“Suit yourself, Detective.”

He was angry at her, angry at what had happened in this house and how the secret had been locked away. He had seen enough during his tour of the place to confirm in his own mind what Kizmin Rider had fervently believed the night before.

He sat down on one of the covered chairs across from the couch and put his briefcase on his knees. He opened it and started going through some of the contents, which from her angle Kate Kincaid could not see.

“Did you find something of interest in Stacey’s bedroom?”

Bosch stopped what he was doing and looked over the top of the briefcase at her for a moment.

“Not really,” he said. “I was just getting a feel for the place. I assume it was thoroughly searched before and there isn’t anything in there that I could find. Did Stacey like the pool?”

He went back to his work inside the briefcase while she told him what a fine swimmer her daughter had been. Bosch really wasn’t doing anything. He was just following an act he had rehearsed in his head all morning.

“She could go up and back without having to come up for air,” Kate Kincaid said.

Bosch closed the case and looked at her. She was smiling at the memory of her daughter. Bosch smiled but without any warmth.

“Mrs. Kincaid, how do you spell innocence?”

“Excuse me?”

“The word. Innocence. How do you spell it?”

“Is this about Stacey? I don’t understand. Why are you — ”

“Indulge me for a moment. Please. Spell the word.”

“I’m not a good speller. With Stacey I always kept a dictionary in my purse in case she asked about a word. You know, one of those little ones that — ”

“Go ahead. Try it.”

She paused to think. The confusion was evident on her face.

“I-double n, I know there’s two. I-double n-o-c-e-n-s-e.”

She looked at him and raised her eyebrows in a question. Bosch shook his head and reopened the briefcase.

“Almost,” he said. “But there’s two c’s, no s.”

“Darn. I told you.”

She smiled at him. He took something out of the briefcase, closed it and put it down on the floor. He got up and walked across to the couch. He handed her a plastic document envelope. Inside it was one of the anonymous letters that had been sent to Howard Elias.

“Take a look,” he said. “You spelled it wrong there, too.”

She stared at the letter for a long time and then took a deep breath. She spoke without looking up at Bosch.

“I guess I should have used my little dictionary. But I was in a hurry when I wrote this.”

Bosch felt a lifting inside. He knew then that there would be no fight, no difficulty. The woman had been waiting for this moment. Maybe she knew it was coming. Maybe that was why she had said she felt better than she had in a long, long time.

“I understand,” Bosch said. “Would you like to talk to me about this, Mrs. Kincaid? About everything?”

“Yes,” she said, “I would.”

• • •

Bosch put a fresh battery into the tape recorder, then turned it on and put it down on the coffee table, the microphone pointed up so that it would capture his voice as well as Kate Kincaid’s.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.

He then identified himself and said who she was, noted the date, time and location of the interview. He read off a constitutional rights advisement from a printed form he had taken from his briefcase.

“Do you understand these rights as I have just read them?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Do you wish to talk with me, Mrs. Kincaid, or do you wish to contact an attorney?”

“No.”

“No what?”

“No attorney. An attorney can’t help me. I want to talk.”

This gave Bosch pause. He was thinking about how best to keep hair off the cake.

“Well, I can’t give you legal advice. But when you say, ‘An attorney can’t help me,’ I’m not sure that that is going to constitute a waiver. You see what I mean? Because it is always possible that an attorney could — ”

“Detective Bosch, I don’t want an attorney. I fully understand my rights and I don’t want an attorney.”

“Okay, then I need you to sign this paper at the bottom and then sign again where it says that you do not request an attorney.”

He put the rights form down on the coffee table and watched her sign it. He then took it back and made sure she had signed her own name. He then signed it himself as the witness and put it in one of the slots of the accordion file in the briefcase. He sat back down in the chair and looked at her. He thought for a moment about talking to her about a spousal waiver but decided that could wait. He’d let the district attorney’s office handle that — when and if the time came.

“Then I guess this is it,” he said. “You want to start, Mrs. Kincaid, or do you want me to ask you questions?”

He was using her name frequently on purpose — in case the tape was ever played before a jury there would be no misunderstanding of whom the voices belonged to.

“My husband killed my daughter. I guess that’s what you want to know first. That’s why you are here.”

Bosch froze for a moment and then slowly nodded.

“How do you know this?”

“For a long time it was a suspicion . . . then it became my belief based on things I had heard. Eventually, he actually told me. I finally confronted him and he admitted it.”

“What exactly did he tell you?”

“He said that it was an accident — but you don’t strangle people by accident. He said she threatened him, said that she was going to tell her friends what he . . . what he and his friends did to her. He said he was trying to stop her, to talk her out of doing it. He said things got out of hand.”

“This occurred where?”

“Right here. In the house.”

“When?”

She gave the date of her daughter’s reported abduction. She seemed to understand that Bosch had to ask some questions that had obvious answers. He was building a record.

“Your husband had sexually abused Stacey?”

“Yes.”

“He admitted this to you?”

“Yes.”

She started to cry then and opened her purse for a tissue. Bosch let her alone for a minute. He wondered if she was crying because of grief or guilt or out of relief that the story was finally being told. He thought it was probably a combination of all three.

“Over how long a period was she abused?” he finally asked.

Kate Kincaid dropped the tissue to her lap.

“I don’t know. We were married five years before . . . before she died. I don’t know when it started.”

“When did you become aware of it?”

“I would rather not answer that question, if you don’t mind.”

Bosch studied her. Her eyes were downcast. The question was at the foundation of her guilt.

“It’s important, Mrs. Kincaid.”

“She came to me once.” She got a fresh tissue from her purse for a fresh torrent of tears. “About a year before . . . She said that he was doing things she didn’t think were right . . . At first, I didn’t believe her. But I asked him about it anyway. He denied it, of course. And I believed him. I thought it was an adjustment problem. You know, to a stepfather. I thought maybe this was her way of acting out or something.”

“And later?”

She didn’t say anything. She looked down at her hands. She pulled her purse onto her lap and held it tightly.

“Mrs. Kincaid?”

“And later there were things. Little things. She never wanted me to go out and leave her with him — but she’d never tell me why. Looking back, it is obvious why. It wasn’t so obvious then. One time he was taking a long time in her room saying good night. I went to see what was wrong and the door was locked.”

“Did you knock on the door?”

She sat frozen for a long moment before shaking her head no.

“Is that a no?”

Bosch had to ask it for the tape.

“Yes, no. I did not knock.”

Bosch decided to press on. He knew that mothers of incest and molestation victims often didn’t see the obvious or take the obvious steps to save their daughters from jeopardy. Now Kate Kincaid lived in a personal hell in which her decision to give up her husband — and herself — to public ridicule and criminal prosecution would always seem like too little too late. She had been right. A lawyer couldn’t help her now. No one could.

“Mrs. Kincaid, when did you become suspicious of your husband’s involvement in your daughter’s death?”

“During Michael Harris’s trial. You see I believed he did it — Harris. I mean, I just didn’t believe that the police would plant fingerprints. Even the prosecutor assured me that it was unlikely that it could be done. So I believed in the case. I wanted to believe. But then during the trial one of the detectives, I think it was Frank Sheehan, was testifying and he said they arrested Michael Harris at the place where he worked.”

“The car wash.”

“Right. He gave the address and the name of the place. And it hit me then. I remembered going to that same car wash with Stacey. I remembered her books were in the car. I told my husband and said we should tell Jim Camp. He was the prosecutor. But Sam talked me out of it. He said the police were sure and he was sure that Michael Harris was the killer. He said if I raised the question the defense would find out and use the information to twist the case. Like with the O.J. case, the truth meant nothing. We’d lose the case. He reminded me that Stacey was found right near Harris’s apartment . . . He said he probably saw her with me at the car wash that day and started to stalk us — stalk her. He convinced me . . . and I let it go. I still wasn’t sure it wasn’t Harris. I did what my husband told me.”