Lost Light (34 page)

 

W
hile the cop on the deck above kept his gun on me his partner dropped through the trapdoor and made his way down the slope to me. He had a flashlight in one hand and a gun in the other and the wild eyes of a man who has no idea what he has stepped into.

“Roll over and put your hands behind your back,” he ordered, adrenaline drawing his voice high and tight.

I did as I was instructed and he put his flashlight down on the ground as he cuffed my wrists, thankfully not in the style of the FBI. I tried to calmly talk to him.

“Just so you know, I —”

“I don’t want to know anything from you.”

“— I’m LAPD retired. Out of Hollywood. Pulled the pin last year after twenty-five-plus.”

“Good for you. Why don’t you save it for the suits?”

My house was in North Hollywood Division. I knew there was no reason why they should know me or care.

“Hey,” said the one from above. “What’s his name? Put the light on him.”

The man on the ground put the light in my face from a foot away. It was blinding.

“What’s your name?”

“Harry Bosch. I worked homicide.”

“Har—”

“I know who he is, Swanny. He’s all right. Get the light out of his face.”

Swanny took the light away.

“Yeah, fine. But the cuffs stay on. The suits can sort it all—ah, Jesus!”

He had put his light on the faceless body in the brush to my left. Linus Simonson, or what was left of him.

“Don’t puke, Swanny,” came the voice from above. “It’s a crime scene.”

“Fuck you, Hurwitz, I’m not gonna puke.”

I heard him moving around. I tried to lift my head to watch him but the brush was too tall. I could only listen. It sounded like he was moving from body to body. I was right.

“Hey, we got a live one down here! Call it in.”

That would be Banks, I assumed. I was glad to hear it. I had the feeling I was going to need a survivor to back up my account. I figured that with Banks facing the fall by himself for the whole thing, he would cut a deal to save his ass and tell the story.

I rolled over and sat up. The cop was kneeling next to Banks on the dirt below the deck. He looked over at me.

“I didn’t tell you to move.”

“I couldn’t breathe with my face in the dirt.”

“Don’t fucking move again.”

“Hey, Swanny,” Hurwitz called down. “The stiff in the house? He’s got a badge. FBI.”

“Holy shit!”

“Yeah, holy shit.”

And they were right. It was a holy shit case. Within the hour the place was swarmed. By the LAPD. By the LAFD. By the FBI. By the media. By my count, there were six helicopters circling in the sky through most of the night, the cacophony so loud I found myself preferring the shotgun blast ringing in my ears.

The LAFD used a chopper to bring Banks up out of the canyon on a stretcher. When they were done with him I called the paramedics over and they put a clear aloe-based gel over the gas burns on my face. They gave me an aspirin and told me the injuries were minor and that there would be no scarring. It felt to me like I’d had my face laser-peeled by a blind surgeon.

I was uncuffed long enough to climb up the slope and then up through the trapdoor. In my house I was recuffed and made to sit on a couch in the living room. From there I could see Milton’s legs extending from the hallway as a crime scene team hovered over him.

Once all of the suits started showing up it started getting serious. Most of them followed the same pattern. They came in, somberly studied Milton’s body, then walked through the living room without looking at me and out onto the deck, where they looked down at the other three bodies. Then they came back in, looked at me without saying a word and went into the kitchen, where somebody had taken it upon himself to open up my new bag of coffee and put the percolator into heavy rotation.

This went on for at least two hours. At first I didn’t know any of them because they were North Hollywood detectives. But then the command decision was made to shift the investigation—LAPD’s part of it—to Robbery-Homicide Division. When the RHD dicks started showing up it started getting like old-home week. I knew many of them and had even worked side by side with some. It wasn’t until Kiz Rider showed up from the chief’s office that anybody thought to take the cuffs off my wrists. She angrily demanded that I be released from the bindings and when nobody made a move to do it, she did it herself.

“You okay, Harry?”

“I think I am now.”

“Your face is red and kind of puffy. You want me to call paramedics?”

“They already checked me out. Minor burns from getting too close to the wrong end of a shotgun.”

“How do you want to do this? You know the score. You want to get a lawyer or can we talk?”

“I’ll talk to you, Kiz. I’ll tell you the whole story. Otherwise, I’ll take the lawyer.”

“I’m not in RHD anymore, Harry. You know that.”

“You should be and you know that.”

“But I’m not.”

“Well, that’s the deal, Kiz. Take it or leave it. I’ve got a good lawyer.”

She thought about it for a few moments.

“All right, wait here for a minute and I’ll be right back.”

She went out the front door to consult with the powers that be about my offer. While she was gone and I was waiting I saw Special Agent John Peoples come in and crouch next to Milton’s body. He then looked over at me and held my eyes. If he was trying to send me a message I wasn’t sure exactly what it was. But he knew I held something of his in the balance. His future.

Rider came back inside and over to me.

“This is the deal. It’s turning into a major gang bang. We’ve got FBI all over this. The guy on the floor is apparently from a terrorism squad and that trumps all. They’re not going to let you and me waltz off into the sunset.”

“Okay, this is what I’ll do. I’ll talk to you and one agent. I want it to be Roy Lindell. Wake him up and bring him in and I’ll lay it all out for everybody. It’s got to be you and Roy or I lawyer up and everybody can figure it out for themselves.”

She nodded and turned and went back out. I noticed that Peoples was no longer in the hallway but I hadn’t seen him leave.

This time Rider was gone for a half hour. But when she came back she strode in with a command presence. I knew before she told me that the deal had been made. The case was hers, at least on the LAPD side of the ledger.

“Okay, we’re going to go down the hill to North Hollywood Division. We’ll use a room there and they’ll tape it for us. Lindell is on his way there. This way everybody’s happy and everybody’s got a piece.”

That was always the way. You had to walk the gauntlet of departmental and intra-agency politics just to get the job done. I was glad I no longer had a part of it.

“You can stand up now, Harry,” Rider said. “I’ll drive.”

I stood up.

“I want to go out on the deck first. I want to look down there.”

She let me go. I walked across the deck and looked down over the railing. Below, large crime scene lights had been erected. The slope was like an anthill with crime scene techs working all over the place. Crews from the medical examiner’s office were huddled over the bodies. Above it all the helicopters moved in a loud, multilevel choreography. I knew that whatever relationships I’d previously had with my neighbors were surely gone now.

“Know what, Kiz?”

“What, Harry?”

“I think it’s time to sell this place.”

“Yeah, good luck with that, Harry.”

She took me by the arm and pulled me away from the railing.

 

T
he North Hollywood station was the newest in the city. It was built post-earthquake and Rodney King riots. On the outside it was a brick fortress designed to withstand both tectonic and social upheavals. On the inside it was state-of-the-art electronics and comfort. I was sat in the center seat of a table in a large interview room. I could not see the microphones and the camera but I knew they were there. I also knew I had to be careful. I had made a bad deal. If a quarter century in the cops had taught me anything, it was not to talk to cops without a lawyer’s advice. And here I was about to do just that. I was about to open up to two people predisposed to believe me and to want to help me. But that wouldn’t matter. What would matter was the tape. I had to step carefully and make sure I said nothing that could come back on me when the tape was reviewed by those who were not my friends.

Kizmin Rider started things off by entering all three of our names into the record, reporting the date, time and location, and then reading me my constitutionally guaranteed right to a lawyer and to hold my tongue if I wished. She then asked me to acknowledge both orally and in writing that I understood these rights and was willingly waiving them. I did so. I had taught her well.

She then got right to it.

“Okay, Harry, you have four people including a federal agent dead at your house, not to mention a fifth man in a coma. You want to tell us all about it?”

“I killed two of them—in self-defense. And the guy in the coma, I did that too.”

“Okay, tell us what happened.”

I began the story at the Baked Potato and took it from there. I mentioned Sugar Ray, the quartet, the porter, the bartenders and their tattoos. I even described the cashier I had bought the coffee from at Ralph’s. I used as much detail as I could remember because I knew that the details would convince them once they checked it all out. I knew from experience that conversation was hearsay, it wasn’t provable one way or the other. So if you were going to tell a story about what people said and how they said it—especially people who were no longer alive—then you’d best salt the story with the things that could be checked and proven. The details. Safety and salvation were in the details.

So I put everything I could remember on the tape, right down to the Marilyn Monroe tattoo. That one made Roy Lindell laugh but Rider didn’t see the humor in it.

I walked them through the story, describing things as they had happened. I offered no background story because I knew that would come out in the questioning that would follow. I wanted them to have a moment-by-moment and detail-by-detail account of what had happened. I did not lie in what I told them but I didn’t tell them everything. I still wasn’t sure how to play the Milton angle. I would wait for a signal from Lindell on that. I was sure he had been given his orders long before he got to the station.

I held the Milton details out for Lindell. The detail I held out for myself was what I had seen when I closed my eyes before pressing the shotgun’s trigger. I kept the image of Angella Benton’s hands to myself.

“And that’s it,” I said when I was done. “Then the uniforms showed up and here we are.”

Rider had been jotting down notes occasionally on a legal pad. She put her pad down and looked at me. She seemed stunned by the story. She probably believed I was very lucky to have survived it.

“Thank you, Harry. That was certainly a close call for you.”

“It was about five close calls.”

“Um, I think we’re going to take a break for a few minutes. Agent Lindell and I are going to step out and talk about this and then I’m sure we will come back with some questions.”

I smiled.

“I’m sure you will.”

“Can we get you anything?”

“Coffee would be nice. I’ve been up all night and at the house they wouldn’t give me any from my own machine.”

“Coffee coming up.”

She and Lindell got up and left the room. A few minutes later a North Hollywood detective I didn’t know came in with a cup of black coffee. He told me to hang in there and left.

When Rider and Lindell came back in I noticed that there were more notes on her pad. She kept the lead and started out doing the talking again.

“We need to clear up a couple things first,” she said.

“Okay.”

“You said that Agent Milton was already in your house when you came in.”

“That’s right.”

I looked at Lindell and then back at Rider.

“You said you were in the process of informing him that you believed you had been followed home when the front door was kicked in by the intruders.”

“Correct.”

“He stepped into the hall to investigate and was immediately hit with a blast from a shotgun, presumably fired by Linus Simonson.”

“Right again.”

“What was Agent Milton doing in your house if you weren’t there?”

Before I could speak Lindell blurted out a question.

“He did have permission to be there, didn’t he?”

“Hey, how about we take one question at a time?” I said.

I looked at Lindell again and his eyes turned down to the table. He couldn’t look at me. Judging by his question, which was really a statement disguised as a question, Lindell was revealing to me what he wanted me to say. I believed at that point that he was making an offer of trade. He was almost certainly in trouble with the bureau for his aid to me during my investigation. And as such, he now had his orders: keep the bureau’s nose clean on this, or there would be consequences for him and possibly for me. So what Lindell was saying to me was that if I told the story in a way that helped him accomplish that objective—without legally compromising myself—then we would both be better off.

The truth was I didn’t mind sparing Milton posthumous controversy and shame. As far as I was concerned he’d already gotten what he deserved and then some. Going after him now would be vindictive and I didn’t need to be vindictive to a dead man. I had other things to do and wanted to preserve my ability to do them.

There was Special Agent Peoples and his BAM squad but there was too much gray between them and Milton’s actions. I had Milton on tape, not Peoples. Using one to try to get to the other was a tough road to drive. I decided in that moment to let the dead man sleep and to live to drive another day.