Nine Dragons (3 page)

He turned back into the storage room, where the interview with Mrs. Li was continuing.

“Chu,” Bosch interrupted.

The AGU detective looked up at him.

“Ask about the son. Was he at home when she called?”

“I already asked. There is another store. It’s in the Valley. He was working there. The family lives together in the middle. In the Wilshire District.”

It seemed clear to Bosch that Chu knew what he was doing. He didn’t need Bosch to prompt him with questions.

“Okay, we’re going back up front. You deal with her and after her son arrives it might be better to take everybody downtown. You okay with that?”

“I’m fine with it,” Chu said.

“Good. Tell me if you need anything.”

Bosch and Ferras went down the hall and to the front of the store. Bosch already knew everybody on the forensics team. A team from the medical examiner’s office had also arrived to document the death scene and collect the body.

Bosch and Ferras decided to split up at that point. Bosch would stay on scene. As lead detective he would monitor the collection of forensic evidence and the removal of the body. Ferras would leave the store and go knock on doors. The liquor store was located in a commercial area of small businesses. He would go door-to-door in an effort to find someone who had heard or seen something related to the killing. Both investigators knew this would likely be a fruitless effort but it was one that needed to be made. A description of a car or a suspicious person could be the piece of the puzzle that would eventually break the case. It was basic homicide work.

“All right if I take one of the patrol guys?” Ferras asked. “They know the neighborhood.”

“Sure.”

Bosch thought that knowing the lay of the land was not Ferras’s true reason for taking a patrol officer with him. His partner thought he needed backup to knock on doors and visit stores in the neighborhood.

Two minutes after Ferras left, Bosch heard loud voices and a commotion coming from outside at the front of the store. He stepped out and saw two of Lucas’s patrol officers trying to physically detain a man at the yellow tape. The struggling man was Asian and in his midtwenties. He wore a tight-fitting T-shirt that displayed his lean build. Bosch quickly stepped toward the problem.

“Okay, stop it right there,” he said forcefully so no one would doubt who was in charge of the situation.

“Let him go,” he added.

“I want to see my father,” the young man said.

“Well, that’s not the way to go about doing it.”

Bosch stepped closer and nodded to the two patrolmen.

“I’ll take care of Mr. Li now.”

They left Bosch and the victim’s son alone.

“What is your full name, Mr. Li?”

“Robert Li. I want to see my father.”

“I understand that. I’m going to let you see your father if you really want to. But you can’t until it’s clear. I’m the detective in charge of this whole thing and I can’t even see your father yet. So I need you to calm down. The only way you will get what you want is if you calm down.”

The young man looked down at the ground and nodded. Bosch reached out and touched him on the shoulder.

“Okay, good,” Bosch said.

“Where’s my mother?”

“She’s inside in the back room being interviewed by another detective.”

“Can I at least see her?”

“Yes, you can. I’ll walk you around back in a minute. I just need to ask you a few questions first. Is that okay?”

“Fine. Go ahead.”

“First of all, my name is Harry Bosch. I’m the lead detective on this investigation. I’m going to find whoever killed your father. I promise you that.”

“Don’t make promises you don’t intend to keep. You didn’t even know him. You don’t care. He’s just another—never mind.”

“Another what?”

“I said, never mind.”

Bosch stared at him for a moment before responding.

“How old are you, Robert?”

“I’m twenty-six and I would like to see my mother now.”

He made a move to turn and head toward the back of the store but Bosch grabbed him on the arm. The younger man was strong but Bosch had a strength in his grip that was surprising. The young man stopped and looked down at the hand on his arm.

“Let me show you something and then I’ll take you to your mother.”

He let go of Li’s arm and then pulled the matchbook from his pocket. He handed it over. Li looked at it with no surprise.

“What about it? We used to give these away until the economy went bad and we couldn’t afford the extras.”

Bosch took the matchbook back and nodded.

“I got it in your father’s store twelve years ago,” he said. “I guess you were about fourteen years old then. We almost had a riot in this city. Happened right here. This intersection.”

“I remember. They looted the store and beat up my father. He should have never reopened here. My mother and me, we told him to open the store up in the Valley but he wouldn’t listen to us. He wasn’t going to let anybody drive him out and now look what happened.”

He gestured helplessly toward the front of the store.

“Yeah, well, I was here that night, too,” Bosch said. “Twelve years ago. A riot started but it ended pretty quick. Right here. One casualty.”

“A cop. I know. They pulled him right out of his car.”

“I was in that car with him but they didn’t get to me. And when I got to this spot I was safe. I needed a smoke and I went into your father’s store. He was there behind the counter but the looters had taken every last pack of cigarettes in the place.”

Bosch held up the book of matches.

“I found plenty of matches but no cigarettes. And then your father reached into his pocket and pulled out his own. He had one last smoke left and he gave it to me.”

Bosch nodded. That was the story. That was it.

“I didn’t know your father, Robert. But I’m going to find the person who killed him. That’s a promise I’ll keep.”

Robert Li nodded and looked down at the ground.

“Okay,” Bosch said. “Let’s go see your mother now.”

4

T
he detectives didn’t clear the crime scene and get back to the squad room until almost midnight. By then Bosch had decided not to bring the victim’s family to PAB for formal interviews. After appointments were made for them to come in Wednesday morning, he let them go home to grieve. Shortly after getting back to the squad Bosch also sent Ferras home so he could attempt to repair damages with his own family. Harry stayed behind alone to organize the evidence inventory and to contemplate things about the case for the first time without interruption. He knew that Wednesday was shaping up as a busy day, with appointments with the family in the morning and results of some of the forensic and lab work coming in, as well as the possible scheduling of the autopsy.

While the canvass of the nearby businesses by Ferras had proved fruitless as expected, the evening’s work had produced one possible suspect. On Saturday afternoon, three days before his murder, Mr. Li had confronted a young man he believed had been routinely shoplifting from the store. According to Mrs. Li and as translated by Detective Chu, the teenager had angrily denied ever stealing anything and drew the race card, claiming Mr. Li had only accused him because he was black. This seemed laughable, since ninety-nine percent of the store’s business came from neighborhood residents who were black. But Li did not call the police. He simply banished the teenager from the store, telling him never to return. Mrs. Li told Chu that the teen’s parting shot at the door was to tell her husband that the next time he came back it would be to blow the shopkeeper’s head off. Li in turn had pulled his weapon from beneath the counter and pointed it at the youth, assuring him that he would be ready for his return.

This meant the teenager was aware of the weapon Li had beneath the counter. If he were to make good on his threat, he would have to enter the store and act swiftly, shooting Li before he could get to his gun.

Mrs. Li would look through gang books in the morning in an effort to find a photo of the threatening youth. If he was associated with the Hoover Street Criminals, then chances were they had his photo in the books.

But Bosch wasn’t fully convinced it was a viable lead or that the kid was a valid suspect. There were things about the crime scene that didn’t add up to a revenge killing. There was no doubt that they had to run the lead down and talk to the kid but Bosch wasn’t expecting to close the case with him. That would be too easy and there were things about the case that defied easy.

Off the captain’s office, there was a meeting room with a long wooden table. This was primarily used as a lunchroom and occasionally for staff meetings or for private discussions of investigations involving multiple detective teams. With the squad empty, Bosch had commandeered the room and had spread several crime scene photographs, fresh from forensics, across the table.

He had laid the photos out in a disjointed mosaic of overlapping images that in a whole created the entire crime scene. It was much like the photo work of the English artist David Hockney, who had lived in Los Angeles for a while and had created several photo collages as art pieces that documented scenes in Southern California. Bosch became familiar with the photo mosaics and the artist because Hockney had been his neighbor for a time in the hills above the Cahuenga Pass. Though Bosch had never met Hockney, he drew a connection to the artist because it had always been Harry’s habit to spread crime scene photos out in a mosaic that allowed him to look for new details and angles. Hockney did the same with his work.

Looking at the photos now while sipping from a mug of black coffee he had brewed, Bosch was first drawn to the same things that had hooked him while he had been at the scene. Front and center were the bottles of Hennessy standing untouched in a row just across the counter. Harry had a hard time believing that the killing could be gang related because he doubted that a gangbanger would take the money and not a single bottle of Hennessy. The cognac would be a trophy. It was right there within reach, especially if the shooter had to lean over or go around the counter to grab bullet casings. Why not take the Hennessy, too?

Bosch’s conclusion was that they were looking for a shooter who didn’t care about Hennessy. A shooter who was not a gangbanger.

The next point of interest was the victim’s wounds. For Bosch, these alone excluded the mystery shoplifter as a suspect. Three bullets in the chest left no doubt that the intention was to kill. But there was no face shot and that seemed to put the lie to this being a killing motivated by anger or revenge. Bosch had investigated hundreds of murders, most of them involving the use of firearms, and he knew that when he had a face shot, the killing was most likely personal and the killer was someone known to the victim. Therefore, the opposite could be held true. Three in the chest was not personal. It was business. Bosch was sure that the unknown shoplifter was not their killer. Instead, they were looking for someone who was possibly a complete stranger to John Li. Someone who had coolly walked in and put three slugs into Li’s chest, then calmly emptied the cash register, picked up his brass and gone to the back room to grab the disc out of the camera-recorder.

Bosch knew it was likely that this was not a first-time crime. In the morning he would need to check for similar crimes in Los Angeles and the surrounding areas.

Looking at the image of the victim’s face, Bosch suddenly noticed something new. The blood on Li’s cheek and chin was smeared. Also, the teeth were clean. There was no blood on them.

Bosch held the photo up closer and tried to make sense of it. He had assumed the blood on Li’s face was expectorant. Blood that had come up from his destroyed lungs in his last fitful gasps for air. But how could that happen without getting blood on his teeth?

He put the photo down and moved across the mosaic to the victim’s right hand. It had dropped down at his side. There was blood on the fingers and thumb, a drip line to the palm of his hand.

Bosch looked back at the blood smeared on the face. He suddenly realized that Li had touched his bloody hand to his mouth. This meant a double transfer had taken place. Li had touched his hand to his chest, getting blood on it, and had then transferred blood from his hand to his mouth.

The question was why. Were these movements part of the final death throes, or had Li done something else?

Bosch pulled his cell and called the investigators’ line at the medical examiner’s office. He had it on speed dial. He checked his watch as the phone rang. It was ten past midnight.

“Coroner’s.”

“Is Cassel still there?”

Max Cassel was the investigator who had worked the scene at Fortune Liquors and collected the body.

“No, he just—wait a minute, there he is.”

The call was put on hold and then Cassel picked up.

“I don’t care who you are, I’m out the door. I just came back in because I forgot my coffee warmer.”

Bosch knew Cassel lived at least an hour’s commute out in Palmdale. Coffee mugs with warmers you plugged into the cigarette lighter were a must for downtown workers with long drive times.

“It’s Bosch. You put my guy in a drawer already?”

“Nope, all the drawers are taken. He’s in icebox three. But I’m done with him and going home, Bosch.”

“I understand. I just have one quick question. Did you check his mouth?”

“What do you mean, check his mouth? Of course I checked his mouth. That’s my job.”

“And there was nothing there? Nothing in the mouth or throat?”

“No, there was something there all right.”

Bosch felt the adrenaline start to kick in.

“Why didn’t you tell me? What was it?”

“His tongue.”

The adrenaline dried up and Bosch felt deflated as Cassel chuckled. Harry thought he had been on to something.

“Very funny. What about blood?”

“Yes, there was a small amount of blood on the tongue and in the throat. It’s noted in my report, which you will get tomorrow.”

“But three shots. His lungs must’ve looked like Swiss cheese. Wouldn’t there be a lot of blood?”