“I do not see the problem.”
“The minister is Preston Tuggins and I thought maybe somebody a little further up the ladder might be better making – ”
“I understand. It was good thinking. I will have it taken care of. I think perhaps the chief will want to handle that. I was just about to call him anyway. Anything else?”
“Not at this time.”
“Thank you, Detective.”
Irving hung up. Chastain asked what he said and Bosch told him.
“This case…,” Chastain said. “I have a feeling things are going to get hairy.”
“Say that again.”
Chastain was about to say something else but Bosch’s pager sounded. He checked the number. Again it wasn’t a call from home but Grace Billets’s second page. He had forgotten to call her earlier. He called now and the lieutenant answered after one ring.
“I wondered if you were going to call me back.”
“Sorry. I sort of got tied up, then I forgot.”
“So what’s going on? Irving wouldn’t tell me who was dead, just that RHD and Central couldn’t handle it.”
“Howard Elias.”
“Oh, shit… Harry… I’m sorry it’s you.”
“It’s okay. We’ll make out.”
“Everybody will be watching you. And if it’s a cop… it’s a no-win situation. Do you get any sense from Irving, does he want to go at it balls to the wall?”
“Mixed signals.”
“You can’t talk freely?”
“Right.”
“Well, I’m getting mixed signals here, too. Irving told me to take your team off the rotation but he said it would only be until Friday. Then I’m supposed to talk to him about it. Now that I know who is dead, I think the translation of that is that you have till then before he probably ships you back to Hollywood and you have to take Howard Elias back here with you and work it when you can.”
Bosch nodded but didn’t say anything. It went with the other moves Irving had made. The deputy chief had created a large team to work the case, but it looked as though he was only giving them a week to work it full-time. Maybe he hoped that the media glare would drop off to a more manageable level by then and the case could eventually disappear into the unsolved files. But Bosch thought Irving was kidding himself if he thought that.
He and Billets talked for a few minutes more before Billets finally signed off with a warning.
“Watch yourself, Harry. If a cop did this, one of those RHD guys…”
“What?”
“Just be careful.”
“I will.”
He closed the phone and looked out the windshield. They were almost to the 110 transition. They would be back at California Plaza soon.
“Your lieutenant?” Chastain asked.
“Yeah. She just wanted to know what was going on.”
“So what’s the deal with her and Rider? They still munching each other’s pie on the side?”
“It’s none of my business, Chastain. And none of yours.”
“Just asking.”
They rode in silence for a while. Bosch was annoyed by Chastain’s question. He knew it was the IAD detective’s way of reminding Bosch that he knew secrets, that he might be out of his element when it came to straight homicide investigation but he knew secrets about cops and should not be taken lightly. Bosch wished he hadn’t made the call to Billets while Chastain was in the car.
Chastain seemed to sense his misstep and broke the silence by trying some harmless banter.
“Tell me about this hard-boiled eggs caper I keep hearing people talk about,” he said.
“It was nothing. Just a case.”
“I missed the story in the paper, I guess.”
“Just a piece of luck, Chastain. Like we could use on this case.”
“Well, tell me. I want to know – especially now that we’re partnering up, Bosch. I like stories about luck. Maybe it will rub off.”
“It was just a routine call out on a suicide. Patrol called us to come out and sign off on it. Started when a mother got worried about her daughter because she hadn’t shown up at the airport up in Portland. She was supposed to fly up there for a wedding or something and never showed up. The family was left waiting at the airport. Anyway, the mother called up and asked for a drive-by check of the daughter’s apartment. A little place over on Franklin near La Brea. So a blue suit went by, got the manager to let him in and they found her. She had been dead a couple of days – since the morning she was supposed to have flown up to Portland.”
“What did she do?”
“It was made to look like she took some pills and then cut her wrists in the bathtub.”
“Patrol said suicide.”
“That’s the way it was supposed to look. There was a note. It was torn out of a notebook and it said things about life not being what she expected and about being lonely all the time and stuff. It was kind of a ramble. Very sad, actually.”
“So? How’d you figure it out?”
“Well, we were – Edgar was with me, Rider had court – we were about to close it out. We had looked around the place and found nothing really wrong – except for the note. I couldn’t find the notebook that the page had been torn out of. And that didn’t sit right. I mean, it didn’t mean she didn’t kill herself, but it was a loose end, you know? A what is wrong with this picture sort of thing.”
“Okay, so you thought somebody was in there and took the notebook?”
“Maybe. I didn’t know what to think. I told Edgar to take another look around and this time we switched and searched through things the other guy had searched the first time.”
“And you found something Edgar had missed.”
“He didn’t miss it. It just didn’t register with him. It did with me.”
“What was it already?”
“In her refrigerator there was a shelf for the eggs. You know, like little indentations that you sit the eggs in?”
“Right.”
“Well, I noticed on some of the eggs she had written a date. All the same date. It was the same day she was flying up to Portland.”
Bosch looked over at Chastain to see if there was a reaction. The IAD man had a confused look on his face. He didn’t get it.
“They were hard-boiled eggs. The ones with dates on them had been hard-boiled. I took one over to the sink and cracked it. It was hard-boiled.”
“Okay.”
He still didn’t get it.
“The date on the eggs was probably the date she had boiled them,” Bosch said. “You know, so she could tell the boiled ones from the others and she’d know how old they were. And it just hit me then. You don’t boil a bunch of eggs so they’re ready for when you want them and then go kill yourself. I mean, what’s the point?”
“So it was a hunch.”
“More than that.”
“But you just knew. Homicide.”
“It changed things. We started to look at things differently. We began a homicide investigation. It took a few days but we got it. Friends told us about some guy who was giving her trouble. Harassing her, stalking her because she turned him down on a date. We asked around the apartment and we started looking at the apartment manager.”
“Shit, I shoulda guessed it was him.”
“We talked to him and he fucked up just enough for us to convince a judge to sign a search warrant. In his place we found the notebook that the supposed suicide note had been torn from. It was like a diary where she wrote down her thoughts and things. This guy found a page where she was talking about life being bad and knew he could use it as a suicide note. We found other stuff that was hers.”
“Why’d he keep the stuff?”
“Because people are stupid, that’s why, Chastain. You want clever killers, watch TV. He kept the stuff because he never thought we’d think it wasn’t a suicide. And because he was in the notebook. She wrote about him stalking her, about how she was sort of flattered and scared of him at the same time. He probably got off on reading it. He kept it.”
“When’s the trial?”