“What did you say?” Harrick asked.
“Her watch,” Bosch said calmly. “The one you gave her. The Audemars Piguet — if I am saying that right. It wasn’t on her wrist and it wasn’t on any property report from the crime scene. It didn’t turn up in the search of Da’Quan Foster’s house, studio, or van. It’s not in its box either. So, what happened to it?”
Harrick took a half step back as he considered what Bosch had just said. Bosch recognized it as a move to create space between them and a potential prelude to a punch. He braced himself to block but Harrick managed to control his rage and the swing never came.
“Just go,” Harrick said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Get out of here.”
Bosch reached in his pocket for his keys and stepped around the front of the car. When he got to the driver’s-side door, he looked back at Harrick, who had not moved.
“It doesn’t matter who I’m working for if I’m trying to find the truth,” he said. “If Foster didn’t do it, somebody else did. And he’s still out there. Think about that.”
Harrick shook his head.
“Who are you, fucking Batman?” he said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. The watch was broken. It was being fixed. It’s got nothing to do with anything.”
“Then, where is it? Did you get it back?”
Harrick opened his mouth to say something, then paused and shook his head.
“I’m not talking to you.”
He turned, checked for traffic, and then crossed the street toward his house.
Bosch watched him disappear through the archway, then got in the Cherokee and drove off. He angrily banged his palm on the steering wheel. He knew that his anonymity on the case had just come to an end. Harrick didn’t know who Bosch worked for but he would soon enough find out. A complaint might follow. Whether it did or it didn’t, Bosch needed to get ready for the onslaught of anger that would come his way.
18
The Haven House was an aging two-story motel with neon promises of free HBO and Wi-Fi. It was the kind of place that probably looked shabby on the day it opened in the 1940s and had only gone downhill from there. The kind that served as a last-stop shelter before the car became primary domicile. Bosch pulled into the parking lot off Santa Monica and cruised slowly. The motel was situated on what was known as a flag lot. A narrow fronting on Santa Monica led into a bigger, wider piece of property in the rear that ran behind other businesses. This afforded the rear parking lot and motel rooms significant privacy. It was no wonder that it had become a place favored by people engaged in illicit sexual transactions.
He saw a door with a 6 painted on it and parked in the spot in front of it. He realized it was the same sort of move he would make when he worked cold cases. Visit the scene of the crime long after the crime had been committed. He called it looking for ghosts. He believed every murder left a trace on the environment, no matter how old.
In this case only a few months had passed but that still made it a cold case.
Bosch got out and looked around. There were a few cars parked in the lot and it was surrounded by the windowless rear side of the businesses fronting Santa Monica on one side and an L-shaped apartment building on two others. There was a row of tall and mature cypress trees buffering the line between the parking lot and the apartment building. The fourth side was lined by wood fencing that ran along the backyard of a private residence.
Bosch thought about Lucia Soto’s report on the James Allen case. The supposition was that Allen had been murdered in room 6 and then his body was removed and dumped in the alley off El Centro. Putting aside the question of why the body was moved, Bosch now saw that it could have been accomplished without great risk. In the middle of the night the parking lot would have been deserted and unseen from the outside. He looked around for any cameras and saw none. It wasn’t the kind of place where customers wanted to be photographed.
Bosch walked back around the corner to the office at the front of the building. The office was not open to the public. The door had a shelf below a sliding window. There was a push-button bell there and Bosch used his palm to ring it three quick times. He waited and was about to hit it again when an Asian man slid the glass window open and looked at Bosch through watery eyes.
“I need a room,” Bosch said. “I want number six.”
“Check-in at three,” the man said.
That would be in four hours. Bosch looked back at the parking lot and saw a total of six cars including his own. He looked back at the man.
“I need it now. How much?”
“Check-in three, check-out twelve noon. Rules.”
“How about I check in yesterday at three, check out today at noon?”
The man studied him. Bosch didn’t look like his usual clientele.
“You cop?”
Bosch shook his head.
“No, no cop. I just want to look at room six. How much? I’ll be out by twelve. Less than an hour.”
“Forty dollar.”
“Deal.”
Bosch pulled out his cash.
“Sixty,” the man said.
Bosch looked up from his money at him and silently communicated the message that the man was fucking with the wrong guy.
“Okay, forty,” the man said.
Bosch put two twenties down on the window’s counter. The man slid out a 3 × 5 registration card but didn’t ask for any formal identification confirming the information Bosch quickly wrote on it.
The man then slid out a key attached to a diamond-shaped piece of plastic with the number 6 on it.
“One hour,” he said.
Bosch nodded and took the key.
“You betcha,” he said.
He walked back around the corner of the building and used the key to open room 6. He stepped in and closed the door behind him. He stood there, taking the whole room in. The first thing he noticed was the rectangular discoloration on the wall where the picture of Marilyn Monroe had obviously hung. It was gone now, most likely taken as evidence.
He turned his head and slowly swept the room, looking for anything unusual about it but committing its well-worn furnishings and drab curtains to memory. Anything that had belonged to James Allen was long gone. It was just a threadbare room with its aging furnishings. It was depressing to think someone had lived here. Even more so to think someone may have died here.
His phone buzzed and he saw that it was Haller.
“Yeah.”
“Where are we?”
“We? We are in a shabby-as-shit room in a hot-sheet motel in Hollywood. The place Da’Quan claims he was at when Lexi Parks was murdered.”
“And?”
“And nothing. A big fat nothing. Mighta helped if he’d scratched his initials into the bed table or put some gang graffiti on the shower curtain. You know, to show he was here.”
“I meant, ‘and what are you doing there?’”
“My job. Covering all the bases. Absorbing, thinking. Looking for ghosts.”
Bosch’s words were clipped. He didn’t like the interruption. He was in the middle of an established process. He was also annoyed with himself for what he had to say next.
“Look, I may have messed up.”
“How so?”
“I posed as a real-estate buyer and got inside the victim’s house. I wanted to look around.”
“And look for ghosts? What happened?”
“Her husband, the deputy sheriff, came by and ran my plate because he thought I was a reporter or something. Instead, he found out I was a retired cop and I was working on the case.”
“That’s not a mess-up. That’s a full-fledged fuckup. You know if the guy makes a complaint, it goes on me with the judge, right?”