“Let me just take a quick run through the rest of this and then I’ll get you out of here,” he said.
“It’s okay, Harry,” Soto said. “You know, after you walked out the door of the squad, I thought I’d never get a chance to see you work again. I like this. I learn from you.”
“What, just sitting there watching me read a murder book?”
“Yes. I learn what you think is important, how you put things together, make conclusions. You remember you told me once that all the answers are usually in the murder book. We just don’t see them.”
Bosch nodded.
“Yeah, I remember.”
He was looking at James Allen’s lengthy arrest record. It was six pages in the book. He scanned them quickly because they were routinely repetitive with several prostitution and loitering arrests plus a few drug possession busts spanning the last seven years. It was a very common rap sheet for a prostitute. Several of the arrests were suspended or not prosecuted as Allen was initially diverted into pre-trial sex-worker and drug-rehab programs. Once that string was played out, his arrests started resulting in convictions and jail time. Never anything in a state correctional facility, always short stints in county jail. Thirty days here, forty-five there, the jail becoming not so much a deterrent as a revolving door — the sad norm for a recidivist sex worker.
The only unusual thing about Allen’s rap sheet was his last arrest — a loitering-with-intent-to-commit-prostitution bust. What caught Bosch’s eye was that the arrest came fourteen months prior to his death and had resulted in a nolle pros — meaning no charges were ever filed against him. Allen was simply released.
“Wait a minute,” Bosch said.
He flipped to the front of the murder book and scanned the crime report and then the first summary filed by Karim and Stotter.
“What is it?” Soto asked.
“This guy hadn’t been arrested in over a year,” Bosch said as he was reading.
“So?”
“Well, he was sort of camped out there on Santa Monica...”
“So?”
Bosch flipped back to the rap sheet and turned the book so she could see it. He started flipping through the pages.
“This guy gets busted three or four times a year for five years and then nothing for the last fourteen months before he gets killed,” he said. “That makes me think he had a guardian angel.”
“What do you mean, someone in the LAPD watching out for him?”
“Yeah, that he was working for somebody. But there’s nothing in here about him being a snitch. No CI number, no report.”
There were protocols for dealing with confidential informants, including in the event that an informant was murdered. But there was nothing in the murder book that clearly indicated that James Allen was an informant.
“Maybe he just got lucky and avoided arrest in that last year,” Soto said. “I mean, arrests have been down across the board the last year. All these shootings with cops and Ferguson and Baltimore and all of that, the uniforms are doing the minimum required. Nobody’s proactive anymore.”
“Do the math,” Bosch said. “These fourteen months go back way before Baltimore, way before Ferguson.”
Bosch shook his head. He had now counted seventeen arrests in five years for Allen on the rap sheet, then more than a year of clean living.
“I think he was working for somebody,” he said. “Off book.”
It was a violation of department policy for an officer to work a snitch without registering the individual with a supervisor and entering the name in the CI Tracking System database. But Bosch knew it regularly occurred. Snitches were procured over time and often used in test situations. Still, fourteen months seemed like a long time to test whether Allen would be a reliable informant.
Stotter and Karim had pulled all of the arrest reports and Bosch started going through these. The names of arresting officers were not on the abbreviated summaries but their unit call signs were listed. He noted that one number was the same on three of Allen’s last five arrests before the fourteen months of non-activity. It was 6-Victor-55. Hollywood Division was denoted by the 6, Victor meant Vice, and 55 indicated it was a two-officer undercover team. He wrote it down on a page of his notebook, then wrote it again on the next page. He tore the second page out and handed it to Soto.
“I think these are probably the guys that were working him,” he said. “Next time you’re on the company computer, see if you can get me their names out of Hollywood Vice. I want to talk to them.”
She looked at the number, then folded the piece of paper and put it into the pocket of her jeans.
“Sure.”
Bosch closed the murder book and handed it to her. She returned it to the red tote bag.
“You sure you can get that back without causing a stir?” he asked.
“They’ll never know,” she said.
“That’s good. And thanks, Lucia. It’s going to help a lot.”
“Anytime. You want to go back in and get another beer?”
Bosch thought for a moment and then shook his head.
“Nah, I got the vibe on this thing. I should stay with it.”
“Big Mo, huh?”
“Yeah, I got momentum back — thanks to you.”
“Okay, Harry, roll with it. Stay safe.”
“You, too.”
She opened the door and got out. Bosch started the engine but didn’t move the car until he watched her walk safely through the back door of the bar.
24
Bosch pulled into the alley off El Centro and checked his watch. It was 10:40 p.m. and he knew that he was inside the window of time during which it was estimated that James Allen was murdered and left propped against the wall behind the car repair shop on the night of March 21. Though time of death in the autopsy was estimated to have been anywhere from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m., he knew he would be encountering the same general environmental conditions as on the night of the murder. Evening temperatures in L.A. did not fluctuate much between March and May. But beyond climate, Bosch was interested in ambient light and its sources, a sense of how sound carried in the alley, and any other factors that might have been in play the night James Allen’s body was left behind.
Bosch drove past the repair shop and stopped in the parking lot behind the loft building. The lot was deserted. He killed the engine, took a flashlight out of the glove box, and got out of the car.
Walking back toward the repair shop, he stopped once to take a wide shot of the alley and the scene of the crime with his phone. He then proceeded to the rear wall of the repair shop. To his disappointment, he found that the graffiti on the wall had been painted over since the night James Allen’s body had been left in the alley. There was only one tag so far on the fresh paint, a depiction of a snake that formed the number 18 — the mark of the notorious 18th Street gang out of Rampart that had sets all over the city, including Hollywood.
He pulled up the photo of the wall that he had copied from the murder book earlier and using a portion of the crumbled asphalt in the picture was still able to place the spot where James Allen’s body had been propped up.
He stepped over to the spot and put his back to the wall. He looked up and down the alley, then up at the apartment building across from him. One of the small bathroom windows on the second floor had a light on. It was cracked open a few inches. Bosch grew annoyed with himself. He had been so concerned about not robbing Soto of her whole evening that he had not taken the proper time — or at least as much time as she would have allowed — to read through all sections of the murder book. He had not seen a report on the canvass of the neighborhood following the discovery of the body. Now he was looking at a lighted and open window that conceivably had a view of the crime scene. Had the resident there been questioned by police? Probably, but Bosch didn’t know for sure.