It was said among cops that a true test of a partnership came when there was an officer-needs-help call. The response is to drop everything and go, pinning the accelerator to the floor and blowing through traffic lights with the siren blaring to get to the officer in need. True partners each take one side of every intersection as they speed through. The driver takes the left, the passenger takes the right, each calling out “Clear!” as the car screams through red lights and intersections. It takes an inordinate amount of trust not to cheat and check the other side, even as your partner calls it clear. With a true partner, you don’t need to check the other side. You know. You believe. When Bosch and Edgar were partners, Bosch always found himself checking the other side of the street. An outsider might view it as a distance forged in the racial divide between them. Edgar was black and Bosch was white. But for each man it was something else, something well below the skin. It was the gap between how each man viewed the job. It was the difference between how a cop works a case and a case works a cop.
But none of that surfaced as the two men smiled at each other and tentatively hugged. Edgar’s head was shaved now and Bosch wondered if he would even have recognized him if he hadn’t known it was his old partner.
“Last I heard, you pulled the pin, moved to Vegas, and were selling real estate,” Bosch said.
“Nah,” Edgar said. “That lasted about two years and I came back here. But look at you. I knew you’d never be able to give it up, but I thought you’d end up with the D.A.’s Office or something. S-F-P-D. They call themselves the Mission City, right? That’s perfect for Harry Bosch.”
Lourdes smiled and Edgar pointed at her.
“You know what I’m talkin’ about,” he said, smiling. “Harry’s always the man on the mission.”
Edgar dropped the smile and the subject when he read Bosch’s frozen look as a hint he was pushing the main difference between them too far. He signaled them to follow him into the elevator alcove and they moved into a crowded box. Edgar pushed the button for the fourth floor.
“Anyway, how’s your daughter doin’?” he asked.
“She’s in college,” Bosch said. “Second year.”
“Wow,” Edgar said. “Crazy.”
Bosch just nodded. He hated carrying on conversations in crowded elevators. Besides, Edgar had never met Maddie, so it was clear that they were now down to idle banter. He said nothing else as they rode up. They got off on the fourth floor, and Edgar used a key card to enter a suite of offices with a large government seal on the wall that showed a seven-pointed star surrounded by the words California Department of Consumer Affairs.
“My crib’s back here,” Edgar said.
“Are you Consumer Affairs?” Lourdes asked.
“That’s right, Health Quality Investigation Unit. We handle enforcement for the medical board.”
He led them to a small private office with a crowded desk and chairs for two visitors. Once they were sitting, they got down to business.
“So this case you’re working,” Edgar said. “You think it’s linked to the complaint one of your victims sent to us?”
Edgar looked at Lourdes as he spoke, but Bosch and Lourdes had agreed on the ride down that Harry would take lead in the meeting, even though Bella had first made contact with Edgar. Bosch had the history with Edgar and would know best how to work the conversation to their advantage.
“We’re not a hundred percent on that yet,” Bosch said. “But it’s getting there. The whole thing was on video, and our read on it is that this was a hit disguised as a robbery. Two shooters, masks, gloves, in and out, no brass left behind. We’re looking at the kid as the target and that brings us to the complaint he sent. He was a good kid — no record, no gangs, most-likely-to-succeed sort of kid just out of pharmacy school. He and his father were at issue about something and it might have been filling prescriptions from that clinic.”
“The sad irony here is that the kid probably went to pharmacy school on money the old man banked filling shady scrips,” Edgar said.
“That is sad,” Bosch said. “So what happened with the kid’s complaint?”
“Okay,” Edgar said. “Well, like I told Detective Lourdes, the complaint landed on my desk but I had not acted on it yet. I pulled it up when we spoke, and judging by the date it was sent and received, this thing was gathering dust in Sacramento for about five or six weeks before they took a look at it and sent it down here to me. Bureaucracy — you know about that, right, Harry?”
“Right.”
“The statute of limitations on these offenses is three years. I would have gotten to it sooner rather than later, but the harsh reality is, it would have been a couple months before I’d have acted on it. I’ve got more open files than I can handle.”
He gestured to the stacks of files on his desk and a shelf to his right.
“Like everybody else in this building, we are critically understaffed. We are supposed to have six investigators and two clerical support slots in this unit to cover the whole county but we have four and one and they added half of Orange County to our territory last year. Just driving down and back to the OC on a case takes half a day.”
Edgar seemed to be going out of his way to explain why the complaint hadn’t yet been followed up on and Bosch realized that it was because of their prior history. Bosch had been so demanding as a partner that Edgar always felt under pressure to perform, and after all these years, he was still making excuses and trying to justify himself to Bosch. It made Bosch regretful and impatient at the same time.
“We understand all of that,” Bosch said. “Nobody’s got enough bullets — that’s the system. We’re just sort of trying to jump-start some stuff here because we’ve got a double murder. What can you tell us about this clinic over in Pacoima that the pharmacist was complaining about?”
Edgar nodded and opened a thin file on his desk. It had a single page of notes in it, and Bosch got the feeling that Edgar hadn’t done much with it until Lourdes called and mentioned Bosch and that they were on their way downtown.
“I checked it out,” Edgar said. “The clinic is licensed and doing business as Pacoima Pain and Urgent Care. The doctor who owns it is listed as Efram Herrera, but then I checked his DEA number and he—”
“What’s a DEA number?” Bosch asked.
“Every physician needs a DEA number to write prescriptions. Every pharmacy is supposed to check that on the scrip before putting pills in the bottle. There is a lot of abuse with phony numbers and stolen numbers. I checked Dr. Herrera’s number and he wrote no prescriptions at all for two years and then came back with a vengeance last year and has been writing them like a madman. I’m talking hundreds a week.”
“Hundreds of pills, or hundreds of prescriptions?”
“Prescriptions. Scrips. As far as pills go, you’re talking thousands.”
“So what’s that tell you?”
“It confirms that the place is a pill mill and no doubt the kid pharmacist’s complaint was on target.”
“I know you told Bella some of this already, but can you school me a little bit? How does a pill mill — how does all of this work?”
Edgar nodded vigorously as Bosch asked the question, jumping at the opportunity to show some expertise to the man who had always doubted him.
“They call the people involved in the mills ‘cappers,’” he said. “They run the show and you need unscrupulous doctors and pharmacies in the mix to make it all work.”