The Night Fire (Renée Ballard, #3)(105)

“Okay, let me take a look. My partner, Reyes, will be up soon. Tell him I’m up top.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ohlman stepped aside and Bosch entered a large maintenance room that had an iron staircase going up to the roof.

Bosch took the stairs slowly, favoring his surgically repaired knee. It was at least thirty steps. When he got to the top he leaned against a steel railing to catch his breath for a moment and then pushed through a door.

A murder of crows flew into the air as the metal door was taken by the wind and banged sharply against the wall. Bosch stepped out. The view was magnificent. To the west he could see the sun beginning to dip toward the Pacific, the orange ball reflecting on a blue-black surface at least twenty miles away.

He walked toward the far edge, where the building curved and which he judged was the point Manley had dropped from. He walked slowly and scanned the ground, moving first across a helicopter pad and then an expanse of gravel on tar. An LAPD helicopter was circling above. Heavy wind buffeted his body, a reminder not to get too near the edge.

Under his feet he could feel that the tar had softened in the direct sunlight of the day.

The door slammed behind him and he whirled around, his hand going to his hip.

There was no one.

The wind.

A two-foot-high parapet ran along the edge of the building. It had a metal endcap containing the lighting strip that outlined the edges of the building in blue at night. The mirrored tower looked generic by day but was a standout on the downtown skyline after sundown.

Near the edge he saw a disturbance in the gravel—a three-foot-long deviation where gravel had been raked off the tar. He lowered himself, bracing his new knee with his hand as he dropped into a baseball catcher’s stance. He studied the marking and decided it could have been a drag mark or a slide mark that occurred during a struggle. But it appeared to have occurred recently: the tar had not been grayed by exposure to the sun and smog, as it had been in other places.

A helicopter made a loud pass overhead. Bosch did not look up. He studied what he was sure was a mark left by Clayton Manley before he went over the edge and down to the hard ground like a broken crow.





50


There was another police officer standing guard in the reception area on the sixteenth floor. His name tag said FRENCH.

“Any of my guys up here yet?” Bosch asked.

“Not yet,” the officer said.

“You’re keeping people from leaving?”

“That’s right.”

“When did you get here?”

“We were code seven at the food court across the street. We got here pretty quick after the call. Maybe twenty-five minutes ago.”

“We?”

“My partner’s upstairs. The firm has elevators on the second level too.”

“Okay, I need to go back to the victim’s office.”

“Yes, sir.”

Bosch walked past the suede couch and started around the staircase but then thought of something and returned to the officer.

“Officer French, did anybody try to leave while you’ve been here?”

“Just a couple people, sir.”

“Who?”

“I didn’t get names. I wasn’t told to do that.”

“Male or female?”

“Two guys, they said they had to go to court. I told them we’d get them cleared as soon as possible. They said they’d call the courtroom to notify them.”

“Okay, thanks.”

Bosch headed around the stairway again. He was convinced that the Black Widow had come and gone. He moved quietly down the hall. The door to Michaelson’s office was closed but the door to Mitchell’s office was open, and as Bosch passed he saw an older man with graying hair standing at the floor-to-ceiling window looking down into the plaza.

The door to Clayton Manley’s office was closed as well. Bosch leaned his ear against it and listened for conversation but heard nothing. He pulled his jacket sleeve over his palm and pushed the handle down to open the door.

The office was empty. He walked in and closed the door, then stepped to the side of the door and took in the room as a whole. He checked the floor first and saw no indentations in the carpet or anything else that drew suspicion or interest. Scanning the rest of the room, he saw no signs that a struggle had taken place.

He got up and moved behind the desk, using the cuff of his coat again to hit the space bar on the computer. The screen came alive but was password protected. Continuing with the cuff over his hand, he opened drawers in the desk, finding nothing of note until he got to the first of the bottom file drawers. The key was still in the lock. He managed to turn it with his sleeve and there on top of several files were the documents Bosch had given Manley that morning. Bosch saw that there were several notes written in the margins of the top sheet.

Just as he lifted the documents out of the drawer, the door to the office swung open and the man Bosch had seen at the window in Mitchell’s office was standing there. He was taller than Bosch had realized from the previous glimpse. Sharp shoulders, thick in the middle but not fat. Forty years before, he could have been an offensive lineman.

“Who are you?” he said. “Are you the police? You have no right to be going through an attorney’s documents, dead or alive. This is outrageous behavior.”