The Wrong Side of Goodbye(101)

“This is where we trade. You ask a question, I ask a question.”

He waited and Poydras did the smart thing. “Ask your question.”

“What was the cause of death?”

“It doesn’t leave this room.”

“Fine with me.”

“We think he was smothered with a pillow off his office couch. He was found slumped at his desk and it looked like a natural. Old man collapses at his desk. Seen it a hundred times before. Only Kapoor at the Coroner’s Office takes the opportunity to grandstand for the media and says there will be an autopsy. He does the cut himself and finds petechial hemorrhaging. Very slight, nothing on the face. Just conjunctival petechiae.”

Poydras pointed to the corner of his left eye to illustrate. Bosch had seen it in many cases. Cutting off oxygen explodes the capillaries. The level of the struggle and the health of the victim were variables that helped define the extent of the hemorrhaging.

“How’d you keep Kapoor from holding a press conference?” Bosch asked. “He needs every bit of positive spin he can get. Discovering a murder written off as a natural is a nice story for him. Makes him look good.”

“We made a deal,” Poydras said. “He keeps it quiet and lets us work and we cut him in on the press conference when we break it open. We make him look like the hero.”

Bosch nodded approvingly. He would have done the same thing.

“So the case gets kicked over to me and Franks,” Poydras said. “Believe it or not, we’re the A team. We go back out to the house. We don’t say anything about it being a homicide. Just that we’re quality control, doing a follow-up investigation, crossing all the t’s and dotting the i’s. We take a few pictures and make a few measurements to make it look good, and we check the pillows on the couch and find what looks like dried saliva on a pillow. We sample it, get a DNA match to Vance, and now we have the means of murder. Somebody took the pillow, came around behind him in his chair at the desk, and held it over his face.”

“An old guy like that, not much of a struggle,” Bosch said.

“Which explains the lack of obvious hemorrhaging. Poor guy went out like a kitten.”

Bosch almost smiled at Poydras calling Vance poor.

“Still,” he said. “It doesn’t feel like something planned in advance, does it?”

Poydras didn’t answer.

“It’s my turn,” he said instead. “Did you find an heir?”

“I did,” Bosch said. “The girl at USC had the baby—a boy— then gave him up for adoption. I traced the adoption and identified the kid. Only thing is, he went down in a helicopter in Vietnam a month before he turned twenty years old.”

“Shit. Did you tell Vance that?”

“Never got the chance. Who had access to his office on Sunday?”

“Security people mostly, a chef and a butler type. A nurse came in to give him a course of prescriptions. We’re checking them all out. He called his secretary in to write some letters for him. She’s the one who found him when she got there. Who else knew what you were hired to do?”

Bosch understood what Poydras was thinking. Vance was looking for an heir. Somebody who stood to benefit from his death if there was no apparent heir might have stepped in to hasten things along. On the other hand, an heir might also be motivated to hasten the inheritance. Lucky for Vibiana Veracruz, she was not identified as a likely inheritor until after Vance was dead. That was a pretty solid alibi in Bosch’s book.

“According to Vance, no one,” Bosch said. “We met alone and he said no one was to know what I was doing. A day after I started the job, his security guy came to my house to try to see what I was up to. He acted as though he had been sent by Vance. I shined him on.”

“David Sloan?” Poydras asked.

“I never got the first name but, yeah, Sloan. He’s with Trident.”

“No, he’s not with Trident. He was with Vance for years. When they brought in Trident he stayed on as the guy in charge of Vance’s personal security and to liaison with Trident. He personally came to your house?”

“Yeah, knocked on the door, said Vance sent him to check on my progress. But Vance told me to talk to no one except the old man himself. So I didn’t.”

Bosch next showed Poydras the card with the phone number Vance had given him. He told the detective that he had called a couple times and left messages. And how Sloan had answered when Bosch called the number after Vance was dead. Poydras just nodded, taking the information in, and fitting it with other case facts. He gave no indication if they had the secret phone and its call records. Without asking if he could keep the card, Poydras put it in his shirt pocket.

Bosch too was fitting things Poydras had given up with the facts he knew. So far Bosch felt he had gotten more than he had given. And something bothered him about the new information when it was filtered through the sieve of his existing case knowledge. Something rubbed. He could not quite place what it was but it was there and it was worrisome.

“You looking at the corporate side of this?” he asked, just to keep the conversation going while he was grinding on the rub.

“I told you, we’re looking at everybody,” Poydras said. “Some people on the board had been questioning Vance’s competence and trying to oust him for years. But he always managed to carry the votes. So there was no love lost with some of them. That group was led by a guy named Joshua Butler, who will probably become chairman now. It’s always a question of who gains and who gains the most. We’re talking to him.”