The Wrong Side of Goodbye(12)

In fifteen minutes he had crossed the top of the Valley and was back in L.A. He took the Maclay Street exit and dropped down into San Fernando, where he turned onto First Street. The SFPD was located in a single-story building with white stucco walls and a red barrel-tile roof. The population of the tiny town was 90 percent Latino and its municipal structures were all designed with a nod to Mexican culture.

Bosch parked in the employee lot and used an electronic key to enter the station through the side door. He nodded to a couple of uniform cops through the window of the report room and followed the back hallway past the chief’s office toward the detective bureau.

“Harry?”

Bosch turned and looked through the door to the chief’s office. Valdez was behind his desk, waving him in.

Harry stepped into the office. It wasn’t as big as the LAPD chief’s suite but it was comfortable and had a sitting area for informal discussions. Hanging from the ceiling was a black-and-white toy helicopter with SFPD painted on its body. The first time Bosch had been in the office Valdez had explained that this was the department’s helicopter—a joking reference to the fact that the department didn’t have its own bird and had to call in air support when needed from the LAPD.

“How’s it going?” Valdez asked.

“Can’t complain,” Bosch said.

“Well, we certainly appreciate what you’re doing around here. Anything happening on the Screen Cutter?”

It was a reference to the serial rapist case Bosch had identified.

“I’m about to go check on responses to our e-mail. After that I’ll get with Bella to talk about next moves.”

“I read the report from the profiler when I approved the payment. Interesting stuff. We gotta get this guy.”

“Working on it.”

“Okay, well, I won’t hold you up.”

“Okay, Chief.”

Bosch glanced at the helicopter for a moment and then left the office. The detective bureau was just a few paces down the hall. By LAPD or any standards, it was quite small. It had once consisted of two rooms, but one room had been subleased to the County Coroner’s Office as a satellite office for two of its investigators. Now there were three detective cubicles crammed into one room with a closet-size supervisor’s office adjoining.

Bosch’s cubicle had five-foot walls that allowed him privacy from three sides. But the fourth side was open to the office door of the squad’s supervisor. That post was supposed to be a full-time lieutenant’s slot, but it had been vacant since the budget crunch and the supervisor was currently the department’s only captain. His name was Trevino and he had so far not been convinced that having Bosch on the premises and handling cases was a good thing. He seemed suspicious of Bosch’s motives for working so many hours for no pay and kept a careful watch over him. For Bosch, the only thing that alleviated this unwanted attention was that Trevino wore multiple hats in the department, as is often the case with small agencies. He was running the detective bureau and was also in charge of interior operations in the station, including the dispatch center, the indoor firing range, and the sixteen-bed jail built to replace the aging facility across the street. These responsibilities often drew Trevino out of the detective bureau and off Bosch’s back.

Bosch checked his mail slot upon entering and found a reminder notice that he was overdue qualifying this month on the range. He moved into his cubicle and sat down at his desk.

Along the way he saw that Trevino’s door was closed and the glass transom above it was dark. The captain was most likely in another part of the building carrying out one of his other duties. Bosch thought he understood Trevino’s suspicion and lack of welcome. Any success he had in clearing cases could be seen as a failing on Trevino’s part. After all, the detective bureau was currently his domain. And it didn’t help when word got around that Bosch had once thrown his LAPD supervisor through a plate-glass window.

Still, there was nothing Trevino could do about Bosch’s placement in the office, because he was part of the police chief’s effort to overcome personnel cuts.

Bosch turned on his computer terminal and waited for it to boot up. It had been four days since he was last in the office. A flyer for a department bowling night had been left on his desk and he immediately transferred this to the recycle bin beneath it. He liked the people he worked with in the new department, but he wasn’t much of a bowler.

Using a key to open a locked file cabinet in his desk, he pulled out a few folders pertaining to open cases he was working and spread them on his desk so it would appear he was engaged in SFPD business. He noticed when he reached for his Screen Cutter folder that it wasn’t there. He found it in the wrong spot in the drawer. It had been misfiled under the first victim’s name rather than under the unknown suspect’s moniker: Screen Cutter. This immediately alarmed and annoyed Bosch. He didn’t believe he could have misfiled the case. All of his career he had carefully managed his case files. The file—whether it was a murder book or a manila folder—was the heart of the case and it always needed to be neatly and thoroughly put together and safely stored.

He put the folder on his desk and considered that someone with a duplicate key might be reading his files and checking his work. And he knew exactly who that might be. He reversed himself and returned all his files to the drawer, then closed and locked it with his key. He had a plan for smoking out the intruder.