Dark Sacred Night (Harry Bosch Universe #31)(14)

Trevino was picking up the phone to call the watch office as he spoke. Bosch ducked back out and used the warrant to signal Lourdes and Luzon to the war room. Bosch went in, took a yellow pad off the supply table and sat at one end of the oval meeting table. The so-called war room was really a multipurpose room. It was used for training classes, as a lunchroom, as an emergency command post, and on occasion as a place to strategize investigations and tactics with the whole detective squad—all five members of it.

Bosch sat down and flipped over the cover sheet of the warrant so he could reread the probable-cause section he had composed. It was drawn from a fourteen-year-old murder case. The victim was Cristobal Vega, fifty-two, who was shot once in the back of the head while he was walking his dog up his street to Pioneer Park. Vega was a veteran gang member, a shot caller for Varrio San Fer 13, one of the oldest and most violent gangs in the San Fernando Valley.

His death was a shock to the tiny town of San Fernando because he was well known within the community after having publicly adopted a Godfather-like presence, deciding neighborhood disputes, contributing major funds to local churches and schools, and even delivering food baskets to the needy during the holidays.

It was a good-guy disguise that cloaked a thirty-plus-year run as a gangster. On the inside of the VSF, he was notoriously violent and known by the moniker Uncle Murda. He moved with two bodyguards at all times and rarely strayed from SanFer turf, because he had been “green-lit” by all surrounding gangs as a result of his leadership position and planning of violent forays into other turf. The Vineland Boyz wanted him dead. The Pacas wanted him dead. Pacoima Flats wanted him dead. And so on.

The killing of Uncle Murda was also surprising because Vega had been caught on the street alone. He had a handgun tucked into the waist of his sweatpants but had apparently thought he was safe to duck out of his fortified home and take his dog to the park shortly after dawn. He never made it. He was found facedown on the sidewalk a block short of the park. His assassin had approached so stealthily from behind that Vega had not even pulled the gun from his waistband.

Though Vega was a hood and a killer himself, the SFPD investigation into his murder had initially been intense. But no witness to the shooting was ever found and the only evidence recovered was the .38 caliber bullet removed during autopsy from the victim’s brain. No competing gang from the area took credit for the kill, and graffiti that either lamented or celebrated Vega’s demise offered no clue as to who or what gang had carried out the hit.

The case went cold and detectives who were assigned due-diligence checks on it each year did not muster a lot of enthusiasm. It was clearly a case where the victim’s death was not seen as much of a loss to society. The world was doing just fine without Uncle Murda.

But when Bosch opened the files as part of his cold-case review, he took a different approach. He had always operated according to the axiom that everybody counts in this world or nobody counts. This belief dictated that he must give each case and each victim his best effort. The fact that Uncle Murda had gotten his moniker because of his willingness to carry out the deadly business of the VSF did not deter Bosch from wanting to find his killer. In Bosch’s book, nobody should be able to come up behind a man on a sidewalk at dawn, put a bullet in his brain, and then disappear into the shadows of time. There was a murderer out there. He might have killed since and he might kill again. Bosch was coming for him.

The time of death was determined by various factors. Vega’s wife said he had gotten up at six a.m. and taken the dog out the door about twenty minutes later. The coroner could only narrow it down to the 100 minutes between then and eight a.m., which was when his body was discovered by a resident near the park. Two canvasses by detectives in the neighborhood produced not a single resident who reported hearing the shot, leading to the conclusion that the shooter might have used a silencer on his weapon—or the entire neighborhood did not want to cooperate with police.

While there were many handicaps in the investigation of years-old cases—loss of evidence, witnesses, crime scenes—the element of time could also be advantageous. Bosch always looked for ways to turn time in his favor.

In the Cristobal Vega investigation, a lot had happened in the fourteen years since the murder. Many of the gangsters in the VSF and its rivals had gone to prison for various crimes, including murder. Some had gone straight and cut ties with the life. These were the people Bosch focused on, using database searches and conversations with gang unit officers in the SFPD and from nearby LAPD divisions to produce two lists of gangsters in prison or believed to be in the straight life.

Over the previous year, he had made numerous prison stops and conducted dozens of visits to the homes and workplaces of men who had left their gang affiliations behind. Each conversation was tailored to the circumstances of the man he was visiting but in each instance questioning casually moved toward the unsolved killing of Cristobal Vega.

Most of the conversations were dead ends. The subject either maintained the code of silence or had no knowledge of the Vega killing. But eventually pieces of information started to create the mosaic. When he heard more than three denials of involvement from members of the same gang he moved that gang off the suspect list. Eventually he had scratched every one of the SanFer rivals off the list. It wasn’t conclusive but it was enough to turn his focus inward at Vega’s own gang.

Bosch eventually struck pay dirt in the rear parking lot of a discount shoe store in Alhambra, east of Los Angeles. The store was where a man named Martin Perez, a reformed SanFer, worked as an inventory manager far away from the turf he once trod. Perez was forty-one years old and had shed his gang affiliation twelve years earlier. Though he had been carried in gang unit intel files as a hard-core member of the SanFers since he was sixteen, he had escaped the life with several arrests on his record but no convictions. He had never been to prison and had spent only a few days here and there in county jail.