Read Online The Black Ice (hb-2) by Michael Connelly - Free Book Online
Authors: Michael Connelly
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the drain.
Chapter 6
It felt like the detective bureau had become a fishbowl and he was the only one in the water. He had to get away from the curious eyes that were watching him. Bosch picked up the stack of blue binders and walked out the backdoor into the parking lot. Then he quickly walked back into the station through the watch office door, went down a short hallway past the lockup and up a staircase to the second-floor storage room. It was called the Bridal Suite because of the cots in the back corner. An unofficial official cooping station. There was an old cafeteria table up there and a phone. And it was quiet. It was all he needed.
The room was empty today. Bosch put the stack of binders down and cleared a dented bumper marked with an evidence tag off the table. He leaned it against a stack of file boxes next to a broken surfboard that had also been tagged as evidence. Then he got down to work.
Harry stared at the foot-high stack of binders. Pounds said the division had sixty-six homicides so far in the year. Figuring the rotation and including Harry’s two-month absence while recovering from the bullet wound, Porter had probably caught fourteen of the cases. With eight still open, that meant he had cleared six others. It wasn’t a bad record, considering the transient nature of homicide in Hollywood. Nationwide, the vast majority of murder victims know their killer. They are the people they eat with, drink with, sleep with, live with. But Hollywood was different. There were no norms. There were only deviations, aberrations. Strangers killed strangers here. Reasons were not a requirement. The victims turned up in alleys, on freeway shoulders, along the brushy hillsides in Griffith Park, in bags dropped like garbage into restaurant Dumpsters. One of Harry’s open files was the discovery of a body in parts-one on each of the fire escape landings of a six-story hotel on Gower. That one didn’t raise too many eyebrows in the bureau. The joke going around was that it was a lucky thing that the victim hadn’t stayed at the Holiday Inn. It was fifteen stories.
The bottom line was that in Hollywood a monster could move smoothly in the flow of humanity. Just one more car on the crowded freeway. And some would always be caught and some would always be untraceable, unless you counted the blood they left behind.
Porter had gone six and eight before punching out. It was a record that wouldn’t get him any commendations but, still, it meant six more monsters were out of the flow. Bosch realized he could balance Porter’s books if he could clear one of the eight open cases. The broken-down cop would at least go out with an even record.
Bosch didn’t care about Pounds and his desire to clear one more case by midnight on New Year’s Eve. He felt no allegiance to Pounds and believed the annual tabulating, charting and analysing of lives sacrificed added up to nothing. He decided that if he was to do this job, he would do it for Porter. Fuck Pounds.
He pushed the binders to the back of the table so he would have room to work. He decided to quickly scan each murder book and separate them into two piles. One stack of possible quick turns, another for the cases he did not think he could do anything with in a short time.
He reviewed them in chronological order, starting with a Valentine’s Day strangulation of a priest in a stall at a bathhouse on Santa Monica. By the time he was done two hours had passed and Harry had only two of the blue binders in his stack of possibilities. One was a month old. A woman was pulled from a bus stop bench on Las Palmas into the darkened entranceway of a closed Hollywood memorabilia store and raped and stabbed. The other was the eight-day-old discovery of the body of a man behind a twenty-four-hour diner on Sunset near the Directors Guild building. The victim had been beaten to death.
Bosch focused on these two because they were the most recent cases and experience had instilled in him a
Chapter 6
It felt like the detective bureau had become a fishbowl and he was the only one in the water. He had to get away from the curious eyes that were watching him. Bosch picked up the stack of blue binders and walked out the backdoor into the parking lot. Then he quickly walked back into the station through the watch office door, went down a short hallway past the lockup and up a staircase to the second-floor storage room. It was called the Bridal Suite because of the cots in the back corner. An unofficial official cooping station. There was an old cafeteria table up there and a phone. And it was quiet. It was all he needed.
The room was empty today. Bosch put the stack of binders down and cleared a dented bumper marked with an evidence tag off the table. He leaned it against a stack of file boxes next to a broken surfboard that had also been tagged as evidence. Then he got down to work.
Harry stared at the foot-high stack of binders. Pounds said the division had sixty-six homicides so far in the year. Figuring the rotation and including Harry’s two-month absence while recovering from the bullet wound, Porter had probably caught fourteen of the cases. With eight still open, that meant he had cleared six others. It wasn’t a bad record, considering the transient nature of homicide in Hollywood. Nationwide, the vast majority of murder victims know their killer. They are the people they eat with, drink with, sleep with, live with. But Hollywood was different. There were no norms. There were only deviations, aberrations. Strangers killed strangers here. Reasons were not a requirement. The victims turned up in alleys, on freeway shoulders, along the brushy hillsides in Griffith Park, in bags dropped like garbage into restaurant Dumpsters. One of Harry’s open files was the discovery of a body in parts-one on each of the fire escape landings of a six-story hotel on Gower. That one didn’t raise too many eyebrows in the bureau. The joke going around was that it was a lucky thing that the victim hadn’t stayed at the Holiday Inn. It was fifteen stories.
The bottom line was that in Hollywood a monster could move smoothly in the flow of humanity. Just one more car on the crowded freeway. And some would always be caught and some would always be untraceable, unless you counted the blood they left behind.
Porter had gone six and eight before punching out. It was a record that wouldn’t get him any commendations but, still, it meant six more monsters were out of the flow. Bosch realized he could balance Porter’s books if he could clear one of the eight open cases. The broken-down cop would at least go out with an even record.
Bosch didn’t care about Pounds and his desire to clear one more case by midnight on New Year’s Eve. He felt no allegiance to Pounds and believed the annual tabulating, charting and analysing of lives sacrificed added up to nothing. He decided that if he was to do this job, he would do it for Porter. Fuck Pounds.
He pushed the binders to the back of the table so he would have room to work. He decided to quickly scan each murder book and separate them into two piles. One stack of possible quick turns, another for the cases he did not think he could do anything with in a short time.
He reviewed them in chronological order, starting with a Valentine’s Day strangulation of a priest in a stall at a bathhouse on Santa Monica. By the time he was done two hours had passed and Harry had only two of the blue binders in his stack of possibilities. One was a month old. A woman was pulled from a bus stop bench on Las Palmas into the darkened entranceway of a closed Hollywood memorabilia store and raped and stabbed. The other was the eight-day-old discovery of the body of a man behind a twenty-four-hour diner on Sunset near the Directors Guild building. The victim had been beaten to death.
Bosch focused on these two because they were the most recent cases and experience had instilled in him a
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