he was sure she sent it. He just never got very far with substantiating what was in it."
Bosch thought of Sylvia. He was sure they were wrong. "Did you talk to the wife, tell her the ID was confirmed?"
"No, Irving did that last night."
"He tell her about the autopsy, 'bout it not being suicide?"
"I don't know about that. See, I don't get to sit down with Irving like you with me here and ask him everything that comes into my head."
Bosch was wearing out his welcome.
"Just a few more, Frankie. Did Chastain focus on black ice?"
"No. When we got this file of yours yesterday, he about shit his pants. I got the feeling he was hearing about all that side of it for the first time. I kind of enjoyed that, Harry. If there was anything to enjoy about any of this."
"Well, now, you can tell him all the rest I told you."
"No chance. This conversation didn't take place. I gotta try to pull it all together like it was my own before I hand anything over to him."
Bosch was thinking quickly. What else was there to ask?
"What about the note? That's the part that doesn't fit now. If it was no suicide then where's this note come from?"
"Yeah, that's the problem. That's why we gave the coroner such a hard time. Far as we can guess, he either had it all along in his back pocket or whoever did him made him write it. I don't know."
"Yeah." Bosch thought a moment. "Would you write a note like that if somebody was about to put you down on the floor?"
"I don't know, man. People do things you'd never expect when they've got the gun on them. They always've got hope that things might turn out all right. That's the way I see it."
Bosch nodded. But he didn't know if he agreed or not.
"I gotta go," Sheehan said. "Let me know what comes up."
Bosch nodded and Sheehan left him there with two cups of coffee on the table. A few moments later Sheehan was back.
"You know, I never told you, it was too bad about what happened with you. We could use you back here, Harry. I've always thought that."
Bosch looked up at him.
"Yeah, Frankie. Thanks."
Fourteen
THE MEDFLY ERADICATION PROJECT CENTER was at the edge of East L.A., on San Fernando Road not far from County-USC Med Center, which housed the morgue. Bosch was tempted to drop by to see Teresa but he figured he should give her time to cool. He also figured that decision was cowardly but he didn't change it. He just kept driving.
The project center was a former county psychiatric ward which had been abandoned to that cause years earlier when Supreme Court rulings made it virtually impossible for the government—in the form of the police—to take the mentally ill off the streets and hold them for observation and public safety. The San Fernando Road ward was closed as the county consolidated its psych centers.
It had been used since for a variety of purposes, including a set for a slasher movie about a haunted nut-house and even a temporary morgue when an earthquake damaged the facility at County-USC a few years back. Bodies had been stored in two refrigerated trucks in the parking lot. Because of the emergency situation, county administrators had to get the first trucks they could get their hands on. Painted on the side of one of them had been the words "Live Maine Lobsters!" Bosch remembered reading about it in the "Only in L.A." column in the Times .
There was a check-in post at the entry manned by a state police officer. Bosch rolled down the window, badged him and asked who the head medfly eradicator was. He was directed to a parking space and an entrance to the administration suite.
The door to the suite still said No Unescorted Patients on it. Bosch went through and down a hallway, nodding to and passing another state officer. He came to a secretary's desk where he identified himself again to the woman sitting there and asked to see the entomologist in charge. She made a quick phone call to someone and then escorted Harry into a nearby office, introducing him to a man named Roland Edson. The secretary hovered near the door with a shocked look on her face until Edson finally told her that would be all.
When they were alone in the office, Edson said, "I kill flies for a living, not people, Detective. Is