me or anyone else, forget about it. I let it go. This case is the thing. There are two people in that train that somebody blew away without so much as a second thought. We’re going to find that person. That’s all I care about now.”
He held Chastain’s eyes until he finally saw a slight nod of agreement. Bosch nodded back. He was sure all the others had seen the exchange. He then took out his notebook and opened it to a fresh page. He handed it to Chastain.
“Okay, then,” he said. “I want everybody to write down their names followed by their home and pager numbers. Cell phones, too, if you got ’em. I’ll make a list up and everybody will get copies. I want everybody in communication. That’s the trouble with these big gang bangs. If everybody isn’t on the same wavelength, something can slip through. We don’t want that.”
Bosch stopped and looked at the others. They were all watching him, paying attention. It seemed that for the moment the natural animosities were relaxed, if not forgotten.
“Okay,” he said. “This is how we’re going to break this down from here on out.”
Chapter 6
ONE of the men from IAD was a Latino named Raymond Fuentes. Bosch sent him along with Edgar to the address on Catalina Perez’s identification cards to notify her next of kin and to handle the questions about her. It was most likely the dead-end part of the investigation – it seemed apparent that Elias was the primary target – and Edgar tried to protest. But Bosch cut him off. The explanation he would share privately with Edgar later was that he needed to spread the IAD men out in order to give him better control of things. So Edgar went with Fuentes. And Rider was sent with a second IAD man, Loomis Baker, to interview Eldrige Peete at Parker Center and then bring him back to the scene. Bosch wanted the train operator at the scene to go over what he had seen and to operate the train as he had before discovering the bodies.
That left Bosch, Chastain and the last IAD man, Joe Dellacroce. Bosch dispatched Dellacroce to Parker Center as well, to draw up a search warrant for Elias’s office. He then told Chastain that the two of them would go to Elias’s home to make the death notification to his next of kin.
After the group split up, Bosch walked to the crime scene van and asked Hoffman for the keys found on the body of Howard Elias. Hoffman looked through the crate he had placed his evidence bags in and came out with a bag containing a ring with more than a dozen keys on it.
“From the front pants pocket, right side,” Hoffman said.
Bosch studied the keys for a moment. There seemed to be more than enough keys for the lawyer’s home, office and cars. He noticed that there was a Porsche key on the ring as well as a Volvo key. He realized that when the investigators finished the current crop of tasks, one assignment he would have to make would be to put someone on locating Elias’s car.
“Anything else in the pockets?”
“Yeah. In the left front he had a quarter.”
“A quarter.”
“Costs a quarter to ride Angels Flight. That’s probably what that was for.”
Bosch nodded.
“And in the inside coat pocket was a letter.”
Bosch had forgotten that Garwood had mentioned the letter.
“Let’s see that.”
Hoffman looked through his crate again and came up with a plastic evidence bag. Inside it was an envelope. Bosch took it from the crime scene tech and studied it without removing it. The envelope had been addressed to Elias’s office by hand. There was no return address. On the left lower corner the sender had written PERSONAL amp; CONFIDENTIAL. Bosch tried to read the postmark but the light was bad. He wished he still carried a lighter.
“It’s your neck of the woods, Harry,” Hoffman said. “Hollywood. Mailed Wednesday. He probably got it Friday.”
Bosch nodded. He turned the bag over and looked at the back of the envelope. It had been cleanly cut open along the top. Elias or his secretary had opened it, probably at his office, before he had put it into his pocket. There was no way of knowing if the contents had been examined since.
“Anybody open it?”
“We didn’t. I don’t know what happened before we got here. I understand that the first detectives saw the name on there and then recognized the body. But I