yourself, too? You left that out of your story, didn’t you? Why’d you need a stun gun if you went in there to kill yourself?”
Stoddard was silent. It was almost as if after seventeen years he had been able to erase the Professional 100 from his memory.
“We got first degree and we got lying in wait,” Bosch said. “You’re going down for the whole ride, Stoddard. You were never going to kill yourself. Back then, or even today.”
“I think I want a lawyer now,” Stoddard said.
“Yeah, of course you do.”
Bosch left the room and walked down the hallway to an open door. It was the monitoring room. The lieutenant and one of the patrol officers from the ride in were in the small space. There were two active video screens. On one Bosch saw Stoddard sitting in the interview room. The camera angle was from an upper corner of the room. Stoddard seemed to be staring blankly at the wall.
The image on the other screen was frozen. It showed Bosch and Stoddard in the backseat of the patrol car.
“How’s the sound?” Bosch asked.
“Beautiful,” the lieutenant said. “We got it all. Taking off the cuffs was a nice touch. Brought his face up into the camera.”
The lieutenant hit a switch and the picture started moving. Bosch could hear Stoddard’s voice clearly. He nodded. The patrol car had been equipped with a dashboard camera used for filming traffic stops and prisoner transports. For the ride in with Stoddard the car’s interior microphone was turned on and the exterior was cut off.
It had worked perfectly. Stoddard’s admissions in the backseat would help seal the case. Bosch felt no worries from that direction at all. He thanked the lieutenant and the patrolman and asked if he could borrow a desk to make some calls.
Bosch called Abel Pratt to update him and to assure him that Rider was shaken up but otherwise okay. He told Pratt that he needed to get SID teams to both Stoddard’s and Muriel Verloren’s homes to process crime scenes. He said a search warrant should be applied for and approved before the SID team entered Stoddard’s house. He said that Stoddard was about to be booked and his fingerprints taken. The prints would need to be compared to those found on the slat from beneath Rebecca Verloren’s bed. He finished by telling Pratt about the video taken during the ride to the station and the admissions Stoddard had made.
“It’s all solid and it’s on tape,” Bosch said. “It all came after Miranda.”
“Good going, Harry,” Pratt said. “I don’t think we’ll have anything to worry about on this.”
“Not with the case, at least.”
Meaning that Stoddard was going to go down without a problem, but Bosch wasn’t sure how he would fare in the review of his handling of the case.
“It’s tough to argue with results,” Pratt said.
“We’ll see.”
Bosch started getting a call-waiting signal on his phone. He told Pratt he had to go and clicked over to the new call. It was McKenzie Ward from the Daily News.
“My sister was listening to the scanner in the photo shop,” she said urgently. “She said a backup unit and an ambulance were sent to the Verloren house. She recognized the address.”
“That’s right.”
“What’s going on, Detective? We had a deal, remember?”
“Yeah, I remember. And I was just about to call you.”
42
THE KITCHEN at the Metro Shelter was dark. Bosch went to the small lobby of the adjoining hotel and spoke to the man behind the glass window. He asked for Robert Verloren’s room number.
“He’s gone, man.”
Something about the finality in his tone put a hollow into Bosch’s chest. It didn’t sound like he meant Verloren had gone out for the night.
“What do you mean gone?”
“I mean gone. He did his thing and he’s gone. That’s it.”
Bosch took a step closer to the glass. The man had a paperback novel open on the counter and had not looked up from its yellowed pages.
“Hey, look at me.”
The man flipped the book over to not lose his page and looked up. Bosch showed him his badge. He then glanced down and saw the book was called Ask the Dust.
“Yes, Officer.”
Bosch looked back up at the man’s tired eyes.
“What do you mean, He did his thing, and what do you mean he’s gone?”
The man shrugged.
“He came in drunk and that’s the one rule we got around here. No drinking. No drunks.”