“How old is it? They started shipping stuff downtown to be microfilmed.”
“Would’ve been in two thousand. You remember Michael Allen Smith?”
Edgar nodded.
“Of course I do. Someone like me isn’t going to forget Smith. What do you want with him?”
“I just want his picture. That file still here?”
“Yeah, anything that fresh is still around. Follow me.”
He led Bosch to a locked door. Edgar had a key and soon they were in a small room lined with shelves crowded with blue binders. Edgar located the Michael Allen Smith murder book and pulled it off a shelf. He dropped it into Bosch’s hands. It was heavy. It had been a tough case.
Bosch took the murder book to the cubicle next to Edgar’s and started flipping through it until he came to a section of photographs that showed Smith’s upper torso and several close-ups of his tattoos. His markings had been used to identify and charge him with the murders of three prostitutes five years earlier. Bosch, Edgar and Rider had worked the case. Smith was an avowed white supremacist who secretly hired black transvestite prostitutes he picked up on Santa Monica Boulevard. Then out of guilt for crossing both racial and sexual lines, he would kill them. It somehow made him feel better about his transgressions. The key break in the case came when Rider found a prostitute who had seen one of the victims get into a van with a customer. He was able to describe a distinctive tattoo on the john’s hand. That eventually led them to Smith, who had collected a variety of tattoos while in various prisons around the country. He was tried, convicted and sent to death row, where he was still dodging the needle with a barrage of legal appeals.
Bosch removed the photos that showed Smith’s neck, hands and upper left arm, all of which were festooned with prison ink.
“I need these while I’m upstairs. If you’re leaving and need to lock the file room I can just leave these on your desk.”
Edgar nodded.
“That’ll be fine. So what are you getting into, man? You’re going to put that shit on yourself?”
“That’s right. I want to be like Mike.”
Edgar narrowed his eyes.
“This connected to that Chatsworth Eights stuff we were talking about yesterday?”
Bosch smiled.
“You know, Jerry, you ought to be a detective. You’re good at it.”
Edgar nodded like he was merely putting up with another sarcastic assault.
“You going to get the haircut, too?” he asked.
“Nah, I wasn’t planning on going that far,” Bosch said. “I’m going to be sort of a reformed skinhead, I think.”
“I get it.”
“So, listen, are you busy tonight? This shouldn’t take too long up there. If you want to wait and finish your puzzle, we could go grab a steak over at Musso’s.”
Just saying it made Bosch hungry for it. That and a vodka martini.
“Nah, Harry, I gotta go over the hill to the Sportsmen’s Lodge for Sheree Riley’s retirement gig. That’s why I was killing time here. I was just waiting out the traffic.”
Sheree Riley was a sex crimes investigator. Bosch had worked with her on occasion but they had never been close. When sex and murder entwined, the cases were usually so brutal and difficult there wasn’t much room for anything but the work. Bosch didn’t know she was retiring.
“Maybe we can get that steak some other time,” Edgar said. “That cool?”
“Everything’s cool, Jerry. Have a good time up there and tell her I said hello and good luck. And thanks for the pictures. They’ll be on your desk.”
Bosch headed back toward the hallway but heard Edgar curse. He turned around and saw his old partner standing and looking into his cubicle with his arms wide.
“Where’d my damn pencil go?”
Bosch scanned the floor and didn’t see it. Eventually his eyes rose and he saw the pencil stuck into the sound-absorption tiles in the ceiling above Edgar’s head.
“Jerry, sometimes what goes up doesn’t come down.”
Edgar looked up and saw his pencil. It took him two jumps to grab it.
The door to the vice unit on the second floor was locked but this was not unusual. Bosch knocked and it was quickly answered by an undercover officer Bosch didn’t recognize.
“Is Vicki here? She’s expecting me.”
“Then come on in.”
The officer stepped back and let Bosch enter. He saw that this room had not been changed dramatically during the retrofitting. It was a long room with work counters running down both sides. Above each vice officer’s space was a framed movie poster. In Hollywood Division, only