Angels Flight

meant the media had yet to pick up on the suicide of Frankie Sheehan. Bosch knew that the ultimate insult to his former partner would have been for a news chopper to hover over the house and film the body lying on the deck.
    “Detective Bosch?”
    Bosch turned. Deputy Chief Irving beckoned from the open slider. Bosch went inside and followed Irving to the dining room table. Agent Roy Lindell was already standing there.
    “Let us talk about this,” Irving said. “Patrol is outside with a woman who says she is your neighbor. Adrienne Tegreeny?”
    “Yes.”
    “Yes what?”
    “She lives next door.”
    “She said she heard three or four shots from the house earlier tonight. She thought it was you. She did not call the police.”
    Bosch just nodded.
    “Have you fired weapons in the house or off the deck before?”
    Bosch hesitated before answering.
    “Chief, this isn’t about me. So let’s just say that there could be reason for her to have thought it was me.”
    “Fine. The point I’m making is that it appears Detective Sheehan was drinking – drinking heavily – and firing his weapon. What is your interpretation of what happened?”
    “Interpretation?” Bosch said, staring blankly at the table.
    “Accidental or intentional.”
    “Oh.”
    Bosch almost laughed but held back.
    “I don’t think there’s much of a doubt about it,” he said. “He killed himself. Suicide.”
    “But there is no note.”
    “No note, just a lot of beers and wasted shots into the sky. That was his note. That said all he had to say. Cops go out that way all the time.”
    “The man had been cut loose. Why do this?”
    “Well… I think it’s pretty clear…”
    “Then make it clear for us, would you please?”
    “He called his wife tonight. I talked to her after. She said he might have been cut loose but he thought that it wouldn’t last.”
    “The ballistics?” Irving asked.
    “No, I don’t think that’s what he meant. I think he knew that there was a need to hook somebody up for this. A cop.”
    “And so then he kills himself? That does not sound plausible, Detective.”
    “He didn’t kill Elias. Or that woman.”
    “Right now that is only your opinion. The only fact we have is that it appears this man killed himself the night before the day we would get the ballistics. And you, Detective, talked me into cutting him loose so that he could do it.”
    Bosch looked away from Irving and tried to contain the anger that was building inside.
    “The weapon,” Irving said. “An old Baretta twenty-five. Serial number acid-burned. Untraceable, illegal. A throw-down gun. Was it your weapon, Detective Bosch?”
    Bosch shook his head.
    “Are you sure, Detective? I would like to handle this now, without the need for an internal investigation.”
    Bosch looked back at him.
    “What are you saying? I gave him the gun so he could kill himself? I was his friend – the only friend he had today. It’s not my gun, okay? We stopped by his house so he could get some things. He must’ve gotten it then. I might have helped him do it but that didn’t include giving him the gun.”
    Bosch and Irving held each other’s stares.
    “You’re forgetting something, Bosch,” Lindell said, interrupting the moment. “We searched Sheehan’s place today. There was no weapon found there.”
    Bosch broke away from Irving and looked at Lindell.
    “Then your people missed it,” he said. “He came here with that gun in his bag, because it wasn’t mine.”
    Bosch moved away from them before he let his anger and frustration get the better of him and he said something that might bring departmental charges. He slid down into one of the stuffed chairs in the living room. He was wet but didn’t care about the furniture. He stared blankly out the glass doors.
    Irving stepped over but didn’t sit down.
    “What did you mean when you said you helped him?”
    Bosch looked up at him.
    “Last night I had a drink with him. He told me things. Told me about how he got carried away with Harris, how the things Harris claimed in his lawsuit – the things he said the cops did to him – were true. All of it was true. You see, he was sure Harris had killed the girl, there was no doubt in him about that. But it bothered him what he had done. He told me that in those moments in the room with Harris he had lost it. He said he became the very thing he had hunted all these years. A monster. It bothered him a lot. I could see it had been eating at him.