Angels Flight

Then I come along tonight and drive him home…”
    Bosch felt the guilt rising up like a tide in his throat. He had not been thinking. He had not seen the obvious. He had been too consumed with the case, with Eleanor and his empty house, with things other than Frankie Sheehan.
    “And?” Irving prompted.
    “And I knocked down the one thing he believed in all these months, the one thing that kept him safe. I told him we had cleared Michael Harris. I told him he was wrong about Harris and that we could prove it. I didn’t think about what it would do to him. I was only thinking about my case.”
    “And you think that put him over,” Irving said.
    “Something happened to him in that room with Harris. Something bad. He lost his family after that, he lost the case… I think the one thread he held on to was his belief that he’d had the right guy. When he found out he was wrong – when I stumbled into his world and told him it was bullshit – the thread snapped.”
    “Look, this is bullshit, Bosch,” Lindell said. “I mean, I respect you and your friendship with this guy, but you aren’t seeing what is right here in front of us. The obvious. This guy did himself because he’s the guy and he knew we’d come back to him. This suicide is a confession.”
    Irving stared at Bosch, waiting for him to come back at Lindell. But Bosch said nothing. He was tired of fighting it.
    “I find myself agreeing with Agent Lindell on this,” the deputy chief finally said.
    Bosch nodded. He expected as much. They didn’t know Sheehan the way Bosch did. He and his former partner had not been close in recent years but they had been close enough at one time for Bosch to know that Lindell and Irving were wrong. It would have been easier for him to agree. It would lift a lot of the guilt off him. But he couldn’t agree.
    “Give me the morning,” he said instead.
    “What?” Irving asked.
    “Keep this wrapped up and away from the press for half a day. We proceed with the warrants and the plan for tomorrow morning. Give me time to see what comes up and what Mrs. Kincaid says.”
    “If she talks.”
    “She’ll talk. She’s dying to talk. Let me have the morning with her. See how things go. If I don’t come up with a connection between Kincaid and Elias, then you do what you have to do with Frankie Sheehan. You tell the world what you think you know.”
    Irving thought about this for a long moment and then nodded.
    “I think that would be the most cautious route,” he said. “We should have a ballistics report by then as well.”
    Bosch nodded his thanks. He looked out through the open doors to the deck again. It was starting to rain harder. He looked at his watch and saw how late it was getting. And he knew what he still needed to do before he could sleep.

Chapter 30
    BOSCH felt the obligation to go to Margaret Sheehan in person and tell her what Frankie had done to himself. It didn’t matter that the couple had been separated. She and Frankie had been together a long time before that happened. She and their two girls deserved the courtesy of a visit from a friend instead of a stranger’s dreadful phone call in the middle of the night. Irving had suggested that the Bakersfield Police Department be prevailed upon to send an officer to the house, but Bosch knew that would be just as clumsy and callous as a phone call. He volunteered to make the drive.
    Bosch did prevail upon the Bakersfield cop shop, but only to run down an address for Margaret Sheehan. He could have called her to ask for directions. But that would have been telling her without telling her, an old cop’s trick for making the job easier. It would have been cowardly.
    The northbound Golden State Freeway was almost deserted, the rain and the hour of night having cleared out all but those motorists with no choice but to be on the road. Most of these were truckers hauling their loads north toward San Francisco and even further or returning empty to the vegetable fields of the midstate to pick up more. The Grapevine – the steep and winding stretch of the freeway up and over the mountains lying north of Los Angeles – was littered with semis that had slid off the roadway or whose drivers had chosen to pull over rather than risk the already treacherous run in the pounding rain. Bosch found that once he cleared this obstacle course and came down out of the mountains he was finally able to pick up some speed and lost time. As he drove he watched branches