Angels Flight

will be fine.”
    “Are you taking over his office, too? Is that where I should bring everything?”
    “Yes. That’s the plan. That would be fine.”
    Bosch nodded but he knew she couldn’t see this.
    “Well,” he said. “Thanks for your help. I don’t know if Irving has said anything, but the lead to Sheehan came out of the files. One of the old cases. I guess you heard about that.”
    “Actually… no. But you’re welcome, Detective Bosch. I’m curious, though. About Sheehan. He was your former partner…”
    “Yes. He was.”
    “Does all of this seem plausible? That he would first kill Howard and then himself? That woman on the train, too?”
    “If you asked me that yesterday I would have said never in a million years. But today I feel like I couldn’t read myself let alone anybody else. We have a saying when we can’t explain things. The evidence is what it is… And we leave it at that.”
    Bosch leaned back on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. He held the phone to his ear. After a long moment she spoke.
    “But is it possible that there is another interpretation of the evidence?”
    She said it slowly, concisely. She was a lawyer. She chose her words well.
    “What are you saying, Inspector?”
    “It’s just Carla now.”
    “What are you saying, Carla? What are you asking me?”
    “You have to understand, my role is different now. I am bound by attorney-client ethics. Michael Harris is now my client in a lawsuit against your employer and several of your colleagues. I have to be care – ”
    “Is there something that clears him? Sheehan? Something you held back before?”
    Bosch sat up and now leaned forward. He was staring wide-eyed at nothing. He was all internal, trying to remember something he could have missed. He knew Entrenkin had held back the trial strategy file. There must have been something in there.
    “I can’t answer your – ”
    “The strategy file,” Bosch cut in excitedly. “It was something in there that puts the lie to this. It…”
    He stopped. What she was suggesting – or the suggestion he was reading in her words – did not make sense. Sheehan’s service weapon had been linked to the Angels Flight shootings. There was a ballistics match. Three bullets from the body of Howard Elias, three matches. End of argument, end of case. The evidence is what it is.
    That was the hard fact he was up against, yet his gut instinct still told him Sheehan was all wrong for this, that he wouldn’t have done it. Yes, he would have gladly danced on Elias’s grave but he wouldn’t have put the lawyer in that grave. There was a big difference. And Bosch’s instincts – though abandoned in light of the facts – were that Frankie Sheehan, no matter what he had done to Michael Harris, was still too good a man at his core to have done the latter. He had killed before, but he was not a killer. Not like that.
    “Look,” he said. “I don’t know what you know or think you know, but you’ve got to help me. I can’t – ”
    “It’s there,” she said. “If you have the files, it’s there. I held something back that I was bound to hold back. But part of it was in the public files. If you look, you’ll find it. I’m not saying your partner is clear. I’m just saying there was something else here that probably should have been looked at. It wasn’t.”
    “And that’s all you are going to tell me?”
    “That’s all I can tell you – and even that I shouldn’t have.”
    Bosch was silent for a moment. He didn’t know whether to be angry with her for not telling him specifically what she knew or just happy that she had given him the clue and the direction.
    “All right,” he finally said. “If it’s here I’ll find it.”

Chapter 35
    IT took Bosch nearly two hours to make his way through the Black Warrior case files. Many of the folders he had opened previously, but some had been viewed by Edgar and Rider or left to others on the squad Irving had put together at Angels Flight less than seventy-two hours earlier. He looked at each file as if he had never seen it before, looking for the thing that had been missed – the telling detail, the boomerang that would change his interpretation of everything and send it in a new direction.
    That was the problem with gang-banging a case – putting multiple investigative teams on it. No single pair of eyes saw all of the evidence, all of the leads or even all of the paperwork. Everything was split up. Though one