Angels Flight

institutional or otherwise with you, Detective Bosch. We are talking about public perceptions. Suffice it to say that if we mishandle this case or its perceptions from the outside, this city could be burning again by midnight.”
    Irving paused to look at his watch.
    “I meet the police chief in twenty minutes. Could you please begin to enlighten me with the accomplishments of the investigation up to this point?”
    Bosch reached over and opened his briefcase. Before he could reach for his notebook the phone on the cabinet rang. He got up and went to it.
    “Remember,” Irving said, “I want them here by eleven.”
    Bosch nodded and picked up the phone. It wasn’t Edgar or Rider and he had not expected that it would be.
    “This is Cormier downstairs in the lobby. This Bosch?”
    “Yeah.”
    “You just got a message here. Guy wouldn’t give a name. He just said to tell you that what you need is in a trash can in the MetroLink station, First and Hill. It’s in a manila envelope. That’s it.”
    “Okay, thanks.”
    He hung up and looked at Irving.
    “It was something else.”
    Bosch sat back down and took his notebook out of his briefcase along with the clipboard with the crime scene reports, sketches and evidence receipts attached to it. He didn’t need any of it to summarize the case but he thought it might be reassuring to Irving to see the accumulation of paper the case was engendering.
    “I’m waiting, Detective,” the deputy chief said by way of prompting him.
    Bosch looked up from the paperwork.
    “Where we are is pretty much point zero. We have a good idea what we have. We don’t have much of a handle on the who and why.”
    “Then what have we got, Detective?”
    “We’re going with Elias being the primary target in what looks like an outright assassination.”
    Irving brought his head down so that his clasped hands hid his face.
    “I know that’s not what you want to hear, Chief, but if you want the facts, that’s what the facts point to. We have – ”
    “The last thing Captain Garwood told me was that it looked like a robbery. The man was wearing a thousand-dollar suit, walking through downtown at eleven o’clock at night. His watch and wallet are missing. How can you discount the possibility of a robbery?”
    Bosch leaned back and waited. He knew Irving was venting steam. The news Bosch was giving him was guaranteed to put ulcers on his ulcers once the media picked it up and ran.
    “The watch and wallet have been located. They weren’t stolen.”
    “Where?”
    Bosch hesitated, though he had already anticipated the question. He hesitated because he was about to lie to a superior on the behalf of four men who did not deserve the benefit of the risk he was taking.
    “In his desk drawer at the office. He must’ve forgotten them when he closed up and headed to his apartment. Or maybe he left them on purpose in case he got robbed.”
    Bosch realized he would still need to come up with an explanation in his reports when the autopsy on Elias revealed the postmortem scratches on his wrist. He would have to write it off to having occurred while the body was being manipulated or moved by the investigators.
    “Then perhaps it was an armed robber who shot Elias when he did not turn over a wallet,” Irving said, oblivious to Bosch’s internal discomfort. “Perhaps it was a robber who shot first and searched for valuables second.”
    “The sequence and manner of the shots suggests otherwise. The sequence suggests a personal tie – rage transmitted from one person to Elias. Whoever did this knew Elias.”
    Irving put his hands down on the table and leaned a few inches toward its center. He seemed impatient when he spoke.
    “All I am saying is that you cannot completely eliminate these other possible scenarios.”
    “That might be true but we’re not pursuing those scenarios. I believe it would be a waste of time and I don’t have the manpower.”
    “I told you I wanted a thorough investigation. I want no stone unturned.”
    “Well, we’ll get to those stones later. Look, Chief, if you are focusing on this so you can tell the media it might be a robbery, then fine, say it might be. I don’t care about what you tell the media. I’m just trying to tell you where we stand and where we’re going to be looking.”
    “Fine. Proceed.”
    He waved a hand in a dismissive gesture.
    “We need to look at the man’s files and draw up lists of potential suspects. The cops who Elias