Angels Flight

find out what it was.”
    “So meantime I’m stuck with Chastain and his crew.”
    “Yup. That’s the deal.”
    “Well, what am I going to do with them? You just told me Chastain’s a leak.”
    “Send them out for coffee and then run away and hide.”
    Lindell laughed.
    “This is what I would do,” Bosch then added on a serious note. “I’d put two of them on Elias and two on Perez. You know, doing the paper, managing the evidence, taking the autopsies – which will probably be today anyway. That will keep them busy and out of your way. Regardless of whether it’s them or not, you’ve got to put at least one body on Perez. We’ve treated her as an also-ran, which she obviously was. But you gotta do the due diligence on it or it can come back on you if you ever go to court and the lawyer asks why Perez wasn’t pursued as the primary target.”
    “Right, right. We gotta cover all the bases.”
    “Right.”
    Lindell nodded but said nothing further.
    “So come on, do we have a deal?” Bosch prompted.
    “Yeah. Sounds like a plan to me. But I want to know what you and your people are doing. You keep in touch.”
    “You got it. Oh, and by the way, one of the IAD guys is a Spanish speaker. Fuentes. Put him on Perez.”
    Lindell nodded and pushed back from the table. He left his coffee cup there, untouched. Bosch took his with him.
    On his way through the anteroom to Irving’s conference room, Bosch noticed that the deputy chief’s adjutant was not at his desk. He saw a telephone message pad on the blotter and reached down and grabbed it as he passed by. He put it in his pocket and entered the conference room.
    Bosch’s partners and the IAD men were now in the conference room. Irving was there also. It was very crowded. After some brief introductions the floor was turned over to Bosch, who briefed the newcomers and Irving on the investigation up to that point. He left out specific details about the visit to Regina Lampley’s apartment, making that part of the investigation appear to be at a dead end. He also made no mention at all of his barroom talk with Frankie Sheehan. When he was done he nodded to Irving, who then took the floor. Bosch moved over to the wall and leaned next to a bulletin board Irving had apparently had installed for the investigators to use.
    Irving began speaking of the political tensions surrounding the case like a storm pressure cell. He mentioned that protest marches were scheduled that day in front of three of the south end police stations and at Parker Center. He said City Councilman Royal Sparks and Reverend Preston Tuggins were scheduled to be guests that morning on a local meet-the-press type of television show called Talk of L.A. He said the chief of police had met with Tuggins and other South Central church leaders the night before to call in markers and urge them to call for calm and restraint from the pulpits during the morning’s services.
    “We are sitting on a powder keg here, people,” Irving said. “And the way to defuse it is to solve this case one way or the other… quickly.”
    While he talked, Bosch took out the phone message pad and wrote on it. He then checked the room to make sure all eyes were on Irving and quietly tore off the top sheet. He reached over and tacked it to the bulletin board and then nonchalantly moved inch by inch down the wall and away from the board. The sheet he had put on the board had Chastain’s name on it. In the message section it said: “Harvey Button called, said thanks for the tip. Will call back later.”
    Irving wound up his comments with a mention about the Channel 4 story.
    “Someone in this room leaked information to a television reporter yesterday. I am warning you people that we will not have this. That one story was your grace period. One more leak and you people will be the ones under investigation.”
    He looked around the room at the LAPD faces, to make sure the message was clear.
    “Okay, that is it,” he finally said. “I will leave you to it. Detective Bosch, Agent Lindell? I would like to be briefed at noon on our progress.”
    “No problem, Chief,” Lindell said before Bosch could respond. “I will be talking to you then.”
    Fifteen minutes later Bosch was walking down the hallway to the elevators again. Edgar and Rider were following behind.
    “Harry, where are we going?” Edgar asked.
    “We’ll work out of Hollywood station.”
    “What? Doing what? Who is going to run the