Echo Park

going to be okay. You’ll have some rehab but then you’ll be as good as new.”
    She couldn’t talk or make a sound because of the tube going down her throat. But she squeezed his hand, and Bosch took that as a positive response.
    He pulled a chair over from the wall and sat down so he could keep her hand in his. Over the next half hour he said very little to her. He just held her hand and she squeezed it from time to time.
    At 5:30 a nurse entered the room and told Bosch that two men had asked for him in the ER waiting room. Bosch gave Rider’s hand a final squeeze and told her he would be back in the morning.
    The two men waiting for him were OIS investigators. Their names were Randolph and Osani. Randolph was the lieutenant in charge of the unit. He had been investigating cop shootings so long that he had supervised the investigations the last four times Bosch had fired his weapon.
    They took him out to their car so they could speak privately. With a tape recorder on the seat next to him, he told his story, beginning with the start of his part of the investigation. Randolph and Osani asked no questions until Bosch began recounting that morning’s field trip with Waits. At that point they asked many questions obviously designed to elicit answers that went with the department’s preconceived plan for dealing with the day’s disaster. It was clear that they wanted to establish that the important decisions, if not
all
the decisions, came through the DA’s office and Rick O’Shea. This was not to say that the department planned to announce that the disaster should be placed at the door of O’Shea’s office. But the department was getting ready to defend itself against attack.
    So when Bosch recounted the momentary disagreement over whether Waits should be uncuffed to descend the ladder, Randolph pressed him for exact quotes of what was said and by whom. Bosch knew that he was their last interview. They presumably had already talked to Cal Cafarelli, Maury Swann and O’Shea and his videographer.
    “Have you looked at the video?” Bosch asked when he was finished telling his view of things.
    “Not yet. We will.”
    “Well, it should have everything on it. I think the guy was rolling video when the shooting started. In fact, I’d like to see that tape myself.”
    “Well, to be honest, we are having a bit of a problem with that,” Randolph said. “Corvin says he must have lost the tape in the woods.”
    “Corvin’s the camera guy?”
    “Right. Says it must’ve come out of his pocket when you people were carrying Rider on the ladder. We haven’t found it.”
    Bosch nodded and did the political math. Corvin worked for O’Shea. The tape would show O’Shea instructing Olivas to take the handcuffs off Waits.
    “Corvin’s lying,” Bosch said. “He was wearing the kind of pants with all the pockets, right? For carrying equipment. Cargo pants. I definitely saw him pop the tape out of the camera and put it in one of those pockets with the flap on the side of his leg. It was when he was the last one left at the bottom. Only I saw it. But it wouldn’t have fallen out. He closed the flap. He’s got the tape.”
    Randolph just nodded as though he’d assumed all along that what Bosch had said was the situation, as though being lied to was simply par for the course in the OIS Unit.
    “The tape’s got O’Shea telling Olivas to take off the cuffs,” Bosch said. “That’s not the kind of video O’Shea would want on the news or in the LAPD’s hands during an election year or any year. So it’s a question of whether Corvin’s keeping the tape to run his own play on O’Shea or O’Shea has told him to hang on to the tape. My bet would be on O’Shea.”
    Randolph didn’t even bother nodding to any of that.
    “Okay, let’s go over it all once more from the top and then we can get you out of here,” he said instead.
    “Sure,” Bosch said, understanding that he was being told that the tape was not his concern. “Whatever you need.”
    Bosch finished the second run-through of the story before seven o’clock and asked Randolph and Osani if he could ride with them back to Parker Center so he could retrieve his car. On the ride back, the OIS men did not discuss the investigation. Randolph turned on KFWB at the top of the hour and they listened to the media version of the events in Beachwood Canyon and the latest update on the search for Raynard Waits.
    A third report was on the growing political