The Black Ice (hb-2)

some things that came up on a couple cases I’m working and they run right across Cal Moore’s trail. And so I just… I just want to be sure about Moore. You know what I mean?”
    “No, I don’t know what you mean.”
    Bosch pulled a chair away from another desk and sat down. They were alone in the squad room but Bosch spoke low and slow, hoping to draw the SID tech in.
    “Just for my own knowledge I need to be sure. What I am wondering is, can you tell me if all the stuff checked out.”
    “Checked out to what?”
    “Come on, man. Was it him and was there anybody else in that room?”
    There was a long silence and then Donovan cleared his throat. He finally said, “What do you mean, you’re working cases that cross his trail?”
    Fair enough question, Bosch thought. There was a small window of opportunity there.
    “I got a dead drug dealer. I had asked Moore to do some checking on the case. Then, I got a dead body, a Juan Doe, in an alley off Sunset. Moore’s the one who found the body. The next day he checks into that dump and does the number with the shotgun. Or so it looks. I just want some reassurances it’s the way it looks. I heard they got an ID over at the morgue.”
    “So what makes you think these two cases are connected with Moore’s thing?”
    “I don’t think anything right now. I’m just trying to eliminate possibilities. Maybe it’s all the coincidences. I don’t know.”
    “Well,” Donovan said. “I don’t know what they got over at the ME’s, but I got lifts in the room that belonged to him. Moore was in that room. I just got finished with it. Took me all day.”
    “How come?”
    “The DOJ computer was down all morning. Couldn’t get prints. I went up to personnel to get Moore’s prints from his package and they told me Irving had already raided it. He took the prints out and took ’em over to the coroner. You know, you’re not supposed to do that, but who’s gonna tell him, get on his shit list. So I had to wait for the Justice computer to come back on line. Got his prints off of that after lunch and just finished with it a little while ago. That was Moore in the room.”
    “Where were the prints?”
    “Hang on.”
    Donovan rolled back his chair to a set of file cabinets and unlocked a drawer with a key from his pocket. While he was leafing through the files, Bosch lit a cigarette. Donovan finally pulled out a file and then rolled his chair back to his desk.
    “Put that shit out, Harry. I hate that shit.”
    Bosch dropped the cigarette to the linoleum, stepped on it and then kicked the butt under Donovan’s desk. Donovan began reviewing some pages he had pulled from a file. Bosch could see that each one showed a top-view drawing of the motel room where Moore’s body was found.
    “Okay, then,” Donovan said. “The prints in the room came back to Moore. All of them. I did the comp-”
    “You said that.”
    “I’m getting to it, I’m getting to it. Let’s see, we have a thumb-fourteen points-on the stock of the weapon. That, I guess, was the bell ringer, the fourteen.”
    Harry knew that only five matching points in a fingerprint comparison were needed for an identification to be accepted in court. A fourteen-point match of a print on a gun was almost as good as having a photo of the person holding the gun.
    “Then, we… let’s see… we had four three-pointers on the barrels of the weapon. I think these kind of got smudged when it kicked out of his hands. So we got nothing real clear there.”
    “What about the triggers?”
    “Nope. Nothing there. He pulled the triggers with his toe and he was still wearing a sock, remember?”
    “What about the rest of the place? I saw you dusting the air-conditioner.”
    “Yeah, but I didn’t get anything there on the dial. We thought he turned the air up, you know, to control decomp. But the dial was clean. It’s plastic with a rough surface, so I don’t think it would have held anything for us.”
    “What else?”
    Donovan looked back down at his charts.
    “I got a lift off his badge-index and thumb, five and seven points respectively. The badge was on the bureau with the wallet. But nothing on the wallet. Only smears. On the gun on the bureau I only got a bunch of smears but a clear thumb on the cartridge.
    “Then, let’s see, I got the whole hand just about, a palm, thumb and three fingers on the left cabinet door under the bathroom sink. I figure he must’ve put his hand on it to steady himself when