The Last Coyote

I don’t see her coming at him with a knife. Then there’s the knife itself. It’s a serrated steak knife, ’bout eight inches long, and she had one of those little purses without a strap.”
    “A clutch.”
    “Yeah, I guess. Anyway, that knife wouldn’t’ve fit in it, so how’d she bring it in? As they say on the street, her clothes fit tighter than the rubbers in her purse, so she wasn’t hiding it on her, either. And there was more. If her purpose was to rip the guy off, why have sex first? Why not pull the knife, take his shit and go? But that didn’t happen. His story was that they did it first, then she came at him, which explained why she was still naked. Which, of course, raised another question. Why rob the guy when you’re naked? Where you going to run like that?”
    “The guy was lying.”
    “Seemed obvious. Then we got something else. In her purse-the clutch-was a piece of paper on which she had written down the motel’s name and the room number. It was consistent with a right-handed person. Like I said, the stab was to the upper right chest of the victim. So it doesn’t add up. If she came at him, the chances are the knife would be in her right hand. If the john then turns it into her, it’s likely the wound would be on the left side of the chest, not the right.”
    Bosch made a motion of pulling his right hand toward his chest, showing how awkward it would be for it to stab his right side.
    “There was all kinds of stuff that wasn’t right. It was a downward-grade wound, also inconsistent with it being in her hand. That would have been upward-grade.”
    Hinojos nodded that she understood.
    “The problem was, we had no physical evidence contradicting his story. Nothing. Just our feeling that she wouldn’t have done it the way he said. The wound stuff wasn’t enough. And then, in his favor, was the knife. It was on the bed, we could see it had fingerprints in the blood. I had no doubt they’d be hers. That’s not hard to do once she’s dead. So while it didn’t impress me, that didn’t matter. It’s what the DA would think and then what a jury would think after that. Reasonable doubt is a big black hole that swallows cases like this. We needed more.”
    “So what happened?”
    “It’s what we call a he-said-she-said. One person’s word against the other, but only the other is dead in this case. Makes it even harder. We had nothing but his story. So what you do in a case like that is you sweat the guy. You turn him. And there’s a lot of ways to do it. But, basically, you gotta break him down in the rooms. We-”
    “The rooms?”
    “The interrogation rooms. In the bureau. We took this guy into a room. As a witness. We didn’t formally arrest him. We asked if he’d come down, said that we had to straighten a few things out about what she did, and he said sure. You know, Mr. Cooperative. Still cool. We stuck him in a room and then Edgar and I went down to the watch office to get some of the good coffee. They’ve got good coffee there, one of those big urns that was donated by some restaurant that got wrecked in the quake. Everybody goes in there to get coffee. Anyway, we’re takin’ our time, talkin’ about how we’re going to go at this guy, which one of us wanted him first, and so on. Meantime, fuckin’ Pounds-excuse me-sees the guy in the room through the little window and goes in and informs him. And-”
    “What do you mean, informs him?”
    “Reads him his rights. This is our goddamn witness and Pounds, who doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing, thinks he’s gotta go in there and give the guy the spiel. He thinks like we forgot or something.”
    Bosch looked at her with outrage on his face but immediately saw she didn’t understand.
    “Wasn’t that the right thing to do?” she asked. “Aren’t you required by law to inform people of their rights?”
    Bosch struggled to contain his anger, reminding himself that Hinojos might work for the department, but she was an outsider. Her perceptions of police work were likely based more on the media than on the actual reality.
    “Let me give you a quick lesson on what’s the law and what’s real. We-the cops-have the deck stacked against us. What Miranda and all the other rules and regs amount to is that we have to take some guy we know is, or at least think is, guilty and basically say, ‘Hey, look, we think you did it and the Supreme Court and every lawyer on the planet would advise you not to talk to