A Darkness More Than Night - Michael Connelly [59]
“Not necessarily. Use the Storey case. It’s high profile. Maybe you’ve been watching the guy on TV and he doesn’t look so good. ‘Is he all right? What’s going on with him?’ Like that. Make it like you’re gossiping.”
She didn’t look mollified. She stepped over to the sliding door and looked out across the marina. She leaned her forehead against the glass.
“I know his former partner,” she said. “There’s an informal group of women who get together once a month. We all work homicide from all the local departments. About a dozen of us. Harry’s old partner Kiz Rider just got moved from Hollywood to Robbery-Homicide. The big time. But I think they were close. He was kind of a mentor. I might be able to hit on her. If I use a little finesse.”
McCaleb nodded and thought of something.
“Harry told me he was divorced. I don’t know how long ago but you could ask Rider about him like, you know, you’re interested and what’s he like, that sort of thing. You ask like that and she might give you the real lowdown.”
Winston looked away from the slider and back at McCaleb.
“Yeah, that will make us good friends when she finds out it was all bullshit and I was setting up on her ex-partner — her mentor.”
“If she’s a good cop she’ll understand. You had to either clear him or bag him and either way you wanted to do it as quietly as possible.”
Winston looked back out the door.
“I’m going to need deniability on this.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning if we do this and you go in there and it all blows up, I need to be able to walk away.”
McCaleb nodded. He wished she hadn’t said it but he could see her need to protect herself.
“I’m just telling you up front, Terry. If it all goes to hell it’s going to look like you overstepped, that I asked you to take a look at the book and you went off on your own. I’m sorry but I have to protect myself here.”
“I understand, Jaye. I can live with it. I’ll take my chances.”
18
Winston was silent for a long time while she stared out the salon’s door. McCaleb sensed that she was building up to something and just waited.
“I’ll tell you a story about Harry Bosch,” she finally said. “The first time I ever met him was about four years ago. It was a joint case. Two kidnap-murders. The one in Hollywood was his, the one in West Hollywood was mine. Young women, girls really. Physical evidence tied the cases together. We were basically working them separately but would meet for lunch every Wednesday to compare notes.”
“Did you profile it?”
“Yeah. This was when Maggie Griffin was still out here at the bureau. She worked something up for us. The usual. Anyway, things heated up when a third one disappeared. A seventeen-year-old this time. The evidence from the first two indicated the doer was keeping them alive four or five days before he got tired of them and killed them. So we had a big clock on us. We got reinforcements and we were running down common denominators.”
McCaleb nodded. It sounded as though they were going by the book on tracking a serial.
“A long shot came up,” she said. “All three of the victims used the same dry cleaner on Santa Monica near La Cienega. The latest — the girl — had a summer job at Universal and took her uniforms in for dry cleaning. Anyway, before we even went in there to the management we went into the employee parking lot and took down tags to run, just in case we got something before we had to go in and announce ourselves. And we got a hit. The manager himself. He’d gotten popped about ten years before on a public indecency. We pulled the jacket and it was a garden-variety flasher case. He pulled up in a car next to a bus stop and opened the door so the woman on the bench could get a look at his johnson. Turned out she was an undercover — they knew a wagger was working the neighborhood and put out decoys. Anyway, he got probation and counseling. He lied about it on his application at the job and over the years worked his way up to manager of the shop.”
“Higher job, higher stress, higher