A Darkness More Than Night - Michael Connelly [78]
His phone chirped. It was Winston.
“It’s coming together, Terry. I’m a believer.”
“What did you get?”
“You first. You said you got some stuff.”
“No, you. What I got is minor. It sounds like you hooked something big.”
“Okay, listen to this. Harry Bosch’s mother was a prostitute. In Hollywood. She got murdered when he was a little kid. And whoever did it got away with it. How is that for psychological underpinnings, Mr. Profiler?”
McCaleb didn’t answer. The new information was stunning and provided many of the missing pieces in the working theory. He watched the hooker and her customer at the window of the motel office. The man passed cash through and received a key. They went in through a glass door.
“Gunn kills a prostitute and walks away,” Winston said when he didn’t respond. “Just like what happened with his mother.”
“How’d you find this out?” McCaleb finally asked.
“I made that call we talked about. To my friend, Kiz. I acted like I was interested in Bosch and asked her if she knew if he was, you know, over his divorce yet. She told me what she knew about him. The stuff about his mother apparently came out a few years ago in a civil trial when Bosch got sued for a wrongful death — the Dollmaker, you remember that one?”
“Yeah, the LAPD refused to call us in on that one. That was also a guy who killed prostitutes. Bosch killed him. He was unarmed.”
“There’s a psychology going on here. A goddamn pattern.”
“What happened to Bosch after his mother was killed?”
“Kiz didn’t really know. She called him an institutional man. It happened when he was ten or eleven. After that he grew up in youth halls and foster homes. He went into the service and then the department. The point is, this is the thing we were missing. The thing that turned a no-count case into something Bosch wouldn’t let go.”
McCaleb nodded to himself.
“And there’s more,” Winston said. “I went through all the accumulated files — extraneous things I didn’t put in the murder book. I looked at the autopsy on the woman Gunn killed six years ago. Her name was Frances Weldon, by the way. There was one thing in there that now seems significant in light of what we now know about Bosch. Examination of the uterus and hips showed that at some point she’d had a child.”
McCaleb shook his head.
“Bosch wouldn’t have known that. He pushed his lieutenant through a window and was on suspension by the time there was an autopsy.”
“True. But he could and probably did look at the case files after he came back. He would have known that Gunn did to some other kid what was done to him. You see, it is all fitting. Eight hours ago I thought you were grasping at straws. Now it looks to me like you’re dead on.”
It didn’t feel all that good to be dead on. But he understood Winston’s excitement. When cases fell together the excitement could sometimes obscure the reality of the crime.
“What happened to her kid?” he asked.
“No idea. She probably gave the child up after the birth. That doesn’t matter. What matters is what it meant to Bosch.”
She was right. But McCaleb didn’t like the loose end.
“Going back to your call to Bosch’s old partner. Is she going to call him and tell him you asked about him?”
“She already did.”
“This is tonight?”
“Yeah, this all just went down. That was that call, her getting back to me. He passed. He told her he was still holding out hope for his wife coming back.”
“Did she tell him it was you who was interested?”
“She wasn’t supposed to.”
“But she probably did. This might mean he knows we’re looking at him.”
“That’s impossible. How?”
“I was just up there tonight. I was in his house. Then the same night he gets this call about you. A guy like Harry Bosch, he doesn’t believe in coincidences, Jaye.”
“Well, when you were up there, how did you handle it?” Winston finally asked.
“Like we said. I wanted