The Overlook - Michael Connelly [4]
He opened the glove box next and several more clip-on IDs like the one found on the body fell to the floorboard. He picked them up one by one and saw that each access badge had been issued by a different local hospital. But the swipe cards all bore the same name and photo. Stanley Kent, the man (Bosch presumed) who was lying dead in the clearing.
He noticed that on the back of several of the tags there were handwritten notations. He looked at these for a long moment. Most were numbers with the letters L or R at the end and he concluded that they were lock combinations.
Bosch looked farther into the glove box and found even more IDs and access key cards. As far as he could tell, the dead man—if he was Stanley Kent—had clearance access to just about every hospital in Los Angeles County. He also had the combinations to security locks at almost every one of the hospitals. Bosch briefly considered that the IDs and key cards might be counterfeits used by the victim in some sort of hospital scam.
Bosch returned everything to the glove box and closed it. He then looked under and between the seats and found nothing of interest. He backed out of the car and went to the open trunk.
The trunk was small and empty. But in the beam of his flashlight he noted that there were four indentations in the carpet lining the bottom. It was clear that something square and heavy with four legs or wheels had been carried in the trunk. Because the trunk was found in the open position it was likely that the object—whatever it was—had been taken during the killing.
“Detective?”
Bosch turned and put the beam of his light into the face of a patrolman. It was the officer who had taken his name and badge number at the perimeter. He lowered the light.
“What is it?”
“There’s an FBI agent here. She’s asking permission to enter the crime scene.”
“Where is she?”
The officer led the way back to the yellow tape. As Bosch got close he saw a woman standing next to the open door of a car. She was alone and she wasn’t smiling. Bosch felt the thud of uneasy recognition hit his chest.
“Hello, Harry,” she said when she saw him.
“Hello, Rachel,” he said.
TWO
IT HAD BEEN ALMOST SIX MONTHS since he had seen Special Agent Rachel Walling of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. As he approached her at the tape, Bosch was sure that not a day had gone by in that time when he hadn’t thought about her. He had never imagined, however, that they would be reunited—if they ever were reunited—in the middle of the night at a murder scene. She was dressed in jeans, an oxford shirt and a dark blue blazer. Her dark hair was unkempt but she still looked beautiful. She obviously had been called in from home, just as Bosch had. She wasn’t smiling and Bosch was reminded of how badly things had ended the last time.
“Look,” he said, “I know I’ve been ignoring you but you didn’t have to go to all the trouble of tracking me down at a crime scene just to—”
“It’s not really a time for humor,” she said, cutting him off. “If this is what I think it might be.”
They’d last had contact on the Echo Park case. He had found her at the time working for a shadowy FBI unit called Tactical Intelligence. She had never explained what exactly the unit did and Bosch had never pushed it, since it wasn’t important to the Echo Park investigation. He had reached out to her because of her past tenure as a profiler—and their past personal history. The Echo Park case had gone sideways and so had any chance for another romance. As Bosch looked at her now, he knew she was all business and he had a feeling he was about to find out what the Tactical Intelligence Unit was all about.
“What is it you think it might be?” he asked.
“I’ll tell you when I can tell you. Can I please see the scene?”
Reluctantly, Bosch lifted the crime scene tape and returned her perfunctory attitude with his standard sarcasm.
“Come on in,