The Drop(73)

“You got it.”

Bosch went back to the cubicle. Chu still wasn’t back.

Harry was consumed by the idea that the leak hadn’t come from the Irving camp. This left the chief’s office and the possibility that moves were being made that Kiz Rider didn’t know about, or that she was hiding from him. He went to his computer and opened up the Times website. In the search box he typed “Emily Gomez-Gonzmart” and hit return.

Soon he had a page full of citations—the headlines of stories that carried the reporter’s byline in reverse chronological order. He started scrolling through, reading the headlines, and quickly came to the conclusion that GoGo did not cover politics or city government. There were no stories in the last year that put her in proximity to Irvin or George Irving. She appeared to be a feature writer who specialized in crime stories. The day-later kind of stories in which she expanded on a crime, reporting on victims and their families. Bosch clicked on a few of these, read the opening paragraphs and then went back to the list.

He scrolled backwards through more than three years of stories, not seeing anything that would connect Gomez-Gonzmart to anyone involved in the George Irving case. And then a headline from early 2008 caught his eye.





Triads Exact Toll on Local Chinese




Bosch opened the story. It was an anecdotal lead about an old woman who owned an apothecary store in Chinatown and who had been paying a monthly protection fee to a Triad boss for more than thirty years. The story then widened into a report on the cultural history of local small-business owners continuing the age-old, Hong Kong–based tradition of paying Triad crime syndicates for protection. The story was spawned by the then-recent murder of a Chinatown landlord that was suspected to have been a Triad hit.

Bosch froze when he got to the ninth paragraph of the story.



“The Triads are alive and well in L.A.,” said Detective David Chu, a member of the LAPD’s Asian Gang Unit. “They prey on people like they’ve preyed on people in Hong Kong for three hundred years.”





Harry stared at the paragraph for a long moment. Chu had transferred to the Open-Unsolved Unit and to partnering with Bosch two years earlier. Before that he worked in AGU, where he had crossed paths with Emily Gomez-Gonzmart, and it seemed he had continued the relationship.

Bosch killed the screen and turned in his seat. Still no sign of Chu. He rolled over to his partner’s side of the cubicle and opened the laptop Chu had left on his desk. The screen lit up and Bosch clicked on the e-mail icon. He glanced around again to make sure Chu had not entered the squad room. He then opened a new e-mail and typed “GoGo” in the address box.

Nothing happened. He deleted it and typed “Emily.” The automatic feature that completed e-mail addresses that had been previously used took over and filled in emilygg@latimes.com.

Bosch felt a rage building. He looked around once more and then went into the e-mail account’s sent box and searched for all e-mails to emilygg. There were several. Bosch started reading them one at a time and quickly realized they were innocuous. Chu used e-mail only to set up meetings, often at the Times cafeteria across the street. There was no way to determine the kind of relationship he had with the reporter.

Bosch closed out the e-mail screens and shut the laptop. He had seen enough. He knew enough. He rolled in his chair back to his own desk and contemplated what to do. The investigation had been compromised by his own partner. The ramifications of this could extend all the way into court if McQuillen was eventually prosecuted. A defense attorney with knowledge of Chu’s impropriety could destroy his credibility as well as the credibility of the case.

That was just part of the case damage. It didn’t even speak to the irrevocable harm that Chu had caused their partnership. As far as Bosch was concerned, that relationship had just ended.

“Harry! You ready to rock?”

Bosch turned in his seat. Chu had just entered the cubicle.

“Yeah,” Bosch said. “I’m ready.”





27




A taxi garage was much like a police station. It operated solely as a hub for the refueling, maintenance and direction of vehicles that continually spread out across a geographic jurisdiction. And, of course, it was the place where those vehicles were replenished with those who drove them. The vehicles were always in play until mechanical failure pulled them out of the lineup. In that there was a rhythm that could be counted on. Cars in, cars out. Drivers in, drivers out. Mechanics in and mechanics out. Dispatchers in and dispatchers out.

Bosch and Chu sat on Gower and watched the front of the Black & White Taxi garage for nearly an hour before they saw the man they believed was Mark McQuillen park a car on the curb and then walk in through the open garage door. He wasn’t what Bosch expected. In his mind’s eye he was picturing the McQuillen he remembered from twenty-five years earlier. The McQuillen whose photo was splashed across the media as the scapegoat of the choke hold task force. The twenty-eight-year-old stud with the buzz cut and the biceps that looked strong enough to crush a man’s skull, let alone his carotid artery.