“When you drove by Orange Grove, you heard no shots or anything like that?”
“No, nothing. I had my windows up.”
“And you were driving fast.”
“Yes, I was going to be late for work.”
“Now, when Detective Edgar came to see you, was that unsettling?”
“Unsettling? Well, yes, I guess so, until I realized what he was there for, and of course I knew I had nothing to do with it.”
“Was it the first time you’d ever encountered a detective or the police like that? You know, on a murder case.”
“Yes, it was very unusual. To say the least. Not a normal part of my life.”
She shook her shoulders as if to intimate a shiver, imply that police and murder investigations were foreign to her. Bosch stared at her for a long moment. She had either forgotten about seeing the armed man with a ski mask coming out of the garage where Roy Alan McIntyre was murdered, or she was lying.
Bosch thought the latter. He thought that Diane Gables was a killer.
“How do you pick them?” he asked.
She turned directly toward him, her eyes locking on his.
“Pick what?”
Bosch paused, squeezing the most out of her stare and the moment.
“The stocks you recommend to people,” he said.
She broke her eyes away and looked at Edgar.
“Due diligence,” she said. “Careful analysis and prognostication. Then, I have to say, I throw in my hunches. You gentlemen use hunches, don’t you?”
“Every day,” Bosch said.
THEY WERE SILENT for a while as they drove away. Bosch thought about the carefully worded answers Gables had given. He was feeling stronger about his hunch every minute.
“What do you think?” Edgar finally asked.
“I think it’s her.”
“How can you say that? She didn’t make a single false move in there.”
“Yes, she did. Her eyes gave her away.”
“Oh, come on, Harry. You’re saying you know she’s a stone-cold killer because you can read it in her eyes?”
“Pretty much. She also lied. She didn’t mention the case in 1999 because she thought we didn’t know about it. She didn’t want us going down that path, so she lied and said you were the only detective she’d ever met.”
“At best, that’s a lie by omission. Weak, Harry.”
“A lie is a lie. Nothing weak about it. She was hiding it from us and there’s only one reason to do that. I want to get inside her house. She’s gotta have a place where she studies and plans these things.”
“So you think she’s a pro? A gun for hire?”
“Maybe; I don’t know. Maybe she reads the paper and picks her targets, people she thinks need killing. Maybe she’s on some kind of vigilante trip. Dark justice and all of that.”
“A regular angel of vengeance. Sounds like a comic book, man.”
“If we get inside that place, we’ll know.”
Edgar drove silently while he composed a response. Bosch knew what was coming before he said it.
“Harry, I’m just not seeing it. I respect your hunch, man, I have seen that come through more than once. But there ain’t enough here. And if I don’t see it, then there’s no judge that’s going to give you a warrant to go back in there.”
Bosch took his time answering. He was grinding things down, coming up with a plan.
“Maybe, maybe not,” he finally said.
TWO DAYS LATER at 9:00 a.m., Bosch pulled up to Diane Gables’s house. The Range Rover was not in the driveway. He got out and went to the front door. After two loud knocks went unanswered he walked around the house to the back door.
He knocked again. When there was no reply, he removed a set of lock picks that he kept behind his badge in his leather wallet and went to work on the dead bolt. It took him six minutes to open the door. He was greeted by the beeping of the burglar alarm. He located the box on the wall to the left of the back door and punched in the four numbers he had seen Gables enter at the front door two evenings before. The beeping stopped. Bosch was in. He left the door open and started looking around the house.
It was a post–World War II ranch house. Bosch had been in a thousand of them over the years and all the investigations. After a quick survey of the entire house he started his search in a bedroom that had been converted to a home office. There was a desk and a row of file cabinets along the wall where a bed would have been. There was a line of windows over the cabinets.
There was also a metal locker with a padlock on it. Bosch opened the venetian blinds over the file cabinets, and light came into the room. He moved to the metal locker and started there, pulling his picks out once again.