“Who submitted the 2007 case?”
“Uh, it was out of Hollywood Division. Detective Jerry Edgar made the submission.”
Bosch almost smiled in the hallway. He went a distance back with Jerry Edgar.
“Have you talked to Edgar yet about the hit?” Bosch asked.
“No. I started with you. Do you want his contact info?”
“I already have it. What’s the vic’s name on that case?”
“Raymond Randolph, DOB six, six, sixty-one — that’s a lot of sixes. DOD July second, 2007.”
“Okay, I’ll get the rest from Edgar. You did good, Pran. This gives me something I can work with.”
Bosch disconnected and went back into the principal’s office. He had not missed his appointment. He checked his watch. He’d give it fifteen minutes, and then he’d have to start moving on the case. His daughter would have to go without her confiscated cell phone until he could get another appointment with the principal.
BEFORE CONTACTING JERRY Edgar at Hollywood Division, Bosch pulled up the files — both hard and digital — on his own case. It involved the murder of a precious-metals swindler named Roy Alan McIntyre. He had sold gold futures by phone and internet. It was the oldest story in the book: There was no gold, or not enough of it. It was a Ponzi scheme through and through and like all of them, it finally collapsed upon itself. The victims lost tens of millions. McIntyre was arrested as the mastermind, but the evidence was tenuous. A good lawyer came to his defense and was able to convince the media that McIntyre was a victim himself, a dupe for organized-crime elements that had pulled the strings on the scheme. The DA started floating a deal that would put McIntyre on probation — provided he cooperated and returned all the money he still had access to. But word leaked about the impending deal, and hundreds of the scam’s victims organized to oppose it. Before the whole thing went to court, McIntyre was murdered in the garage under the Westwood condominium tower where he lived. Shot once between the eyes, his body found on the concrete next to the open door of his car.
The crime scene was clean; not even a shell casing from the nine-millimeter bullet that had killed him was recovered. The investigators had no physical evidence and a list of possible suspects that numbered in the hundreds. The killing looked like a hit. It could have been McIntyre’s unsavory backers in the gold scam or it could have been any of the investors who’d gotten ripped off. The only bright spot was that there was a witness. She was Diane Gables, a twenty-nine-year-old stockbroker who happened to be driving by McIntyre’s condo on her way home from work. She’d reported seeing a man wearing a ski mask and carrying a gun at his side run from the garage and jump into the passenger seat of a black SUV waiting in front. Panicked by the sight of the gun, she didn’t get an exact make or model of the SUV or its license-plate number. She’d pulled to the side of the road rather than following the vehicle as it sped off.
Bosch had not interviewed Gables when he had reevaluated the case in the Open-Unsolved Unit. He had simply reviewed the file and submitted it to the DEATH squad. Now, of course, he would be talking to her.
He picked the phone up and dialed a number from memory. Jerry Edgar was at his desk.
“It’s me — Bosch. Looks like we’re going to be working together again.”
“Sounds good to me, Harry. What’ve you got?”
DIANE GABLES’S CURRENT address, obtained through the DMV, was in Studio City. Edgar drove while Bosch looked through the file on the 2007 case. It involved the murder of a man who had been awaiting trial for raping a seventeen-year-old girl who had knocked on his door to sell him candy bars as part of a fundraiser for a school trip to Washington, DC.
As Bosch read through the murder book, he remembered the case. It had been in the news because the circumstances suggested it had been a crime of vigilante justice by someone who was not willing to wait for Raymond Randolph to go on trial. Randolph was intending to mount a defense that would acknowledge that he’d had sexual intercourse with the girl but state that it was consensual. He planned to claim that the victim offered him sex in exchange for his buying her whole carton of candy bars.
The forty-six-year-old Randolph was found in the single-car garage behind his bungalow on Orange Grove, south of Sunset. He had been on his knees when he was shot twice in the back of the head.
The crime scene was clean, but it was a hot day in July and a neighbor who had her windows open because of a broken air conditioner heard the two shots, followed by the high-revving and rapid departure of a vehicle in the street. She called 911, which brought a near-immediate response from the police at Hollywood Station three blocks away and also served to peg the time of the murder almost to the minute.