The Night Fire: A Ballard and Bosch thriller (Harry Bosch 22) (31 page)

A third story was the most recent and was about a federal RICO investigation into the corrupt practices of a Las Vegas company that provided linens for several casino resorts on the Strip. Butino was mentioned as a minority owner of the linen and laundry company.

Next Bosch moved to the California Bar website and searched the name William Michaelson to see if any disciplinary actions had been taken against the attorney. He found only one: it had occurred four years earlier, when Michaelson was censured in a case where he took a meeting with a prospective client in a contract dispute. The woman later complained to the bar that Michaelson listened to her outline her side of the dispute for forty minutes before saying he was not interested in taking the case. She later found out that he was already engaged by the defendant she intended to sue and had taken the meeting with her in order to get inside information on the opposition.

It was a sneaky move, and while the bar went easy on Michaelson, it told Bosch a lot about his character and ethics. Michaelson was a lead partner in the firm. What did that say about the other partners and associates who worked for him? What did that say about Manley, who was just one door farther down the hallway at the firm?

“Hey, Daddo.”

Bosch looked up as his daughter slipped into the chair across the table from him. His eyes lit up. He felt the hurt of having learned about John Jack Thompson and everything else slip away.

Maddie slipped her backpack under the table in front of her. “Is this okay?” Bosch asked. “I thought you were going to text me.”

“Yeah, but I love this place,” Maddie said. “Usually, you can’t get a table.”

“I must’ve hit it at the right time.”

“What are you working on?”

Bosch closed his laptop.

“I was looking up a lawyer on the California Bar,” he said. “Wanted to know if anybody had dinged him with a complaint.”

“Uncle Mickey?” Maddie asked.

“No, no, not him. Another guy.”

“Are you working on a case?”

“Yeah. Actually two of them. One with Renée Ballard—who says hello, by the way—and one sort of on my own.”

“Daddo, you’re supposed to be retired.”

“I know but I want to keep moving.”

“How’s your knee?”

“It’s pretty good. Today I went out without the cane. All day.”

“Is that okay with the doctor?”

“He didn’t want me to use it at all. He’s a hard-liner. So how’s school?”

“Boring. But did you hear the big news? They caught that guy Saturday night.”

“You mean the creeper?”

“Yeah, he broke into the wrong house. It’s on the
Orange County Register
website. Same thing—a house of girls. He snuck in, only he didn’t know one of the girls had her boyfriend staying over. The boyfriend catches him in the house, beats the crap out of him, then calls the cops.”

“And he’s good for the other two?”

“The police haven’t called us, but they told the
Register
they would be doing the DNA stuff, seeing if he was connected. But they said the MO was the same.
Modus operandi
—I love saying those words.”

Bosch nodded.

“Do you know where the house was?” he asked. “Was it near yours?”

“No, it was in the neighborhood on the other side of the school.”

“Well, great, I’m glad they caught the guy. You and your roommates should be able to sleep better now.”

“Yeah, we will.”

Bosch intended to call his contact at the Orange Police Department on his drive back up to L.A. to find out more about the arrest. But he was elated by the news. He was acting reserved because he didn’t want his daughter to know how truly unnerving the situation had been for him. He decided to move on to other subject matter with her.

“So, what’s the psych project you’re all doing?”

“Oh, just a dumb thing on how social media influences people. Nothing groundbreaking. We have to write up a survey and then spread out and find people on campus to take it. Ten questions about FOMO.”

She pronounced the last word
foe-moe
.

“What is ‘foe-moe’?” Bosch asked.

“Dad, come on,” Maddie said. “Fear Of Missing Out.”

“Got it. So, you want something to eat or drink? You have to go up to the counter. I’ll hold the table.”

He reached into his pocket for some cash.

“I’ll pay with my card,” Maddie said. “Do you want something?”

“Are you getting food?” Bosch asked.

“I’m going to get something.”

“Then get me a chicken-salad sandwich if they have it. And another coffee. Black. Let me give you some cash.”

“No, I have it.”

She got up from the table and headed to the counter. He was constantly amused by how she always wanted to pay herself with her credit card, when the credit-card bill came to him anyway.

He watched her order from a young man who most likely was a fellow student. She smiled and he smiled and Bosch began to think there was a previous connection.

She came back to the table with two coffees, one with cream.

“You have to study tonight?” Bosch asked.

“Actually, no,” Maddie said. “I have class seven to nine and then some of us are going to the D.”

Bosch knew that the D was a bar called the District favored by students over twenty-one. Maddie was one of them. The reminder of that prompted Bosch’s next question.

“So which way are you leaning today? For after graduation.”

“You’re not going to like it, but law school.”

“Why do you think I won’t like that?”

“I know you want me to be a cop. Plus it means more school and you already spent a ton of money sending me here.”

“No, how many times have we had this talk? I want you to do what you want to do. In fact, the law is safer and you’d make more money. Law school is great, and don’t worry about the costs. I have it covered. And I didn’t spend a ton of money sending you here. Your scholarships covered most of it. So it’s the other way around. You saved me money.”

“But what if I end up like Uncle Mickey—
defending the damned
, as you like to say?”

Bosch drank some of his fresh coffee as a delaying tactic.

“That would be your choice,” he said after putting the cup down. “But I hope you’d at least look at the other side of it. I could set you up if you wanted to talk to some people in the D.A.’s Office.”

“Maybe someday you and I could be a team. You hook ’em and I cook ’em.”

“That sounds like fishing.”

“Speaking of fishing, is that what you came down to ask me about?”

Bosch drank more coffee before answering. He caught a further break when the handsome lad from the counter delivered their food and Maddie over-thanked him. Bosch looked at her plate. It seemed like everybody was eating avocado toast lately. It looked awful to him.

“Is that dinner?” he asked.

“A snack,” Maddie said. “I’ll eat at the D. The guy with the grill outside has the best veggie dogs. It’s probably the thing I’ll miss most about this place.”

“So if it’s law school, not here?”

“I want to get back to L.A. Uncle Mickey went to Southwestern up there. I think I could get in. It’s a good feeder school for the public defender’s office.”

Before Bosch could react to that, the handsome server came back to the table and asked Maddie if she liked her toast. Maddie enthusiastically approved and he went back behind the counter. He hadn’t bothered to ask Bosch how his sandwich was.

“So that guy, you know him?” Bosch asked.

“We had a class together last year,” Maddie said. “He’s cute.”

“I think he thinks you’re cute.”

“And I think you’re changing the subject.”

“Can’t I just come down and hang with my daughter a little bit, drink coffee, eat a sandwich, and learn new words like
foe-moe
?”

“It’s an acronym, not a word:
F-O-M-O.
What’s really going on, Dad?”

“Okay, okay. I wanted to tell you something. It’s not a big deal but you always get mad when you think I intentionally don’t tell you things. I think it’s called
FOLO
—Fear Of Being Left Out.”

“That doesn’t make sense. Plus
FOLO
is already taken: that’s Fear Of Losing Out. So what’s the news? Are you getting married or something?”

“No, I’m not getting married.”

“Then what?”

“You remember how I used to have to get chest X-rays because of that case I had where radioactive material was found?”

“Yes, and then you stopped when they said you had a clean bill of health.”

The concern was growing in her eyes. Bosch loved her for that.

“Well, now I have a very mild form of leukemia that is highly treatable and is being treated, and I’m only telling you this because I know you would scream at me if you found out later.”

Maddie didn’t respond. She looked down at her coffee and her eyes shifted back and forth as if she was reading instructions on what to say and how to act.

“It’s not a big thing, Mads. In fact, it’s just a pill. One pill I take in the morning.”

“Do you have to do chemo and all of that?”

“No, I’m serious. It’s just a pill. That is the chemo. They say I just take this and I’ll be okay. I wanted to tell you because your uncle Mickey is going to bat for me on this and he’s going to try to get some money for it. It happened when I was on the job and I don’t want to lose everything I have set up for you because of it. So he said it could make some news, and that’s what I wanted to avoid—you reading about it online somewhere and then being upset with me for not telling you. But, really, everything is fine.”

She reached across the table and put her hand on top of his.

“Dad.”

He turned his hand over so he could hold her fingers.

“You have to eat your snack,” he said. “Whatever that is.”

“I don’t feel like eating now,” she said.

He didn’t either. He hated scaring her.

“You believe me, right?” he asked. “This is like a formality. I wanted you to hear it from me.”

“They should pay. They should pay you a lot of money.”

Bosch laughed.

“I think you should go to law school,” he said.

She didn’t see the humor in that. She kept her eyes down.

“Hey, if you don’t feel like eating that, let’s take it to go and then go over to that ice-cream place you like, where they cold brew it, or whatever it’s called.”

“Dad, I’m not a little girl. You can’t make everything right with ice cream.”

“So, lesson learned. I should have just shut up and hoped you never found out.”

“No, it’s not that. I’m allowed to feel this way. I love you.”

“And I love you, and that’s what I’m trying to say: I’m going to be around for a long while. I’m going to send you to law school and then I’m going to sit in the back of courtrooms and watch you send bad people away.”

He waited for a reaction. A smile or a smirk, but he got nothing. “Please,” he said. “Let’s not worry about this anymore. Okay?”

“Okay,” Maddie said. “Let’s go get that ice cream.”

“Good. Let’s go.”

She waved the cute guy over and asked him for to-go boxes.

An hour later Bosch had dropped his daughter back at her car and was heading north on the 5 freeway toward L.A. It had been a double-whammy of a day: John Jack Thompson injecting pain and uncertainty into his life, then Bosch doing the same to his daughter and feeling like some sort of criminal for it.

The bottom line was that he was still having a hard time with Thompson. Bosch was almost seventy years old and he had seen some of the worst things people can do to each other, yet something done decades ago and long before his knowledge of it had sent him reeling. He wondered if it was a side effect of the pills he was taking each morning. The doctor had warned there could be mood swings.

On top of all that, he realized he was experiencing FOMO: he wanted to be there when Ballard took down Elvin Kidd for killing John Jack Thompson’s son. Not because he wanted to see the arrest itself—Bosch had never taken particular joy in putting the cuffs on killers. But he wanted to be there for the son. The victim. John Hilton’s own father apparently didn’t care who had killed him, but Bosch did and he wanted to be there. Everybody counted or nobody counted. It might have been a hollow idea to Thompson. But it wasn’t to Bosch.

Ballard had her earbuds in and was listening to a playlist she had put together for building an edge and keeping it. She was squeezed between two large Special Ops officers in the back of a black SUV. It was seven a.m. and they were on the 10 freeway heading out to Rialto to take down Elvin Kidd.

Two SUVs, nine officers, plus one already in an observation post outside Kidd’s home in Rialto. The plan was to make the arrest when Kidd emerged from his house to go to work. Going into the residence of an ex-gang member was never a good plan; they would wait for Kidd to step out. The last report from the man in the OP had been that the suspect’s truck and attached equipment trailer were backed into the driveway. No movement or light had been reported inside the house.

The arrest plan had been approved by the Special Ops lieutenant, who was in the lead SUV. Ballard’s role was as observer and then arresting officer. She would step in after Kidd was in custody and read the man his rights.

In the second SUV the men had carried on a conversation as though Ballard was not among them. The dialogue crisscrossed in front of her without so much as a
What do you think?
or a
Where do you come from?
thrown Ballard’s way. It was just nervous chatter and Ballard knew everybody had different ways of getting ready for battle. She put her earbuds in and listened to Muse and Black Pumas, Death Cab, and others. Disparate songs that all built and held an edge for her.

Ballard saw the driver talking into a rover and pulled out her buds.

“What’s up, Griffin?” she asked.

“Lights on in the house,” Griffin said.

“How far out are we?”

“ETA twenty minutes.”

“We need to step it up. This guy might be ready to boogie. Can we go to code three on the freeway?”