“Excuse me, Chief?”

“One other matter. I felt because of the identity of one of the victims in this case that it was incumbent upon me to notify the inspector general. She seemed – how do I put this – she seemed acutely interested in the case when I explained the facts we had at that time. Using the word acutely is probably an understatement.”

Carla Entrenkin. Bosch almost cursed out loud but held it back. The inspector general was a new entity in the department: a citizen appointed by the Police Commission as an autonomous civilian overseer with ultimate authority to investigate or oversee investigations. It was a further politicizing of the department. The inspector general answered to the police commission which answered to the city council and the mayor. And there were other reasons Bosch almost cursed as well. Finding Entrenkin’s name and private number in Elias’s phone book bothered him. It opened up a whole set of possibilities and complications.

“Is she coming out here to the scene?” he asked.

“I think not,” Irving said. “I waited to call so that I could say the scene was clearing. I saved you that headache. But do not be surprised if you hear directly from her in the daylight.”

“Can she do that? I mean, talk to me without going through you? She’s a civilian.”

“Unfortunately, she can do whatever she wants to. That is how the Police Commission set up the job. So what it means is that this investigation, wherever it goes, it better be seamless, Detective Bosch. If it is not, we will be hearing from Carla Entrenkin about it.”

“I understand.”

“Good, then all we need is an arrest and all will be fine.”

“Sure, Chief.”

Irving disconnected without acknowledging. Bosch looked up. Chastain and Baker were stepping onto the train.

“There’s only one thing worse than having the IAD tagging along on this,” he whispered to Rider. “That’s the inspector general watching over our shoulders.”

Rider looked at him.

“You’re kidding? Carla I’mthinkin’ is on this?”

Bosch almost smiled at Rider’s use of the nickname bestowed on Entrenkin by an editorialist in the police union’s Thin Blue Line newsletter. She was called Carla I’mthinkin’ because of her tendency toward slow and deliberate speech whenever addressing the Police Commission and criticizing the actions or members of the department.

Bosch would have smiled but the addition of the inspector general to the case was too serious.

“Nope,” he said. “Now we got her, too.”

AT the top of the hill they found Edgar and Fuentes had returned from notifying Catalina Perez’s family of her death, and Joe Dellacroce had returned from Parker Center with completed and signed search warrants. Court-approved searches were not always needed for the home and business of the victim of a homicide. But it made good sense to get warrants in high-profile cases. Such cases attracted high-profile attorneys if they eventually resulted in arrest. These attorneys invariably created their high profiles by being thorough and good at what they did. They exploited mistakes, took the frayed seams and loose ends of cases and ripped open huge holes – often big enough for their clients to escape through. Bosch was already thinking that far ahead. He knew he had to be very careful.

Additionally, he believed a warrant was particularly necessary to search Elias’s office. There would be numerous files on police officers and cases pending against the department. These cases would most likely proceed after being taken on by new attorneys, and Bosch needed to balance the preservation of attorney-client privacy with the need to investigate the killing of Howard Elias. The investigators would no doubt need to proceed carefully while handling these files. It was the reason he had called the district attorney’s office and asked Janis Langwiser to come to the scene.

Bosch approached Edgar first, taking him by the arm and nudging him over to the guardrail overlooking the steep drop-off to Hill Street. They were out of earshot of the others.

“How’d it go?”

“It went the way they all go. About a million other places I’d rather be than watching the guy get the news. Know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I know. You just tell him or did you ask him some questions?”

“We asked, but we didn’t get very many answers. The guy said his wife was a housecleaner and she had a gig somewhere over here. She took the bus over. He couldn’t give an address. Said his wife kept all of that stuff in a little notebook she carried.”

Bosch thought for a moment. He didn’t remember any notebook in the evidence inventory. Balancing his briefcase on the guardrail, he opened it and took out the clipboard on which he had the accumulated paperwork from the crime scene. On top was the yellow copy of the inventory Hoffman had given him before he had left. It listed Victim #2’s belongings but there was no notebook.

“Well, we’ll have to check with him again later on. We didn’t get any notebook.”

“Well, send Fuentes back. The husband didn’t speak English.”

“All right. Anything else?”

“No. We did the usual checklist. Any enemies, any problems, anybody giving her trouble, anybody stalking her, so on and so forth. Nada. The husband said she wasn’t worried about anything.”

“Okay. What about him?”

“He looked legit. Like he got hit in the face with the big frying pan called bad luck. You know?”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Hit hard. And there was as much surprise there as anything else.”

“Okay.”

Bosch looked around to make sure they were not being overheard. He spoke low to Edgar.

“We’re going to split up now and go with the searches. I want you to take the apartment Elias kept over at The Place. I was – ”

“So that’s where he was going.”

“Looks like it. I was just up there with Chastain, did a drive-by. I want you to take your time this time. I also want you to start in his bedroom. Go to the bed and take the phone book out of the top drawer of the table with the phone on it. Bag it and seal it so nobody can look at it until we get everything back to the office.”

“Sure. How come?”

“I’ll tell you later. Just get to it before anybody else. Also, take the tape from the phone machine in the kitchen. There’s a message we want to keep.”

“Right.”

“Okay then.”

Bosch stepped away from the guardrail and approached Dellacroce.

“Any problems with the paper?”

“Not really – except for waking the judge twice.”

“Which judge?”

“John Houghton.”

“He’s okay.”

“Well, it didn’t sound like he appreciated having to do everything twice.”

“What did he say about the office?”

“Had me add in a line about preserving the sanctity of attorney-client privilege.”

“That’s it? Let me see.”

Dellacroce took the search warrants out of the inside pocket of his suit jacket and handed Bosch the one for the office at the Bradbury. Bosch scanned through the stock wording on the first page of the declaration and got to the part Dellacroce had talked about. It looked okay to him. The judge was still allowing the search of the office and the files, but was simply saying that any privileged information gleaned from the files must be germane to the murder investigation.

“What he’s saying is that we can’t go through the files and turn what we get over to the city attorney’s office to help defend those cases,” Dellacroce said. “Nothing goes outside our investigation.”

“I can live with that,” Bosch said.

He called everybody into a huddle. He noticed Fuentes was smoking and tried not to think about his own desire for a cigarette.

“Okay, we’ve got the search warrants,” he said. “This is how we’re gonna split it up. Edgar, Fuentes and Baker, you three take the apartment. I want Edgar on lead. The rest of us will go to the office. You guys on the apartment, I also want you to arrange for interviews of all the doormen in the building. All shifts. We need to find out as much about this guy’s routines and personal life as we can. We’re thinking there may be a girlfriend somewhere. We need to find out who that was. Also, on the key chain there is a key to a Porsche and a Volvo. My guess is Elias drove the Porsche and it’s probably in the parking garage at the apartment building. I want you to take a look at that, too.”