The Last Coyote (Harry Bosch, #4; Harry Bosch Universe, #4)

by Michael Connelly

Marjorie Lowe’s last known destination was a party in Hancock Park. According to Katherine Register, she was more specifically going to meet Conklin. After she was dead, Conklin had called the detectives on the case to make an appointment but any record of the interview, if any occurred, was missing.

just liked his job. He was a rarity because he never tired of it.

“Oh, yeah, he was the bulldog outside the door. Ran his campaigns. That’s how Mittel got started. Now that’s one mean—I’m glad he got out of criminal law and into politics, he’d be a motherfucker to come up against in court.”

Conklin, according to Katherine Register, knew Marjorie Lowe. It was clear from the murder book that he had somehow reached into the investigation of her death for reasons unknown. His reach was then apparently covered up for reasons unknown. This had occurred only three months before he announced his candidacy for district attorney and less than a year before a key figure in the investigation, Johnny Fox, died while in his political employ.

“Everybody wants the chance to do the right thing, Hirsch. It makes them feel good inside. Even if doing it doesn’t exactly fit inside the rules, sometimes you have to rely on the voice inside that tells you what to do.”

Essentially, that made ESD the city’s temple of failure. What was behind the steel doors Bosch opened was the physical evidence from thousands of unsolved crimes. Crimes that had never resulted in prosecution. It even smelled of failure.

I accept the truth. I accept the truth in anything as long as it’s the truth.

guess I was mad about that and felt abandoned. I was also hurt. The hurt was the worst part. She loved me.”

I lived a few months two different times with some fosters but I always got sent back.

Anyway, when you took a kid into your home as foster parents, you got a monthly support payment. A lot of people took kids in just for those checks. I’m not saying these people did, but they never told DPSS I wasn’t in their home anymore after I left.”

“These stories, Harry,” she finally said, “these stories that you tell are heartbreaking in their own way. It makes me see the boy who became the man. It makes me see the

depth of the hole left by your mother’s death. You know, you would have a lot to blame her for and no one would blame you for doing it.”

“I don’t blame her for anything. I blame the man who took her from me. See, these are ...

Bird alone, flying high Flying through a clouded sky Sending mournful, soulful sounds Soaring over troubled grounds

Bosch ran his finger over the plastic where the spot was. It was then that he realized something. There was no other blood. He knew that it was the thing that had bothered him as he read the murder book but he had been unable to get ahold of the thought then. Now he had it. The blood. No blood on the undergarments, the skirt or the stockings, or pumps. Only on the blouse. Bosch also knew the autopsy had described a body with no lacerations.

Nowhere did it mention or give any reference code for any analysis ever being done on the blood. This invigorated him. There was a good chance that the blood spot came from the killer, not the victim.

There’s another irony, he thought. Lifecare. The only thing the place probably cared about was when you were going to die, so your space could be sold to the next one.

“Yes, they’d be in twice. In the federal employees base and in the FBI’s. They keep prints on record of everyone they do background investigations on, if that’s what you mean. But remember, just because somebody visits the president, it doesn’t mean they get printed.”

In the inventory of his morality, what Pounds had done to him was equally wrong.

You’re looking at your life in two parts. The first part is with her, which you seem to have imbued with a happiness I’m sure was not always there. The second part is your life after, which you acknowledge has not met expectations or is in some way unsatisfactory.

In fact, I feel… I don’t know what the word is, maybe ashamed. I feel ashamed that I haven’t done this long before now. A lot of years have gone by and I just let them go. I feel like I let her down somehow… that I let myself down.”

Everybody counts or nobody counts. Well, for a long time she didn’t count. Not with this department, this society, not even with me. I have to admit that, not even with me. Then I opened that file this week and I could see that her death was just put away. It was buried, just like I had buried it. Somebody put the fix in because she didn’t count. They did it because they could. And then when I think about how long I’ve let it go… it makes me want

to… I don’t know, just hide my face or something.”

There is a basic rule of nature. No living thing sacrifices itself or hurts itself needlessly.

“Well, then I have to tell you that a patient-doctor relationship can be broken if the therapist believes the patient is endangering himself or others. I told you I was almost powerless to stop you. Not completely.” “You’d go to Irving?” “I will if I believe you are being reckless.”

“First of all, he’s a commander of detectives who has never been a detective himself.

He’s what we call a Robocrat. A bureaucrat with a badge. He doesn’t know the first thing about clearing cases.

“He touched my suspect.”

That’s a cardinal rule; don’t touch somebody else’s suspect. It doesn’t matter if you’re a lieutenant or the damn chief, you stay clear until you check first with the guys with the collar.”

“Reads him his rights. This is our goddamn witness and Pounds, who doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing, thinks he’s gotta go

and give the guy the spiel. He thinks like we forgot or something.”

“Well, some of the guys came running in and pulled me out of there. The station commander sent me home. Pounds had to go to the hospital to fix his nose. IAD took a statement from him and I was suspended. And then Irving stepped in and changed it to ISL. Here I am.”

“So what we’ve got,” he finally said, “is a murderer out there on the street and the guy who allowed him to go free is back behind his desk, the broken glass already replaced, business as usual. That’s our system. I got mad about it and look what it got me. Stress leave and maybe the end of my job.”

What struck him most about Florida on this first drive was its flatness.

Cruising along the Tamiami Trail,

was hard to keep track of all the disasters in the world.

They shouldn’t’ve done what they did.” “Who’s they?” “You know, the big shots.” “What did they do?” “They took it away from us. And Eno let them. He cut some deal with

them himself. Shit.”

She hadn’t been killed in that alley. That much was clear. She’d been dropped off.

“I think there were a few clients. And the list didn’t go into the book because Eno said so. Remember,

“Yeah, he was at the top of it. He was her… uh, manager and—”

“Her pimp, yo...

“Point is, Fox was none too happy about that. That put him at the top of our list.”

“Yeah. He was our man. We had prints we had taken off the belt—the murder weapon—but we had no comparisons from him. Johnny had been pulled in a few times in the past but never booked. Never printed. So we really needed to bring him in.”

“Well, on one of the days we were watching Fox’s place, waiting for him to show up, we got a message on the radio to call Arno Conklin.

He wanted to talk about the case. ASAP. Now this was a holy shit kind of call. For two reasons. One, Arno was going great guns then. He was running the city’s moral commandos at the time and had a lock on the DA’s office, which was coming open in a year. The other reason was that we’d only had the case a few days and hadn’t come near the DA’s office with anything. So now all of a sudden the most powerful guy in the agency wants to see us.

“Yeah, Arno. Only I had it wrong. The request for a meeting was only for Claude. Not me. Eno went alone.”

He was telling Bosch that he didn’t trust his own partner.

“He came back from the meeting saying Conklin asked him to lay off Fox because Fox was clear on this case and Fox was working as an informant on one of the commando investigations. He said Fox was important to him and he didn’t want him compromised or roughed up, especially over a crime he didn’t commit.”

“Yeah, I was there but nothing happened. We interviewed him. Fox was there with Conklin, so was the Nazi.” “The Nazi?” “Conklin’s enforcer, Gordon Mittel.”