Page 52 of Resurrection Walk

“You need to call the cops. Get it on the record.”

“I’m not finished checking the house. Let me call you back.”

“Fine, but you need to call the —”

Bosch disconnected, dropped the phone in his pocket, and continued the sweep of the house. He checked the bedrooms and bathrooms but saw no further evidence of intrusion. He sat down on his bed. He thought about things and wondered again if it was possible that he had left the door open and the turntable spinning. Maybe the smell of a cigarette was a ghost memory of his own former addiction or a side effect of his medical treatment. He knew that short-term memory loss and a heightened or diminished sense of smell or taste were possible side effects of the therapy he was receiving.

Dr. Ferras had given Bosch his personal cell number, and Bosch thought about calling now. But he quickly dismissed the idea. What was Ferras going to say beyond what was already in the small print of the materials Bosch had signed? Forgetfulness was a possible side effect.

Bosch felt tired and old. And defeated. He put the gun on the side table. The pillow looked so inviting. He thought about calling his daughter to see if she had come by and left the door open. She didn’t smoke, as far as Bosch knew, but the man she was dating did. He decided he would do it later. He would also decide whether to call the police later. Right now he needed to rest.

He lay down and soon his dark thoughts about mortality slipped away and he was dreaming of himself as a younger man, moving through a tunnel with a dying flashlight.

17

IT WAS Afive-hour drive and Bosch left home in predawn darkness to get ahead of traffic and make it to the prison by 10 a.m., the start of visiting hours. He knew he was risking a ten-hour round trip and the waste of a whole day if Angel Acosta refused to see him. But he was riding on a hunch based on decades of experience in law enforcement and banking that a twenty-nine-year-old lifer would welcome any interruption or change of pace in a schedule that offered little of it for the next forty or fifty years. The trick would be getting him to open up and talk once they were face-to-face.

Along the way he burned through his whole playlist of favorite jazz recordings, from Cannonball Adderley to Joe Zawinul, finishing with Weather Report’s “Birdland,” Zawinul’s signature fusion composition, as he pulled into the visitors’ parking lot at Corcoran State Prison. The music had cleared his mind of the concerns he’d been carrying since arriving home to see his kitchen door open three days earlier. He had found himself in the strange position of hoping it had been an intruder and not the other option: the first indication of a slide into dementia. He had filed a police report but knew that it was the kind of crime that would receive little attention from the LAPD’s North Hollywood Division burglary unit. The officer who took the report was not convinced there had been a break-in, since Bosch could not say whether anything was taken. The officer did not bother to call a fingerprint technician to the house either. Bosch could not fault him for this, given his own uncertainty.

Bosch had been to the state prison at Corcoran many times as a badge-carrying detective, but this was his first time as a civilian. Finding Angel Acosta had not been as difficult as locating Madison Landon. Bosch had gone back to the digital archives of theL.A. Timesand combed through all the follow-up stories on the shoot-out between Roberto Sanz and gang members at a Lancaster hamburger stand. One gangster was killed, one was wounded and arrested, and two got away. The one that was arrested was identified in subsequent stories as Angel Acosta. He had been shot once in the abdomen but recovered in the hospital ward at the county jail and a year after the shoot-out pleaded guilty to assaulting a law enforcement officer. To Bosch it looked like a sweetheart deal — three to five years for shooting at a sheriff’s deputy. On top of that Acosta wasn’t tagged with responsibility for his fellow gangbanger’s death. That was usually an add-on in gang cases when someone was killed in the commission of a crime. California prosecutors no longer followed this practice because of adverse appellate rulings, but six years ago it was still a routine enhancement slapped on the defendant. Why Acosta hadn’t faced it from his initial arrest was unclear.

The light sentence didn’t matter in the long run because Acosta was later convicted of murdering a fellow inmate. His new conviction carried a life sentence without parole. He had been moved to Corcoran, where it was likely he would be for the rest of his life.

Bosch wanted to talk to Acosta for a few reasons. He was suspicious about that first sentence and how Acosta got it. The newspaper accounts were short and didn’t mention his attorney or the prosecutor who’d handled the case. Added to this was the new information that Roberto Sanz had been talking to an Agent MacIsaac. Bosch knew that the Bureau investigation likely had to do with the wide-ranging probe of the cliques and corruption that had proliferated inside the sheriff’s department. Any focus on Sanz and his affiliation with the Cucos would have included a look at the shoot-out that had made Sanz a hero in the department. If Bosch could get Acosta talking, that was what he would ask about.

People making unscheduled visits had to fill out a form and then stand by in a waiting room while the inmate was asked if he would agree to the visit. There was no timetable. The corrections officer who Bosch gave the completed form to did not run back into the prison dorms with it to find Acosta. He simply put the form on top of a stack and told Bosch to make himself comfortable in the waiting room and listen for his name to be called.

Bosch waited almost two hours and then heard his name. Acosta had agreed to the visit. Bosch knew that was the easy part. The next — getting Acosta to talk to him — was the hard part.

He was led to a room where twenty stools and interview booths lined one side and a catwalk ran along the opposite one. A corrections officer walked a back-and-forth circuit watching over the booths.

Bosch was instructed to take booth seven. He sat down on a steel stool in front of a thick piece of scratched plexiglass with a telephone receiver on a side hook. He waited another ten minutes before a thin, wiry man in prison blues showed up on the other side of the glass. The man hesitated, then picked up the phone but didn’t sit down. Bosch picked up his phone. The next thirty seconds would determine if he’d wasted the day.

“You a cop?” Acosta said. “You look like a cop.”

“Used to be,” Bosch said. “Now I work for people like you.”

Acosta’s entire neck was collared in prison-ink tattoos that showed his allegiance to La Eme — the Mexican Mafia that controlled all Latino gangs in California prisons. He had one teardrop tattoo at the corner of his left eye, and his head and face were shaven. He stared at Bosch, curious about his answer. He slowly slid onto his stool.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“It was on the paper the guard showed you,” Bosch said. “My name’s Bosch. I’m a private investigator.”

“Okay, private investigator, no bullshit, what do you want?”

“I’m trying to get a woman named Lucinda Sanz out of prison. You know that name?”

“Can’t say I do and I don’t care.”

“She was married to the deputy who shot you six years ago. You remember now?”

“I remember she did a righteous thing, that lady, putting his ass in the ground. I heard about that. But what’s it got to do with me? I got a perfect alibi. When that shit went down, I was already in prison, thanks to him and his lying ass.”

“He was lying? Then how come you pled?”

“Let’s just say I had no choice,cabrón.I got nothing else to say.”

He took the phone away from his ear and reached out to hang it up. Bosch held up a finger as if to sayOne last question.Acosta brought the phone back to his ear.

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