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“Kent Osborne.”
Bosch shook his hand.
“Harry Bosch,” he said. “Thanks for your time.”
“Gotta make time for the LAPD,” Osborne said. “That’s the big time.”
Bosch smiled uneasily. There had been a slightly sarcastic tone in Osborne’s voice.
Osborne led Bosch to a detective bureau, where he counted desks for sixteen detectives. There were no signs hanging from the ceiling denoting crime sections. Half the desks had menor women sitting behind them, and most of them had eyes on Bosch as he came in.
Osborne’s desk was the last in the first row. He pulled a chair from an empty desk and rolled it over in front of his.
“Have a seat. Are you hurt? You’re limping.”
“I was in an accident Sunday. Messed up my knee.”
“Looks like you messed up your ear, too.”
“Yeah.”
Both men sat down. Osborne checked something on the screen of his desktop computer and then looked at Bosch.
“So, what can I do for you, LAPD?” he asked.
“I don’t know if the guy behind the window explained anything, but I work cold case homicides,” Bosch said. “I’m working a quadruple case—four members of a family murdered with a nail gun and then buried in the desert.”
“That’s gotta hurt.”
Bosch did not acknowledge the poor attempt at gallows humor.
“The case is almost nine years old,” he said. “We recently reopened it and there’s a person of interest. We have a solid witness that puts him here, but that was at least six years ago.”
Osborne frowned.
“Six years in Key West is a long time,” he said. “This town turns over quick. People come and go. Why’d you ask for a missing persons dick?”
Bosch had not heard the term applied to a detective in a long time, and possibly never in the real world.
“Because of the crime in L.A.,” he said. “This guy played a long game. Took a job, worked his way up over the years until he was a valued employee, then killed the owner and his familyand looted the business in a classic bust-out scheme. My guess is he came here to do it all again.”
“As far as I know, we got no families murdered here, LAPD.”
“My witness back in L.A. said he invested in a bar in Key West and then the bar went belly-up. I think if he’s here, he’s moved on to something else.”
“And the missing persons part?”
“Do you have a case involving a prominent person—like a business owner—who’s gone missing?”
Osborne leaned back in his chair and swiveled it back and forth as he considered the question.
“Nothing like that, that I know of. Our cases are mostly about bored teenagers going up to Miami, tourists getting so shit-faced at Sloppy Joe’s they can’t find their way back to the motel. Can’t think of a prominent citizen going missing.”
“What about a bar going under six or seven years ago?”
Osborne let out a laugh.
“There isn’t a shortage of those,” he said.
