Bosch and Lourdes had spent the rest of the day watching Dr. Jaime Henriquez to see whether he would eventually make a house call. Henriquez was a native son of San Fernando. He was the kid who’d made good and stayed close. A UCLA-trained physician, he could have worked anywhere in the country. But he came home and now operated a busy general practice on Truman Avenue with two other doctors to handle the overflow of patients Henriquez drew. He was a San Fernando success story, having grown up in the barrio and now living in the lush Huntington Estates, the nicest and safest neighborhood in the city.
But while outwardly he was a pillar of success and respectability, his name was secretly carried in the SFPD’s gang intel files. Both his father and grandfather had been SanFers, and loyalty—whether compelled or volunteered—ran deep. The secret of his life was that Henriquez was a suspected gang doctor, and Bosch and Lourdes were going to find out if he was treating the killer of Martin Perez. Lourdes’s cousin J-Rod had put them onto Henriquez, saying he was one of three doctors on the gang unit’s radar. But the other two had already drawn investigations from the state’s medical board and it was J-Rod’s interpretation that for this case—the killing of a witness—the SanFers would go to their top patcher, who lived a life that seemed beyond reproach.
Most of the day had been spent on surveillance of the busy medical office where Henriquez practiced. Both Bosch and Lourdes dodged calls from sheriff’s detectives Lannark and Boyce. And as they watched the medical building and the Mercedes-Benz registered to Henriquez parked out front, they tried to figure out where the leak in the investigation had been.
One of two things had happened. Someone had tipped the SanFers to the fact that Martin Perez was cooperating with the police. Or Perez had made some slip with an acquaintance or family member and had given himself away.
Bosch and Lourdes believed it was most likely the former and they spent their time running down the possibilities, dismissing some and holding on to others.
Bosch had mentioned his suspicions about Tom Yaro, the LAPD detective assigned as interdepartmental liaison to the execution of the search warrant, but Lourdes pointed out that Yaro didn’t have enough information about the case to set up the hit on Perez. Additionally, it had been Yaro who had alerted Lourdes to Cortez watching the morning’s search from the parking lot of the laundry. But that could have been a sincere warning or part of a more devious plan to solidify Yaro as someone on the pro-Bosch team.
“Yaro was briefed for the search warrant,” Lourdes said. “But we never discussed your source in the briefing, and Perez was a John Doe on the warrant. Yaro had no name, no location—it’s a long shot, if you ask me.”
This turned the conversation uncomfortably toward the SFPD. Many of the officers in the department were from San Fernando, and it would have been virtually impossible to grow up in the two-square-mile town without knowing somebody who was in the SanFers. Still, that connection usually worked in a positive way. Many officers added to the gang intel files after street conversations with past acquaintances. Lourdes’s cousin J-Rod was an example of this and she could not remember an incident in her history with the department when information had gone the other way.
That seemed to turn the conversation even more uncomfortably toward Bosch. What move had he made that might have revealed Perez’s betrayal to the SanFers?
Bosch was at a loss. He acknowledged that he often left his laptop in the cell he used as an office. But the cell was always locked and the computer was password protected. He knew that both could be compromised but it still seemed like a remote possibility that a member of the SanFer gang would undertake such an intrusion.
“It’s gotta be something else,” he said. “Maybe we look at Perez again. Who knows? Maybe he called somebody, bragged about taking down Cortez. Nobody said he was very smart.”
“Maybe,” Lourdes said, but her tone implied that she was unconvinced.
Defeated in their efforts to figure it out or at least settle on a focus, they let silence fill the car until they spotted a man approaching Henriquez’s Mercedes-Benz.
“Is that him?” Bosch asked.
Lourdes held up her phone where she had downloaded to her screen a photo of Henriquez from the DMV.
“It’s him,” she said. “Here we go.”
They followed the doctor north and into the Huntington Estates, where he pulled into a garage next to a two-story home with columns out front. The garage was attached to the house, and the detectives lost sight of the doctor once the door automatically came down.
“Think that’s it?” Lourdes said. “He’s in for the night?”
“If he worked on the shooter this morning, then I think he’s gotta check on the patient at some point,” Bosch said.
“Unless he died.”
“There’s that.”
“Or unless he’s in that house.”
“There’s that, too.”
“So we stay?”
“I’m staying. If you’ve got stuff to do, you can walk down the street and call an Uber. I’ll let you know if he makes a move.”
“No, I’m not leaving you here alone.”
“Not a big deal. This is a long shot anyway.”
“Not what partners do.”
Bosch nodded.
“Okay,” he said. “But one of us might have to Uber over to Route 66 to pick up dinner. Haven’t eaten all day.”
“Not a problem,” Lourdes said. “If you like that stuff.”
Bosch didn’t take the bait. They’d had good-natured disputes about surveillance food in the past.
They were parked a half block from the doctor’s house in the driveway of a home that was empty while under full renovation. Bosch had positioned his old Jeep Cherokee in front of a flatbed used for towing construction materials, and the old beater fit in. The windows were smoked, and as long as they didn’t light themselves with phone screens, they would go unnoticed by the doctor or others in the neighborhood.
“Do you remember the music group Seals and Crofts?” Lourdes asked.
“Yeah,” Bosch said. “Seventies, right? They were big.”
“Before my time but I heard this is where they lived. The Estates.”
“Hmm.”
The small talk continued for almost two hours, until the discussion of food came up again in earnest. Lourdes wasn’t interested in Bosch’s hamburger-and-hot-dog joint and Bosch had long ago OD’d on all the Mexican restaurants in town. They were about to flip for it, when a car came down the street and killed its lights as it pulled into the driveway of the Henriquez house. It was full dark now but Bosch had identified the make of the car as it drove by the construction site. It was a white Chrysler 300.
“This is it,” Bosch said.
No one got out of the car. It sat and idled, exhaust puffing from its twin pipes.
None of the house’s exterior lights came on when a figure emerged from the side and got into the Chrysler.
“Is that the doctor?” Lourdes asked.
“Can’t tell, but I’m betting it is,” Bosch said.
The car took off from the Henriquez house and passed in front of Bosch’s Jeep without slowing down. Bosch waited until it had turned a corner and then he pulled out.
The trick was following the Chrysler out of the residential neighborhood without being made. Once the surveillance was in the commercial district, it was easier to use other cars on the road as camouflage. Bosch and Lourdes followed it to San Fernando Road and then north into the Sylmar region of Los Angeles. At Roxford the Chrysler turned right and entered a neighborhood of middle-class ranch homes on quarter-acre properties.
Just past Herrick Street the Chrysler turned right into a driveway and parked. Bosch drove on by. Lourdes reported what she saw.
“Several men,” she said. “They met the car and hurried him inside.”
“Must’ve taken a turn for the worse,” Bosch said.
“So, what do we do?”
“For now we wait.”
“For what? This is L.A. We should call in LAPD SWAT and scoop them all up.”
“We will. But let’s wait till they get the doctor out of there. Now that we can prove he does work for the SanFers, I think your cousin might want to flip him and keep him on the hook the rest of his days.”
Lourdes nodded. It was a good plan. Henriquez would more than likely be willing to trade information with the gang intel unit in exchange for avoiding the humiliation of being exposed as a gang doctor.
“Except we still don’t know who snitched off Perez,” Lourdes said. “That could make things very dangerous for the doctor if he turns informant too.”
Bosch nodded.
“That we need to keep working on,” he said. “But once we know who the shooter is, that might become clearer.”