Free Angels Flight by Michael Connelly

I keep hearing people talk about,” he said.
    “It was nothing. Just a case.”
    “I missed the story in the paper, I guess.”
    “Just a piece of luck, Chastain. Like we could use on this case.”
    “Well, tell me. I want to know — especially now that we’re partnering up, Bosch. I like stories about luck. Maybe it will rub off.”
    “It was just a routine call out on a suicide. Patrol called us to come out and sign off on it. Started when a mother got worried about her daughter because she hadn’t shown up at the airport up in Portland. She was supposed to fly up there for a wedding or something and never showed up. The family was left waiting at the airport. Anyway, the mother called up and asked for a drive-by check of the daughter’s apartment. A little place over on Franklin near La Brea. So a blue suit went by, got the manager to let him in and they found her. She had been dead a couple of days — since the morning she was supposed to have flown up to Portland.”
    “What did she do?”
    “It was made to look like she took some pills and then cut her wrists in the bathtub.”
    “Patrol said suicide.”
    “That’s the way it was supposed to look. There was a note. It was torn out of a notebook and it said things about life not being what she expected and about being lonely all the time and stuff. It was kind of a ramble. Very sad, actually.”
    “So? How’d you figure it out?”
    “Well, we were — Edgar was with me, Rider had court — we were about to close it out. We had looked around the place and found nothing really wrong — except for the note. I couldn’t find the notebook that the page had been torn out of. And that didn’t sit right. I mean, it didn’t mean she didn’t kill herself, but it was a loose end, you know? A what is wrong with this picture sort of thing.”
    “Okay, so you thought somebody was in there and took the notebook?”
    “Maybe. I didn’t know what to think. I told Edgar to take another look around and this time we switched and searched through things the other guy had searched the first time.”
    “And you found something Edgar had missed.”
    “He didn’t miss it. It just didn’t register with him. It did with me.”
    “What was it already?”
    “In her refrigerator there was a shelf for the eggs. You know, like little indentations that you sit the eggs in?”
    “Right.”
    “Well, I noticed on some of the eggs she had written a date. All the same date. It was the same day she was flying up to Portland.”
    Bosch looked over at Chastain to see if there was a reaction. The IAD man had a confused look on his face. He didn’t get it.
    “They were hard-boiled eggs. The ones with dates on them had been hard-boiled. I took one over to the sink and cracked it. It was hard-boiled.”
    “Okay.”
    He still didn’t get it.
    “The date on the eggs was probably the date she had boiled them,” Bosch said. “You know, so she could tell the boiled ones from the others and she’d know how old they were. And it just hit me then. You don’t boil a bunch of eggs so they’re ready for when you want them and then go kill yourself. I mean, what’s the point?”
    “So it was a hunch.”
    “More than that.”
    “But you just knew. Homicide.”
    “It changed things. We started to look at things differently. We began a homicide investigation. It took a few days but we got it. Friends told us about some guy who was giving her trouble. Harassing her, stalking her because she turned him down on a date. We asked around the apartment and we started looking at the apartment manager.”
    “Shit, I shoulda guessed it was him.”
    “We talked to him and he fucked up just enough for us to convince a judge to sign a search warrant. In his place we found the notebook that the supposed suicide note had been torn from. It was like a diary where she wrote down her thoughts and things. This guy found a page where she was talking about life being bad and knew he could use it as a