Angels Flight by Michael Connelly Page A

was obviously writing it down.
    “Are you in the video room?”
    “Sure am. What can I do for you?”
    “I’m looking for somebody and there is a good chance she is at one of your tables right now. I was wondering if you could look at the tubes for me.”
    “What’s she look like?”
    Bosch described his wife but could not give any description on clothes because he had not checked the closets at the house. He then waited two minutes while Jardine apparently studied the video screens connected to the surveillance cameras in the poker room.
    “Uh, if she’s here, I’m not seeing her,” Jardine finally said. “We don’t have very many women in here this time of night. And she doesn’t match the ones we’ve got. I mean, she could have been in here earlier, maybe one or two o’clock. But not now.”
    “Okay, thanks.”
    “Hey, you got a number. I’ll take a walk around the place, call you back if I see anything.”
    “I’ll give you my pager. But if you see her, don’t approach her. Just give me a page.”
    “Will do.”
    After giving the man his pager number and hanging up, Bosch thought about the card clubs in Gardena and Commerce but decided not to call. If Eleanor was going to stay local she would have gone to Hollywood Park. If she didn’t go there she’d go to Vegas or maybe the Indian place in the desert near Palm Springs. He tried not to think about that and focused his mind back on the case.
    Bosch next called the district attorney’s night switchboard after getting the number out of his phone book. He asked to be connected to the on-call prosecutor and was eventually connected to a sleepy attorney named Janis Langwiser. She happened to be the same prosecutor who had filed charges in the so-called hard-boiled eggs case. She had recently moved over from the city attorney’s office and it had been the first time Bosch had worked with her. He had enjoyed her sense of humor and enthusiasm for her job.
    “Don’t tell me,” she said, “you’ve got a scrambled eggs case this time? Or better yet, the western omelet case.”
    “Not quite. I hate to pull you out of bed but we’re going to need somebody to come out and give us a little guidance on a search we’ll be doing pretty soon.”
    “Who’s dead and where’s the search?”
    “Dead is Howard Elias, Esquire, and the search is going to be in his office.”
    She whistled into the phone and Bosch had to hold it away from his ear.
    “Wow,” she said, now fully alert. “This is going to be . . . well, something. Tell me the general details.”
    He did and when he was finished Langwiser, who lived thirty miles north in Valencia, agreed to meet the search team at the Bradbury in one hour.
    “Until then, take things very carefully, Detective Bosch, and don’t go into the office until I am there.”
    “Will do.”
    It was a little thing but he liked her calling him by his title. It was not because she was a good deal younger than he was. It was because so often prosecutors treated him and other cops without respect, as simply tools for them to use whatever way they wanted in prosecuting a case. He was sure Janis Langwiser would be no different as she became more seasoned and cynical, but at least for now she outwardly showed him small nuances of respect.
    Bosch disconnected and was about to put the phone away when he thought of something else. He called information again and asked for the home listing for Carla Entrenkin. He was connected to a recording that told him the number was unlisted at the customer’s request. It was what he had expected to hear.
    As he crossed Grand Street and California Plaza to Angels Flight, Bosch again tried not to think of Eleanor and where she might be. But it was hard. It hurt his heart when he thought about her being out there somewhere alone, searching for something he obviously couldn’t give her. He was beginning to feel his marriage would be doomed if he didn’t soon figure out what it was she needed.