AT the top of the hill they found Edgar and Fuentes had returned from notifying Catalina Perez’s family of her death, and Joe Dellacroce had returned from Parker Center with completed and signed search warrants. Court-approved searches were not always needed for the home and business of the victim of a homicide. But it made good sense to get warrants in high-profile cases. Such cases attracted high-profile attorneys if they eventually resulted in arrest. These attorneys invariably created their high profiles by being thorough and good at what they did. They exploited mistakes, took the frayed seams and loose ends of cases and ripped open huge holes — often big enough for their clients to escape through. Bosch was already thinking that far ahead. He knew he had to be very careful.

Additionally, he believed a warrant was particularly necessary to search Elias’s office. There would be numerous files on police officers and cases pending against the department. These cases would most likely proceed after being taken on by new attorneys, and Bosch needed to balance the preservation of attorney-client privacy with the need to investigate the killing of Howard Elias. The investigators would no doubt need to proceed carefully while handling these files. It was the reason he had called the district attorney’s office and asked Janis Langwiser to come to the scene.

Bosch approached Edgar first, taking him by the arm and nudging him over to the guardrail overlooking the steep drop-off to Hill Street. They were out of earshot of the others.

“How’d it go?”

“It went the way they all go. About a million other places I’d rather be than watching the guy get the news. Know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I know. You just tell him or did you ask him some questions?”

“We asked, but we didn’t get very many answers. The guy said his wife was a housecleaner and she had a gig somewhere over here. She took the bus over. He couldn’t give an address. Said his wife kept all of that stuff in a little notebook she carried.”

Bosch thought for a moment. He didn’t remember any notebook in the evidence inventory. Balancing his briefcase on the guardrail, he opened it and took out the clipboard on which he had the accumulated paperwork from the crime scene. On top was the yellow copy of the inventory Hoffman had given him before he had left. It listed Victim #2’s belongings but there was no notebook.

“Well, we’ll have to check with him again later on. We didn’t get any notebook.”

“Well, send Fuentes back. The husband didn’t speak English.”

“All right. Anything else?”

“No. We did the usual checklist. Any enemies, any problems, anybody giving her trouble, anybody stalking her, so on and so forth. Nada. The husband said she wasn’t worried about anything.”

“Okay. What about him?”