“He looked legit. Like he got hit in the face with the big frying pan called bad luck. You know?”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Hit hard. And there was as much surprise there as anything else.”

“Okay.”

Bosch looked around to make sure they were not being overheard. He spoke low to Edgar.

“We’re going to split up now and go with the searches. I want you to take the apartment Elias kept over at The Place. I was — ”

“So that’s where he was going.”

“Looks like it. I was just up there with Chastain, did a drive-by. I want you to take your time this time. I also want you to start in his bedroom. Go to the bed and take the phone book out of the top drawer of the table with the phone on it. Bag it and seal it so nobody can look at it until we get everything back to the office.”

“Sure. How come?”

“I’ll tell you later. Just get to it before anybody else. Also, take the tape from the phone machine in the kitchen. There’s a message we want to keep.”

“Right.”

“Okay then.”

Bosch stepped away from the guardrail and approached Dellacroce.

“Any problems with the paper?”

“Not really — except for waking the judge twice.”

“Which judge?”

“John Houghton.”

“He’s okay.”

“Well, it didn’t sound like he appreciated having to do everything twice.”

“What did he say about the office?”

“Had me add in a line about preserving the sanctity of attorney-client privilege.”

“That’s it? Let me see.”

Dellacroce took the search warrants out of the inside pocket of his suit jacket and handed Bosch the one for the office at the Bradbury. Bosch scanned through the stock wording on the first page of the declaration and got to the part Dellacroce had talked about. It looked okay to him. The judge was still allowing the search of the office and the files, but was simply saying that any privileged information gleaned from the files must be germane to the murder investigation.

“What he’s saying is that we can’t go through the files and turn what we get over to the city attorney’s office to help defend those cases,” Dellacroce said. “Nothing goes outside our investigation.”

“I can live with that,” Bosch said.

He called everybody into a huddle. He noticed Fuentes was smoking and tried not to think about his own desire for a cigarette.