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With Finbar McShane’s murder of Sheila Walsh, Harry Bosch has never been more sure that he is right, though he wishes against everything in his soul that he was wrong. There are a bunch of cops and crime scene techs at Gallagher Equipment as we open Bosch: Legacy Season 3 Episode 5, and the officer who takes Harry’s statement says they’ve put a BOLO out on McShane. But that just feels like a half-measure, something perfunctory from the LAPD, just like their lack of interest in pursuing the Gallaghers’ original disappearance. We like that a salty old cat like Bosch still smokes. And as he rips a cig through gritted teeth, Harry vents his anger. A Be On the Lookout won’t do shit. “Guy who did this disappeared an entire family. He’s gone. He’s fucking gone.” And we cut to a box truck and a dark alleyway, where Finbar emerges from the shadows. He climbs into a secret compartment built into the truck’s payload and it roars off, presumably to somewhere the businessman-murderer can escape the look of fiery determination in the eyes of Harry Bosch.
Bosch tried to reassure Siobhan that her loved ones would be okay. That sentiment was real; it was the right thing to do. But for him, gut instinct is like a honed blade. And his intuition and investigative sense were cutting away at what he increasingly suspected was the terribly sad truth. It was Finbar who we saw in Bosch: Legacy Episode 3, tying up the Gallaghers, and his quickie cash sale of a backhoe to Bing Crider was part of covering his tracks. When Harry and Mo track the GPS data on the machine, they see it moved a few miles from the Ojai cabin on the morning the family vanished. They drive out there, with Mo packing a drone, and canvass the remote wooded area. And what Bosch was hoping not to find – even though he hated that he would – is buried in newly-tilled earth beneath the willow trees. Two parents and their two young children, murdered and discarded in a shallow grave. His face says it all as Harry arrives to tell Siobhan.
Such a ghastly crime is the kind of thing Honey Chandler has committed her district attorney platform to fighting against. But with the election arriving, her opponent is still more interested in self-serving politics. Even after the Preston Borders escape attempt and resulting shootout, Emett Archer wants Detective Jimmy Robertson to wait on clearing Harry Bosch’s name until after the election. But Robertson – and the character is guided here by the effortless cool of Paul Calderón – is like “Fuck that.” He leaks the entire double-secret investigation and Archer’s foot-dragging within it to the Los Angeles Times, which publishes its story on Election Day. And if Chandler and her team were confident before, they’re overjoyed to realize that with Archer’s political life crumbling, and their encouragement of grassroots voting, Honey is a shoe-in for the job her daughter Michelle says her strength prepared her for.
The Chandler campaign’s grassroots outreach also uncovered something that seems significant in light of her victory. Speaking with Dennis Williams (Marlon Young), a diner owner put off of voting by lack of police response to his son’s murder, Chandler is startled to learn that the LAPD ignored evidence of his son’s sexual relationship with an influential city councilman. Williams says Patrick Currey (Jeremy Glazer) injected his son with a designer drug, which caused the overdose that killed him. Police inaction and high-profile malfeasance? Sounds like District Attorney of Los Angeles Honey “Money” Chandler just found her first big case.
But there’s even more going on in this hinge episode of Bosch: Legacy’s final season. Victoria, who Vasquez and Bosch have learned goes by the street name “Fortune,” is proving to be an elusive adversary. She sniffs out their sting at Find Your Grind studios before even setting foot in the place – Maddie: “I think we just got made” – and issues orders to her boyfriend Albert and their no-account accomplice Nestor that the follow-home robberies stop while they lay low. Too much heat, “and I ain’t going to jail for either of you fools.” Andrea Cortés continues to be a force in Legacy as Victoria/Fortune. Her high-criming intensity is a match for the name-brand conviction of Titus Welliver as Harry Bosch. And as Vasquez and Bosch’s follow-home investigation continues, it will be with one potentially game-changing bombshell: Albert, Victoria’s stickup man boyfriend, is also Officer Reyna Vasquez’s nephew.
Which brings us to this episode’s final developing bombshell. After they meet for a quiet drink, where they ruminate over their shared history, the bizarre circumstances of the “Chief’s Special” investigation, and the bullets-flying reveal of the Wasco inmate escape/Bosch frame-up, Harry and Jimmy part on good terms. Good enough that Detective Robertson is in a pleasant mood as he repairs to a food truck for some barbacoa tacos. But a masked man appears, and waving a gun, he robs the truck of loose cash before turning on Robertson. The detective, wary, doesn’t even pull his piece. But the guy shoots him dead anyway.
What will Harry Bosch’s steely instincts tell him about this one? Because the way Robertson’s murder went down, it seemed designed to only look random. Who could be gunning so hard for Jimmy that they would carry out his murder in a busy public place? And why? Besides trying to chase down Finbar McShane for what he did to the Gallaghers and Sheila, Bosch is gonna need to get with the new DA to sort out what larger conspiracies and truths are living just below LA’s surface.
Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.
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