City of Bones Read online

  Bosch ran across the circle and up the steps to the truck’s platform. He quickly determined which toilet the banging was coming from and went to the door. The exterior hasp—used for securing the toilet for transport—had been closed over the loop and a chicken bone had been used to secure it.

  “Hold on, hold on,” Bosch yelled.

  He tried to pull the bone out but it was too greasy and slipped from his grip. The pounding and screaming continued. Bosch looked around for a tool of some kind but didn’t see anything. Finally, he took his pistol out of his holster, checked the safety and used the butt of the weapon to hammer the bone through the hasp, careful all the time to aim the barrel of the gun at a downward angle.

  When the bone finally popped out he put the gun away and flipped the hasp open. The door burst outward and Teresa Corazon charged out, almost knocking him over. He grabbed her to maintain his balance but she roughly pushed him away.

  “You did that!”

  “What? No, I didn’t! I was over there the whole—”

  “I want to know who did it!”

  Bosch lowered his voice. He knew everyone in the encampment was probably looking at them. The media down the street as well.

  “Look, Teresa, calm down. It was a joke, okay? Whoever did it did it as a joke. I know you don’t like confined spaces but they didn’t know that. Somebody just wanted to ease the tension around here a little bit, and you just happened to be—”

  “It’s because they’re jealous, that’s why.”

  “What?”

  “Of who I am, what I’ve done.”

  Bosch was nonplussed by that.

  “Whatever.”

  She headed for the stairs, then abruptly turned around and came back to him.

  “I’m leaving, you happy now?”

  Bosch shook his head.

  “Happy? That has nothing to do with anything here. I’m trying to conduct an investigation, and if you want to know the truth, not having the distraction of you and your cameraman around might be a help.”

  “Then you’ve got it. And you know that phone number you called me on the other night?”

  Bosch nodded. “Yeah, what about—”

  “Burn it.”

  She walked down the steps, angrily hooked a finger at her cameraman and headed toward her official car. Bosch watched her go.

  When he got back to the picnic table, only Brasher and Edgar remained. His partner had reduced his second order of fried chicken to bones. He sat with a satisfied smirk on his face.

  Bosch dropped the bone he had knocked out of the hasp onto Edgar’s plate.

  “That went over real well,” he said.

  He gave Edgar a look that told him he knew he had been the one who did it. But Edgar revealed nothing.

  “The bigger the ego the harder they fall,” Edgar said. “I wonder if her cameraman got any of that action on tape.”

  “You know, it would have been good to keep her as an ally,” Bosch said. “To just put up with her so that she was on our side when we needed her.”

  Edgar picked up his plate and struggled to slide his large body out of the picnic table.

  “I’ll see you up on the hill,” he said.

  Bosch looked at Brasher. She raised her eyebrows.

  “You mean he was the one who did it?”

  Bosch didn’t answer.

  7

  THE work in the city of bones lasted only two days. As Kohl had predicted, the majority of the pieces of the skeleton had been located and removed from the spot beneath the acacia trees by the end of the first day. Other bones had been found nearby in the brush in a scatter pattern indicative of disinterment over time by foraging animals. On Friday the searchers and diggers returned, but a daylong search of the hillside by fresh cadets and further excavation of the main squares of the grid found no more bones. Vapor probes and sample digs in all the remaining squares of the grid turned up no bones or other indications that other bodies had been buried beneath the acacia trees.

  Kohl estimated that sixty percent of the skeleton had been collected. On her recommendation and with Teresa Corazon’s approval the excavation and search were suspended pending further developments at dusk on Friday.

  Bosch had not objected to this. He knew they were facing limited returns for a large amount of effort and he deferred to the experts. He was also anxious to proceed with the investigation and identification of the bones—elements which were largely stalled as he and Edgar had worked exclusively on Wonderland Avenue

  during the two days, supervising the collection of evidence, canvassing the neighborhood and putting together the initial reports on the case. It was all necessary work but Bosch wanted to move on.

  On Saturday morning he and Edgar met in the lobby of the medical examiner’s office and told the receptionist they had an appointment with Dr. William Golliher, the forensic anthropologist on retainer from UCLA.

  “He’s waiting for you in suite A,” the receptionist said after making a call to confirm. “You know which way that is?”

  Bosch nodded and they were buzzed through the gate. They took an elevator down to the basement level and were immediately greeted by the smell of the autopsy floor when they stepped out. It was a mixture of chemicals and decay that was unique in the world. Edgar immediately took a paper breathing mask out of a wall dispenser and put it on. Bosch didn’t bother.

  “You really ought to, Harry,” Edgar said as they walked down the hall. “Do you know that all smells are particulate?”

  Bosch looked at him.

  “Thanks for that, Jerry.”

  They had to stop in the hallway as a gurney was pushed out of an autopsy suite. There was a body on it, wrapped in plastic.

  “Harry, you ever notice that they wrap ’em up the same way they do the burritos at Taco Bell?”

  Bosch nodded at the man pushing the gurney.

  “That’s why I don’t eat burritos.”

  “Really?”

  Bosch moved on down the hall without answering.

  Suite A was an autopsy room reserved for Teresa Corazon for the infrequent times she actually left her administrative duties as chief medical examiner and performed an autopsy. Because the case had initially garnered her hands-on attention she had apparently authorized Golliher to use her suite. Corazon had not returned to the crime scene on Wonderland Avenue

  after the portable toilet incident.

  They pushed through the double doors of the suite and were met by a man in blue jeans and a Hawaiian shirt.

  “Please call me Bill,” Golliher said. “I guess it’s been a long two days.”

  “Say that again,” Edgar said.

  Golliher nodded in a friendly manner. He was about fifty with dark hair and eyes and an easy manner. He gestured toward the autopsy table that was in the center of the room. The bones that had been collected from beneath the acacia trees were now spread across the stainless steel surface.

  “Well, let me tell you what’s been going on in here,” Golliher said. “As the team in the field has been collecting the evidence, I’ve been here examining the pieces, doing the radiograph work and generally trying to put the puzzle of all of this together.”

  Bosch stepped over to the stainless steel table. The bones were laid out in place so as to form a partial skeleton. The most obvious pieces missing were the bones of the left arm and leg and the lower jaw. It was presumed that these were the pieces that had long ago been taken and scattered distantly by animals that had rooted in the shallow grave.

  Each of the bones was marked, the larger pieces with stickers and the smaller ones with string tags. Bosch knew that notations on these markers were codes by which the location of each bone had been charted on the grid Kohl had drawn on the first day of the excavation.

  “Bones can tell us much about how a person lived and died,” Golliher said somberly. “In cases of child abuse, the bones do not lie. The bones become our final evidence.”

  Bosch looked back at him an
d realized his eyes were not dark. They actually were blue but they were deeply set and seemed haunted in some way. He was staring past Bosch at the bones on the table. After a moment he broke from this reverie and looked at Bosch.

  “Let me start by saying that we are learning quite a bit from the recovered artifacts,” the anthropologist said. “But I have to tell you guys, I’ve consulted on a lot of cases but this one blows me away. I was looking at these bones and taking notes and I looked down and my notebook was smeared. I was crying, man. I was crying and I didn’t even know it at first.”

  He looked back at the outstretched bones with a look of tenderness and pity. Bosch knew that the anthropologist saw the person who was once there.

  “This one is bad, guys. Real bad.”

  “Then give us what you’ve got so we can go out there and do our job,” Bosch said in a voice that sounded like a reverent whisper.

  Golliher nodded and reached back to a nearby counter for a spiral notebook.

  “Okay,” Golliher said. “Let’s start with the basics. Some of this you may already know but I’m just going to go over all of my findings, if you don’t mind.”

  “We don’t mind,” Bosch said.

  “Good. Then here it is. What you have here are the remains of a young male Caucasoid. Comparisons to the indices of Maresh growth standards put the age at approximately ten years old. However, as we will soon discuss, this child was the victim of severe and prolonged physical abuse. Histologically, victims of chronic abuse often suffer from what is called growth disruption. This abuse-related stunting serves to skew age estimation. What you often get is a skeleton that looks younger than it is. So what I am saying is that this boy looks ten but is probably twelve or thirteen.”

  Bosch looked over at Edgar. He was standing with his arms folded tightly across his chest, as if bracing for what he knew was ahead. Bosch took a notebook out of his jacket pocket and started writing notes in shorthand.

  “Time of death,” Golliher said. “This is tough. Radiological testing is far from exact in this regard. We have the coin which gives us the early marker of nineteen seventy-five. That helps us. What I am estimating is that this kid has been in the ground anywhere from twenty to twenty-five years. I’m comfortable with that and there is some surgical evidence we can talk about in a few minutes that adds support to that estimation.”

  “So we’ve got a ten- to thirteen-year-old kid killed twenty to twenty-five years ago,” Edgar summarized, a note of frustration in his voice.

  “I know I am giving you a wide set of parameters, Detective,” Golliher said. “But at the moment it’s the best the science can do for you.”

  “Not your fault, Doc.”

  Bosch wrote it all down. Despite the wide spread of the estimation, it was still vitally important to set a time frame for the investigation. Golliher’s estimation put the time of death into the late seventies to early eighties. Bosch momentarily thought of Laurel Canyon in that time frame. It had been a rustic, funky enclave, part bohemian and part upscale, with cocaine dealers and users, porno purveyors and burned out rock-and-roll hedonists on almost every street. Could the murder of a child have been part of that mix?

  “Cause of death,” Golliher said. “Tell you what, let’s get to cause of death last. I want to start with the extremities and the torso, give you guys an idea of what this boy endured in his short lifetime.”

  His eyes locked on Bosch’s for a moment before returning to the bones. Bosch breathed in deeply, producing a sharp pain from his damaged ribs. He knew his fear from the moment he had looked down at the small bones on the hillside was now going to be realized. He instinctively knew all along that it would come to this. That a story of horror would emerge from the overturned soil.

  He started scribbling on the pad, running the ballpoint deep into the paper, as Golliher continued.

  “First of all, we only have maybe sixty percent of the bones here,” he said. “But even still, we have incontrovertible evidence of tremendous skeletal trauma and chronic abuse. I don’t know what your level of anthropological expertise is but I’m going to assume much of this will be new to you. I’m going to give you the basics. Bones heal themselves, gentlemen. And it is through the study of bone regeneration that we can establish a history of abuse. On these bones there are multiple lesions in different stages of healing. There are fractures old and new. We only have two of the four extremities but both of these show multiple instances of trauma. In short, this boy spent pretty much most of his life either healing or being hurt.”

  Bosch looked down at the pad and pen clutched tightly in his hands. His hands were turning white.

  “You will be getting a written report from me by Monday, but for now, if you want a number, I will tell you that I found forty-four distinct locations indicating separate trauma in various stages of healing. And these were just his bones, Detectives. It doesn’t cover the damage that could have been inflicted on vital organs and the tissue. But it is without a doubt that this boy lived probably day in and day out with a lot of pain.”

  Bosch wrote the number down on the pad. It seemed like a meaningless gesture.

  “Primarily, the injuries I have catalogued can be noted on the artifacts by subperiosteal lesions,” Golliher said. “These lesions are thin layers of new bone that grow beneath the surface in the area of trauma or bleeding.”

  “Subperi—how do you spell that?” Bosch asked.

  “What does it matter? It will be in the report.”

  Bosch nodded.

  “Take a look at this,” Golliher said.

  Golliher went to the X-ray box on the wall and flipped on the light. There was already film on the box. It showed an X-ray of a long thin bone. He ran his finger along the stem of the bone, pointing out a slight demarcation of color.

  “This is the one femur that was collected,” he said. “The upper thigh. This line here, where the color changes, is one of the lesions. This means that this area—the boy’s upper leg—had suffered a pretty strong blow in the weeks before his death. A crushing blow. It did not break the bone but it damaged it. This kind of injury would no doubt have caused surface bruising and I think affected the boy’s walk. What I am telling you is that it could not have gone unnoticed.”

  Bosch moved forward to study the X-ray. Edgar stayed back. When he was finished Golliher removed the X-ray and put up three more, covering the entire light box.

  “We also have periosteal shearing on both of the limbs present. This is the stripping of the bone’s surface, primarily seen in child abuse cases when the limb is struck violently by the adult hand or other instrument. Recovery patterns on these bones show that this particular type of trauma occurred repeatedly and over years to this child.”

  Golliher paused to look at his notes, then he glanced at the bones on the table. He picked up the upper arm bone and held it up while he referred to his notes and spoke. Bosch noticed he wore no gloves.

  “The humerus,” Golliher said. “The right humerus shows two separate and healed fractures. The breaks are longitudinal. This tells us the fractures are the result of the twisting of the arm with great force. It happened to him once and then it happened again.”

  He put the bone down and picked up one of the lower arm bones.

  “The ulna shows a healed latitudinal fracture. The break caused a slight deviation in the attitude of the bone. This was because the bone was allowed to heal in place after the injury.”

  “You mean it wasn’t set?” Edgar asked. “He wasn’t taken to a doctor or an emergency room?”

  “Exactly. This kind of injury, though commonly accidental and treated every day in every emergency room, can also be a defensive injury. You hold your arm up to ward off an attack and take the blow across the forearm. The fracture occurs. Because of the lack of indication of medical attention paid to this injury, my supposition is that this was not an accidental injury and was part of the abuse pattern.”

  Golliher gently returned the bone to its
spot and then leaned over the examination table to look down at the rib cage. Many of the rib bones had been detached and were lying separated on the table.

  “The ribs,” Golliher said. “Nearly two dozen fractures in various stages of healing. A healed fracture on rib twelve I believe may date to when the boy was only two or three. Rib nine shows a callus indicative of trauma only a few weeks old at the time of death. The fractures are primarily consolidated near the angles. In infants this is indicative of violent shaking. In older children this is usually indicative of blows to the back.”