Angle of Investigation Read online

  “No, when she gave notice.”

  “When was that?”

  “She gave two weeks’ notice, so it was two weeks back from Friday.”

  “And do you have a new nanny lined up?”

  “No, not yet. We were still looking.”

  “But you put the feelers out and ran the ad again, that sort of thing?”

  “Right, but listen, what does this have to—”

  “Let me ask the questions, Stephen. Your wife told us that she worried about leaving William with you, that you couldn’t handle the strain of it.”

  Helton looked shocked. The statement came from left field, as Bosch had wanted it.

  “What? Why would she say that?”

  “I don’t know. Is it true?”

  “No, it’s not true.”

  “She told us she was worried that this wasn’t an accident.”

  “That’s absolutely crazy and I doubt she said it. You are lying.”

  He turned in his seat so that the front of his body faced the corner of the room and he would have to turn his face to look directly at Bosch. Another tell. Bosch knew he was zeroing in. He decided it was the right time to gamble.

  “She mentioned a story you found in the L.A. Times that was about a kid left in a car up in Lancaster. The kid died of heatstroke. She was worried that it gave you the idea.”

  Helton swiveled in his seat and leaned forward to put his elbows on the table and run his hands through his hair.

  “Oh, my God, I can’t believe she…”

  He didn’t finish. Bosch knew his gamble had paid off. Helton’s mind was racing along the edge. It was time to push him over.

  “You didn’t forget that William was in the car, did you, Stephen?”

  Helton didn’t answer. He buried his face in his hands again. Bosch leaned forward so that he only had to whisper.

  “You left him there and you knew what was going to happen. You planned it. That’s why you didn’t bother running ads for a new nanny. You knew you weren’t going to need one.”

  Helton remained silent and unmoving. Bosch kept working him, changing tacks and offering sympathy now.

  “It’s understandable,” he said. “I mean, what kind of life would that kid have had anyway? Some might even call this a mercy killing. The kid falls asleep and never wakes up. I’ve worked these kinds of cases before, Stephen. It’s actually not a bad way to go. It sounds bad but it isn’t. You just get tired and you go to sleep.”

  Helton kept his face in his hands but he shook his head. Bosch didn’t know if he was denying it still or shaking off something else. He waited and the delay paid off.

  “It was her idea,” Helton said in a quiet voice. “She’s the one who couldn’t take it anymore.”

  In that moment Bosch knew he had him but he showed nothing. He kept working it.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “She said she had nothing to do with it, that this was your idea and your plan and that when she called you it was to talk you out of it.”

  Helton dropped his hands with a slap on the table.

  “That’s a lie! It was her! She was embarrassed that we had a kid like that! She couldn’t take him anywhere and we couldn’t go anywhere! He was ruining our lives and she told me I had to do something about it! She told me ho e told w to do something about it! She said I would be saving two lives while sacrificing only one.”

  Bosch pulled back across the table. It was done. It was over.

  “Okay, Stephen, I think I understand. And I want to hear all about it. But at this point I need to inform you of your rights. After that, if you want to talk, we’ll talk and I’ll listen.”

  When Bosch came out of the interview room Ignacio Ferras was there waiting for him in the hallway. His partner raised his fist and Bosch tapped his knuckles with his own fist.

  “That was beautiful,” Ferras said. “You walked him right down the road.”

  “Thanks,” Bosch said. “Let’s hope the DA is impressed, too.”

  “I don’t think we’ll have to worry.”

  “Well, there will be no worries if you go into the other room and turn the wife now.”

  Ferras looked surprised.

  “You still want me to take the wife?”

  “She’s yours. Let’s walk them into the DA as bookends.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “Good. Go check the equipment and make sure we’re still recording in there. I’ve got to go make a quick call.”

  “You got it, Harry.”

  Bosch walked into the squad room and sat down at his desk. He checked his watch and knew it would be early in Hong Kong. He pulled out his cell phone anyway, and sent a call across the Pacific.

  His daughter answered with a cheerful hello. Bosch knew he wouldn’t even have to say anything and he would feel fulfilled by just the sound of her voice saying the one word.

  “Hey, baby, it’s me,” he said.

  “Daddy!” she exclaimed. “Happy Father’s Day!”

  And Bosch realized in that moment that he was indeed a happy man.

  Angle of Investigation

  THEN

  “This is all because of Manson,” Eckersly said.

  Bosch looked across the seat at his training partner, unsure of what he meant.

  “Charles Manson?”

  eigl“You know, Helter Skelter and all of that shit,” Eckersly explained. “They’re still scared.”

  Bosch nodded, though he still didn’t get it. He looked out the windshield. They were heading south on Vermont through territory unfamiliar to him. It was only his second day with Eckersly and his second on the job. Almost all of the neighborhoods in Wilshire were unfamiliar to him but that was okay. Eckersly had been working patrol in the division for four years. He knew the neighborhoods.

  “Somebody doesn’t answer the phone, and back east they think Squeaky and the rest of Charlie’s girls have broken in and chopped them up or something,” Eckersly continued. “We get a lot of these ‘check the lady’ calls. Nearly four years now and people still think L.A.’s been turned over to the nuts.”

  Bosch had been away from the world when Manson and his people had done their thing. So he didn’t have a proper read on what the murders had done to the city. When he had come back from Vietnam he had felt an edginess in L.A. that had not been there before he left. But he didn’t know whether that was because of the changes he had been through or the ones the city had been through.

  South of Santa Monica they took a left on Fourth Street and Bosch started reading numbers off of mailboxes. In a few seconds Eckersly pulled the squad car to a stop in front of a small bungalow with a driveway down the side to a single garage in the back. They both got out, Bosch taking his nightstick out of the plastic pipe on the door and sliding it into the ring on his equipment belt.

  “Oh, you won’t need that,” Eckersly said. “Unless you want to use it to knock on the door.”

  Bosch turned back to the car to put the club back.

  “Come on, come on,” Eckersly said. “I didn’t tell you to put it back. I just said you wouldn’t need it.”

  Bosch hustled to catch up to him on the flagstone walkway leading to the front door. He walked with both hands on his belt. He was still getting used to the weight and the awkward bulk of it. When he was in Vietnam his job had been to go into the tunnels. He’d kept his body profile as trim as possible. No equipment belt. He carried all of his equipment—a flashlight and a forty-five—in his hands.

  Eckersly had sat out the war in a patrol car. He was eight years older than Bosch and had that many years on the job. He was taller and heavier than Bosch and carried the weight and bulk of his equipment belt with a practiced ease. He signaled to Bosch to knock on the front door, as if that took training. Bosch knocked three times with his fist.

  “Like this,” Eckersly corrected.

  He rapped sharply on the door.

  “Police, Mrs. Wilkins, can you come to the door, please?”

 
His fist and voice had a certain authority. A tone. That was what he was trying to teach his rookie partner.

  Bosch nodded. He understood the lesson. He looked around and saw that the windows were all closed even though it was a nice cool morning. Nobody answered the door.

  “You smell that?” he asked Eckersly.

  “Smell what?”

  The one area where Bosch didn’t need any training from Eckersly was in the smell of death. He had spent two tours in the dead zone. In the tunnels the enemy put their dead into the walls. Death was always in the air.

  “Somebody’s dead,” Bosch said. “I’ll check around back.”

  He stepped off the front porch and took the driveway to the rear of the property. The odor was stronger back here. To Bosch, at least. The dispatcher on the radio had said June Wilkins lived alone and hadn’t answered phone calls from her daughter in Philadelphia for seven days.

  There was a small enclosed yard with a clothesline stretching from the corner of the garage to the corner of the house. There were a few things hanging on the line, two silk slips and other women’s undergarments. There were more clothing items on the ground, having fallen or been blown off the line. The winds came up at night. People didn’t leave their clothes on the line overnight.

  Bosch went to the garage first and stood on his toes to look through one of two windows set high in the wooden door. He saw the distinctive curving roofline of a Volkswagen Beetle inside. The car and the clothing left out on the line seemed to confirm what the odor already told him. June Wilkins had not left on a trip, simply forgetting to tell her daughter back east. She was inside the house waiting for them.

  He turned to the house and went up the three concrete steps to the back door stoop. There was a glass panel in the door that allowed him to see into the kitchen and partway down a hallway that led to the front rooms of the house. Nothing seemed amiss. No rotting food on the table. No blood on the floor.

  He then saw on the floor next to a trash can a dog food bowl with flies buzzing around the rotting mound inside it.

  Bosch felt a quickening of his pulse. He took his stick out and used it to rap on the glass. He waited but there was no response. He heard his partner knock on the front door again and announce once more that it was the police.

  Bosch tried the knob on the back door and found it unlocked. He slowly opened the door and the odor came out with an intensity that made him drop back off the stoop.

  “Ron!” he called out. “Open door in the back.”

  After a moment he could hear his partner’s equipment belt jangling as he hustled to the back, his footfalls heavy. He came around the corner to the stoop.

  “Did you—oh, shit! That is rank! I mean, that is bad! We’ve got a DB in there.” Bo mothere.sch nodded. He assumed DB meant dead body.

  “Should we go in?” he asked.

  “Yeah, we better check it out,” Eckersly said. “But wait a second.”

  He went over to the clothesline and yanked the two slips off the line. He threw one to Bosch.

  “Use that,” he said.

  Eckersly bunched the silk slip up against his mouth and nose and went first through the door. Bosch did the same and followed him in.

  “Let’s do this quick,” Eckersly said in a muffled voice.

  They moved with speed through the house and found the DB in the bathroom off the hallway. There was a clawfoot bathtub filled to the brim with still dark water. Breaking the surface were two rounded shapes, one at either end, with hair splayed out on the water. Flies had collected on each as if they were lifeboats on the sea.

  “Let me see your stick,” Eckersly said.

  Not comprehending, Bosch pulled it out of his belt ring and handed it to his partner. Eckersly dipped one end of the stick into the tub’s dark water and prodded the round shape near the foot of the tub. The flies dispersed and Bosch waved them away from his face. The object in the water shifted its delicate balance and turned over. Bosch saw the jagged teeth and snout of a dog break the surface. He involuntarily took a step back.

  Eckersly moved to the next shape. He probed it with the stick and the flies angrily took flight, but the object in the water did not move so readily. It was not free-floating like the dog. It went down deep like an iceberg. He dipped the stick down farther and then raised it. The misshapen and decaying face of a human being came up out of the water. The small features and long hair suggested a woman but that could not be determined for sure by what Bosch saw.

  The stick had found leverage below the dead person’s chin. But it quickly slipped off and the face submerged again. Dark water lapped over the side of the tub and both of the police officers stepped back again.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Eckersly said. “Or we’ll never get it out of our noses.”

  He handed the nightstick back to Bosch and pushed past him to the door.

  “Wait a second,” Bosch said.

  But Eckersly didn’t wait. Bosch turned his attention back to the body and dipped the stick into the dark water again. He pulled it through the water until it hooked something and he raised it up. The dead person’s hands came out of the water. They were bound at the wrists with a dog collar. He slowly let them back down into the water again.

  On his way out of the house, Bosch carried the stick at arm’s length from his body. In the backyard he founth=yard hed Eckersly standing by the garage door, gulping down fresh air. Bosch threw the slip he had used to breathe through over the clothesline and came over.

  “Congratulations, boot,” Eckersly said, using the department slang for rookie. “You got your first DB. Stick with the job and it will be one of many.”

  Bosch didn’t say anything. He tossed his nightstick onto the grass—he planned to get a new one now—and took out his cigarettes.

  “What do you think?” Eckersly asked. “Suicide? She took the pooch with her?”

  “Her hands were tied with the dog’s collar,” Bosch said.

  Eckersly’s mouth opened a little but then he recovered and became the training officer again.

  “You shouldn’t have gone fishing in there,” he said sternly. “Suicide or homicide, it’s not our concern anymore. Let the detectives handle it from here.”

  Bosch nodded his contrition and agreement.

  “What I don’t get,” his partner said, “is how the hell did you smell that at the front door?”

  Bosch shrugged.

  “Used to it, I guess.”

  He nodded toward the west, as if the war had been just down the street.

  “I guess that also explains why you’re not puking your guts out,” Eckersly said. “Like most rookies would be doing right now.”

  “I guess so.”

  “You know what, Bosch. Maybe you’ve got a nose for this stuff.”

  “Maybe I do.”

  NOW

  Harry Bosch and his partner, Kiz Rider, shared an alcove in the back corner of the Open-Unsolved Unit in Parker Center. Their desks were pushed together so they could face each other and discuss case matters without having to talk loudly and bother the six other detectives in the squad. Rider was writing on her laptop, entering the completion and summary reports on the Verloren case. Bosch was reading through the dusty pages of a blue binder known as a murder book.

  “Anything?” Rider asked without looking up from her screen.

  Bosch was reviewing the murder book since it was the next case they would work together. He hadn’t chosen it at random. It involved the 1972 slaying of June Wilkins. Bosch had been a patrolman then and had been on the job only two days when he and his partner at the time had discovered the body of the murdered woman in her bathtub. Along with the body of her dog. Both had been held underwater and drowned.

  There were thousands of unsolved murders in the files of the Los Angeles Police Department. To justify the time and cost of mounting a new investigation, there had to be a hook. Something that could be sent through the forensic databases in search of a match: fingerprints,
ballistics, DNA. That was what Rider was asking. Had he found a hook?

  “Not yet,” he answered.

  “Then why don’t you quit fooling with it and skip to the back?”

  She wanted him to skip to the evidence report in the back of the binder and see if there was anything that could fit the bill. But Bosch wanted to take his time. He wanted to know all the details of the case. It had been his first DB. One of many that would come to him in the department. But he’d had no part in the investigation. He had been a rookie patrolman at the time. He had to watch the detectives work it. It would be years in the department before it was his turn to speak for the dead.

  “I just want to see what they did,” he tried to explain. “See how they worked it. Most of these cases, they coulda-shoulda been cleared back in the day.”

  “Well, you have till I’m finished with this summary,” Rider cautioned. “After that we better get flying on something, Harry.”

  Bosch blew out his breath in mock indignation and flipped a large section of summaries and other reports over in the binder until he got to the back. He then turned to the tab marked FORENSICS and looked at an evidence inventory report.

  “Okay, we’ve got latents, you happy?”

  Rider looked up from her computer for the first time.

  “That could work,” she said. “Tied to the suspect?”

  Bosch flipped back to the evidence report to look for the summary ascribed to the specific evidence logged in the inventory. He found a one-paragraph explanation that said a right palm print had been located on the wall of the bathroom where the body had been found. Its location was sixty-six inches from the floor and seven inches right of center above the toilet.

  “Well…”

  “Well, what?”

  “It’s a palm.”

  She groaned.

  It was not a good hook. Databases containing palm prints were relatively new in law enforcement. Only in the past decade had palm prints been seriously collected by the FBI and the California Department of Justice. In California there were approximately ten thousand palms on file compared with the millions of fingerprints. The Wilkins murder was thirty-three years old. What were the chances that the person who had left a palm print on the wall of the victim’s bathroom would be printed two decades or more later? Ride"ju later?r had answered that one with her groan.