City of Bones Read online

  Bosch thought of the pain he was in, of how he had been unable to sleep well because of the injury to his ribs. He thought of a young boy living with that kind of pain year in and year out.

  “I gotta go wash my face,” he suddenly said. “You can continue.”

  He walked to the door, shoving his notebook and pen into Edgar’s hands. In the hallway he turned right. He knew the layout of the autopsy floor and knew there were rest rooms around the next turn of the corridor.

  He entered the rest room and went right to an open stall. He felt nauseous and waited but nothing happened. After a long moment it passed.

  Bosch came out of the stall just as the door opened from the hallway and Teresa Corazon’s cameraman walked in. They looked warily at each other for a moment.

  “Get out of here,” Bosch said. “Come back later.”

  The man silently turned and walked out.

  Bosch walked to the sink and looked at himself in the mirror. His face was red. He bent down and used his hands to cup cold water against his face and eyes. He thought about baptisms and second chances. Of renewal. He raised his face until he was looking at himself again.

  I’m going to get this guy.

  He almost said it out loud.

  When Bosch returned to suite A all eyes were on him. Edgar gave him his notebook and pen back and Golliher asked if he was all right.

  “Yeah, fine,” he said.

  “If it is any help to you,” Golliher said, “I have consulted on cases all over the world. Chile, Kosovo, even the World Trade Center. And this case . . .”

  He shook his head.

  “It’s hard to comprehend,” he added. “It’s one of those where you have to think that maybe the boy was better off leaving this world. That is, if you believe in a God and a better place than this.”

  Bosch walked over to a counter and pulled a paper towel out of a dispenser. He started wiping his face again.

  “And what if you don’t?”

  Golliher walked over to him.

  “Well, you see, this is why you must believe,” he said. “If this boy did not go from this world to a higher plane, to something better, then . . . then I think we’re all lost.”

  “Did that work for you when you were picking through the bones at the World Trade Center?”

  Bosch immediately regretted saying something so harsh. But Golliher seemed unfazed. He spoke before Bosch could apologize.

  “Yes, it did,” he said. “My faith was not shaken by the horror or the unfairness of so much death. In many ways it became stronger. It brought me through it.”

  Bosch nodded and threw the towel into a trash can with a foot-pedal device for opening it. It closed with an echoing slam when he took his foot off the pedal.

  “What about cause of death?” he said, getting back to the case.

  “We can jump ahead, Detective,” Golliher said. “All injuries, discussed and not discussed here, will be outlined in my report.”

  He went back to the table and picked up the skull. He brought it over to Bosch, holding it in one hand close to his chest.

  “In the skull we have the bad—and possibly the good,” Golliher said. “The skull exhibits three distinct cranial fractures showing mixed stages of healing. Here is the first.”

  He pointed to an area at the lower rear of the skull.

  “This fracture is small and healed. You can see here that the lesions are completely consolidated. Then, next we have this more traumatic injury on the right parietal extending to the frontal. This injury required surgery, most likely for a subdural hematoma.”

  He outlined the injury area with a finger, circling the forward top of the skull. He then pointed to five small and smooth holes which were linked by a circular pattern on the skull.

  “This is a trephine pattern. A trephine is a medical saw used to open the skull for surgery or to relieve pressure from brain swelling. In this case it was probably swelling due to the hematoma. Now the fracture itself and the surgical scar show the beginning of bridging across the lesions. New bone. I would say this injury and subsequent surgery occurred approximately six months prior to the boy’s death.”

  “It’s not the injury causing death?” Bosch asked.

  “No. This is.”

  Golliher turned the skull one more time and showed them another fracture. This one in the lower left rear of the skull.

  “Tight spider web fracture with no bridging, no consolidation. This injury occurred at the time of death. The tightness of the fracture indicates a blow with tremendous force from a very hard object. A baseball bat, perhaps. Something like that.”

  Bosch nodded and stared down at the skull. Golliher had turned it so that its hollow eyes were focused on Bosch.

  “There are other injuries to the head, but not of a fatal nature. The nose bones and the zygomatic process show new bone formation following trauma.”

  Golliher returned to the autopsy table and gently placed the skull down.

  “I don’t think I need to summarize for you, Detectives, but in short, somebody beat the shit out of this boy on a regular basis. Eventually, they went too far. It will all be in the report to you.”

  He turned from the autopsy table and looked at them.

  “There is a glimmer of light in all of this, you know. Something that might help you.”

  “The surgery,” Bosch said.

  “Exactly. Opening a skull is a very serious operation. There will be records somewhere. There had to be follow-up. The roundel is held back in place with metal clips after surgery. There were none found with the skull. I would assume they were removed in a second procedure. Again, there will be records. The surgical scar also helps us date the bones. The trephine holes are too large by today’s standards. By the mid-eighties the tools were more advanced than this. Sleeker. The perforations were smaller. I hope this all helps you.”

  Bosch nodded and said, “What about the teeth? Anything there?”

  “We are missing the lower mandible,” Golliher said. “On the upper teeth present there is no indication of any dental work despite indication of ante-mortem decay. This in itself is a clue. I think it puts this boy in the lower levels of social classification. He didn’t go to the dentist.”

  Edgar had pulled his mask down around his neck. His expression was pained.

  “When this kid was in the hospital with the hematoma, why wouldn’t he tell the doctors what was happening to him? What about his teachers, his friends?”

  “You know the answers to that as well as me, Detective,” Golliher said. “Children are reliant on their parents. They are scared of them and they love them, don’t want to lose them. Sometimes there is no explanation for why they don’t cry out for help.”

  “What about all these fractures and such? Why didn’t the doctors see it and do something?”

  “That’s the irony of what I do. I see the history and tragedy so clearly. But with a living patient it might not be apparent. If the parents came in with a plausible explanation for the boy’s injury, what reason would a doctor have to X-ray an arm or a leg or a chest? None. And so the nightmare goes unnoticed.”

  Unsatisfied, Edgar shook his head and walked to the far corner of the room.

  “Anything else, Doctor?” Bosch asked.

  Golliher checked his notes and then folded his arms.

  “That’s it on a scientific level—you’ll get the report. On a purely personal level, I hope you find the person who did this. They will deserve whatever they get, and then some.”

  Bosch nodded.

  “We’ll get him,” Edgar said. “Don’t you worry about that.”

  They walked out of the building and got into Bosch’s car. Bosch just sat there for a moment before starting the engine. Finally, he hit the steering wheel hard with the heel of his palm, sending a shock down the injured side of his chest.

  “You know it doesn’t make me believe in God like him,” Edgar said. “Makes me believe in aliens, little green men from outer
space.”

  Bosch looked over at him. Edgar was leaning his head against the side window, looking down at the floor of the car.

  “How so?”

  “Because a human couldn’t have done this to his own kid. A spaceship must’ve come down and abducted the kid and done all that stuff to him. Only explanation.”

  “Yeah, I wish that was on the checklist, Jerry. Then we could all just go home.”

  Bosch put the car into drive.

  “I need a drink.”

  He started driving out of the lot.

  “Not me, man,” Edgar said. “I just want to go see my kid and hug him until this gets better.”

  They didn’t speak again until they got over to Parker Center.

  8

  BOSCH and Edgar rode the elevator to the fifth floor and went into the SID lab, where they had a meeting set up with Antoine Jesper, the lead criminalist assigned to the bones case. Jesper met them at the security fence and took them back. He was a young black man with gray eyes and smooth skin. He wore a white lab coat that swayed and flapped with his long strides and always moving arms.

  “This way, guys,” he said. “I don’t have a lot but what I got is yours.”

  He took them through the main lab, where only a handful of other criminalists were working, and into the drying room, a large climate-controlled space where clothing and other material evidence from cases were spread on stainless steel drying tables and examined. It was the only place that could rival the autopsy floor of the medical examiner’s office in the stench of decay.

  Jesper led them to two tables where Bosch saw the open backpack and several pieces of clothing blackened with soil and fungus. There was also a plastic sandwich bag filled with an unrecognizable lump of black decay.

  “Water and mud got into the backpack,” Jesper said. “Leached in over time, I guess.”

  Jesper took a pen out of the pocket of his lab coat and extended it into a pointer. He used it to help illustrate his commentary.

  “We’ve got your basic backpack containing three sets of clothes and what was probably a sandwich or some kind of food item. More specifically, three T-shirts, three underwear, three sets of socks. And the food item. There was also an envelope, or what was left of an envelope. You don’t see that here because documents has it. But don’t get your hopes up, guys. It was in worse shape than that sandwich—if it was a sandwich.”

  Bosch nodded. He made a list of the contents in his notebook.

  “Any identifiers?” he asked.

  Jesper shook his head.

  “No personal identifiers on the clothing or in the bag,” he said. “But two things to note. First, this shirt here has a brand-name identifier. ‘Solid Surf.’ Says it across the chest. You can’t see it now but I picked it up with the black light. Might help, might not. If you are not familiar with the term ‘Solid Surf,’ I can tell you that it is a skateboarding reference.”

  “Got it,” Bosch said.

  “Next is the outside flap of the bag.”

  He used his pointer to flip over the flap.

  “Cleaned this up a little bit and came up with this.”

  Bosch leaned over the table to look. The bag was made of blue canvas. On the flap was a clear demarcation of color forming a large letter B at the center.

  “It looks like there was some kind of adhesive applicate at one time on the bag,” Jesper said. “It’s gone now and I don’t really know if that occurred before or after this thing was put in the ground. My guess is before. It looks like it was peeled off.”

  Bosch stepped back from the table and wrote a few lines in his notebook. He then looked at Jesper.

  “Okay, Antoine, good stuff. Anything else?”

  “Not on this stuff.”

  “Then let’s go to documents.”

  Jesper led the way again through the central lab and then into a sub-lab where he had to enter a combination into a door lock to enter.

  The documents lab contained two rows of desks that were all empty. Each desk had a horizontal light box and a magnifying glass mounted on a pivot. Jesper went to the middle desk in the second row. The nameplate on the desk said Bernadette Fornier. Bosch knew her. They had worked a case previously in which a suicide note had been forged. He knew she did good work.

  Jesper picked up a plastic evidence pouch that was sitting in the middle of the desk. He unzipped it and removed two plastic viewing sleeves. One contained an unfolded envelope that was brown and smeared with black fungus. The other contained a deteriorated rectangular piece of paper that was broken into three parts along the folds and was also grossly discolored by decay and fungus.

  “This is what happens when stuff gets wet, man,” Jesper said. “It took Bernie all day just to unfold the envelope and separate the letter. As you can see, it came apart at the folds. And as far as whether we’ll ever be able to tell what was in the letter, it doesn’t look good.”

  Bosch turned on the light box and put the plastic sleeves down on it. He swung the magnifier over and studied the envelope and the letter it had once contained. There was nothing remotely readable on either document. One thing he noted was that it looked like there was no stamp on the envelope.

  “Damn,” he said.

  He flipped the sleeves over and kept looking. Edgar came over next to him as if to confirm the obvious.

  “Woulda been nice,” he said.

  “What will she do now?” Bosch asked Jesper.

  “Well, she’ll probably try some dyes, some different lights. Try to get something that reacts with the ink, brings it up. But she wasn’t too optimistic yesterday. So like I said, I wouldn’t be getting my hopes up about it.”

  Bosch nodded and turned off the light.

  9

  NEAR the back entrance to the Hollywood Division station was a bench with large sand-filled ashtrays on either side. It was called the Code 7, after the radio call for out-of-service or on break. At 11:15 P.M. on Saturday night Bosch was the only occupant on the Code 7 bench. He wasn’t smoking, though he wished he was. He was waiting. The bench was dimly lit by the lights over the station’s back door and had a view of the parking lot jointly shared by the station and the firehouse on the back end of the city complex.

  Bosch watched as the patrol units came in from the three-to-eleven shift and the officers went into the station to change out of uniforms, shower and call it a night, if they could. He looked down at the MagLite he held in his hands and rubbed his thumb over the end cap and felt the scratchings where Julia Brasher had etched her badge number.

  He hefted the light and then flipped it in his hand, feeling its weight. He flashed on what Golliher had said about the weapon that had killed the boy. He could add flashlight to the list.

  Bosch watched a patrol car come into the lot and park by the motor pool garage. A cop he recognized as Julia Brasher’s partner, Edgewood, emerged from the passenger side and headed into the station carrying the car’s shotgun. Bosch waited and watched, suddenly unsure of his plan and wondering if he could abandon it and get into the station without being seen.

  Before he decided on a move Brasher got out of the driver’s side and headed toward the station door. She walked with her head down, the posture of someone tired and beat from a long day. Bosch knew the feeling. He also thought something might be wrong. It was a subtle thing, but the way Edgewood had gone in and left her behind told Bosch something was off. Since Brasher was a rookie, Edgewood was her training officer, even though he was at least five years younger than her. Maybe it was just an awkward situation because of age and gender. Or maybe it was something else.

  Brasher didn’t notice Bosch on the bench. She was almost to the station door before he spoke.

  “Hey, you forgot to wash the puke out of the back seat.”

  She looked back while continuing to walk until she saw it was him. She stopped then and walked over to the bench.

  “I brought you something,” Bosch said.

  He held out the flashlight.
She smiled tiredly as she took it.

  “Thank you, Harry. You didn’t have to wait here to—”

  “I wanted to.”

  There was an awkward silence for a moment.

  “Were you working the case tonight?” she asked.

  “More or less. Started the paperwork. And we sort of got the autopsy earlier today. If you could call it an autopsy.”