City of Bones Read online

  He touched the thick rope of skin above his left hip.

  “This? This was a knife.”

  “Where’d that happen?”

  “A tunnel.”

  “And your shoulder?”

  “Bullet.”

  “Where?”

  He smiled.

  “A tunnel.”

  “Ouch, stay out of tunnels.”

  “I try.”

  He got into the bed and pulled the sheet up. She touched his shoulder, running her thumb over the thick skin of the scar.

  “Right in the bone,” she said.

  “Yeah, I got lucky. No permanent damage. It aches in the winter and when it rains, that’s about it.”

  “What did it feel like? Being shot, I mean.”

  Bosch shrugged his shoulders.

  “It hurt like hell and then everything sort of went numb.”

  “How long were you down?”

  “About three months.”

  “You didn’t get a disability out?”

  “It was offered. I declined.”

  “How come?”

  “I don’t know. I like the job, I guess. And I thought that if I stuck with it, someday I’d meet this beautiful young cop who’d be impressed by all my scars.”

  She jammed him in the ribs and the pain made him grimace.

  “Oh, poor baby,” she said in a mocking voice.

  “That hurt.”

  She touched the tattoo on his shoulder.

  “What’s that supposed to be, Mickey Mouse on acid?”

  “Sort of. It’s a tunnel rat.”

  Her face lost all trace of humor.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “You were in Vietnam,” she said, putting things together. “I’ve been in those tunnels.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When I was on the road. I spent six weeks in Vietnam. The tunnels, they’re like a tourist thing now. You pay your money and you can go down into them. It must’ve been . . . what you had to do must’ve been so frightening.”

  “It was more scary afterward. Thinking about it.”

  “They have them roped off so they can sort of control where you go. But nobody really watches you. So I went under the rope and went further in. It got so dark in there, Harry.”

  Bosch studied her eyes.

  “And did you see it?” he asked quietly. “The lost light?”

  She held his eyes for a moment and nodded.

  “I saw it. My eyes adjusted and there was light. Almost like a whisper. But it was enough for me to find my way.”

  “Lost light. We called it lost light. We never knew where it came from. But it was down there. Like smoke hanging in the dark. Some people said it wasn’t light, that it was the ghosts of everybody who died in those things. From both sides.”

  They spoke no more after that. They held each other and soon she was asleep.

  Bosch realized he had not thought about the case for more than three hours. At first this made him feel guilty but then he let it go and soon he too was asleep. He dreamed he was moving through a tunnel. But he wasn’t crawling. It was as if he were underwater and moving like an eel through the labyrinth. He came to a dead end and there was a boy sitting against the curve of the tunnel’s wall. He had his knees up and his face down, buried in his folded arms.

  “Come with me,” Bosch said.

  The boy peeked his eyes over one arm and looked up at Bosch. A single bubble of air rose from his mouth. He then looked past Bosch as if something was coming up behind him. Bosch turned around but there was only the darkness of the tunnel behind him.

  When he looked back at the boy, he was gone.

  12

  LATE Sunday morning Bosch drove Brasher to the Hollywood station so she could get her car and he could resume work on the case. She was off duty Sundays and Mondays. They made plans to meet at her house in Venice that night for dinner. There were other officers in the parking lot when Bosch dropped her next to her car. Bosch knew that word would get around quickly that it appeared they had spent the night together.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have thought it out better last night.”

  “I don’t really care, Harry. I’ll see you tonight.”

  “Hey, look, you should care. Cops can be brutal.”

  She made a face.

  “Oh, police brutality, yeah, I’ve heard of it.”

  “I’m serious. It’s also against regs. On my part. I’m a D-three. Supervisor level.”

  She looked at him a moment.

  “Well, that’s your call, then. I’ll see you tonight. I hope.”

  She got out and closed the door. Bosch drove on to his assigned parking slot and went into the detective bureau, trying not to think of the complications he might have just invited into his life.

  It was deserted in the squad room, which was what he was hoping for. He wanted time alone with the case. There was still a lot of office work to do but he also wanted to step back and think about all the evidence and information that had been accumulated since the discovery of the bones.

  The first thing to do was put together a list of what needed to be done. The murder book—the blue binder containing all written reports pertaining to the case—had to be completed. He had to draw up search warrants seeking medical records of brain surgeries at local hospitals. He had to run routine computer checks on all the residents living in the vicinity of the crime scene on Wonderland. He also had to read through all the call-in tips spawned by the media coverage of the bones on the hill and start gathering missing person and runaway reports that might match the victim.

  He knew it was more than a day’s work if he labored by himself but decided to keep with his decision to allow Edgar the day off. His partner, the father of a thirteen-year-old boy, had been greatly upset by Golliher’s report the day before and Bosch wanted him to take a break. The days ahead would likely be long and just as emotionally upsetting.

  Once Bosch had his list together he took his cup out of a drawer and went back to the watch office to get coffee. The smallest he had on him was a five-dollar bill but he put it in the coffee fund basket without taking any change. He figured he’d be drinking more than his share through the day.

  “You know what they say?” someone said behind him as he was filling the cup.

  Bosch turned. It was Mankiewicz, the watch sergeant.

  “About what?”

  “Fishing off the company dock.”

  “I don’t know. What do they say?”

  “I don’t know either. That’s why I was asking you.”

  Mankiewicz smiled and moved toward the machine to warm up his cup.

  So already it was starting to get around, Bosch thought. Gossip and innuendo—especially anything with a sexual tone—moved through a police station like a fire racing up a hill in August.

  “Well, let me know when you find out,” Bosch said as he started for the door of the watch office. “Could be useful to know.”

  “Will do. Oh, and one other thing, Harry.”

  Bosch turned, ready for another shot from Mankiewicz.

  “What?”

  “Just stop fooling around and wrap up your case. I’m tired of my guys having to take all the calls.”

  There was a facetious tone in his voice. In his humor and sarcasm was a legitimate complaint about his officers on the desk being tied up by the tip calls.

  “Yeah, I know. Any good ones today?”

  “Not that I could tell, but you’ll get to slog through the reports and use your investigative wiles to decide that.”

  “Wiles?”

  “Yes, wiles. Like Wile E. Coyote. Oh, and CNN must’ve had a slow morning and picked up the story—good video, all you brave guys on the hill with your makeshift stairs and little boxes of bones. So now we’re getting the long-distance calls. Topeka and Providence so far this morning. It’s not going to end until you clear it, Harry. We’re all counting on you back here.”

  Again
there was a smile—and a message—behind what he was saying.

  “All right, I’ll use all my wiles. I promise, Mank.”

  “That’s what we’re counting on.”

  Back at the table Bosch sipped his coffee and let the details of the case move through his mind. There were anomalies, contradictions. There were the conflicts between location choice and method of burial noticed by Kathy Kohl. But the conclusions made by Golliher added even more to the list of questions. Golliher saw it as a child abuse case. But the backpack full of clothes was an indication that the victim, the boy, was possibly a runaway.

  Bosch had spoken to Edgar about it the day before when they returned to the station from the SID lab. His partner was not as sure of the conflict as Bosch but offered a theory that perhaps the boy was the victim of child abuse both at the hands of his parents and then an unrelated killer. He rightfully pointed out that many victims of abuse run away only to be drawn into another form of abusive relationship. Bosch knew the theory was legitimate but tried not to let himself go down that road because he knew it was even more depressing than the scenario Golliher had spun.

  His direct line rang and Bosch answered, expecting it to be Edgar or Lt. Billets checking in. It was a reporter from the L.A. Times named Josh Meyer. Bosch barely knew him and was sure he’d never given him the direct line. He didn’t let on that he was annoyed, however. Though tempted to tell the reporter that the police were running down leads extending as far as Topeka and Providence, he simply said there was no further update on the investigation since Friday’s briefing from the Media Relations office.

  After he hung up he finished his first cup of coffee and got down to work. The part of an investigation Bosch enjoyed the least was the computer work. Whenever possible he gave it to his partners to handle. So he decided to put the computer runs at the end of his list and started with a quick look through the accumulated tip sheets from the watch office.

  There were about three dozen more sheets since he had last looked through the pile on Friday. None contained enough information to be helpful or worth pursuing at the moment. Each was from a parent or sibling or friend of someone who had disappeared. All of them permanently forlorn and seeking some kind of closure to the most pressing mystery of their lives.

  He thought of something and rolled his chair over to one of the old IBM Selectrics. He inserted a sheet of paper and typed out four questions.

  Do you know if your missing loved one underwent any kind of surgical procedure in the months before his disappearance?

  If so, what hospital was he treated at?

  What was the injury?

  What was the name of his physician?

  He rolled the page out and took it to the watch office. He gave it to Mankiewicz to be used as a template of questions to be asked of all callers about the bones.

  “That wily enough for you?” Bosch asked.

  “No, but it’s a start.”

  While he was there Bosch took a plastic cup and filled it with coffee and then came back to the bureau and dumped it into his cup. He made a note to ask Lt. Billets on Monday to procure some help in contacting all the callers of the last few days to ask the same medical questions. He then thought of Julia Brasher. He knew she was off on Mondays and would volunteer if needed. But he quickly dismissed it, knowing that by Monday the whole station would know about them and bringing her into the case would make matters worse.

  He started the search warrants next. It was a matter of routine in homicide work to need medical records in the course of an investigation. Most often these records came from physicians and dentists. But hospitals were not unusual. Bosch kept a file with search warrant templates for hospitals as well as a listing of all twenty-nine hospitals in the Los Angeles area and the attorneys who handled legal filings at each location. Having all of this handy allowed him to draw up twenty-nine search warrants in a little over an hour. The warrants sought the records of all male patients under the age of sixteen who underwent brain surgery entailing the use of a trephine drill between 1975 and 1985.

  After printing out the requests he put them in his briefcase. While normally it was proper on a weekend to fax a search warrant to a judge’s home for approval and signature, it would certainly not be acceptable to fax twenty-nine requests to a judge on a Sunday afternoon. Besides, the hospital lawyers would not be available on a Sunday anyway. Bosch’s plan was to take the warrants to a judge first thing Monday morning, then divide them with Edgar and hand-deliver them to the hospitals, thereby being able to push the urgency of the matter with the lawyers in person. Even if things went according to plan, Bosch didn’t expect to start receiving returns of records from the hospitals until mid-week or later.

  Bosch next typed out a daily case summary as well as a recap of the anthropological information from Golliher. He put these in the murder book and then typed up an evidence report detailing the preliminary SID findings on the backpack.

  When he was finished Bosch leaned back and thought about the unreadable letter that had been found in the backpack. He did not anticipate that the documents section would have any success with it. It would forever be the mystery shrouded in the mystery of the case. He gulped the last of his second cup of coffee and opened the murder book to the page containing a copy of the crime scene sketch and chart. He studied the chart and noted that the backpack had been found right next to the spot Kohl had marked as the probable original location of the body.

  Bosch wasn’t sure what it all meant but instinctively he knew that the questions he now had about the case should be kept foremost in his mind as new evidence and details continued to be gathered. They would be the screen through which everything would be sifted.

  He put the report into the murder book and then finished the updating of the paperwork by bringing the investigator’s log—an hour-by-hour time chart with small entry blocks—up to date. He then put the murder book in his briefcase.

  Bosch took his coffee cup to the sink in the rest room and washed it out. He then returned it to its drawer, picked up his briefcase and headed out the back door to his car.

  13

  THE basement of Parker Center, the headquarters of the Los Angeles Police Department, serves as the record archives for every case the department has taken a report on in the modern era. Until the mid-nineties records were kept on paper for a period of eight years and then transferred to microfiche for permanent storage. The department now used computers for permanent storage and was also moving backward, putting older files into digital storage banks. But the process was slow and had not gone further back than the late eighties.

  Bosch arrived at the counter in archives at one o’clock. He had two containers of coffee with him and two roast beef sandwiches from Philippe’s in a paper bag. He looked at the clerk and smiled.

  “Believe it or not I need to see the fiche on missing person reports, nineteen seventy-five to ’eighty-five.”

  The clerk, an old guy with a basement pallor, whistled and said, “Look out, Christine, here they come.”

  Bosch smiled and nodded and didn’t know what the man was talking about. There appeared to be no one else behind the counter.

  “The good news is they break up,” the clerk said. “I mean, I think it’s good news. You looking for adult or juvy records?”

  “Juveniles.”

  “Then that cuts it up a bit.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  The clerk disappeared from the counter and Bosch waited. In four minutes the man came back with ten small envelopes containing microfiche sheets for the years Bosch requested. Altogether the stack was at least four inches thick.

  Bosch went to a microfiche reader and copier, set out a sandwich and the two coffees and took the second sandwich back to the counter. The clerk refused the first offer but then took the sandwich when Bosch said it was from Philippe’s.

  Bosch went back to the machine and started fiche-ing, wading first into the year 198
5. He was looking for missing person and runaway reports of young males in the age range of the victim. Once he got proficient with the machine he was able to move quickly through the reports. He would scan first for the “closed” stamp that indicated the missing individual had returned home or been located. If there was no stamp his eyes would immediately go to the age and sex boxes on the form. If they fit the profile of his victim, he’d read the summary and then push the photocopy button on the machine to get a hard copy to take with him.