The Drop hb-17 Read online

  “Okay, these are really old and faded but if you look at the victim’s neck, you can make out the pattern left by the ligature. She was strangled.”

  Bosch heard her sharp intake of breath.

  “Oh, my god,” she said.

  He closed the binder quickly and looked up at her. She had brought one hand to her mouth.

  “I’m sorry. I thought you were used to seeing stuff like—”

  “I am, I am. It’s just that you never get used to it. My specialty is sexual deviancy and dysfunction. To see the ultimate . . .”

  She pointed to the closed binder.

  “That’s what I try to stop. It’s awful to see it.”

  Bosch nodded and she told him to go back to the photos. He reopened the binder and returned to the plastic sleeves. He chose a close-up of the victim’s neck and pointed out the vague indentation on Lily Price’s skin.

  “You see what I’m talking about?”

  “Yes,” Stone said. “Poor girl.”

  “Okay, now look at this one.”

  He switched to a different Polaroid on the next sleeve and told her once again to look at the ligature pattern. There was a noticeable indentation in the skin.

  “I see it but what does it mean?”

  “The angle is different on this photo and it shows the top line of the ligature. The first shot shows the lower line.”

  He flipped the sleeve back and used his finger to outline the differences between the two shots.

  “You see it?”

  “Yes. But I’m not following. You have two lines. What do they mean?”

  “Well, the lines don’t match. They’re on different levels of her neck. So it means that they are the top and bottom edges of the ligature. Take them together and we get an idea of how wide the ligature was and, more important, what it was.”

  Spacing his thumb and forefinger he traced two lines on one of the photos, outlining a ligature that would have been almost two inches wide.

  “It’s all we have after so long,” he said. “The autopsy photos weren’t in the archives file. So these photos are it, and they show that the ligature was at least an inch and a half wide on the neck.”

  “Like a belt?”

  “Exactly. And then look at this. Right under the ear we have another indentation, another pattern.”

  He went to another photo in the second sleeve.

  “It looks like a square.”

  “Right. Like a square belt buckle. Now let’s go to the blood.”

  He flipped to the first sleeve and zeroed in on the first three Polaroids. They all showed shots of the blood smear on the victim’s neck.

  “Just one drop of blood that was smeared on her neck. It’s right in the middle of the ligature pattern, meaning it could have been transferred from the ligature. Twenty-two years ago their theory was that the guy was cut and was bleeding and a drop fell on her. He wiped it away but left the smear.”

  “But you think it was a transfer.”

  “Right. And that’s where Pell comes in. It was his blood—his eight-year-old blood on her. How did it get there? Well, if we go with the transfer theory, it came off the belt. So the real question is not how did it get on Lily, it’s how did it get on the belt?”

  Bosch closed the binder and returned it to his briefcase. He pulled out the thick file from the Department of Probation and Parole. He held it up with two hands and shook it.

  “Right here. I told you last night when you said you could not reveal client confidences that I already had his PSI evaluations. Well, I read them last night after I got home and there’s something here and it ties in with your whole thing about repetitive behavior and—”

  “He was whipped with a belt.”

  Bosch smiled.

  “Careful, Doctor, you don’t want to be revealing confidences. Especially because you don’t have to. It’s all right here. Every time Pell got a psych evaluation, he told the same story. When he was eight years old, he and his mother lived with a guy who abused him physically and eventually sexually. It was probably what sent him down the path he’s been on. But the physical abuse included being whipped with a belt.”

  Bosch opened the file and handed her the first evaluation report.

  “He was whipped so hard he must’ve bled,” he said. “That report says he had scars on his backside from the abuse. To leave a scar you have to break the skin. You break the skin and you get blood.”

  He watched her as she scanned the report, her eyes fixed in concentration. He felt his phone vibrate but ignored it. He knew it was probably his partner reporting that he had completed the DNA lab visit.

  “Johnny,” she said as she handed the report back.

  Bosch nodded.

  “I think he’s our man and I need to talk to Pell to get a line on him. Has he ever told you his full name? In the PSIs he only calls him Johnny.”

  “No, he just called him Johnny in our sessions, too.”

  “That’s why I need to talk to him.”

  She paused as she considered something Bosch apparently hadn’t thought of. He thought she would be as excited about the lead as he was.

  “What?”

  “Harry, I have to consider what this will do to him, dredging all of this up. I’m sorry but I have to consider his well-being before the well-being of your investigation.”

  Bosch wished she hadn’t said that.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “What do you mean ‘dredging it up’? It’s in all three of his psych reports here. He has to have talked to you about this guy. I’m not asking you to break that confidence. I want to talk directly to him.”

  “I know and I can’t stop you from talking to him. It’s really his option. He’ll talk to you or he won’t. But my only worry is that he’s quite fragile as you can—”

  “You can get him to talk to me, Hannah. You can tell him it will help him.”

  “You mean lie to him? I won’t do that.”

  Bosch stood up, since she had not returned to her seat.

  “I don’t mean lie. I mean tell the truth. This will help him get this guy out of the shadows of the past. Like an exorcism. Maybe he even knows that this guy was killing girls.”

  “You mean there’s more than one?”

  “I don’t know but you saw the photos. It doesn’t look like a onetime thing, like, oh, I got that out of my system and it’s back to being a good citizen again. This was a predator’s crime and predators don’t stop. You know that as well as I do. It doesn’t matter if this happened twenty-two years ago. If this guy Johnny is still out there, I have to find him. And Clayton Pell is the key.”

  13

  Clayton Pell agreed to talk to Bosch but only if Dr. Stone remained present. Harry had no problem with that and thought that having Stone on hand might be helpful during the interview. He only advised her that Pell might become a witness in an eventual trial and as such Bosch would conduct the interview in a methodical and linear fashion.

  An orderly walked Pell into the interview room, where three chairs had been set up, one facing the other two. Bosch introduced himself and shook Pell’s hand without hesitation. Pell was a small man no more than five foot two and a hundred ten pounds, and Bosch knew that victims of sexual abuse during childhood often suffered from stunted growth. Disrupted psychological growth affected physical growth.

  Bosch pointed Pell to his seat and cordially asked if he needed anything.

  “I could use a smoke,” Pell said.

  When he sat, he brought his legs up and crossed them on the seat. It seemed like a childlike thing to do.

  “I could use one, too, but we’re not going to break the rules today,” Bosch said.

  “That’s too bad, then.”

  Stone had suggested that they set the three seats up around a table to make it less formal but Bosch had said no. He also choreographed the seating arrangement so that both he and Stone would be left and right of Pell’s center view line, which meant he would have to constantly look
back and forth between them. Observing eye movement would be a good way for Bosch to measure sincerity and veracity. Pell had become a tragic figure in Stone’s estimation but Bosch held no such sympathy. Pell’s traumatic history and childlike dimensions didn’t matter. He was now a predator. Just ask the nine-year-old boy he had pulled into his van. Bosch planned to constantly remind himself that predators hid themselves and that they lied and waited for their opponents to reveal weaknesses. He wouldn’t make a mistake with Pell.

  “Why don’t we get started here,” Bosch said. “If you don’t mind I will take written notes as we talk.”

  “A’right by me,” Pell said.

  Bosch pulled out his notebook. It had an LAPD detective’s badge embossed on its leather cover. It had been a gift from his daughter, who had had it custom-made through a friend in Hong Kong whose father was in the leather business. The embossing was complete with his badge number—2997. She’d given it to him at Christmas. It was one of his most treasured possessions because it had come from her, but also because he knew it served a valuable purpose. Every time he flipped it open to jot down a note, he was showing the badge to his interview subjects and reminding them that the power and might of the state was before them.

  “So what’s this about?” Pell asked in a high, nasal voice. “Doc didn’t tell me nothin’ about nothin’.”

  Stone did not tell him not to call her Doc.

  “It’s about a murder, Clayton,” Bosch said. “From way back when you were just a boy of eight years old.”

  “I don’t know nothin’ about no murder, sir.”

  The voice was grating and Bosch wondered if it had always been that way or if it was the by-product of the prison attack.

  “I know that. And you should know that you are not suspected in this crime in any way.”

  “Then why come to me?”

  “Good question, and I’m going to just answer it straight, Clayton. You are in this room because your blood and your DNA were found on the victim’s body.”

  Pell shot straight up out of his chair.

  “Okay, I’m out of here.”

  He turned to head toward the door.

  “Clay!” Stone called out. “Hear him out! You are not a suspect! You were eight years old. He just wants to know what you know. Please!”

  He looked down at her but pointed at Bosch.

  “You can trust this guy but I don’t. The cops don’t do anybody any favors. Only themselves.”

  Stone stood up to make her pitch.

  “Clayton, please. Give it a chance.”

  Pell reluctantly sat back down. Stone followed and he stared at her while refusing to look at Bosch.

  “We think the killer had your blood on him,” Bosch said. “And it somehow got transferred to the victim. We don’t think you had anything to do with the crime.”

  “Why don’t you just get it over with,” he replied, holding his wrists out together for cuffing.

  “Clay, please,” Stone said.

  He waved both hands in an enough already gesture. He was small enough that he could completely turn his body in his seat and put both legs over the chair’s left arm, giving Bosch the cold shoulder like a child ignoring his parent. He folded his arms across his chest and Bosch could see the top edge of a tattoo peeking out of his collar on the back of his neck.

  “Clayton,” Stone said sternly. “Don’t you remember where you were when you were eight? Don’t you remember what you’ve told me over and over?”

  Pell tucked his chin down toward his chest and then relented.

  “Of course I do.”

  “Then answer Detective Bosch’s questions.”

  He milked it for ten seconds and then nodded.

  “Okay. What?”

  Just as Bosch was about to ask a question, his phone buzzed in his pocket. Pell heard it.

  “If you answer that, I am fucking walking out of here.”

  “Don’t worry, I hate cell phones.”

  Bosch waited for the buzzing to stop and then proceeded.

  “Tell me about where you were and how you were living when you were eight years old, Clayton.”

  Pell turned back straight in his chair to face Bosch.

  “I was living with a monster. A guy who liked to beat the shit out of me whenever my mother wasn’t around.”

  He paused. Bosch waited and then prompted.

  “What else, Clayton?”

  “He decided that just beatin’ me up wasn’t good enough. He decided he liked for me to suck him off, too. A couple times a week. So that’s how I was living, Detective.”

  “And this man was named Johnny?”

  “Where did you get that?”

  Pell looked at Stone, assuming she had betrayed his confidence.

  “The name’s in your PSI reports,” Bosch said quickly. “I read them. You mention a guy named Johnny in them. Is that who we’re talking about here?”

  “I just call him that. Now, I mean. He reminded me of Jack Nicholson in that Stephen King movie. The ‘Here’s Johnny’ guy, chasing after the boy with an ax all the time. That was what it was like for me, only no ax. He didn’t need no ax.”

  “What about his real name? Did you know it?”

  “Nope, never did.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Course I’m sure. The guy fucked me up for life. If I knew his name, I’d remember it. The only thing I remember was his nickname, what everybody called him.”

  “What was it?”

  A small, thin smile played on Pell’s lips. He had something everyone wanted and he was going to work it to his advantage. Bosch could tell. All those years in prison, he had learned to play the angles.

  “What do I get for it?” he asked.

  Bosch was ready.

  “You might get to put the guy who tortured you away for good.”

  “What makes you think he’s even still alive?”

  Bosch shrugged.

  “Just a guess. The reports say your mother had you when she was seventeen. So she was about twenty-five when she took up with this guy. My guess is that he wasn’t too much older than her. Twenty-two years ago . . . he’s probably in his fifties and he’s probably still out there doing what he does.”

  Pell stared down at the floor and Bosch wondered if he was seeing a memory from the time he was in the man’s control.

  Stone cleared her voice and spoke.

  “Clay, remember how we’ve talked about evil and whether people are born that way or if it is given to them? About how acts can be evil but the person committing them is not?”

  Pell nodded.

  “This man is evil. Look what he did to you. And Detective Bosch believes he committed other evil acts on other victims.”

  Pell nodded again.

  “That fucking belt had letters on the buckle. He used to hit me with that buckle. The fucker. After a while I just didn’t want to get hit anymore. It was easier just to give him what he wanted . . .”

  Bosch waited. There was no need to ask another question. Stone seemed to sense it as well. After a long moment Pell nodded a third time and spoke.

  “Everybody called him Chill. Including my mother.”

  Bosch wrote it down.

  “You said the belt buckle had letters on it. You mean like initials? What were they?”

  “C. H.”

  Bosch wrote it down. His adrenaline started to kick in. He might not have a full name but he was getting close. For a split second an image came to him. His fist raised and knocking on a door. No, pounding on a door. A door that would be opened by the man known as Chill.

  Pell continued to talk unbidden.

  “I thought of Chill last year when I saw all that stuff on the news about the Grim Sleeper. Chill had photos like that guy, too.”

  The Grim Sleeper was the name given to a serial killer suspect and the task force investigation that sought him. A single killer was suspected in multiple murders of women, but there were large spaces of time between
killings and it was as though he had gone to sleep and was hibernating. When a suspect was identified and captured the year before, investigators found hundreds of photos of women in his possession. Most of the women were naked and in sexually suggestive poses in the shots. The investigation was ongoing as to who the women were and what had happened to them.

  “He had photos of women?” Bosch asked.

  “Yeah, the women he’d fucked. Naked pictures. His trophies. He took pictures of my mother. I saw ’em. He had one of those cameras where the picture just came right out so he didn’t have to worry about taking film to the drugstore and getting found out. Back before they had digital.”

  “A Polaroid.”

  “Yeah, right. Polaroid.”

  “It is not unusual,” Stone said. “For men who physically hurt women or not. It’s a form of control. Ownership. Skins on the wall, keeping score. A symptom of a very controlling personality. In today’s world of digital cameras and Internet porn, you see this more and more.”

  “Yeah, well then, I guess Chill was a pioneer,” Pell said. “He didn’t have no computer. He kept his pictures in a shoe box. That’s how we moved away from him.”

  “What do you mean?” Bosch asked.

  Pell tightened his lips for a moment before answering.

  “He took a picture of me with his dick in my mouth. And he put it in his shoebox. One day I stole it and left it where my mom would see it. We moved out that day.”

  “Were there other photos of boys or men in that shoebox?” Bosch asked.

  “I remember seeing one other. It was a kid like me but I didn’t know who it was.”

  Bosch wrote down a few more notes. Pell’s information that Chill was apparently a pansexual predator was a key part of the emerging profile. He then asked if Pell could remember where they lived when he and his mother were with the man called Chill. He could only remember that they were close to Travel Town at Griffith Park, because his mother used to take him there to ride on the trains.

  “Could you walk there or did you drive?”

  “We took a taxi and I remember it was close. We went there a lot. I liked being on those little trains.”

  It was a good note. Bosch knew Travel Town was on the north side of the park and it probably meant Pell had lived with Chill in North Hollywood or Burbank. It would help narrow things.