City of Bones Page 9

  The microfiche also contained records of missing person reports forwarded to the LAPD by outside agencies seeking people believed to have gone to Los Angeles.

  Despite his speed at the task, it took Bosch more than three hours to go through all the reports for the ten years he had requested. He had hard copies of more than three hundred reports in the tray to the side of the machine when he was finished. And he had no idea whether his effort had been worth the time or not.

  Bosch rubbed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. He had a headache from staring at the machine’s screen and reading tale after tale of parental anguish and juvenile angst. He looked over and realized he hadn’t eaten his sandwich.

  He returned the stack of microfiche envelopes to the clerk and decided to do the computer work in Parker Center rather than drive back to Hollywood. From Parker Center he could jump on the 10 Freeway and shoot out to Venice for dinner at Julia Brasher’s house. It would be easier.

  The squad room of the Robbery-Homicide Division was empty except for the two on-call detectives who were sitting in front of a television watching a football game. One of them was Bosch’s former partner, Kizmin Rider. The other Bosch didn’t recognize. Rider stood up smiling when she saw it was Bosch.

  “Harry, what are you doing here?” she asked.

  “Working a case. I want to use a computer, that all right?”

  “That bone thing?”

  He nodded.

  “I heard about it on the news. Harry, this is Rick Thornton, my partner.”

  Bosch shook his hand and introduced himself.

  “I hope she makes you look as good as she did me.”

  Thornton just nodded and smiled and Rider looked embarrassed.

  “Come on over to my desk,” she said. “You can use my computer.”

  She showed him the way and let him sit in her seat.

  “We’re just twiddling our thumbs here. Nothing happening. I don’t even like football.”

  “Don’t complain about the slow days. Didn’t anybody ever tell you that?”

  “Yeah, my old partner. Only thing he ever said that made any sense.”

  “I bet.”

  “Anything I can do to help?”

  “I’m just running the names—the usual.”

  He opened his briefcase and took out the murder book. He opened it to a page where he had listed the names, addresses and birth dates of residents on Wonderland Avenue

  who had been interviewed during the neighborhood canvas. It was a matter of routine and due diligence to run the name of every person investigators came across in an investigation.

  “You want a coffee or something?” Rider asked.

  “Nah, I’m fine. Thanks, Kiz.”

  He nodded in the direction of Thornton, who had his back to them and was on the other side of the room.

  “How are things going?”

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  “Every now and then he lets me do some real detective work,” she said in a whisper.

  “Well, you can always come back to Hollywood,” he whispered back with a smile.

  He started typing in the commands for entering the National Crime Index Computer. Immediately, Rider made a sound of derision.

  “Harry, you’re still typing with two fingers?”

  “It’s all I know, Kiz. I’ve been doing it this way for almost thirty years. You expect me to suddenly know how to type with ten fingers? I’m still not fluent in Spanish and don’t know how to dance, either. You’ve only been gone a year.”

  “Just get up, dinosaur. Let me do it. You’ll be here all night.”

  Bosch raised his hands in surrender and stood up. She sat down and went to work. Behind her back Bosch secretly smiled.

  “Just like old times,” he said.

  “Don’t remind me. I always get the shit work. And stop smiling.”

  She hadn’t looked up from her typing. Her fingers were a blur above the keyboard. Bosch watched in awe.

  “Hey, it’s not like I planned this. I didn’t know you were going to be here.”

  “Yeah, like Tom Sawyer didn’t know he had to paint a fence.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Tell me about the boot.”

  Bosch was stunned.

  “What?”

  “Is that all you can say? You heard me. The rookie you’re, uh . . . seeing.”

  “How the hell do you know about it already?”

  “I’m a highly skilled gatherer of information. And I still have sources in Hollywood.”

  Bosch stepped away from her cubicle and shook his head.

  “Well, is she nice? That’s all I wanted to know. I don’t want to pry.”

  Bosch came back.

  “Yes, she’s nice. I hardly know her. You seem to know more about her and me than me.”

  “You havin’ dinner with her tonight?”

  “Yeah, I’m having dinner with her.”

  “Hey, Harry?”

  Rider’s voice had lost any note of humor.

  “What?”

  “You got a pretty good hit here.”

  Bosch leaned down and looked at the screen. After digesting the information he said, “I don’t think I’m going to make it to dinner tonight.”

  14

  BOSCH pulled to a stop in front of the house and studied the darkened windows and porch.

  “Figures,” Edgar said. “The guy ain’t even going to be home. Probably already in the wind.”

  Edgar was annoyed with Bosch, who had called him in from home. The way he figured it, the bones had been in the ground twenty years, what was the harm of waiting until Monday morning to talk to this guy? But Bosch said he was going by himself if Edgar didn’t come in.

  Edgar came in.

  “No, he’s home,” Bosch said.

  “How d’you know?”

  “I just know.”

  He looked at his watch and wrote the time and address down on a page in his small notebook. It occurred to him then that the house they were at was the one where he had seen the curtain pulled closed behind a window on the evening of the first call out.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “You talked to him the first time, so you take the lead. I’ll jump in when it feels right.”

  They got out and walked up the driveway to the house. The man they were visiting was named Nicholas Trent. He lived alone in the house, which was across the street and two houses down from the hillside where the bones had been found. Trent was fifty-seven years old. He had told Edgar during his initial canvas of the neighborhood that he was a set decorator for a studio in Burbank. He was unmarried and had no children. He knew nothing about the bones on the hill and could offer no clues or suggestions that were helpful.

  Edgar knocked hard on the front door and they waited.

  “Mr. Trent, it’s the police,” he said loudly. “Detective Edgar. Answer your door, please.”

  He had raised his fist to hit the door again when the porch light went on. The door was then opened and a white man with a shaved scalp stood in the darkness within. The light from the porch slashed across his face.

  “Mr. Trent? It’s Detective Edgar. This is my partner, Detective Bosch. We have a few follow-up questions for you. If you don’t mind.”

  Bosch nodded but didn’t offer his hand. Trent said nothing and Edgar forced the issue by putting his hand against the door and pushing it open.

  “All right if we come in?” he asked, already halfway across the threshold.

  “No, it’s not all right,” Trent said quickly.

  Edgar stopped and put a puzzled look on his face.

  “Sir, we just have a few more questions we’d like to ask.”

  “Yeah, and that’s bullshit!”

  “Excuse me?”

  “We all know what is going on here. I talked to my attorney already. Your act is just that, an act. A bad one.”

  Bosch could see they were not going to get anywhere with the trick-or-treat strategy. He
stepped up and pulled Edgar back by the arm. Once his partner had cleared the threshold he looked at Trent.

  “Mr. Trent, if you knew we’d be back, then you knew we’d find out about your past. Why didn’t you tell Detective Edgar about it before? It could have saved us some time. Instead, it gives us suspicion. You can understand that, I’m sure.”

  “Because the past is the past. I didn’t bring it up. I buried the past. Leave it that way.”

  “Not when there are bones buried in it,” Edgar said in an accusatory tone.

  Bosch looked back at Edgar and gave him a look that said use some finesse.

  “See?” Trent said. “This is why I am saying, ‘Go away.’ I have nothing to tell you people. Nothing. I don’t know anything about it.”

  “Mr. Trent, you molested a nine-year-old boy,” Bosch said.

  “The year was nineteen sixty-six and I was punished for it. Severely. It’s the past. I’ve been a perfect citizen ever since. I had nothing to do with those bones up there.”

  Bosch waited a moment and then spoke in a calm and quieter tone.

  “If that is the truth, then let us come in and ask our questions. The sooner we clear you, the sooner we move on to other possibilities. But you have to understand something here. The bones of a young boy were found about a hundred yards from the home of a man who molested a young boy in nineteen sixty-six. I don’t care what kind of citizen he’s been since then, we need to ask him some questions. And we will ask those questions. We have no choice. Whether we do it in your home right now or with your lawyer at the station with all of the news cameras waiting outside, that’s going to be your choice.”

  He paused. Trent looked at him with scared eyes.

  “So you can understand our situation, Mr. Trent, and we can certainly understand yours. We are willing to move quickly and discreetly but we can’t without your cooperation.”

  Trent shook his head as though he knew that no matter what he did now, his life as he knew it was in jeopardy and probably permanently altered. He finally stepped back and signaled Bosch and Edgar in.

  Trent was barefoot and wearing baggy black shorts that showed off thin ivory legs with no hair on them. He wore a flowing silk shirt over his thin upper body. He had the same build as a ladder, all hard angles. He led them to a living room cluttered with antiques. He sat down in the center of a couch. Bosch and Edgar took the two leather club chairs opposite. Bosch decided to keep the lead. He didn’t like the way Edgar had handled the door.

  “To be cautious and careful, I am going to read you your constitutional rights,” he said. “Then I’ll ask you to sign a waiver form. This protects you as well as us. I am also going to record our conversation so that nobody ends up putting words in anybody else’s mouth. If you want a copy of the tape I will make it available.”

  Trent shrugged and Bosch took it as reluctant agreement. When Bosch had the form signed he slipped it into his briefcase and took out a small recorder. Once he started it and identified those present as well as the time and date, he nodded to Edgar to assume the lead again. This was because Bosch thought that observations of Trent and his surroundings were going to be more important than his answers now.

  “Mr. Trent, how long have you lived in this house?”

  “Since nineteen eighty-four.”

  He then laughed.

  “What is funny about that?” Edgar asked.

  “Nineteen eighty-four. Don’t you get it? George Orwell? Big Brother?”

  He gestured toward Bosch and Edgar as the front men of Big Brother. Edgar apparently didn’t follow the statement and continued with the interview.

  “Rent or own?”

  “Own. Uh, at first I rented, then I bought the house in ’eighty-seven from the landlord.”

  “Okay, and you are a set designer in the entertainment industry?”

  “Set decorator. There is a difference.”

  “What is the difference?”

  “The designer plans and supervises the construction of the set. The decorator then goes in and puts in the details. The little character strokes. The characters’ belongings or tools. Like that.”

  “How long have you done this?”

  “Twenty-six years.”

  “Did you bury that boy up on the hillside?”

  Trent stood up indignantly.

  “Absolutely not. I’ve never even set foot on that hill. And you people are making a big mistake if you waste your time on me when the true killer of that poor soul is still out there somewhere.”

  Bosch leaned forward in his chair.

  “Sit down, Mr. Trent,” he said.

  The fervent way in which Trent delivered the denial made Bosch instinctively think he was either innocent or one of the better actors he had come across on the job. Trent slowly sat down on the couch again.

  “You’re a smart guy,” Bosch said, deciding to jump in. “You know exactly what we’re doing here. We have to bag you or clear you. It’s that simple. So why don’t you help us out? Instead of dancing around with us, why don’t you tell us how to clear you?”

  Trent raised his hands wide.

  “I don’t know how! I don’t know anything about the case! How can I help you when I don’t know the first thing about it?”

  “Well, right off the bat, you can let us take a look around here. If I can start to get comfortable with you, Mr. Trent, then maybe I can start seeing it from your side of things. But right now . . . like I said, I’ve got you with your record and I’ve got bones across the street.”

  Bosch held up his two hands as if he was holding those two things in them.

  “It doesn’t look that good from where I’m looking at things.”

  Trent stood up and threw one hand out in a gesture toward the interior of the house.

  “Fine! Be my guest. Look around to your heart’s content. You won’t find a thing because I had nothing to do with it. Nothing!”

  Bosch looked at Edgar and nodded, the signal being that he should keep Trent occupied while Bosch took a look around.

  “Thank you, Mr. Trent,” Bosch said as he stood up.

  As he headed into a hallway that led to the rear of the house, he heard Edgar asking if Trent had ever seen any unusual activity on the hillside where the bones had been found.

  “I just remember kids used to play up—”

  He stopped, apparently when he realized that any mention he made of kids would only further suspicion about him. Bosch glanced back to make sure the red light of the recorder was still on.

  “Did you like watching the kids play up there in the woods, Mr. Trent?” Edgar asked.

  Bosch stayed in the hallway, out of sight but listening to Trent’s answer.

  “No, I couldn’t see them if they were up in the woods. On occasion I would be driving up or walking my dog—when he was alive—and I would see the kids climbing up there. The girl across the street. The Fosters next door. All the kids around here. It’s a city-owned right-of-way—the only undeveloped land in the neighborhood. So they went up there to play. Some of the neighbors thought the older ones went up there to smoke cigarettes, and the concern was they would set the whole hillside on fire.”

  “How long ago are you talking about?”

  “Like when I first moved here. I didn’t get involved. The neighbors who had been here took care of it.”

  Bosch moved down the hall. It was a small house, not much bigger than his own. The hallway ended at a conjunction of three doors. Bedrooms on the right and left and a linen closet in the middle. He checked the closet first, found nothing unusual, and then moved into the bedroom on the right. It was Trent’s bedroom. It was neatly kept but the tops of the twin bureaus and bed tables were cluttered with knickknacks that Bosch assumed Trent used on the job in helping to turn sets into real places for the camera.

  He looked in the closet. There were several shoe boxes on the upper shelf. Bosch started opening them and found they contained old, worn-out shoes. It was apparently Trent’s ha
bit of buying new shoes and putting his old ones in the box, then shelving them. Bosch guessed that these, too, became part of his work inventory. He opened one box and found a pair of work boots. He noticed that dirt had dried hard in some of the treads. He thought about the dark soil where the bones had been found. Samples of it had been collected.