City of Bones (10 page)

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

T
HE 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 1985. 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.

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

B
OSCH 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.