City of Bones (19 page)

Delacroix shook her head.

“I can’t remember. It’s been—I just remember that he liked that shirt a lot.”

Bosch nodded and gave the photo back to Edgar. It wasn’t the kind of solid confirmation they could get from X-rays and bone comparison but it was one more notch. Bosch was feeling more and more sure that they were about to identify the bones. He watched Edgar put the photo in a short stack of pictures he intended to borrow from Sheila’s collection.

Bosch checked his watch and looked back at Sheila.

“What about your mother?”

Sheila immediately shook her head.

“Nope, she was long gone by the time all of this happened.”

“You mean she died?”

“I mean she took a bus the minute the going got tough. You see, Arthur was a difficult child. Right from the beginning. He needed a lot of attention and it fell to my mother. After a while she couldn’t take it any longer. One night she went out to get some medicine at the drugstore and she never came back. We found little notes from her under our pillows.”

Bosch dropped his eyes to his notebook. It was hard to hear this story and keep looking at Sheila Delacroix.

“How old were you? How old was your brother?”

“I was six, so that would make Artie two.”

Bosch nodded.

“Did you keep the note from her?”

“No. There was no need. I didn’t need a reminder of how she supposedly loved us but not enough to stay with us.”

“What about Arthur? Did he keep his?”

“Well, he was only two, so my father kept it for him. He gave it to him when he was older. He may have kept it, I don’t know. Because he never really knew her, he was always very interested in what she was like. He asked me a lot of questions about her. There were no photos of her. My father had gotten rid of them all so he wouldn’t have any reminders.”

“Do you know what happened to her? Or if she’s still alive?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea. And to tell you the truth, I don’t care if she is alive or not.”

“What is her name?”

“Christine Dorsett Delacroix. Dorsett was her maiden name.”

“Do you know her birth date or Social Security number?”

Sheila shook her head.

“Do you have your own birth certificate handy here?”

“It’s somewhere in my records. I could go look for it.”

She started to get up.

“No, wait, we can look for that at the end. I’d like to keep talking here.”

“Okay.”

“Um, after your mother was gone, did your father remarry?”

“No, he never did. He lives alone now.”

“Did he ever have a girlfriend, someone who might have stayed in the house?”

She looked at Bosch with eyes that seemed almost lifeless.

“No,” she said. “Never.”

Bosch decided to move on to an area of discussion that would be less difficult for her.

“What school did your brother go to?”

“At the end he was going to The Brethren.”

Bosch didn’t say anything. He wrote the name of the school down on his pad and then a large letter
B
beneath it. He circled the letter, thinking about the backpack. Sheila continued unbidden.

“It was a private school for troubled boys. My dad paid to send him there. It’s off of Crescent Heights near Pico. It’s still there.”

“Why did he go there? I mean, why was he considered troubled?”

“Because he got kicked out of his other schools for fighting mostly.”

“Fighting?” Edgar said.

“That’s right.”

Edgar picked the top photograph off of his keeper file and studied it for a moment.

“This boy looks like he was as light as smoke. Was he the one starting these fights?”

“Most times. He had trouble getting along. All he wanted to do was be on his skateboard. I think that by today’s standards he would be diagnosed as having attention deficit disorder or something similar. He just wanted to be by himself all the time.”

“Did he get hurt in these fights?” Bosch asked.

“Sometimes. Black and blue mostly.”

“Broken bones?”

“Not that I remember. Just schoolyard fights.”

Bosch felt agitated. The information they were getting could point them in many different directions. He had hoped a clear-cut path might emerge from the interview.

“You said your father searched the drawers in your brother’s room and found clothes missing.”

“That’s right. Not a lot. Just a few things.”

“Any idea what was missing specifically?”

She shook her head.

“I can’t remember.”

“What did he take the clothes in? Like a suitcase or something?”

“I think he took his schoolbag. Took out the books and put in some clothes.”

“Do you remember what that looked like?”

“No. Just a backpack. Everybody had to use the same thing at The Brethren. I still see kids walking on Pico with them, the backpacks with the
B
on the back.”

Bosch glanced at Edgar and then back at Delacroix.

“Let’s go back to the skateboard. Are you sure he took it with him?”

She paused to think about this, then slowly nodded.

“Yes, I’m pretty sure he took it with him.”

Bosch decided to cut off the interview and concentrate on completing the identification. Once they confirmed the bones came from Arthur Delacroix, then they could come back to his sister.

He thought about Golliher’s take on the injuries to the bones. Chronic abuse. Could it all have been injuries from schoolyard fights and skateboarding? He knew he needed to approach the issue of child abuse but did not feel the time was appropriate. He also didn’t want to tip his hand to the daughter so that she could turn around and possibly tell the father. What Bosch wanted was to back out and come back in later when he felt he had a tighter grasp on the case and a solid investigative plan to go with.

“Okay, we’re going to wrap things up here pretty quickly, Sheila. Just a few more questions. Did Arthur have some friends? Maybe a best friend, someone he might confide in?”

She shook her head.

“Not really. He mostly was by himself.”

Bosch nodded and was about to close his notebook when she continued.

“There was one boy he’d go boarding with. His name was Johnny Stokes. He was from somewhere down near Pico. He was bigger and a little bit older than Arthur but they were in the same class at The Brethren. My father was pretty sure he smoked pot. So we didn’t like Arthur being friends with him.”

“By ‘we,’ you mean your dad and you?”

“Yes, my father. He was upset about it.”

“Did either of you talk to Johnny Stokes after Arthur went missing?”

“Yes, that night when he didn’t come home my father called Johnny Stokes, but he said he hadn’t seen Artie. The next day when Dad went to the school to ask about him, he told me he talked to Johnny again about Artie.”

“And what did he say?”

“That he hadn’t seen him.”

Bosch wrote down the friend’s name in his notebook and underlined it.

“Any other friends you can think of?”

“No, not really.”

“What’s your father’s name?”

“Samuel. Are you going to talk to him?”

“Most likely.”

Her eyes dropped to the hands clasped in her lap.

“Is that a problem if we talk to him?”

“Not really. He’s just not well. If those bones turn out to be Arthur . . . I was thinking it would be better if he didn’t ever know.”

“We’ll keep that in mind when we talk to him. But we won’t do it until we have a positive identification.”

“But if you talk to him, then he’ll know.”

“It may be unavoidable, Sheila.”

Edgar handed Bosch another photo. It showed Arthur standing next to a tall blond man who looked faintly familiar to Bosch. He showed the photo to Sheila.

“Is this your father?”

“Yes, it’s him.”

“He looks familiar. Was he ever—”

“He’s an actor. Was, actually. He was on some television shows in the sixties and a few things after that, some movie parts.”

“Not enough to make a living?”

“No, he always had to work other jobs. So we could live.”

Bosch nodded and handed the photo back to Edgar but Sheila reached across the coffee table and intercepted it.

“I don’t want that one to leave, please. I don’t have many photos of my father.”

“Fine,” Bosch said. “Could we go look for the birth certificate now?”

“I’ll go look. You can stay here.”

She got up and left the room again, and Edgar took the opportunity to show Bosch some of the other photos he had taken to keep during the investigation.

“It’s him, Harry,” he whispered. “I got no doubt.”

He showed him a photo of Arthur Delacroix that had apparently been taken for school. His hair was combed neatly and he wore a blue blazer and tie. Bosch studied the boy’s eyes. They reminded him of the photo of the boy from Kosovo he had found in Nicholas Trent’s house. The boy with the thousand-yard stare.

“I found it.”

Sheila Delacroix came into the room carrying an envelope and unfolding a yellowed document. Bosch looked at it for a moment and then copied down the names, birth dates and Social Security numbers of her parents.

“Thanks,” he said. “You and Arthur had the same parents, right?”

“Of course.”

“Okay, Sheila, thank you. We’re going to go. We’ll call you as soon as we know something for sure.”

He stood up and so did Edgar.

“All right if we borrow these photos?” Edgar asked. “I will personally see that you get them back.”

“Okay, if you need them.”

They headed to the door and she opened it. While still on the threshold Bosch asked her one last question.

“Sheila, have you always lived here?”

She nodded.

“All my life. I’ve stayed here in case he comes back, you know? In case he doesn’t know where to start and comes here.”

She smiled but not in any way that imparted humor. Bosch nodded and stepped outside behind Edgar.

25

B
OSCH walked up to the museum ticket window and told the woman sitting behind it his name and that he had an appointment with Dr. William Golliher in the anthropology lab. She picked up a phone and made a call. A few minutes later she rapped on the glass with her wedding band until it drew the attention of a nearby security guard. He came over and the woman instructed him to escort Bosch to the lab. He did not have to pay the admission.

The guard said nothing as they walked through the dimly lit museum, past the mammoth display and the wall of wolf skulls. Bosch had never been inside the museum, though he had gone to the La Brea Tar Pits often on field trips when he was a child. The museum was built after that, to house and display all of the finds that bubbled up out of the earth in the tar pits.

When Bosch had called Golliher’s cell phone after receiving the medical records on Arthur Delacroix, the anthropologist said he was already working on another case and couldn’t get downtown to the medical examiner’s office until the next day. Bosch had said he couldn’t wait. Golliher said he did have copies of the X-rays and photographs from the Wonderland case with him. If Bosch could come to him, he could make the comparisons and give an unofficial response.

Bosch took the compromise and headed to the tar pits while Edgar remained at Hollywood Division working the computer to see if he could locate Arthur and Sheila Delacroix’s mother as well as run down Arthur’s friend Johnny Stokes.

Now Bosch was curious as to what the new case was that Golliher was working. The tar pits were an ancient black hole where animals had gone to their death for centuries. In a grim chain reaction, animals caught in the miasma became prey for other animals, who in turn were mired and slowly pulled down. In some form of natural equilibrium the bones now came back up out of the blackness and were collected for study by modern man. All of this took place right next to one of the busiest streets in Los Angeles, a constant reminder of the crushing passage of time.

Bosch was led through two doors and into the crowded lab where the bones were identified, classified, dated and cleaned. There appeared to be boxes of bones everywhere on every flat surface. A half dozen people in white lab coats worked at stations, cleaning and examining the bones.

Golliher was the only one not in a lab coat. He had on another Hawaiian shirt, this one with parrots on it, and was working at a table in the far corner. As Bosch approached, he saw there were two wooden bone boxes on the worktable in front of him. In one of the boxes was a skull.

“Detective Bosch, how are you?”

“Doing okay. What’s this?”

“This, as I’m sure you can tell, is a human skull. It and some other human bones were collected two days ago from asphalt that was actually excavated thirty years ago to make room for this museum. They’ve asked me to take a look before they make the announcement.”

“I don’t understand. Is it . . . old or . . . from thirty years ago?”

“Oh, it’s quite old. It was carbon-dated to nine thousand years ago, actually.”

Bosch nodded. The skull and the bones in the other box looked like mahogany.

“Take a look,” Golliher said and he lifted the skull out of the box.

He turned it so that the rear of the skull faced Bosch. He moved his finger in a circle around a star fracture near the top of the skull.

“Look familiar?”

“Blunt-force fracture?”

“Exactly. Much like your case. Just goes to show you.”

He gently replaced the skull in the wooden box.

“Show me what?”

“Things don’t change that much. This woman—at least we think it was a woman—was murdered nine thousand years ago, her body probably thrown into the tar pit as a means of covering the crime. Human nature, it doesn’t change.”

Bosch stared at the skull.

“She’s not the first.”

Bosch looked up at Golliher.

“In nineteen fourteen the bones—a more complete skeleton, actually—of another woman were found in the tar. She had the same star fracture in the same spot on her skull. Her bones were carbon-dated as nine thousand years old. Same time frame as her.”