City of Bones (24 page)

“Which is?”

“Well, we are very confident that Nicholas Trent was clear on this. So we are looking elsewhere. The autopsy—the injuries to the bones—indicate chronic child abuse, dating to early childhood. The mother was out of the picture, so we are looking at the father now. We haven’t approached him yet. We’re gathering string. If we were to announce that we have an ID and the father saw it, we would be putting him on notice before we need to.”

“If he buried the kid there, then he already is on notice.”

“To a degree. But he knows if we can’t come up with a legit ID we’ll never link it to him. The lack of an ID is what keeps him safe. And it gives us time to look at him.”

“Understood,” Irving said.

They sat in silence for a few moments, Bosch expecting Irving to say something else. But he didn’t. Bosch looked at Billets and spread his hands in a what-gives gesture. She shrugged her shoulders.

“So then . . . ,” Bosch began, “we’re not putting it out, right?”

Silence. Then:

“I think that is the prudent course to follow,” Irving said.

Medina tore the page he had written on out of his notebook, crumpled it and tossed it into a trash can in the corner.

“Is there anything we
can
put out?” he asked.

“Yes,” Bosch said quickly. “We can clear Trent.”

“Negative,” Irving said just as quickly. “We do that at the end. When and if you make a case, then we will clean up the rest.”

Bosch looked at Edgar and then at Billets.

“Chief,” he said. “If we do it that way, we could be hurting our case.”

“How so?”

“It’s an old case. The older the case, the longer the shot. We can’t take chances. If we don’t go out there and tell them Trent is clear, we’ll be giving the guy we eventually take down a defense. He’ll be able to point at Trent and say he was a child molester, he did it.”

“But he will be able to do that, whether we clear Trent now or later.”

Bosch nodded.

“True. But I am looking at it from the standpoint of testifying at trial. I want to be able to say we checked Trent out and quickly dismissed him. I don’t want some lawyer asking me why, if we so quickly dismissed him, we waited a week or two weeks to announce it. Chief, it will look like we were hiding something. It’s going to be subtle but it will have an impact. People on juries look for any reason not to trust cops in general and the LAPD in par—”

“Okay, Detective, you have made your point. My decision still stands. There will be no announcement on Trent. Not at this time, not until we have a solid suspect we can come forward with.”

Bosch shook his head and slumped a bit in his seat.

“What else?” Irving said. “I have a briefing with the chief in two minutes.”

Bosch looked at Billets and shook his head again. He had nothing else he wanted to share. Billets spoke up.

“Chief, at this time I think that’s pretty much where we stand.”

“When do you plan to approach the father, Detectives?”

Bosch poked his chin at Edgar.

“Uh, Chief, Detective Edgar here. We are still looking for a witness that could be important to talk to before approaching the father. That would be a boyhood friend of the victim. We’re thinking he might have knowledge of the abuse the boy suffered. We’re planning to give it the day. We believe he’s here in Hollywood and we have a lot of eyes out there on the—”

“Yes, that is fine, Detective. We will reconvene this conversation tomorrow morning.”

“Yes, Chief,” Billets said. “At nine-thirty again?”

There was no answer. Irving was already gone.

30

B
OSCH and Edgar spent the rest of the morning updating reports and the murder book and calling hospitals all over the city to cancel the records searches they had requested by warrant on Monday morning. But by noon Bosch had had enough of the office work and said he had to get out of the station.

“Where you want to go?” Edgar asked.

“I’m tired of waiting around,” Bosch said. “Let’s go take a look at him.”

They used Edgar’s personal car because it was unmarked and there were no undercover units left in the motor pool. They took the 101 up into the Valley and then the 405 north before exiting in Van Nuys. The Manchester Trailer Park was on Sepulveda near Victory. They drove by it once before coming back and driving in.

There was no gate house, just a yellow-striped speed bump. The park road circled the property, and Sam Delacroix’s trailer was at the rear of the tract, where it bumped up against a twenty-foot-high sound-retention wall next to the freeway. The wall was designed to knock down the nonstop roar of the freeway. All it did was redirect and change its tone, but it was still there.

The trailer was a single-wide with rust stains dripping down the aluminum skin from most of the steel rivet seams. There was an awning with a picnic table and a charcoal grill beneath it. A clothesline ran from one of the awning’s support poles to a corner of the next trailer in line. Near the back of the narrow yard an aluminum storage shed about the size of an outhouse was pushed up against the sound wall.

The windows and door of the trailer were closed. There was no vehicle in the lone parking spot. Edgar kept the car going by at an even five miles an hour.

“Looks like nobody’s home.”

“Let’s try the driving range,” Bosch said. “If he’s over there, maybe you can hit a bucket of balls or something.”

“Always like to practice.”

The range had few customers when they got there but it looked like it had been a busy morning. Golf balls littered the entire range, which was three hundred yards deep, extending to the same sound wall that backed the trailer park. At the far end of the property, netting was erected on high utility poles to protect the freeway drivers from long balls. A small tractor with ball harvesters attached at the rear was slowly traversing the far end of the range, its driver secured in a safety cage.

Bosch watched for a few moments alone until Edgar came up with a half bucket of balls and his golf bag, which had been in the trunk of his car.

“I guess that’s him,” Edgar said.

“Yeah.”

Bosch went over to a bench and sat down to watch his partner hit some balls from a little square of rubber grass. Edgar had taken off his tie and jacket. He didn’t look that much out of place. Hitting balls a few green squares down from him were two men wearing suit pants and button-down shirts, obviously using their lunch break from the office to fine-tune their game.

Edgar propped his bag on a wooden stand and chose one of the irons. He put on a glove, which he had taken from the bag, took a few warm-up swings and then started striking balls. The first few were grounders that made him curse. Then he started getting some air underneath them and he seemed pleased with himself.

Bosch was amused. He had never played golf a single time in his life and couldn’t understand the draw it had for many men—in fact, most of the detectives in the squad room played religiously, and there was a whole network of police tournaments around the state. He enjoyed watching Edgar get worked up even though hitting range balls didn’t count.

“Take a shot at him,” he instructed after he thought Edgar was fully warmed up and ready.

“Harry,” Edgar said. “I know you don’t play but I got news for you. In golf you hit the ball at the pin—the flag. No moving targets in golf.”

“Then how come the ex-presidents are always hitting people?”

“Because they’re allowed to.”

“Come on, you said everybody tries to hit the guy in the tractor. Take a shot.”

“Everybody but the serious golfers.”

But he angled his body so that Bosch could tell he was going to take a shot at the tractor as it came to the end of a crossing and was making the U-turn to go back the other way. Judging by the yardage markers, the tractor was a hundred forty yards out.

Edgar swung but the ball was another grounder.

“Dammit! See, Harry? This could hurt my game.”

Bosch started laughing.

“What are you laughing at?”

“It’s just a game, man. Take another shot.”

“Forget it. It’s childish.”

“Take the shot.”

Edgar didn’t say anything. He angled his body again, taking aim at the tractor, which was now in the middle of the range. He swung and hit the ball, sending it screaming down the middle but a good twenty feet over the tractor.

“Nice shot,” Bosch said. “Unless you were aiming for the tractor.”

Edgar gave him a look but didn’t say anything. For the next five minutes he hit ball after ball at the range tractor but never came closer to it than ten yards. Bosch never said anything but Edgar’s frustrations increased until he turned and angrily said, “You want to try?”

Bosch feigned confusion.

“Oh, you’re still trying to hit him? I didn’t realize.”

“Come on, let’s go.”

“You still have half your balls there.”

“I don’t care. This will set my game back a month.”

“That’s all?”

Edgar angrily shoved the club he had been using into his bag and gave Bosch his dead-eye look. It was all Bosch could do not to burst into laughter.

“Come on, Jerry, I want to get a look at the guy. Can’t you hit a few more? It looks like he’s gotta be done soon.”

Edgar looked out at the range. The tractor was now near the fifty-yard markers. Assuming he had started back at the sound wall, he would be finished soon. There weren’t enough new balls out there—just Edgar’s and the two business guys’—to warrant going back over the entire range.

Edgar silently relented. He took out one of his woods and went back to the green square of fake grass. He hit a beautiful shot that almost carried to the sound wall.

“Tiger Woods, kiss my ass,” he said.

The next shot he put into the real grass ten feet from the tee.

“Shit.”

“When you play for real, do you hit off that fake grass?”

“No, Harry, you don’t. This is practice.”

“Oh, so in practice you don’t re-create the actual playing situation.”

“Something like that.”

The tractor pulled off the range and up to a shed behind the concession stand where Edgar had paid for his bucket of balls. The cage door opened and a man in his early sixties got out. He started pulling wire-mesh baskets full of balls out of the harvester and carrying them into the shed. Bosch told Edgar to keep hitting balls so that they wouldn’t be obvious. Bosch nonchalantly walked toward the concession stand and bought another half bucket of balls. This put him no more than twenty feet from the man who had been driving the tractor.

It was Samuel Delacroix. Bosch recognized him from a driver’s license photo Edgar had pulled and shown him. The man who once played a blond, blue-eyed Aryan soldier and had put a spell on an eighteen-year-old girl was now about as distinguished as a ham sandwich. He was still blond but it obviously came from a bottle and he was bald to the crown of his head. He had day-old whiskers that shone white in the sun. His nose was swollen by time and alcohol and pinched by a pair of ill-fitting glasses. He carried a beer paunch that would’ve been a ticket to a discharge in anybody’s army.

“Two-fifty.”

Bosch looked at the woman behind the cash register.

“For the balls.”

“Right.”

He paid her and picked up the bucket by the handle. He took a last glance at Delacroix, who suddenly looked over at Bosch at the same time. Their eyes locked for a moment and Bosch casually looked away. He headed back toward Edgar. That was when his cell phone started to chirp.

He quickly handed the bucket to Edgar and pulled the phone out of his back pocket. It was Mankiewicz, the day-shift watch sergeant.

“Hey, Bosch, what are you doing?”

“Just hitting some balls.”

“Figures. You guys fuck off while we do all the work.”

“You found my guy?”

“We think so.”

“Where?”

“He’s working at the Washateria. You know, picking up some tips, loose change.”

The Washateria was a car wash on La Brea. It employed day laborers to vacuum and wipe down cars. They worked mostly for tips and what they could steal out of the cars without getting caught.

“Who spotted him?”

“Couple guys from vice. They’re eighty percent sure. They want to know if you want them to make the move or do you want to be on scene.”

“Tell them to sit tight and that we’re on the way. And you know what, Mank? We think this guy’s a rabbit. You got a unit we can use as an extra backup in case he runs?”

“Um . . .”

There was silence and Bosch guessed that Mankiewicz was checking his deployment chart.

“Well, you’re in luck. I got a couple three-elevens starting early. They should be out of roll call in fifteen. That work for you?”

“Perfect. Tell them to meet us in the parking lot of the Checkers at La Brea and Sunset. Have the vice guys meet us there, too.”

Bosch signaled to Edgar that they were going to roll.

“Uh, one thing,” Mankiewicz said.

“What’s that?”

“On the backup, one of them’s Brasher. Is that going to be a problem?”

Bosch was silent a moment. He wanted to tell Mankiewicz to put somebody else on it but knew it was not his place to. If he tried to influence deployment or anything else based on his relationship with Brasher, then he could leave himself open to criticism and the possibility of an IAD investigation.

“No, no problem.”

“Look, I wouldn’t do it but she’s green. She’s made a few mistakes and needs this kind of experience.”

“I said no problem.”

31

T
HEY planned the takedown of Johnny Stokes on the hood of Edgar’s car. The vice guys, Eyman and Leiby, drew the layout of the Washateria on a legal pad and circled the spot where they had spotted Stokes working under the waxing canopy. The car wash was surrounded on three sides by concrete walls and other structures. The area fronting La Brea was almost fifty yards, with a five-foot retention wall running the border except for entry and exit lanes at each corner of the property. If Stokes decided to run, he could go to the retention wall and climb it, but it was more likely that he would go for one of the open lanes.