City of Bones (37 page)

“So where do we go from here?” she asked when he was finished.

“We start over, look at everything we’ve got, see what we missed. We go to the kid’s school, see what records they have, look at yearbooks, try to contact classmates. Things like that.”

Billets nodded. If she knew anything about the call from the O-3, she wasn’t letting on.

“I think the most important thing is that spot up there on the hill,” Bosch added.

“How so?”

“I think the kid was alive when he got up there. That’s where he was killed. We have to figure out what or who brought him up there. We’re going to have to go back in time on that whole street. Profile the whole neighborhood. It’s going to take time.”

She shook her head.

“Well, we don’t have time to work it full-time,” she said. “You guys just sat out of the rotation for ten days. This isn’t RHD. That’s the longest I’ve been able to hold a team out since I got here.”

“So we’re back in?”

She nodded.

“And right now it’s your up—the next case is yours.”

Bosch nodded. He had assumed that was coming. In the ten days they’d been working the case, the two other Hollywood homicide teams had both caught cases. It was now their turn. It was rare to get such a long ride on a divisional case anyway. It had been a luxury. Too bad they hadn’t turned the case, he thought.

Bosch also knew that by putting them back on the rotation Billets was making a tacit acknowledgment that she wasn’t expecting the case to clear. With each day that a case stayed open, the chances of clearing it dropped markedly. It was a given in homicide and it happened to everybody. There were no closers.

“Okay,” Billets said. “Anything else anybody wants to talk about?”

She looked at Bosch with a raised eyebrow. He suddenly thought maybe she did know something about the call from the O-3. He hesitated, then shook his head along with Edgar.

“Okay, guys. Thanks.”

They went back to the table and Bosch called Jesper.

“The dummy’s safe,” he said when the criminalist picked up the phone. “I’ll bring it down later today.”

“Cool, man. But that wasn’t why I called. I just wanted to tell you I can make a little refinement on that report I sent you on the skateboard. That is, if it still matters.”

Bosch hesitated for a moment.

“Not really, but what do you want to refine, Antoine?”

Bosch opened the murder book in front of him and leafed through it until he found the SID report. He looked at it as Jesper spoke.

“Well, in there I said we could put manufacture of the board between February of ’seventy-eight and June of ’eighty-six, right?”

“Right. I’m looking at it.”

“Okay, well, I can now cut more than half of that time period. This particular board was made between ’seventy-eight and ’eighty. Two years. I don’t know if that means anything to the case or not.”

Bosch scanned the report. Jesper’s amendment to the report didn’t really matter, since they had dropped Trent as a suspect and the skateboard had never been linked to Arthur Delacroix. But Bosch was curious about it, anyway.

“How’d you cut it down? Says here the same design was manufactured until ’eighty-six.”

“It was. But this particular board has a date on it. Nineteen eighty.”

Bosch was puzzled.

“Wait a minute. Where? I didn’t see any—”

“I took the trucks off—you know, the wheels. I had some time here between things and I wanted to see if there were any manufacture markings on the hardware. You know, patent or trademark coding. There weren’t. But then I saw that somebody had scratched the date in the wood. Like carved it in on the underside of the board and then it was covered up by the truck assembly.”

“You mean like when the board was made?”

“No, I don’t think so. It’s not a professional job. In fact it was hard to read. I had to put it under glass and angled light. I just think it was the original owner’s way of marking his board in a secret way in case there was ever a dispute or something over ownership. Like if somebody stole it from him. Like I said in the report, Boney boards were the choice board for a while there. They were hard to get—might’ve been easier to steal one than find one in a store. So the kid who had this one took off the back truck—this would have been the original truck, not the current wheels—and carved in the date. Nineteen eighty A.D.”

Bosch looked over at Edgar. He was on the phone speaking with his hand cupped over the mouthpiece. A personal call.

“You said A.D.?”

“Yeah, you know, as in anno Domini or however you say it. It’s Latin. Means the year of our Lord. I looked it up.”

“No, it means Arthur Delacroix.”

“What? Who’s that?”

“That’s the vic, Antoine. Arthur Delacroix. As in A.D.”

“Damn! I didn’t have the vic’s name here, Bosch. You filed all of this evidence while he was still a John Doe and never amended it, man. I didn’t even know you had an ID.”

Bosch wasn’t listening to him. A surge of adrenaline was moving through his body. He knew his pulse was quickening.

“Antoine, don’t move. I’m coming down there.”

“I’ll be here.”

47

T
HE freeway was crowded with people getting an early start on the weekend. Bosch couldn’t keep his speed as he headed downtown. He had a feeling of pulsing urgency. He knew it was because of Jesper’s discovery and the message from the O-3.

He turned his wrist on the wheel so he could see his watch and check the date. He knew that transfers usually took place at the end of a pay period. There were two pay periods a month—beginning the first and the fifteenth. If the transfer they were going to put on him was immediate, he knew that gave him only three or four days to wrap up the case. He didn’t want to be taken off it, to leave it in Edgar’s or anybody else’s hands. He wanted to finish it.

Bosch reached into his pocket and brought out the phone slip. He unfolded it, driving with the heels of his palms on the wheel. He studied it for a moment and then got out his phone. He punched in the number from the message and waited.

“Office of Operations, Lieutenant Bollenbach speaking.”

Bosch clicked the phone off. He felt his face grow hot. He wondered if Bollenbach had caller ID on his phone. He knew that delaying the call was ridiculous because what was done was done whether he called in to get the news or not.

He put the phone and the message aside and tried to concentrate on the case, particularly the latest information Antoine Jesper had provided about the skateboard found in Nicholas Trent’s house. Bosch realized that after ten days the case was wholly out of his grasp. A man he had fought with others in the department to clear was now the only suspect—with apparent physical evidence tying him to the victim. The thought that immediately poked through all of this was that maybe Irving was right. It was time for Bosch to go.

His phone chirped and he immediately thought it was Bollenbach. He was not going to answer but then decided his fate was unavoidable. He flipped open the phone. It was Edgar.

“Harry, what are you doing?”

“I told you. I had to go to SID.”

He didn’t want to tell him about Jesper’s latest discovery until he had seen it for himself.

“I could’ve gone with you.”

“Would’ve been a waste of your time.”

“Yeah, well, listen, Harry, Bullets is looking for you and, uh, there’s a rumor floatin’ around up here that you caught a transfer.”

“Don’t know anything about it.”

“Well, you’re going to let me know if something’s happening, aren’t you? We’ve been together a long time.”

“You’ll be the first, Jerry.”

When Bosch got to Parker Center he had one of the patrolmen stationed in the lobby help him lug the dummy up to SID, where he returned it to Jesper, who took it and carried it easily to its storage closet.

Jesper led Bosch into a lab where the skateboard was on an examination table. He turned on a light that was mounted on a stand next to the board, then turned off the overhead light. He swung a mounted magnifying glass over the skateboard and invited Bosch to look. The angled light created small shadows in the etchings of the wood, allowing the letters to be clearly seen.

1980 A.D.

Bosch could definitely see why Jesper had jumped to the conclusion he did about the letters, especially since he did not have the case victim’s name.

“It looks like somebody sanded it down,” Jesper said while Bosch continued to look. “I bet what happened was that the whole board was rehabbed at one point. New trucks and new lacquer.”

Bosch nodded.

“All right,” he said after straightening up from the magnifying glass. “I’m going to need to take this with me, maybe show it to some people.”

“I’m done with it,” Jesper said. “It’s all yours.”

He turned the overhead light back on.

“Did you check under these other wheels?”

“’Course. Nothing there, though. So I put the truck back on.”

“You got a box or something?”

“Oh, I thought you were going to ride it out of here, Harry.”

Bosch didn’t smile.

“That’s a joke.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Jesper left the room and came back with an empty cardboard file box that was long enough to contain the skateboard. He put the skateboard in it along with the detached set of wheels and the screws, which were in a small plastic bag. Bosch thanked him.

“Did I do good, Harry?”

Bosch hesitated and then said, “Yeah, I think so, Antoine.”

Jesper pointed to Bosch’s cheek.

“Shaving?”

“Something like that.”

The drive back to Hollywood was even slower on the freeway. Bosch finally bailed at the Alvarado exit and worked his way over to Sunset. He took it the rest of the way in, not making any better time and knowing it.

As he drove he kept thinking about the skateboard and Nicholas Trent, trying to fit explanations into the framework of time and evidence that they had. He couldn’t do it. There was a piece missing from the equation. He knew that at some level and at some place it all made sense. He was confident he would get there, if he had enough time.

At four-thirty Bosch banged through the back door into the station house carrying the file box containing the skateboard. He was heading quickly down the hallway to the squad room, when Mankiewicz ducked his head into the hallway from the watch office.

“Hey, Harry?”

Bosch looked back at him but kept walking.

“What’s up?”

“I heard the news. We’re gonna miss you around here.”

The word traveled fast. Bosch held the box with his right arm and raised his left hand palm down and made a sweeping gesture across the flat surface of an imaginary ocean. It was a gesture usually reserved for drivers of patrol cars passing on the street. It said, Smooth sailing to you, brother. Bosch kept going.

Edgar had a large white board lying flat across his desk and covering most of Bosch’s as well. He had drawn what looked like a thermometer on it. It was Wonderland Avenue, the turnaround circle at the end being the bulb at the bottom of the thermometer. From the street there were lines drawn signifying the various homes. Extending from these lines were names printed in green, blue and black marker. There was a red X that marked the spot where the bones had been found.

Bosch stood and stared at the street diagram without asking a question.

“We should’ve done this from the start,” Edgar said.

“How’s it work?”

“The green names are residents in nineteen eighty who moved sometime after. The blue names are anybody who came after ’eighty but has already left. The black names are current residents. Anywhere you see just a black name—like Guyot right here—that means they’ve been there the whole time.”

Bosch nodded. There were only two names in black. Dr. Guyot and someone named Al Hutter, who was at the end of the street farthest from the crime scene.

“Good,” Bosch said, though he didn’t know what use the chart would be now.

“What’s in the box?” Edgar asked.

“The skateboard. Jesper found something.”

Bosch put the box down on his desk and took off the top. He told and showed Edgar the scratched date and initials.

“We’ve got to start looking at Trent again. Maybe look at that theory you had about him moving into the neighborhood
because
he had buried the kid up there.”

“Jesus, Harry, I was almost joking about that.”

“Yeah, well, it’s no joke now. We have to go back, put together a whole profile on Trent going all the way back to nineteen eighty, at least.”

“And meantime we catch the next case here. That’s real sweet.”

“I heard on the radio it’s supposed to rain this weekend. If we’re lucky it will keep everybody inside and quiet.”

“Harry, inside is where most of the killing is done.”

Bosch looked across the squad room and saw Lt. Billets standing in her office. She was waving him in. He had forgotten that Edgar said she was looking for him. He pointed a finger at Edgar and then back at himself, asking if she wanted to see them both. Billets shook her head and pointed back only at Bosch. He knew what it was about.

“I gotta go see Bullets.”

Edgar looked up at him. He knew what it was about, too.

“Good luck, partner.”

“Yeah, partner. If that’s still the case.”

He crossed the squad room to the lieutenant’s office. She was now seated behind her desk. She didn’t look at him when she spoke.

“Harry, you’ve got a forthwith from the Oh-Three. Call Lieutenant Bollenbach before you do anything else. That’s an order.”

Bosch nodded.

“Did you ask him where I’m going?”

“No, Harry, I’m too pissed off about it. I was afraid if I asked I’d get into it with him and it’s got nothing to do with him. Bollenbach’s just the messenger.”

Bosch smiled.

“You’re pissed off?”

“That’s right. I don’t want to lose you. Especially because of some bullshit grudge somebody up top has against you.”

He nodded and shrugged.

“Thanks, Lieutenant. Why don’t you call him on speakerphone? We’ll get this over with.”