City of Bones (39 page)

As dawn’s light came up he saw the blue-gray mountain rising in the mist behind the town and reducing it to what it was; insignificant in the face of time and the natural pace of things. Bosch looked up at Mt. Whitney, the highest point in California, and knew it had been there long before any human eyes had ever seen it and would be there long after the last set was gone. Somehow it made it easier to know all that he knew.

Bosch was hungry and wanted to go over to one of the diners in town for steak and eggs. But he wouldn’t leave his post. If you moved from L.A. to Lone Pine it wasn’t just because you hated the crowds, the smog and the pace of the big city. It was because you also loved the mountain. And Bosch wasn’t going to risk missing Don and Audrey Blaylock to a morning mountain hike while he was eating breakfast. He settled for turning the car on and running the heater for five minutes. He had been parceling out the heat and the gas that way all night.

Bosch watched the house and waited for a light to come on or someone to pick up the newspaper that had been dropped on the driveway from a passing pickup two hours earlier. It was a thin roll of newspaper. Bosch knew it wasn’t the
L.A. Times.
People in Lone Pine didn’t care about Los Angeles or its murders or its detectives.

At nine Bosch saw smoke start to curl out of the house’s chimney. A few minutes later, a man of about sixty wearing a down vest came out and got the paper. After picking it up he looked a half block down the street to Bosch’s car. He then went back inside.

Bosch knew his car stood out on the street. He hadn’t been trying to hide himself. He was just waiting. He started the car and drove down to the Blaylocks’ house and pulled into the driveway.

When Bosch got to the door the man he had seen earlier opened it before he had to knock.

“Mr. Blaylock?”

“Yeah, that’s me.”

Bosch showed his badge and ID.

“I was wondering if I could talk to you and your wife for a few minutes. It’s about a case I’m working.”

“You alone?”

“Yeah.”

“How long’ve you been out there?”

Bosch smiled.

“Since about four. Got here too late to get a room.”

“Come in. We have coffee on.”

“If it’s hot, I’ll take it.”

He led Bosch in and pointed him toward a seating arrangement of chairs and a couch near the fireplace.

“I’ll get my wife and the coffee.”

Bosch stepped over to the chair nearest the fireplace. He was about to sit down when he noticed all the framed photographs on the wall behind the couch. He stepped over to study them. They were all of children and young adults. They were of all races. Two had obvious physical or mental handicaps. The foster children. He turned and took the seat closest to the fire and waited.

Soon Blaylock returned with a large mug of steaming coffee. A woman came into the room behind him. She looked a little bit older than her husband. She had eyes still creased by sleep but a kind face.

“This is my wife, Audrey,” Blaylock said. “Do you take your coffee black? Every cop I ever knew took it black.”

The husband and wife sat next to each other on the couch.

“Black’s fine. Did you know a lot of cops?”

“When I was in L.A. I did. I worked thirty years for the city fire department. Quit as a station commander after the ’ninety-two riots. That was enough for me. Came in right before Watts and left after ’ninety-two.”

“What is it you want to talk to us about?” Audrey asked, seemingly impatient with her husband’s small talk.

Bosch nodded. He had his coffee and the introductions were over.

“I work homicide. Out of Hollywood Division. I’m on a—”

“I worked six years out of fifty-eights,” Blaylock said, referring to the fire station that was behind the Hollywood Division station house.

Bosch nodded again.

“Don, let the man tell us why he came all the way up here,” Audrey said.

“Sorry, go ahead.”

“I’m on a case. A homicide up in Laurel Canyon. Your old neighborhood, actually, and we’re contacting people who lived on the street back in nineteen eighty.”

“Why then?”

“Because that is when the homicide took place.”

They looked at him with puzzled faces.

“Is this one of those cold cases?” Blaylock said. “Because I don’t remember anything like that happening in our neighborhood back then.”

“In a way it’s a cold case. Only the body wasn’t discovered until a couple weeks ago. It had been buried up in the woods. In the hills.”

Bosch studied their faces. No tells, just shock.

“Oh, my God,” Audrey said. “You mean all that time we were living there, somebody was dead up there? Our kids used to play up there. Who was it who was killed?”

“It was a child. A boy twelve years old. His name was Arthur Delacroix. Does that name mean anything to either of you?”

The husband and wife first searched their own memory banks and then looked at each other and confirmed the results, each shaking their head.

“No, not that name,” Don Blaylock said.

“Where did he live?” Audrey Blaylock asked. “Not in the neighborhood, I don’t think.”

“No, he lived down in the Miracle Mile area.”

“It sounds awful,” Audrey said. “How was he killed?”

“He was beaten to death. If you don’t mind—I mean, I know you’re curious about it, but I need to ask the questions starting out.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Audrey said. “Please go on. What else can we tell you?”

“Well, we are trying to put together a profile of the street—Wonderland Avenue—at that time. You know, so we know who was who and who was where. It’s really routine.”

Bosch smiled and knew right away it didn’t come off as sincere.

“And it’s been pretty tough so far. The neighborhood has sort of turned over a lot since then. In fact, Dr. Guyot and a man down the street named Hutter are the only residents still there since nineteen eighty.”

Audrey smiled warmly.

“Oh, Paul, he is such a nice man. We still get Christmas cards from him, even since his wife passed away.”

Bosch nodded.

“Of course, he was too expensive for us. We mostly took our kids to the clinics. But if there was ever an emergency on a weekend or when Paul was home, he never hesitated. Some doctors these days are afraid to do anything because they might get—I’m sorry, I’m going off like my husband, and that’s not what you came here to hear.”

“It’s all right, Mrs. Blaylock. Um, you mentioned your kids. I heard from some of the neighbors that you two had a foster home, is that right?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Don and I took in children for twenty-five years.”

“That’s a tremendous, uh, thing you did. I admire that. How many children was it?”

“It was hard to keep track of them. We had some for years, some for only weeks. A lot of it was at the whim of the juvenile courts. It used to break my heart when we were just getting started with a child, you know, making them feel comfortable and at home, and then the child would be ordered home or to the other parent or what have you. I always said that to do foster work you had to have a big heart with a big callus on it.”

She looked at her husband and nodded. He nodded back and reached over and took her hand. He looked back at Bosch.

“We counted it up once,” he said. “We had a total of thirty-eight kids at one time or another. But realistically, we say we raised seventeen of them. These were kids that were with us long enough for it to have an impact. You know, anywhere from two years to—one child was with us fourteen years.”

He turned so he could see the wall over the couch and reached up and pointed to a picture of a boy in a wheelchair. He was slightly built and had thick glasses. His wrists were bent at sharp angles. His smile was crooked.

“That’s Benny,” he said.

“Amazing,” Bosch said.

He took a notebook out of his pocket and flipped it open to a blank page. He took out a pen. Just then his cell phone started chirping.

“That’s me,” he said. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Don’t you want to answer it?” Blaylock asked.

“They can leave a message. I didn’t even think there’d be clear service this close to the mountain.”

“Yeah, we even get TV.”

Bosch looked at him and realized he had somehow been insulting.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean anything. I was wondering if you could tell me what children you had living in your home in nineteen eighty.”

There was a moment when everyone looked at one another and said nothing.

“Is one of our kids involved in this?” Audrey asked.

“I don’t know, ma’am. I don’t know who was living with you. Like I said, we’re trying to put together a profile of that neighborhood. We need to know exactly who was living there. And then we’ll go from there.”

“Well, I am sure the Division of Youth Services can help you.”

Bosch nodded.

“Actually, they changed the name. It’s now called the Department of Children’s Services. And they’re not going to be able to help us until Monday at the earliest, Mrs. Blaylock. This is a homicide. We need this information now.”

Again there was a pause as they all looked at one another.

“Well,” Don Blaylock finally said, “it’s going to be kind of hard to remember exactly who was with us at any given time. There are some obvious ones. Like Benny and Jodi and Frances. But every year we’d have a few kids that, like Audrey said, would be dropped in and then taken out. They’re the tough ones. Let’s see, nineteen eighty . . .”

He stood up and turned so he could see the breadth of the wall of photos. He pointed to one, a young black boy of about eight.

“William there. He was nineteen eighty. He—”

“No, he wasn’t,” Audrey said. “He came to us in ’eighty-four. Don’t you remember, the Olympics? You made him that torch out of foil.”

“Oh, yeah, ’eighty-four.”

Bosch leaned forward in his seat. The location near the fire was now getting too warm for him.

“Let’s start with the three you mentioned. Benny and the two others. What were their full names?”

He was given their names, and when he asked how they could be contacted he was given phone numbers for two of them but not Benny.

“Benny passed away six years ago,” Audrey said. “Multiple sclerosis.”

“I’m sorry.”

“He was very dear to us.”

Bosch nodded and waited for an appropriate silence to go by.

“Um, who else? Didn’t you keep records of who came and for how long?”

“We did but we don’t have them here,” Blaylock said. “They’re in storage in L.A.”

He suddenly snapped his fingers.

“You know, we have a list of the names of every child we tried to help or did help. It’s just not by year. We could probably cut it down a little bit, but would that help you?”

Bosch noticed Audrey give her husband a momentary look of anger. Her husband didn’t see it but Bosch did. He knew her instincts would be to protect her children from the threat, real or not, that Bosch represented.

“Yes, that would help a lot.”

Blaylock left the room and Bosch looked at Audrey.

“You don’t want him to give me that list. Why is that, Mrs. Blaylock?”

“Because I don’t think you are being honest with us. You are looking for something. Something that will fit your needs. You don’t drive three hours in the middle of the night from Los Angeles for a ‘routine questioning,’ as you call it. You know these children come from tough backgrounds. They weren’t all angels when they came to us. And I don’t want any of them blamed for something just because of who they were or where they came from.”

Bosch waited to make sure she was done.

“Mrs. Blaylock, have you ever been to the McClaren Youth Hall?”

“Of course. Several of our children came from there.”

“I came from there, too. And an assortment of foster homes where I never lasted very long. So I know what these children were like because I was one myself, all right? And I know that some foster homes can be full of love and some can be just as bad as or worse than the place you were taken from. I know that some foster parents are committed to the children and some are committed to the subsistence checks from Children’s Services.”

She was quiet a long moment before answering.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “You still are looking to finish your puzzle with any piece that fits.”

“You’re wrong, Mrs. Blaylock. Wrong about that, wrong about me.”

Blaylock came back into the room with what looked like a green school folder. He placed it down on the square coffee table and opened it. Its pockets were stuffed with photos and letters. Audrey continued despite his return.

“My husband worked for the city like you do, so he won’t want to hear me say this. But, Detective, I don’t trust you or the reasons you say you are here. You are not being honest with us.”

“Audrey!” Blaylock yelped. “The man is just trying to do his job.”

“And he’ll say anything to do it. And he’ll hurt any of our children to do it.”

“Audrey, please.”

He turned his attention back to Bosch and offered a sheet of paper. There was a list of handwritten names on it. Before Bosch could read them Blaylock took the page back and put it down on the table. He went to work on it with a pencil, putting check marks next to some of the names. He spoke as he worked.

“We made this list just so we could sort of keep track of everybody. You’d be surprised, you can love somebody to death but when it comes time to remember twenty, thirty birthdays you always forget somebody. The ones I’m checking off here are the kids that came in more recent than nineteen eighty. Audrey will double-check when I’m done.”

“No, I won’t.”

The men ignored her. Bosch’s eyes moved ahead of Blaylock’s pencil and down the list. Before he was two-thirds to the bottom he reached down and put his finger on a name.

“Tell me about him.”

Blaylock looked up at Bosch and then over at his wife.

“Who is it?” she asked.

“Johnny Stokes,” Bosch said. “You had him in your home in nineteen eighty, didn’t you?”

Audrey stared at him for a moment.

“There, you see?” she said to her husband while looking only at Bosch. “He already knew about Johnny when he came in here. I was right. He’s not an honest man.”