City of Bones (40 page)

50

B
Y the time Don Blaylock went to the kitchen to brew a second pot of coffee Bosch had two pages of notes on Johnny Stokes. He had come to the Blaylock house through a DYS referral in January 1980 and was gone the following July, when he was arrested for stealing a car and going on a joyride through Hollywood. It was his second arrest for car theft. He was incarcerated at the Sylmar Juvenile Hall for six months. By the time his period of rehabilitation was completed he was returned by a judge to his parents. Though the Blaylocks heard from him on occasion and even saw him during his infrequent visits to the neighborhood, they had other children still in their care and soon drifted from contact with the boy.

When Blaylock went to make the coffee Bosch settled into what he thought would be an uncomfortable silence with Audrey. But then she spoke to him.

“Twelve of our children graduated from college,” she said. “Two have military careers. One followed Don into the fire service. He works in the Valley.”

She nodded at Bosch and he nodded back.

“We’ve never considered ourselves to be one hundred percent successful with our children,” she continued. “We did our best with each one. Sometimes the circumstances or the courts or the youth authorities prevented us from helping a child. John was one of those cases. He made a mistake and it was as if we were to blame. He was taken from us . . . before we could help him.”

All Bosch could do was nod.

“You seemed to know of him already,” she said. “Have you already spoken to him?”

“Yes. Briefly.”

“Is he in jail now?”

“No, he’s not.”

“What has his life been since . . . we knew him?”

Bosch spread his hands apart.

“He hasn’t done well. Drugs, a lot of arrests, prison.”

She nodded sadly.

“Do you think he killed that boy in our neighborhood? While he was living with us?”

Bosch could tell by her face that if he were to answer truthfully he would knock down everything she had built out of what was good in what they had done. The whole wall of pictures, the graduation gowns and the good jobs would mean nothing next to this.

“I don’t really know. But we do know he was a friend of the boy who was killed.”

She closed her eyes. Not tightly, just as if she were resting them. She said nothing else until Blaylock came back into the room. He went past Bosch and put another log on the fire.

“Coffee will be up in a minute.”

“Thank you,” Bosch said.

After Blaylock walked back to the couch, Bosch stood up.

“I have some things I would like you to look at, if you don’t mind. They’re in my car.”

He excused himself and went out to the slickback. He grabbed his briefcase from the front seat and then went to the trunk to get the file box containing the skateboard. He thought it might be worth a try showing it to the Blaylocks.

His phone chirped just as he closed the trunk and this time he answered it. It was Edgar.

“Harry, where are you?”

“Up in Lone Pine.”

“Lone Pine! What the fuck are you doing up there?”

“I don’t have time to talk. Where are you?”

“At the table. Like we agreed. I thought you—”

“Listen, I’ll call you back in an hour. Meantime, put out a new BOLO on Stokes.”

“What?”

Bosch checked the house to make sure the Blaylocks weren’t listening or in sight.

“I said put out another BOLO on Stokes. We need him picked up.”

“Why?”

“Because he did it. He killed the kid.”

“What the fuck, Harry?”

“I’ll call you in an hour. Put out the BOLO.”

He hung up and this time turned the phone off.

Inside the house Bosch put the file box down on the floor and then opened his briefcase on his lap. He found the envelope containing the family photos borrowed from Sheila Delacroix. He opened it and slid them out. He split the stack in two and gave one-half to each of the Blaylocks.

“Look at the boy in these pictures and tell me if you recognize him, if he ever came to your house. With Johnny or anybody else.”

He watched as the couple looked at the photos and then exchanged stacks. When they were finished they both shook their heads and handed the photos back.

“Don’t recognize him,” Don Blaylock said.

“Okay,” Bosch said as he put the photos back into the envelope.

He closed his briefcase and put it on the floor. He then opened the file box and lifted out the skateboard.

“Has either of you—”

“That was John’s,” Audrey said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I recognize it. When he was . . . taken from us, he left it behind. I told him we had it. I called his house but he never came for it.”

“How do you know that this is the one that was his?”

“I just remember. I didn’t like the skull and crossbones. I remember those.”

Bosch put the skateboard back in the box.

“What happened to it if he never came for it?”

“We sold it,” Audrey said. “When Don retired after thirty years and we decided to move up here, we sold all of our junk. We had a gigantic garage sale.”

“More like a house sale,” her husband added. “We got rid of everything.”

“Not everything. You wouldn’t sell that stupid fire bell we have in the backyard. Anyway, that was when we sold the skateboard.”

“Do you remember who you sold it to?”

“Yes, the man who lived next door. Mr. Trent.”

“When was this?”

“Summer of ’ninety-two. Right after we sold the house. We were still in escrow, I remember.”

“Why do you remember selling the skateboard to Mr. Trent? ’Ninety-two was a long time ago.”

“I remember because he bought half of what we were selling. The junky half. He gathered it all up and offered us one price for everything. He needed it all for his work. He was a set designer.”

“Set decorator,” her husband corrected. “There is a difference.”

“Anyway, he used everything he bought from us on movie sets. I always hoped I would see something in a movie that I’d know came from our house. But I never did.”

Bosch scribbled some notes in his pad. He had just about everything he needed from the Blaylocks. It was almost time to head south, back to the city to put the case together.

“How did you get the skateboard?” Audrey asked him.

Bosch looked up from his notepad.

“Uh, it was in Mr. Trent’s possessions.”

“He’s still on the street?” Don Blaylock asked. “He was a great neighbor. Never a problem at all with him.”

“He was until recently,” Bosch said. “He passed away, though.”

“Oh, my gosh,” Audrey proclaimed. “What a shame. And he wasn’t that old a man.”

“I just have a couple more questions,” Bosch said. “Did John Stokes ever tell either of you how he came to have the skateboard?”

“He told me that he had won it during a contest with some other boys at school,” Audrey said.

“The Brethren School?”

“Yes, that’s where he went. He was going when he first came to us and so we continued it.”

Bosch nodded and looked down at his notes. He had everything. He closed the notebook, put it in his coat pocket and stood up to go.

51

B
OSCH pulled the car into a space in front of the Lone Pine Diner. The booths by all the windows were filled and almost all of the people in them looked out at the LAPD car two hundred miles from home.

He was starved but knew he needed to talk to Edgar before delaying any further. He took out the cell phone and made the call. Edgar answered after half a ring.

“It’s me. Did you put the BOLO out?”

“Yeah, it’s out. But it’s a little hard to do when you don’t know what the fuck is going on,
partner.
”

He said the last word as if it was a synonym for asshole. It was their last case together and Bosch felt bad that they were going to end their time this way. He knew it was his fault. He had cut Edgar out of the case for reasons Bosch wasn’t even sure about.

“Jerry, you’re right,” he said. “I fucked up. I just wanted to keep things moving and that meant driving through the night.”

“I would’ve gone with you.”

“I know,” Bosch lied. “I just didn’t think. I just drove. I’m coming back now.”

“Well, start at the beginning so I know what the fuck is going on in our own case. I feel like a moron here, putting out a BOLO and not even knowing why.”

“I told you, Stokes is the guy.”

“Yeah, you told me that and you didn’t tell me anything else.”

Bosch spent the next ten minutes watching diners eat their food while he recounted his moves for Edgar and brought him up to date.

“Jesus Christ, and we had him right here,” Edgar said when Bosch was finished.

“Yeah, well, it’s too late to worry about that. We have to get him back.”

“So you’re saying that when the kid packed up and ran away, he went to Stokes. Then Stokes leads him up there into the woods and just kills him.”

“More or less.”

“Why?”

“That’s what we have to ask him. I’ve got a theory, though.”

“What, the skateboard?”

“Yeah, he wanted the skateboard.”

“He’d kill a kid over a skateboard?”

“We’ve both seen it done for less and we don’t know if he intended to kill him or not. It was a shallow grave, dug by hand. Nothing premeditated about that. Maybe he just pushed him and knocked him down. Maybe he hit him with a rock. Maybe there was something else going on between them we don’t even know about.”

Edgar didn’t say anything for a long moment and Bosch thought maybe they were finished and he could get some food.

“What did the foster parents think about your theory?”

Bosch sighed.

“I didn’t really spin it for them. But put it this way, they weren’t too surprised when I started asking questions about Stokes.”

“You know something, Harry, we’ve been spinning our wheels is what we’ve been doing.”

“What do you mean?”

“This whole case. It comes down to what?—a thirteen-year-old killing a twelve-year-old over a fucking toy. Stokes was a juvy when this went down. Ain’t nobody going to prosecute him now.”

Bosch thought about this for a moment.

“They might. Depends on what we get out of him after we pick him up.”

“You just said yourself there was no sign of premed. They’re not going to file it, partner. I’m telling you. We’ve been chasing our tail. We close the case but nobody goes away for it.”

Bosch knew Edgar was probably right. Under the law, it was rare that adults were prosecuted for crimes committed while they were juveniles as young as thirteen. Even if they pulled a full confession out of Stokes he would probably walk.

“I should have let her shoot him,” he whispered.

“What’s that, Harry?”

“Nothing. I’m going to grab something to eat and get on the road. You going to be there?”

“Yeah, I’m here. I’ll let you know if anything happens.”

“All right.”

He hung up and got out of the car, thinking about the likelihood of Stokes walking away from his crime. As he entered the warm diner and was hit with the smells of grease and breakfast, he suddenly realized he had lost his appetite.

52

B
OSCH was just coming down out of the squiggle of treacherous freeway called The Grapevine when his phone chirped. It was Edgar.

“Harry, I’ve been trying to call you. Where y’at?”

“I was in the mountains. I’m less than an hour out. What’s going on?”

“They’ve got a fix on Stokes. He’s squatting in the Usher.”

Bosch thought about this. The Usher was a 1930s hotel a block off Hollywood Boulevard. For decades it was a weekly flophouse and prostitution center until redevelopment on the boulevard pushed up against it and suddenly made it a valuable property again. It was sold, closed and readied to go through a major renovation and restoration that would allow it to rejoin the new Hollywood as an elegant grand dame. But the project had been delayed by city planners who held final approval. And in that delay was an opportunity for the denizens of the night.

While the Hotel Usher awaited rebirth, the rooms on its thirteen floors became the homes of squatters who snuck past the fences and plywood barriers to find shelter. In the previous two months Bosch had been inside the Usher twice while searching for suspects. There was no electricity. There was no water, but the squatters used the toilets anyway and the place smelled like an aboveground sewer. There were no doors on any of the rooms and no furniture. People used rolled-up carpets in the rooms as their beds. It was a nightmare to try to search safely. You moved down the hall and every doorway was open and a possible blind for a gunman. You kept your eyes on the openings and you might step on a needle.

Bosch flipped on the car’s emergency lights and put his foot hard on the pedal.

“How do we know he’s in there?” he asked.

“From last week when we were looking for him. Some guys in narcs were working something in there and got a line on him squatting all the way up on the thirteenth floor. You gotta be scared of something to go all the way to the top in a place with the elevators shut down.”

“Okay, what’s the plan?”

“We’re going to go in big. Four teams from patrol, me and the narcs. We start at the bottom and work our way up.”

“When do you go?”

“We’re about to go into roll call now and talk it out, then we go. We can’t wait for you, Harry. We have to take this guy before he gets out and about.”

Bosch wondered for a moment if Edgar’s hurry was legitimate or simply an effort to get even with Bosch for his cutting him out of several of the investigative moves on the case.

“I know,” he finally said. “You going to have a rover with you?”

“Yeah, we’re using channel two.”

“Okay, I’ll see you there. Put your vest on.”

He said the last not because he was concerned about Stokes being armed, but because he knew a heavily armed team of cops in the enclosed confinement of a dark hotel hallway had danger written all over it.