City of Bones (5 page)

“Bosch here.”

“Edgar. Better come on back over here, Harry. We already have something.”

“Right.”

Edgar was standing in an almost level spot in the brush about forty yards from the acacia trees. A half dozen of the cadets and Brasher had formed a circle and were looking down at something in the two-foot-high brush. The police chopper was circling in a tighter circle above.

Bosch got to the circle and looked down. It was a child’s skull partially submerged in the soil, its hollow eyes staring up at him.

“Nobody touched it,” Edgar said. “Brasher here found it.”

Bosch glanced at her and the humor she seemed to carry in her eyes and mouth were gone. He looked back at the skull and pulled the radio off his belt.

“Dr. Corazon?” he said into it.

It was a long moment before her voice came back.

“Yes, I’m here. What is it?”

“We are going to have to widen the crime scene.”

6

W
ITH Bosch acting as the general overseeing the small army that worked the expanded crime scene, the day progressed well. The bones came out of the ground and the hillside brush easily, as if they had been impatiently waiting a very long time. By noon, three blocks in the grid were being actively excavated by Kathy Kohl’s team, and dozens of bones emerged from the dark soil. Like their archeological counterparts who unearthed the artifacts of the ancients, the dig team used small tools and brushes to bring these bones gently to light. They also used metal detectors and vapor probes. The process was painstaking yet it was moving at an even faster pace than Bosch had hoped for.

The finding of the skull had set this pace and brought a sense of urgency to the entire operation. It was removed from its location first, and the field examination conducted on camera by Teresa Corazon found fracture lines and surgical scarring. The record of surgery assured them they were dealing with relatively contemporary bones. The fractures in and of themselves were not definitive in the indication of homicide, but when added to the evidence that the body had been buried they gave a clear sense that the tale of a murder was unfolding.

By two o’clock, when the hillside crews broke for lunch, almost half of the skeleton had already been recovered from the grid. A small scattering of other bones had been found in the nearby brush by the cadets. Additionally, Kohl’s crew had unearthed fragments of deteriorated clothing and a canvas backpack of a size most likely used by a child.

The bones came down the hillside in square wooden boxes with rope handles attached on the sides. By lunch, a forensic anthropologist was examining three boxes of bones in the medical examiner’s office. The clothing, most of it rotten and unrecognizable, and the backpack, which had been left unopened, were transported to LAPD’s Scientific Investigation Division lab for the same scrutiny.

A metal detector scan of the search grid produced a single coin—a quarter minted in 1975—found at the same depth as the bones and approximately two inches from the left wing of the pelvis. It was assumed that the quarter had been in the left front pocket of pants that had rotted away along with the body’s tissue. To Bosch, the coin gave one of the key parameters of time of death: If the assumption that the coin had been buried with the body was correct, the death could not have happened before 1975.

Patrol had arranged for two construction site lunch wagons to come to the circle to feed the small army working the crime scene. Lunch was late and people were hungry. One truck served hot lunches while the other served sandwiches. Bosch waited at the end of the line for the sandwich truck with Julia Brasher. The line was moving slowly but he didn’t mind. They mostly talked about the investigation on the hillside and gossiped about department brass. It was get-to-know-you conversation. Bosch was attracted to her, and the more he heard her talk about her experiences as a rookie and a female in the department, the more he was intrigued by her. She had a mixture of excitement and awe and cynicism about the job that Bosch remembered clearly from his own early days on the job.

When he was about six people from the order window of the lunch truck, Bosch heard someone in the truck asking one of the cadets questions about the investigation.

“Are they bones from a bunch of different people?”

“I don’t know, man. We just look for them, that’s all.”

Bosch studied the man who had asked the question.

“Were they all cut up?”

“Hard to tell.”

Bosch broke from his spot with Brasher and walked to the back of the truck. He looked through the open door at the back and saw three men wearing aprons working in the truck. Or appearing to work. They did not notice Bosch watching. Two of the men were making sandwiches and filling orders. The man in the middle, the one who had asked the cadet questions, was moving his arms on the prep counter below the order window. He wasn’t making anything, but from outside the truck it would appear he was creating a sandwich. As Bosch watched, he saw the man to the right slice a sandwich in half, put it on a paper plate and slide it to the man in the middle. The middle man then held it out through the window to the cadet who ordered it.

Bosch noticed that while the two real sandwich makers wore jeans and T-shirts beneath their aprons, the man in the middle had on cuffed slacks and a shirt with a button-down collar. Protruding from the back pocket of his pants was a notebook. The long, thin kind that Bosch knew reporters used.

Bosch stuck his head in the door and looked around. On a shelf next to the doorway he saw a sport jacket rolled into a ball. He grabbed it and stepped back away from the door. He went through the pockets of the jacket and found an LAPD-issued press pass on a neck chain. It had a picture of the middle sandwich maker on it. His name was Victor Frizbe and he worked at the
New Times.

Holding the jacket to the side of the door, Bosch rapped on the outside of the truck, and when all three men turned to look he signaled Frizbe over. The reporter pointed to his chest with a
Who, me?
look and Bosch nodded. Frizbe came to the door and bent down.

“Yes?”

Bosch reached up and grabbed him by the top bib on the apron and jerked him out of the truck. Frizbe landed on his feet but had to run several steps to stop from falling. As he turned around to protest, Bosch hit him in the chest with the balled-up jacket.

Two patrol officers—they always ate first—were dumping paper plates into a nearby trash can. Bosch signaled them over.

“Take him back to the perimeter. If you see him crossing it again, arrest him.”

Each officer took Frizbe by an arm and started marching him down the street to the barricades. Frizbe started protesting, his face growing as red as a Coke can, but the patrol officers ignored everything about him but his arms and marched him toward his humiliation in front of the other reporters. Bosch watched for a moment and then took the press card out of his back pocket and dropped it in the trash can.

He rejoined Brasher in line. Now they were just two cadets away from being served.

“What was that all about?” Brasher asked.

“Health-code violation. Didn’t wash his hands.”

She started laughing.

“I’m serious. The law’s the law as far as I’m concerned.”

“God, I hope I get my sandwich before you see a roach or something and close the whole thing down.”

“Don’t worry, I think I just got rid of the roach.”

Ten minutes later, after Bosch lectured the truck owner about smuggling the media into the crime scene, they took their sandwiches and drinks to one of the picnic tables Special Services had set up on the circle. It was a table that had been reserved for the investigative team, but Bosch didn’t mind allowing Brasher to sit there. Edgar was there along with Kohl and one of the diggers from her crew. Bosch introduced Brasher to those who didn’t know her and mentioned she had taken the initial call on the case and helped him the night before.

“So where’s the boss?” Bosch asked Kohl.

“Oh, she already ate. I think she went off to tape an interview with herself or something.”

Bosch smiled and nodded.

“I think I’m going to get seconds,” Edgar said as he climbed over the bench and left with his plate.

Bosch bit into his BLT and savored its taste. He was starved. He wasn’t planning to do anything but eat and rest during the break but Kohl asked if it was all right if she gave him some of her initial conclusions on the excavation.

Bosch had his mouth full. After he swallowed he asked her to wait until his partner came back. They talked in generalities about the condition of the bones and how Kohl believed that the shallow nature of the grave had allowed animals to disinter the remains and scatter the bones—possibly for years.

“We’re not going to get them all,” she said. “We won’t come close. We’re going to quickly reach a point where the expense and the effort won’t be worth the return.”

Edgar returned with another plate of fried chicken. Bosch nodded to Kohl, who looked down at a notepad she had on the table to her left. She checked some of her notations and started talking.

“The things I want you to be mindful of are the grave depth and location terrain. I think these are key things. They’re going to have to play somehow into who this child was and what happened to him.”

“Him?” Bosch asked.

“The hip spacing and the waistband of the underwear.”

She explained that included in the rotten and decomposed clothing was the rubber waistband, which was all that was left of the underwear that had been on the body when it was buried. Decomposition fluids from the body had led to the deterioration of the clothing. But the rubber waistband was largely intact and appeared to have come from a style of underwear made for males.

“Okay,” Bosch said. “You were saying about grave depth?”

“Yes, well, we think that the hip assembly and lower spinal column were in undisturbed position when we uncovered them. Going on that, we’re talking about a grave that wasn’t more than six inches to a foot deep. A grave this shallow reflects speed, panic, a host of things indicative of poor planning. But—” she held up a finger “—by the same token, the location—very remote, very difficult—reflects the opposite. It shows careful planning. So you have some kind of contradiction going on here. The location appears to have been chosen because it was damn hard to get to, yet the burial appears to have been fast and furious. This person was literally just covered with loose topsoil and pine needles. I know pointing all of this out isn’t necessarily going to help you catch the bad guy but I want you to see what I’m seeing here. This contradiction.”

Bosch nodded.

“It’s all good to know. We’ll keep it in mind.”

“Okay, good. The other contradiction—the smaller one—is the backpack. Burying it with the body was a mistake. The body decomposes at a much faster rate than the canvas. So if you get identifiers off the bag or its contents, it becomes a mistake made by the bad guy. Again poor planning in the midst of good planning. You’re smart detectives, I’m sure you’ll figure all this out.”

She smiled at Bosch and then studied her pad again, lifting the top page to look beneath it.

“I think that’s it. Everything else we talked about up at the site. I think things are going very well up there. By the end of the day we’ll have the main grave done. Tomorrow we’ll do some sampling in the other grids. But this should probably wrap by tomorrow. Like I said, we’re not going to get everything but we should get enough to do what we need to do.”

Bosch suddenly thought of Victor Frizbe’s question to the cadet at the lunch wagon and realized that the reporter might have been thinking ahead of Bosch.

“Sampling? You think there’s more than one body buried up there?”

Kohl shook her head.

“I have no indication of that at all. But we should make sure. We’ll do some sampling, sink some gas probes. It’s routine. The likelihood—especially in light of the shallow grave—is that this is a singular case, but we should be sure about it. As sure as we can be.”

Bosch nodded. He was glad he had eaten most of his sandwich because he was suddenly not hungry. The prospect of mounting an investigation with multiple victims was daunting. He looked at the others at the table.

“That doesn’t leave this table. I already caught one reporter sniffing around for a serial killer, we don’t want media hysteria here. Even if you tell them what we’re doing is routine and just to make sure, it will be the top of the story. All right?”

Everyone nodded, including Brasher. Bosch was about to say something when there was a loud banging from the row of portable toilets on the Special Services trailer on the other side of the circle. Someone was inside one of the phone booth–sized bathrooms pounding on its thin aluminum skin. After a moment Bosch could hear a woman’s voice behind the sharp banging. He recognized it and jumped up from the table.

Bosch ran across the circle and up the steps to the truck’s platform. He quickly determined which toilet the banging was coming from and went to the door. The exterior hasp—used for securing the toilet for transport—had been closed over the loop and a chicken bone had been used to secure it.

“Hold on, hold on,” Bosch yelled.

He tried to pull the bone out but it was too greasy and slipped from his grip. The pounding and screaming continued. Bosch looked around for a tool of some kind but didn’t see anything. Finally, he took his pistol out of his holster, checked the safety and used the butt of the weapon to hammer the bone through the hasp, careful all the time to aim the barrel of the gun at a downward angle.

When the bone finally popped out he put the gun away and flipped the hasp open. The door burst outward and Teresa Corazon charged out, almost knocking him over. He grabbed her to maintain his balance but she roughly pushed him away.

“You did that!”

“What? No, I didn’t! I was over there the whole—”

“I want to know who did it!”

Bosch lowered his voice. He knew everyone in the encampment was probably looking at them. The media down the street as well.