The Drop (11 page)

Bosch checked the two other PSI reports and found variations of the same story, though some of Pell’s recollections of the dates and ages shifted slightly. Still, it was largely the same story and its repeated nature was either a testament to the laziness of the evaluators or to Pell’s telling the truth. Bosch guessed that it was somewhere in the middle. The evaluators only reported what they had been told or they copied it off a prior report. No effort had been made to confirm Pell’s story or even to find the people who had abused him.

Bosch took out his notebook and wrote down a summary of the story about the man named Johnny. He was now sure that there had been no screwup in the handling of evidence. In the morning, he and Chu had an appointment at the regional lab and Chu at least would keep it—if only to eventually be able to testify that they had exhaustively investigated all possibilities.

But Bosch had no doubt that the lab was in the clear. He could feel the trickle of adrenaline dripping into his bloodstream. He knew it would soon become a relentless torrent and he would move with its flow. He believed he now knew who had killed Lily Price.

12

I
n the morning Bosch called Chu from his car and told him to handle the visit to the crime lab without him.

“But what are you doing?” his partner asked.

“I have to go back to Panorama City. I’m checking out a lead.”

“What lead, Harry?”

“It involves Pell. I read his file last night and came up with something. I need to check it. I don’t think there’s a problem at the lab but we have to check it out in case it ever came up at trial—if there ever
is
a trial. One of us has to be able to testify that we checked out the lab.”

“So what do I tell them when I get there?”

“We have an appointment with the deputy director. Just tell her you need to double-check how the evidence from the case was handled. You interview the lab rat that ran the case and that will be it. Twenty minutes, tops. Take notes.”

“And what will you be doing?”

“Hopefully talking to Clayton Pell about a man named Johnny.”

“What?”

“I’ll tell you when I get back to the PAB. I gotta go.”

“Har—”

Bosch disconnected. He didn’t want to get bogged down with explanations. That slowed things down. He wanted to keep his momentum.

Twenty minutes later he was cruising Woodman looking for a parking slot near the Buena Vista apartments. There was nothing and he ended up parking on a red curb and walking a block back to the halfway house. He reached through the gate to buzz the office. He identified himself and asked for Dr. Stone. The gate was unlocked and he entered.

Hannah Stone was waiting for him with a smile in the office suite’s lobby area. He asked if she had her own office or a place where they could speak privately and she took him into one of the interview rooms.

“This will have to do,” she said. “I share an office with two other therapists. What’s going on, Harry? I wasn’t expecting to see you again so soon.”

Bosch nodded, agreeing that he had thought the same thing.

“I want to talk to Clayton Pell.”

She frowned as though he was putting her in a difficult position.

“Well, Harry, if Clayton is a suspect, then you’ve put me in a very—”

“He’s not. Look, can we sit down for a second?”

She pointed him to what he assumed was the client/patient chair while she took a chair facing it.

“Okay,” Bosch started. “First, I have to tell you that what I say here will probably sound too coincidental to be coincidence—in fact, I don’t even believe in coincidence. But what we talked about last night at dinner hooked into what I did after dinner and here I am. I need your help. I need to talk to Pell.”

“And it’s not because he’s a suspect?”

“No, he was too young. We know he’s not the killer. But he’s a witness.”

She shook her head.

“I’ve been talking to him four times a week for nearly six months. I think if he had witnessed this girl’s murder, it would have come up on some level, subconscious or not.”

Bosch held up his hands to stop her.

“Not an eyewitness. He wasn’t there and probably doesn’t even know a thing about her. But I think he knew the killer. He can help me. Here, just take a look at this.”

He opened his briefcase on the floor between his feet. He pulled out the original Lily Price murder book and quickly opened it to the plastic sleeves containing the faded Polaroid photos of the crime scene. Stone got up and came around to the side of his chair so she could look.

“Okay, these are really old and faded but if you look at the victim’s neck, you can make out the pattern left by the ligature. She was strangled.”

Bosch heard her sharp intake of breath.

“Oh, my god,” she said.

He closed the binder quickly and looked up at her. She had brought one hand to her mouth.

“I’m sorry. I thought you were used to seeing stuff like—”

“I am, I am. It’s just that you never get used to it. My specialty is sexual deviancy and dysfunction. To see the ultimate . . .”

She pointed to the closed binder.

“That’s what I try to stop. It’s awful to see it.”

Bosch nodded and she told him to go back to the photos. He reopened the binder and returned to the plastic sleeves. He chose a close-up of the victim’s neck and pointed out the vague indentation on Lily Price’s skin.

“You see what I’m talking about?”

“Yes,” Stone said. “Poor girl.”

“Okay, now look at this one.”

He switched to a different Polaroid on the next sleeve and told her once again to look at the ligature pattern. There was a noticeable indentation in the skin.

“I see it but what does it mean?”

“The angle is different on this photo and it shows the top line of the ligature. The first shot shows the lower line.”

He flipped the sleeve back and used his finger to outline the differences between the two shots.

“You see it?”

“Yes. But I’m not following. You have two lines. What do they mean?”

“Well, the lines don’t match. They’re on different levels of her neck. So it means that they are the top and bottom edges of the ligature. Take them together and we get an idea of how wide the ligature was and, more important, what it was.”

Spacing his thumb and forefinger he traced two lines on one of the photos, outlining a ligature that would have been almost two inches wide.

“It’s all we have after so long,” he said. “The autopsy photos weren’t in the archives file. So these photos are it, and they show that the ligature was at least an inch and a half wide on the neck.”

“Like a belt?”

“Exactly. And then look at this. Right under the ear we have another indentation, another pattern.”

He went to another photo in the second sleeve.

“It looks like a square.”

“Right. Like a square belt buckle. Now let’s go to the blood.”

He flipped to the first sleeve and zeroed in on the first three Polaroids. They all showed shots of the blood smear on the victim’s neck.

“Just one drop of blood that was smeared on her neck. It’s right in the middle of the ligature pattern, meaning it could have been transferred from the ligature. Twenty-two years ago their theory was that the guy was cut and was bleeding and a drop fell on her. He wiped it away but left the smear.”

“But you think it was a transfer.”

“Right. And that’s where Pell comes in. It was his blood—his eight-year-old blood on her. How did it get there? Well, if we go with the transfer theory, it came off the belt. So the real question is not how did it get on Lily, it’s how did it get on the belt?”

Bosch closed the binder and returned it to his briefcase. He pulled out the thick file from the Department of Probation and Parole. He held it up with two hands and shook it.

“Right here. I told you last night when you said you could not reveal client confidences that I already had his PSI evaluations. Well, I read them last night after I got home and there’s something here and it ties in with your whole thing about repetitive behavior and—”

“He was whipped with a belt.”

Bosch smiled.

“Careful, Doctor, you don’t want to be revealing confidences. Especially because you don’t have to. It’s all right here. Every time Pell got a psych evaluation, he told the same story. When he was eight years old, he and his mother lived with a guy who abused him physically and eventually sexually. It was probably what sent him down the path he’s been on. But the physical abuse included being whipped with a belt.”

Bosch opened the file and handed her the first evaluation report.

“He was whipped so hard he must’ve bled,” he said. “That report says he had scars on his backside from the abuse. To leave a scar you have to break the skin. You break the skin and you get blood.”

He watched her as she scanned the report, her eyes fixed in concentration. He felt his phone vibrate but ignored it. He knew it was probably his partner reporting that he had completed the DNA lab visit.

“Johnny,” she said as she handed the report back.

Bosch nodded.

“I think he’s our man and I need to talk to Pell to get a line on him. Has he ever told you his full name? In the PSIs he only calls him Johnny.”

“No, he just called him Johnny in our sessions, too.”

“That’s why I need to talk to him.”

She paused as she considered something Bosch apparently hadn’t thought of. He thought she would be as excited about the lead as he was.

“What?”

“Harry, I have to consider what this will do to him, dredging all of this up. I’m sorry but I have to consider his well-being before the well-being of your investigation.”

Bosch wished she hadn’t said that.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “What do you mean ‘dredging it up’? It’s in all three of his psych reports here. He has to have talked to you about this guy. I’m not asking you to break that confidence. I want to talk directly to him.”

“I know and I can’t stop you from talking to him. It’s really his option. He’ll talk to you or he won’t. But my only worry is that he’s quite fragile as you can—”

“You can get him to talk to me, Hannah. You can tell him it will help him.”

“You mean lie to him? I won’t do that.”

Bosch stood up, since she had not returned to her seat.

“I don’t mean lie. I mean tell the truth. This will help him get this guy out of the shadows of the past. Like an exorcism. Maybe he even knows that this guy was killing girls.”

“You mean there’s more than one?”

“I don’t know but you saw the photos. It doesn’t look like a onetime thing, like, oh, I got that out of my system and it’s back to being a good citizen again. This was a predator’s crime and predators don’t stop. You know that as well as I do. It doesn’t matter if this happened twenty-two years ago. If this guy Johnny is still out there, I have to find him. And Clayton Pell is the key.”

13

C
layton Pell agreed to talk to Bosch but only if Dr. Stone remained present. Harry had no problem with that and thought that having Stone on hand might be helpful during the interview. He only advised her that Pell might become a witness in an eventual trial and as such Bosch would conduct the interview in a methodical and linear fashion.

An orderly walked Pell into the interview room, where three chairs had been set up, one facing the other two. Bosch introduced himself and shook Pell’s hand without hesitation. Pell was a small man no more than five foot two and a hundred ten pounds, and Bosch knew that victims of sexual abuse during childhood often suffered from stunted growth. Disrupted psychological growth affected physical growth.

Bosch pointed Pell to his seat and cordially asked if he needed anything.

“I could use a smoke,” Pell said.

When he sat, he brought his legs up and crossed them on the seat. It seemed like a childlike thing to do.

“I could use one, too, but we’re not going to break the rules today,” Bosch said.

“That’s too bad, then.”

Stone had suggested that they set the three seats up around a table to make it less formal but Bosch had said no. He also choreographed the seating arrangement so that both he and Stone would be left and right of Pell’s center view line, which meant he would have to constantly look back and forth between them. Observing eye movement would be a good way for Bosch to measure sincerity and veracity. Pell had become a tragic figure in Stone’s estimation but Bosch held no such sympathy. Pell’s traumatic history and childlike dimensions didn’t matter. He was now a predator. Just ask the nine-year-old boy he had pulled into his van. Bosch planned to constantly remind himself that predators hid themselves and that they lied and waited for their opponents to reveal weaknesses. He wouldn’t make a mistake with Pell.

“Why don’t we get started here,” Bosch said. “If you don’t mind I will take written notes as we talk.”

“A’right by me,” Pell said.

Bosch pulled out his notebook. It had an LAPD detective’s badge embossed on its leather cover. It had been a gift from his daughter, who had had it custom-made through a friend in Hong Kong whose father was in the leather business. The embossing was complete with his badge number—2997. She’d given it to him at Christmas. It was one of his most treasured possessions because it had come from her, but also because he knew it served a valuable purpose. Every time he flipped it open to jot down a note, he was showing the badge to his interview subjects and reminding them that the power and might of the state was before them.

“So what’s this about?” Pell asked in a high, nasal voice. “Doc didn’t tell me nothin’ about nothin’.”

Stone did not tell him not to call her Doc.

“It’s about a murder, Clayton,” Bosch said. “From way back when you were just a boy of eight years old.”

“I don’t know nothin’ about no murder, sir.”

The voice was grating and Bosch wondered if it had always been that way or if it was the by-product of the prison attack.