The Wrong Side of Goodbye

by Michael Connelly

  Claudy opened the envelope and poured its contents out on his desk. He leaned over and looked straight down at the broken pieces of the negative strip without touching them.

  “Some of them look like they show a woman in front of a mountaintop,” Bosch said. “I’m interested in all of it, but in those the most. The woman. I think the location is someplace in Vietnam.”

  “Yeah, you have some cupping here. Some cracking. It’s Fuji film.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “It usually holds up pretty well. Who is she?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I want to see her. And the baby she’s holding.”

  Claudy said, “Okay. I think I can do something with this. My guys in the lab can. We’ll rewash and re-dry them. Then we’ll print. I see some fingerprints and they might be set after so long.”

  Bosch considered that. His assumption was that Santanello took the shots. They were with his camera and other negatives taken by him. Why would someone send developed negatives to a soldier in Vietnam? But if it was ever questioned, the fingerprints might be useful.

  “What’s your time frame?” Claudy asked.

  “Yesterday,” Bosch said.

  Claudy smiled.

  “Of course,” he said. “You’re Hurry-Up-Harry.”

  Bosch smiled back and nodded. Nobody had called him that since Claudy had left the department.

  “So give me an hour,” Claudy said. “You can go to our break room and make a Nespresso.”

  “I hate those things,” Bosch replied.

  “Okay, then go take a walk in the cemetery. More your style anyway. One hour.”

  “One hour.”

  Bosch stood up.

  “Give my regards to Oliver Hardy,” Claudy said. “He’s in there.”

  “Will do,” Bosch said.

  Bosch left Flashpoint and walked down Valhalla Drive. It was only when he entered the cemetery by a huge memorial that he remembered that in his research of Whitney Vance he had read that Vance’s father was buried here. Close to Caltech and under the jet path of Bob Hope Airport, the cemetery was the final resting place for a variety of aviation pioneers, designers, pilots, and barnstormers. They were interred or memorialized in and around a tall domed structure called the Portal of the Folded Wings Shrine to Aviation. Bosch found Nelson Vance’s memorial plaque on the tiled floor of the shrine.

  NELSON VANCE

  Visionary Air Pioneer

  Earliest Advocate of U.S. Air Power, Whose Prophetic Vision

  and Leadership Was a Primary Factor in American

  Supremacy in the Air in War and Peace

  Bosch noticed that there was a space next to the memorial plaque for another interment and wondered if this was already on reserve as Whitney Vance’s final destination.

  Bosch wandered out of the shrine and over to the memorial to the astronauts lost in two separate space shuttle disasters. He then looked across one of the green lawns and saw the start of a burial service near one of the big fountains. He decided not to venture further into the cemetery, a tourist amid the grief, and headed back to Flashpoint without searching for the grave of the heavier half of the comedy team of Laurel and Hardy.

  Claudy was ready for him when Bosch returned. He was ushered into a drying room in the lab where nine 8 x 10 black-and-white prints were clipped to a plastic board. The photos were still wet with developing fluids, and a lab tech was just finishing using a squeegee to remove the excess. The exterior framing was seen on some of the prints, and some showed the fingerprints Claudy had warned about. Some of the shots were completely blown out by light exposure and others exhibited varying degrees of damage to the negative. But there were three shots that were at least 90 percent intact. And one of these was a shot of the woman and child.

  The first thing Bosch realized was that he had been wrong about the woman standing in front of a mountain in Vietnam. It was no mountainside and it was not Vietnam. It was the recognizable roofline of the Hotel del Coronado down near San Diego. Once Bosch registered the location, he moved in close to study the woman and the baby. The woman was Latina and Bosch could see a ribbon in the baby’s hair. A girl, no more than a month or two old.

  The woman’s mouth was open in a smile showing unbridled happiness. Bosch studied her eyes and the happy light that was in them. There was love in those eyes. For the baby. For the person behind the camera.

  The other photos were full frames and fragments from a series of shots taken on the beach behind the del Coronado. Shots of the woman, shots of the baby, shots of the sparkling waves.

  “Does it help?” Claudy asked.

  He was standing behind Bosch, not getting in the way as Harry studied the prints.

  “I think so,” Bosch said. “Yeah.”

  He considered the totality of the circumstances. The photos and their subjects were important enough to Dominick Santanello for him to attempt to hide them as he sent his property home from Vietnam. The question was why. Was this his child? Did he have a secret family that his family in Oxnard knew nothing about? If so, why the secrecy? He looked closely at the woman in the photo. She seemed to be in her mid- to late twenties. Dominick would not yet have been twenty. Was the relationship with an older woman the reason he didn’t tell his parents and sister?

  Another question was about the location. The photos were taken during a trip to the beach either at or near the Hotel del Coronado. When was this? And why was a strip of negatives from a photo shoot that very clearly took place in the States included in property sent home from Vietnam?

  Bosch scanned the images again, looking for anything that would help place the shots in time. He saw nothing.

  “For what it’s worth, the guy was good,” Claudy said. “Had a good eye.”

  Bosch agreed.

  “Is he dead?” Claudy asked.

  “Yes,” Bosch said. “Never made it home from Vietnam.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “Yeah. I saw some of his other work. From the bush. From his missions.”

  “I’d love to see it. Maybe there’s something that could be done with it.”

  Bosch nodded but was concentrating on the photos in front of him.

  “You can’t tell when these photos were taken, can you?” he asked.

  “No, there was no time stamp on the film,” Claudy said. “Not really done back then.”

  Bosch expected that to be the case.

  “But what I can tell you is when the film was made,” Claudy added. “Down to a three-month period. Fuji coded their film stock by production cycle.”

  Bosch turned around and looked at Claudy.

  “Show me.”

  Claudy came forward and went to one of the prints made from a broken negative. The negative’s frame was part of the print. Claudy pointed to a series of letters and numbers in the frame.

  “They marked the film by year and three-month manufacturing run. You see here? This is it.”

  He pointed to a section of the coding: 70-AJ.

  “This film was made between April and June of 1970,” he said.

  Bosch considered the information.

  “But it could have been used any time after that, right?” he asked.

  “Right,” Claudy said. “It only marks when it was made, not when it was used in a camera.”

  Something didn’t add up about that. The film was manufactured as early as April of 1970 and the photographer, Dominick Santanello, was killed in December 1970. He could have easily bought and used the film sometime in the eight intervening months, then sent it home with his belongings.

  “You know where that is, right?” Claudy asked.

  “Yeah, the del Coronado,” Bosch said.

  “Sure hasn’t changed much.”

  “Yeah.”

  Bosch stared at the photo of mother and child again and then he got it. He understood.

  Dominick Santanello trained down in the San Diego area in 1969 but he would have been shipped overseas before the
end of the year. Bosch was looking at photos taken in San Diego in April 1970 at the very earliest and that was well after Santanello was in Vietnam.

  “He came back,” Bosch said.

  “What?” Claudy asked.

  Bosch didn’t answer. He was riding the wave. Things were cascading, coming together. The civvies in the box, the long hair in the bristles of the brush, the photos removed from the inside of the footlocker, and the hidden photos of the baby on the beach. Santanello had made an unauthorized trip back to the States. He hid the photo negatives because they were proof of his crime. He had risked court-martial and the stockade to see his girlfriend.

  And his newborn daughter.

  Bosch now knew. There was an heir somewhere out there. Born in 1970. Whitney Vance had a granddaughter. Bosch was sure of it.

  17

  Claudy put all of the photos into a stiff cardboard folder to keep them from getting bent or damaged. In the car, Bosch opened the folder and looked at the photo of the woman and the baby one more time. He knew there were a lot of aspects of his theory to confirm and some that could never be confirmed. The film negatives that produced the photos in the folder were found secreted in Nick Santanello’s camera but that did not necessarily mean he had taken the photos himself. The photos could have been taken for him and then the negatives mailed to him in Vietnam. Harry knew it was a possibility that could not be completely dismissed but his gut told him that it was an unlikely scenario. The negatives had been found with his camera and other negatives of photos taken by him. It was clear to him Santanello had taken the shot of the woman and the baby.

  The other question that hung over the theory was why Santanello would keep his relationship and fatherhood secret from his family, most notably his sister, back in Oxnard. Bosch knew that family dynamics were almost as unique as fingerprints and it might take several more visits with Olivia to get to the truth of the relationships within the Santanello family. He decided that the best use of his time would be to prove or disprove that Santanello was Whitney Vance’s son and that he may have produced an heir—the baby in the Hotel del Coronado photos. The other explanations could come later, if they still mattered at that point.

  He closed the folder and snapped the attached elastic band back around it.

  Before starting the car, Bosch pulled out his phone and called Gary McIntyre, the investigator at the National Personnel Records Center. The day before, Olivia Macdonald had written an e-mail to McIntyre granting Bosch permission to receive and review records of her brother’s military service. He now checked with McIntyre on the status of his search.

  “Just finished pulling everything together,” McIntyre said. “It’s too big to e-mail. I’ll drop it on our download site and e-mail you the password.”

  Bosch wasn’t sure when he would get to a computer terminal to download a dense digital file, or if he could even figure out how to do it.

  “That’s fine,” he said. “But I’m on the road today heading to San Diego and I’m not sure I can access it. I’d love knowing what you came up with during his training—since I’ll be down there.”

  Bosch let that hang in the air. He knew a guy like McIntyre would be slammed with records requests from all over the country and needed to move on to the next case. But Harry hoped that the intrigue involved in the Santanello file—a soldier killed forty-six years earlier—would win the day and push McIntyre toward answering at least a few questions on the phone. The NCIS investigator probably spent most of his days pulling files on Gulf War vets accused of drug- and alcohol-infused crimes or locked up in Baker Act wards.

  Finally, McIntyre responded.

  “If you don’t mind hearing me eat the meatball sub that was just delivered to my desk, I can go through the stuff and answer a few questions.”

  Bosch pulled out his notebook.

  “Perfect,” he said.

  “What are you looking for?” McIntyre asked.

  “Just so I have it right, can we start with the short version of his postings? You know, where and when?”

  “Sure.”

  Bosch took notes as McIntyre, between loud bites of his sandwich, read off the record of Santanello’s military assignments. He had arrived at boot camp at the San Diego Naval Training Center in June 1969. Upon graduation he received orders moving him to the hospital corps school at Balboa Naval Hospital. His training was then continued at the Field Medical School at Camp Pendleton in Oceanside and in December he was ordered to Vietnam, where he was assigned to the hospital ship Sanctuary. After four months on the boat, he received a TAD (Temporary Additional Duty) to First Medical Battalion in Da Nang, at which point he started accompanying Marine recon units into the bush. He remained with First Med for seven months, until he was killed in action.

  Bosch thought of the Zippo lighter with the Subic Bay chevron that he had found among Santanello’s belongings in Olivia Macdonald’s attic. It was still in its box and appeared to be a keepsake.

  “So he was never in Olongapo?” he asked.

  “No, not on here,” McIntyre said.

  Bosch thought maybe Santanello had gotten the Zippo in a trade with a medic or soldier who had previously been assigned to the base in the Philippines. Possibly someone he had served with or cared for on the Sanctuary.

  “What else?” McIntyre asked.

  “Okay, I’m trying to find people I can talk to,” Bosch said. “People he was tight with. Do you have the orders for his TAD from basic to Balboa?”

  He waited. He was about to ask McIntyre to go further than he probably anticipated when he agreed to answer questions while eating. From his own experience, Bosch knew that because of the random nature of a soldier’s training and assignments in the military, few relationships lasted. But because Santanello was on a trajectory of training as a combat medic, there might be one or two other corpsmen who made the same journey, and it was likely they would have bonded as the familiar faces in a sea of strangers.

  “Yeah, got it,” McIntyre said.

  “Does it list all personnel transferred on the same orders?” Bosch asked.

  “Yes. Fourteen guys from his basic training class went to Balboa.”

  “Okay, good. Now what about the orders from Balboa to Field Medical at Pendleton? Is there anybody on that list who he went through all three steps with?”

  “You mean basic to Balboa to Pendleton? Shit, that could take all day, Bosch.”

  “I know it’s a lot, but if you have the lists there, is there anybody on that list of fourteen that went with him to Pendleton?”

  Bosch thought the request was less involved than McIntyre was indicating but he wasn’t going to suggest that.

  “Hold on,” McIntyre said gruffly.

  Bosch was silent. He didn’t want to possibly say the wrong thing and halt the cooperation. Four minutes went by before he heard any sounds, including eating, from McIntyre.

  “Three guys,” he finally said.

  “So three guys were in all three training classes with him?” Bosch asked.

  “That’s right. You ready to copy?”

  “Ready.”

  McIntyre recited and spelled three names: Jorge Garcia-Lavin, Donald C. Stanley, and Halley B. Lewis. Bosch recalled the name Lewis being stenciled on the shirt that Santanello was wearing in the photo Olivia had shown him. He took it as a sign that the two were tight. He now had a direction.

  “By the way,” McIntyre said. “Two of these guys were KIA.”

  The air went out of Bosch’s hope of finding someone who could help him identify the woman and baby in the del Coronado photograph.

  “Which ones?” he asked.

  “Garcia-Lavin and Stanley,” McIntyre said. “And I really need to get back to my work, Harry. All of this is in the file you can download.”

  “I’ll grab it as soon as I can,” Bosch said quickly. “One last quick question and I’ll let you go. Halley B. Lewis. You have a hometown or DOB to go with that name?”

  “Says here Ta
llahassee, Florida. That’s all I’ve got.”

  “Then that’s what I’ll take. I can’t thank you enough, Gary. Have a great day.”

  Bosch disconnected, started the car, and headed west toward the 170, which would take him up to San Fernando. His plan was to use the SFPD computer to track down Halley B. Lewis and see what he could remember about his fellow corpsman Dominick Santanello. As he drove he thought about the percentages. Four men go through basic training, preliminary medical training, and then combat medical school together. They then get shipped to Vietnam together and only one out of four makes it back home alive.

  Bosch knew from his own experience in Vietnam that corpsmen were high-value targets. They were number three on every VC sniper’s list, after the lieutenant and radioman on a patrol. You take out the leader, then you take out communications. After that, take out triage and you have an enemy unit in complete fear and disarray. Most of the corpsmen Bosch knew wore no markings indicating what their role was in a recon mission.

  Bosch wondered if Halley B. Lewis knew how lucky he had been.

  18

  Bosch called Whitney Vance’s private number on his way to San Fernando and got the straight-to-message beep again. He once again asked Vance to call him back. After disconnecting he wondered what Vance’s status was as a client. If he was no longer communicating with Bosch, was Bosch still working for him? Harry was well into the case and his time was paid for. Either way he wasn’t stopping what he had started.

  He next took a shot in the dark and called directory assistance for Tallahassee, Florida. He asked for a listing for Halley B. Lewis and was told there was only one listing under that name and it was for a law office. Bosch asked to be connected, and soon the call was answered by a secretary who put Bosch on hold when he identified himself and said he wanted to talk to Mr. Lewis about Dominick Santanello from the Field Medical School at Camp Pendleton. At least a minute went by and Bosch used the time to formulate what he would say to the man, should he get on the line, without violating his confidential agreement with Vance.