The Wrong Side of Goodbye

by Michael Connelly

“Forensics already checked it,” Sisto said. “It’s clean. No prints. Guy wore gloves and a mask.”

  Bosch nodded as he studied the knife through the plastic. It was a black folding knife and the blade was open. He could see the manufacturer’s logo stamped on the blade along with some code numbers too small and difficult to read through the plastic. He would make sure he looked at it back in the controlled environment of the detective bureau.

  “Nice knife, though,” Sisto added. “I looked it up on my phone. It’s made by a company called TitaniumEdge. It’s called Socom Black. The powdered black blade is so it doesn’t reflect light—you know, when you’re out at night and have to shank somebody.”

  He said it with sarcasm that didn’t amuse Bosch.

  “Yeah, I know,” Bosch said.

  “I looked at a couple knife blogs while I was waiting here—yes, they have knife blogs. A lot of them say the Socom Black is one of the best out there.”

  “Best for what?” Bosch asked.

  “Scary shit, I guess. Wet work. Socom probably stands for some kind of special forces black ops stuff.”

  “Special Operations Command. Delta Force.”

  Sisto looked surprised.

  “Whoa. I guess you know your military shit.”

  “I know a few things.”

  Bosch carefully handed him back the knife.

  Bosch wasn’t sure what Sisto thought of him. They’d had little interaction even though their desks in the bureau were only a privacy wall apart. Sisto handled property crimes and Bosch wasn’t spending his time on unsolved property crimes, so there had been little reason for conversation beyond the routine salutations each day. Bosch assumed that Sisto, who was half Harry’s age, viewed the older detective as some kind of relic from the past. The fact that Bosch most often wore a jacket and tie when he came in to work for free was probably confounding to him as well.

  “So the blade was not folded when you found it?” Bosch asked. “The guy was behind the curtain with the blade out?”

  “Yes, out and ready,” Sisto said. “Think we ought to fold it closed so nobody gets cut?”

  “No. Book it the way you found it. And just be careful with it. Warn people it’s open. Maybe see about getting a box when you take it back to Evidence Control.”

  Sisto nodded as he carefully placed the knife back in the larger evidence bag. Bosch stepped over to the window and looked down at the broken glass in the backyard. The Screen Cutter had hurled himself into the window and broken through the framing as well as the glass. Bosch’s first thought was that he had to have been hurt. The whack with the broomstick must have been so stunning that he chose to flee instead of fight—the opposite reaction of his intended victim. But going through the window and taking out the frame as well as the glass took a lot of force.

  “Any blood or anything in the glass?” he asked.

  “Not that we found so far,” Sisto said.

  “You got the word on the knife, right? We don’t talk about it with anybody—especially the brand and model.”

  “Roger that. You think people are really going to come in and confess to this?”

  “I’ve seen stranger things. You never know.”

  Bosch pulled his phone and started moving away from Sisto so he could make a call in private. He stepped into the hallway and then into the kitchen, where he called his daughter’s number. As usual, she didn’t answer. Her primary use of the cell phone was for texting and checking her social media. But Bosch also knew that while she might not answer his calls or even know about them—her phone’s ringer was perpetually silenced—she did listen to the messages he left.

  As expected, the call rang through to message.

  “Hey, it’s your dad. Just wanted to check on you. Hope everything is good and you’re safe. I might be traveling through the OC sometime this week on my way to San Diego on a case. Let me know if you want to grab coffee or something to eat. Maybe dinner. Okay, that’s it. Love you and hope to see you soon—oh, and put water in that dog bowl.”

  After disconnecting he stepped out the front door of the house, where there was a patrol officer on post. His name was Hernandez.

  “Who’s boss tonight?” Bosch asked.

  “Sergeant Rosenberg,” Hernandez said.

  “Can you hit him up and see if he’ll swing by and grab me? I need to get back to the station.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Bosch walked out to the curb to wait for the patrol car with Irwin Rosenberg to come along. He needed a ride but he also needed to tell Rosenberg, who was watch commander for the night, to have patrol keep an eye on Beatriz Sahagun’s house.

  He checked his phone and saw that he had just gotten a text back from Maddie saying she was up for dinner if he was passing through and that there was a restaurant she had been wanting to try. Bosch replied that they would set it up as soon as his schedule became clear. He knew that his daughter, the San Diego trip, and the Vance case were all going to be put on hold for at least a couple days. He would have to stay with the Screen Cutter case, if only to be ready to respond to what the media spotlight would invariably bring in.

  20

  Bosch was the first one into the detective bureau Saturday morning, and the only thing that would have made him prouder was if he had stayed all night working the case. But his status as volunteer allowed him to choose his hours and he chose a solid night’s sleep over chasing a case till dawn. He was too old for that. That he would reserve for homicides.

  On his way through the police station he had stopped by the communications room and picked up the stack of messages that had come in since the news about the serial rapist hit the media the evening before. He also dropped by the evidence control unit and checked out the knife recovered at the crime scene.

  Now at his desk he sipped the iced latte he had picked up at Star-bucks and started wading through the messages. As he did an initial run-through he created a second pile for messages in which it was noted that the caller spoke Spanish only. These he would give to Lourdes to review and follow up on. She was expected to work the Screen Cutter case through the weekend. Sisto was on call for all other cases needing a detective, and Captain Trevino was due in because it was his rotation weekend to be in charge of the department.

  Among the Spanish-only messages was an anonymous call from a woman who reported that she had also been attacked by a rapist who wore a mask like those worn by Mexican wrestlers. She refused to reveal her name because she admitted she was illegally in the country and the police operator could not convince her that no action would be taken against her on her immigration status if she fully reported the crime.

  Bosch had always expected that there were other cases he didn’t know about but it was still a heartbreaking message to read because the woman told the operator that the attack had occurred almost three years earlier. Bosch realized that the victim had lived with the psychological and perhaps even physical consequences of the horrible assault for all that time without even being able to hold on to the hope that justice would someday prevail and her attacker would be held to answer for his crime. She had given all of that up when she chose not to report the crime for fear it would lead to her deportation.

  There were people who would have no sympathy for her, Bosch knew. People who would argue that her remaining silent about the attack allowed the rapist to move on to the next victim without concern about police attention. Bosch could find some validity in that but he was more sympathetic to the plight of the silent victim. Without even knowing the details of how she had gotten to this country, Bosch knew her path here had not been easy and her desire to stay no matter what the consequences—even to be silent about a rape—was what touched him. Politicians could talk about building walls and changing laws to keep people out, but in the end they were just symbols. Neither would stop the tide any more than the rock jetties at the mouth of the port did. Nothing could stop the tide of hope and desire.

  Bosch walked around the cubicle and p
ut the stack of Spanish-only messages down on Lourdes’s desk. It was the first time he had ever come around and seen her work space from this angle. There was the usual array of police bulletins and Wanted flyers. There was a flyer depicting a missing woman that had haunted the department for ten years because she had never been found and foul play was feared. Pinned at center to the half wall separating their desks were several photos of a child, a boy. Some of the photos showed him being held by Lourdes or another woman, and some depicted all three in group hugs. He paused for a moment to lean down and look at the happiness in the photos and just then the door to the bureau opened and Lourdes entered.

  “What are you doing?” she asked as she picked up a marker and wrote her start time on the squad attendance board.

  “Uh, I was just putting these phone messages down for you,” he said as he backed up to give her room to enter her space. “The Spanish-language calls from last night.”

  Lourdes swung around him and into her cubicle.

  “Oh, okay. Thank you.”

  “Hey, is that your kid?”

  “Yes. Rodrigo.”

  “I didn’t know you had a kid.”

  “It happens.”

  There was an awkward silence while she waited for Bosch to ask if the other woman was part of the relationship and which one actually bore the child or if he was adopted. Bosch chose not to pursue it.

  “That top message there is from another victim,” he said, as he started moving back around the cubicles to his own desk. “Wouldn’t give a name but said she was an illegal. The com center said she called on a pay phone by the courthouse.”

  “Well, we knew there were probably more out there,” Lourdes said.

  “I’ve got a stack over here to go through as well. And I pulled the knife from evidence control.”

  “The knife? Why?”

  “These high-end military knives are collectors’ items. It might be traceable.”

  He returned to his desk and dropped out of Lourdes’s sight.

  Bosch looked first at the stack of messages that he knew would probably exhaust a good part of his day with little or no return, and then at the knife.

  He chose the knife. He first put on a pair of latex gloves and then removed the weapon from the plastic evidence bag. The noise made during the removal from the bag drew Lourdes up on her feet and looking over the partition.

  “I never saw it last night,” she said.

  Bosch held it up so she could see it close.

  “That looks completely fucking savage,” she said.

  “Definitely for use on a silent kill squad,” he said.

  He drew the knife back and held it horizontally with the edge of the blade out. He pantomimed attacking someone from behind, covering the mouth with his right hand and then sticking the point of the blade into a target’s neck with his left. He then sliced outward with the knife.

  “You go in the side and slice out through all of the bleeders and the throat,” he said. “No sound, the target bleeds out in under twenty seconds. Done.”

  “The target?” Lourdes said. “Were you one of those guys, Harry? In a war, I mean.”

  “I was in a war long before you were born. But we didn’t have anything like this. We used to put boot polish on our blades.”

  She looked confused.

  “So they wouldn’t catch a reflection in the dark,” he said.

  “Of course,” she said.

  He put the knife down on his desk, embarrassed by his demonstration.

  “You think our guy is ex-military?” Lourdes asked.

  “No, I don’t,” Bosch said.

  “Why?”

  “Because he ran yesterday. I think if he had any training, he would have regrouped, recovered, and advanced. He would have gone right back at Beatriz. Maybe killed her.”

  Lourdes stared at him for a moment and then nodded toward the iced latte putting a water mark on the blotter.

  “Was she there today when you went in?”

  “No, not there. Not surprising. But she might just be off on Saturdays.”

  “Okay, well, I’m going to start calling some of these people back. Hope it doesn’t bother you.”

  “No, no bother.”

  She disappeared from sight again and Bosch put on his reading glasses to examine the knife, but as he looked down at the weapon on his blotter he saw something else. He saw the face of a man he had killed in a tunnel more than forty years before. Bosch had pushed himself back into a crevasse in the tunnel and the man had come right past him in the darkness. Hadn’t seen him, hadn’t smelled him. Bosch grabbed him from behind, put one hand over his face and mouth and tore through the man’s throat with his knife. It was over so quickly and efficiently that not a drop of the arterial spray got on Bosch. He always remembered the man’s last breath exhaling against the palm of the hand he had clamped over his mouth. He remembered closing the man’s eyes with his hand as he laid him down in his blood.

  “Harry?”

  Bosch came out of the memory. Captain Trevino was standing behind him in the cubicle.

  “Sorry, I was just thinking,” Bosch sputtered. “What’s up, Cap?”

  “Sign the board,” Trevino said. “I don’t want to have to keep telling you.”

  Bosch swiveled in his chair to see Trevino pointing toward the door where the board was located.

  “Right, right. I’ll do it now.”

  He stood up and Trevino stepped back so he could leave the cubicle. The captain spoke to his back.

  “That’s the knife?” Trevino asked.

  “That’s the knife,” Bosch said.

  Bosch grabbed a marker off the board’s sill and put down that he had arrived at 6:15 that morning. He hadn’t exactly checked the time but he knew he had been at the Starbucks at 6:00.

  Trevino went into his office and shut the door. Bosch returned to the knife on his desk. This time he put the time travel aside and leaned down so he could read the numbers stamped on the black blade. On one side of the TitaniumEdge logo was the date of manufacture—09/08—and on the other side was a number Bosch assumed was the weapon’s unique serial number. He wrote both of these down and then went online to see if TitaniumEdge had a website.

  As he did so he heard Lourdes start one of the callbacks in Spanish. Bosch understood enough to know she was calling someone who had fingered a person she knew as the rapist. Bosch knew it would be a quick call. The investigators were 95 percent sure they were looking for a white man. Any caller accusing a Latino would be wrong and most likely engaged in trying to make a personal enemy’s life difficult.

  Bosch found the TitaniumEdge site and quickly learned that owners of their knives could register them at purchase or thereafter. It was not required and Bosch guessed that in most cases purchasers had not bothered. The knife manufacturer was located in Pennsylvania—close to the steel mills that produced the raw materials of their weapons. The website showed that the company made several different folding knives. Not knowing if the business would be open on a Saturday, Bosch took a shot and called the number listed on the website. His call was answered by an operator and he asked for the supervisor on duty.

  “We have Johnny and George here today. They’re the guys in charge.”

  “Is one of them available?” he asked. “Doesn’t matter which.”

  She put Bosch on hold and two minutes later a gruff male voice came on the line. If there was a voice to match a black blade knife maker, it was this one.

  “This is Johnny.”

  “Johnny, this is Detective Bosch with the SFPD out in California. I was wondering if I could have a few minutes of your time to help with an investigation we have going out here.”

  There was a pause. Bosch had taken to using the abbreviation SFPD when making calls outside the city because the chances were good that the receiver of the call would jump to the conclusion that Bosch was calling from the San Francisco Police Department and be more willing to help than if they knew he was c
alling from tiny San Fernando.

  “SFPD?” Johnny finally said. “I’ve never even been to California.”

  “Well, it’s not about you, sir,” Bosch said. “It’s about a knife that we recovered from a crime scene.”

  “Was someone hurt with it?”

  “Not that we’re aware of. A burglar dropped it when he was chased from a house where he had broken in.”

  “Sounds like he was going to use it to hurt somebody.”

  “We’ll never know. He dropped it and I’m trying to trace it. I see from your website that purchasers can register them. I was wondering if I could find out if this one is registered.”

  “Which one is it?”

  “It’s a Socom Black. Four-inch black powdered blade. On the blade it says it was made in September ’08.”

  “Yeah, we don’t make that one anymore.”

  “But it is still highly regarded and a collector’s item, from what I’ve been told.”

  “Well, let me look it up here on the computer and see what we got.”

  Bosch was buoyed by the cooperation. Johnny asked for the serial number and Bosch read it to him off the blade. Harry could hear him tap it into a computer.

  “Well, it’s registered,” Johnny said. “But unfortunately, that’s a stolen knife.”

  “Really?” Bosch said.

  But this was not surprising to him. He thought it unlikely that a serial rapist would use a weapon that could be traced directly to him, even if he narcissistically assumed that he would never lose the knife or be identified as a suspect.

  “Yeah, stolen a couple years after the original purchaser bought it,” Johnny said. “At least that’s when he notified us.”

  “Well, it’s been recovered,” Bosch said. “And that owner will be getting it back after we’re finished with the case. Can you give me that information?”

  Here was where Bosch hoped that Johnny wouldn’t ask for a warrant. That would slow pursuit of this lead down to a crawl. Rousing a judge on a weekend to sign a warrant for a small part of an investigation was not something he relished doing.

  “We are always happy to help out the military and law enforcement,” Johnny said patriotically.