He grabbed at the phone, knocking it off the bed table to the floor, before finally picking it up and answering.
“Maddie? What’s wrong?”
“Uh, nothing. What’s wrong with you? You sound weird.”
“I was sleeping. What’s going on?”
“Well I thought we were maybe going to have lunch today. Are you still at your hotel?”
“Shoot, I’m sorry, Maddie. I forgot to call you. I’m back home. I got called back last night on an emergency. An officer got abducted and we worked all night on it.”
“Holy shit! Abducted? Did you get him back?”
“It was a she, and yes, we got her back. But it was a long night and I’m just catching up. I think I’m going to be kind of busy for a few days. Can we do lunch or dinner this weekend or early next week?”
“Yeah, no worries. But how was she abducted?”
“Uh, it’s kind of a long story but he was a wanted guy and he sort of grabbed her before she grabbed him. But we got her back, he’s under arrest, and everything’s okay.”
He left the explanation short because he didn’t want her to know the details of what had happened to Bella Lourdes or that he had shot her abductor. That would make for a long conversation.
“Well, good. I guess, then, I’ll let you go back to sleep.”
“Did you have classes this morning?”
“Psychology and Spanish. I’m finished for the day.”
“That’s nice.”
“Uh, Dad?”
“Yeah.”
“I kind of also wanted to say I was sorry about what I said yesterday about the restaurant and everything. I didn’t know your reasons and it kind of sucked that I jumped on you. I’m really sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it, baby. You didn’t know and it’s all right.”
“So we’re cool?”
“We’re cool.”
“Love you, Dad. Now go to sleep.”
She laughed.
“What?”
“That’s what you used to say to me when I was little. ‘Love you, now go to sleep.’”
“I remember that.”
After disconnecting, Bosch pulled the bandanna back over his eyes and tried to go back to sleep.
And failed.
Twenty minutes into the effort, with the Death Cab guitar hook an earworm playing in his head, he gave up on finding the sleep trench again and got out of bed. He took another quick shower to refresh himself and headed back north to San Fernando.
The number of media trucks outside the police station had doubled since the week before when the Screen Cutter was just a wanted man. Now that he had been identified, had abducted one cop, and had been shot by another, the case was big news. Bosch went in the side door as usual and was able to escape notice from the reporters gathered in the front lobby. The department’s media officer was usually the captain, as part of his catchall duties, but Bosch assumed Trevino would not be the point man on a story he had played a significant part in. He suspected the media management on this story would fall to Sergeant Rosenberg, who was affable and telegenic in a cop sort of way. He looked like a cop and talked like a cop and that’s what the media wanted.
The detective bureau was deserted and that was the way Bosch needed it. After an event like that of the night before, people tended to want to talk. They’d gather around the desk and tell it from their point of view, listen to it from somebody else’s point of view. It was therapeutic. But Bosch didn’t want to talk. He wanted to work. He had to write what he knew would be a lengthy and detailed charging document that would be first scrutinized by his superiors in the department, then by multiple prosecutors with the District Attorney’s Office and then a defense lawyer and, eventually, even the media. He wanted focus, and the quiet detective bureau would be perfect.
Sisto wasn’t in the bureau but his presence was immediately felt. When Bosch got to his desk and dropped his car keys, he found four neat stacks of code inspection reports waiting for him. The young detective had come through.
Bosch sat down to work and almost immediately felt the weight of exhaustion settle onto him. He had not gotten enough rest after the events of the night before. His shoulder was aching from the impact of the curtain frame in Dockweiler’s fallout shelter, but where he was feeling it most was in his legs. That run back up the slope of the wash was the first time he had fired the pistons in a long time and he was sore and fatigued. He signed in to the computer, opened a blank document, and left it ready while he went down the hallway to the station’s kitchen.
On the way he passed the open door of the chief’s office and saw Valdez seated at his desk, the telephone to his ear. The snippet of conversation he heard was enough for Bosch to know the chief was talking to a reporter, saying that the department was not going to identify the officer who had been abducted, because she was the victim of a sexual assault. Bosch thought that in a department as small as San Fernando’s it would not take a good reporter more than a few calls to figure out who was being protected. That would result in reporters camped on the front lawn of Bella Lourdes’s house, unless her address was protected by being deeded in Taryn’s name.
There was a fresh pot of coffee already brewed and Bosch poured two cups, leaving both black. On the way back to the bureau he stopped by the open door of the chief’s office and held one up as an offer. Valdez nodded and covered the phone to respond.
“Harry, you’re the man.”
Bosch stepped into the office and put the cup down on the desk.
“Knock ’em dead, Chief.”
Five minutes later Bosch was back in his cubicle and going through the inspection reports. It only took him an hour because once he became familiar with the form, he was able to quickly go through it and identify the street where each inspection took place. He was looking for the five streets where the known victims, including Beatriz Sahagun, lived. At the end of the hour he had placed Dockweiler on each victim’s street in the months before her assault or attempted assault. In two of the cases he had actually inspected the victim’s home as long as nine months earlier.
The information garnered from the reports helped draw a solid picture of Dockweiler’s MO. Bosch believed that he first saw the victims while conducting inspections, then stalked them and carefully planned the assaults for weeks and sometimes months. As a code inspector and former police officer he had skills that aided this process. Bosch had no doubt that Dockweiler entered and prowled the homes of the victims, possibly even while they were at home and asleep.
Finished with the code inspection piece of the puzzle, Bosch began writing the charging document. He was a two-finger typist but he was fast just the same, especially when he knew and was confident in the story he wanted to tell.
He worked another two hours without a break or even a look up from the computer screen. When he was finished he took a gulp of cold black coffee and hit the print button. The universal printer on the other side of the room spit out six single-spaced pages of a chronology that began with the first Screen Cutter rape four years earlier and ended with Kurt Dockweiler lying facedown on his kitchen floor with a bullet lodged in his spine. Bosch proofed it with a red pen, made the corrections on the computer, and printed it again. He then took it to the chief’s office, where he found him talking on the phone to yet another reporter. He covered the receiver again.
“USA Today,” he said. “This story is going coast to coast.”
“Make sure they spell your name right,” Bosch said. “I’m going to need you to read and approve this. I want to file on Dockweiler first thing tomorrow morning. I’m going for five counts of forcible rape, one count attempted rape, then kidnapping, assault with a deadly weapon, and multiple counts of theft of government property.”
“The kitchen-sink approach. I like it.”
“Let me know. I have to go write up the evidence report and the search warrant that we got approved last night.”
Bosch was about to leave the office
, when Valdez held up a finger, then returned to his phone call.
“Donna, I need to go,” he said. “You have the details in the press release, and like I said, we’re not putting out either officer’s name at this time. We took a really bad character out of circulation and we’re all very proud of that. Thank you.”
Valdez hung up the phone, even as he and Bosch could hear the reporter’s voice asking another question.
“All day long,” Valdez said. “They’re calling from all over the place. Everybody wants to get photos of the dungeon. Everybody wants to talk to Bella and you.”
“I heard you on the phone earlier when you used that word dungeon,” Bosch said. “That’s how things take on a whole new life in the media. It’s a fallout shelter, not a dungeon.”
“Well, as soon as Dockweiler has a lawyer he can sue me. These reporters…One of them told me the average cost of incarcerating an inmate is thirty K a year but with Dockweiler likely being a paraplegic now, it will double for him. I said, so what are you saying, we should have just executed him on the spot to save the money?”
“We did have our chance.”
“I’ll forget you said that, Harry. I don’t even want to think about what you were going to do to him last night.”
“Just what was necessary to find Bella.”
“Well, we did anyway.”
“We got lucky.”
“That wasn’t luck. That was good detective work. Anyway, you should be ready. They’re trying to find out who the shooter was and when they learn it was you, they’ll connect it to West Hollywood last year and everything else before. Be prepared.”
“I’ll take a vacation and disappear.”
“Good idea. So this is good to go?”
He had picked up the document Bosch had delivered.
“You tell me,” Bosch said.
“Okay, give me fifteen minutes,” Valdez said.
“By the way, where’s the captain been all day? Sleeping?”
“No, he’s staying at the hospital with Bella. I wanted someone there to keep the media away and in case she needed anything.”
Bosch nodded. It was a good move. He told Valdez he would be in the bureau and to call or e-mail if he wanted any changes to the charging document.
He returned to his computer in the detective bureau. He was just putting the finishing touches on a report summarizing the physical evidence they had amassed in the case when his cell phone buzzed. It was Mickey Haller calling.
“Yo, Bro, haven’t heard from you,” the lawyer said. “You talk to the granddaughter yet?”
The Vance case had been so thoroughly crowded out of Bosch’s mind with the events of the past eighteen hours that it seemed like his trip to San Diego had been a month ago.
“No, not yet,” Bosch said.
“What about Ida Parks Whatever-Her-Name-Is?” Haller asked.
“Ida Townes Forsythe. No, haven’t gotten to her yet either. Things have sort of been crazy with my other job.”
“Holy shit. You’re on that thing with the guy and the dungeon up there in Santa Clorox?”
It was an old nickname for Santa Clarita, reflecting its early incarnation as a destination for white flight from Los Angeles. It seemed somehow inappropriate coming from a guy Bosch knew grew up in Beverly Hills, the county’s first bastion of white isolationism and privilege.
“Yes, I’m on the case,” Bosch said.
“Tell me, is the guy hooked up with a lawyer yet?” Haller asked.
Bosch hesitated before answering.
“You don’t want to go there,” he said.
“Hey, I’ll go anywhere,” Haller said. “Have case, will travel. But you’re right, this probate stuff may keep me occupied for a while.”
“They file probate on Vance yet?”
“Nope. Waiting.”
“Well, I should be back on that sometime tomorrow. When I find the granddaughter I’ll let you know.”
“Bring her in, Harry. I’d like to meet her.”
Bosch didn’t answer. His attention was drawn to his screen, where he had just received an e-mail from Valdez approving his case summary and charging affidavit. He now had to finish the evidence report and the search warrant and he would be good to go.
36
On Wednesday morning Bosch was at the District Attorney’s Office as soon as the doors opened. Because it was a high profile case he had arranged to come in for an appointment to file charges against Dockweiler. Rather than going to an intake prosecutor who would file the case and then pass it on, never to see it again, the Dockweiler prosecution was assigned from the start to a veteran trial attorney named Dante Corvalis. Bosch had never worked with Corvalis previously but knew of him by reputation— his nickname in the courthouse was “The Undefeated” because he had never lost a case.
The process of filing went smoothly, with Corvalis only rejecting Bosch’s request for charges relating to the property crimes Dockweiler had committed. The prosecutor explained that it would already be a complicated case with the testimony of multiple victims and DNA analysis to explain to the jury. There was no need to spend prep time or court time on Dockweiler’s theft of tools, concrete, and a manhole cover from the Department of Public Works. That, simply, was small-time stuff that might create jury backlash.
“It’s the effect of TV,” Corvalis said. “Every trial you see on the box lasts an hour. Juries on real cases get impatient. So you can’t overprosecute a case. And the bottom line is, we don’t need it. We’ve got enough here to put him away forever. And we will. So let’s forget about the manhole cover—except for when you testify about finding Bella. It will be a nice detail to draw out in your testimony.”
Bosch couldn’t argue the point. He was happy just to have one of the office’s major players on the case from the start. Bosch and Corvalis agreed to set a schedule of meeting every Tuesday to discuss preparations for the case.
Bosch was out of the Foltz Building by ten. Rather than go to his car, he walked down Temple and then crossed over the 101 freeway at Main Street. He walked through Paseo de la Plaza Park and then down Olvera Street through the Mexican bazaar, assuring himself that he could not be followed by car.
At the end of the long passage through the souvenir stalls he turned and looked back to see if he had a tail on foot. Satisfied after several minutes that he was alone, he continued antisurveillance measures by crossing Alameda and entering Union Station. He passed through the giant waiting room and then took a circuitous path to the roof, where he pulled a TAP card out of his wallet and got on the Metro’s Gold Line.
He studied every person on the train as it left Union Station and headed into Little Tokyo. At the first stop, he exited the train but then paused next to the sliding door. He checked every other commuter who got off, and none seemed suspicious. He stepped back onto the train to see if any of them did the same, waited until the bell warned that the doors were closing, and jumped off at the last moment.
No one followed.
He walked two blocks down Alameda and then cut in toward the river. The address he had for Vibiana Veracruz put her studio on Hewitt near Traction in the heart of the Arts District. Circling back to Hewitt, he repeatedly stopped and checked his surroundings. Along the way he passed several old commercial structures that were restored or in the process of being restored for use as loft homes.
The Arts District was more than a neighborhood. It was a movement. Beginning almost forty years earlier, artists of all disciplines started to take over millions of square feet of empty space in the abandoned factories and fruit-shipping warehouses that had thrived in the area before World War II. Paying pennies per foot for massive live-work spaces, some of the city’s most notable artists thrived here. It seemed appropriate that the movement was anchored in an area where in the early 1900s artists had vied to design the colorful images that graced the crates and boxes of fruit shipped across the country, popularizing a recognizable California style that said life was good
on the West Coast. It was one of the small things that helped inspire the wave of westward movement that now made California the most populous state in the union.
The Arts District now faced many of the issues that came with success, namely the swift spread of gentrification. In the past decade the area started drawing big developers interested in big profits. The cost of a square foot of space was no longer measured in pennies but in dollars. Many of the new tenants were upscale professionals who worked in downtown or Hollywood and wouldn’t know the difference between a stippling and a stencil brush. Many of the restaurants went upscale and had celebrity chefs and valet parking that cost more than a whole meal in the old corner cafés where artists once congregated. The idea of the district being a haven for the starving artist was becoming more and more unfounded.
As a young patrol officer in the early ’70s Bosch had been assigned to Newton Division, which included what was then called the Warehouse District. He remembered the area as a barren wasteland of empty buildings, homeless encampments, and street crime. He had transferred to Hollywood Division before the arts renaissance had begun. Now as he walked through, he marveled at the changes. There was a difference between a mural and a piece of graffiti. Both were arguably works of art, but the murals in the Arts District were beautiful and showed care and vision similar to those he had seen a few days earlier down in Chicano Park.
He passed by The American, a building more than a hundred years old that originally served as a hotel for black entertainers during segregation and later was ground zero for both the arts movement and the burgeoning punk rock scene in the 1970s.
Vibiana Veracruz lived and worked across the street in a building that had once been a cardboard plant. It was where many of the waxed fruit boxes with labels that served as California’s calling cards were produced. It was four stories tall with brick cladding and steel-framed warehouse windows still intact. There was a brass plaque next to the entrance that stated its history and the year of its construction: 1908.
There was no security or lock on the entrance. Bosch entered a small tiled lobby and checked a board that listed artists and their loft numbers. Bosch found the name Veracruz next to 4-D. He also saw on a community bulletin board several notices about tenant and neighborhood meetings regarding issues like rent stabilization and protesting building-permit applications at city hall. There were sign-up lists and he saw the name Vib scrawled on all of these. There was also a flyer for a showing of a documentary film called Young Turks on Friday evening in loft 4-D. The flyer said the film was about the founding of the Arts District in the 1970s. “See this place before the greed!” the flyer trumpeted. It appeared to Bosch that Vibiana Veracruz had inherited some of the community activism that had charged her mother’s life.
The Wrong Side of Goodbye Page 27