“Plus my mother was murdered when I was a kid. I think it’s why I became a cop. So finding that woman—my second day on the job—was sort of like finding my mother. I can’t explain it. But what I can tell you is that I remember being in that house like it was yesterday. And Eckersly never touched a thing in there, let alone put his hand on the wall over the toilet.”
Now she was silent for a long moment before responding.
“Okay, Harry.”
Ten Thousand Palms was on the outskirts of Joshua Tree. They made good time and pulled into the visitor parking space in front of the tiny police station shortly before one. They had worked out how they would handle Eckersly in the last half hour of the drive.
They went in and I rwent inasked a woman who was sitting behind a front counter if they could speak with Eckersly. They flashed the gold and told her they were from the Open-Unsolved Unit. The woman picked up a phone and communicated the information to someone on the other end. Before she hung up, a door behind her opened and there stood Ron Eckersly. He was thicker and his skin a dark and worn brown from the desert. He still had a full head of hair, which was cut short and silver. Bosch had no trouble recognizing him. But it didn’t appear that he recognized Bosch.
“Detectives, come on back,” he said.
He held the door and they walked into his office. He was wearing a blue blazer with a maroon tie over a white shirt. It did not appear to Bosch that he had a gun on his belt. Maybe in a little desert town a gun wasn’t needed.
The office was a small space with LAPD memorabilia and photographs on the wall behind the desk. Rider introduced herself and shook Eckersly’s hand and then Bosch did the same. There was a hesitation in Eckersly’s shake and then Bosch knew. Instinctively, he knew. He was holding the hand of June Wilkins’s killer.
“Harry Bosch,” Eckersly said. “You were one of my boots, right?”
“That’s right. I came on the job in ’seventy-two. We rode Wilshire patrol for nine months.”
“Imagine that, one of my boots coming back to see me.”
“Actually, we want to talk to you about a case from ’seventy-two,” Rider said.
As planned, she took the lead. They took seats and Bosch once again tried to determine if Eckersly was armed. There was no telltale bulge beneath the blazer.
Rider explained the case to Eckersly and reminded him that he and Bosch had been the patrol officers who discovered the body. She asked if he remembered the case at all.
Eckersly leaned back in his desk chair, his jacket falling to his sides and revealing no holster or weapon on his belt. He looked for an answer on the ceiling. Finding nothing, he leaned forward and shook his head.
“I’m drawing a blank, Detectives,” he said. “And I’m not sure why you would come all the way out here to ask an old patrol dog about a DB. My guess is we were in and out, and we cleared the way for the dicks. Isn’t that right, partner?”
He looked at Bosch, his last word a reminder that they had once protected each other’s back.
“Yes, we were in and out.”
“But we have information—newly discovered information—that you apparently had a relationship with the victim,” Rider said matter-of-factly. “And that this relationship was not brought to light during the initial investigation.”
Eckersly looked closely at her, wondering how to read the situation. Bosch knew this wase wnew thi the pivotal moment. If Eckersly were to make a mistake, it would be now.
“What information?” Eckersly asked.
“We’re not at liberty to discuss it, Chief,” Rider responded. “But if you have something to tell us, tell us now. It would be best for you to clear this up before we go down the road with it.”
Eckersly’s face cracked into a smile and he looked at Bosch.
“This is a joke, right? Bosch, you’re putting her up to this, right?”
Bosch shook his head.
“No joke,” Bosch said. “You’re in a spot here, Chief.”
Eckersly shook his head as if not comprehending the situation.
“You said Open-Unsolved, right? That’s cold case stuff. DNA. This a DNA case?”
Bosch felt things tumbling into place. Eckersly had made the mistake. He had taken the bait and was fishing for information. It wasn’t what an innocent man would do. Rider felt it, too. She leaned toward his desk.
“Chief, do you mind if I give you a rights warning before we go further with this?”
“Oh, come on,” Eckersly protested. “You can’t be serious. What relationship?”
Rider read Eckersly the standard Miranda rights warning from a card she pulled out of a pocket in her blazer.
“Chief Eckersly, do you understand your rights as I have read them?”
“Of course, I understand them. I’ve only been a cop for forty years. What the hell is going on here?”
“What’s going on is that we are giving you the opportunity to explain the relationship you had with this woman. If you choose not to cooperate, then it’s not going to work out well for you.”
“I told you. There was no relationship and you can’t prove there was. That body had been in that tub for a week. From what I heard, it practically came apart when they were taking it out of there. You got no DNA. Nobody even knew about DNA back then.”
Rider made a quick glance toward Bosch and this was her signal that he could step in if he wanted. He did.
“You worked Wilshire for four years before that morning,” Bosch said. “Did you meet her on patrol? When she was out walking the dog? Where did you meet her, Chief? You told me you were working solo for four months before I was put in the car with you. Is that when you met her? When you were out working alone?”
Eckersly angrily grabbed the phone out of its cradle on his dellyle on hsk.
“I still know some people at Parker Center. I’m going to see if they are aware of what you two people are doing. Coming to my office to accuse me of this crap!”
“If you call anyone, you better call your lawyer,” Bosch said.
Eckersly slammed the phone back down into its cradle.
“What do you want from me? I did not know that woman. Just like you, I saw her for the first time floating with her dog in the bathtub. First and last time. And I got out of there as fast as I goddamn could.”
“And you never went back in.”
“That’s right, boot. I never went back in.”
There, they had him.
“Then how come your palm print was on the wall over the toilet?”
Eckersly froze. Bosch read his eyes. He remembered the moment he had put his hand on the wall. He knew they had him.
Eckersly glanced out the office’s only window. It was to his left and it offered a view of a fire department equipment yard. He then looked back at Bosch and spoke in a quiet voice.
“You know how often I wondered when somebody like you would show up here… how many years I’ve been waiting?”
Bosch nodded.
“It must have been a burden,” he said without sympathy.
“She wanted more, she wanted something permanent,” Eckersly said. “Christ, she was fifteen years older than me. She was just a patrol pal, that’s what we called them. But then she got the wrong idea about things and when I had to set her straight she said she was going to make a complaint about me. She was going to go to the captain. I was married back then. I couldn’t…”
He said nothing else. His eyes were downcast. He was looking at the memory. Bosch could put the rest of it together. Eckersly hatched a plan that would throw the investigation off, send it in the wrong direction. His only mistake was the moment he put his hand on the wall over the toilet.
“You have to come with us now, Chief,” Rider said.
She stood up. Eckersly looked up at her.
“With you?” he said. “No, I don’t.”
With his right hand he pulled open the desk drawer in front of him and quickly reached in with his left. He withdrew a black, steel pistol and
brought it up to his neck.
“No!” Rider yelled.
>
Eckersly pressed the muzzle deep into the left side of his neck. He angled the weapon upward and pulled the trigger. The weapon’s contact against his skin muffled the blast. His head snapped back and blood splattered across the wall of police memorabilia behind him.
Bosch never moved in his seat. He just watched it happen. Pretty soon the woman from the front counter came running in and she screamed and held her hands up to her mouth.
Bosch turned and looked at Rider.
“That was a long time coming,” he said.
Laura was already rented at Eddie’s Saturday Matinee, so Bosch rented Sharky’s Machine instead. He watched it at home that night while drinking beer and eating peanut butter sandwiches, and trying to keep his mind away from what had happened in Eckersly’s office. It wasn’t a bad movie, though he could see almost everything coming. Burt Reynolds and Bernie Casey made pretty good cops and Rachel Ward was the call girl with a heart of gold. Bosch saw what Burt saw in her. He thought he could easily fall in love with her, too. Call girl or not, dead or alive.
Near the end of the movie, there was a shootout and Bernie Casey got wounded. Bleeding and out of bullets, he used a Zen mantra to make himself invisible to the approaching shooter.
It worked. The shooter walked right by him, and Bernie lived to tell about it. Bosch liked that. At the end of the movie he remembered that moment the best. He wished there were a Zen chant he could use now so Ronald Eckersly could just walk on by him, too. But he knew there was no such thing. Eckersly would take his place with the others that came to him at night. The ones he remembered.
Bosch thought about calling Kiz and telling her what he thought of the movie. But he knew it was too late and she would get upset with him. He killed the TV instead and turned off the lights.
And for more Michael Connelly…
The following is an excerpt from the opening pages of The Drop.
On sale 27th October 2011.
Available for pre-order now.
One
Christmas came once a month in the Open-Unsolved Unit. That was when the lieutenant made her way around the squad room like Santa Claus, parceling out the assignments like presents to the squad’s six detective teams. The cold hits were the lifeblood of the unit. The teams didn’t wait for callouts and fresh kills in Open-Unsolved. They waited for cold hits.
The Open-Unsolved Unit investigated unsolved murders going back fifty years in Los Angghteles. There were twelve detectives, a secretary, a squad room supervisor, known as the whip, and the lieutenant. And there were ten thousand cases. The first five detective teams split up the fifty years, each pair taking ten randomly chosen years. Their task was to pull all the unsolved homicide cases from their assigned years out of archives, evaluate them and submit long-stored and forgotten evidence for reanalysis with contemporary technology. All DNA submissions were handled by the new regional lab out at Cal State. When DNA from an old case was matched to an individual whose genetic profile was carried in any of the nation’s DNA databases, it was called a cold hit. The lab put cold hit notices in the mail at the end of every month. They would arrive a day or two later at the Police Administration Building in downtown Los Angeles. Usually by 8 A.M. that day, the lieutenant would open the door of her private office and enter the squad room. She carried the envelopes in her hand. Each hit sheet was mailed individually in a yellow business envelope. Generally, the envelopes were handed to the same detectives who had submitted the DNA evidence to the lab. But sometimes there were too many cold hits for one team to handle at once. Sometimes detectives were in court or on vacation or on leave. And sometimes the cold hits revealed circumstances that required the utmost finesse and experience. That was where the sixth team came in. Detectives Harry Bosch and David Chu were the sixth team. They were floaters. They handled overflow cases and special investigations.
On Monday morning, October 3, Lieutenant Gail Duvall stepped out of her office and into the squad room, carrying only three yellow envelopes. Harry Bosch almost sighed at the sight of such a paltry return on the squad’s DNA submissions. He knew that with so few envelopes he would not be getting a new case to work.
Bosch had been back in the unit for almost a year following a two-year reassignment to Homicide Special. But coming back for his second tour of duty in Open-Unsolved, he had quickly fallen into the rhythm of the squad. It wasn’t a fly squad. There was no dashing out the door to get to a crime scene. In fact, there were no crime scenes. There were only files and archive boxes. It was primarily an eight-to-four gig with an asterisk, that asterisk meaning that there was more travel than with other detective squads. People who got away with murder, or at least thought they had, tended not to stick around. They moved elsewhere and often the OU detectives had to travel to retrieve them.
A big part of the rhythm was the monthly cycle of waiting for the yellow envelopes to come out. Sometimes Bosch found it hard to sleep during the nights leading up to Christmas. He never took time off during the first week of the month and never came to work late if there was a chance that the yellow envelopes were in. Even his teenage daughter noticed his monthly cycle of anticipation and agitation, and had likened it to a menstrual cycle. Bosch didn’t see the humor in this and was embarrassed whenever she brought it up.
Now his disappointment at the sight of so few envelopes in the lieutenant’s hand was something palpable in his throat. He wanted a new case. He needed a new case. He needed to see the look on the killer’s face when he knocked on the door and showed his badge, the embodiment of unexpected justice come calling after so many years. It was addictive and Bosch was craving it now.
The lieutenant handed the first envelope to Rick Jackson. He and his partnerf w his pa, Rich Bengtson, were solid investigators who had been with the unit since its inception. Bosch had no complaint there. The next envelope was placed on an empty desk belonging to Teddy Baker. She and her partner, Greg Kehoe, were on their way back from a pickup in Tampa—an airline pilot who had been connected through fingerprints to the 1991 strangulation of a flight attendant in Marina del Rey.
Bosch was about to suggest to the lieutenant that Baker and Kehoe might have their hands full with the Marina case and that the envelope should be given to another team, namely his, when the lieutenant looked at him and used the last remaining envelope to beckon him to her office.
“Can you guys step in for a minute? You, too, Tim.”
Tim Marcia was the squad whip, the detective three who handled mostly supervisory and fill-in duties in the squad. He mentored the young detectives and made sure the old ones like Jackson and Bosch didn’t get lazy.
Bosch was up out of his seat before the lieutenant had finished her question. He headed toward the lieutenant’s office with Chu and Marcia trailing behind.
“Close the door,” Duvall said. “Sit down.”
Duvall had a corner office with windows that looked across Spring Street at the Los Angeles Times Building. Paranoid that reporters were watching from the newsroom across the way, Duvall kept her shades permanently lowered. It made the office dim and cavelike. Bosch and Chu took the two seats positioned in front of the lieutenant’s desk. Marcia followed them in, moved to the side of Duvall’s desk and leaned against an old evidence safe.
“I want you two to handle this hit,” she said, proffering the yellow envelope to Bosch. “There’s something wrong there and I want you to keep quiet about it until you find out what it is. Keep Tim in the loop but keep it low-key.”
The envelope had already been opened. Chu leaned over to look as Harry lifted the flap and pulled out the hit sheet. It listed the case number for which DNA evidence had been submitted, plus the name, age, last known address and criminal history of the person whose genetic profile matched it. Bosch first noticed that the case number had an 89 prefix, meaning it was a case from 1989. There were no details about the crime, just the year. But Bosch knew that 1989
cases belonged to the team of Ross Shuler and Adriana Dolan. He knew this because 1989 had been a busy year for him working murders for the Homicide Special team, and he had recently checked on one of his own unsolved cases and learned that jurisdiction over cases from that year belonged to Shuler and Dolan. They were known in the unit as “the kids.” They were young, passionate and very skillful investigators, but between them they had less than eight years’ experience working homicides. If there was something unusual about this cold hit, it was not surprising that the lieutenant wanted Bosch on it. Bosch had worked more killings than everybody in the unit combined. That is, if you took out Jackson. He had been around forever.
Bosch next studied the name on the hit sheet. Clayton S. Pell. It meant nothing to him. But Pell’s arrest record included numerous arrests and three separate convictions for indecent exposure, falses aosure, imprisonment and forcible rape. He had spent six years in prison for the rape before being released eighteen months earlier. He had a five-year probation tail and his last known address came from the state probation and parole board. He was assigned to a halfway house for sexual offenders in Panorama City.
Based on Pell’s record, Bosch believed the 1989 case was likely a sex-related murder. He could feel his insides beginning to tighten. He was going to go out and grab Clayton Pell and bring him to justice.
“Do you see it?” Duvall asked.
“See what?” Bosch asked. “Was this a sex killing? This guy has the classic pred—”
“The birth date,” Duvall said.
Bosch looked back down at the hit sheet as Chu leaned over farther.
“Yeah, right here,” Bosch said. “November nine, nineteen eighty-one. What’s that got—”
“He’s too young,” Chu said.
Bosch glanced at him and then back down at the sheet. He suddenly got it. Clayton Pell was born in 1981. He was only eight years old at the time of the murder on the hit sheet.
“Exactly,” Duvall said. “So I want you to get the book and box from Shuler and Dolan and very quietly figure out what we have here. I’m hoping to God they didn’t get two cases mixed up.”
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