Angle of Investigation: Three Harry Bosch Short Stories

by Michael Connelly

  “It’s still worth a shot,” Bosch said optimistically. “I’ll put in the SID request.”

  “You do that. Meantime, as soon as I’m done here I’ll see if I can find a case with a real hook we can run with.”

  “Hold your horses, Kiz. I still haven’t run any of the names out of the book. Give me today with this and then we’ll see.”

  “Not good to get emotionally involved, Harry,” she responded. “The Laura syndrome, you know.”

  “It’s not like that. I’m just curious. It was sort of my first case.”

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  “You know what I mean. I remember thinking she was an old lady when the detectives gave me the rundown on it. But she was only forty-six. I was half her age, so I thought anybody forty-six was old and had had a good run of it. I didn’t feel too bad about it.”

  “Now you do.”

  “Forty-six was too young, Kiz.”

  “Well, you’re not going to bring her back.”

  Bosch nodded.

  “I know that.”

  “You ever seen that movie?”

  “Laura? Yeah, I’ve seen it. Detective falls in love with the murder victim. You?”

  “Yeah, but it doesn’t hold up too well. Sort of a parlor room murder case. I liked the Burt Reynolds take on it in the eighties. Sharky’s Machine. With Rachel Ward. You seen it?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Had Bernie Casey in it. When I was a youngster I always thought he was a fine-looking man.”

  Bosch looked at her with a raised eyebrow.

  “Before I switched teams,” she said. “Then I rented it a couple years ago and Bernie didn’t do it for me. I liked Rachel Ward.”

  Her bringing up her sexuality seemed to put an uneasiness between them. She turned back to her computer. Bosch looked down at the evidence report.

  “Well, we know one thing,” he said after a while. “We’re looking for a left-handed man.”

  She turned back to look at him.

  “How do you know that?”

  “He put his right hand on the wall over the toilet.”

  “And?”

  “It’s just like a gun, Kiz. He aimed with his left hand because he’s left-handed.”

  She shook her head dismissively.

  “Men…”

  She went back to work on her computer, and Bosch went back to the murder book. He wrote down the information he would need to give to the latent prints section of the Scientific Investigation Division in order for a tech to look up the palm print in their files. He then asked if Rider wanted him to pick her up a coffee or a soda from the cafeteria while he was floating around the building. She said no and he was off. He took the murder book with him.

  Bosch filled out the comparison request forms and gave them to a print tech named Larkin. He was one of the older, more experienced techs. Bosch had gone to him before and knew that he would move quickly with the request.

  “Let’s hope we hit the jackpot, Harry,” Larkin said as he took the forms.

  It was true that there was always a sense of excitement when you put an old print into a computer and let it ride. It was like pulling the lever on a slot machine. The jackpot payoff was a match, a cold hit in police parlance.

  After leaving SID Bosch went to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee and to finish reading through the murder book. He decided he could handle the constant background noise of the cafeteria better than he could the intrusive questions from Kiz Rider.

  He understood where his partner was coming from. She wanted to choose their cases dispassionately from the thousands that were open. Her concern was that if they went down a path in which Bosch was exorcizing ghosts or choosing cases with personal attachments, they would burn out sooner rather than later.

  But Bosch was not as concerned. He knew that passion was a key element in any investigation. Passion was the fuel that kept his fire burning. So he purposely sought the personal connection or, short of that, the personal outrage in every case. It kept him locked in and focused. But it wasn’t the Laura syndrome. It wasn’t the same as falling in love with a dead woman. By no means was Bosch in love with June Wilkins. He was in love with the idea of reaching back across time and catching the man who had killed her.

  The killing of June Wilkins was as horrible as it was cunning. The woman was bound hands and feet with a dog collar and a leash and then drowned in the tub. Her dog was treated to the same death. The autopsy showed no bruising or injuries on Wilkins suggestive of a struggle. But analysis of blood and tissue samples taken during autopsy indicated that she had been drugged with a veterinary paralytic. It meant that it was likely that Wilkins was conscious but unable to move her muscles to fight or defend herself when she was submerged in the water in the bathtub. Analysis of the dog’s blood found that the animal ith the anhad been drugged with the same substance.

  A textbook investigation followed the murder but it ultimately led to no arrests or the identification of a suspect. June Wilkins had lived alone. She had been divorced and had one child, a college student who went to school in Philadelphia. June worked as an assistant to a casting director in an office in a building at Hollywood and Vine, but had been on a two-week vacation at the time of her death.

  No evidence was found that she’d had an ongoing romantic relationship or that there were any hard feelings from a former relationship. It appeared to neighbors, acquaintances, coworkers and family members that the love of her life was her dog, a miniature poodle named Frenchy.

  The dog was also the focus of her life. He was of pure breed, and the only travel Wilkins did in the year most recent to her death had been to attend dog shows in San Diego and Las Vegas, where Frenchy competed. The second bedroom of her bungalow had been converted into a grooming salon, where ribbons from previous dog shows lined the mirrors.

  The original investigation was conducted by partners Joel Speigelman and Dan Finster of Wilshire Division. They began with a wide focus on Wilkins’s life and then narrowed in on the dog. The use of the veterinary drug by the killer and the killing of the dog suggested some connection to that aspect of the victim’s life. But that avenue soon hit a dead end when the detectives found no indication of a dispute or difficulty involving Wilkins in the competitive world of dog shows. They learned that Wilkins was considered a harmless novice in that world and was neither taken seriously by her competitors nor competitive in nature herself. The detectives also learned that Frenchy, though a purebred animal, was not a champion-caliber dog and the ribbons he took home were more often than not awarded for simply competing, not winning.

  The detectives changed their theory and began to consider the possibility that the killer had purposely misdirected the investigation toward the dog show angle. But what the correct angle of investigation should have been was never determined. The investigation stalled. The detectives never linked the palm print on the bathroom wall to anyone and lacking any other solid leads the case was pushed into the wait-and-see pile. That meant it was still on the desk but the investigators were waiting for something to break—an anonymous tip, a confession or even another murder of similar method. But nothing came up and after a year it was moved off the table and into the archives to gather dust.

  While reading through the binder Bosch had written down a list of names of people who had come up in the investigation. These included family members, neighbors and coworkers of the victim as well as acquaintances she encountered through veterinary services and the dog shows she attended.

  In most cases Speigelman and Finster had asked for birth dates, addresses and even Social Security numbers while conducting their interviews. It was standard operating procedure. Their thoroughness back then would now help Bosch when he ran every name from the list through the crime computer.

  When finished reading, Bosch closed the murder book and looked at his list. He had collected thirty-six names to run through the computer. He knew he had theen w he ha names and the palm print and th
at was about it. He could also run ketamine hydrochloride through the computer to see if it had come up in any other investigations since 1972.

  He decided that if nothing came out of the three angles of investigation he would drop the case, admit defeat to his partner and press on to the next case that had a valid hook.

  As he finished his coffee, he thought about the palm print. There had been no analysis of it other than to measure its location on the wall and have it ready for comparison to suspects that might come up in the investigation. But Bosch knew that there was more to it than that. If the print was sixty-six inches up the wall, that meant it was likely that the man who had left it was over six feet tall. He came to this conclusion because he knew that if the suspect leaned forward to brace himself while urinating, he would probably put his hand on the wall at shoulder level or slightly above. Add a foot in height for his neck and head and you have a man ranging from six two to six six in total height. A tall, left-handed man.

  “That narrows it down,” Bosch said to himself, noting his own sarcasm.

  He got up, dumped his coffee cup and headed out of the cafeteria. On the elevator up to five he thought about the times he had leaned his hand on the wall over a toilet. He was either drunk, middle-of-the-night sleepy or burdened by something besides a heavy bladder. He wondered which of these conditions had fit the tall, left-handed man.

  Most of the police department’s civilian offices were on the fifth floor along with the Open-Unsolved Unit. He passed the unit’s door and went down to the Personnel Department. He picked up contact information on Speigelman, Finster and his old partner, Eckersly. In years past such information would be jealously guarded. But under order from the Office of the Chief of Police, detectives with the Open-Unsolved Unit were given carte blanche because it was part of investigatory protocol to contact and interview the original investigators of a case that had been reopened.

  Eckersly, of course, was not one of the original investigators. He was only there on the morning they had found the lady in the tub. But Bosch thought it might be worth a call to see if he remembered that day and had any thoughts on the reinvestigation of the case. Bosch had lost contact with Eckersly after he completed his street training and was transferred out of Wilshire Division. He assumed he was no longer on the job and was not mistaken. Eckersly had pulled the plug at twenty years, and his pension was sent to the town of Ten Thousand Palms, where he was the police chief.

  Nice move, Bosch thought. Running a small-town police force in the desert and collecting an LAPD pension on the side. Every cop’s dream.

  Bosch also noted the coincidence of Eckersly now living in a town called Ten Thousand Palms and the fact that Bosch was currently running an angle through a database of ten thousand palm prints.

  Rider was not at her desk when Bosch got back to the unit. There was no note of explanation left on his desk and he figured she had simply taken a break. He sat at her desk and looked at her laptop. She had left it on but had cleared the screen before leavingchifore le the office. He pulled the list of names out of the murder book and connected to the National Crime Index Computer. He didn’t have his own computer and was not highly skilled in the use of the Internet and most law enforcement databases. But the NCIC had been around for years and he knew how to run names on it.

  All thirty-six names on his list would have been run through existing databases in 1972 and cleared. What he was looking for now was whether any of the thirty-six people had been arrested for any kind of significant or similar crime in the years after the June Wilkins murder.

  The first name he entered came back with multiple hits for drunk driving arrests. This didn’t get Bosch particularly excited but he circled the name on the list anyway and moved on. No hits came up on the next seven and he crossed them out. The next name after that scored a hit with an arrest for disturbing the peace. Bosch circled it but again was not feeling the tug of a hook yet.

  The process continued with most of the names coming up clean. It wasn’t until he entered the twenty-ninth name that Bosch looked at the screen and felt a tightness grip in his chest.

  The twenty-ninth name was Jonathan Gillespie. He had been described in the murder book as a dog breeder who sold miniature poodles in 1972. He had sold the dog Frenchy to June Wilkins two years before her death and was interviewed by Speigelman and Finster when they were trying to run down the dog show angle on the case. According to the NCIC records, Gillespie went to prison on a rape charge in 1981 and served six years in prison. He was now a registered sexual offender living in Huntington Beach. There had been no other arrests since 1981. He was sixty-eight years old.

  Bosch underlined the name on the list and wrote down the case number. It had an LAPD prefix. Though he immediately wanted to go to work on Gillespie, he finished running the rest of the names through the NCIC database first. He got two more hits, one for a DUI and one for a hit-and-run accident with injuries. He circled the names to keep with his procedure but was not excited about them.

  Before signing out of the NCIC system, he switched over to the crime-tracking database and entered ketamine hydrochloride into the search window. He got several hits back, all within the last fifteen years, and learned that the substance was being used increasingly as a date rape drug. He scrolled through the cases listed and didn’t see anything that linked them to June Wilkins. He logged off the database to begin his pursuit of Jonathan Gillespie.

  Closed cases from 1981 had gone to microfiche archives and the department was slowly moving backward and entering case information into the department’s computerized database. But 1981 was too far back. The only way Bosch would be able to look at the sexual assault case that had sent Gillespie to prison would be to go to the records archives, which were housed over at Piper Tech, the storage facility and air squadron base at the edge of downtown.

  Bosch went to his side of the desk and wrote a note to Rider telling her he had come up with a hot angle and was chasing it through Piper Tech. The phone on his desk started to ring. He finished the note and grabbed the phone while standing up to reach the note over to Rider’s desk.

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  “Open-Unsolved, this is Bosch.”

  “Harry, it’s Larkin.”

  “I was just going to call you.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “I have a name for you.”

  “Funny, I have a name for you. I matched your palm and you’re not going to like it.”

  “Jonathan Gillespie.”

  “What?”

  “Jonathan Gillespie.”

  “Who is that?”

  “That’s not your match?”

  “Not quite.”

  Bosch sat back down at his desk. He pulled a pad over in front of him and got ready to write.

  “Who did you come up with?”

  “The palm print belonged to one of ours. Guy must have left it while at the crime scene. Sorry about that.”

  “Who is it?”

  “The name is Ronald Eckersly. He worked for us ’sixty-five to ’eighty-five, then he pulled the pin.”

  Bosch almost didn’t hear anything else Larkin said.

  “… shows that he was a patrol lieutenant upon retirement. You could go to personnel and get a current location if you need to talk to him. But it looks like he might have just screwed up and put his hand on the wall while he was at the scene. Back then they didn’t know anything about crime scene protocol and some of these guys would—hell, about twenty years ago I was dusting a homicide scene and one of the detectives who had been there all night started frying an egg in the dead guy’s kitchen. He said, ‘He ain’t gonna miss it and I’m goddamn starved.’ You believe that? So no matter how hard you drill into them not to touch—”

  “Thanks, Larkin,” Bosch said. “I’ve got to go.”

  Bosch hung up, grabbed the note off Rider’s desk and crumpled it in his hand. He took his cell phone off his belt and called Rider’s cell number. She answered right away.
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  “Where are you?” Bosch asked.

  “Having a coffee.”

  “You want to take a ride?”

  “I’ve got the case"0egot the summary to finish. A ride where?”

  “Ten Thousand Palms.”

  “Harry, that’s not a ride. That’s a journey. That’s at least ninety minutes each way.”

  “Get me a coffee for the road. I’ll be right down.”

  He hung up before she could protest.

  On the drive out Bosch told Rider about the moves he had made with the case and how the print had come back to his old partner. He then recounted the morning he and Eckersly had found the lady in the tub. Rider listened without interrupting, then she had only one question at the end.

  “This is important, Harry,” she said. “You are dealing with your own memory and you know from case experience how faulty memories can be. We’re talking thirty-three years ago. Are you sure there wasn’t a moment when Eckersly could have put his hand on the wall?”

  “Yeah, like he might’ve leaned against the wall and taken a leak while I didn’t notice.”

  “I’m not talking about taking a leak. Could he have leaned against the wall when you found the body, like he got grossed out or sick and leaned against the wall for support?”

  “No, Kiz. I was in that room the whole time he was. He said, ‘Let’s get out of here,’ and he was the first one out. He did not go back in. We called in the detectives and then stood outside keeping the neighbors away when everybody showed up.”

  “Thirty-three years is a long time, Harry.”

  Bosch waited a moment before responding.

  “I know this sounds sad and sick but your first DB is like your first love. You remember the details. Plus…”